Someone on Twitter, I forget who (sorry), posted a link to “Shit White Girls Say… to Black Girls,”, and this video had me laughing hard at work.

With a few exceptions (“Jews were slaves, too” & “My grandma hates collards” mainly, ’cause what kind of monster hates greens?), I’ve heard all of this, despite not being a black girl. This is one of those “So funny it’s true!” videos, and its jokes have plenty of bite. I keep my hair super short in part because some white people LOVE to touch black hair, like it’s catnip or magical or something. (It isn’t. It’s just black. And mine.) If I say no, you can’t touch my hair, then that’s… I don’t even know, playing hard to get? “Your mouth says no but your hair says YES YES YES TOUCH ME TOUCH ME?” And I mean, I’m a grown man with a good aight job who’s self-sufficient, and people still pull that. I had a mohawk for a couple months in late 2011 (word to travis bickle) and it still happened. C’mon, son. It’s always so awkward, too, because nobody means nothing by it but it’s enraging and then you’re taking things too seriously and you gotta loosen up, your hair’s cute, i just wanna touch it and–

Don’t even get me started on afro-fetishism (it’s not that cool of a hairstyle, y’all, especially after you put your hands in it) or calling black folks some variety of chocolate or other brown foods as a romantic thing. Really? Are you twelve?

This chick saying “______ is soooo ghetto” and “Hollerrrrr” had me in stitches. It’s a dead on impersonation, and the ghetto one is a particular pet peeve of mine. It’s pretty screwed up, if you think about how that word is used and the perception of who is in the ghetto.

I’ve been following this documentary series called Little Brother for a while now. It’s composed of several interviews with young black boys from pre-teens on up. The producers talk to the boys about their life, basically what life is like. It’s counterprogramming, I figure, for black pathology, which teaches that black boys will be dead or in jail by 25, are crack babies, are savages, will stick you for your purse in an elevator, wants your white daughters, and on and on. It starts at the top, really, with “What’s wrong with the black community?” before trickling down to “How will black women date if all the black men are in jail?” to “Let’s completely ruin the perfectly useful phrase ‘down low’ so that we can push a paranoid and probably homophobic trend, also, how will black women date if all of the black men are secretly gay?” to “Why are black teens having so many babies?” and then on down to “Seriously though, black boys will rape and murder you just for living. Hide your daughters.” Talib Kweli had a good line in “Astronomy (8th Light)” that took a while to sink in for me. “Black like the perception of who on welfare.”

It’s an old and poisonous lie, and one we still haven’t gotten rid of. It’s taken new forms, too–Herman Cain is cooning his black behind off in order to convince the white people who will make or break his campaign that he isn’t like the dangerous black people, look! he hates Muslims, too! “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?”

This documentary hits close to home for me and probably a lot of other people, because you grow up seeing this on the news (this is back when the news was true), reading it in text books, and hearing warnings from teachers and/or DARE cops. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t actually true because you had no way of knowing better. You assume that it’s right, and maybe you start living your life accordingly, because that’s how you’re Supposed To Be. You get boxed in.

Personally, I grew up fatherless. My mom took me to the YMCA or the sports league on base so I could play basketball and soccer. She was a social worker at the time, so she saw the worst of us. I taught myself to shave, which is still one of my least favorite things to do, cut my hair, and talk to girls. I had to guess at what makes a man, or try to glean secret truths by watching other people. It was confusing and frustrating, and the sort of thing that everyone probably goes through. You’d never know it, though, because who’d talk about it? “Hey man, what should I say to Terra?” “How do I shave?”

This documentary is really interesting. I like seeing black boys getting a chance to talk about what they like and don’t like, how and where they’re growing up, and how they relate to their family. It’s nice to see them talking about what love feels like. It’s nice, I guess, to see a confirmation that I was normal, everyone I knew was normal, and things are probably gonna be okay.

The trailer:

I got an email this morning letting me know that Little Brother is airing on TV tonight. It’s showing on the Documentary Channel.

Don’t miss the U.S. National Television Premiere of Little Brother: Things Fall Apart on Documentary Channel, tonight at 8pm EST/PST with a repeat broadcast at 11:00pm EST/PST.

Subscribers of Dish Network (Channel 197) and DirecTV (Channel 267) across the United States will be able to watch the broadcast.

If you’re like me, though, and you don’t have that channel, you can check it out on Amazon. Little Brother: Things Fall Apart is available for seven day rental for $4.99.

I feel like this project is pretty important. It’s a humanizing effort, a reminder that these boys are no different from anyone else. They weren’t poisoned from birth.

Give it a look, if you’re curious.

The opening to Nas’s “Proclamation (Nigger Hatred)” is killer. It’s what sold me on his (aight to good) untitled album back when it was still called Nigger. The Malcolm X quote, the Paul Mooney joke (“White folks made up ‘nigger’ and don’t want me to say it” is endlessly funny to me for some reason), and Nas’s quiet, subdued flow… it’s haunting. It’s Nas at his best, kicking something conscious but jiggy. There’s no complicated wordplay here, either. It’s just straight spitting. Honestly, “Proclamation” has the perfect sound for sad black music in the 2000s, doesn’t it? I dunno. It’s spare and sorta menacing because of it, but melancholy, too.

The video for “Be A Nigger Too” starts out with “Proclamation” and it’s the perfect lead-in to the video. “Be A Nigger Too” is a montage of… it’s just people, really. Military cats, families, fights, slave times, robberies, awards, everything. There’s a lot of actor cameos in there, too. It’s a snapshot of real life. It’s a solid video, but there’s one part that gave me goosebumps back when I first watched it.

At about 3:50 in, the video slams to a bassy pulse and the slave times are juxtaposed with scenes and faces in the modern day. It’s drawing a direct line from one to the other. That’s pretty powerful, but then it flashes back to black and white and it gets really crazy.

This kid, a teenager I guess, wakes up out of bed and grabs his uzi off the dresser, and runs up on a white man outside. The kid is mirroring Nas’s rhymes–”Wake up in the mornin’, shake my third leg in the toilet/ Uzi on the nightstand, I’m the man you go to war with/ Not the man you go to war against/ patience, I’ll get you / if that means I can’t sleep a whole year, I’ma get you”–but what got me was when he flipped that classic Malcolm X pose, with the M1 by the window. The posture is different. Malcolm is alert and watchful. The kid is waiting, but hiding. There’s a reason for that, I think.

The thing about the Malcolm photo is that it’s iconic. It’s burned into the psyche of so many people. It’s a symbol of black power, black masculinity, love, and a lot of things. It’s a man making a conscious decision to protect his family from those who would do them harm. It’s the idea that meeting violence with violence is not something to be ashamed of. It’s something to avoid, but when your back is against the wall, you need to be ready to put someone down. It’s an acknowledgement of the danger of speaking your mind, but an affirmation that you must speak your mind, no matter the consequences. It’s huge. I can’t even begin to really wrap my mind around it.

This kid with the gun is the opposite. It doesn’t mean any of the things that the Malcolm photo does. Instead, it’s a failure. It’s born not out of power, but out of fear. The kid isn’t there to protect anyone. He’s a predator. He wants revenge, not freedom. Or maybe he wants freedom, and the only way he knows how to get it is via revenge. Offensive action.

There’s something about kids with guns. I have a mild obsession with child soldiers. I’ve probably spent entirely too much time reading about the Lord’s Resistance Army. Limbaugh defending the LRA to score points against Obama actually made me wish that Limbaugh was dead. I don’t–that’s not the type of emotion/response/political discourse that I like, but that was my gut reaction. “How can you defend these people?”

(digression)

I’ve read stories of heroic kids fighting at Stalingrad or wherever and dozens more besides. All of them gross me out. I feel like when you hit the point where a kid has to pick up a gun, or is forced or coerced to do it, there’s been a complete and total collapse of everything that adults are supposed to do. Children are supposed to be protected from that sort of thing.

So this kid picking up the gun, briefly emulating one of my most favorite photographs, and then inverting it… that grabbed me. It grabbed me by the throat and threw me off a roof or something. It’s intense, and it really heightened how I feel about the song.

The video’s a bit overlong (a third song? credits? really? wrap it up, cousin, i got places to be), but the first four-five minutes are nuts. It’s a perfect marriage of imagery and lyrical content. It’s not just someone performing a song very well (as in the video for the stellar “Bridging the Gap” with Nas’s father), or a sorta concept-y thing (“Hip-Hop Is Dead” goes hard), or flossing as hard as they can (“Nasty”, which had me as soon as Nas said “I come from the Wheel of Ezekiel to pop thousand dollar bottles of Scotch, smoke pot, and heal the people” and I was REALLY into it when he said “Bet a hundred stacks, niggas’ll run it back/ Just havin fun, I ain’t even begun to black/ Light another blunt in fact, haha…”). I like all those videos a whole lot, and to be honest there’s not a lot of difference between a concept joint like “Hip-Hop Is Dead” and “Be A Nigger Too.” I feel like the difference is that the marriage between audio and visual is much stronger in “Be A Nigger Too.” “Hip-Hop Is Dead” will exist, and knock, forever, without the video. The video’s well done, but not essential. The video is essential for “Be A Nigger Too.”

Heidi MacDonald found a report in the Guardian about Tintin in the Congo. I guess there was a move to ban it due to racist content, but a judicial advisor has rejected the idea that the book is racist. Here’s a few quick thoughts/jokes on the subject.

1. I liked this reasoning on the part of the advisor because it’s full of crap:

De Theux de Meylandt said in the document seen by Reuters that Tintin author Georges Remi (better known as Hergé) did not intend to incite racial hatred when he depicted his cartoon hero on an adventure in the former Belgian colony in a 1931 work that was updated in 1946.

“The representations (of African people) by Herge are a reflection of his time,” De Theux de Meylandt wrote.

Intention is a key criteria in substantiating a charge of racism. The court is expected to deliver a judgement rejecting or accepting Mondondo’s argument that the book’s depiction of Africans is racist.

“We see in particular that Tintin in the Congo does not put Tintin in a situation where there is competition or confrontation between the young reporter and any black or group of blacks, but pits Tintin against a group of gangsters … who are white,” De Theux de Meylandt also wrote in the statement.

2. It’s kind of interesting how the law (I assume) approaches racism as a conscious act–”intend to incite racial hatred”–rather than something that just happens. Intent, near as I can tell, has basically zip to do with racism. Inciting racial hatred is a racist act, but it is not the sum total of racism. Racism can be clutching your purse when someone hops onto an elevator or looking at a certain type of woman as a sex object first. Racism can be dragging a man behind a truck until he dies in agony. Racism can be denying home loans to black families, shooting a grandmother in the face because you got the wrong house, underestimating a stranger, overpraising a child, and more. Racism is a lot of things. It’s a system. It’s an opinion. It’s an act. It’s an emotion. It’s whatever. Intent? Not really relevant. If I didn’t mean to step on your toe, you’re still sitting there with a flat toe, right?

3. I love love love “The representations (of African people) by Herge are a reflection of his time.” Man oh man do I love it. It’s the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card. “Oh, it was just the time! Weren’t they so quaint back then with their casual racism? Land sakes, mint juleps, landed gentry, southern belles, I do declare!” That got away from me a little. The point is, the racism in this drawings is okay because it was okay at the time. It’s quaint, like, I dunno, cocaine in Coca-cola or those enormous dresses women used to wear in the 1800s that doubled as circus tents.

I don’t believe in a sliding scale of morality and neither should you. If lynching somebody until their eyes bug out is a dick move in 2011, it was a dick move in 1911. If drawing an entire race like they were darkie nigger savages is a racist act in 2011, guess what bruh, it’s a racist act at every other point in time, as well. It’s dehumanizing. If you argue it isn’t, you’re objectively wrong. That’s the entire point of that type of art.

4. Think about the context, too. Depicting blacks as subhuman is a tried and true tactic. Churches used to teach that blacks were the descendants of Ham, son of Noah, and used the curse of Ham as a justification for slavery. (You know I heard somebody tell me that in church as a kid? That really made me mad, because I was young enough to know that story was full of crap, but they were old enough to have probably heard it from actual slaves.) Black men and women were depicted as hypersexual because they were closer to savagery than whites, which had the bonus of making it a-okay to sleep with them whenever you felt like it, and then to deny it to the heavens should you get caught (shout-out to the Thomas Jefferson clan). They’re violent. They’re dangerous. They’re stupid. Take your pick.

The savages in Tintin in the Congo are particularly disgusting because of the time period the book came out in. Congo was a Belgian colony at the time, and the book portrayed the people as stupid “Me Too Stupid To Know How Talk Right” savages. It is explicit propaganda. It posits a world where the Congolese are too stupid to be civilized on their own. It’s Deepest Darkest Africa, The Dark Continent garbage all over again. And man, I wonder what the point of depicting the citizens of a colony of your country as subhuman? Could it be to shore up the idea that you’re supposed to be there? That being there is right? Golly.

So, no, “it was the times!” is a crap excuse. Will Eisner and Hergé both drew unbelievably, cartoonishly racist depictions of black people. A lot of other people did, too. Racism! It exists. Don’t pretend it didn’t because you like how somebody put lines on paper. Plenty of great (and bad and normal) people do scumbag things here and there. Just accept it!

5. Tintin in the Congo: it’s objectively racist. It’s stupid to try and ban it, though. Even racist speech is free speech.

Here’s the solicit for X-Men #20, on sale digitally and in finer comic shops nationwide:

Guest starring Iron Man 2.0! The fallout of Schism pushes the X-Men and War Machine at each other in Eastern Europe asSsentinels are being traded on the black market.

Here’s me earlier this year (it feels like forever ago) in an interview with Tom Spurgeon:

And look at Marvel’s upcoming Iron Man 2.0. The cover artist, title, and logo are all intended to make it look like it’s part of Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s successful run on Iron Man. The twist? It stars James Rhodes as War Machine. The same James Rhodes who was just in a series a year ago that bit the dust with issue #12. How is that anything but a vote of no-confidence for black characters in comics? Congrats, Rhodey! You’re a major co-star in a big Hollywood blockbuster and Marvel knows that the current comics audience won’t even look at you without someone else’s logo on the cover.

Related, but maybe not: Bleeding Cool is saying that Iron Man 2.0 is canceled as of #12.

I read a few issues of Iron Man 2.0. It was a Nick Spencer/Ariel Olivetti book at the beginning, but Kano and Carmine Di Giadomenico (who I like a whole lot) pinch hit a bit. I was unimpressed. I was actually sort of annoyed when Rhodey slipped further and further into the background. I hit one issue where Rhodey wasn’t in it at all, or on one page or something ridiculous like that. And then Fear Itself hit and the book turned into Cast-Off Iron Fist Characters Monthly (sometimes featuring War Machine). Chris Eckert did a pretty good job of breaking down why that sucks over here.

I’m not one of those comics hardliners, either. People who are like “It took Stan and Steve six pages to do Spider-Man’s origin and yet Miles Morales isn’t even in costume yet in issue three!” are morons. Fights don’t have to happen for an issue to be good. “Nothing happened” is a crap complaint. You take a story on its own merits, not by the standards of some time before any of us were born. You could probably build a very good story with the hero/titular character flitting around the outskirts of the book. I think Brian Azzarello and Marcelo Frusin did that pretty well on their last arc of Hellblazer. You can build dread.

The problem with Iron Man 2.0 is that there was no narrative momentum. I never bought the premise of the story. Spencer didn’t stick the landing when he was setting it up. As a result, rather than building a mystery, an entire issue about some dude I don’t care about or some rip from Chinese mythology was an intrusion, rather than an infiltration. Does that make sense?

If the story is good, you can do whatever you want. Even pirate comics and lengthy essays.

But that’s all a sidebar for what I really want to get at, which is referring to Rhodey as “Iron Man 2.0″ in solicit text. Yeah, they call him War Machine later, but he’s introduced as Iron Man 2.0. He’s branded as Iron Man 2.0.

And I don’t think anything speaks to the state of colored folks and comics as well as that. Marvel has been astonishingly good at keeping their black characters around. They’re miles ahead of their nearest competition. Barring a couple breaks of maybe 18-24 months combined, we’ve had an ongoing Black Panther comic since like 1998 or whenever Priest started. Bendis turned Luke Cage into a superstar (but still no solo series). Misty Knight has starred in three separate Heroes for Hire/Daughters of the Dragon series in the past what, six years? And she’s getting relaunched again this week? Marvel clearly wants this to work. They’ve thrown everything at the wall and nothing appears to be sticking.

Their new tactic is stripping a character of his own identity and hitching his cart to another character. Iron Man 2.0‘s entire outward appearance is meant to emulate Iron Man and confuse consumers into thinking it stars a white dude or something, I dunno. Rhodey has been around for decades. He has a fanbase. But it isn’t enough. So Marvel is pretending like Rhodey is a subset of Iron Man rather than letting him stand on his own two.

And that sucks. Readers (hopefully) aren’t that stupid, and it’s so limiting in scope. Rhodey spent the ’90s (and several other brief periods of time) attempting to escape Tony Stark’s shadow. I’m far from a superfan, or even an average fan, and I know that. To pull him back under that shadow in the name of goosing sales and then to make him a sideliner in his own comic… I dunno. Maybe there just shouldn’t be War Machine comics. Or maybe I misread and Iron Man 2.0 is about Tony Stark’s world and not War Machine at all.

I’ve been trying to think my way through how you could spin turning Rhodey subordinate as a positive. I don’t think you can. There will always be a connection between him and Stark. That’s unavoidable and totally an avenue worth exploring. But at one point, in the text and without, he was his own distinct person. Sacrificing that, in any way, on the altar of hoping to goose sales… I dunno. It seems like such a waste.

Black Panther has a touch of this, having stepped into Daredevil’s shoes in terms of title and gimmick. I dislike it for different reasons, though. Black Panther has always been at the forefront of that comic. I think the book is dreadfully average right now, with the occasional dip into stupid (but the art tends toward fire), but that’s beside the point. Becoming the Man Without Fear and running a Denny’s feels like a step all the way out of the Black Panther’s gimmick (king of a technologically advanced isolationist nation who is also smart enough to supply Reed Richards with gadgets), but at the same time, Francesco Francavilla was born to draw him. I mean, can you imagine a hard espionage tale featuring the Panther with art like this?

“The Most Dangerous Man Alive.”

It’s so strange to think of two decades-old characters who have to step into a white man’s shoes in order to boost sales. I called Iron Man 2.0 a vote of no-confidence for black characters, and I think that holds true. If they were genuinely viable in and of themselves, they’d star in series of their own, not ones that are strapped to someone else’s back. Neither story feels like a particularly organic transition (though Rhodey’s status quo over the past however many years has been wildly uneven to begin with). Honestly, I don’t buy that either of them are good fits, either. But I can see what Marvel’s attempting to do, and in a way, I get it. In another way, it grosses me out.

It seems like you can pull off great portrayals of black characters in team books. Thunderbolts is a treat, and New Mutants, last I checked, was majority non-white. But once you get down into Soloville, you start hitting road bumps. Depressing.

Let them dudes have their own names and identities. Or let them die.

(this is long, sorry, but i guess i have FEELINGS )

In between NBA 2k11 (and soon 2k12) games, I sometimes write about comics. It’s just a thing I do, you know, keep the lights on and the Hawks on my TV. I reviewed Frank Miller’s Holy Terror, his big 9/11 getback novel. If you’ve talked to me for more than thirty seconds, you probably know I really enjoy dude’s work, and was looking forward to Holy Terror with more than a little trepidation. Maybe more excitement than trepidation, but I definitely knew 1) how bad this could get and 2) that Miller doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body. Which makes the fact that Holy Terror is as bad as I expected it to be all the more depressing. Read the review–it’s two thousand words, and I spent a long time writing it (more on that in a bit). People are going buck wild in the comments, I bet.

Here’s a quote for something I want to talk out:

There’s a line from a poem that’s been running through my head ever since I finished Holy Terror: “When she was good, She was very, very good, But when she was bad she was horrid.” It applies very well to Holy Terror. The last page is a stinger as good as anything ever seen on The Twilight Zone. The rest of it? It’s depressing. It feels almost like a betrayal. Miller has done many things that were forward-thinking or intelligent, whether exploring the ideals of black beauty in Sin City or blowing the hinges off what comics could be with Elektra Assassin. For him to do something like this, which is stupid at best, is… let’s call it disappointing. He’s punching far below his weight class. I’m still looking forward to the 300 sequel Xerxes, but my desire for it has definitely been tempered, if not nearly annihilated, by Holy Terror.

And “betrayal” feels like one of those things that the comics fans I hate would say in a review, in-between sentences about how this portrayal of the Vision is something something continuity joke. That got away from me, but you get my point. I wrote it in the review yesterday and then stopped. I erased it, rewrote the sentence, and then put it back, because that’s what it feels like. Not a dramatic, everything-you-know-is-wrong, GOTCHA betrayal. Just a minor one. Something I thought was true was revealed to be false.

I’ve talked incessantly about how The Big Fat Kill pretty much completely rewired my head and is probably the thing that led to my love of straight up crime fiction. I grew up and read more and realized that Miller was bigger than hardboiled books. I was pleased to see that his body of work was not only diverse, but groundbreaking. I mean, count ‘em: Daredevil, Wolverine, Born Again, Year One, Elektra Assassin, Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, A Dame to Kill For, 300, and Hard Boiled, to name his more inarguable examples of classics. He’s been in comics for 33 years, so… what is that, around a one hot book every three years average? That’s pretty great. He’s a legend for a reason.

And so, the “whores whores whores” stuff online bothered me a whole lot. If you’re pulling that card, you’re ignorant of Miller’s body of work. There’s really no other way to say it. I did/do a lot of eye-rolling at that stuff and try to correct it when appropriate. Miller’s back catalog is way deeper than that criticism suggests, and I guess because of my attachment to his work over the years, it’s my pet bugaboo?

I expected Holy Terror to be pretty bad. I was hoping for ASBAR bad, where there are these glorious shining spots of fantastic storytelling mixed in with the inexplicable nonsense, instead of The Spirit bad, which was mostly bad except for those parts where I kinda sorta got what Miller was trying to do. Back in July, I said “boy do i hope this isn’t super racist when it drops.” And I kept doing that. I kept making jokes about how it was probably gonna be pretty offensive or racist with each new bit of news. I think it’s because I knew, deep down, that it would be terrible, but hopefully if I joked about it, it would somehow become less racist or something. Denial, son.

G Willow Wilson posted this on her Twitter:

“As a Muslim comics creator, seeing an icon like Frank Miller write a book like Holy Terror is like getting punched in the face. Just sayin.”

And ugh, man! I like Wilson a lot, though I don’t follow her on Twitter, so this was the written equivalent of somebody punching you in the face while you’re asleep. You’re gonna feel it, and you’re gonna remember it for a long time. It will cold ruin your day until you finally man up and take care of it. What she said crawled all the way up into my brain, and it sat there asking me why I was being stupid. I knew better, I always knew better, so why the hesitance and dumb jokes instead of facing up to what Holy Terror was shaping up to be? I knew that I needed to recognize wisdom and do what I should have done ages ago.

So I canceled my preorder. No, really. I did it the same day, a couple hours later:

’cause I mean, I’m a smart guy, but I was being a smart dumb guy by fooling myself into thinking that Holy Terror was something that I would possibly be able to like and still respect myself. I’m a fan–not a stan. Or so I’d like to think anyway.

I got a PDF galley of the book the very next day. I laughed at the timing and read it as soon as I got home. And on the first read, I was stunned. Or not stunned–more like blank. I read every page, some twice, and at the end, I was empty. I didn’t hate it, but I was completely devoid of anything to really say about it. That was it? I read it again and everything fell into place. That blankness was me working through the cognitive dissonance of someone I’d thought was a modern, progressive person doing a book that was filled with wall to wall hate for people I respect a great deal. I mean, no way, no how does that happen.

Except it did, it’s real, and man, yeah, I’m glad I canceled the preorder. I would’ve been furious. I would’ve felt terrible. I would’ve felt a lot of things, probably. Even with not having put money into it, I felt bad about it. I felt gross. Holy Terror was everything I was hoping it wouldn’t be. I was a fool for thinking otherwise.

It took me three hours to write that review. That’s an extremely long time for me to take to write anything of that length. (embarrassingly long.) I spent the whole weekend thinking about Holy Terror, despite going to a Hong Kong cinema film festival, and wrote it on Sunday. Writing the review wasn’t working for me at all–and maybe this is melodramatic but whatever, it’s true–until I put on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. It came out on my ninth birthday and a gang of my family all drove to Macon as a group to see it. It was genuinely life-changing for me, like a watershed moment or Paul waking up on the road to Damascus. If I had to make a chart of things that have had a huge influence on my life, Denzel Washington as Malcolm X would be one of the top five biggest things. It’s that real to me. I don’t watch it near as often as I should, but every time it’s as good as it ever was. (I forgot about the children saying “I am Malcolm X” at the end this time around, and they caught me completely flat-footed. Long story short, FYI, I got a lil choked up.)

(My man Pedro from Funnybook Babylon also hooked me up with a Kindle copy of the new Malcolm bio while I was watching the movie. Very X sort of day.)

I dunno why, but that made the review flow easier. Writing alongside something I knew and loved, and that was in a very real way directly relevant to what Miller was writing about, worked. I got that I needed to make it more of a personal essay than a “Buy this book/don’t buy this book” review, and I wanted to do it from the perspective of someone who loves Miller’s work in general and was disgusted and disappointed. “Betrayal.” I was surprised when I wrapped up the review a little bit before the credits rolled, but there’s something weirdly fitting there. I dunno. Serendipity. It is what it is.

I don’t hate Frank Miller. I’m entirely more disappointed than I expected to be, but I’m still kinda sorta looking forward to Xerxes. I dunno.

I threw some shots Grant Morrison’s way last month, and I didn’t even bother buying (or bootlegging) Action Comics. I’m just not interested any more, and that’s a feeling that’s been growing for a while. I don’t need his books and I don’t think I’m missing all that much these days. I haven’t written Miller off like I have Morrison, though I think that Holy Terror and what it represents are an objectively bigger sin than “has stupid opinions about Superman and needs to openly rep for the Siegels and Shusters or quit comics.” I liked Morrison a lot at one point, but he’s never been as fundamental to me as Miller was. Is that why I haven’t entirely quit his comics? I dunno, but that feels like the correct answer.

But even then, I’m giving a lot of thought to Xerxes. The comic is one of his best, and the movie felt offensive in ways the comic didn’t. Vagaries of the medium, maybe. I don’t think that’s stannery. I feel like that’s probably true. I’ve liked what I’ve seen of it, but I’m still thinking about it a lot. I dunno.

The Miller and Morrison things are sort of identical, in that both situations involve a creator I respect proving that my faith was misplaced. We build up these pictures of others in our heads, and we fill in the blanks based on what we know or what we want to believe. Seeing those differences made as plain as day is always a shocking, surprising thing. It’s unfair, maybe, but we still do it.

I have a hard time separating the art from the artist once I become aware of something I would personally find loathsome about the artist. Sure, they’re still talented, but there are SO many things to take that I can live my entire life experiencing new things before working my way over to them. Other people are better at it than I am, and I’m a little jealous. But I don’t like the idea that my money would go to supporting someone who represents something I hate. And it’s disappointing when people you like give you reasons not to like them.

Every time I see their name, I’ll think of what they did. I dunno if that’s being an informed, responsible consumer or just thinking too much about comics or both.

But you know, whatever whatever. I’m glad I got to see a dozen or so brand new and genuinely incredible Miller pages, despite the words that were on them. You speak of “love and hate.” This is it in a nutshell.

This post is around ten words longer than the actual review and took me around an hour to write. (More words now.) Sorry. I’m kinda bummed out.

Y’all probably shouldn’t buy Holy Terror though.

…that it is essentially covert, or maybe just casual, white supremacy.

How great does this kid look, by the way? Sharp haircut. Sara Pichelli is great.

Here’s the short version:

The long version keeps drifting on me and not coming out correctly, so let me try and boil it down:

The words you choose to use simultaneously reflect and create the world around you. If you make an effort to be effusively positive about things, you’re going to attract people who either share in or enjoy your positivity. The odds are good that they will be positive, too, setting up a situation where you both feed off each other. If you want to keep up a too cool for school distant air, and so your version of effusive praise is “Oh, yeah, that was cool,” then you’re going to attract like-minded people who understand you. Make sense? Everything feeds on everything else.

“Black Spider-Man” otherizes Miles Morales. (It also ignores that he’s half-Puerto Rican, but that’s another conversation entirely.) He’s not Spider-Man. He’s black Spider-Man. He isn’t the new Spider-Man first, or Ultimate Spider-Man first. He’s black Spider-Man. Which is funny, because Barry Allen and Wally West were just the new Flashes. Hal Jordan is a Green Lantern, but John Stewart is the black Green Lantern.

It foregrounds Miles’s race in a conversation where his race should be irrelevant. His race is probably going to end up being just as big a part of his character as it was for Peter Parker–which I do think was a fairly significant part of that character–but in terms of who the character is and how we refer to him, “black Spider-Man” is garbage.

It sets up the adjective-less Spider-Man as the default, and therefore superior, version. Black Spider-Man will always be second-best because he wasn’t first. Comics fans in particular like to prize the original flavor, or whichever flavor was dominant whenever they began reading, so you can’t tell me that isn’t true. Every time I read “black Spider-Man” I taste battery acid. It feels mean, like the most important part of Miles’s character is that he’s (whisper this with me) not white!

Every single person who has dropped the “Batman of Africa” phrase into their news report, writing, solicits, interviews, commentary, criticism, or emails is lazy. Plain and simple. Every single one. If they aren’t mocking the phrase, they are lazy. Whenever I see it, I want to (and usually do) stop reading whatever page I’m on. There is no Batman of Africa, just like there’s no Batman of South America or Batman of Europe. There are Batmen of France, Argentina, and cities, but there are no Batmen of continents. David Zavimbi, Batwing, is the Batman of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or maybe the Batman of Fake-Kinshasha.

“Batman of Africa,” like “black Spider-Man,” plays into these subtle, but still awful, racial and national stereotypes. Africa is “AFRICA” in people’s minds because lazy, racist fiction and news painted it as a monolithic dark continent full of black people. Lies cloud the mind. Africa, like any other continent, features an astonishing amount of ethnic diversity, whether native or immigrant. You don’t even have to open a book to know this. Charlize Theron is African, man. More specifically, and more respectfully, she’s South African. She’s from Johannesburg. She’s famous.

But the mental image that leaps to mind when people say “Africa” is bone nose savages, savage warlords, savage child soldiers, and AIDS savaging the countryside. Not Egypt, or the Ivory Coast, or a continent of one billion people, most of whom are just like us and go through many of the same trials and travails that we do. There’s no diversity in “AFRICA!” That fact is ugly and stupid. It’s 2011. What’s wrong with you?

David Zavimbi, presumably, is Congolese. “Batman of the Congo” has less of a ring to it, but it doesn’t make you look as unforgivably ignorant as “Batman of Africa” does.

Being black is no more remarkable than being white. Miles Morales is notable for being the first black Spider-Man, particularly in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but it isn’t his blackness that makes him special. It’s the fact that he’s not Peter Parker. The fact that he’s half-black, half-Puerto Rican, (and how cool would it be if his dad was a dark skinned Puerto Rican and his mom was light skinned black?!), that it looks like he’s taking part in a lottery to get into a good school in the preview images, and that he’s thirteen years old is just sauce. It’s not the meal. It’s part of the meal, sure, but you do yourself and the character (or rather, the concept, what the character represents, or something, because we do not respect characters ’round these parts) a disservice by boiling him down to “black Spider-Man.” He’s so much more than that, judging by the press run Marvel just went on, that breaking him down to being the black Spider-Man is… it’s garbage, it’s lazy, it’s stupid.

It makes you look like Stormy.

This is drifting.

Black Debbie doesn’t exist. I probably could’ve left this at the Sealab video and been good.

Please think before you speak.

-This review of Fantagraphics’ Peanuts reprint project is great. This little girl gets exactly why Charlie Brown and Snoopy are so wonderful. Hang it up, everybody else.

-My main man Tucker Stone turned five and then got back down to the business of showing you the guts of this week’s comic books.

-Rich Johnston pulled together a post meant to educate some dickface retailer about racism and speaking in public. It’s a good one, very well done. He asked me if I wanted to contribute, but I declined. I felt like that guy had gotten enough, or even too much, of my attention after I tweeted about it two times. C’est la guerre, right?

-The reason that retailer went off on the racist tip is that the new Ultimate Spider-Man (created by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli) is a half-black, half-hispanic kid named Miles Morales (alliteration, holla). While I stand by my position that original characters are greater than legacies, who are by their very nature subordinate and inferior to the original model, I also understand that cape comics are screwed and cannot support new original characters. They have to be tied to the old in order to survive today. It sucks, but that’s the industry we’ve built, right?

-The retailer, of course, is noted sexist douchebag Larry Doherty of Larry’s Comics in Lowell, MA, whose previous claim to fame, a year or two before making jokes about “nigga lips,” was calling out ComicsAlliance editor-in-chief Laura Hudson as a one-trick pony who only talks about sexism in comics and, I assume as some sort of incredible zinger, sending her a photo of a woman with a bunch of hot dogs stuffed in her mouth. It’s cool that he’s outed himself as a racist, too. Gotta catch ‘em all, right?

-Every time I see somebody on Twitter shouting that guy out like “Yo this guy knows how to sell comcis!” my eyes narrow a little bit. Watch who you associate with, because it’s all too easy for their actions to define you.

-I don’t necessarily think Marvel should be patted on the back, but this is a pretty cool move. No other major character–and the major characters these days are Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, make no mistake–have been replaced by a non-white. In this case, the one, true Spider-Man, or Ultimate Spider-Man, or whatever, is a black guy. What’s more, this’ll pull the Ultimate universe away from pantomiming the past, which is what the last murderfest and reboot was supposed to do. You can’t do a retread of Venom with Miles Morales. They don’t have the history, and there are no expectations.

-No, there are some expectations. We’ll see the classic villains, probably for the first year or so, to ease readers in. Seeing how the new guy (and I hope he has a different personality than Parker and doesn’t use the same yiddish slang) interacts with these old characters will be more interesting than seeing Parker do the same old song and dance. Word is that he’ll be working with Aunt May and Gwen Stacy, too, which is cool.

-I tweeted some stuff about the new Spider-Man and the marketing of the character, too: “It would be nice if the Big Two could treat diversity as a fact of life, but the market & genre demand events/hype. It’s nice when they try. So, though I haven’t been a big Bendis fan for a while, I’ll try out this new Spider-Man. It’s (mostly) new and fresh. I hope it works out. Wonder Woman’s pants has been a running argument for over a year now. A new Spider-Man, and what’s more, a black one, is gonna be a big deal. It’s like that bit in Casanova. “The genre demands it!” The cape industry bends strange in a lot of nonsensical, but traditional, ways. but anyway, Sara Pichelli is ill, and I’m all about her getting a brand new #1 to call her own, and hopefully a fat sack of royalty checks”

-One request: can we not call him “Black Spider-Man?” That’s stupid.

-There’s this quote from Sara Pichelli in Marvel’s PR that I wanted to pull out: “Maybe sooner or later a black or gay – or both – hero will be considered something absolutely normal.”

-What she says works directly against Marvel’s marketing. (Spider-Man is black now!) She’s saying that this sort of thing should be par for the course, rather than an aberration. I like that she slipped that in there, whether my understanding of her statement is what she intended or not. The big deal about Nightrunner, the new Aqualad, and… who am I forgetting? Batwing? Blue Beetle? The big deal about all those guys should’ve been no big deal to us. I don’t get hype when an ill new black character shows up in One Piece (word to sleepy old Admiral Kuzan) or in a new movie. Why should I when it happens in the comics I’ve been reading since I was a child? If anything, these books should be the ones blazing trails like they used to do.

-Pichelli’s art is great. I did a Pretty Girls on her last year. Happy to see her with a huge gig.

-Thinking about this deal (and regrettably reducing it to a tired old Big Two competition, which I normally loathe but in this case is a viable angle for analysis)… Marvel’s never really had as much of a problem with race as DC has had. The ’70s were very good to them in terms of introducing cool new faces, and the 2000s (and maybe a little earlier–Priest’s Black Panther) saw a resurgence of strong titles featuring black characters. I think we’re long past the day when someone like Triathlon could gain traction, but Marvel definitely tries something new time and time again. Therefore–they didn’t have to create Miles Morales. They have characters who we love who are good.

-DC pushed Cyborg to the front lines as part of their big diversity push (at least in part) because he’s the only black guy they have that 1) has a fairly sizable fanbase (due to Wolfman/Pérez Teen Titans mostly) 2) doesn’t have Black in his name (eliminating Black Lightning from the runnings) and 3) isn’t a legacy character (peace out, John Henry Irons, John Stewart, Mr Terrific, Aqualad, and a handful of others). Not to say that he doesn’t deserve to play in the Big Leagues, because he absolutely does, but there’s a… paucity of candidates, aren’t there? He also isn’t named Vixen, which is a huge bonus.

-Marvel, though, has a figurative ton of black characters they could throw into the Avengers without anyone batting an eye, other than the people who make a hobby out of batting eyes. What’s more, they put him into their biggest costume. So, yeah, maybe this new Spider-Man really is something to be applauded. I’ll have to think it over some.

-I was on a Best/Worst Manga panel at SDCC 2011. You can read Deb Aoki’s great recap here.

-I liked this NYT piece debunking a few myths about slavery, marriage, and family, too.

-This post on Eating Watermelon While Black was also a pretty fun read. It’s interesting seeing other people’s perspectives on the very real cultural/social divide between black and white.

-Geez, I guess I did have something to say about Miles Morales after all. Hopefully the new book is good. Both companies’ sudden stabs at being inclusive seem sort of like a last-ditch gasp for air before the lights go out, but at the same time… I appreciate that they’re trying. Better late than never, right?

-New costume is pretty tight. I like the black and red, and the webby fingers.

I was out of the news loop while I was in San Diego. No, that’s both true and untrue (Schroedinger’s Anecdote I guess). I was clued into the Image and Marvel news, as I was covering their panels (as seen on ComicsAlliance!), but DC and Fantagraphics and everyone else? I got their news via Twitter or word of mouth, if I got the news at all. At some point, I checked in on the DC blog and saw this post, which had the art for all of their Edge titles. The standout is easily Travel Foreman’s work on Animal Man, with the I, Vampire pages by Andrea Sorrentino being the surprise “whoa, that actually looks cool” of the day. (It looks very Jae Lee.) There were also these two pages by Sami Basri, artist of Voodoo:

And you know, the pages are aight or whatever. Basri’s style is very clean, but not particularly… spectacular, right? He can do the pinup, cheesecakey stuff fine, but he’s never really done anything that made me go “whoa.” DC uses him to make sexy girl comics, which is apparently what Voodoo is going to be. And I dig Voodoo, I love the whole Wildstorm Universe (or I did, anyway), but man, talk about a pitch that fails to grab you.

I saw the pages at… I don’t know, waking up o’clock in the morning and tweeted about it a little bit, with the intent of leaving it at these quick hits:

’cause I mean, I don’t have to tell everyone every single one of my opinions. There are hundreds of comics I’ve never mentioned here that I don’t care about, right?

buuuuuuuuut there was this:

which immediately brought to mind one of my favorite Jadakiss bars: “Fuck boys do fuck shit” and probably a whole bunch of unfair (psyche) ad hominems. It’s not even a foot-in-mouth thing, it’s just a dude turning into a defensive jerk in an attempt to head off a controversy that, near as I can tell, didn’t actually happen anywhere. This guy is all, “Heh, look at all these dummies jumping to conclusions from the preview images released to sell my comic to them.” and there’s not even anybody on Twitter, the ultimate in personality spamming technology, talking about it beyond me and one person I know with locked tweets. As far as freakouts go, this is on the same level as taking a swig from a soda bottle and going, “Hm, is this a little flat? Maybe not.”

Anyway, it’s midnight-something, and I gotta be up in the morning, but I really don’t like how this guy is assigning all types of bad faith arguing on the part of readers who (probably) have very reasonable questions about Voodoo. So: let’s freak out.

“Waiting for the inevitable ‘she’s half-naked!’ freakouts over Voodoo pages.”

Thought about writing a rebuttal to this, but it’s late and this isn’t really the part I want to focus on because it’s stupid. The meat is in the second sentence. But I mean, congrats on being defensive without someone even challenging you. He sounds like the little kid who tells his mom that nobody ate any cookies while she was out and the dog broke the vase not me, I promise when she comes home and just says “Hello.”

“There couldn’t POSSIBLY be a story reason for that, right?”

There’s a story reason for everything. Dizzy Cordova from 100 Bullets is hands-down my favorite lady in comics and her introduction to the world featured a chick forcing a kiss on her in prison. Elektra wears a stupid looking costume. Blah blah blah, there’s a reason for everything.

There’s probably a great reason. She stripped in Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s, too. That’s reason enough, I’m sure. “It’s faithful to her origin!” We’ll find out the reason later on, when we get to read the actual comic. The reason doesn’t matter, though. Months before the books hit the shelves, the only thing that matters is the perception that the PR tour DC is currently on creates in the minds of readers.

This interview with Marz at CBR and this interview with Dan Didio at The Advocate are the most substantial sources of info on the new series.

The CBR interview begins with this:

Ron Marz: Well, obviously, we’re trying to stay away from giving out a whole lot of detail on any of the stories. I think there’s unfortunately a great desire to have spoilers in this business, period. And frankly, I do think it takes away from the experience of the story. So even if I could tell you what we’re going to do, I probably wouldn’t anyway. I feel like people should approach these books — or any books, really — not knowing what they’re really getting into.

and as a result, here is a list of things we know about Voodoo in the New DC Universe:
1. She’s a point of view character for the new universe
2. She takes her clothes off for dudes
3. She likes kissing boys AND girls

The first point is a bit bunk, because every single character will serve as a tour through the new universe, and the second is expected. I’m from Georgia–we might as well have invented strip clubs down south, so that’s fine, I don’t have some bias against strippers. The third is new, to my knowledge, and to the knowledge of a couple of my other Wildstorm Fan Club Crew. It’s not a big deal–kissing girls is fun, I know girls who kiss girls, it’s 2011, I live in San Francisco, whatever whatever–but it is a surprise.

Taken all together, though, it’s crap.

Voodoo is now (inexplicably) one of the highest profile black characters in the DC Universe. (She’s specifically Louisiana Creole, I believe, which was maybe/probably finally established in Alan Moore’s Dancing in the Dark? [as opposed to "generically ethnic" i mean]) It’s her, Mr Terrific, and Cyborg. Voodoo and Terrific have their own solo series, which I would argue puts them a notch above Cyborg, who is just a member of the JLA. Arguable point, to be sure.

(morningtime edit: I forgot about Static, whose series I want to buy, and Batwing. John Stewart’s going to be in a series, and Jason Rusch is costarring in another, too. My point stands, though: Voodoo is top dog when it comes to DC’s black ladies.)

Voodoo is starring in a book that, judging by the choice of artist, is meant to be sexy. Now, all comics should be sexy, but this is a sexy first sort of thing. “We got a comic starring a lady and it’s gotta be sexy so the fanboys buy it” sexy. “Bad girls for fanboys” sexy. “We need hot girls falling out of their tops while serving drinks to dudes rocking ugly sunglasses, as seen on page two of our preview images” sexy. That’s what Basri does, and that’s fine. He did the job on Power Girl. The problem: all we’ve heard about the interior of Voodoo has to do with her sex life. With Power Girl, he was brought on to draw her boobs real big or whatever, but we still got story info, relationship teases, villains, and so on. Voodoo gets none of that because this guy is afraid of spoilers.

DC sucks at black people. They especially suck at black women. So for the first taste of the most important (and the only one to have any measure of press–I think Vixen is on the JLI, but hasn’t gotten any press focus?) black superheroine in their entire universe to be about how you get to see her boobies sometimes, and oh man, wait until you see her kiss a girl at the beginning of issue two (we taking bets on that?) and hey hey hey look at these awesome pages in a strip club bros is crap.

It’s worse than crap. What message is that sending? Mr Terrific has been described as the most eligible bachelor in the DCU in the run-up to his series, so obviously love and/or sex will play a major role in his series. You know what Eric Wallace and them haven’t done, though? They haven’t spent time subtly letting us know that he’s gonna be running through every white woman in the DCU with his big black mandingo johnson. They’ve said that he’s highly sought after, but also talked about the types of stories he’s going to be in (I believe he’ll be in outer space by issue four?), his supporting cast (of black people! of a variety of ages and skillsets! also at least one white dude, and probably a civilian version of Power Girl), his status quo (he’s rich!), and plenty of other bits intended to whet your whistle. What do we actually know about the series? Probably nothing that we won’t find out in the first eight pages. We don’t know details. We don’t know plot points. We know the barest hint of teases. We know the equivalent of an iMDB summary and cast page–that’s it. And it got my interest! It worked! Here DC Comics: have three (or two) dollars!

Here’s what we know about Voodoo, in case you forgot:
1. She’ll make out with a girl with her top off while making eye contact with you, brother, and let me tell you–whooo!–it is hot.

Great advertising, dudes. “Here’s a black lady–she might give you a chubby. ~diversity~”

So yeah, it’s nice that you have story reasons for Voodoo stripping. Alan Moore did, too, and so did Jim Lee and Grant Morrison and Joe Casey (well, post-stripping in that case) and everyone else who ever touched the character. But we aren’t reading the story. We’re I’m reading the advertisement for the story. I’m trying to decide if I want to test the series out or not. I’m doing exactly what all of this information, as unbelievably scant as it is, to meant to do: decide whether or not Voodoo is worth my three (or two, actually) dollars.

If my reaction to your preview material is “Oh, well, this looks like the same old garbage,” that’s not my bad. That’s your bad. That’s you not being able to sell water to a man who’s dying of thirst.

As a black dude who has been increasingly and pretty much unceasingly disappointed in how DC approaches colored folks over the past few years, Voodoo isn’t worth it for me. And with Ron Marz already on the defensive, throwing up stupid, mean-spirited snaps that anybody could take apart with five minutes thought about the portrayal of black men and women in comics, Voodoo isn’t even worth stealing.

DC needs to muzzle their boy and maybe start thinking outside of the fanboy box. Listen to “Black Girl Lost” or “Dear Mama” or “White Man’z World” or something, man. Read some dream hampton. Find some dumb college kid in a daishiki who’ll talk to you about “the black experience.”

Do something. Anything, really. ’cause I’m basically what should be the target audience for this book, being both a Wildstorm fan and black, and every word out of this guy’s mouth is making me less and less interested in the series. Wait, no, that bit’s a lie–it’s turning me from bored apathy toward actual scorn.

Bullet points, this time.

-Read this essay by Chris Sims about the content of Superman 712.

-Long story short, Chris Roberson’s story about an Arab Muslim was turfed in favor of a Krypto story by Kurt Busiek that was shelved years ago due to lawsuit problems. Read the post.

-Essentially, DC joined Marvel in telling the world, “Yes, we are sorry for our stories, we will not stand behind our stories or their creators, and yes, you can tell us what to put in our comics. We just want to make you happy.”

-The most DC deserves here, the absolute most, is what Jay-Z said at the end of “Takeover.” I don’t normally curse on here, ’cause my grandmom reads this sometimes, but this is warranted, and a sentiment from the bottom of my heart:

-”You only get half a bar – fuck y’all niggas.”

-If I were a better man, that would be it. No explanation, no further dissing, no nothing. Just a cold, “Fuck y’all niggas.”

-But, I want to talk this out in public so that someone hopefully gets why this is a stupid decision and so unbelievably heinous.

-My littlest brother just turned three. I got to spend a week with him when I went back home earlier this year. He’s a bright, stubborn, playful, energetic, smart little kid who looks just like I did when I was his age.

-He’s my twin. He’s also half-Arab, on his father’s side. (Our mom is regular American black.)

-I try to police myself pretty hard, in terms of thoughts. What do I believe, why do I believe it, is it the right thing to believe? How did I come to that conclusion?

-Having a little brother who is Arab, whose father is Muslim, forces whatever theoretical ideas or feelings I have or had about how I feel about Arabs or Muslims into the light of cold, hard reality. “How would I feel if?” becomes “I feel like this.”

-And basically, point blank, end of story, Yousef, and his father, are blood. Every inch of them. That’s concrete facts, more serious than cancer.

-And blood is the most important thing in the world. It’s love. Blood should dissolve all imaginary ideological barriers.

-So whatever prejudices I had before he was born? I didn’t have many, but sure, I had some? They’re dead. Forever. Because he’s here, and he is me. We’re the same blood.

-I’m taking this personally for that exact reason. What’s good for me is good for him, and what’s bad for him is bad for me. Especially when it concerns an industry I love and support with my dollars. I have a responsibility to him to make this world a better.

-DC made this decision after being spooked by catching the ire of the Fox News crowd twice in one year. They don’t want their flagship character, who has already been associated with anti-American activities a couple times over the past few years (after that last dumb movie, earlier this year), to be seen hanging out with terrorists.

-Except, Sharif isn’t a terrorist. He’s a hero. Who is Arab. And was inspired by Superman to do good in his community.

-I don’t think DC is a racist company. I think they’re a bit clueless, but they have made great strides in terms of being better about race, for whatever “better about race” may mean to you personally. They’re trying.

-I do think that this decision is racist, or, at best, sympathetic to racists. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this story as described, and no reason to be suspicious of a fictional character.

-This is cowardice, pure and simple. DC doesn’t want a bunch of fat, bigoted, big-mouthed cornballs saying mean things about them.

-Instead, they’d rather bow down and go, “Oh, well, we don’t want to poke that hornet’s nest. Maybe we should back down and not bother to represent people of Arab descent in our flagship comics.”

-They aren’t saying, “Oh, maybe he is a terrorist!”, but they sure are sending the message that, when forced to choose between pissing off a blowhard know-nothing who doesn’t even read their books, and supporting a culture of Americans that has been unjustly and unfairly maligned for years now, including in comic books, they will pick the angry old white dude who’s looking to line his pockets off the back of nothing more than racism and fear.

-”Our comics aren’t here to challenge you or uplift you. They are here to sustain the status quo and deliver bland platitudes about power and responsibility masquerading as knowledge. Be easy, dear reader, the world is fine.”

-If your comics are supposed to be this utopian garbage about the power of a single man fighting against evil, what type of message do you think this sends?

-You don’t bow down to scum, and you don’t bow down to tyrants. You shouldn’t be bowing at all.

-The world’s a big place, and at this point, I’d be fine with DC Comics being left in the dirt.

-Grow a spine, you unbelievable fucking cowards.