Comic books, in the grand tradition of the pulp magazines that inspired them, are historically pretty conservative and often outright offensive with their depictions of different races, sexualities and gender identities than their "norm" of straight white dudes. You could even make the argument that comics - superhero comics in particular - are institutionally racist, having been sold primarily to those straight white dudes for so long that trying to appeal to anybody else seems beyond their reach. Which means they also don't need to worry about upsetting people over than their core audience. Of course, we have managed to come a long way from the overtly racist caricatures of comic books produced in the pre-Civil Rights era, when the United States were relatively bigoted as a whole, especially when it came to their enemies in World War II. You only need to look at the DC title Blackhawk to see how bad things used to be, and how much they've changed. When the international team of ace pilots first appeared in 1941's Military Comics #1, their ranks included Chop-Chop, a buck-toothed, yellow-skinned caricature of an Asian person who spoke in broken English and wore his hair in a queue. As the Blackhawks saw the forties become the fifties, and the fifties become the sixties, Chop-Chop went from being a racist figure of comic relief who wore coolie clothes to a fully-fledged member of the team, clad in the same uniform as his peers. Since the eighties he has simply been another squad member, who happens to be Asian, and an actual person. That's pretty much the point we're at with comics nowadays, but superhero comics history is still littered with unfortunate, ill-conceived and just plain racist characters and storylines. Here are eight of the worst offenders we've come across.
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/
