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| Midnight |
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| The Spirit |
Similarly, it's universally acknowledged that Eisner's work--particularly as personified in The Spirit's sidekick, Ebony White--at best partook of a sort of benign racism all too common in the 1930s and 1940s.
It's sometimes argued--for example on the excellent Comic Tropes YouTube channel--that Gabby was no less offensive of a character since he supposedly represents, "casual racism." (start at about the 3:52 point)
Since Chris, the Comic Tropes host, is clearly far more knowledgeable about comics history than I am, I want to be cautious about disagreeing with him, but I'm not sure that Gabby does represent casual racism.
Isn't it at least possible that Jack Cole should be given the benefit of the doubt? Given that so much else of the Spirit was copied pretty much directly (e.g., the fedora, the suit color, the domino mask, etc.) the fact that Cole deviated from strict adherence to the Eisner sidekick formula seems significant to me. Isn't it possible to argue that Gabby represented not an implicit assumption that black people were "merely monkeys" but rather a passive-aggressive resistance to perpetuating the kind of racist caricatures exhibited by Ebony White?
Again, I want to be cautious about disagreeing with Chris. I haven't even made it all the way through the original Midnight comics yet, so there may be future Cole stories that blow my sympathetic thesis about the guy out of the water. However, to this point the only instance I've run across where Cole explicitly drew black people was in "The Circus Mystery" (Smash Comics #24), wherein the unnamed black boy does exhibit stereotyped language (e.g., "Sho!!") but also the boy is depicted as reliable, trustworthy, and competent.
So, what say you? Is Chris right, or should we be a bit more sympathetic to Cole? Was he perpetuating racism, or trying to push back against it?
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