On the subject of who’s telling whose stories… not long after finding the BLACK MOTHER GOOSE BOOK, I found this Black Archie-looking comic.

The art was spot on so I thought it might be an Archie spinoff (Archie had a Black character, Chuck, maybe Fast Willie was Chuck’s cousin) but it’s a separate publisher completely. The publisher was Bertram A. Fitzgerald, who published the Golden Legacy comics, a series of comic book retellings of historical Black figures. You can see those advertised in Fast Willie here:

Fast Willie itself was a fairly typical teen comic, made up of a ten-pager story and some single page gag comics. Just imagine Archie but make Archie and Jughead Black and make Pops Puerto Rican.

The comic was supposedly written by the publisher, Bertram A. Fitzgerald, but I suspect the artist, Gus LeMoine (who also drew for Archie), had a strong hand in the writing. One pagers like this suggests that to me.

But I could be wrong. There isn’t much online about the making of this comic. And for a time, Gus LeMoine’s identity was even a subject of debate. At any rate, Fast Willie Jackson didn’t resonate with comic readers, Black or white, and the adventures of Mocity’s favorite son only lasted for seven issues.