YMMV / Black Lightning

• Ass Pull:
  • Judd Winick's first issue of Outsiders (2003) introduces us to Black Lightning's daughter Anissa, who ends up becoming the heroine Thunder. His 20-something year old daughter whom had never been seen or mentioned in any prior series featuring Black Lightning, despite his wife being a fairly prominent figure in many stories. Geoff Johns then took this even further in his JSA run by introducing us to another previously-unseen daughter, Jennifer.
  • Jennifer had been foreshadowed in Bad Future story Kingdom Come. This still qualifies as an Ass Pull by virtue of Black Lightning having no references to children just a short time before this, and his age in The Outsiders comics previously being about Batman's age at the oldest. He'd have already had to father these women by the time of his introduction.
• Fair for Its Day: The first series features a lot of stereotypical elements that can come off as a bit silly and dated in the modern day, but at the time, it was one of the more subversive takes, and it's very clear that Isabella had DC's horrid initial pitch in mind. Jefferson Pierce is heroic, well-spoken, a trained athlete, and very intelligent, and it's made clear that the Jive Turkey persona he uses is just that: a persona. Of course, nowadays, people would just write the well-spoken smart guy without needing to bother with the constant slang.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Before even debuting. DC originally tried to make their first headlining black superhero a character named Black Bomber, who was a white racist who unknowingly turned into a black superhero when under stress as a result of exposure to chemicals while in Vietnam; his outfit when transformed was essentially a basketball uniform. He also had separate black and white girlfriends for his two forms, who knew about his changes and each other (he did not.) Both the existing scripts for his pilot issues had him transform and someone, only to turn back into his white form and then recoil and shout a racial slur after discovering he'd saved a black person. Comics historian Don Markstein described him as "an insult to practically everybody with any point of view at all". After his character was scrapped, Tony Isabella (who also wrote for Luke Cage, the resident black superhero at Marvel Comics) was asked to salvage the design.