A few years back, John Ridley and Georges Jeanty wrote one of the most interesting comics to come out of Wildstorm since Wildcats 3.0 and Adam Warren’s Gen13. Its setting is simple. It is in a parallel version of our 1960s, except the American government has been manufacturing heroes and villains as part of a superheroic Cold War against communism. The Civil Defense Corps is run by the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration. Note that I said creating heroes and villains- most of the fights are staged for the public’s benefit, and the lack of the internet basically means that the public has no idea of the truth.

The hook of the book is pretty interesting. A member of the Civil Defense Corps dies in battle. The FDAA needs a replacement, and their hotshot new PR guy has a great, if controversial, idea. Hire a colored, put him in a costume, and call him The New American. To avoid public panic, put a full mask on him. Let him work for a few weeks or months, gain the public’s trust, and then, when the time is right, reveal that he’s black. One problem: he’s revealed on his very first mission and a wave of distrust and fear sweeps across the public.

One of the government’s pet villains, an insane and murderous racist, breaks from his leash. The Southern members of the CDC don’t take the revelation of their colored comrade well and essentially secede from the organization. Civil rights protestors end up dead. Heroes are revealed as regular human beings, no matter their extra-normal powers, and that human pettiness is shown to be something very damaging. And, in the middle of it all, Jason Fisher, the New American, needs to decide whether he owes more to his people or his country, despite criticism coming from all sides.

The American Way is how you do comics. Not Issues comics, though it very definitely deals with a variety of issues. Not black comics, though it is a comic starring a black male. Not even superhero comics. It’s how you do comics. The characters have depth, plenty of thought went into how the story plays out, and Georges Jeanty’s art is excellent.

Fisher being black is a large part of the book, since if he wasn’t, there’d be no conflict. How people react to his race is the interesting part. It varies from outright hatred to fear to good old fashioned exploitation. When his brother finds out that Jason’s enhanced, his first thought is that Jason needs to hit the road and start making some noise and forcing people to wake up to civil rights. Others want him to keep his head down, because he isn’t going to do anything but cause trouble.

Overall, it was just a great book. It isn’t centered 100% on race, with Keenan Ivory Wayans dropping in for “MESSAGE!” To quote Tucker Stone again,

I guess what i’m saying is: the best thing isn’t for black characters to be in some “let’s talk about being black” comic book, it’s for black characters to show up in good fucking comic books. If they want to talk about problems getting cabs, fine, but it better need to be there for the story, and not as some garish window dressing designed to make intellectual panties wet.

The American Way isn’t that book meant to make guilty liberals stop their grinnin’ and drop their linen, though I’m sure it will. It’s a well rounded look at an alternate world, interpersonal relationships, and the measure of a hero.

It’s a good comic book.

Superheroes were dedicated to kids for a very long time. Probably for the majority of their existence, I think. Heroes had to be true blue, respectable people. They were scientists, rich men, and reporters. Villains were bad, or evil, but not sadistic. At the end of the story, and later the issue or story arc, the villains were defeated, lessons were learned, and the status quo was resolved.

This set up a Manichean Storytelling Machine, to butcher a phrase, where good was good and evil was evil. Even the darker heroes fell into this– the Punisher, though a murderer, was portrayed as a hero above all. Ghost Rider used his hell-born power to save innocents. While there were shades of grey, these shades weren’t too far off from the norm.

This sets up a traditional story-telling style that is singularly unequipped to handle race. In fact, “handling” race is part of the approach that’s problematic in comics. It’s treating race as a problem to be fixed, a villain to conquer, or an obstacle to hurdle. It’s something you must work around and with, rather than something that informs a story.

Once this approach to race was set up, it started a snowball effect. Heroes have to beat this villain and prove racism to be evil. This is a surface-level reading and reaction to race, and one which can’t handle the complicated reality of what race really is. You have to prove something, and the length of a comic means that you’re limited to just proving that either your hero is racist or he isn’t.

Race and racism are actually much more complicated than that, and tough to get across in 22 (or 32 or 48 or 64 or 96) pages. You have to rely on being able to reduce the situation into an easily digestible bite. Making the move is a worthy effort, and it is definitely important to raise the profile of this sort of thing, but it also does the whole situation a disservice.

It’s too simple. You can’t beat racism. You can’t “e-racism,” like all the bumper stickers said in the ’90s, and which still sounds like a fancy way of saying “internet racism.” It isn’t going to go away and disappear into the ether. It’s not something that’s hard-wired, but it’s pretty close. It’s all wrapped up in nationalism, classism, and tribal thought. Our race informs our personalities, our history, and how we live in the day to day.

So, in a way, talking or complaining about race in comics isn’t swinging for the bleachers as much as it is swinging for home plate. You want to find something wrong about black people and comics? Throw a stone. You’ll find something to talk about.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t expect more out of superhero books. If we can tell nuanced and exciting stories about being depressed in Nebraska, the deconstruction or destruction of a superhero, entire universes being wiped out, or what it really means to be a hero, certainly we can do something similar about, or involving, race?

The last issue of Nightwing has been published.  No one is taking much notice of it, and it is with a heavy heart that I admit that I can see why.

A number of books are ending this month – Nightwing, Robin, Birds of Prey, and The Blue Beetle – leaving me with a severely reduced pull-list.  But while Robin has ended with developments that, in my opinion, suck so hard that they could depressurize a space shuttle, the final few stories leave us with some sense of completion for the series.  Tim Drake has become someone new.  Sucky, but new.

Nightwing, on the other hand, is a sad example of one of those books whose characters are never quite heavyweights in their own right, but are close enough to the larger fictional universe that they get sucked into all plot lines.  Bludhaven was flattened in Final Crisis.  The main character undertook a pointless trip to New York because everything needed to be different One Year Later.  He had a girlfriend.  She moved away.  He found another.  She moved away.  Given another year or so he would have found another and she would have disappeared just as abruptly, because he’s practically betrothed to a character in another book.  Vigilante hijacked the plot for about three months in order to publicize that character’s upcoming book.

Then it was time for the unfortunate Pre-Event-Release-Date, Post-Event-Continuity to kick in.  This happens during every Big Event.  All the characters in a minor book hint incessantly at all the wild and crazy things that have happened in Event books that have yet to be released, leaving the reader confused and missing the emotional impact of the story.

I like the character of Dick Grayson, who is, of all the Bats, the cheeriest.  But after Devin Grayson left the series was helmed by too many different authors going too many different directions.  It was lurching and staggering like a punch-drunk boxer, and it was merciful to throw in the towel now.  I just wish that there were more of a sense of completion, rather than the books just being cut off. 

But who knows?  Maybe it will come back after the next Big Event.  At least that way it will have a fresh start.

I commissioned this piece from a friend of mine, Adam Rosenlund. I commissioned it because I dig his art and mainly because I was curious. I just told him I wanted Jim Lee-era Jubilee, Harley Quinn, and late-era Dizzy from 100 Bullets in a mall food court and let him go wild.

It’s pretty awesome.

One accidental thing about this– these are basically three of my favorite characters at different points of my life. Jubilee is pre/early teens, Harley is late teens, and Diz is adulthood. Weird, totally unintentional.

I don’t read comics because of Jack Kirby, but I do enjoy them more than I would because of the ones he created.

There are a few hero pairs out there, groups like Superman/Steel, Captain America/Falcon, Iron Man/War Machine, Scott Free/Shilo Norman, Captain Marvel/Monica Rambeau, Hal Jordan/John Stewart, and maybe a few others. Generally, I’m talking about either the black replacement or the black sidekick.

Most authors tend to set up a situation in which one hero is better than the other, sometimes even to the point where one hero defers to the other just based on stature. Other times, the black heroes are left to languish for years. John Stewart is kind of clearly the red-headed step child of the Green Lantern Corps, being the only one without regular panel time. Shilo Norman was in limbo for years and Monica Rambeau still hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s almost always a little off balance.

Kirby’s treatment of Captain America & the Falcon was pretty amazing. Even though Captain America is an icon and a war hero, their relationship was one based purely on friendship. Falcon wasn’t consumed with hero-worshipping Cap, nor was he just on sidekick status. They were just friends. They would hang out, do things together, and get into adventures. It was a buddy movie, rather than anything involving sidekicks.

I mentioned it last year, but Kirby invented Gabriel Jones, Black Panther, Flippa Dippa, Vykin the Black, Black Racer, Princess Zanda, and Mr. Miracle over the course of his career. I’m sure that he created more, but these characters alone are impressive. What Kirby did was push forward a diverse cast of characters. He was a guy who did the stories he wanted to tell, and those stories weren’t all-white.

In an email, Tucker Stone from The Factual Opinion said this to me:

Wouldn’t it be better if you hired a writer who pitched a black story because that’s the story he wanted to tell? I flat out refuse to believe that there’s nobody with one. There’s a million douches with fantasy stories about Power Girl. There’s somebody with a black Firestorm story. Wouldn’t you just be starting from a cleaner point? A point where you say, hey, this guy is black so fucking what. I have a story I want to tell. Instead, you get: this guy’s black now. Figure it out and make it work.

That’s what Kirby did. He wasn’t given an order to create a Black Superman or Black Firestorm. He just wrote about black characters because he thought it’d be a good story, not because there was a need for a New Diversity Initiative. No one in a board room was sitting over his shoulder, telling him to make his books ethnic or urban or whatever fake word we are using now to mean “black.” He wasn’t trying to fix anything. He wasn’t trying to be anti-racist.

He just did it because he wanted to.

That’s how it should work.

You want to know the problem with doing A Very Special Issue of a comic book? Nine times out of ten, it ends up being stupid.

JMS’s Nighthawk is my usual punching bag for this sort of thing. He’s basically a black nationalist. A better way to describe him would be as a “high school rebel.” You know the kid that read a bit of Marcus Garvey, maybe a little Ellison, and now he’s all “whitey” this and “cracker” that? That’s what Nighthawk is. He’s ostensibly there so that JMS can make a point about race, but it’s been a few years and I have no idea what that point could be, other than something completely surface level. Racism is bad? Black people can be racist, too? One time a black guy called JMS a cracker, and JMS felt really guilty about possibly having a racist thought in response, so Nighthawk is his penance, always there to chastise him and keep him on the straight and narrow? I do not know.

I read Superman 179 recently, which was co-plotted by Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb, with scripting by Loeb. It’s A Very Special Issue of Superman. It’s the one where he comes face to face with Race and conquers the fell beast. I’m going to let this excerpt tell it.

So, what have we learned? That being an alien is just like being black? That sometimes black people get angry? That whitey is wrong AGAIN? That Superman is the smuggest jerk alive?

Now raise your hand if you didn’t know any of that before you read this issue. In fact, raise your hand if this portrayal of the subtleties of black/white interactions and inner city social politics is deeper than, say, what you learned about that back in kindergarten. No hands?

What, exactly, are we supposed to take from this?

This kind of story goes nowhere, says nothing, and is just one of those books that get done just so someone somewhere can check off a box and pat themselves on the back, for lo, they have written about racism and found it good. Look, there are even references to things black people like! Muhammad Ali! Malcolm X! We put “Fight the Power!” on the cover, that’s some straight up Public Enemy right there, boyeee! Plus! Hold on, get this, man!

Muhammad X is from Harlem!

Black cred? Skyrocketing, baby! Another issue like this and I bet we can totally dap up our homies, smoke Newports, drink foties, say nigga, and dance with black chicks without getting funny looks!

There’s a few bars from an OutKast song that I’m overly fond of. It’s about authenticity and appearances. “Now, question. Is every nigga with dreads for the cause? Is every nigga with golds for the fall? Naw, so don’t get caught up in appearance.”

In short, Superman 179 is dressed up like it’s down for the cause. It’s a story that’s ostensibly about how Superman is beyond race. He’s a human being, and human beings aren’t racist to other human beings. Even then, Superman will look out for Harlem and spend some time thinking over race. He’s Superman, of course he’s just that awesome.

Don’t be fooled. This grade school, Mickey Mouse, chirping bird approach to race is foolish. No one learns anything, it gives the hero a chance to be either pompous or admonished, and in the next issue, whoops, Harlem’s gone again! Superman’s back saving a mostly white cast! Ron Troupe, Superman’s brother-in-law is now divorced and MIA!

Superman 179, and books like it, are lip service in the worst way. They are an acknowledgment that race is a Thing, with a capital T, that must be dealt with in some way that usually does not involve punching. However, it will involve speeches, navel gazing, and a healthy lack of perspective, not to mention the general low level of quality. It’s false representing.

“We’re down with you!” books like this seem to say, but its eyes are hiding a corporate cunning. “We’re going to hook you, and you will like it, because we understand what you, a black person, go through daily! We did our part, now read Superman monthly, $2.99!”

Please. It’s a strikingly cynical approach to the whole subject, and one that isn’t at all thought out, at that. We know racism is bad. I’ve known that on a very real level since kindergarten. And yet, the comic books that keep talking about it keep doing it on the level of a four year old, with a hard black and white philosophy applied to situations that are anything but.

The problem is that we aren’t stupid, and we might have paid for it, but we ain’t buying it. Try again, kid. Maybe you’ll get a cookie when you write a good book, instead of going for a cheap pop.

Issue number 17 of Green Arrow And Black Canary has me once again wondering what to do with a story that is going in a decent direction, but not going in the direction you want it to.

In the past, when Cassandra Cain became a completely different character, for example, I simply lost interest.  This isn’t quite the same. 

I had hoped that the new Arrow book would yield a group of characters who were like the Bats, but with a sense of fun.  Mia’s life was getting good.  Connor was fairly cheerful for an ex-monk.  Ollie and Dinah seemed to be getting along.  I wanted a big, chaotic, adventure-loving family.  That is not what I got.  Mia and Connor are out of the picture for the foreseeable future.  Ollie is getting darker and ‘on edge.’   Even Dinah seems subdued.

At the same time, the world that Andrew Kreisberg is writing is shaping up very well.  We’ve got two villains who are each obsessed with half of the supercouple.  We’ve got a burgeoning professional relationship between a police lieutenant and Ollie.  Dinah and Ollie, despite occasionally arguing, are getting along well and not falling into that ‘constantly fighting over some damn stupid thing’ trap that fictional couples often settle into as soon as they get married.

It’s not the comic I was hoping for, but it’s a good comic. 

So, the question remains:  What happens when you couldn’t be with the comic you love, but you could love the one you’re with?  Are there any comics that really didn’t turn out the way you were hoping them to, but with which you could reconcile your differences and grow to love?

Yeah, that’s Vertigo’s longest running main character John Constantine getting his Kramer on right there.

I thought about getting tricksy and putting the rest of this entry behind a cut to get your interest and see what’s up with John C getting all British National Party on us, but I’ll just go ahead and say that there’s a plot twist toward the end of this post. Oops, spoilers!

I’ve talked about context before, but I want to revisit it with a slightly less flippant tone this time around. Do read that post, however, as I think it makes a very good point about lists of items with no discussion or commentary.

Tropic Thunder was one of my favorite movies last year, if not my absolute favorite. It was definitely the movie I saw the most, with three times in the theater and a few more times once the Blu-ray dropped. Part of it was that I cried the first three times I saw it from laughing so hard. The other part was that it was one of those features that butts right up against race and doesn’t back down, resulting in something brave and interesting.

The surface value reading of Tropic Thunder, the kiddy pool reading, is that it’s a movie that features blackface, an ignorant and offensive portrayal of a black person by a white person. It was used to keep black people from roles in motion pictures.

The problem is that, in the context of the movie, that isn’t what Tropic Thunder is about at all. Instead, it’s about the amazing self-centeredness of actors, a self-centeredness that allows an Australian actor to think that it’s a good idea to dye his skin and pretend to be what he thinks a ’60s era black man was like.

Brandon Jackson, who plays rapper Alpa Chino, comes into major conflict with Robert Downey Jr’s character throughout the movie. He calls him out regularly, even going so far as to say that there was one good role in the movie for a black man, and “they gave it to Crocodile Dundee.” It sets up an interesting and surprisingly deft commentary on race, actors, and Hollywood. Race is treated as a commodity, something to be bought and sold.

RDJ’s authentic impression of a man doing an inauthentic impression of a black guy probably hits its peak when he goes off about how he’s going to collar up some greens, y’all, you realize that he’s working from a stereotype and just didn’t bother to actually see what real black people are like.

John Ridley says this in response to a columnist suggesting that there is no situation in which a blackface performance is at all acceptable:

Really? Can’t imagine any circumstance to use the word Nigger? You mean, like in a Ralph Ellison novel?

Trustees of the Liberal Plantation aside, Downey Jr.’s performance is sharp, smart satire. Clever, but aimed squarely for the gut, in the way the New Yorker’s Barack/Michelle-as-radicals cover was aimed at some other Brahmin organ that giggles with delight when it’s self-manipulated.

Nothing’s taboo. I don’t know that there’s a single subject out there which isn’t worthy of examination. Some comics have dealt with rape in terrible ways. Others, like The Slavers, leaves you feeling angry and pessimistic because it’s real. Same with racism, sexism, or anything else. The only barometer for what’s appropriate or not is the level of quality. If it works, it’s fine. If it didn’t work? Try again, kid.

This brings me right back around to comics. When is it appropriate for John Constantine to say nigger?

When he’s speaking to a friend he has history with, both of whom have just been through hell in a very literal sense of the word.

Context.

In the first part of Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, two disembodied voices discuss Batman’s funeral.  One of them is, apparently, Batman.  The other is an unknown guide.  Given the fact that I’d burned out on the hallucinogenic tone of much of Batman RIP I expected to dislike this story.

I have to say, I dig it.  The overall playfulness of the story makes it work. 

First there are the weird, funny little messages in the art, such as a giant typewriter billboard with the slogan, “Don’t Type It . . . Finger it!”  There’s the fact that Two-Face drives around in a half-trashed car.  There’s Batman, in the coffin, in his full uniform.  There’s the ridiculous cat mask that Selina wears when she and Batman fight during  a flashback.

I also like the different eras and obvious lack of continuity of the story.  It reminds me of the Legends of the Dark Knightseries, in which any nutty thing could happen, from Batman starring in a vampire version of Sunset Boulevard to a supervillain a fashion show.

Of course the fact that the entire tone of the story is funereal puts a damper on my spirits, but overall I enjoyed Gaiman’s take on the Batverse.  It’ll be interesting to see how he makes sense of the situation he sets up, but if he’s up to that challenge this could be a more memorable Bat-story than several of past few years’ big events.

I spent the weekend in New York, and all I have to show for it is this podcast with most of the FBB gang.

Go listen.