Indy Comics Writer

We had a historic presidential election in the United States this year. Our country, which has so long touted itself as the land of opportunity for all, finally elected a black man (bi-racial, to be exact, but still …) to the highest office in the land. Personally, I was thrilled.

Sometimes fate works in mysterious ways. Still heady from the effects of this big, historic step, I spotted a biography of Jackie Ormes in our local library. Ormes, like Obama, was also a pioneer.

Ormes is regarded as the first African-American female cartoonist in the United States. She created four cartoon and comics series that ran in African-American newspapers — including the famed Chicago Defender — from 1937 to 1956. One of her creations, the single-panel cartoon Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, led to the creation of the Patty-Jo doll. Ormes’ strips are funny, and also, at times, biting.

One well-known comic shows a well-dressed, perfectly manicured African-American girl confronting a trashy, dirty white girl outside a clubhouse reserved for “lilly” white people only. The African-American girl has a single louse in a jar, that she claims came from the white girl’s exclusive club. The 1946 strip is meant as a protest of restrictive property covenants in Chicago that kept segregation an all-too-real event.

As comics creators, we should respect those pros that came before us, especially when those pros faced significant obstacles. In the United States when Ormes worked, there were very few opportunities for African-American women.

If you want to learn more about Ormes, a good place to start is the book Jackie Ormes: The First African-American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein and the University of Michigan Press. Visit this page to get a look at this book.

We too often overlook our industry’s history. This is a mistake. Studying the ways in which the comics industry developed is crucial to truly understanding the medium.

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