NYFA Screenwriting instructor Alex Simmons was recently featured in the Golden Globes Awards Online Magazine for his groundbreaking work in the comic industry. Simmons, a comic book creator, and a writer of screenplays and stage plays, has written for Disney Books, Penguin Press, Simon and Schuster, DC Comics, and Archie Comics. However, his most noteworthy work is BlackJack, a comic about the “tales of an African-American soldier of fortune globetrotting during the turbulent 1930s.”
Simmons shared with Golden Globes Magazine that his love for comics was an extension of his love for cartoons as a child but that he had fleeting dreams of being an actor before having an epiphany. “I reached a point where I realized I can’t just be an actor writing something that I can perform, I have to really accept the responsibility of being a writer, especially if I want my stories to ring true and to be authentic, and to say something.”
BlackJack was born out of a desire to represent African Americans as multi-dimensional, multifaceted people. In his adolescence, when he was bit by the acting bug, Simmons noticed that Black characters were flat. “It was the 70s and there were two roles for black actors at that time: it was either a lot of films about plantation life and slave life or it was ‘angry black man.” Those roles were not enough for Simmons as a young adolescent pursuing acting and they certainly weren’t enough for a writer who had taken responsibility for the stories he told. Simmons wanted to tell “a good solid story about Black people,” and he had some questions that needed answering, “we had soldiers that died in various countries fighting for this world. Why weren’t they depicted? What was their story? What were the stories of the Black men who went to Europe for World War I and didn’t come back to the United States? Why didn’t they come back?”
The first BlackJack never saw print. Marketing companies were not interested in publishing and distributing the comic. But that didn’t stop Simmons, “When I drove to [comic] conventions, I sold them out of the trunk of my car. When I took public transportation, or Metro Rail or Amtrak, then it was out of my suitcase.”
Like Alex Simmons, BlackJack didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. BlackJack refused stereotypes and preserved the history of Black men in an era that wanted to erase them. BlackJack, like Stan Lee’s Falcon, led the way for Black Panther, Miles Morales and the Black Superheroes that will flood the sky in the future.
“I knew the heroes, fictional and otherwise. I also knew — though we were conspicuously absent – that Black people were part of that era and not just as domestics and laborers. So I took what I knew, mixed it with what I imagined … and Blackjack was born.”