You know, this is one of those things that I’ve seen over and over, but have trouble coming up with specific examples for.

I’m sure you know just what I mean, though, and it isn’t exclusive to black characters in comics. It’s that bit where, say, a white man rebukes a black person, or a woman, or an asian person, or someone who is white, but maybe not rich, and then the white guy gets a face full of “Well, I don’t know where YOU’RE from, but around here…” or “You don’t know how it is!” It’s that scene where a person thinks some variant on “As a ______, I have to work twice as hard!” or “I have to show these people that I’m just as good as they are, even though I’m _____!” I don’t know if you read it, but Huntress Year One was riddled with that kind of thing.

I totally understand the motivation behind the idea. I’ve been given advice that amounts to “People are going to hate you for who you are, so you better work twice as hard.” It’s a common train of thought that comes from being in a situation where you’re the underdog.

However, it got super old pretty quickly. I’ve been thinking of it as “The Big Getback.” “Finally!” whichever character is thinking to himself, “I get to show this white guy that he doesn’t know anything about being a black guy! I get to throw all the injustice of the past four hundred years right into the face of my oppressor!”

Uh, then what?

What happens after that? After the character gets his getback, it’s like a little book is closed. “This character has gotten revenge for racism, and now we can move on to stories about other things.” Captain Marvel has shown those racist sexist pigs that she can beat them up with lasers, Luke Cage has gotten all up in whitey’s face and yelled, and Superman has been told off for not looking out for the people in Suicide Slum and has looked a little chagrined. Ladies and gentlemen, we have spat in the face of racism and can now move on to other stories.

It’s a little silly, really. It’s cheap catharsis. What does it really bring to the story, except “Racism exists and sometimes people get angry about it?” That sort of thing is obvious. It just seems cornier and cornier every time it happens. It’s another symptom of “black characters are special.” “Let’s hit this checklist of Black Issues so our characters will feel authentic!” “Look man, black people got it hard! Let’s hit these marks!”

And no, I don’t know what’s up with Kitty Pryde, either. Easiest examples for me to find.

Anyway. New King Kong. It’s not so good. You probably heard that from, y’know, the rest of the world.

They get to Skull Island where savages feed virgins to King Kong. And, while remaining faithful to every aspect of the ’33 Kong, bajillionaire director Peter Jackson populates the place with, as our fisherman in Casanova calls the citizens of Coldheart, “ooga booga bone-nose nigger savage motherfuckers.”

Now, I’m about as sensitive to race issues as the next middle-class white guy. But- really, Peter? Really? That’s the best you could do? You can show us the monkey and the girl ice skating in Central Park but you can’t manage to update the D.W. Griffin-level of stereotypical Savage Nergro Monster? Were there no assistants or friends, colleages or freakin’ P.A.s that took his Grande Hobbitness aside to point out that, hey, maybe we’re spending two hundred million dollars and short of top hats and canes, we’ve just filled Skull Island like it was the Isle of Misfit Al Jolsons?

It wasn’t re-envisioning, re-mastering, reinventing, or re-presenting anything but bigotry; Jackson and co. trucked in racism and wrote it off as an act of fidelity and faithfulness to flawed and ignorant source material.

And anyway it just pissed me off. So when, a few months later, I read about North Sentinel Island for the first time, the two thoughts collided with one another.

Fuck that guy. Here are savages to save the world.
-Matt Fraction, Casanova #5 (back matter)

I can’t help but feel like Matt Fraction, though obviously well-intentioned, missed the point.

Black Panther has Wakanda. Superman’s got Vathlo Island. Tyroc has Marzal Island. Casanova has Coldheart. They all have a few things in common. Remote or isolated countries filled with technologically advanced black people, untouched by the evils of colonialism.

If I had to put my finger on it, I guess it’s born from some kind of political correctness gone wrong. In an effort to avoid creating stereotypical black or African savages, the creators overcorrected in the opposite direction. They put the black characters on a pedestal, turning them into paragons of virtue and exemplars of everything good about humanity.

The thing is, the noble savage portrayal really isn’t better than the ooga booga bone-nose nigger savage stereotype. Both are equally unrealistic. Both of them treat black people as something outside of the norm. “Look! They aren’t stereotypical! They’re super-advanced! They’re sci-fi savages!”

There’s a line from Black Star’s Thieves In the Night that applies here. Mos Def says, “I find it distressing there’s never no in-between- we either niggas or Kings, we either bitches or Queens.” It’s a sign of the gulf between blacks in comics and blacks in real life. You’ve got your unrepentant villain or mugger (more likely the latter) and then you have your heroes, who do it because it’s right.

You don’t have that in-between guy, who tries to be faithful to his girlfriend, but man, he can’t quite make it. You don’t have the girl who strips to pay for her degree in botany. You don’t have that guy who comes home from his high paying job, rolls a blunt, and zones out for a couple hours.

No, you have virtuous-to-a-fault musclemen and super scientists. You have angry black men turned BFFs and haughty queens. You have a bunch of not-stereotypes that end up being just as bad as the stereotypes.

See what I mean?

I think that Casanova is one of the best comics in recent memory, but the Coldheart stuff was pretty eye-rolly. Just another bunch of super savages, here to save us all. Super or not, they’re still savages. Savage or not, they still don’t reflect anything but a distorted view of political correctness.

When Fraction says, “Fuck that guy. Here are savages to save the world,” he basically sums up his motivation for creating Coldheart: revenge on racism. Racism is such an ugly and hated thing that it becomes way too easy to overcorrect. It becomes a battle of extremes. For every bone-nose savage, you create a hyper-advanced doctor. For every street thug, you create a king. For every neck-rolling sass-mouth chickenhead, you make a queen. And in doing so, you get further and further from anything resembling a black experience.

It’s really easy to fall prey to unconscious racism when you’re trying to avenge a racist act. “He’s very well-spoken!” and “You people are all right!” and “All black people aren’t like that!” aren’t racist in and of themselves, but they definitely fall into that realm of “Hang on, what do you mean by that?”

I like a couple of those super savage cultures. Wakanda is pretty awesome, due in large part to Kirby throwing everything at the wall and having it stick, and like I said, I love Casanova. Tyroc’s home is pretty much the only thing I really know about the Legion, because I had a comic with him when I was a kid. Even still, the two extremes are, like most extremes, not reflective of how things really are. If you really want to fight racism, you’ll answer that extreme with something in-between.

I really enjoyed the new volume of Afro Samurai. Resurrection stripped out all of the dross from the first Afro Samurai film. Romance subplot? Gone. Meandering explanations? Gone. Light characterization? Gone. What was left was a lean exploitation flick in the style of Ninja Scroll or Fist of the North Star.

I may speak on Afro (and Ninja Ninja) later this month, but Afro Samurai kind of exemplifies something I love about black, or rap, culture. It’s universal. It went from being something that wouldn’t last twenty years to one of the most dominant forms of music on the planet. Who did Britney Spears, all-american girl, go to when she wanted a hit? Timbaland and Pharrell. Rap has infested pop and dance music to an amazing level.

Looking fresh is still a huge part of rap culture and one of the biggest meccas for streetwear fashion is… Tokyo. I spent a week in Tokyo back in October and man, I could’ve spent thrice what I did on clothes and sneakers. I came home with two different books that were basically sneakerhead fetishism. Kids in fitted Yankees New Eras hit me with the head nod as I walked past and I bonded with these two dudes who didn’t speak a word of English other than “B.I.G.” and “Nas.” I used to live in Spain, I’ve been to France, and found rap fans in both places.

It’s worldwide, and that’s a beautiful thing. People talk about Obama getting elected as if it was the end of racism. Well, that’s dumb. Obama being president isn’t going to change racism. But, right now, there are whole countries full of kids growing up in and around black culture, repping it like it was their own. In a way, they have made it their own by accepting it and modifying it to fit their own culture. These kids identifying and learning from each other because they have that common ground… that’s where post-racialism is going to come from. Not from one man doing one thing. It’s going to come from sharing cultures.

It’s not going to be a flip of a switch. It’s not going to be as easy as declaring “mission complete!” or just up and deciding that we’re post-racial. There’s got to be give and take and push and pull and just something deeper than mere co-existing before post-racialism happens. This is part of why I think that having the two biggest superhero comics out actually represent their audience, and real life, is vital.

Here’s a few tips if you want to write black people in comics.

1. Find a quiet place to write
2. Use a laptop– they’re easy to get comfy with and you can research and write at the same time. Also? Music.
3. Keep a hammer by your laptop
4. Hit your laptop with the hammer, and then your hands, because you’re gonna get it wrong.

Still with me?

You’re going to piss somebody off. That’s just the way love life goes. If your character is too thuggish, he’s an idiot gangbanger thug mandingo. If he’s too bookish, he’s an Uncle Tom. If he’s not black enough, he’s just a white dude with black skin. If he’s too black, you’re just reinforcing negative stereotypes.

You can’t win. This is the unspoken rule of creating or writing black characters. Someone, somewhere, is going to hate what you do and how you did it. It could be something in your approach, dialogue, or technique. It could be nothing at all, you might have just pushed someone’s buttons on accident. You’re co-opting, appropriating, and destroying.

With that said, all of that’s no reason to not do it.

If you’ve got half a brain, you’re smart enough to write black people. You know that every black person is different, but that there are still similarities in all of us. If you’re really unsure, you’ll run it by a black friend or two. If you don’t have any black friends, go find some.

Paul Cornell is a pretty smart dude. When he created Faiza Hussein, a British Muslim, he consulted actual Muslim women. Why? Because he knows that there are intricacies or in-jokes or experiences that he may not know about. It was an amazingly respectful, honest, and (to be frank) obvious move. When you’re writing detectives, serial killers, crazy people, or scientists, you do a bit of research to make sure that your ideas are sound. Same goes for race. I respect G. Willow Wilson for similar reasons– it’s clear that she’s willing to do the research necessary to make the story real. A little research goes a long way.

Scared money don’t make money. If you’re so scared of criticism that you’re going to choke when writing black people, you shouldn’t be doing it. If you’re going to seize up at the first sign of criticism, you shouldn’t do it. You’ve got to have the smarts and guts to be able to plow on through and pray that you’re right. It’s a touchy subject, and with good reason, but if no one ever tries, it will never stop being a touchy subject.

Sometimes, creators turn out to be so great at it, no matter their race and upbringing, that I’m willing to read anything from them that involves touchy subjects. Garth Ennis is probably number one on that list for me in everything but religion. He dared to try and tackle things that other people glossed over, and turned out to be pretty great at it. The man has an honestly startling grasp of character, be it white, black, or whatever. The Slavers arc of Punisher MAX was one of the saddest things I’ve ever read, and probably one of the best stories to ever come out of Marvel. It’s something that a lesser writer would have bumbled and botched. Under Ennis, it was honestly terrifying in a very sad sort of way. It makes the stupid superhero fights the Punisher is going to be getting into for the next however many years look worthless.

And that’s how you do it. You do it right, you do it well. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Put in some work, do some research, and get it done.

This is for the single maternal figures beaten to the floor
And crawled back for the children and stood up for more
And watched those same kids as adults
cut bullshit vinyl kites callin’ women whores

El-P, “Constellation Funk”

Single motherhood is a fact of life for a lot of black people. I’m a product of a single mother, related to others, and I can’t really think of a time when I didn’t have friends who were also products of a single mother.

I don’t know if I have to regurgitate the facts for you. We all know about the lowered expectations, an insult in and of itself, and the hardships that society puts single mothers through. We know that they get sneers at the mall, tut-tuts on the street, and a lack of eye contact in the church. It’s probably a lot like being a leper, only lepers don’t have mouths to feed.

So, single mothers are basically the original hustlers. Work twice as hard for half the reward. Keeping your nose to the grindstone isn’t really enough, is it? You’ve gotta get your whole face in there.

I asked a few friends about single mothers in comics a few weeks ago. I got a decently long list of names. I knew some of them, while others were fairly obscure. I had a hunch before I asked that none of the named characters would be black, and that hunch turned out to be pretty much correct. I’d forgotten about Rocket from Icon, but that was it.

That’s kind of surprising to me. I don’t know whether it’s out of some sense of overcorrecting for stereotyping or what, but black single mothers in comics are shockingly rare. Luke Cage, poster-child for whatever black issues you’d like to hang on his shoulders, was raised in a house with two parents.

I can’t think of a series where real attention was given to a black single mother. There are orphans, single fathers, and ones whose parents are never mentioned, ever. I think that it’d be an interesting move to make. What would a hero that came from a that kind of household be like? What about a villain?

I’ve found that the children of single mothers tend to turn out one of two ways. Sometimes you get what El-P is talking about above, where the kids grow up and don’t respect what came before. You get songs dedicated to whores and a generation of folks making the same mistakes their parents did. On the flipside, you have people who watched someone struggle to make ends meet for years, sacrificing a lot, and learned from that example.

Tell me that situation isn’t rife with possibilities.

It’s odd what makes it into the comics and what doesn’t. I’ve seen drug dealers, civil rights leaders, thugs, businessmen, sidekicks, crackheads, hookers, strippers, and soldiers, but not recurring single mothers. Muslim characters tend to be paper thin, if they appear at all, and I can’t think of a church-going black character who isn’t also a grandma.

In comics, it’s a relatively unexplored aspect of being black in America, and one that’s so much more common than any of the stuff I named above. You’d think that someone, somewhere, has gotten into it, but I haven’t seen it, and it certainly hasn’t happened with any of the major black characters, has it?

Sentences, by Percy Carey and Ron Wimberly, was the first book I read that bothered to give some attention to it, with a frankly hilarious and pretty much true to life scene starring Carey’s mother.

Either way, this one’s for Staci, who showed me that fighting can be literal or figurative, but never optional.

Right now, we’re just about two and a half hours from the launch of my second annual Black History Month series, where I take every day in February to talk about specific aspect of black culture and comic books. It’s mainly focused on superhero comics, since that’s what I grew up reading and still makes up the bulk of my reading material.

While there are often interconnecting themes, I try to keep each post to its own specific subject. Later in the month you’ll probably see some callbacks and references to earlier posts. I’m not lecturing here so much as I am talking– I’d like to conversate about these subjects with other people. Smart question and stupid questions welcome!

Sometimes the subjects are specific characters, or specific treatments of characters. Other times, they’re more abstract- “blacks in comics.” I’ve got a loose structure in mind for this month, with the first couple of weeks being largely about what comics are missing and the latter two about characters or story arcs. It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course, but trust me when I say that there is a plan behind all of this.

You can email me here. If you want to see my previous posts about race and comics, check out the colored commentary category. You can find last year’s series under the black history month category. It’s okay, but it’s a year old. This year’s posts will be under black history month ’09. If you just want to read the BHM09 posts, you can subscribe to its RSS feed. Otherwise, you can sub to 4l!’s main feed. I’d suggest the latter, really– Gav and Esther are great writers and well worth reading. Enough intro, it’s almost time to get into it.

I had a fascinating conversation with Esther a few weeks back about how most superhero characters, if taken as a whole, are pretty much entirely unlikeable. Batman has let dozens of people die, made plans on how to disable his friends, and been a jerk to everyone under the sun. Spider-Man’s hit his wife, tried to kill her, had nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown, and lies to everyone he loves. Superman took over the world at some point in the past eight years, even.

But, you can’t have consequences for these actions in corporate comics. These characters are intellectual properties, which means that they must be available for exploitation. So, Batman does not go to jail for his killer spy satellite, nor for his plans to destroy the JLA. Spider-Man is “hunted” but never really has to pay for anything he’s done, despite the whole world believing he killed Gwen Stacy. Superman has destroyed half a dozen government task forces geared toward his capture but whoops he’s Superman and he was the good guy and just defending himself.

These characters make the same mistakes, over and over, in a cycle of mean-spiritedness and myopia. It makes reading comics without being extremely picky kind of a hard thing to do, doesn’t it?

Black Adam & Isis: Arab

Mister Miracle: Black

Ra’s al Ghul: Arab

Talia al Ghul: European, Chinese, and Arab (apparently)

Renee Montoya: Dominican

Me: Looking back on the past month or so of DC’s comics

Dave Sim‘s fabulous, startling, and _____ glamourpuss magazine has taken a decidedly political stance in just its fifth issue! The eponymous glamourpuss has something to say and she isn’t holding back! Read on, but brace yourselves, because this is fabulously startling!

Oh my! Sadly, the brutality of the print industry strikes again. No, glamourpuss (the magnificent magazine) hasn’t been canceled, nor has glamourpuss (the fabulous fashionista) been removed from her lofty position. No, she’s just missing a bit of the latest development in the now-past presidential race:

Barack Obama made Hillary Clinton (wait for it) Secretary of State.

The nerve!

Graeme from io9 quoted me in a piece about Fox News and black superheroes this morning, you can check that out right here.

Keep an eye on the site in Feb. I’m going to be relatively quiet this week since I’m still gearing up for BHM09. Once 02/01 hits, though, it’s on like Donkey Kong.