Stone Soul Wonder

Black families quail in terror as Rodent, the dread giant rat, stalks the streets of the ghetto. No one seems to be a match for the evil Rodent; the ghetto dwellers are condemned to die an agonizing, verminous death. But wait! Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ... Black Man!!!

So you better hat up, Rodent, because it looks like Black Man is here to stay. Thanks to Tom Floyd, a Gary, Ind., commercial artist, young blacks can look up to an authentic soul hero. The first edition of Black Man Comics will shortly hit the newsstands with a very soulful twist on the requisite introductory issue: like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel, Black Man is born of the transformation of a clean-cut young man into a creature possessed of superhuman powers.

In this case, the power is conferred by Scientist P.T. Jones (read: George Washington Carver) on a young black student-athlete named Steve Thomas with peanuts soaked in the mysterious chemical X. Wearing a slave-chain medallion, a cloth suit with the curse of Nat Turner upon it, and special boots that will enable him to fly by "lifting yourself by your own bootstraps," Black Man, the Soul Wonder of the World, sets out to "rid the universe of poverty, crime and racial bigotry." His arch enemies are Rodent, who breeds on filth and spreads disease; Riot, an immense black gone mad with the craving for destruction; and Narcotics, a heinous figure with hypodermic needles in place of fingers.

Floyd came by the idea because he saw the need to give black children their own hero to supplant those of his boyhood. As he puts it: "I got turned off of Tarzan because he was white and was always swinging out of trees and beating up black natives."

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