All-Negro Comics #1 (1947) holds a landmark place in comics history as the first known American comic book written, drawn, and published entirely by African-American creators. Edited and published in Philadelphia by pioneering journalist Orrin C. Evans, the 48-page anthology cut across genres: it opened with Ace Harlem, a hard-boiled detective story featuring a Black police investigator (by John Terrell), and ranged through the jungle-adventure hero Lion Man, plus humor strips and prose features. In his now-famous foreword, Evans wrote that "every brush stroke and pen line in the drawings on these pages are by Negro artists" — a deliberate stand against the demeaning racial caricatures common in 1940s comics.

The book emerged from a remarkable moment in post-war Black journalism. After the Philadelphia Record folded in 1947, Evans — described in his New York Times obituary as the first Black writer to cover general assignments for a mainstream white U.S. newspaper — founded All-Negro Comics, Inc. with partners including Harry T. Saylor and Bill Driscoll. A planned second issue never appeared: Evans reported being unable to buy newsprint, with distributors and rival publishers apparently shutting him out, and the single issue quickly faded into obscurity.

Today All-Negro Comics #1 is recognized as a foundational work of Black comics history — published 19 years before Marvel's Black Panther — and is studied by comics historians, librarians, and scholars of African-American culture. Held in major archives (Penn, the Harry Ransom Center) and reissued in an Eisner Award-winning 75th-anniversary edition (2022), the original 1947 issue is widely regarded as public domain and survives in digital scans, making this once-rare artifact accessible to new generations of readers and creators.