How did early Black and Brown comics creators repurpose colonial "lost civilization" tropes to contest dominant regimes of place, power, and legitimacy in U.S. popular culture from the 1930s through the 1960s? This panel argues that lost-world settings are not simply adventure conventions but contested narrative structures through which creators negotiate sovereignty, historical memory, and civic authority. Stanford W. Carpenter (Comicpalooza University) reconstructs the underrecognized labor of early Black comics production, examining creators such as Jay Jackson, Ezra Clyde Jackson, Orrin C. Evans, and Bertram A. Fitzgerald Jr. alongside key characters including Bungleton Green and Neil Knight. Kevin Garcia (The Liberal Arts and Science Academy) analyzes Golden Age depictions of Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations, showing how fantasies of technological antiquity often reproduce extractive colonial logics, while some texts offer more critical representations of Indigenous Latin America. Michael Dando (St. Cloud State University) centers Lion Man in All-Negro Comics #1 (June 1947), arguing that "Magic Mountain" operates simultaneously as a pulp-derived lost-civilization site and as a civic metaphor for Black and Brown authority over resource governance, sovereignty, and collective security in an early Cold War frame. Together, the panel demonstrates that early Black and Brown comics traditions refunctioned and refused colonial forms from within mass culture toward counter worlds and self-determination.
