The First Interracial Kiss in Comic Books

 

The earliest interracial kiss in a comic from a major publisher that I’ve found was in 1943, in Military Comics #17, when Blackhawk kissed a Chinese woman.

It’s not quite what it looks like, though — the woman gets her dying wish, a kiss from Blackhawk.

There’s a strong hint of interracial romance in a 1952 comic book of King Solomon’s Mines, though there’s no interracial kiss. On the cover, a white man and a black man appear to be fighting for the love of a black woman.

Yes, she’s lighter-skinned than the black man, but she’s still black in a time when interracial marriage was illegal in many states. As Gallup notes, only 4% of Americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites in 1958, while 77% approved by 2007:

DC Comics missed a chance for an apparent interracial kiss in 1970 when Lois Lane became black for a day:

To give DC a little credit, the writer had Lois ask Superman if he could love her if she was black:

He responded with a variant of the standard superhero cop-out, saying it would be too dangerous for him to marry anyone.

The first straight-up romantic kiss in comics didn’t come until 1975, in a Killraven story in Marvel’s Amazing Adventure #31:

But the first interracial kiss involving superheroes came in Marvel Team-Up #63 & #64, in 1977, when Iron Fist and Misty Knight finally snogged.


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