Comic Books

In the early 1930’s, a printing press company specializing in color printing was facing a bit of an issue.  Due to a little thing known as the Great Depression, pretty much everybody in the entirety of the United States was a little strapped for cash.  As a result, most newspapers and businesses did away with anything luxurious or frivolous, with color printing being top of the list.  Not really wanting to just call it a day and declare bankruptcy, the printing company instead came up with a desperate scheme which involved putting all the old newspaper comic strips they could find in a single big book and selling it for dirt cheap.  The collection actually sold amazingly well, and so was born the comic book.

Now being business people, the owners of this printing press of course squeezed their new cash cow as much as humanely possible by going into overdrive printing new collections.  However, there was just one little problem, they quickly ran out of already printed comic strips.  Not wanting to go back to worrying about not making money, the printers instead got the bright idea that they should just make up their own original comics.  This worked quite well, and before you could say Jack’s your uncle, or whatever the hell it was old timey people said, numerous competitors were jumping into the new industry.  Now unlike a newspaper, having a whole book to fill opened up a lot of opportunities for would be writers and artists.  Where once comics were limited to short strips, suddenly it was possible to do lengthier features.  What once was once an art form dominated by puns expanded into a mode of storytelling with complete, and at times complex, plots. Nearly every genre had its own comic book, with the most popular being horror, crime, science fiction, westerns, romance, and superheroes.  By the 1940’s, comic books were read by nearly everybody in the country.

Things went pretty well for the comics industry until the 1950’s, a time when people who got home from a war that was supposedly fought for freedom began to wonder if perhaps they were starting to get way too much freedom back home.  The war against comic books began when a crackpot psychologist, who apparently really hated comics, wrote a popular book claiming that they were turning children into violent homoerotic sociopaths.  People being the way they have always been, many freaked right the fuck out, leading to a growing movement to outlaw comics and even a hearing before the U.S. Senate.  As a result, the comics industry freaked right the fuck out too, and soon after they created what became known as the Comics Code Authority, which forcefully censored the industry by using public worry to guarantee that newsstands and other distributors would only carry comics that had the CCA’s seal of approval.  The CCA completely banned the showing of violence, gore, and overt sexuality.  However, it also banned anything that questioned people in authority or the two point three kids and a big slice of apple pie version of American values.  It should be pretty obvious that this was pretty much all of the good stuff, and as a result, comic book readership plummeted, and many companies went out of business.  By the mid-1960’s, the only people still widely reading comics were adolescent boys, resulting in a greater concentration on titles focused on children’s humor and superheroes.

As mainstream comic book companies increasingly focused on the saccharin laced and American flag waving story lines required by the CCA, other comic book artists went underground to circumvent the censorship.  Creatively called the ‘underground comics scene’, these artists created heavily sexualized satirical characters who subverted authority and questioned everything and anything being declared normal at the time.  These comics were mostly sold via unconventional distributors, such as head shops, and by the late 1960’s had become popular on many college campuses as part of the counterculture.  The growing competition of the underground scene, led to many mainstream artists working within the code to push its boundaries, which in turn started to force changes to the code, such as allowing corrupt public officials in comics, but only if they got their comeuppance.  This marked the beginning of the end for the CCA and its censorship.

In 1971, the U.S. government approached Marvel Comics to create a superhero comic about drug abuse.  While pretty standard stuff these days, at the time it was a fairly novel request, especially given the fact that the depiction of drug use was totally against the code.  Though the CCA refused to give the comic its seal of approval, Marvel printed it anyways, figuring the U.S. government was a bit of a bigger deal than the CCA.  Marvel was absolutely right, the comic was a major hit, and the CCA was shown to be the toothless bully it had always been.  However, though the CCA was shown to be nothing but a boogey man, it continued to at least try to give the illusion that it had control for several decades more.  The CCA stamp was common on most comics clear through the 1990’s, even though everything the code was supposedly against slowly became more commonplace throughout the industry.  The CCA finally became fully defunct in 2011.  As a result, comic books have made a comeback in recent years, with stories branching out from the old muscly people in tights plots to stories in about every genre you can think of, attracting readers of all ages.  You can find these resurgent comic books in about every bookstore and library in the country, only now we call them graphic novels.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority#/media/File:Approved_by_the_Comics_Code_Authority.gif

Rinderpest

Aside from North and South America, few other continents have gotten such a raw deal from contact with their neighbors quite as much as Africa.  Throughout most of history, Africa was seen mostly as a source of exotic trade goods and slaves.  However, people from Europe and the Middle East mostly stayed on the coast, avoiding the interior with the exception of South Africa.  This was largely due to the fact that the interior of Africa was completely chock full of deadly tropical diseases and well armed and organized tribes and kingdoms, who were less than welcoming to those daring to venture inland.  However, as the European powers began to jockey for actual control of Africa’s resources, things quickly got out of hand.

In the 1880’s, Italy just up and decided one day that it would be in its best interest to control the areas of the region known as the Horn of Africa.  The only problem with this idea was that the various peoples living there, most notably the Ethiopians, were not really down with the whole idea.  Things got rather violent.  It was during these various campaigns, around 1889, that the Italian army got the bright idea that they should totally ship in some cattle from India and the Middle East to help feed its troops.  Unfortunately, these cattle were infected by a nasty air borne disease known as rinderpest, which though common in the homeland of the cattle, had never been seen before in Africa.  You can probably guess what happened next.  The disease spread rapidly amongst the cattle, goats, sheep, and oxen of the locals, killing some 90 percent within a few years.  This was not exactly a good thing for the locals, who not only depended on their cattle for food, but also their oxen for plowing their fields.  While many people reverted to farming by hand, things only got worse when a drought swept the area.  By the end of the epidemic, an estimated third of the population of Ethiopia had starved to death.  Things just got shittier from there.

To the south of Ethiopia were the famed savannas of Kenya and Tanzania, home to numerous nomadic tribes, the most powerful of whom were the Maasai.  Most of these tribes, the Maasai chief amongst them, were entirely dependent upon their large cattle herds for sustenance.  With cattle theft a common practice, some unlucky bastards stole some cattle from Ethiopia.  It was a major mistake.  Within months, millions of cattle were dead and dying, removing the only source of food for the Maasai and the other tribes.  Within a few years, an estimated two-thirds of the Maasai starved to death.  The sheer number of cattle and people dying horrified the European powers who controlled the coast, but not to the degree that it kept them from moving into the interior to take control of the territory that the Maasai were no longer able to defend.  In the meanwhile, the rinderpest outbreak continued making its way south, eventually crossing the Zambeze River and threatening British controlled South Africa.  Not really down with 90 percent of their cattle dying, the British carried out various schemes to halt the spread of the virus.  The first attempt was to build a thousand mile barbed wire fence.  This worked about as well as you would imagine it would.  The next strategy was to kill every susceptible animal in a zone several hundred miles wide stretching across the continent.  People used to think big back then.  This worked to the degree that it slowed the disease, but still millions of cattle in South Africa died before the epidemic burned itself out around the end of the century.

If all of this sounds pretty horrorific, then it might not be a good time to mention that things weren’t over yet.  The rinderpest epidemic not only killed 90 percent of the cattle in East Africa, it also killed around 50 percent of the various wild cloven hooved animals; such as wildebeest, giraffes, and various types of antelope.  The resulting depopulation of grazing animals resulted in wide areas of the savanna shifting from grasslands to large swaths of scrubby thorn bushes.  These areas were the perfect breeding ground for tsetse flies, a blood sucking bastard who also happened to be the primary carrier of sleeping sickness, a terrible disease which drives people insane, makes them extremely lethargic, and then finally kills them.  Though tsetse flies had always been in Africa, the greatly boosted population caused a sleeping sickness outbreak across Eastern Africa from 1901 through 1908 which killed hundreds of thousands of people, including up to two thirds of the native population in some regions.  This pretty much ended any native attempts to stop the European colonial takeover.

The Europeans who took control of the savannas mostly concentrated on creating large plantations and ranches, as well as giant game preserves.  The truth of the matter was that the Europeans were more horrified by the deaths of so many big game animals rather than the fate of all the people that had died.  After all, while a bunch of so-called savages perishing was one thing, it was nothing compared to not being able to go big game hunting.  So yeah, it was that kind of fucked up.  A combination of these game preserves, a ban on any natives killing wild animals, and large swaths of tsetse infested scrubland being avoided, and therefore undeveloped, led to an explosion in wild animal populations to levels likely higher than before the outbreak.  This included lions, which led to a sharp increase in the number of lion attacks on villages, which the locals were pretty much just told to shut up and get used to.  Some modern ecologists would later say that the rinderpest outbreak was the greatest boon to African wildlife in modern history, which though true, is still probably a shitty thing to say all things considered.  Research into both sleeping sickness and rinderpest resulted in the development of effective quarantine and treatment methods by World War II, though outbreaks still periodically occurred.  Rinderpest was declared globally eradicated in 2010.  Sleeping sickness still kills 3,500 people in Africa each year.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rinderpest_1896-CN.jpg

Tulsa's Shame

The discovery of oil at the turn of the twentieth century in Oklahoma turned the little hamlet of Tulsa into a thriving boom town overnight.  Tens of thousands of people flocked to the city, overwhelming the Native Americans who made up the majority of the population.  Would be entrepreneurs from the urban centers of the Midwest and East Coast, many of them immigrants, mixed with poverty stricken Whites and Blacks from the South, making Tulsa one of the most diverse cities in the region.  For the arriving Black population, Tulsa represented an opportunity for economic success, but also a chance to escape from the violence of the Jim Crow south.  Though the ugliness of segregation followed them to Tulsa, the newly arrived Black population still found economic success in the neighborhood of Greenwood.  By 1920, Greenwood was the most affluent Black neighborhood in the country.

In 1921, a young black shoe shiner went across the street to use a segregated washroom on the top floor of a downtown office building.  On his return, he tripped while exiting the elevator and fell into the young woman working as the operator.  Some of the local shop owners heard the woman scream and called the police, claiming that an attempted rape had taken place.  The police, not being total idiots, took this claim with a grain of salt.  However, since the woman was saying little about the incident and the shop keepers were pretty insistent about their version of events, the police decided that it would probably be best to take the shoe shiner into protective custody.  It’s probably worth mentioning that at the time racial tensions were at a rather high level.  Barred from serving in the military, African-Americans had been one of the primary sources of alternative labor during World War I, taking over many of the jobs that had been held by the 4 million or so young men who were drafted into the military, many of whom were the children of poor immigrants.  On the one hand, this created new opportunities for the nation’s Black population, who prior to the war had almost entirely worked as sharecroppers in the South.  On the other, it caused issues for the returning soldiers, who came home to find a new source of competition for the jobs they had left behind.  Matters were only worsened by a post-war recession and many big companies bringing in Black labor to break up worker strikes.  As a result, a series of race riots broke out across the country in the summer of 1919, with immigrants attacking Black neighborhoods.  Though Tulsa largely remained peaceful, there was an undercurrent of violence both actual and threatened.  Thousands of Whites in Tulsa joined the newly formed Ku Klux Klan after the war, and six Black men were lynched during this period.

The afternoon after the shoe shiner was taken into protective custody, one of Tulsa’s more sensationalist newspapers published a story about the incident, of course being careful to only state the facts.  No wait, that’s not right, they actually made it sound like the shoe shiner raped the elevator operator and threw in an editorial stating that the shoe shiner was most definitely going to get lynched.  You can probably guess what happened next.  Within a few hours of the paper being published, a lynch mob of several hundred people showed up at the courthouse.  This did not sit well with the Black population of Greenwood, and after some debate, some 30 young men armed themselves and went to the courthouse to support the besieged police.  Tensions rose on both sides, with several people firing guns in the air to show how serious they were, which quickly shifted into firing guns into each other.  When the smoke cleared, ten White men and two Black men were dead.  The shock of the sudden violence quickly gave way to a full on riot, with armed Whites chasing Blacks in a running gun battle through the streets.

Rumors quickly began circulating throughout Tulsa that a full on race revolution was occurring.  Thousands of White people armed themselves and surrounded the Greenwood neighborhood, where the local Black populace prepared to defend their homes and businesses.  Both sides took pot shots at each other throughout the night.  The Oklahoma National Guard was quickly deployed, but they did little to stop the violence, instead setting themselves up in defensive positions around the edge of the Greenwood neighborhood.  Seeing no chance of protection from the authorities, many Black people began to flee the city.  The following morning, the White rioters, many of whom had military training, launched a full on assault on Greenwood.  Masses of White men marched up the streets, shooting indiscriminately, lighting buildings on fire, and even hanging some Black residents.  Several of the rioters, some of them possibly police officers, commandeered biplanes from the local airport, which they used to drop homemade firebombs on the neighborhood.  Attempts by the fire department to fight the fires were stopped by the rioters.  The Oklahoma National Guard troops, bolstered by reinforcements, finally took action to end the riot by midday.  By that time, some 300 people had been killed (around 250 Black and 50 White), 800 wounded, and 35 city blocks had been burned, leaving 10,000 African-Americans homeless. Some 6,000 members of the Black community who had not fled, were rounded up and held en masse at three internment centers for several days.

Most of the residents of Greenwood spent close to a year in tents as they tried to rebuild their neighborhood, a process greatly lengthened by attempts by city leaders to halt construction via new stringent building codes and re-zoning efforts.  Though Greenwood was eventually rebuilt, it never reclaimed its former glory, becoming a slum during the Great Depression and eventually being mostly torn down for a new freeway during the 1970’s.  Though some 85 people were indicted for their participation in the riot, none were ever convicted.  The incident was collectively forgotten and scrubbed from the city’s historical record.  City officials didn’t formally apologize until the 1990’s.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Negro_Slain_in_Tulsa_Riot,_June-1-1921_(14389395391)_(cropped).jpg