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.

Something Garth Ennis does that I love is that he tends to have really obvious soapbox moments in his comics. The Boys has had a few of them so far, and The Boys 27, part five of We Gotta Go Now, had a particularly well-timed one.

One thing that’s vital to remember when discussing, mulling over, or thinking about race is this fundamental fact: we are different, but we are the same. Our parents’ parents’ parents might came from somewhere else, we have different accents, and our skin color is different, but fundamentally, we all want the same things out of life.

Yes, there is always the crushing weight of history. We might have had different starting points, our peoples have gone through various tragedies and so on and so forth, but in the end?

It’s 2009 in the United States of America.

I think that it’s fair to say that I’m a little conflicted as to where I stand on the racial identification/country loyalty scale. Am I black first or am I an American first? Which comes first? Do I feel comfortable pledging allegiance to a country that’s spent much of the past treating people who look like me as less than trash?

I guess it’s all in how you look at things. I don’t use the phrase “African-American.” When I was younger, I thought it was both corny and self-limiting. I’ve kept with black for ages, and I don’t think I’ll ever change. It’s simple, it’s descriptive, and honestly, it sounds pretty tight.

At the same time, I’m still an American. I was born here, I’ll probably die here, and I can’t really think of anywhere that’s better than here. It isn’t perfect, but near as I can tell, it’s about as perfect as things are right now.

I don’t think that your entire culture should be absorbed into the mass, leaving one featureless mess. There’s something to be said for embracing your past even as you move into the future. It’s kind of like I mentioned here, with how post-racialism is going to begin.

So, am I black or am I American? I can’t decide if the answer is “both” or “That’s a stupid question.” The two are not mutually exclusive, and celebrating one doesn’t denigrate the other. I think Billy Butcher’s approach up top is really interesting, and maybe crucial. We’re all under the umbrella of American, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s the old melting pot or salad bowl analogy. A bunch of different things mixed in to make one wonderful thing.

I went to New York Comic-con 2009 this weekend and had a grand old time. I met up with Gavin, Tucker and Nina Stone, Timothy Callahan, Julian, Ron Wimberly, the Funnybook Babylon gang, LeSean Thomas, Sean Witzke, Cheryl Lynn, and probably half a dozen more people over the course of the weekend.

What’s striking, though, is how the con doesn’t really represent the make-up of the stereotypical comics reader. Yes, there are the chubby white dudes wheeling carts full of comic books to be signed and being rude (a special shout-ot to the guy dressed as a robot who hit me in the head with his boombox). Yes, there were dozens of Slave Leias clogging up the aisles like half-naked roaches. However, there were a lot of girls, latinos, and black folks.

This wasn’t really shocking to me as much as it was just a confirmation of the song I’ve been singing for years now– we’ve always been here. I grew up on comics. Everyone I know grew up on these books, black or white. We all found something to love. I’ve noticed that most of the black people I know leaned toward Marvel for a variety of reasons.

The con was real life– it’s the world that I’m used to seeing, it’s the world that I grew up in, and it’s the world that all of us know. I saw black dude working a booth with some anime thong on his head (I *smh*’d, seriously), others wearing Naruto headbands (I *smh*’d again, you aren’t tupac), and others just dressed like normal people. Some were even dressed as grown-ups. What matters is that there was a huge variety of people there. Young, old, and everywhere in-between. Some were there for indie books, others for superhero pieces, and still others for that creepy porno people always sell at cons.

I went to two panels on Sunday, which doubled my total for the weekend. The first was the Multiculturalism in Comics panel, which was okay, save for a few bumps which I probably won’t get into later as they’re overall meaningless. But, the second panel was the Hip-hop and Comics panel, which was not printed in the show flyer (It was shown as ??? and had no description). It featured Chuck D, DMC of Run DMC, Kyle Baker, James Bomb, Adam Wallenta, and a couple other guys whose name escapes me.

It was pretty wonderful. Rather than being a shillfest for PE’s comic, which was only mentioned maybe twice, it was about growing up in the ’60s and ’70s and what they were into. It was about the intersection between rap and superheroes. It was about everything I’ve ever talked about in one hour long panel.

One thing I hate are comic fans who get upset when somebody goes “Ha ha, nerds!” It’s stupid self-hating lack of self-esteem-having silliness. This panel was the opposite. It was a bunch of guys in touch with their inner nerd and not feeling bad about it at all. One guy mentioned that he was getting stellar grades in school and was being tested for access to a gifted class in school. The teacher asked him if he knew what espionage meant. His response?

“Like in Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division?”

“What?”

“Uh, it means spy stuff. Espionage.”

Other notable shout-outs were White Tiger (Hector Ayala from Spanish Harlem, “’cause where else are you gonna put a Puerto Rican in New York City?”), Shang-Chi, Moon Knight, and Spider-Man (who is from Queens, and a favorite of Kyle Baker and DMC, both of whom are Queensborn).

I wish I had recorded the panel, because it was everything I want to do in BHM09 all in one place. It talked about how the fact that Marvel’s characters had problems you could relate to and lived in NYC made them more real and relatable than other characters.

It was as much a celebration of comics, and loving comics, as it was about hip-hop. They often mentioned how secret identities informed the creation of rap aliases and costumes, and even how Peter Parker being a normal kid with an outlandish alter ego helped turn Darryl McDaniel into a Devastating Mic Controller.

Everyone reads comics. Comics are a mirror to our society. It shows our fears, hopes, dreams, failures, vulnerabilities, and possibilities. For comics not to reflect us (and by us I mean “people,” not “black people”), even as it reflects all this other stuff, is silly.

No, silly is the wrong word. It’s stupid. It’s stupid because it’s so glaringly obvious a child can see it.

Shades & Comanche are two villains with delusions of adequacy. They failed at being successful criminals, failed at uniting the prisoners behind Luke Cage, and then they broke out of prison and kept failing upward. They failed their way into supervillaining, costumes, and high tech weapons. Eventually, they failed their way out of existence, as they haven’t appeared as a duo in years.

They were part of Luke Cage’s amazingly colorful cast of supporting characters. They were supervillains in that they tried to do bad things, but they were usually spectacularly ineffective. Gavin made a good point when I was talking about this post with him. Shades and Comanche are victims of the idea of “escalation” from The Dark Knight. When heroes appear, villains appear. When heroes up the ante to beat the villains, the villains do the same.

The problem is that for every Joker, there are undoubtedly fifty Jokesters, Comedians, Wildcards, Clown Kings, Clown Crowns, Laughing Boys, and Sitcom Commandos running around the city and lowering the tone. Shades and Comanche were those guys. They put on costumes and did dirt. Sometimes they would end up having to team up with Luke Cage to make it out of a tough situation.

Boiled down, they were bunglers and idiots, but, like an insane amount of Cage’s supporting cast, incredibly charming. Before Deadpool charmed the pants off a generation of fans, Shades & Comanche were a couple of lovable failures.

They’d be pretty easy to bring back, too. Cage is a big name Avenger now, and it’s only a matter of time before someone leaks his location. And what happens when you’re a Name and you’ve got family or idiots in your past? They come calling.

So, it’s easy. Traditional failures, Shades & Comanche, show up on Luke Cage’s doorstep in full costume. “Luke! You have a kid. You should retire… we’ll take your place.” Seems pretty solid, right?

Now imagine them speaking with this guy’s voice:

Revamp of the year, sensational character rediscovery of 2010.

S&C would fill a pretty cool niche, I think. They aren’t 4th Wall Funny like Deadpool or Creep Funny like Ant-man. They’re just… dumb. Very very dumb, but also very, very earnest. If anyone should’ve given up years ago, it should’ve been these two, but they keep on, keepin’ on.

These two are one of my favorite little bits of black comics history. I don’t know that I’d ever call them major players, but they were a fun little slice of comedy, intentional or unintentional, in Luke Cage’s books.

Three things happened on November 18, 1992. The first is that I turned nine years old. Finally! I was almost as old as Bart Simpson, who was one of my many childhood heroes. Second, Spike Lee’s feature length biopic “Malcolm X” was released. I saw it that weekend, if not on the day of release, at the big theater in the next town over. The last of the three is that Superman died, at least according to Roger Stern’s novelization.

The Death of Superman was basically my introduction to DC Comics. I wheedled and begged and got a few of the books, and eventually ended up tearing through the novelization. This is why I didn’t know that Hal Jordan was involved in the climax of the mega-arc until years later, and only recently found out that Bloodwynd, the only black guy on the JLA at that point, was actually the Martian Manhunter.

The movie was, in hindsight, much more of a milestone. It was my first introduction to the real Malcolm X, rather than the brief paragraphs we’d get in history books. All I really knew at that point was that he was a white people-hating, fast-talking, symbol of the violent side of the civil rights movement. Where Martin Luther King, Jr. was the tip-top of the non-violent resistance solution, meaning “the right choice,” X was the guy who advocated violence. He was the scary one. Don’t be like him, children, turn the other cheek.

It turns out that what I learned in my little history books, usually during Black History Month, wasn’t the whole story. The film filled in a lot of things that I didn’t even know I was missing. I didn’t know that he travelled to Mecca, nor that his views adjusted after he left. I had no idea that he wasn’t the bogeyman that he was portrayed as in school.

It didn’t instantly change my mind. I didn’t become Baby Huey P. Newton on the spot. I do think, however, that it fostered a healthy mistrust of things that you are taught, or at least a driving thirst to know more about everything. I’ve owned a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X ever since I was old enough to have a job. X quickly became my second favorite figure from that era, after being slightly edged out by Muhammad Ali.

Superheroes are, at their heart, about uplifting. My favorite hero by far is Spider-Man, and I think the character has a lot to say about both the human condition and having fun. At the same time, Malcolm X taught me a lot about self-esteem, being comfortable in my own skin, and being, or becoming, a man.

There is, or was, a common metaphor for how the X-Men worked back in the day. Professor Xavier was Martin Luther King, Jr., prophet of peace. Magneto was Malcolm X, the violent villain. After having read things by and about the man, it’s probably my least favorite analogy in comics ever.

It’s extremely reductionist. It doesn’t track with either of the two men’s beliefs or practices, and in a way, it’s amazingly insulting to both. MLK wouldn’t have been caught dead with a paramilitary fighting force in his basement, and Malcolm X didn’t, and would not, advocate genocide. The analogy only works if the two men are what I was taught in school: good and bad, two opposing forces fighting for basically the same thing.

A little education goes a long way. I’m pretty sure that every thing I’ve complained about with regards to inaccurate or offensive portrayals of blacks in comics can be fixed with a little extra knowledge. You don’t even have to spend any money, since twenty minutes on Google can get you very far these days. A few good key words and you’re going to be sitting pretty.

I don’t think that the fundamental source of all of the problems with blacks in comics is racism. Institutionalized racism plays a part, sure, but it isn’t the end-all, be-all. Ignorance (and here I do not mean malicious or “you’re dumb” ignorance, I’m referring to “not knowing something”) is the issue.

If you don’t know, you can’t do it. It’s as easy as that. You are not forbidden from doing it, but anyone who does know about what you’re talking about? Those people are going to point and they are going to laugh and they are going to sit in judgment of you… and you kind of deserve it.

Talking about black characters in comics puts me in mind of the old joke about newscasters. If they mention an armed robbery and not the race of the crook, it’s obviously a white guy– they would’ve said the race if he wasn’t. This is because being black is Different. It’s something outside of the norm. Basically, to put as blunt a point on it as possible, it’s The Other.

Once you create a book with an all, or mostly, black cast, and you acknowledge their race, marketing and advance word of mouth is given a chance to play up that aspect of the book, no matter how much it plays into the content of the book.

This is what happens when you treat black characters as special snowflakes. This is what happens when so many black characters have to address Racism, or The Streets, or The Struggle, or The Man at some point in their career. You begin to build certain expectations in your audience. You’re waiting for that bit of the book where you get hit over the head with race.

Before The Crew came out, Christopher Priest was already fighting the idea that it was a Black Book.

I briefly wanted to call this book The Black Avengers. It’s a terrible idea, but, the truth is, with this cast, race will speak the loudest. Having not said a whole lot about what this book is, the feedback I’ve gotten thus far has only confirmed that fear. Fans don’t know what THE CREW is, but they know it’s, “A black book set in the ghetto.” So, I figured, why not. Race is all some fans will see anyway, let’s just get to it. The book has a kind of Avengers vibe, anyway, with two archetypical AV characters in our black Iron Man (WAR MACHINE) and Black Captain America (JUSTICE). Moreover, Black Avengers really just nails What This Is in a way “The Crew” really can’t.

It’s kind of funny. If Christopher Priest had replaced the gangs in The Mog with, say, Hydra, you could’ve branded The Crew as The Avengers: The Crew and had the kind of story Hawkeye used to star in. With black heroes up against black gangs, though, it’s a Black Book.

This is essentially what I’m trying, and have been trying, to get at. Books featuring a cast of largely black characters become almost inherently political. They’ve got to be about Black People, rather than about adventures. No, that’s wrong. They seem like they have got to be about Black People, rather than adventures. It’s that perception and prejudice again thing- we’re trained to expect certain things out of these books.

Admittedly, I’m working from a small sample size here, and that’s part of the problem. Talking about this sort of thing is tough when you can only point to a fistful of books for examples. How can you talk about reasonable or offensive portrayals when your sources are lacking? We haven’t had enough books starring black characters to erase the idea that Black Books are always something to be gawked at or treated as a big deal.

The books, and characters, aren’t abnormal. Get your hands dirty, put them through their paces, and make them commonplace. I’m pretty happy about Luke Cage being in New Avengers, in part because that’s the highest profile position for a black comics character since Steel became one of the four fake Supermen over a decade ago. It’s a step in the right direction, at the very least.

I don’t want it to seem like the market should suddenly be flooded with dozens of black people, each with a different gimmick and backstory. You don’t have to “blackify” comics. At the same time… the more black characters there are, the fewer characters there are that will be expected to be official representatives of the race. You’ll have more variety, more characters to identify, and a wider range of experiences.

So, there it is. Nothing’s ever simple, right?

(apologies for this post going up almost six hours late– i’d had it scheduled for tomorrow for some reason!)
One thing you can’t help sometimes is looking at black characters with a critical eye. Do they measure up to whatever standard of quality that black characters have to meet? Are they stereotypes? Are they insulting? It’s not even an intentional thing, sometimes. It’s part of that same line of thinking that leads to idle thoughts like, “Man, there weren’t any black folks in that movie” or “I was surprised the black guy didn’t die first.”

Barracuda’s one of those characters that you can call “problematic.” “Stereotypical.” “Ignorant.” “Racist.” He was created by Garth Ennis in the pages of Punisher MAX in a story about corrupt businessmen. The businessmen hired him to get rid of a couple of problems before they unveiled their big scheme.

Barracuda is essentially the essence of the mandingo: hypersexed, hyperviolent, and just waiting for a chance to put his hands on everything you hold dear and taint it. He is every “black male” on your evening news, every “big black guy” your friend ever told you about fighting, every bogeyman who ever broke into your house or stole your car, and every dude that ever made your mother clutch her purse in an elevator. You remember all those stories about the Superdome after Katrina? He was behind all of it. He’s even built like a big gorilla, all muscles and glower.

The problem is that Barracuda is probably the best black villain in years. That may be damning with faint praise, since I can’t think of another single significant black villain in mainstream comics, but it’s still true. He’s appeared in a total of three stories since his inception, the last of which ended with his death.

Frank Castle’s entire gimmick, at least under Ennis (a.k.a. “The Good Stories”), is that he’s singularly focused and prepared for his war on crime. He’s using his Vietnam-era training to put criminals to bed. Barracuda is also a vet, but he’s coming from Reagan’s wars in South America, rather than Vietnam. He found a taste for money, now his skills go to the highest bidder.

At first glance, Barracuda is just another big dumb tough guy, but that isn’t correct at all. He’s extraordinarily quick-witted and resilient in addition to being one of the meanest men alive.

He got a standalone story of his own that showed what happened between his beginning and his end. It was, what, a dark comedy? It showcased a morbid sense of humor and obscene levels of violence. It also showed even more of Barracuda’s character. His lack of social graces was obvious beforehand, but the series makes it clear that he’s full of pride. Frank Castle embarrassed him and hurt him and he can’t let that stand. So, he takes a trek down to South America to stage a coup and stack cash so that he can finance his revenge. He manipulates what, three or four different factions into all-out war? All on his own? Barracuda is no joke.

Barracuda is a big ball of negative stereotypes, but, man, he’s positively a breath of fresh air. We’ve got a comics world with a squeaky clean Luke Cage, a character born out of the blaxploitation tradition. Sure, sometimes he speaks in ASCII characters, but he spends the rest of his time doing things like being faithful to his wife, worrying about his daughter, and trying to make the world a better place. What part of the game is that?

Ennis creating an unapologetically negative and vicious black villain who isn’t some super scientist or freak of nature is a brave move, since most people don’t seem to have bothered. Ennis dives in with relish and man, it pays off big time. You get an interesting and exciting villain, someone who can actually stand up to the hero of the book, and a story that, even though you know Barracuda is going to bite it because he’s going up against Frank Castle, is thrilling nonetheless. “The Long, Cold Dark” was a story that took both characters to the edge in a way that you just don’t see often enough in mainstream books. You know that it’s going to end messy, but the devil’s in the details.

So here’s to Barracuda, an excellent example that we all cannot be, and should not be, Robbie Robertson when it comes to comics. Drop the kid gloves and give me a savage every once and a while. If I can’t get a savage, at least let me get a Bodie.

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.