There’s been this thing going around the bits of the blogosphere that talk about race and comics called “Chromatic Comics.” It started here, dipped over here, ended up on When Fangirls Attack (which is where I first saw it), and just this week showed up on Fantastic Fangirls. Essentially, established characters in various properties are recast to be a different race or gender. From the outside looking in, the choices appear to be fairly arbitrary. Kanye West as Archangel, for example, or Vanessa Williams as Emma Frost.

To put it bluntly, I didn’t get it, didn’t like it, couldn’t quite put my finger on why, and I’d decided not to say anything about it, barring some private conversations with friends. I felt like a player hater, coming from the position of “this is dumb and a waste of time and borderline offensive and I can’t quite figure out why.”

Earlier today, my buddy Cheryl Lynn proved that she’s smarter than I am when she started talking about it on Twitter. She gathered her thoughts and expanded on them in a post on her blog. It’s must-reading, frankly, and is almost exactly why I have a problem with “Chromatic Comics.” An excerpt:

This whole Chromatic Comics ish irritates me. Y’know, Marvel does have a whole boatload of POC characters. Stuff like that makes it seem like only the white ones are important and deserve focus. Y’know what would be nice? For POC characters to get the same promotion and devotion that white characters get so people don’t have to think of POC actors they’d like in the “important” (white) characters’ roles.

She has several more things to say on the subject, including a beautiful and nuanced breakdown of why Luke Cage has to be black and Frank Castle has to be white. I urge you to go read it. And pardon me if the following is just a rehash of her better piece.

Cheryl makes a good point on the subject of what race actually means in stories. She says, “And just like I’m not just a color, that white kid isn’t just a blank slate. He isn’t the default. And acting like he is the default hurts both him and me.” I’ve often seen it said, and probably said myself, that white is the default. That isn’t true- white is dominant, yes, but not the default. White doesn’t mean “average.” It, like black, is completely insufficient.

Elektra is white. Elektra is native to Greece. Emma Frost is white. Emma Frost is upper class Boston old money. Luke Cage is black, but he’s Harlem black. James Rhodes is black, but he’s South Philly black. Peter Parker is white, but he’s Forest Hills, Queens white. Night Thrasher is black, but he’s upper class New York City black. Steve Rogers isn’t just white. He’s from the LES during the depression.

I’m black, but I’m Warner Robins, Georgia black, where the black folks can be found watching NASCAR, mud bogging, rolling with blue flags out their back pockets, and working on an air force base.

My littlest brother is half-black, half-Egyptian, and has a name that’ll keep him on no-fly lists for his entire life. He’s living with my mom and her husband in New England. He’s going to be a different kind of black than I am. My younger brother, who’s about to turn twenty, is a different kind of black than I am, and we lived in the same house for twelve or so years. That’s three males, raised by the same woman, who aren’t the same kind of black. I can’t replace either of them and they can’t replace me. I’m absolutely certain that that applies to white people, and Chinese people, and whoever.

This race thing isn’t as simple as a skin tone and nappy hair. That’s kiddie pool anthropology. That just reinforces the idea of white as the default, in that it ignores the rich culture that white people hold dear. It reinforces the idea that non-white characters don’t matter, because why would anyone cast Jubilee in a movie? Why would anyone go see a movie about Misty Knight or Luke Cage? Let’s flip Jean Grey and Cyclops to being Indian and Chinese and roll with that! Progress!

But hey, here’s a counterpoint: Spider-Man and X-Men didn’t start this burst of superhero movies in Hollywood. No, Wesley Snipes as Blade did that. Black hero with a black love interest and everything. And before the movies? Blade was lame. All he had going for him before the movie was awesome Gene Colan art and we got two great movies out of him and one awful one. As far as quality of Hollywood superhero flicks go, he’s matched Batman (both 1989 and Begins franchises), Spider-Man, X-Men, and Superman. Blade beats Hulk, considering that those movies were mediocre at best.

Imagine what we could get for Aya. Or Jubilee. Or Dizzy. Or Loop. Or Misty. Or Luke. (Or Hypno Hustler.)

You mean to tell me that nobody would go see an action movie about a black chick with an afro, a robot arm, a sneer and a half-Japanese sword-wielding BFF in 2010? That they’d rather see The Dark Dark Phoenix Saga instead? Get outta here. If we can buy Matt Damon as action star, we can buy a black character as a black character, rather than a palette swap.

Chromatic Comics is tokenism, or maybe lip service. Either way, it’s not powerful. It’s not respectful. It’s not even anti-racist. It ignores what we already have in favor of continuing to worship exclusively white characters as if they were the end-all, be-all of comics. Hey- Marvel and DC already do that. We should do better than flipping a switch or using the paint bucket in Photoshop and calling it a day. We’ve got some diamonds in all this rough. Let’s act like it.

Two superhero flicks are coming out on DVD & Blu-ray in Feb- Planet Hulk and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Planet Hulk hits the first week of February, while Justice League comes out February 23rd.

Pardon the blatant marketing, if you’re looking to buy them on any format, give some thought to pre-ordering them through our Amazon referral links. Amazon doesn’t charge you until the item ships, and if the price drops between now and when the movie ships, you get the lowest price automatically.

Planet Hulk is going for $14.99 on DVD and twenty bucks on Blu-ray. Justice League has a Two-Disc Edition for $14.99 and a Blu-ray for $25.99.

So, yeah, if you’re interested- give them (and us) a pre-order.

–Chad Nevett on the intro
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music
-Review show! We haven’t done one of these in a while.
-Joe Casey and Ardian Syaf’s Superman/Batman #68
-Ed Brubaker and Luke Ross’s Captain America #602 & Sean McKeever and David Baldeon’s Nomad backup
-Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Amanda Conner’s Power Girl #8
-Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian #1
-Sholly Fisch, Robert Pope, and Scott McRae’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold #13
-Art Baltazar and Franco’s Tiny Titans #24
-And out!

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I was interested in Graeme McMillan’s review of Human Target.  He comes to the conclusion that pretty much everyone else I’ve talked to did; it’s an okay show, but it’s nothing even remotely like the comic book.  Although the commenters on io9 seemed to take it pretty well, I’m wondering how fans who are more invested in the comic would take it.

I wonder this for two reasons:

1.  It’s really not an okay show.  It’s a drinking game kind of show.  One drink for every time Chance pauses in the middle of an action sequence to make a big production of being the coolest guy on earth.  One drink for every time Chance’s boss is humiliated.  One drink for every time Guerrero looks at someone with his steely eyes and they back down for no reason because he is just.  That.  Dangerous.  It’s only a show you watch if nothing, nothing at all, else is on and you’re too tired to focus on anything else.

2.  Most of the time I am the one who gets angry when this kind of thing happens, and now someone else will be angry instead.  Once such a large amount of you gets invested in comics, it’s nice to sit on the sidelines with popcorn and watch the drama unfold.

Welcome to this week’s edition of This Week in Agents of Atlas. We have a lot of Agents of Atlas this time around, so let’s get to the Agents of Atlas!

(Not shown: the Agents of Atlas backup story in Incredible Hercules)

Amazing Spider-Man #618
Dan Slott and Marcos Martin

Authority: The Lost Year #5
Grant Morrison, Keith Giffen and Jonathan Wayshak

Read the rest of this entry »

Oh hey, Dwayne McDuffie posted 45 seconds of the upcoming Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths on his site!

Originally, I was going to write up a silly post comparing Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno to the Thor vs. Superman fight from JLA/Avengers, but halfway into that write-up it hit me how it was too stupid, even for me. With that botched, I feel the need to post something.

Many of you know of Something Awful and their Photoshop Phridays. Recently, they did a two-parter with the theme being “Movies + Video Game Names”. The concept is taking a movie poster/DVD cover/whatever and altering it so that the title is that of an existing videogame. For instance, changing the title of Footloose to Dance Dance Revolution or changing Hell Comes to Frogtown to Battletoads. It’s simple and lacks excessive Photoshop skill (or Paint Shop Pro skill in my case), but leads to some very funny and creative images. Here’s part one and part two.

A couple of my entries made it in, which rocks, but in the end I had way too much fun making these and couldn’t stop myself. Here’s a gallery of what I’ve done to waste my time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Marvel recently released the Deadpool variant cover to Siege #3, the one that’s tied to their promotion involving Blackest Night covers. Here it is:

Never change, Marvel.

I did a thing on Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian at Comics Alliance.

It’s a brief over on storytelling in Grant Morrison books. An excerpt:

Reality and fiction feed off of each other in many of Morrison’s works, existing in a state where one is entirely dependent upon the other. Sometimes, they two realities are one and the same. Sometimes, the lines between the two of them are just a little blurred. “Joe the Barbarian” falls firmly into that latter group. Joe himself says that he is a stereotype, just like the bullies who torture him at his father’s gravesite. On at least some level, he’s aware of the fact that everything is a story.

If you didn’t buy Joe the Barbarian this week… you made a mistake. It was only a dollar. Go back to your comic shop and pick it up.

Does anyone remember a certain Bat story that came out a while ago?

Batman is out at a strangely casual event with the Justice League.  It’s something between a company party and a training retreat.  They make their way through various scenarios in an out-of-the-way place, and everythings going fine at first.

Then things start getting strange.  Even though an event should have ended, it keeps going on and on, the conclusion retreating farther and farther the closer he gets.  A town that should be in one place is in another, and is completely deserted.  One moment it’s day, the next it’s night.

At first Batman thinks that it’s the work of a supervillain.  The rest of the Justice League doesn’t agree, however, and insists that everything is normal.  Batman begins to suspect his friends are either deliberately testing him, or under some sinister, greater power.

Then it all becomes clear.  None of it is real.  He’s dreaming, trapped in his own paranoid mind, and he has to wake up.

Then I wake up.  (Bam!  Did you see that twist ending?  I sure didn’t.)  Yes, I twisted it all up on you (though the above story probably was published sometime back in the sixties), meta-style.  I know, there isn’t anything interesting about listening to someone else’s dreams.

There is, however, something interesting about listening to someone’s inadequacies.  The reason the setting kept changing randomly was my brain being unable to hold onto the narrative.  Everything that happened was obviously a dream.  It’s just that I didn’t know it was a dream.  Batman did.

Apparently, there is a Batman inside my brain.  And he’s smarter than I am. 

My only hope now is to eat, drink, and laze myself flabby so that he decides I’m inadequate and doesn’t try to take over my mind and force me to fight crime in my sleep.