The biggest villain of all is racism

The first black superhero appeared years before Stan Lee’s Black Panther

With a sequel to Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther film now officially underway, Hollywood has finally made space for more stories about black heroes. (Coogler recently signed on to produce a film version of Bitter Root, an acclaimed new comic book about Harlem Renaissance monster hunters. The director’s involvement promises a visionary reimagining of 1920s black America.)

Hollywood reaped the rewards of finally spotlighting a character who is commonly known as the first black superhero, making room for Marvel to launch solo films with women and Asian characters, Captain Marvel and the upcoming Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

But Stan Lee, who created Black Panther, did not invent the black superhero, and the amnesia surrounding who really did, decades earlier, is part of a larger pattern of black inventors going unappreciated.

Black Panther was predated by nearly two decades by the now-forgotten Lion Man.

Had this cat-crusader been allowed to thrive, the role of black heroes in media might have evolved very differently — and we might have a far richer and more inclusive array of identities reflected in popular culture today.

Lee created countless beloved heroes for Marvel Comics, but the legacy surrounding how he handled black characters is complex. In his early work, he created an offensive black character named Whitewash Jones in 1941 as part of the series The Young Allies.

Whitewash spoke in a stereotypical drawl and is introduced as a skilled harmonica player before adding, “Yeah man! I is also good on de watermelon!”

Lee was still a teenager and new to writing comics in 1941, and The Young Allies was one of his earliest efforts.

Whitewash Jones faced no backlash at the time because he was part of a larger trend in which black characters were portrayed almost exclusively as buffoons.

But in July 1947, journalist Orrin C. Evans published the first — and only — issue of a comic book aimed exclusively at black readers, made solely by black creators and featuring only black characters — All-negro Comics No. 1. Evans, who as a journalist regularly covered NAACP and National Urban League conventions, sought to actively counter racial distortions. He wanted to offer stories born out of experience and civic engagement, and to give black readers heroic characters.

He wanted the series to elevate black creators, too, such as E.C. Stoner, who drew a story in 1937 for the first issue of Detective Comics, the now-famous series that soon introduced Batman in its pages.

Lion Man, a cat-themed superhero, debuted as protector of the world’s largest uranium deposit in Africa’s Gold Coast (now Ghana). But Lion Man was forgotten soon after his 1947 debut. Evans was planning a second instalment. But many distributors and newsstands refused to sell All-negro Comics, making it hard to find outside of Evans’ hometown of Philadelphia.

He couldn’t secure a printer willing to do a second issue or even anyone willing to sell him the paper to print it on.

Readers had to wait until the mid-1960s for the further adventures of a black superhero.

That’s when Lee created Black Panther, to widespread success. When Lee launched his new line of Marvel superheroes in 1961 with The Fantastic Four, he sought to make his stories reflect the world around him.

A first step came in adding a black soldier named Gabriel Jones to the pages of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in 1963.

An early issue of that series even tackled racial bigotry, demonstrating that Lee was becoming more attuned to the need to reflect societal change in the wake of the civil rights movement.

By building a legacy around how a white creator made great advances in portraying black culture in popular media, we disguise the racism that prevented creators such as Evans from finding success in the same markets as Lee and other white publishers. Superman has often been read as a parable about the experiences of Jewish immigrants, but black creators were denied the chance to tell similar stories.

If black superheroes didn’t have to wait for white creators like Lee to embrace the changes made by civil rights activists, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wait until now for a character like Black Panther to become one of Hollywood’s most successful heroes.