Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: about comics, nat gertler

Nat Gertler Spotlights Missing Black Golden Age Superhero Sergeant Joe

Nat Gertler's About Comics has started a new video series with a look at a long forgotten Black superhero, Sergeant Joe.

About Comics has started a new video series with a look at a long-forgotten Black superhero, Sergeant Joe, one that predates the most commonly cited "first Black superhero". The series Comics Show & Tell with Nat Gertler is intended to be an ongoing look at interesting, bizarre, and overlooked pieces of comics culture, whether it be comic books, comic strips, magazine cartoons, or other bits of the cartoon arts. The first episode digs up a vital piece of comics history that had gone overlooked for more than three-quarters of a century.

"If you look at articles about the history of Black superheroes, many of them will point to the introduction of such a hero in Bungleton Green, a long-running strip from Black weekly papers in January 1945, as the earliest example," explains show host Nat Gertler. "When I stumbled across the Sergeant Joe comic strip in Black newspaper archives a few years back, I thought I found something that started in February 1945 and just lasted for two strips… and even that was worth spreading word about, with writer Ken Quattro and I getting word out about those two appearances on social media last November. But this past week I discovered that Sergeant Joe had actually first appeared months earlier and ran for much longer than I had detected, and knew this was an important discovery that needed to be covered."

While the first two episodes of Comics Show & Tell will focus on overlooked early Black superheroes, the series is intended to cover a wide range of topics, from Microsoft's toe in the graphic novel business to pirated Polish Peanuts books. Nat Gertler has been reading comics for more than half a century, writing comics for more than a third of a century, and publishing comics for more than a quarter of a century. He has been writing about the history of comics for thirty years in the pages of the magazine Hogan's Alley, and in 2023 won an Eisner Award for a biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz he co-wrote for the Schulz Museum. This is the first recent ongoing video effort for About Comics, which previously had done such audio podcasts as The AAUGH Blog Podcast (around 60 episodes about the comic strip Peanuts, particularly Peanuts books) and Invisible Zeppelin (a sitcom about the call center for a superhero team, about a dozen episodes long), as well as short videos about the character Licensable Bear™.

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