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Marvel fans first met Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as the Falcon, but nowadays he’s Captain America — on both the screen and the page. Sam will take the lead in the next Marvel film, “Captain America: Brave New World,” which is not bad for a former sidekick character.
Created by Stan Lee and artist Gene Colan in 1969, Falcon is often considered the first African-American superhero. (T’Challa, the Black Panther debuted a year earlier, making him the first Black superhero, but he is from Wakanda.) By the late 1960s, the Civil Rights Act was the law of the land and segregation (though not racism) was a thing of the recent past. That decade, Marvel Comics decided to get with the program and began slowly introducing Black supporting characters.
“Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos” first shipped to newsstands in 1963 and featured a Black soldier, Gabe Jones, in the main cast. Next came characters like Joe “Robbie” Robertson, editor of the Daily Bugle in “Amazing Spider-Man.” And then Black Panther opened the door for actual Black superheroes like Falcon, Bill Foster/Goliath, and Luke Cage.
Now, Black Panther only unintentionally shared a name with the militant Black Panther Party, but the common names have helped Stan Lee’s modern reputation as more of a firebrand than he really was. According to “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story” by Sean Howe, Falcon came about because of Lee’s real concern: good publicity. As Howe’s book recounted: in 1969, an article ran in the East Village Other, an underground NYC newspaper, that claimed comic books lacked Black characters. Lee/Marvel responded, in a letter penned by an assistant editor, that they were making a conscious (but gradual) effort to introduce Black characters and listing off ones that they already had: T’Challa, the Robertson family, Gabe Jones, Willie Lincoln, the supervillains Centurius and Man-Ape (yeah…), and the Falcon.
Only, the Falcon hadn’t debuted at this time. According to Howe, Lee and Colan hastily put him in “Captain America” #117, and he then became the book’s co-lead.
Marvel Comics
Now, in his foreword to “Marvel Masterworks: Captain America” Volume 4, Colan claimed the Falcon was his idea because he wanted to draw a Black superhero:
“I enjoyed drawing people of every kind. I drew as many different types of people as I could into the scenes I illustrated, and I loved drawing Black people. I always found their features interesting and so much of their strength, spirit and wisdom written on their faces. I approached Stan, as I remember, with the idea of introducing an African-American hero and he took to it right away. As for The Falcon’s look, I had in mind a very rugged looking, well-built and tall guy. I looked at several African-American magazines, and used them as the basis of inspiration for bringing The Falcon to life.”
Who were the models in those magazines? According to both Howe and comic historian Brian Cronin, it was someone famous for a much different reason today: Orenthal James “O.J.” Simpson.
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