Trevor Von Eeden on 40 Years in Comics, Racism, and DC Comics

♦ I’m going to put my hand up here and say that in 40 years of liking his work I had no idea Trevor Von Eeden was black. Amazingly I managed to like his work with no real need to know what race or nationality he was. From Trevor’s point of view, however, life hasn’t been quite so simple.

So at 16, Trevor became DC Comics’ first black artist, as well as the youngest they’d ever hired, and co-created Black Lightning with editor Jack C. Harris, and Tony Isabella (who created the character, and his powers). Trevor realised over time that the term “black” is inherently political, and was to some degree embedded in how he was treated as a creator.  Von Eeden “always received negative comments instead of positive encouragement from the editors”, (please look at the images on this page) :

“I had no idea how my work was generally received in Comicdom, for the majority of the 25 years I’ve worked at DC—all I knew was that my editors always seemed negatively critical of it.”

Von Eeden goes on to talk about his relationship with Lynn Varley, Frank Miller, and about Eddie Berganza’s treatment of him when he had cancer (spoiler: it doesn’t reflect well on Berganza). This is a serious long-form interview with a long time comics professional that any comic fan should want to read. Please take the time to click through to ComicCreatorNews – which is a great site anyway – to read more!

While I’m at it please go to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ramongil/the-hard-code where you can support Ramon Gil and Trevor’s new project The Hard Code.

From Thriller, an amazing piece of storytelling.