American cartoonist (1911-1985). Real name: Zelda Mavin Jackson. She was born in Pittsburgh, but her father, who owned a printing company and movie theater, died in a car accident in 1917, and the family was left temporarily upturned. She and her older sister Dolores moved in with an aunt and uncle for a while, and when their mother remarried, the family moved to Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a small town with a ridiculous name.
She was an artist and writer throughout high school and was even named the arts editor for the high school yearbook, where she drew caricatures of her classmates and teachers. She also wrote to Robert Vann, the editor of a weekly African-American newspaper called the Pittsburgh Courier, and he had her cover a number of boxing matches for the paper. She also wrote on the police and courtroom beats, wrote features, and did proofreading and editing.
She graduated from Monongahela High School in 1930 and married Earl Ormes in 1931. They moved to Salem, Ohio to be closer to Earl's family. They had a daughter, Jacqueline, who died of a brain tumor at three years old.
Jackie still loved art and drawing, and she created her first comic strip for the Courier in 1937. "Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem" was about a Mississippi teenager who traveled to New York City to find fame singing and dancing in the famous Cotton Club. The Courier had 14 city editions which were distributed all over the country -- which meant Ormes was the first Black woman to produce a nationally appearing comic strip. The strip ran just short of a year.
The Ormeses moved to Chicago in 1942, and Jackie wrote some articles and a short-lived social column for The Chicago Defender, one of the leading Black newspapers, which also published her single-panel gag cartoon "Candy" for a few months in 1945.
In August 1945, Ormes had a new cartoon in the Courier -- "Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger," a single-panel comic featuring Patty-Jo, a talkative, intelligent, and socially-aware tyke, and her older sister Ginger, who never spoke and was mostly there to give Ormes an opportunity to draw high fashion outfits on her. The strip ran for 11 years, and inspired a best-selling doll. Ormes signed a contract with the Terri Lee doll company in 1947 to produce Patty-Jo dolls, based on the little girl in the strip. The dolls had a large wardrobe and were popular with both Black and White kids. The dolls were only produced until the end of 1949, but are now considered collectors' items.
In 1950, the Courier began publishing an eight-page color comics section, and Ormes relaunched her Torchy comic strips as "Torchy in Heartbeats." This new version of Torchy roamed the nation and the world seeking adventure and romance. She also had time to comment on social issues, race, and more. The strip also included a mini-feature called "Torchy Togs" -- cut-out paper dolls complete with fashionable outfits for Torchy to wear. Ormes had a serious passion for fashion, and she -- and her readers -- got a lot of joy out of crafting beautiful clothing for the heroine to wear.
Ormes' heroines, including both Torchy and Patty-Jo, are notably outspoken and opinionated, and Torchy eagerly sought out adventure and danger and worked to correct injustices -- qualities that made them distinct outliers in all of comics. The standard for both romance comics and adventure comics of the time were that women were fainting, frail nymphs, able to do little beyond pining for a man and being rescued by a man and telling a man how strong and brave he is. Torchy might get rescued by a man sometimes, but she'd also rescue him a few times, and she was never fainting or frail.
Of course, it helped that Jackie Ormes was a Black woman who wanted to write stories you'd never see in an industry dominated by white men. And it helped that she was writing comics for Black-owned newspapers that wanted stories about Black people having thrilling adventures and sharing smart opinions and wearing fashionable clothing. But her stories hold up. The storytelling tropes may sometimes be dated, but the comics are still fun to read, and you can't say that for everything that came out of the Golden Age of superhero comics.
Ormes retired from cartooning in 1956 but kept making art, including portraits, still lifes, and even murals. She held fashion show fundraisers for her community on Chicago's south side and was one of the founding board members of the DuSable Museum of African American History. She was also a serious doll collector, with 150 dolls, both modern and antiques, in her collection.
Ormes died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 26, 1985. She was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame for the National Association of Black Journalists in 2014. She was also inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame in 2018.