I seem to remember some "Sheena" comics from the 40's. Sheena was drawn white, of course, but the local natives were a puzzlement. The ladies were drawn as light tan while the men were depicted as black!
Kind of mixed code symbols at work here. I guess we couldn't have young white boy readers getting excited by depictions skimply clad black women.
Or maybe they were worried young boy readers wouldn't find the scantily clad black women as attractive and sales would suffer?
I notice this with Asian movies. The actresses are usually much lighter skinned than the actors. Maybe they just try to avoid a tan, maybe it's a casting decision.
Or even TV sitcoms, where the husband is usually fat and stupid, while the wife is gorgeous and sharp. It lets the women in the audience think, "Yeah, I too deserve better" while the men in the audience put up with the discrepancy because they can at least watch the good-looking actresses and laugh at the jokes.
TV shows with great looking men and awful looking women would get cancelled after the first commercial, I think. Actually, the commercials invariably have homely clueless husbands with their lovely wives bailing them out, too ("He can't go grocery shopping by HIMSELF"), so there's no escape there either.
I don't understand why they drew caricatures then realistic minorities in the same comic. It's disconcerting. Much like Donald Duck eating a chicken leg.
It doesn't make much sense. I doubt if the artists or editors gave it much thought. Steamboat and Chop Chop were comedy relief. Woozy Winks from Plastic Man, Doiby Dickles from Green Lantern and the Human Bomb's Throckmorton were also grotesque caricatures amidst the more realistic art, but they were not racial caricatures. They were just bizarre looking guys and that made all the difference.
In the 1960s, we had an outbreak of weird little magical imps following the heroes around. BatMite, Quisp, Zook, Cryll... that was a strange fad,too.
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Kind of mixed code symbols at work here. I guess we couldn't have young white boy readers getting excited by depictions skimply clad black women.
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I notice this with Asian movies. The actresses are usually much lighter skinned than the actors. Maybe they just try to avoid a tan, maybe it's a casting decision.
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Well, heck, Doc, that was true of the Cosby Show, too.
Cf the city of Opar, where the men were all squat, ugly brutes and the women...
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TV shows with great looking men and awful looking women would get cancelled after the first commercial, I think. Actually, the commercials invariably have homely clueless husbands with their lovely wives bailing them out, too ("He can't go grocery shopping by HIMSELF"), so there's no escape there either.
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In the 1960s, we had an outbreak of weird little magical imps following the heroes around. BatMite, Quisp, Zook, Cryll... that was a strange fad,too.
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