An Old Friend

"...the wide nose, heavy lips, and fuzzy hair are all as important to a colored cartoon character as the dark complexion.."

-from E.C. Matthews 1928 instruction book HOW TO DRAW FUNNY PICTURES*

There I am, laying in bed, minding my own business, looking through my PLASTIC MAN ARCHIVE Vol. 1, just flipping through the pretty unspectacular early Jack Cole artwork when I start noticing that Will Eisner's Spirit became a regular fixture of POLICE COMICS eleven issues in. Fittingly I had just finished looking through THE BEST OF THE SPIRIT collection.

Why am I buying THE BEST OF THE SPIRIT instead of the archives? Well $20 for a one time investment and for the broadstrokes of Eisner's run seems fairly reasonable. At $50 a pop for 26 volumes? I don't have the money, let alone the space, for something like that. Same goes for the BATMAN and SUPERMAN CHRONICLES route: buying $50 a piece for research material is just ridiculous when the equivalent softcover is more than half the price.

Also, as Douglas Wolk makes mention of in his chapter on Will Eisner in READING COMICS, THE BEST OF THE SPIRIT is almost Ebony White free, whereas THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES are presented in all its glorious truth.

But open up almost any volume, and you're going to run smack into the most embarrassing stumbling block of the series: the Spirit's thick-lipped, bellboy-attired sidekick Ebony White, sometimes accompanied by his pal Bucken Wing. Yes, those were the sorts of caricatures that were common currency at that time; yes, Ebony makes a few stabs at greater dignity in THE SPIRIT'S later years (and is also briefly replaced by an Eskimo sidekick named Blubber-not really an improvement-and then by a stereotype-free and personality-free white kid named Sammy). There's no getting away from the awfulness of the stereotype anyway. If readers have to actively historicized every page Ebony appears on to keep from cringing too hard to see the rest of what Eisner's doing, there's a big problem.

-Douglas Wolk, Pg. 168-169.

So while I knew there was a deficit of Ebony in the Spirit collection, I wasn't exactly expecting him to pop up in PLASTIC MAN, if only on a cover. It is still kind of jaw dropping (at least of enough notice for me to write this post in the first place)! I accept it when it appears in Robert Crumb's comics, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER, when it pops up in Chris Ware's sketchbooks, when used in Terry Zwigoff's GHOST WORLD, Spike Lee's BAMBOOZLED...the image itself works when one considers its context and usage. From that very period of time, when there is no awareness, no irony involved? Pretty uncomfortable, no matter how you cut it.

Sorry, but "It was a different time back then" doesn't fly, nor does it fly with something like COAL BLACK AND THE SEBBEN DWARFS, no matter how much John K. doesn't find it personally offensive, or how some of Bob Clampett's best friends are black, or however the fuck that old chestnut goes. "I'm not racist, but...."

Am I going to now throw my PLASTIC MAN ARCHIVE in the incinerator? Nope. Will this stop me from buying WINSOR MCCAY'S EARLY WORKS Vol.1? Nah. Am I going to become a PC crusader? No, because society and the market do a pretty good job of keeping this sort of thing out of the public eye. What about that stupid NEW YORKER cover with Barack Obama and his wife? Just a poor attempt at satire at the end of the day. Do I need Whoopie Goldberg to tell me that it is OK to watch old Warner Bros. cartoons that contain racial stereotypes and racist caricatures? Fuck off, Whoopie Goldberg!

Huh, TROPIC THUNDER comes out soon and has Robert Downey Jr. in black-face, doesn't it? Let's hope that works out better than Ted Danson black-face...oh, and one more choice bit from Mr. E.C. Matthews' HOW TO DRAW FUNNY PICTURES:

"...the cartoonist usually plays on the colored man's love of loud clothes, watermelon, chicken, crap-shooting, fear of ghosts, etc."*

-Jarrett

*from Brian Walker's THE COMIC: BEFORE 1945, pg. 54.