The Racism Of "Great Comics"

Racism was unfortunately not something that Great Comics Publishing in the early 1940s could keep out of their pages what with WWII going on and anti-Asian propaganda playing a huge part during this time. One such character was created by someone going by the name “Char-Lee“. Shanghai Shea is an American pilot in China referred to as an Ace of the Orient who with his thick glasses-wearing Chinese partner Wing Low is asked to lead the Purple Dragon Squadron against the opposing Japanese forces. Shanghai has a plan to get captured by the Japanese navy, but Wing Low stows away on his plane and helps free him. The whole Shanghai Shea adventure is deep in nationalism and dehumanizes the Japanese with our Ace character referring to them as yellow gangsters, but since he’s the shining white knight in a foreign land he gets away with the occasional xenophobia. Other incidents of racism run throughout both Great and Choice Comics, one of which was the less-than-heroic efforts Andrew Jackson used against Native Americans who were merely defending their land. Much of the bigotry on display in these comics are in the humor sections like Hot Foot written by ”Joy Ryde” who is a stereotypical Asian boy running a stereotypical laundromat. Chimpsey is suspectedly a bad caricature of a black person, even though its more obvious that he’s just an anthropomorphic chimp. Clambake The Magician was assisted by a cliche cartoon black helper with big lips. A further example is Origin Of The Bat which tells the Cree legend of how a mouse became a flying rodent of which the story ends with someone sitting in front of a wigwam while smoking up a peace pipe. Funny animal cartoonist Victor Pazmino put his own kind of discrimination with the Peter The Pooch short where a dog must protect a baby from wandering into a circus filled with an overt number of racist representatives of the African-American workers all cursed with illiterate southern drawl. The biggest case of intolerance is the fairy tale of Kid Bagdad who gets tasked by a caliph to go through a series of hazards to bring him back a cask which happens to house a genie that is the only dark-skinned character in the whole story claiming to be the slave of his new white master. The tale of Aladdin was never all that accurate with the original character being Chinese and not Arabic, but Kid Bagdad is just a bad copy of a bad copy.