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.

vs

Flip it horizontally, and what do you have…?

Tatt’ed Man is so hoooooooooood!

Obviously, the winner, as previously suggested on this site, should be Ted Kord, who I am assuming is not in the picture in order to preserve the element of surprise.

But if it ends up being Alfred?  In that uniform?  It’s all been worth 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?

A short while ago, I spent time brainstorming, trying any idea for a superhero or superhero team that I could think of.  I came up with octogenarians and toddlers, humans, animals, plants, outsiders and pageant winners, religious devotees and atheists, geniuses and halfwits.  I think I got a good cross-section of humanity, but there was one characteristic that all of the characters had; a smart mouth.

It occurs to me that one of the most common element in superhero comics is humor.  Whether it’s the grinding cynical humor of The Boys, the quips that seem to follow Gail Simone’s characters wherever they go, the screwball humor of the Booster Gold and Ted Kord, the flat-out parody of The Tick, or the cutesy silliness of the Tiny Titans, almost every book has it.

Read the rest of this entry »

(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.

hermanos already left for the east coast yesterday. I’m about to get some sleep before trekking into New York tomorrow. If for some crazed reason you actually recognize me, feel free to say hi. Unless I’m at the urinal. Then it’s just weird.

Hopefully enough interesting stuff will happen that I’ll have a nice write-up for when I’m done. In the meantime, here are some random thoughts on things:

– Like with every year, I take a week off from work to go to Comic Con. That way I get a day off to prepare, as well as three days after the con to relax. This is especially a good thing because where I work, Barnes & Noble, we’re set to have a book signing by Kate Gosselin (of Jon & Kate Plus 8 fame). It was set to be on Tuesday, but just got postponed a day. Not only am I escaping the horrors of having to deal with that book signing, but I’m also escaping a day of angry people wondering where the hell Kate Gosselin is. Phew.

– Speaking of work, we’ve started playing the latest Springsteen album. There’s this song called Outlaw Pete and I swear I can’t listen to it without hearing Kiss’ I Was Made for Loving You. One trip to Google and it appears like the internet agrees with me. Knew I wasn’t crazy.

– How great is the cliffhanger retcon reveal in Secret Warriors #1? You know what rules? Rereading What If the Punisher Became an Agent of SHIELD. Bendis has inadvertently made that comic even more awesome.

– Even though he won’t be around, hermanos will still have his Black History posts up day by day.

– Click the image to see how Final Crisis #7 really should have ended.

– I haven’t played around with MUGEN for years, but damn if this isn’t well done.

Back in a couple of days. Be good to each other.