Fast Willie Jackson

Fast Willie Jackson by Bertram Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fast Willie Jackson is a little known Archie knockoff from the '70s featuring a mostly Black or Latino cast. It's scarce and expensive but fortunately an outfit called Mini-Komix put it out on IndyPlanet.

Bertram Fitzgerald wrote all the stories and unknown artist Gus Lemoine, rumored to be Archie artist Henry Scarpelli, supplied the art in a Dan DeCarlo style.

The stories are out of the Archie mold but are more fitting for Willie and his crew. Willie is the Archie of the crew and the butt of a lot of the jokes. Hannibal is the musclehead, Frankie is the coolest cat in town and Dee Dee is the girl everyone wants to date. Jabar, the militant, is the only other character that gets a lot of time in this volume.

The art in this is great, no shocker since it resembles '70s Archie stuff.

I would have rated this higher but the presentation has some problems. It looks like Mini-Komix scanned newsprint pages instead of cleaning them up or shooting from the source material. Some of the pages look really washed out. I'm also not sure if this is cobbled together from multiple issues of Fast Willie Jackson. It's 62 pages and there weren't a helluva lot of 62 page comics around in the 1970s.

Fast Willie Jackson is a funky time capsule from the 1970s. The presentation could use some work, though. 3.5 out of 5 stars.


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