Who's Out There?

« We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. » — Wernher von Braun

The other day, I was digging through my to-read pile, and came upon a 1950s Charlton science-fiction title I’d picked up for a song during a trip to the Maritimes (that’s New Brunswick in this case), last Fall. Its second story struck me as slight but quite fun, which is pretty much the best one could hope for in those strict, early years under the Comics Code’s oppressive authority. Despite the quickly executed job under overpowering Colletta varnish, I surmised I could identify the penciller’s style: none other than Matt Baker, whom I wrote about almost exactly a year ago, in Matt Baker’s Disquieting Romance. I’d advise you to begin there.

In his review of Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour (2012, TwoMorrows), cartoonist Eddie Campbell provided a useful bit of context: « A final phase, in which Baker had a hard time getting any work at all, is also examined briefly. Between 1955 and ‘59 he mostly pencilled for Vince Colletta, who was somehow well enough placed to pick up as much work as he could handle from Atlas and Charlton. He farmed a great deal of it out to others to pencil, leaving the inking for himself, which is one way to make a living and I’ve never had any problem with it. Colletta is a figure that comic book fans love to vilify. There’s him, Fredric Wertham, and the Red Skull, making the triumvirate of evil. »

But enough telling for now, time for some showing!

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So what was in it for Vince Colletta? Basic economics aside — it’s easier to ink well-executed layouts — perhaps he harboured sympathy for this massively talented Black man who couldn’t get work, as all but a few did — regardless of talent — after the massive contraction of the comics field in the mid-Fifties. As a native Sicilian, it couldn’t be far from Colletta’s mind that in America, his own people, not so long before, were forcibly excluded from the ‘Whites’ club.

As Brent Staples wrote in How Italians Became ‘White’ (The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2019): « Italian immigrants were welcomed into Louisiana after the Civil War, when the planter class was in desperate need of cheap labor to replace newly emancipated black people, who were leaving backbreaking jobs in the fields for more gainful employment.

These Italians seemed at first to be the answer to both the labor shortage and the increasingly pressing quest for settlers who would support white domination in the emerging Jim Crow state. Louisiana’s romance with Italian labor began to sour when the new immigrants balked at low wages and dismal working conditions.

The newcomers also chose to live together in Italian neighborhoods, where they spoke their native tongue, preserved Italian customs and developed successful businesses that catered to African-Americans, with whom they fraternized and intermarried. In time, this proximity to blackness would lead white Southerners to view Sicilians, in particular, as not fully white and to see them as eligible for persecution — including lynching — that had customarily been imposed on African-Americans. »

-RG