While 'Incognegro' was set in the thirties, it was written much later, in the twenty-first century. While it was ostensibly about race, it used race as a focus to tell a broader story about identity. This, on the other hand, is a historical document that's inherently all about race because that's the only reason why it exists.

I'm reading and reviewing 'All-Negro Comics' as a large format paperback book, published by a Michigan company, UP History and Hobby. However, it's really just a reprint of the first issue of a comic book that saw print in June 1947 as the first in a projected series that never continued. The editor was Orrin C. Evans and he was the president of All-Negro Comics, Inc. His goal was to publish brand-new material written and drawn by "Negro artists", the accepted term back then, and this was the first example he put on the marketplace. It seemed like a good idea. After all, he'd already broken one glass ceiling as "the first black writer to cover general assignments for a mainstream white newspaper in the United States." This was merely another one.

It's a fascinating title, primitive for sure but no more so than any mainstream comic book that was on the racks in 1947. 'Superman' and 'Batman' hadn't been out for ten years yet and 'Eerie' had just launched the horror comic that January. Most comics looked primitive back then. The reasons why it's fascinating aren't the ones I expected, though. I thought going in that it would be a cultural document. At a time when African Americans were specific stereotypes in movies, mostly used as comic relief, how would African American writers and artists depict themselves to their own communities? And, sure, there's plenty of that here but what struck me most was how insanely varied this book is.

'Ace Harlem' is pretty close to what I expected, a violent mystery solved by the "famed negro detective" that points the way to the blaxploitation era of film. 'Lion Man' isn't outside what I expected, a specific link between educated African Americans and their primitive heritage on the other side of the ocean, back in Africa. These strips could easily run today and without too many aesthetic changes. They're dated more for their vocabulary than their setting or action. But 'Dew Dillies'? What possibly reason could there be for including that strip in this book? It feels as out of place as the quartet of cartoons dubbed Hep-Chicks on Parade.

Maybe that's my biases creeping in, which have less to do with race or gender and more to do with age. While I'm sure this was pitched more to black readers than white and more to boys than girls, it ought to be just as accessible to any race or gender. However, 'Dew Dillies' seems out of place here, as a strip that those readers, likely teenagers, would skip as "kids' stuff'. If they had much younger siblings, maybe they'd pass it to them once they'd read the rest. And I mean much younger siblings, the sort who might scrawl all over the pages in crayon instead of reading the story. And they wouldn't be interested in anything else because they wouldn't be old enough. Am I being ageist here? I don't think so.

I rather liked 'Ace Harlem', who was clearly being positioned to be the mascot of the series. He has a little of the intellectual detective of the Sherlock Holmes tradition in him, able to scan a crime scene and catch the one detail he needs to see. However, he's also tough and driven by a strong moral compass, so comes across more like a black take on Dick Tracy. The bad guys are a dismal lot but also a notably stereotypical one. Pop's Bar-B-Que Shack is where the sharp chicks and smooth studs hang out but, one early morning, it's held up by black hoods in zoot suits. It's up to Ace Harlem to find him, but tellingly not bring him down. The powers of karma do that all on their own, as they tended to do in 'Doc Savage' novels. This is pulp writing, even if it's visual rather than prose.

From that, with its detectives and waitresses, hoods and underground middlemen, chains and superstitions, we go straight to 'Dew Dillies'. What are they, you might ask? Tiny naked winged cherubs that only little children can see. There's action here too, eventually, as a hawk drops a clam to force it open and it's about to crush one of the dillies until Bibber dropkicks it away, but it's not an action piece. It's so passive that we soon learn that all dillies have to be vegetarian because they're related to the ducks. Yes, we shimmy from chain-wielding zoot-suited hoods to naked vegetarian cherubs in the blink of an eye.

And then we shimmy again to a prose story. I remember reading comic books from the sixties and seventies that mostly unfolded in visual form, what Will Eisner called sequential art, but always threw a couple of prose short stories into the mix too. That was especially true with the annuals. This one's 'Ezekiel's Manhunt' and it's a pulp short story about a couple of young kids who run into an adult bootlegger and murderer but manage to get the best of him. It's exactly what I'd expect in a boys' paper back in England. That the characters happen to be black is the only real difference.

On the other hand, 'Lion Man' is quintessentially American, because it plays up heritage. That it's about a black character just makes that heritage African but it could easily be rewritten to reflect a white character whose heritage was Dutch or Norwegian. It's less about the story and more about going back through generations and finding that they always shift continent. Here, Lion Man is an American-born college-educated scientist, who's been sent by the UN to protect the world's largest deposit of uranium, held within the Gold Coast's Magic Mountain. He looks rather like Will Smith in a loincloth and kufi hat.

The actual adventure is capable enough, with stereotypical white villains (not a cliché that's at all restricted to African American comics). Dr. Blut Sangro (Blue Blood?) and his guide Brosser are so outrageously bad that it's OK for Lion Man to punch a man wearing glasses. They're also the only white characters in this entire book. White men in an African American comic must be the equivalent token to British actors in Hollywood action movies, at least for half a century or so before Liam Neeson got to become an action hero.

If 'Ace Harlem' is the best thing here and 'Dew Dillies' both the worst and the furthest out of place, everything else fits in between. 'Lion man' really ought to rank second, but it's simple in nature and has no resolution because we’re only given part one of a story and need to "watch for the further adventures of Lion Man in the next issue of All-Negro Comics", which naturally never arrived. 'Lil' Eggie' is a one-page gag strip that relies on a joke so old that it was past its sell by date even in 1947. The 'Hep-Chicks on Parade' cartoons are almost as out of place as the 'Dew Dillies', something I'd expect to see in a girls' fashion magazine. And I can't make up my mind about 'Sugarfoot'. It's rather fun as mildly suggestive slapstick but it really shouldn't be. It feels a little wrong to like it.

I'm rather sad that 'All-Negro Comics' didn't make it, but this was the United States in 1947. It was never going to make it. Just breaking that glass ceiling was achievement enough for Orrin C. Evans, who moved onto other things instead when he found that he was unable to purchase the necessary newsprint for a second issue. Many believe that he was specifically blocked by the white distribution and publishing industries and that rings very true, especially as they began to publish their own titles for the black audience. In other words, one issue did the job and the title could be retired as mission accomplished, even if it didn't feel like that at the time.

And "Remember - Crime doesn't pay, kids! Stick to the church, and use up your energy in good clean sports." ~~ Hal C F Astell