Wow! Human looking Asian-Americans and African-Americans in a WWII-era comic book! This holiday story of tolerance and equality for all is a rarity all right and if you guessed it to be written by Gardner Fox with his history of "relevant" stories you'd be...well...apparently incorrect. GCD credits this one to sci-fi author Henry Kuttner
3 comments:
thanx for this, timely in many ways...
Yes, Megyn, there IS a Black Santa.
It's nice to have a reminder once in a while that not ALL Golden Age comics gleefully participated in nonsense that we feel compelled to make excuses for today. They didn't whine and snivel that they were forced to do the right thing because of "political correctness;" they did the right thing because it was the right thing to do.
Overall, Henry Kuttner was the best science-fiction writer with whose work I'm familiar; but I cannot say that I think that this particular story is well written. (I think that Kuttner greatly underestimated his audience here.) None-the-less, it definitely is good to see a comic-book story that in 1944 spoke-out unequivocally against racism and against intolerance of religious heterodoxy. It would be easy to impute Kuttner's greater sensitivity to his own ethnic background; but, sadly, a great many of the writers, artists, editors, and publishers who offered the most racist material were of the same general ethnicity as he.
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