Fair For Its Day / Comic Books

• Yellow Claw, published by Marvel precursor Atlas Comics, was named for its villain, a rather racist Yellow Peril character. But its hero, FBI agent Jimmy Woo (who has since become a SHIELD agent and leader of the Agents of Atlas), was Chinese-American, quite a rarity in those days.
• Wonder Woman villain Dr. Poison— an agent of Imperial Japan—could be considered this. Granted, she was still a villain, and a pretty nasty one at that, but she didn't have the same caricatured appearance or speech patterns as most other Japanese villains from World War II comics. She also qualifies for this trope simply for having an individual personality at all; most Japanese villains in World War II cartoons and comics were depicted as barely-human mooks.
• When Marvel first ran Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, its Token Black character Gabe Jones was portrayed rather stereotypically (complete with a jazz trumpet on the cover of the very first issue), but having a black character on the team at all was quite revolutionary in that day and age, and he was generally treated as equal with the other commandos and a valued member of the strike force.
• Luke Cage's blaxploitation origins are a bit cringe-worthy to read. Heck, in-universe he rather considers the yellow-disco-shirt-Sweet-Christmas era an Old Shame. Yet he was the very first black superhero to have his own title series, he regularly served as a reserve member of the Fantastic Four, and he rapidly evolved from a generic Scary Black Man to a well-rounded character.
• The "Fourth World" titles by Jack Kirby, specifically New Gods and Forever People, featured two black characters with "black" in their hero names (Vykin the Black and the Black Racer), neither of whom actually wore much-if-any black, as well as an Asian man going by Sonny Sumo. However, they're consistently treated with respect, speak normal English, and as the original comics came out in the early 70s, they were some of the first minority heroes DC had to offer (in fact, they predate Luke Cage by about a year).
• Will Eisner laid out a similar defense for Ebony White from The Spirit. He argued that despite his racist minstrel appearance, Ebony was a relatively competent and heroic depiction of a black Sidekick, especially for the time period he was created in.
• Tintin has what would be considered very racist portrayals of minorities today. However, Tintin and the heroes always treated these people with respect, while the villains would not treat them this way.
  • Invoked in The Blue Lotus, where Hergé consciously defies Western stereotypes about the Chinese and makes fun of people who still believe in them. Tintin defended a Chinese waiter who gets manhandled unfairly by a brutish American businessman. Later, he befriends Chang, a Chinese boy and they stay close in later books. Tintin freely admits many Westerners mistreat Chinese people, and the book is squarely on their side against both this along with it denouncing Japanese imperialism. Chang was based on a real Chinese friend of Hergé's.
  • This is why Nelvana chose to Bowdlerise some of the stories. In The Broken Ear, Tintin still disguises himself as a member of the boat crew, but rather than dress in blackface like in the comic book, just wears a wig and has a fake moustache. In The Red Sea Sharks, the ship full of African Muslims trying to make their pilgrimage to Mecca were instead changed to refugees. That makes it sound even worse. Although said Muslims were portrayed with stereotypical features and as rather dim, it's made clear they should be aided, as they're being trafficked into modern slavery. Similarly, the Arabs (though pretty stereotypical at times too) are often also sympathetic, with Tintin siding with them again.
  • The same goes for the Blackfeet tribe from "Tintin in America". Again, pretty stereotypical (and anachronistic because they're shown still living a traditional lifestyle and this is in the late 1920s), but they are portrayed as right for fighting against outsiders that encroach onto their land. It's being seized by the government after oil is discovered there is shown as clearly tragic and wrong.
• It's quite jarring to see Digby saying that "The black boy's done it, sir" near the end of the first Dan Dare story, but it was remarkable that a 1950s British comic would have a black African as supreme commander of the Earth forces in the first place. Dan certainly treats him with all the respect owed to his rank.
• Nero: Petoetje was a black Papuan native adopted by the white Flemish woman Madam Pheip. Despite being brought to Belgium he kept walking around in his native dress for several albums. This is a bit embarrassing nowadays, but at the same time no other comic strip at the time had a little black boy as part of the main cast. Not only that: Petoetje is actually smart and doesn't speak in pidgin talk.
• Circles was first published in 2001 and the story continued up to 2004, with each chapter being a season of the year. In those times, these types of comic books were rare and few were successful. Issues like illegal marriage were much more apparent in those times. That said, the final chapters were published in 2015, nearly after all marriage was legalized in the United States where it was published and written.
• Hal Jordan's Inuit sidekick, Tom Kalmaku, introduced during the '60s run of Green Lantern. On one hand, he had the extremely racist nickname "Pieface" and tended to say things like "great fish hooks!" when shocked. On the other hand, he was a competent minority character in an important position at Ferris Air who Hal respected as a trusted friend and equal. Nowadays, he is only ever referred to by his real name and the more derogatory aspects of his early portrayal are treated as an in-universe Berserk Button.
• Shazam!: By modern standards, the Golden Age depiction of Freddy Freeman — who was regularly called a "cripple" by friends and strangers alike — is ableist. However, he was one of the very first disabled protagonists in comics, and was always portrayed as an intelligent kid and a valuable ally to Captain Marvel. In fact, some fans even argue that Freddy's Golden Age depiction is more progressive than other versions of the character, since he never struggled with the same anger or self-image issues that have plagued his modern incarnations.
• Dust, or Sooraya Qadir of the X-Men might draw some groans today. She's a Muslim who always wears a burqa, has a very stereotypical power of sand manipulation, and was specifically rescued because she was the target of slaver terrorists. But keep in mind that she was created in December of 2002, just a little over a year after 9/11. The fact that she's always been portrayed as heroic, and is a well-defined character, and was notably one of the few mutants who never lost their powers to the Decimation event, is sure to stand out in an era where depictions of heroic Muslims were extremely hard to find in western media.
• Gen¹³ is rather infamous today for being filled with gratuitous amounts of fanservice and stereotypes, and for having an LGBT Native American member that wouldn't stop going off about being PC when she wasn't shy about her sexuality. However, back when the comic debuted in the mid-'90s it was rather progressive on several fronts. For one, it was one of the few teams in comics where the women outnumbered the men, with the leader and most powerful member also being Fairchild, a woman no less. It was written in a manner where the sexes weren't made a big deal of, but happened to be that way. On top of that, it was very diverse with only one member (Burnout) that filled the "safe" qualities of being a white male heterosexual. The fact that all members were treated equal, even the aforementioned Rainmaker as the LGBT character, also stands out. Rainmaker herself also fits, as in the '90s most mainstream comic writers were very scared of putting outright LGBT characters in their main stories, out of fear of a homophobic reaction hurting their sales, yet they made no attempt to portray Rainmaker as anything other than that around a decade or so before it started catching on.
• New Teen Titans
  • The series is rather infamous today for featuring a sexual relationship between the fifty-something Deathstroke and the 14-year-old Terra, which was statutory rape. While many would say it wasn't treated with the seriousness it would be nowadays, and later retellings of the scenario alter it to avoid the situation altogether, it's worth noting that it was always portrayed as being wrong, disgusting, and a depraved act of perversion. But nowadays, with how much society has evolved, it can still seem like a regressive way of writing despite not being played as "good" in any way. What makes it dissonant specifically is that Deathstroke was always portrayed as a cool villain even then, making if offputting to some. Still, though it's a can of worms almost no one would open nowadays, and Marv Wolfman did, he made sure to write it for exactly the horror of what it was, and that much was correct.
  • The series also features a Bed Trick between an 18 year old Miriam Delgado (aka Mirage) transformed into Starfire and Nightwing (specifically during the events of Total Chaos), also written by Marv Wolfman. Whilst back then, this incident was taken as something of a hilarious accident, in the years to come, this has become a staple example of both Double Standard Rape: Female on Male and Spicy Latina. The former comes from the team's lack of urgency towards the incident, whilst the second stems from the fact that Miriam is explicitly a person of colour (New Titans and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! would later confirm her ethnicity as being Brazilian) as well as being a borderline teenager. This is also not to mention the fact that Mirage later gets raped by Deathwing in Team Titans (who the audience was lead to believe was a future Dick Grayson). Whilst many fans of Starfire and Nightwing delight in wishing that Miriam's character was killed off, the incident itself should be acknowledged as taking away a teenager woman of colour's agency just for shock value. Luckily, Phil Jimenez manages to salvage the character during his run on Team Titans.
• The Night Gwen Stacy Died is nowadays sometimes criticized for being a textbook example of Stuffed into the Fridge. However, in 1973 the idea of killing any major character, let alone the love interest, was unheard of, and the consequences of Gwen's death are felt long afterwards, with her friends mourning her over the course of multiple issues.
• The Sandman (1989):
  • A Game of You is the storyline that most heavily falls into this due to its portrayal of Wanda:
    • Wanda was explicitly stated to be transgender, back in a time (1991-92) when transgender characters virtually never appeared in comics, much less in a positive capacity, and at the very beginning of (Anglo-American) cultural acceptance that the concept of being truly transgender even existed. Now that transgender characters (never mind people, in a public capacity) are more common and understood, her character tends to be examined much more closely, particularly the fact that she's the only character who dies in the storm at the arc's climax (a common fate for gay and transgender characters). For his part, Gaiman based Wanda on a trans woman he actually knew at the time (Thessaly was based on one of her critics, who he disagreed with), and has said that he wouldn't write her the same way in the 21st century, but he's still proud of her. She's undeniably a good, loyal friend to Barbie, and Barbie treats her like the woman she knows she is.
    • Also of particular note is the moment when Wanda is denied passage on the Moon's road because she is not biologically female. The fact that it's not a human making this call but rather a larger, more ineffable cosmic entity can come across as a little harsh. On the other hand, this series states time and again that the gods (and indeed the Endless) are not necessarily right or infallible, and humans can influence, shape or reject them as they see fit. Plus it's not actually the Moon stating that Wanda can't make the journey but Thessaly, who, as has already been mentioned, is an asshole.
    • The end of the storyline can also rub people reading later the wrong way. In a dream, Barbie sees Wanda hanging briefly with Death on her way to what comes after; Wanda is "drop-dead gorgeous" in a very classically feminine way, and Barbie describes her as "[having] nothing camp about her, nothing artificial". In the 21st century, that imagery and description could cause annoyance (as it seems to support the notion that trans women must conform to "traditional" femininity to be considered women), but as noted above, the mere acknowledgement that Wanda's soul was unquestionably that of a woman, an absolute statement that Wanda was a woman, was itself unheard of not just in comics but in media at large, and was a powerful, important moment that contributed to Gaiman winning acknowledgement from GLAAD. Gaiman likely made her very feminine just to make absolutely sure the point got driven home to those who needed it, in 1992, with a big, fat, dream-dust-conjured hammer. Also, in 1992, Barbie's description is likely the way nearly anyone would have described the contrast.
  • On a different tack, the "ethnic" stories. Both then and now, the entire point was to show that everyone dreams, that Dream is much older than the USA (or UK) and that not all the action has to happen on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, which is a pretty commendable effort compared to Sandman's contemporaries (or even many efforts afterward). In the 21st century, though, it's hard not to notice that a lot of the non-Caucasian-focused stories tend to lean pretty heavily on the stereotypes ("Tales in the Sand" and "Ramadan" are the worst offenders about this), a lot of which come across pretty negatively.
  • In a different use of Bury Your Gays, both Chantal and Zelda die of AIDS near the end of the story, Chantal off-panel and Zelda during The Kindly Ones. Today this can seem almost infuriating, but this one really can be chalked up to "a different time". The Kindly Ones itself was written specifically at the furious burning peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1994-95, when upwards of fifty thousand people were dying yearly in the U.S. alone, just before HAART was developed... and it was a time when many people still tried to avoid talking about AIDS or homosexuals at all. Gaiman's entire purpose was to shine a huge spotlight on the fact that, yes, gay people are people, and they hurt, and they die, and they shouldn't be ignored (which a hell of a lot of the world around Rose, the focus character for that segment, is trying its damnedest to do). It also emphasises the fact that AIDS isn't a punishment for 'sinners', not even merely an affliction of the gay community, but a disease that anyone can suffer from—Chantal contracted it not from sex or intravenous drug use, but from getting a kidney transplant from an HIV-positive organ donor who'd flown under the radar. Gaiman felt very strongly about AIDS education and awareness in general at the time — it's why he agreed to do a comic PSA about the subject featuring Death during the run of Sandman — so it's not at all a surprise he would try and emphasize it this way in his most visible work of the time, even if in later years it comes across more harshly and unfortunately.
• The DC comics series under the editorship of Julius Schwartz were a bit ahead of their time with the depiction of the female supporting characters within limits. For instance, Green Lantern Hal Jordan had Carol Ferris who was the head of a major aerospace manufacturing corporation and the Ray Palmer Atom had Iris who was a successful lawyer.
• Fantomah, the jungle-queen superheroine created by Fletcher Hanks, creator of Stardust the Super Wizard, is basically a female jungle-themed Stardust, with all the problems of his more famous character's sadism and brutality, plus the usual Mighty Whitey issues common to jungle superheroes popular in that era... but this was in 1940, a year before Wonder Woman; while Fantomah is basically a Stardust-style all-powerful psychopath, she was also one of the first female superheroines, and her Good Is Not Soft portrayal was decidedly unusual for female characters of the day. Also, while her "normal" appearance is a conventionally-attractive blonde, when she's using her powers to punish villains, her face turns into a horrifying skull. Additionally, most of the enemies she fights are people seeking to exploit the jungle or its native inhabitants.
• The original Doom Patrol was ahead of its time with Rita Farr aka Elasti-Girl, who is undeniably the major muscle of the team when she is in her giant form and ready to mix it up in battle.
• Red Sonja is not only the Trope Maker for Chainmail Bikini (though in her case it's technically scale armor), but the title character was also forced to take a vow to never have sex with a man who couldn't defeat her in combat. However, as you could probably guess by now, simply having the protagonist of a Conan-esque Sword and Sorcery work be a woman in the first place was progressive for the time.

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