Number 179


Average White Goddess


Jun-Gal is from Blazing Comics #1, 1944. Blazing Comics is probably known for its cover feature, The Green Turtle, one of the few Golden Age comic book heroes--maybe the only one?--created and drawn by a Chinese-American, Chu Hing.

Jun-Gal is notable for at least a few reasons: The horrible pun name. The artwork, which is more suitable to the 1920s than the 1940s, and the racial attitudes, which permeate the story.

Jun-Gal's "real" name (in the story, anyway) is Joan Teal. Teal is Mrs. Pappy's maiden name, so that made me sit up and take notice.

As drawn, Joan is a beautiful blonde girl in a sarong. They were going for the Dorothy Lamour look, which was hugely popular during World War II. While Sheena and others went around in animal skins, Jun-Gal wore her sarong. Jun-Gal is given powers of strength from the "Pit Of Death," an ever-burning hole full of radium. Apparently it doesn't affect the black people the same way. Because she's blonde, she becomes the queen, the goddess figure to the superstitious and uneducated natives. Maybe African-Americans of the era viewed this sort of thing with trepidation, but to white America it was pretty much business as usual with attitudes toward "coloreds." Tarzan movies were made up of this sort of stereotyping. The natives are cruel, stupid, superstitious and treacherous. The whites, just by virtue of their race, are made to be masters over the blacks.


What's most interesting to me is the racial viewpoint. This is standard fare for the era. The characters are stock. The blacks are "natives;" not Africans, just "natives." They have bulging lips drawn in a minstrel style. The white people are set upon and the parents killed by the "bad natives." Joan is raised by her "mammy," in the midst of the village of her parents' killers.

I'm presenting this as it was, over 60 years ago. The irony isn't lost on us that when this was published we were fighting an enemy whose philosophy of superiority was repugnant to us. But it was repugnance in words, not deeds. Over in morally superior America we felt it was OK to discriminate based on race, all the while excoriating our enemies for doing the same.

OK, that was then, this is now. I've climbed down from my soapbox. Blazing Comics was short-lived, only five issues, and I own only the first issue. I can't tell you if Jun-Gal lasted for the entire run. The Comic Book Price Guide doesn't help, and the Grand Comics Database doesn't even list Blazing Comics. I don't know what happened to Jun-Gal after her origin story, and I don't know who wrote or drew her adventure(s). That's really a lot I don't know about Jun-Gal, isn't it?

More about →

Number 134

EC: Preachy-ing to The Choir


Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, as publisher and editor of EC Comics, had social consciousness. They published several stories they called "preachies," which were stories told, EC-style, to demonstrate the racist and uglier side of life in America.

The preachy in Shock Suspenstories #11* is "In Gratitude," drawn by Wally Wood. The message is straightforward. A young soldier, Joey, returns home a hero from Korea. He has been wounded and lost his hand. His best buddy threw himself on a hand grenade and saved Joey's life. Because his buddy, Hank, had no family Joey has his remains sent home for burial in the town cemetery. The undertaker calls Joey's parents, as well as other townies, and they protest having this black person buried in their cemetery.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

  In the climactic scene Joey gets up to the podium and chews out the bigots, then sits down and cries while they walk out in silence.

Maybe no one thought about this in 1953 when it was published, but the only people shown in the story are white people. Hank, when he's shown, is pictured so his race can't be easily determined.

In a nutshell this was what I find nowadays to be outdated about the EC Preachies. White people were most often the springboards for their stories. The minority group members, blacks, Jews, Mexicans, whomever, were just props. Because of the strict storytelling strictures of EC Comics there had to be a shock ending, so the minority characters were often just a way of fooling the reader until the denouement.

"In Gratitude" was spotlighted in the documentary on the first Tales From The Crypt TV series DVD, "Tales From The Crypt: From Comic Books to Television." What wasn't mentioned that put it in some sort of historical context is that the story appeared a year before the landmark "Brown v Board Of Education" ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, two years before the savage murder of Emmett Till, three years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and ten years before the March on Washington, all watershed events in the history of Civil Rights. In all of those events African-Americans were the group that had to take action. They couldn't just depend on white people, even well-meaning white people producing comic books in New York, to precipitate the action.

As well-meaning as "In Gratitude" was, I believe that anyone who believed strongly in segregation wouldn't be swayed by this story, and the readers who would most likely be in agreement with the story would be people who had a predisposition to that philosophy. I don't think the Preachies changed anybody's minds, but even while saying that, it was brave of EC to publish them. In those days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Civil Rights as an issue was viewed in about the same light as Communism. It was a threat to the American way of white people having absolute power and minorities knowing their "place."


*In case you're interested, two other stories from Shock Suspenstories #11 are covered in Pappy's #102 and Pappy's #99 .

More about →