If we've learned anything from this list, it's that comic books have been super, super racist, and on numerous occasions. There was a time, though, that this was the norm. The time that saw the creation of Egg Fu, and Chop-Chop, and their ilk, when superhero comic were arguably just reflecting the prevailing attitudes of the culture they were created in. Which is to say, the pre-1960s era, when almost every major title going featured at least one racist character at one point or another, if not more. That's not to say things were perfect after the sixties - as the rest of this article will attest to - but that things were just so much worse before then. Things hit their peak during the Second World War, where every other issue of Batman, Superman and World's Finest featured slurs and caricatures of the sort seen above. Both the Japanese and the Germans were seen as fair game for the American publishers, although it was the former of their enemies that really came in for some bigoted kickings. There was Egg Fu, Chop-Chop, and a whole bunch of other Fu Manchu-derived characters depicted as buck-toothed stereotypes who mixed up their "r"s and "l"s. There were German villains who were directly referred to by racist terms. Things weren't any better for the black characters, either, who were uniformly rendered as thick-lipped golliwogs who spoke in a vague approximation of Ebonics. And to be fair to the comics of the time, they weren't alone. You can see just as sensitively handled portrayals of racial minorities in the cartoons (there's some especially egregious Donald Duck shorts out there), films, and radio serials of the era. That doesn't stop them from being incredibly problematic, though, and a reminder that whilst we've come a long way since then, things were pretty bad to begin with.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
