Reading Room BUCCANEERS "Black Roger: Power of Lightning!"

Let's return to one of the first Muslim (or Moslem, as they were known then) fighters...

...with a story featuring the least-Muslim pirate you'll ever see!

This tale from Quality's Buccaneers #21 (1950) explains this particular group of pirates, including the scantly-clad Kahena, are from the Eastern city of Khob, so their Asian, rather than Arabic, appearance is, for a change, explained.
When superheroes' popularity waned at the end of World War II, comics looked for other genres to fill the gap.

Taking their cue from movie box office sales, several publishers either premiered new books featuring swashbuckling scoundrels or converted ongoing titles from superheroes to pirates.

While most of the strips were pretty blatant copies of various Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power pirate characters, this strip recombined elements of Captain Blood (Educated professional wrongly-convicted) and Zorro (masked avenger) along with our hero concentrating on a particular class of pirate...Moslems along the Barbary Coast of Africa!

Regrettably, both writer and artist(s) are unknown.

Black Roger appeared in every issue of Buccaneers during its' 9-issue run, never once making the cover (That was reserved for an Errol Flynn/Sea Hawk clone named "Captain Daring".

But you'll be seeing them all on this blog over the next few months.

Watch for them!