594 STAR SPANGLED COMICS
addiction, a blues musician who was among the fi rst to tell Stagger Lee’s story through
song, a woman who struggles to break out of a life of prostitution, and even a glimpse
into the title character’s childhood.
It is not the aim of McCulloch and Hendrix to exonerate Shelton, but rather to off er
a fuller, more complex frame of reference from which to evaluate his actions. Th e man
immortalized as Stagger Lee committed cold-blooded murder, but the graphic novel
makes clear that he is also caught up in a network of racial politics that make it diffi cult
to demonize him. Th ree of the most memorable symbols of the legend—the hat, the
gun, and the ghost—are used to epitomize Shelton’s existential struggle in the graphic
novel. A secondary story line, for instance, depicts the title character as a child in Texas
on a fi shing trip with a respected elder named Zell Baxley. When Baxley uses an out-
house that is off -limits to blacks, young Lee Shelton watches in horror as the older man
is forced by two white offi cers to pick up his own feces and place it his hat. Th e scene
not only insinuates a motive for Shelton’s well-known outrage over his own Stetson, but
also provides a deeper view into daily humiliations of racism for black men. In a later
scene, Shelton’s attorney recounts a West African folktale to his law clerk as a way of
generating a more empathetic view of their client. He invites the Yoruba deity, Obatala,
into his offi ce as a reminder of how often and how fl agrantly due process has been
denied to the descendants of Africans in America. In seeking justice for a “bad man”
like Lee Shelton then, the story also affi rms the rights of humanity in a broader sense.
Th e fact that the title character is ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison instead of
being dragged out of the jail by a lynch mob is, ironically enough, considered a step in
the right direction.
It is for this reason, perhaps, that McCulloch and Hendrix push their story beyond
the criminal court to the blues guitars and piano juke joints across the country. Th ey
leave the reader with a tortured and helpless Lee Shelton who has been systematically
erased in his last years, unwritten as the blues songs proliferate and a fi ctional stranger
named Stagger Lee (and Stack o’ Lee, Stackalee, or Stagolee) takes his place. Lost, too,
in the larger-than-life image of Lee slugging it out with the Devil in Hell is the fact that
Shelton actually died of tuberculosis in prison in 1912. Th e reader is left to determine
the extent to which the 12 bars of a Stagger Lee blues song also serve as the psycho-
social manifestation of a prison from which Shelton will never escape.
In addition to earning nominations for the Eisner Award and Eagle Comics Award,
Stagger Lee won four Glyph Comics Awards for Best Writer, Story of the Year, Best
Male Character, and Best Cover (2007).
Qiana J. Whitted
STAR SPANGLED COMICS was the second to last of DC’s eight main Golden Age
anthologies to debut. It is notable for its patriotic theme and for shifting focus several
times, going through adventure and occult periods before changing its title to Star
Spangled War Stories. Coming roughly half a year after the appearance of Timely’s
successful Captain America comics, Star Spangled can be seen as an attempt to cash in
