Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos has landed here at Copacetic, nearly eighty years after it originally blasted off in the pages of The Chicago Defender, one of – if not the – most significant and widely read of the Black newsweeklies (along with the Pittsburgh Courier, just FYI) published in the the United States during the twentieth century. The two years of Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos collected here – for the first time anywhere – in this 9" x 9" square format softcover running 184 pages, is part Jack Kirby, part Carter G. Woodson. These classic, WW II-era strips ran from November 28, 1942 through January 27, 1945.
The characters that make up the Mystic Commandos embody the high moral tone of self-sacrifice prevailing during these WW II years – along with a focus on battling Nazis – and worked to provide a dose of behavioral role modeling along with the suspenseful entertainment. Most importantly, and uniquely, woven throughout these weekly comic strips are the matter-of-fact, day-to-day dealings with the pervasive racism – implicit and explicit – of the society in which their adventures take place. These dealings move to center stage during the second half of the collection when time travel is introduced into the narrative, first when the characters are transported back into the slavery of the 18th century, and then, intriguingly, when they are beamed into the 21st century, where Whites find themselves discriminated against by the now dominant Greens, in ways that directly parallel those ways in which Blacks were discriminated against by Whites at the time of publication.
Each of the approximately 100 strips that appear here was, when originally published, appended by a brief, text-heavy, one-panel biography of an important figure in Black History. These were created in the "uplift the race" mode, and are well selected with each managing to effectively convey the gist of the significance of each historical personage in the tiny space allotted, which, when you stop and think about it, is really quite a feat. Because the strip's format varied over time, in order to maintain an equal quality of reproduction across these important bio strips, the decision was made by the publisher, editor and designer of this volume to print them all together, in order, at the back of the volume. They also included the first handful in their original place at the conclusion of each week, so readers will experience them in situ, as they originally appeared. Even today, these strips offer an education, and everyone reading them will come away better informed.
Taken all together, here, at long last, in the pages of Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos is the missing chapter in the history of Golden Age comics. Don't miss it! Now boarding...
And, while we're at it, here's what the book's publisher, New York Review Comics, has this to say:
"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.
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. 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. 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.
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."
