The familiar history of the first black superhero in mainstream American comics goes like this: In 1966, in the pages of Fantastic Four no. 52, Marvel Comics creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced T'Challa, a prince and protector of Wakanda, a secret African kingdom. Clad in an ebony battle suit, T'Challa is better known as Black Panther, a character that would become the title hero in a 2018 blockbuster film that would earn an Oscar nomination for best picture and finish the year as the highest-grossing film in America.
But, the same month that Fantastic Four no. 52 hit newsstands, there was another comic book that reached readers with a tale introducing a different superhero, one destined for tragedy on the page. It was Adventure Comics no. 346 from DC Comics and it marked the debut of Ferro Lad, a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the collective of heroic teens who fight to keep the universe safe in the far-flung future. The character was depicted wearing a blank metal helmet with slots for eyes and at the mouth. It's hard to think of a superhero with a more anonymous visage but, as it turns out, the creator of Ferro Lad intended for the boy in the helmet to be a young Black hero. That creator was future Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who in 1966 was just a teenager himself, a wunderkind freelancer for DC with a casual comfort about the idea of a black hero sharing the page with the other members of the Legion, which, after all, already had prominent members in alien shades of green and blue.
Ferro Lad would become a memorable martyr in the pages of Adventure Comics -- he nobly sacrificed his life to save the galaxy in issue no. 353 -- but what would that sacrifice have meant in comics lore if the hero wrapped in that blank metallic hood had been a Black youth? What does it say that DC Comics couldn't even flirt with the concept of a 30th Century where Black heroes were accepted? I talked to Shooter recently about the missed opportunity of the hero who DC preferred to make blank instead of Black.
Shooter corrected me when I said he wrote the story at age 14 – due to the DC publishing schedule, my math was off. Shooter, as it turned out, was a mere 13 when he penned his first published comics tale.
“They didn’t start coming out until I was 14. Everything was on a long lead-time. The thing is the first story I wrote, which introduced Ferro Lad, among others, it was written in about April 1965, something like that. I was 13. The editor, you know, he liked it, I found out later. He wrote me a nice letter and said, ‘This is nice, why don’t you send us another one. So, I sent him a two-parter. After three issues that he liked, he was convinced that maybe I was worth giving a try. He didn’t want to pay me or hire me until after I had done enough stuff to convince him I was worth doing it, that it wasn’t going to be a one-shot, flash-in-the-pan kind of thing. After the third one he called me up and said we’re going to buy these and publish them, we want to use you a regular writer. I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ He didn’t know how old I was. I lived 400 miles away. He finally found out how old I was when he called me up and wanted me to come up to New York. ‘We’ll put you up in a hotel, spend a week up here, we’ll fly you up.’ I’m wondering how that’s going to go so I hesitated, and he said, ‘How old are you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I just turned 14.’ And he said, ‘Put your mother on the phone.’”
How did Shooter deliver such polished work at that age? The Ferro Lad saga was more than just interesting, it was emotionally affecting and evocative. Where did a kid come up with that kind of work? Shooter said it was born of necessity. Times were tough in the kid’s Pittsburgh household.
“I was desperate. My family needed the money. When I set out to do it, I wasn’t just goofing around. I really studied comics.”
The youngster’s analytical mind pulled apart the formulas and tropes of the comic books of the day and he dutifully jotted down his insights and diagrammed the stories. Some were good, most were bad. He noticed right away that among the brands – DC, Marvel, Charlton, Dell, etc. – one was clearly superior. The Marvel Comics, the ones written by the ubiquitous Stan Lee, were heads and shoulder above the still-dominant content by the old-guard outfit, DC Comics, aka National Periodicals. The DC stories were “kinda dumb,” Shooter concluded, and he saw opportunity in that lagging quality. If Shooter could pin down the essence of the Marvel books, maybe he could sell the finished product to DC. “That’s why I sent it to DC I knew I couldn’t write as well as Stan.”
Surveying the DC line of superhero titles – Superman, Batman, The Flash, Detective Comics, and Green Lantern among them – Shooter latched on to Adventure Comics as the best place to start. In those days Adventure Comics was home to the Legion of Super-Heroes, with its relatively vast cast of characters and unfettered turf (the whole wide universe of the distant future) as the best place to start. “Just tons of potential,” Shooter said, still marveling at the boundless opportunities of it. “They just left it laying around on the ground.”
The editor that Shooter had impressed was Mort Weisinger, who had been editing the Superman titles since the mid-1950s. I asked Shooter if his stories were met with a heavy hand. “He hardly ever touched a word. There were no rewrites, nothing like that. In five years, I rewrote exactly four pages and the reason was he had approved something in the plot and changed his mind.”
Shooter didn’t submit traditional scripts, which would have instructed the artists in a manner similar to a screenplay for a multi-paneled page. Instead, he turned in roughly sketched versions of a finished-form comic book, with a cover image and blocked-out interior pages with drawn panels and dialogue balloons in place. It was the approach of a true novice but also one that left no doubt that this new freelancer had a grasp of pacing and story dynamics. These pages were then handed to artists who qualified as true comic-book legends, Curt Swan and Wally Wood, who rendered polished penciled artwork that followed the map of Shooter’s page-by-page stories. In those days, writer and artist credits were considered superfluous but it was the irascible Wood who bucked that convention. Wood, renowned for his graceful illustrations and infamous for reminding people that he kept a firearm close by his side, was the rare creator who could get away with putting his name on the splash page. Taking a liking to the new junior partner in the business, he began adding Shooter’s name and it stuck. “They didn’t want to piss him off.” What elevated the Pittsburgh teenager in the eyes of the veteran artist? In Wood’s eyes, the somewhat crude drawings and layout by Shooter qualified him as an artist, as opposed to a mere writer. “He hated writers. But I wasn’t a writer I was an artist because I did the layout. He thought writers were blithering idiots, they’d ask for a guy answering his phone while lighting a pipe.”
In his studied analysis of the DC line of comics, Shooter noticed that there was an almost stingy reluctance to introduce new meaningful supporting characters in most of the comics being published. The same villains and costars were paraded out again and again or, worse, there would be two-dimensional one-off villains of the month who would be dispatched in short order and never heard from again. Shooter said The Flash was one exception to the rule and the result was a vivid and varied Rogue’s Gallery (with Mirror Master, the Weather Wizard, Captain Cold, etc.) that created a distinctive dynamic that kept readers coming back to Central City looking for a fresh energy that was missing from, say, the been-there-done-that crew in Metropolis.
So Shooter brought new faces with him when he got his shot with the Legion of Super-Heroes: a martial arts savant called the Karate Kid, an illusion-weaver named Princess Projectra, and stolid youngster who went by the name Ferro Lad. Ferro Lad’s power was the ability to shift his body into a powerful metallic form that made him powerful and durable in the face of almost any attack. Shooter didn’t initially plan on Ferro Lad becoming the most famous martyr in superhero lore this side of Bucky Barnes, but he had a different distinction in mind for the new Legionnaire. He wanted his character to break the color barrier in the superhero group, even though the outfit technically had a Crayola variety of otherworldly skin hues.
“I was born in the 50s, that’s the other side of the watershed, alright, and so as I’m coming-of-age, coming to an age of reason, that’s when all this great stuff started happening. Martin Luther King Jr. and women’s rights…so I’m young, I’m idealistic, I’m a teenager. I’m going high school and tragically hip, so I wanted to introduce a character, but it’s all white people. OK, not all – there are green ones – but I mean DC Comics is all white people. I wanted to introduce a black character and I thought of a good way to do that.”
Shooter’s unusual non-script approach to his submissions made him the de facto designer of the characters. When he put Ferro Lad down on the page, he drew him with a wraparound helmet that obscured his features. He also designed him with gloves although that detail would be lost in translation when the comic books reached the colorist phase of production. His plan was to gradually reveal that Ferro Lad’s costume was protective armor, an extra layer of protection that guarded him when his superpower wasn’t activated.
“It was to help protect him even though even though he became metallic having a layer of armor over him was a good idea,” Shooter explained. “So it was a functional mask. It wasn’t because he was scarred in an accident or something. I was going to have him take the mask off and be a black guy.”
The big payoff was the opposite of a dramatic flourish. The plan Shooter had was a casual nonresponse, the visual equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders. After all, in the 30th Century, wouldn’t a universe full of diverse humanoids greet the skin color of a trusted colleague as a non-factor?
Shooter elaborated: “I’d have him take the mask off and have no one say a word. Nobody bats an eye. Why would they bat an eye? We got a blue person, we got an orange person, you got a green person, who cares? This is the future – they figure it out by then. You know I was going to have it be a non-event. It was nothing, not even mentioned, you know? Just pull his mask off and he’s black. That was my plan.”
The epic tale of Ferro Lad was underway but Shooter kept the big reveal aspect of the plan to himself. Eventually, though, he casually told his editor what was coming. The response was as emphatic as it was instant. No way.
“I told him what my plan is and he says, ‘No, you’re not doing that,’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘If you have a black character, we lose our distribution in the South.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘We’ll lose all the distribution in South and they’ll stop carrying DC Comics. No, we’re not doing it.’”
Shooter had also been working on an unrelated plan to incorporate another real-world element to his Legion of Super-Heroes stories – he wanted to illustrate the heightened dangers entailed in the team’s adventures and he wanted to do it by showing a hero lose their life in the course of a mission.
“If these guys were going on all these dangerous missions all the time, doesn’t somebody get hurt once in a while? Doesn’t somebody get killed once in a while?” Shooter had already decided that the group would face a tremendous threat and that “one of them just wasn’t coming home.”
When DC Comics refused to let Ferro Lad remove his mask to reveal the face of a heroic black youngster, Shooter knew who would be the heroic martyr in the group.
“When I couldn’t do what I wanted to do with Ferro I said, ‘Well, then let me at least give him an honorable death. You know, something you know people will remember. That’s why I chose him.”
Ferro Lad was originally intended to be an ongoing character, a Legion member who would endure and fight the good fight for years. It was the decision by DC Comics to whitewash the hero that led to his martyr sacrifice. Shooter added an exclamation point to the dramatic death by taking steps to prevent the typical comic book trope of some concocted resurrection, which Shooter thought would cheapen the hero’s valiant demise while defeating the Sun Eater,
“He was going to be around forever but when they wouldn’t let me do that, I said, well, I know he’s black. And he’s going to have an honorable death, and so that was my plan. I wanted to keep him dead, by the way, because they had killed Lightning Lad once and brought him back. So, he’s alive? You know he was dead, but he got better a couple issues later? I thought, no, dead should be dead, the guy is dead, that’s it. And so, a couple issues after I did the death of Ferro Lad, I showed his ghost. Yeah, okay, so he’s really dead. And then in a couple issues there was an adult Legion story – like what happens when the Legionnaires are older – and so his statue was in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. He’s still dead 20 years later. So, I was trying to make sure nobody would mess with what I did.”
One final thought on Ferro Lad: The initial plan by Shooter to reveal Ferro Lad as a black hero struck a familiar chord when he explained it to me. I asked if he had been inspired possibly by Judgment Day, a then-audacious 1953 story in the EC Comics series Weird Fantasy that depicted a helmeted astronaut who visits a planet where the robot populace is divided with one faction treated unfairly for no reason other than that their color. The astronaut determines that the planet should be denied membership in the Galactic Federation until they evolved past their bigotry. In the final panel of the story, the astronaut removes his helmet revealing for the first time that he’s a black man. The story by writer Al Feldstein and artist Joe Orlando stands as one of the proudest moments of the EC Comics library. Shooter acknowledged the influence of that legacy moment.
“Well, it must’ve been in the back of my head somewhere, I mean, I thought it was a great story,” Shooter said. “I think Joe Orlando drew that didn’t he? While I can’t say that was in my mind when I was doing that, the Ferro thing, but now that you mention it, you know I had read that story and it was good.”
