It ran in the Chicago Defender, a paper by and for African Americans that began in 1905 and continues today online.īungleton Green was the star of a gag strip in the paper until new creator Jay Jackson (who also wrote and drew the strip "Speed Jaxon" on the same comics page) took it over and transitioned it to an action and adventure serial with Bungleton becoming mentor to a group of teens who tangle with ghosts, magic rings, Nazis, time travel, and mad scientists. I like old newspaper comic strips from the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, but here's one about which I have been woefully ignorant.
This edition includes a new eye-opening essay by Jeet Heer, who investigates Jackson's earlier work and personal history and provides a fuller portrait of the cartoonist who remade Bungleton Green. Never before collected or republished, Jackson’s stories are packed with jaw-dropping twists and breathtaking action, and present a radical vision of a brighter American future. Nazis, segregationist senators, Benedict Arnold, fifth columnists, eighteenth-century American slave traders, evil scientists, and a nation of racist Green Men all faced off against the Mystic Commandos and Green, who in the strip’s run would be transformed by Jackson into the first-ever Black superhero. He teamed the bumbling Green with a crew of Black teens called the Mystic Commandos, and together they battled the enemies of America and racial equality in the past, present, and future. He took the Defender’s stale and long-running gag strip Bungleton Green and remade it into a gripping, anti-racist science-fiction adventure comic.
In 1942, almost a year after America entered the Second World War, Jay Jackson-a former railroad worker and sign painter, now working as a cartoonist and illustrator for the legendary Black newspaper the Chicago Defender-did something unexpected.
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