DC announced last fall the launch of a mini-series called First Wave, written by Brian Azzarello, which reimagines the DCU in the context of the pulp hero-era 30s. It will combine reimagined superheroes like Batman (Black Canary will actually be black, for example) with classic pulp heroes like Doc Savage. The Spirit will also be involved, and the Ebony question is addressed in this quote above, attributed to Azzarello and apparently approved by the powers that be, from a recent DC featurette.

The Comics Journal’s Tom Crippen discusses the potential character change, comparing it to the original incarnation of Ebony as created by the late Will Eisner:

…“attitude (sass)” is a long way off from summing up Ebony White. Yes, he’s mischievous sometimes, but he’s quixotic sometimes. He’s a lot of things: officious, greedy, tender, poetic, warm-hearted. Maybe you could put “sassy” in there, but the word isn’t his hallmark. Ebony makes noise, but the noise isn’t about himself; it’s just a byproduct of him leading his life. He isn’t staking out a place for himself, and he isn’t trying to brush people back. For a 12-year-old black kid in 1947, his position with the Spirit and Dolan, et al., is magically secure and well respected. He doesn’t have to be sassy: he can say what he thinks.

When Darwyn Cooke relaunched The Spirit a few years ago, he set it in modern times (though he kept the 40s-noir atmosphere) and made Ebony a regular kid, in both looks and dialogue. And of course, director Frank Miller did away with him altogether in his film version of The Spirit. This is different; the intent with First Wave (essentially an Elseworlds story, not unlike New Frontier) is to be faithful to the spirit of the pulp hero era. According to Azzarello in the CBR interview, he has the consent of Eisner’s estate to reinterpret the Spirit as he sees fit. Apparently this also extends to the Spirit’s supporting cast.

I’ve always had a blind spot regarding The Spirit, specifically because of Ebony. I have read Eisner Spirit strips with and without Ebony, but it’s next to impossible for me to truly enjoy them. If the purpose of First Wave is to evoke the pulp hero era, this does put Azzarello in a bind, since it’s hard to write about this time period without dealing with the prejudices inherent in that era, especially when one includes POCs in the story (First Wave will also include the Blackhawks, with a reimagined version of Asian character Chop Chop).

Granted, as Crippen says, Ebony enjoys an unusually privileged position as the Spirit’s sidekick, but it’s a fantasy, and how much one is willing to buy into this fantasy depends on how one sees the character within the context of the strip. How often does the Spirit step into Ebony’s world? How aware is he of the life Ebony would very likely live as a black male child in 1940s America? I don’t know for certain, but I suspect Eisner may not have had these questions in mind when he was creating the strip – and even if he did, it’s highly unlikely he would have been allowed to tell stories that address these issues.

Making Ebony a “brash, sassy girl,” however, may not be the best answer. The sassy black female is a greatly-overused stereotype in pop culture. It makes black women seem shrewish and unsophisticated and is almost always played for laughs. I don’t believe Azzarello would consciously feed into that stereotype, but by invoking the words “brash” and “sassy,” one cannot help but draw the correlation. And lest we forget, this would not be the first time Azzarello has written black characters with unfortunate implications, as anyone who remembers his Luke Cage mini-series will recall.

I’d rather Azzarello wrote the Ebony-Spirit relationship honestly: make them partners, make them heroes, but at the same time let each be aware of the positions each other occupies in their world as a result of their race. It’s not something that needs to be in the reader’s face every time we see them, but it needs to lurk just below the surface, ready to pop up at any time. And the same should apply to Black Canary and Chop Chop. Anything less will come across – to this reader, at least – as flawed.