The Original, Infamous Inspiration For Marvel's The Falcon

Marvel fans first met Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as the Falcon, but nowadays he's Captain America — on both the screen and the page. Sam will take the lead in the next Marvel film, "Captain America: Brave New World," which is not bad for a former sidekick character.

Created by Stan Lee and artist Gene Colan in 1969, Falcon is often considered the first African-American superhero. (T'Challa, the Black Panther debuted a year earlier, making him the first Black superhero, but he is from Wakanda.) By the late 1960s, the Civil Rights Act was the law of the land and segregation (though not racism) was a thing of the recent past. That decade, Marvel Comics decided to get with the program and began slowly introducing Black supporting characters. 

"Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos" first shipped to newsstands in 1963 and featured a Black soldier, Gabe Jones, in the main cast. Next came characters like Joe "Robbie" Robertson, editor of the Daily Bugle in "Amazing Spider-Man." And then Black Panther opened the door for actual Black superheroes like Falcon, Bill Foster/Goliath, and Luke Cage.

Now, Black Panther only unintentionally shared a name with the militant Black Panther Party, but the common names have helped Stan Lee's modern reputation as more of a firebrand than he really was. According to "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" by Sean Howe, Falcon came about because of Lee's real concern: good publicity. As Howe's book recounted: in 1969, an article ran in the East Village Other, an underground NYC newspaper, that claimed comic books lacked Black characters. Lee/Marvel responded, in a letter penned by an assistant editor, that they were making a conscious (but gradual) effort to introduce Black characters and listing off ones that they already had: T'Challa, the Robertson family, Gabe Jones, Willie Lincoln, the supervillains Centurius and Man-Ape (yeah...), and the Falcon.

Only, the Falcon hadn't debuted at this time. According to Howe, Lee and Colan hastily put him in "Captain America" #117, and he then became the book's co-lead.

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Now, in his foreword to "Marvel Masterworks: Captain America" Volume 4, Colan claimed the Falcon was his idea because he wanted to draw a Black superhero:

"I enjoyed drawing people of every kind. I drew as many different types of people as I could into the scenes I illustrated, and I loved drawing Black people. I always found their features interesting and so much of their strength, spirit and wisdom written on their faces. I approached Stan, as I remember, with the idea of introducing an African-American hero and he took to it right away. As for The Falcon's look, I had in mind a very rugged looking, well-built and tall guy. I looked at several African-American magazines, and used them as the basis of inspiration for bringing The Falcon to life."

Who were the models in those magazines? According to both Howe and comic historian Brian Cronin, it was someone famous for a much different reason today: Orenthal James "O.J." Simpson.

Simpson, who passed in April 2024, was a star football player during the 1960s and 1970s, and then an actor. Of course, now people mostly remember him for standing trial in the 1994 murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Simpson was acquitted at the trial's end in 1995, but consensus has become that the verdict got it wrong, especially since he was found liable in a 1997 civil suit. Simpson being cleared was less about the actual crime, and more because the trial became a spotlight for systemic racism in America.

In 1969 (when Colan would've seen those magazine photos of Simpson), he had played college football for the University of Southern California Trojans and had recently been drafted into NFL team the Buffalo Bills, where he played until 1977. At the time, he was a rising star and his athletic good looks did seem superheroic. 

Another case-in-point: some producers on "The Terminator" wanted Simpson to star in the picture. Director James Cameron, though, thought Simpson's public persona as a "likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy" wouldn't work as a literal killing machine. "Mind you, this was before O.J. was actually a killer. We might have reconsidered after he had killed his wife," Cameron joked to EW in 2014.

In another coincidence, one of Falcon's movie appearances references the O.J. Simpson trial. In "Captain America: Civil War," Sam tells Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) that if Tony wants him to give up Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), "You'd have to go Mark Fuhrman on my ass." Fuhrman was one of the Los Angeles police detectives who investigated the Brown Simpson/Goldman murder, and was called to testify at the trial. That led to the discovery that he had a long history of using racist language and his public disgrace. "Civil War" writers Markus and McFeely told Vulture that they were "lucky" that Ryan Murphy's dramatization mini-series "American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson" aired earlier in 2016. That way, the public was reminded of the case (and Fuhrman) before "Civil War" premiered.

Needless to say, though, I don't think any current or future Marvel illustrators are going to use O.J. Simpson photos as artistic references for Falcon the way his creator did.

"Captain America: Brave New World" opens in theaters on February 14, 2025.