A Series by Dale Berry
MWA NorCal board member Dale Berry is a San Francisco-based writer and illustrator, who has produced independent comics since 1986. His graphic novels (the Tales of the Moonlight Cutter series, The Be-Bop Barbarians with author Gary Phillips) have been published by mainstream, as well as his own imprint, Myriad Publications, and his graphic short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His life has included stints as a carnival barker, Pinkerton’s guard, professional stagehand, fencing instructor, and rock radio DJ. He and Gary Phillips wrote the chapter on Graphic Stories for MWA’s How to Write a Mystery.
Part One
The tradition of crime and mystery authors contributing to comics is almost as long as crime and mystery have been a part of comics itself. And the genre, whether it’s in novels, pulp magazines, radio dramas, films, or comics, has always reflected the fears of its times.
Part Two
No longer dependent solely on newspaper syndicates, several publishers—some large and corporate owned, some smaller and independent—had begun generating their own comic-filled books. Many were already producing pulp magazines and brought those sensibilities and genres with them when they began creating content in the new medium.
Part Three
Traversing the Earth (but mostly big cities), fighting for the common people, the “superhero” was born.
Part Four
Plot, dialogue, and characterization began to have an edgier, more adult feel. Artwork began to rely on more sophisticated, commercial art techniques. Traditional comic strip-inspired cartooning gave way to rendering with more realism. Page layout and panel-to-panel continuity, the ways in which a comic book is read and the story is visually told, began to take on more cinematic, sometimes almost expressionistic, dynamism.
Part Five
Seemingly every progress America discovered for itself, it also attempted to destroy. From equality to jazz, atomic power to comic books, nothing our nation has developed has come without internal conflict and a human cost.
Part Six
The first representation of black characters in comics to be drawn realistically and treated as equals, even capably superior, can be found here.
Part Seven
At the juncture of publishing and race, art and commerce, America’s North and South, the red threads of our Evidence Board connect us to one of the early black creators, his relationship to a pornographer with gangland connections, and a tale that involves pulp fiction, true crime, and the very origins of America’s comic book industry.
Part Eight
In comic book history, female representation and equality can seem problematic. In crime, mystery and superhero comics especially, the question of sexism is a bit of a moving target, even today.
Part Nine
The earliest crime comics to feature serious independent female headliners could be found in the subgenre of “fearless girl reporter” strips. These series usually showcased single newspaper women, focused on finding the truth and usually fed up with the incompetence and inaction of shallow male editors, fellow reporters or cop boyfriends.
Part Ten
Comic books’ first masked, female crimefighter would emerge in March 1940, while 1941 saw the debut of comics’ first masked heroine actually created by a woman.