Sunday, November 13, 2022

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 207: THE BLACK WITCH

(Crack Comics 018, 1941)


The Black Witch is a member of a long comic book tradition: Haitian voodoo practitioners who use their sinister powers to get up to no good - in this case kidnapping the wife of one of Richard "Madam Fatal" Stanton's friends as raw material in a search for eternal youth.

The Black Witch is also part of a long-term demographic shift in comics: while the Haitian voodoo character is a staple villain s(and sometimes hero) into at least the 90s, in the early days they were basically all white folks like the Black Witch here, or the Master of Corpses. A question that I'm not qualified to answer: is this more racist than the state of things post 1960 or so when the population of voodoo villains more accurately represents the demographic makeup of Haiti or is it semi-vilifying an entire ethnoreligious group? 

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