Hero For Hire!

I grew up in the wilds of Appalachia, a territory isolated in the middle of America where the ebb and flow of society comes late if at all. So it was rare for me to encounter people of color of any kind. I  knew only a few black people, and none of them well at all. So for all practical purposes my first exposure to "black culture" other than the nightly news was Marvel's well-crafted Hero for Hire comic book starring Luke Cage.

Cage was an angry black man, falsely imprisoned and put upon in jail over and over again. Ultimately he became the subject of an experiment, weirdly similar to other experiments done on black men in America over the decades, almost always without their knowledge let alone consent. That wasn't the case with Cage, he knew he was a guinea pig and what he got in return were great powers, not such that he could fly in the skies or morph his body into bizarre forms, but powers that made him stronger and tougher than other people. He escapes jail and  become a fugitive and while in hiding makes money by helping people as a domestic mercenary. He is always angry and full of resentment and that was all understandable. That was my introduction to black culture as presented by white guys like Archie Goodwin, George Tuska, Steven Englehart and John Romita. The one exception was Billy Graham, not the preacher, but the artist, a black man who drew comics and who was ideally suited to handle this new character.

The new True Believers reprint of the debut issue takes me back to those days before I knew about the genre of "blaxploitation" and how Hero for Hire fit so neatly into it. Luke Cage became one of my favorite heroes, a visually interesting hero who operated in the shadow of the more accepted heroes like the Fab 4 and the Avengers. Eventually though Luke Cage became "Power Man" and the title moved on from its mercenary beginnings, at least to some degree. I though have always liked those earliest issues, most drawn by Billy Graham with a lush panache little seen in comics at the time. Much of Marvel's Bronze Age production has fallen onto the ash heap, but not Hero for Hire. A small complaint on my part  is that somehow Cage got yellow boots -- I always loved the way in his first few appearances the boots were blue with yellow tops, it was to my eye a stronger design.

Here are the delightful covers of the run.

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