Black Lightning Strikes Again!

Black Lightnng proved too good a character to let disappear when the original series passed away during the great comic book implosion. Jeff Pierce was a smart and adept black man who wanted to bring justice to Suicide Slum and those were stories needed telling. So what to do?

World's Finest, the longtime home of Superman and Batman tandem was a dollar comic for a time and had room to rent to aspiring heroes and heroines looking for a place to next. Hawkman and Hawkgirl too up residence as did Captain Marvel / Shazam. Green Arrow had been there in the pre-dollar days and that left room for one more and Black Lightning stepped in.

Written by Denny O'Neil and drawn by Dick Dillin, George Tuska, and Rich Buckler among others the stories sadly were not that strong. O'Neil didn't get Isabella's take on Black Lightning and instead of a good man pretending to be a brash superhero we get just the former, a hero full of platitudes all too eager to call attention to the color of his skin. 

The fight against the underworld continued but the private life of Jefferson Pierce was almost never dealt with aside from a few antique references to mimeographing some tests. (That was a blast from the past, I'll say that.)

Things were a little better when Black Lightning guest-starred alongside Superman. The threat is from the school Pierce works at and that helps, but the absolute oddness of the threat is not the kind of thing Black Lightning ought to battling. He doesn't do aliens. '

Which is pretty much what he told the Justice League of America when they checked him out for membership, In classic Silver Age style they tested  him under the guise of presumed villains but it felt weird and in the end he turned them down. 

One excellent thing about the two-parter, a favorite of mine from this era of the JLA, is that Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughling drew Black Lighting exceedingly well. His costume really had snap and I got a real sense of what should look like. It had seemed rather drab really from the get go, a side effect of Vince Colletta's inks (I generally like Colletta, but he doesn't hit the mark on his turn on Black Lightning). 

Then it was off to Detective Comics, also a dollar book as Black Lightning closed out his Bronze Age career. 

He looked quite sharp alongside Batman when Dick Giordano drew him as they worked in parallel mostly to stop a deadly gang of gas theives. 

But it was in the last two installments of his run that new writer J.M DeMatteis and artist Gerald Forton really hit the ball out of the park. Suddenly the personal life was back and the school was front and center and the whole thing felt exactly right. The tone of the character was the strongest it had been since Isabella's departure. 

And like that it was over. Black Lightning finished out his run and then went on to join Batman in the replacement comic for The Brave and the Bold -- The Outsiders. Drawn by Jim Aparo (as he was in his Who's Who entry he looked quite sharp. (See the cover at the very top of this post.)

It would be some time before he'd return again under the hand of his creator Tony Isabella. That's coming next Wednesday.  

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

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