Original Art Stories: Trevor Von Eeden and Black Lightning

Created by Tony Isabella in 1976 after meeting several black readers and working with talented artists such as Keith Pollard, Arvell Jones and Ron Wilson, Black Lightning was mooted as DC's answer to the various black characters at Marvel, The Black Panther, The Falcon and Luke Cage. DC had inititally approached Isabella to work on a character that had been created by another writer, The Black Bomber. Isabella recalls, "The hero, who would be their first "black" character to star in his own title, was a white racist Vietnam vet, who, as a result of taking part in chemical experiments to allow soldiers to blend in better with the jungle, turned into a black super-hero in moments of stress. It gets worse. "In each of the two well-intentioned scripts, the hero would, in his white racist persona, save a person he couldn't see clearly and, on finding out the person was black, exclaim something along the lines of-and this is a quote -"You mean I risked