Decades before Marvel's "Luke Cage" was a Netflix hit show or "Black Panther" smashed box office records, a Black cartoonist created Ebon, one of the first Black superheroes to appear in his own comic book.
The character was nearly lost to history until a pair of friends working under the moniker Black Kirby revived and reimagined the comic book as part of the art exhibit, "Ebon: Fear of a Black Planet."
John Jennings is a professor of media and cultural studies at University of California Riverside. He shared more about "Ebon: Fear of a Black Planet" and how it honors Ebon's creator, Larry Fuller.
"[The exhibit] is an Afro-futurist historical account of one of the most influential Black cartoonists of our time, Larry Fuller. There's a re-imagining of his face and a reimagining of his seminal comic book, Ebon. At the time that he was creating, only three African-American artists were part of a world-famous underground comics movement in Haight-Ashbury back in the 1960s," Jennings said.
Jennings talked about how, until Black Panther was created in 1966, there were no Black superheroes in the mainstream comic world. The exhibit features a variety of items paying tribute to Fuller and Ebon.
"Only about 100 or so original Ebon comic books were published by Spearhead Press back in the 1970s. We have reproductions of the entire book that's actually scanned in from Larry Fuller's own collection. There's this organization of Black comics lovers, and these are the most knowledgeable Black men about comics you would ever imagine. And they were partially started because of conversation with Larry Fuller about Ebon," Jennings said.
Honoring Fuller by putting his face onto Ebon in the exhibit was an important way for Jennings to pay tribute to the artist.
"When you put someone's image in it, you're basically saying that they're worthy to be shown, that they're worthy just to have a narrative, that they're worthy to be archived. What happens when you don't do that? It basically gives people the mindset that that person's life doesn't matter, that that person's history doesn't matter, that they have not given anything in society. So we're trying to show the opposite," he said.
You can visit the "Ebon: Fear of a Black Planet" exhibit at the UC Riverside Culver Center of the Arts until Sunday, June 19.
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