While not a super-hero in the truest sense of the term, Dell's western character, Lobo, is the first African-American to be featured in his own comic. What was up with Dell back in these days? Before their wacky re-launch of classic monsters as super-heroes, editor D.J. Arneson and Tony Tallarico (with pencils by Bill Fraccio) came up with the idea of a black man who goes west after the Civil War, gets wrongly accused of killing his ranch boss, saves a miner who ends up gifting him his gold mine (!) and goes about performing other assorted good deeds for the rest of the book. Some historians have dubbed Lobo the black Zorro because he fights for justice, leaving behind gold coins with a wolf and an "L" on them, as well as pressing the coin's imprint of the forehead of his vanquished villains.
Largely a run-of-the-mill western, it's still a bit of a weird comic.
Twenty to twenty five percent of the cowboys from the time of the old west were African American men. A bit of history that should be honored and remembered.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. They were particularly indispensable for the cattle ranching industry in the years following the Civil War and their many other contributions helped to shape the American West. It's likely that Arneson and Tallarico considered this when they developed the title. Not entirely weird, but unique and unexpected for the time.
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