One of the pleasures of attending G-Fest this year in
Chicago was getting the
chance to meet one of my comic book heroes from days past,
Tony Isabella. Mr.
Isabella has a long list of comic book credits (including a great run on
Hawkman!) but what he is most remembered for these days is the creation of the
character Black Lightning for DC Comics in the 1970s. After years of legal
wrangling with DC Comics about the creator's credit of that character Mister Isabella
and the company are now happily in collaboration again. Indeed, things have
been settled to the point that Mr. Isabella is a part of the production of the
newest DC TV show - Black Lightning! This mid-season replacement show premieres
next year on the CW and I can hardly wait!
Of course Mr. Isabella was at G-Fest in his capacity as a
Kaiju fan and presided over a number of panels revolving around giant monsters
both in their comic book form, novelizations and on screen. But being an old comic book fan
what I was thrilled most about was the chance to get in him to sign my trade
paperback copy of the original run of Black Lightning comic books. Luckily Mr.
Isabella is an incredibly nice man and was willing to talk to an aging fanboy about
his work. He even imparted some information about the production of the
upcoming television show, his participation in it and the possibilities at this
juncture of a second season. Let's just say I'm really looking forward to
seeing Black Lightning finally hit the small screen next year.
One of the things he and I discussed was that the first
issue of Black Lightning I saw back in the seventies was
issue number four, I can clearly remember buying it off a spinner rack when I was a kid even though I can't remember which store that rack was in. He told me something
that should have shocked me more but it didn't really shock me very much at
all. It seems that Black Lightning had trouble getting distribution in the
southeast during its initial run. As a matter of fact, the distributors in the
southeast dropped a lot of other DC comic books so that they wouldn't have to
distribute Black Lightning. There's nothing like running into another example
of the big, ugly racial prejudice of the region of the country in which you were
born and raised. All I could do was shake my head in disgust and wonder what
this type of below-the-radar racist crap did to shape what I was able to see
and read as a kid. While I'm sure such a pathetic bit of distribution
censorship wouldn't occur today I'm also not completely positive that it might
not happen in some other hidden form. I don't know why but sometimes it's far
too easy for me to forget just how racially polarized the region of the country
in which I reside remains. I guess I'm lucky to have seen an issue of Black
Lightening at all when I was young. Now I wonder if the same thing might have
been true for Luke Cage, Power Man since I remember several back issues of his
comic being among the first books I ordered through the mail when I was a young comic
fan.
