KANSAS CITY, Mo. — He's dark and handsome. He leaps stereotypes in a single bound. And he's on his toughest mission yet: muscling his way off the pages of a comic book onto the shelves of major toy stores.
Meet Omega Man, the creation of Alonzo Washington, a civil rights and social activist whose 5-year-old company, Omega 7 Inc., publishes comic books featuring socially conscious superheroes of color.
The comics are distributed by Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., of Timonium, Md., the world's largest distributor of English-language comic books.
Fast gaining favor with comic book collectors, Omega Man is the first of Washington's characters to take three-dimensional form.
A 6-inch Omega Man action figure, available in dark- and light-brown skin tones, is currently being introduced at Toys R Us stores across the country, said Glen Geisler, Toys R Us advertising manager for the Denver-to-St. Louis region.
"The figure is in different skin shades from what is normally happening out there," Geisler said. "It's kind of a new and exciting venture that we think other manufacturers will take notice of."
For Washington, who was approached by Precision Design Workshop of Hong Kong in 1996 about creating an Omega Man action figure, production of the figure fulfills something of a childhood dream.
"At a young age, I used to take my action figures and paint them. I'd get some clay and change their features, give them an afro or something and turn them into superheroes that I'd make up--a black Superman or something," said the 30-year-old Washington.
But, he said, "I never really thought seriously about doing my comic book work as action figures."
It's not just facial features and the braid down his back signifying African royalty that distinguish Omega Man from other bodysuit-clad men of supernatural powers. There are, after all, other black action figures on the market.
Many of those, however, are sidekicks to white superheroes or began as white characters whose skin was later darkened by their creators or marketers, Washington said.
"A lot of these black superheroes that are sidekicks are ex-cons, ex-athletes, something stereotypical. Omega Man comes from the future. He's intelligent," he said. "He carves out his own destiny. He travels through time, so that means he knows a lot about history."
