'70s Comix Pioneer Who Created the First Titular Black Superhero Gets His Due
In the 1970s, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, Larry Fuller was drawing political, sexy comics featuring Black superheroes and psychedelic erotica. The underground comix movement was at its height, and radical artists were independently publishing the kinds of subversive work banned by the Comics Code Authority. Fuller was one of three prominent Black artists in the scene (the other two being Grass Green and Raye Horn) and the creator of both America's first gay comic book "Gay Heart Throbs" and the first titular Black superhero Ebon.
"I'm not Mr. Excitement," Fuller insists with a laugh. "I'm pretty square actually, not really square, just kind of, you know, I'm old." He's 78 and can still remember growing up in New Orleans in the '50s before desegregation.
"We still had back of the bus stuff at that time," Fuller recalls. "You had to sit behind this marker, and sometimes somebody would get on the bus, and they would move the marker behind where you were sitting, so you'd have to get up and go sit behind that marker again."
Fuller's parents were sharecroppers and struggling to support their three children, so they sent Fuller to live with a relative who worked as a schoolteacher. She encouraged him to make use of her home library, and soon he was devouring science fiction by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as well as scandalous erotica by D.H. Lawrence. When Fuller ran out of books at home, he applied for a library card.
"It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me," he says. "My reading habits are prodigious, but pathological would probably be a better word. Curiosity would be my superpower."
Around 1959, Fuller joined his parents in San Francisco where he attended high school.
"I can still remember when I first got on the cable car with my stepfather in San Francisco. He just sat where he wanted and so did I, and that took me about a week to get over; it was a different world," Fuller remembers.
Fuller began to volunteer at the San Francisco Library, where he continued to foster his love of science fiction through the works of Andre Norton and Isaac Asimov. Two weeks after graduating from high school, Fuller followed his cousins into the Air Force and was stationed in North Dakota.
"That's a great place to not have a social life," says Fuller. "It was great. I mean, if you didn't want a social life, you found the right place."
With ample free time on his hands, Fuller entertained himself by sketching superheroes in his notebook. His characters, who were often Black, were designed as lead protagonists and devoid of many of the racial stereotypes commonly seen in the day.
When Fuller returned to San Francisco, underground comix were all the rage. The streets and pubs were filled with artists and writers, and Gary Arlington's San Francisco Comic Book Company, one of the first comic book stores in the country, became a hub for the movement's leading pioneers.
"Everybody who was anybody in the comix underground came to his store," says Fuller. "The first time I went there, I met the king of the underground Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Roger Brand and Trina Robbins, who was working the cash register."
They were writing, editing and publishing their own comics with hardcore political themes and X-rated material. Independent artists no longer had to censor themselves or seek the favor of mainstream labels like DC or Marvel. Following Arlington's lead, comic book stores began popping up in waves throughout San Francisco and down California.
Fuller became a regular at the Comic Book Company and a good friend of Arlington's. Though Fuller never had any intention of publishing his own comics, Arlington eventually asked him if he'd be interested in creating a Black superhero. Fuller agreed and began to search for a professional artist to draw Ebon but was unable to find one.
"Things were not like they are now; there was no internet," explains Fuller. "There had only recently been colored TV. I know that sounds like the dark ages."
Instead of giving up, Fuller used his GI Bill to attend art school and completed a rough storyboard.
Ebon drew his powers from a fantastical immortal heart that allowed him tochannel energy from dark spaces and transform it into a black force field. The idea was inspired by the first heart transplant, which was conducted in 1967 in South Africa. Though Ebon was unknowingly a descendant from an all-Black planet called Nyta, the story opened with him mourning his mortal mother on Earth.
"I never talk about this, but if this guy that sent him the heart was his father, then he was actually a descendant not from his own mother or father," Fuller says. "Nobody ever asks about it, but I wanted some confusion around that." Ebon's true origins can be assumed to be similar to the Immaculate Conception.
Fuller handed the storyboard draft to Arlington, who decided to publish it as it was.
"And I said, 'Whoa, wait a minute. I don't have a cover,'" recalls Fuller. "And he said, 'Well, you'll draw a cover.'" Fuller drew the front and back covers, and Arlington published America's first leading Black superhero.
"It flopped spectacularly," says Fuller.
Only 100 copies of the first issue were ever printed. After that, Arlington introduced Fuller to Raye Horn (also known as Wiley Spade) who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator. The two went on to create "White Whore Funnies" and "Gay Heart Throbs," both of which fared better than "Ebon."
Fuller remembers the first time he felt truly validated by the impact of his work. "I was walking down the street in my neighborhood, and two gay men were arm and arm reading the [Gay Heart Throbs] comic and just laughing like hell," he recalls. "If I ever needed to be convinced that I was doing the right thing, that did it." Fuller eventually stopped writing the comics, allowing LGBTQ+ artists to take their story into their own hands.
"The whole creative process is a wonderful thing," says Fuller. "You can sit down and make up something from nothing. My friend Ray and I, some of our best times were when one of us had an idea, and we'd sit down and have coffee or beer. We would just kick it around, and then write it up and draw it out."
While the two didn't necessarily have the level of formal training or resources that the mainstream comic book publishers had, they were always creating and making use of what they did have. Eventually, Fuller transitioned to the publishing side of the industry.
"I became a businessman against my own will," he insists.
Fuller found more financial success in art stockpiling. At one point, he had three hundred pages of artwork, which were tragically destroyed in a fire in 1980.
Ebon quickly fell into obscurity and Fuller published his last comic "The Dreamer" in 1992 with his friend and collaborator Grass Green (the two never met in person). Tired of the constant hustling in the independent publishing industry, Fuller moved to Sacramento where he's lived for the last 28 years working various jobs in civil service, medical transcription and real estate.
As for "Ebon," Fuller assumed it was destined to remain forgotten in history, but years later, the little-known comic experienced a resurgence of interest from comic book collectors as well as academics.
Ebon takes another step in the limelight, over 50 years after its original publication, in an exhibit at UCR Arts, "Ebon: Fear of a Black Planet" (March 19 to June 19). Led by Afro-speculative trailblazers John Jennings, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside and Stacey Robinson, professor of Digital Arts at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the exhibition celebrates Fuller's groundbreaking work, building out his vision of Ebon's universe.
"I'm still a little astounded at the whole thing," says Fuller. "It started with somebody realizing there's been a large number of African American people in comics. There have been all along, but now, there's a lot of academic interest."
Fuller never fully realized the importance of his pioneering work.
"A long line of Black comics have come out, but Ebon was apparently the first one. So that would make it notable just in that," he says. "There had to be a first, and that was it, I guess."
Though Fuller had been acquainted with Jennings for about 15 years, Jennings only discovered "Ebon" a few years ago. He quickly saw the potential for reviving the character and began to send Fuller new ideas and drawings for sequels. Fuller was thrilled with the artwork but was unconvinced that there would be a significant audience for it.
Ebon has since become a rare collector's item with one person owning six copies, the most on record. And while Fuller still possesses most of the original artwork, he mourns the loss of the original cover, which was auctioned off on eBay after Arlington passed away in 2014.
After the renewed interest in Ebon, Fuller wrote a new, two-comic series featuring the character. The cover of the first one is displayed at the UCR Arts exhibit, and the second one is currently in progress. Both Fuller and Jennings hope to publish more stories in the future. The gallery is also showcasing an action figure that will be available to the public in a few months and new depictions of Ebon's universe, including Gods and legends created by Jennings and Johnson, all with Fuller's enthusiastic approval.
"I don't need a lot of attention, but I'm glad that I lived long enough to see the character and myself given some flowers," says Fuller. He laments that many of his friends didn't live to experience the same recognition. "Grass Green was like way, way, way more productive than I was. He did a lot of great stuff. I mean, he was an inspiration."
Fuller has watched the demographics of the comic book world change over the years. He still remembers the shock he felt when he met some of his favorite artists at a comic convention and realized that they were Black.
"When Paris Cullens [a comic artist best known for his work on DC Comics' "Blue Devil" and "Blue Beetle"] came to my table and introduced himself I almost fell out of my chair!" he exclaims.
With the internet and a growing number of Black artists, these surprises are fewer and fewer. "It's no longer a strange thing. You tell someone you're a Black artist today, and they yawn," jokes Fuller.
You can enrich the whole fabric of literature or comics by having an idea. Even if it's not necessarily greatly executed, you learn from it, you become more from it.Larry Fuller
Today Fuller lives a quiet life with his wife. "I've been happily married for 30-plus years, and we get along famously," he says.
The two met while volunteering at the Hunger Project in San Francisco and can be spotted these days tango dancing around Sacramento. "We want to enjoy the time we have while we're here," he says. Since exiting the underground comix scene, Fuller has poured his creative energies into learning and sketching dance.
"I'm just grateful on so many levels, you can quote that," says Fuller. "And that's not a platitude. It's just… I'm just grateful that the whole thing has happened and that I could be part of this experience."
Fuller insists that he doesn't have any exciting tales to relate or any great nuggets of wisdom to impart, but he does offer one last thought.
"You can enrich the whole fabric of literature or comics by having an idea. Even if it's not necessarily greatly executed, you learn from it, you become more from it," says Fuller. "Like maybe we didn't think we'd danced well then, but when we look back at old videos of us dancing we go, 'Geez, that part right there looks pretty good.'"
