super magic black origin freshly out of dopeness
created: How come people keep saying that Heroes for Hire is a bite of Birds of Prey? The gimmick is completely different, the cast rotates instead of having a core of girl power… I don’t get it, honest I don’t. But whatever whatever, here’s some stuff what I wrote:

–some breakdowns of some mutants from some movie at Moviefone

–a quick look at Marvel’s Heroes for Hire

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definitely out of dopeness, sketch another opus
consumed: How funky is Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid? It got snubbed hard at the Grammys, but that’s life, I figure. Short post today, ’cause things are blowing up.

-via Angie Wang comes a fascinating game. Here’s what she said about it when she linked it: “An affecting wordless game where your anthropomorphizing tendencies towards inanimate objects will reward you” and here’s the link: http://www.the-end-of-us.com. I liked this a lot. Play the game all the way through (it’s as long as a song) before scrolling down to read about it.

–This Jeff Yang piece about how multiracialism is redefining Asian identity is pretty interesting. I wonder if there’s a parallel in the evolution of black racial identity? Like, at some point, your great great great grandparents are straight up African or Haitian or whatever American, and then by it gets down to you, you’re just sorta… black american. That doesn’t mean that you’re not Nigerian or Somalian or whatever, but that you have more to pull from than just one mother culture. Does that make sense? It’s not a diluting so much as it is an evolution and adaptation. I haven’t given this the time to percolate that it deserves, but Yang’s piece brought up a lot of really interesting questions I need to answer for myself.

-It also made me think about fusion cuisine, which I generally think of as being wack but is almost definitely something that you’ll see more of when you hit the family reunion bbq and there’s all types of sushi and collards in casserole dishes and fish, hot dogs, burgers, and hog maws on the grill.

-There’d still be just kool-aid and lemonade in the jugs, though. Everybody loves kool-aid and lemonade.

-Guess who’s hungry right now.

-I’m feeling like Ghostface in “Shakey Dog”. “Fried plantains and rice, big round onions on a T-bone steak, my stomach growling, yo, I want some.”

-More colored commentary, this time courtesy of C-Rayz Walz and The Angel & The Preacher:

-via Ron Wimberly comes a gang of super dope James Bond novel covers. Diamonds Are Forever is great and Octopussy is creepy. It’s slightly nsfw on the sidebar (pulp covers got pretty rowdy), but you can’t see nothing so tell your boss to get deez nutz if he tries to say something.

-JM Ken Niimura, artist of the undeniably dope I Kill Giants, has a webcomic called 514H. I dig it–a little funny, good panels, nice colors. What’s up with not having an RSS feed, though?

-More Jog on Ditko.

-I dig this belt from The Hundreds, but only in black. They’ve got a store in SF. I might pop by and see about picking it up. I went from having regular belts as kids, with loops and holes you had to punch out, to woven belts in high school, and now all I rock are these types. I thought they were called golf belts, but whatever.

–Joáo Lemos is an ill artist. He did the only story I dug in that Wolverine 1000 joint Marvel put out, a collabo with Sarah Cross. I hope this guy gets more and more high profile work.

–People recreating old photos. I think this is good staging + Photoshop? Regardless, this is a fantastic project. I don’t think I can even pick a favorite, though the ones that span like thirty years are pretty awesome.

-The Grammys were a joke when it came to rap. They picked the laziest, safest rap albums to award. Eminem’s Recovery winning over The Roots’s How I Got Over is jokes.

-ANYway, there’s also Record of the Year awards, which prompted this:

-Four out of five songs nominated for Record of the Year were rap joints. Em and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie” (straight), Bobby Ray and Bruno Mars’s “Nothin’ On You” (good), Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You” (aight, but y’all ran that one into the ground instantly), and Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind” (one of Jay’s best, I guess). The fifth song is Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now.” Now, silly me, I figured we’d get a rap win.

-Four rappers. One country group named after nostalgia for back when nigras knew their place won.

-Really though? That’s pretty doggone suspect.

-The next Damon Albarn Appreciation Society post might be a little mean. A preview:

-Speaking of mean… Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver’s SHIELD would be an ill comic if it were about something other than how unbelievably awesome white dudes have been throughout history. I mean, dang, can’t I at least get an Arab mathematician or Chinese dude as an actual character? Only white guys did anything of substance over the past however many thousand years and next few hundred years? I feel like I’m asking for one rib over here.

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knock off your set, BROOKLYN we keep ’em open
David: Hellblazer 276, Thunderbolts 153
Esther: Yes: Superman/Batman 81, Tiny Titans 37
Perhaps, if Damian is really funny: Supergirl 61
Possibly, if it looks decent: Young Justice 1, although it’s stupid that they made Robin Dick and not Tim. Tim’s been around for twenty-two years! That’s at least twice as long as the show’s target audience has been alive. Come on, people!
Gavin: Booster Gold 41, Green Lantern Corps 57, Green Lantern 62, Darkwing Duck 9, Amazing Spider-Man 654.1, Avengers Academy 9, Deadpool MAX 5, Hulk 30, S.H.I.E.L.D. 6, Thunderbolts 153, Uncanny X-Force 5

I spend a lot of time thinking about race. It happens both on the “being black in America consists in large part of being constantly reminded you are black in America” level and on the “how does the portrayal of race alter the quality of this bit of pop culture” level. If you live in America, it’s inescapable, isn’t it? You have to have some thoughts on the subject.

The vogue thing for a while was “Race is a social construct,” which really just translates to “I took a class in college once and learned to parrot pointless statements.” Another good one is “I don’t see race,” which is another way of saying, “I don’t think I’m racist, but I also don’t want to spend any time investigating this uncomfortable subject, so let me just dodge this and leave me alone, okay?”

Words are powerful. They help us define our selves and our limits, and can be used for good or evil. How you talk about what you’re talking about matters a great deal. In high school, I made the decision to wipe the phrase “African-American” from my vocabulary. It’s clunky and ugly, and growing up, I was taught to be black and proud. You can roll with it or get rolled over.

I struggled with “nigger” for a fair few years. Is it offensive, am I okay with that, is it disrespectful to my elders, what about rap music, how would C Delores Tucker feel about it, is it a political choice… in the end, I decided that saying “the n-word” is something I’m not even remotely interested in doing. Euphemisms, beating around the bush, all of that isn’t for me. If I’m gonna say nigger, I’m just gonna man up and say it. And so I did. And do. Death to euphemisms. Keep it honest.

There are a couple phrases I do not, and have rarely ever, used when writing about race, black people, and comical books. “Minority” and “People of color.” I think the last time I used “of color” was 2006. My problem with both of those phrases is how they set up white as the default, and then any other race as the other. I get how that can be valuable in politics or whatever, but for me personally? I’m not down. Why? Because I don’t like black being defined as being in opposition to someone else. I stand on my own, and my people do, too. I’m not not-white. I’m black. That’s something else entirely.

So, I made the conscious decision to scrub them from my vocabulary. That’s not how I want to think about these things. And I am better for it, both personally and academically, for lack of a better way to say “bloggily.”

Black History Month 2011 kicks off Tuesday. I’m learning a lot about the connection of blacks to comics and also about where I, as a reader, stand with regards to blacks and comics.

Stay tuned.

Still thinking about February and Black History Month. Formulating a plan of attack, striking things from lists, and catching up on things I missed.

Anyway, my homegirl Cheryl made a brief return to comics blogging with a trio of posts over the last week or so. There’s ten things she wants out of DC in 2011, some stuff she wants from Marvel and DC in other media, and how DC is kind of a lost cause when it comes to getting books that aren’t lily white.

She writes a lot, and I agree with most of it. Together, you have sort of a general list of things that Marvel and DC aren’t doing that they should, and could, be doing to push comics and their characters harder. The point about diversity being a lost cause at DC stings, but it’s true. Marvel’s a little better, mainly due to having created a decent group of black characters in the ’70s and then again in the ’90s, but who do they have that can support a book on their own? Not Cage, not Storm, not Night Thrasher… Black Panther has a solo book, but how absolutely awful has that series been for the past couple years? Right now, he’s batting clean-up in someone else’s book. Six months from now? Who knows? Maybe DC will get Aqualad off the ground, but I’m not sure the market wants it.

I wanted to start this post about race and comics with this:

because, cripes, that’s Hypno Hustler, hands down my favorite obscure comics character and Mark Waid and Paul Azaceta brought him back. It’s also a funny macro for black characters in comics. Do you get it? Next would be this:

Black Batman: Bruce Wayne won’t franchise in urban markets
Black Panther: Stuck in dumb, unforgiveably boring comics
The Boondocks: Gone forever
Brother Voodoo: Brother Who?
Chalky White: Not given nearly enough screen-time, inexplicable fascination with not building bookcases
Garterbelt: Drawn with stereotypically huge lips, pedo priest
Menace: Tragic Mulatto, single mother
Lebron James: Worse than Hitler
Luke Cage: Would rather hang out at prison than with his White Wife and Mixed Baby
Power Man: Does Dominican count as black?
Robin: Still not black
Storm: smh
Turk: Needs to stop snitching
War Machine: Who cares?

But, the thought of pretending like I care that Brother Voodoo bit it in some comic I didn’t read gives me a migraine and I’m all out of jokes. Instead, though, I’m going to do this:

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was a hero to most
I can’t get into Will Eisner’s The Spirit. I’ve tried a fistful of times. I bought a trade, thinking that putting money down would force me to plow through it. It didn’t. I can’t get past Ebony White. He’s a roadblock that I can’t get around.

I get the excuses and explanations. It was the humor of the time, Eisner didn’t know any better, he didn’t really mean it, Ebony was actually helpful, he was heroic in his own way, and a credit to his race. Blah blah blah. Eisner is a legend, and you don’t really want to tar his past with accusations of racism, do you? The Spirit is a classic, a titan in the medium! It’s hugely influential, so surely you can let this minor issue pass? It’s not really racism, is it?

But if it talks like a duck and looks like a pickaninny and drives Miss Daisy? Then it’s a slap in the face, and who consents to being slapped?

The issue of Ebony White is minimized in favor of the ongoing stature of The Spirit. It’s obviously an issue, since the two most recent relaunches of The Spirit have adjusted the character to be more palatable. Miller didn’t even put him in the movie, presumably because he knew that Ebony was a hard sell. Brian Azzarello turned her into a sassy black girl for the First Wave books. (Better “Nuh-uh nigga I ain’t going in there you better ask somebody else to do that nuh-UH” than “Yessuh boss whateva you say, boss.” That’s progress, innit?) But Ebony, the character, is minimized in favor of The Spirit, the classic. Don’t let racism ruin this great thing.

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puffin newports ’cause life’s a bitch, and it’s too short

You can see maximization in the cases of OJ Simpson and Mike Vick. You’d think those two guys were the second and third coming of Charles Manson the way the news and society keeps on about them. Their crimes are maximized to the point where Tucker Carlson can say on tv that Vick should’ve been executed for his crimes. America: where you do the crime and do the time, or get acquitted, and then you keep doing the time because you’re a filthy, filthy convict.

Unless you’re Johannes Mehserle, who got to shoot an unarmed father in the back, get sentenced in November, be eligible for release two months later, and be hailed as a hero and victim of… something.

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everything is everything, what is meant to be will be

When I first started writing about race and comics, I feel like I focused on characters. I wanted to celebrate these characters I’d grown up enjoying or learned to enjoy as an adult. “Look! We exist! And we’re not awful!” Time went on and I started to point out the problems. This kind of tone deaf, “this is how black people act in movies, not in real life” sort of thing. I later learned to focus on context. Here is why this bit is good, here is how it relates to real life. Finding the way verisimilitude makes stories better. This year, I tried to focus more on the people creating the comics.

Next year is another Black History Month. Right now, I feel like if I approach any of it from the position of black characters in mainstream comics, I’ll be making a huge mistake. Storm, Black Panther, and Luke Cage can be a useful lens for thoughts about race and comics at times, but by and large? I don’t care any more. What matters are the people who make the books, not these dusty old trademarks.

The problem with superheroes and black folks is that superhero comics used to be children’s comics. The in-text morals and structure are still leagues behind everything else. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a military family, but “heroes don’t kill” is an absurd positon to have and borderline insulting. Plenty of heroes kill. Some of our favorite Americans have killed dozens of people. But, the childlike morality stuck around, so we’re stuck with it. A side effect is that characters have to be very easy to understand.

Superhero comics don’t do nuance well. They do twenty-two pages of fights, yelling, and basic romantic drama well, but subtlety? Nah. And if you expect to be represented as a person, you’re going to need a certain degree of subtlety.

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the violence in me reflects the violence that’s around me

It’s not all strange fruit and Al Sharpton in cape comics. Fred Van Lente and Mahmud Asrar’s Shadowland: Power Man was a breath of fresh air, and it’s actually kind of sad that that’s true. Regardless, Van Lente and Asrar knocked the book out of the park, cleverly working in socioeconomic and racial issues that enhanced the story, rather than distracted from the tale. They treated certain things as a given and created something worth reading.

The more I think about it, the more that Bendis’s Cage strikes me as an amalgamation of various black dudes in movies. It’s like an impersonation. A good one, but just off enough to be noticeable. He takes stands that don’t make sense, is bad with money, and is seemingly written as a Strong Black Man. You know how writers do that, yeah? Like there’s a checklist? Stands by his crew, loves his family, would die for his kids, on and on and on.

Jeff Parker’s work on Thunderbolts consistently impresses me, though. Like Van Lente and Power Man, he writes Cage in a way that clicks for me. When he busts out the black dudeisms like “What’s my name?” it’s not just an empty boast or black braggadocio. There’s a point to it. The bluesman in the Shadowland tie-ins was on point, too, and so was the way Cage deferred to him. It rings true in a way that Cage refusing Captain America’s money doesn’t. It’s about Cage, but it’s bigger than him, too.

These should be the rule, not the exception, but it is what it is.

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take sun people, put ’em in atlanta snow

Chris Sims wrote an essay a few months back he called “The Racial Politics of Regressive Storytelling”. To sum it up, and I hope I’m not doing him a disservice by paraphrasing his argument, DC’s thirst for nostalgia has had the unintended side effect of scrubbing some of the non-white characters out of their universe. I think Sims has a point in there, but I don’t know that I agree with the why.

I don’t think that DC is working of nostalgia at all, especially not for the Silver Age. The Silver Age, running from the ’50s up to the early ’70s at the latest, was a time when superhero comics turned soft and transient. Characters changed shape, gimmick, and styles issue to issue. The Silver Age is generally viewed online as being wacky and out-there, super weird and goofy. It isn’t known for Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, and Ray Palmer so much as for that time Superman had an ant head and Jimmy Olsen married a gorilla. Jordan, Allen, and Palmer date from those times, yes, but they aren’t emblematic of those times.

If you skip across the street to Marvel, there’s an interesting parallel. Over the past ten years, several characters from the ’70s have made a return. They haven’t replaced anyone, but Luke Cage, Misty Knight, Werewolf by Night, Moon Knight, Spider-Woman, Nova, Iron Fist, Ghost Rider, Shang-Chi, and even Howard the Duck have made returns, no matter how completely unmarketable they may be. Does that count as nostalgia for the ’70s?

I don’t think that either situation counts as nostalgia. There is certainly someone’s fond memories of a character involved in the process, but nostalgia is a yearning for, and sometimes emulation of, the past. Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown is a love letter to blaxploitation films. The casting of Pam Grier, the soundtrack, and all the overt references to blaxploitation is proof positive.

If you look at Bendis’s Cage or Geoff Johns’s Hal Jordan, and I mean really look at them, you’d see how they aren’t really fueled by nostalgia at all. The stories aren’t even remotely the same. They star the same characters, sure, but casting Pam Grier alone does not a blaxploitation movie make. Johns’s Green Lantern is deadly serious and never boring. The goofy ring structures, the giant boxing gloves and baseball bats, have largely given way to airplanes and detailed rifles. It’s realistic, rather than whimsical. His Flash comes a little closer to emulating the Silver Age style, but even then, he’s taking one part of the past (the Flash Facts/science) and applying it to something new (giving us stories that let Francis Manapul show us how cool superspeed is). The characters are old. The stories aren’t.

I haven’t read the recent stories with Ray Palmer and Hawkman, but I imagine that those are the same. Old characters, new stories. I know Hawkman in Brightest Day is caught up in some kind of insane recap/readjustment of his history, like Grant Morrison’s “Every Batman story is true” mandate. That doesn’t sound like nostalgia to me. It sounds like cape comics. It sounds like entropy. And with the way the comic industry is right now, it’s inevitable.

Cape comics are a closed system at this point. They cannot grow. This means that the only place left to go with these characters is to flip them. We’re in the remix era of superheroes, and we have been for years, probably ever since Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. Morrison took every crappy old X-Men concept, from sentinels to the Phoenix to Magneto to the New Mutants, and made it brand new. Superheroes have to take a page from William S Burroughs and create cut-up comics. Take this bit of history, match it with the other bit, and make something new. The fanbase is fiercely conservative and only want known quantities.

Disagree? Look at Paul Cornell’s Action Comics, Morrison’s Batman, Johns’s Green Lantern, Bendis’s Avengers empire (especially Prime and whichever one JRjr was drawing), Brubaker’s Captain America, Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, and Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men. All of those are pulling ideas that are thirty, forty, sixty years old into the modern day and telling new stories with them. Taking the past and remixing it, updating it for a new era.

Cut-up Comics! The cover of New Gods 1 with “Kirby Is Here!” scratched out and “DJ Premier Is On The Wheels of Steel!” written in. Spider-Man twisted and turned through a new lens! Watch as the past is reinvented by way of public execution on the comics page!

This is something that only cape comics can do. If you take Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and try it, do you know what you get? Re-hash. It’s too small, too new, for that to work. Superheroes, though, are perfect for it. It’s the only way they’ll survive. Consumers don’t want new heroes. The market has proven its hostility to books that don’t fit within a certain shape. Fine–play with what sits inside that shape. Four walls can be a prison or a lab. Choose one.

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y’all probably done forgot about her. but i ain’t gonna ever forget.

Remember earlier this year when the new Aqualad was announced and half the online commentary was, “Oh, so now we get BLACK Aqualad? Blaqualad?” and the other half was “Oh, so he’s AFRAID OF WATER, huh, he CAN’T SWIM? Is that how it is?”

Yeah. I see you. Do better. Be better.

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a colored life still ain’t worth but a few ducats

Right now is still the best time to be black in cape comics. Cage is headlining a couple of books, Black Panther keeps getting tries at bat, Steel is kicking off and probably dying in an event next year, DC’s new Aqualad seems cool (he was dope on the show and pretty straight in the comics), Black Panther’s little sister has her own miniseries… things don’t suck. They could be better, though.

I got a letter from a third-tier company’s PR rep a few months back. Not a personal one, just your usual PR crap. It mentioned that there had been criticism online about there not being enough “diverse characters,” so they were launching a series starring a black guy.

Point: Cool, someone’s trying to listen to what people are saying.
Counter-point: Man, it’s all just business in the end, isn’t it?

Here’s the bio of the only black American Girl, Addy Walker, created in 1993:

The novels were written by Connie Porter, and she ended up doing eleven of them over the course of ten years. And I get it, I really do–if you want to show that a character that has courage and the ability to overcome circumstances, an escaped slave is pretty good.

I just can’t imagine ever wanting to buy something like this for anyone’s daughter. It’s gross, it’s another reminder that being black in America sucks. It’s like the news pieces that told me I’d be more likely to be dead or in jail by twenty-five than to make something of myself, that rap music was poisoning my little colored brain, or that I’d be a bad person because I came from a broken home. It’s the same thing that made me a credit to my race as a child because I was smart, rather than smart, period.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and Ron Wimberly hit the nail on the head when he said, “Yeah, it’s kinda bugged. but really, what’s new?”

Listen to this for the next couple minutes while you read this post. It’s Gil Scott-Heron’s “On Coming From A Broken Home Part 1,” and it is deeply relevant.

David Wolkin is a friend of mine, and we had a conversation a while back about the portrayal of Jews in cape comics. He made a very strong point that it tends to revolve around shame and guilt and the Holocaust, often at the expense of any other possible subject matter. Gotham Central has a Jewish guy who usually appears just to talk about kosher donuts and persecution, rather than, say, anything else.

It’s similar to blacks in cape comics, where they are either from the hood, pretending to be from the hood, inexplicably spending time in the hood, or, in the case of Storm, who I like less and less on a daily basis because her history is disgusting, actively separated from and placed above the hood, because colored folks, am I right, fellas?

It’s all about narrative. It’s storytelling. Whether through laziness or malicious intent, this is what we get from pop culture and the media. Jewish characters get to come to terms with the Holocaust or their own Jewishness. Black characters get to talk about how there’s no justice, just us (a phrase that, if I ever had to say it aloud, would make me blow my brains out). It’s the same garbage, day in, day out. “Remember this horrible thing your people have gone through? Well, as far as we’re concerned, it’s the only fuel that matters to our storytelling engines. Don’t worry, we won’t let you forget or ever progress past it.”

Another example? “Look at how weird this thing from Japan is!” Chip Kidd, author of Bat-Manga, indulged in it when he touched up translations in the book to “We are certainly not trying to make fun of the Japanese grasp of English, but at the same time, here and there we wanted to preserve its undeniable charm.” That’s the narrative about Japan: It’s cool and different and weird and charming. Which is patronizing and ignorant.

Wolkin is doing this thing he’s called 8 Days of Wolkin and one of his posts is about a recent issue of Ragman. Stick with it all the way through, because it flashes into something else partway through. It’s good, and he talks about the stories we tell ourselves, or allow ourselves to be told, in the post. He’s also got a killer line about the intro to All-Star Jewish Superman.

This is the kind of thing I think that it’s important to be cognizant, and wary, of when consuming culture. It’s always deeper than what’s on the TV or in comics. A lot of cape comics are unbelievably basic and unwilling to grow up, and this is the sort of pap we’re fed nine times out of ten.

Put shorter: there are more stories to be told, so stop telling these tired old tales.

One of those other stories can be found in Ann Nocenti’s “Goudou Goudou” series on HiLoBrow. She’s been teaching film in Haiti for a few years, and now, after the quake, she’s still at it. It’s a nice counterpoint to the almost pornographic attention to the death and destruction that we got shortly after the quake and the deafening silence we’ve had since.

“Goudou Goudou” isn’t about how awful life is in Haiti right now. It’s about the things her film class has seen, her own reactions to them, and the people of Haiti that she’s met. It’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s life through their open window, rather than digging through their trash for goodies. There are three out–one, two, three–and they’re all good. They roll out weekly, and you can grab the RSS for just her posts here.

I’ve talked before about how Nocenti is one of the most interesting comics writers ever, mainly here and here. I still think she beats the pants off all but maybe two or three writers working today. But at the same time, it’s really nice to see that she’s a good journalist, or just plain writer, really.

Long story short, screw Storm and be careful what you put into your head. Don’t believe the hype.

Verisimilitude is what makes stories work. It’s a measure of how true the story is and how closely it sticks to believability. Do characters speak, behave, and dress as they should? It’s a tough thing to nail and even tougher to describe. Verisimilitude requires a lot of intangibles to get right, the sort of things that you can only really judge via gut reactions. One man’s dead-on is another man’s completely wrong.

Creating believable white characters is relatively easy. White’s the default ethnicity for Americans, and we’re positively drowning in white culture, for whatever definition of white culture you choose to subscribe to, so you don’t need a lot of reference. Non-white characters, or white European characters, are something exceptional. They’re black or Mexican or Japanese or Scottish characters, rather than just characters. You have to put some sauce on them to get them right.

The black experience is one of those things that exists, but is different for every single person. It’s just real life–some things are common, other things are rare, and the full experience is something unique. The key to verisimilitude is capturing those common aspects so that people reading it can grab onto them. They provide a touchstone, or something to relate to. The more of the story that is true for you, the more of it that you’re willing to buy into. It’s a con. You get someone to believe one thing and they’re much more likely to believe the next thing you tell them.

Chris Claremont’s method was to layer on the shtick and hope for the best. It worked well enough at the time, but it comes off corny now. Attempts to make Luke Cage a believable black character resulted in what feels like parody today. If you look closely at your non-white character of choice, you can probably see these tics or traits clear as day. They’re an attempt to lend verisimilitude.

What I liked about Fred Van Lente and Mahmud Asrar’s Shadowland: Power Man 2 is that it’s one of the few cape comics in ages that actually felt like it reflected the black experience. It’s not corny, it’s not ironic, and it’s not self-conscious. It just feels natural. The next closest candidate would be Jeff Parker and Kev Walker’s Thunderbolts, but Power Man surpasses even that. It’s all due to verisimilitude.

It’s the little things. It’s the way Victor’s mom uses his whole name when she gets mad at him. A quick survey of my friends suggests that this happens in black and latino houses, but not so much in white ones. Or the way the white kids talk about how down they are because they listen to black music, clearly one beer and half a blunt away from hitting their black friends with a “my nigga” like it’s all good. It’s how the dialogue has subtle shifts away from the Queen’s English without dropping into a white impression of jivetalk.

Victor spends the entire issue calling Luke Cage “Carl,” a reference to “Carl Lucas,” his government name. It’s the sort of thing that’s just a diss in and of itself–he’s calling Cage out of his name as a show of disrespect. More than anything else, it puts me in mind of Cam’Ron’s 50 Cent diss “Curtis”, where he turned 50’s real name into a sing-songy diss. It’s both basic disrespect and a reference to the fact that Victor knows who Cage is and doesn’t buy into his hype.

Interracial dating is touchy, too. Every young black male, at least the ones where I’m from, knows to tiptoe around white girls, just in case. There’s nothing that people like better than a chance to paint a black dude as a victimizer of white virginity (see also: Kanye West/Taylor Swift and the out of proportion reaction), and you don’t want to get caught slipping. On the black side of things, a black guy with a white girl is a sell-out. Strong black men (there’s about eight, total) need to stick by their sisters, blah blah blah.

So yeah, when Victor is airing out Cage for leaving the hood and deserting his people, he’s definitely going to get at Cage for marrying a white girl. And yep, Cage is definitely gonna be extremely pissed, because I guarantee almost every black girl he knows (with the exception of Storm) has been giving him the side-eye. That kind of nagging is senseless, but it happens, and people cope. Some people laugh it off. Others get up in your face and dare you to say some ☠☠☠☠ about their wife. Victor’s apology even rings true–it’s an unfair accusation, rooted in centuries old brainwashing, and everyone knows it. But, we still do it.

It is what it is.

There are other parts that rang true, too. A distrust of altruism and a trust of money. The only people who’ll work for you for free is family, and they’ll only do it under duress. But if you put money in someone’s pocket? That’s a contract. The emphasis on staying where you’re from as an indicator of your realness. Commanche’s implication that getting clean money is less than making brown paper bag money. Most especially, though, is the way that Victor can’t escape his dad’s shadow. He’s going to end up paying for his father’s sins even as he’s busy atoning for something he said to his father by wrapping himself up in his father’s past. He’s stuck in his orbit and he really can’t escape it.

I like that Van Lente is actually using Cage’s past beyond someone talking about how he did time. My main man DW Griffith is still MIA, but Shades & Commanche make an appearance, amongst several other old Cage villains of varying levels of competence. Cage’s past actually has a direct connection to the current story, but not to the point where you have to have read all of his old appearances (though marvel makes it easy on you). I like how it implicitly sets up a road less traveled dichotomy between Cage and Victor’s father. If Cage had chosen differently or stayed with his gang, things could have been very different.

I really enjoyed that Van Lente and Asrar brought back a bunch of Cage’s old villains. They look silly, and they’re treated like jokes, but not like blaxploitation jokes. Ha ha afros and platform shoes! Cage and his comic tend to get summarized as “Where’s my money, honey?” over and over again, which is both a disservice to the character and needlessly reductive. Jokes about how blaxploitation is soooo wacky are trite.

But really, it’s the verisimilitude that did it. I know the FBB4l! axis found it to be a very strong book, and that includes a black guy from the south, a different black guy from New York, a white guy from Kansas, and a Dominican dude from Queens. It isn’t a black book in that it’s constantly screaming at you about how black it is and look at this this is like The Wire, this is the hood, man. No, Power Man builds a world around Victor Alvarez that is just intensely believable. I want more like this.

Black people! Comics! It’s been a while, but I’m back for my crown.

There’s tendency in comics to write pretty generic black guys. You occasionally get the Samuel L Jackson Fight the Power Angry Black Fella types, but more often than not, you’re looking at a slightly watered down version of that same type. Sanitized Shaft. Diet Dolemite. Toothless Tommy Gibbs. Put Bishop (pre-mega murder spree), most depictions of John Stewart, Luke Cage, Black Lightning, Mr. Terrific, and Steel in a room together. First, note their hair. Second, note their personalities. They’re all kind of really moral, upstanding human beings… but with an edge. Maybe they used to be mad at the man. Maybe they sometimes have flashy nods to whatever standard of blackness they were born into. Who knows, who cares, but a bunch of black dudes with basically the same moral compass is boring.

(Fully half of black women in cape comix, excepting Storm who has been kept in safety away from all things black up until recently, tend to pop into the snakecharming neck, nuh uh I know that chick didn’t just do what I just saw her do, tell me I didn’t just see that, super ghitto around the way girl stereotype a little too easily. The other half of black women in comics is Vixen, who is like Animal Man, but stuck in boring stories.)

There are no rules for writing black people in comics, and anyone who’d tell you otherwise is someone not worth listening to. In my family alone is a vast range of characters, some less than positive and some exemplary. Everything counts, everything is true. The thing is, sometimes people trip into pitfalls when writing black people, and black guys in particular. You could easily make a list of mis-steps.

One is slipping in slang. Slang is an intensely regional thing with several outside factors. I don’t talk like people from New York talk, but we do share some slang because of shared history or culture. Have you ever seen somebody write “crunked?” I can almost guarantee that person isn’t from the south, because “crunk” is its own past tense. You didn’t get crunked last night, you got crunk. Slang shifts and warps depending on where you are. You wouldn’t catch me dead saying “hella,” but I can’t quite scrub “might could” or “one more ‘gin” from my vocabulary. You seriously can’t just urbandictionary this stuff and expect to get it right.

Another way is by showing how ROUGH and TOUGH these guys are by throwing in some of that old “urban flavor.” Since they were raised on the streets they’re a little harder than some milquetoast whiteboy like Spider-Man! So they’ll slang it up, call somebody a @#$&()&, and then fist bump another guy right before hitting a villain with a yo mama joke or something. And sure, there’s that thing black people do where they nod at each other on the street (don’t front like you haven’t seen it and/or don’t do it on occasion) which makes our white friends ask “Do you know that guy?” in a hushed whisper. I can see how that’d cultivate this crazy idea that there’s a quiet coalition of people with a thug just waiting to jump out of their skin. But (wait for it) not everybody is from the cold, hard streets. Some folks are from the suburbs. Some folks are country.

The biggest offender in my mind, though, is something that probably got widespread appeal back during the blaxploitation era, resurrected by Snoopy Doggy Dogg, and then it caught fire and died when Destiny’s Child dropped a single. I’m sure you know it–some variant of a guy going “SAY MY NAME!” It’s raw dog alpha male braggadocio, a way of humiliating someone by forcing them to acknowledge the fact that you’re better than them. If you’ve ever played Madden NFL 2004 and broke out an eighty yard run to TD off a ridiculous quarterback sneak with Michael Vick, you know exactly what I’m talking about because you’ve done it yourself (I know I’m guilty).

It’s corny, it’s stupid, it’s cliche, and people do it, but I don’t necessarily want to read about it. It’s shorthand for Cool Black Guy, which really just means Black Guy Who Threatens People Other Than Me And Maybe My Friends, and that’s offensive, Mr. Charlie.

But.

Thunderbolts 147. Jeff Parker, Kev Walker, Frank Martin. Here’s two pages and the two spreads that follow them.

And well… they did my least favorite thing and they pulled it off. It’s not forced, it’s not awkward, and it’s honestly the most flavor Cage has had since the Azzarello/Corben CAGE mini from almost ten years ago. The setting, the timing, the violence, all of this is dead on. It’s perfect, it’s believable, and it’s fantastic. It’s not just “Hey, by the way, this guy is black, remember?” It’s a show of authority, it’s a big dog showing his charges exactly who the alpha male is around here.

I like Cage, but I haven’t like liked him in ages. He’s been pretty bland and neutered under Bendis’s run. It’s not that I want the old Cage, the Kurt Busiek/Jo Duffy Cage back, but I kind of do. This thing that Parker and Walker are doing here, though, is the best of both worlds without ignoring either of them.

Every story is true. But, if you’re going to tell some of them… at least put in the work and get it right, like these guys did.

All right? Peace.

The other day, I said this:

Who wants ##% of characters to fulfill some role? Straw men? Idiots? Let’s go with idiots.)

and reader Spacesquid said this in the comments:

Just to go partially off topic and stick up for statistics for a moment: demanding x% of characters fulfil some role is foolish, as you say, but pointing out x% of characters currently fulfil that role is different, isn’t it? in fact, how else can you have this conversation, unless it’s grounded either in a) the current proportions of various types of people, or b) how that proportion is changing as time goes on (either compared to the other proportions, or on its own terms)? What are examples but points of data, and what is the drawing of conclusions from those examples but the application of statistics?

I mean, sure, some people do it very, very badly, but at heart it’s still number crunching; at the end of the day (and acknowledging the unpleasantness of this being framed as white vs all others) I can’t see how “Here are six examples of non-white characters in DC being badly treated” is actually qualitatively different from “Here are the proportions of white and non-white characters in DC, and the proportion of those that have been badly treated”. The latter would take much longer to compile, but that makes it hard, not stupid.

In short, I think there’s a difference between stating statistics are irrelevant in these kinds of discussion and pointing out statistics can be applied in exceptionally stupid ways.

Or am I missing something?

It’s a good question and I wanted to take the time to give it the attention it deserves. There are situations where statistics and/or proportions may shed some light on a subject, and they often serve as a pretty decent starting point at best. What I am against, though, is the use of proportions or real-life census stats as a guideline or as a tool for discussing race in art. Now’s the part where I attempt to express why I think that’s a mistake.

Race, as we live it in the United States, is a way to group people based on shared lineage. Due to the way race was approached decades ago, it is very simplified and dumbed down. You could be Salvadoran and your friend could be Mexican, but on the census, you might be ticking the same box. If you’re Afro-Cuban, everybody you meet might assume you’re mainline American black. Our approach to race is a complex concept dumbed down, but still a huge part of our lives. I’m black and from Georgia. I’m black on both sides up to my great grandparents, but sometimes my facial hair comes in with a red tint. That makes me wonder what other races are floating around in my genes. But, for the purposes of America, that mixed ancestry doesn’t matter. I’m black.

The main source for race-related statistics is the US Census. It’s probably the only thing with a wide sample size and anything approaching accuracy. Roughly, and I’m rounding a bit here because the decimals are irrelevant, the Census says that the population of the United States breaks down to 75% white, 12% black, and 12% hispanic. The next highest represented race are Asians, then mixed race people, and then American Indians. (For some reason, all of these numbers, after subtracting 2.4% for mixed race people, add up to 110%. Don’t blame me, I’m an English major. Just ride with me and know that America keeps it 110% real. Or understand that the Census counts “Hispanic or Latino (of any race) and that messes up the numbers some. [This is why statistics are evil.])

Applying a simplified version of these numbers to a comics universe means that you’d end up with 75 white people, 12 black people, 12 Hispanics of indeterminate origin, 3 asians, and 1 person to represent everything else. So then, when talking about racism or race in comics (they are two very different things), you could say that DC sidelining Wally West and his family reduces their Asian representation by an apocalyptic amount while reducing their white representation by a negligible number. That’s a fair point, and one way that statistics can be valuable.

The problem comes in deciding which metric to use. If you use my hometown as a model, you’d have 62 white people, 32 black people, 1 asian person, 3 latinos, and 1 person to represent everyone else. You could pop Black Goliath, erase Jason Rusch, kill Bishop, and evaporate Ron Troupe and it would just be a really bad weekend, rather than a minor bit of genocide. If you killed Jaime Reyes and Hector Ayala, though, you just decimated the latino population.

It gets worse when you start looking at regions. Which side of town you lived on decided which high school you went to, and the racial make-up of the town gets even more complicated. When I went to school overseas, I was one of maybe eight black people in the whole school. I was related to one of the others, and only two of us were high schoolers. The rest of the population was majority white/Spanish, and then latino, and then Asian, and then other. If I stayed home sick, that high school suddenly became 50% less black than it was before. New York City is less than half white. San Francisco is 30% Asian. Atlanta is sixty-some percent black. Los Angeles is almost half latino. And on and on and on.

In real life, certain race-related statistics are so fluid as to be meaningless. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that were majority black, majority white, and evenly mixed. My group of friends over the years has ranged from exclusively black to mostly white to mixed evenly. Which one do you use as a guide? Where do you point and say “This is the right one?”

You can’t. All of them are right. Approaching race on a macro level, as in using the 75/12/12/3/1 ratio, is okay, but only for macro level things. It’s the barest of starting points, just something that gives you an idea that something is janky. The closer you dial in to a single person or area, the more the data twists and turns on itself. It’s like my English major’s understanding of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more accurate you try to be, the less you reflect the reality of the situation.

“America is 12% black” is an accurate statement. It is true for a very specific situation. What it isn’t, however, is real. You can’t actually use it to reflect real life, because real life generally doesn’t support that number. It’s being measured on too large of a scale. It’s like–the universe is more empty than it is full. There are electrons and atoms and whatever, but the space between them is what creates that figure. From our point of view, though, the universe is full of stuff. Its emptiness is something too big for us to see, like the exact racial proportions of the United States are something that only matters on a very high level and doesn’t really reflect life down here on the street.

Applying this to comics seems to me like an error in approach, and paying attention to diversity for diversity’s sake, rather than just writing books like real life looks. One of the most interesting comics on the stands has a 100% Japanese cast. One Piece exists in this bizarro world where the main cast is from Brazil, Japan, Sweden, Africa, France, Canada, Russia, USA, and Austria. Unknown Soldier is majority black. Wildcats 3.0 and Flex Mentallo were majority white. Were there any black people in Calvin & Hobbes?

Here’s the root of my problem with running with percentages: good stories are good independent of color. I think that, as children, it is important to see people who look like you doing positive and negative things. That’s one of the reasons I’m so thankful Milestone existed. But, overall? If you’re grown? If it’s good, it’s good.

Good writers and artists pay attention to things and create stories that stand head and shoulders above the pap. There was this recolored Legion of Superheroes thing that made the rounds last year. I thought it was pretty dumb, because all the choices seemed pretty arbitrary. Same thing with “Chromatic Casting.” There was no reason behind it beyond making the Legion less white. As far as reasons go… it works, up to a point. This, though, went far beyond that point into… what? Showing how things could be? That’s not how this works. What good is that? Let’s deal with the real, and if it’s artificial? Let it be.

There should be a reason for everything. If you decide to make a white character, you should know why you made him white and how that affects his characterization. If you make a black heroine, you should know why she’s black. Arbitrary decisions, or decisions made according to numbers, serve no one. People who think about their choices and create accordingly, those are the people who make a difference. Those are the people who make stories that matter.

An example of how to use statistics: Most black people marry other black people. Last I read, something like 93% overall marry within their race. If you look at comics… you can count the number of regular or high profile black/black relationships on what, one hand? It took until 2006 for Storm, the highest profile black hero by far, to start dating a black dude. So, if you look at the real life numbers (high percentage of blacks marry blacks) and compare them to comics (interracial marriage is more common than black/black relationships), you have the ingredients for an argument. What you don’t have is an argument, not yet. You need to look at the situation, examine the history, look at the characters involved, etc etc. You need to see about some context before you can say anything, and just saying “It’s 93% here and 10% there” isn’t enough.

One million words later: that’s why I don’t like using numbers to talk about race online. It works until it doesn’t, and when it stops working, it really stops working. It works as a starting point, just something to give an idea form, and then you need to find something else.

The only statistic that you need to know is that 4thletter! keeps it 2010% real.

What people like this Mark Engbloom guy don’t understand is that my post about Ian Sattler’s comments wasn’t a reply. It was a dashed off “Your mama” or “u mad?” He said something stupid, and rather than coming with a point-by-point reply, I came with jokes published by his own company. It’s like joking about “White Power Rings.” No, they aren’t called that in the text. No, it isn’t a valid criticism. Yes, it is funny.

But fine. Let’s look at exactly why Sattler’s statement is the most clown shoes, two-faced thing to come out of DC since the last time somebody up there talked about how much they liked Milestone.

It’s so hard for me to be on the other side because it’s not our intention.

It’s not how we perceived it. We get the same thing about how we treat our female characters.”

That’s nice, but who cares about your intentions? If I’m stomping around with my big feet and I accidentally stomp on your toe and break it, I don’t get to say, “Yo my bad about your toe, dog, but that wasn’t my intention.” I can either apologize if I’m feeling sorry or I can move on. I don’t think forcing people to apologize is a worthwhile endeavor, either. I know that I gave enough insincere apologies as a kid and have seen enough as an adult to completely devalue the thought of a forced apology meaning anything at all.

When faced with criticism, you can either appease people or you can stonewall them. If you don’t think you did anything wrong, stick to your guns. “I don’t think it was racist” is perfectly fine. “We didn’t mean it, but also people say we’re mad sexist, too, isn’t that weird?” isn’t.

There is a reason behind it all. We don’t see it that way and strive very hard to have a diverse DCU. I mean, we have green, pink, and blue characters. We have the Great Ten out there and I have counter statistics, but I won’t get into that.

The problem with this statement is that green, pink, and blue people don’t exist. In fact, comparing actual, real-life people to fake people when discussing real-life issues is a pretty screwed up thing to do, isn’t it? It’s saying, “Yes, I understand your complaints, but look over here! This thing that we made up is just like what you want, just a different shade! That’s the same thing, right?”

No, it really isn’t. The point of diversity is to reflect reality. If you’re bringing up imaginary people when talking about actual people… you probably should just stop talking. A real life example: you’re making a cartoon for kids. Your boss asks why there aren’t any kids in your show. You respond that there are several kids, like this dwarf, this baby dragon, this baby goblin, those are like kids, right? No.

If you have counter statistics… bring them out. Setting aside the fact that this isn’t about statistics at all (Who wants ##% of characters to fulfill some role? Straw men? Idiots? Let’s go with idiots.), show me what you’ve got. Here, I got a head start on them for you! I did a rough count and came up with 73 DCU covers in their August 2010 solicitations. I didn’t count CMX, Wildstorm, or Vertigo, so these are strictly books with characters owned by DC. There is one Brazilian woman, one Asian woman crying in a cemetery (and perhaps another in Birds of Prey, but I can’t tell through the mask), and five black people. Except, two of the black men are unnamed criminal henchmen, one is Azrael, one is Static, and the other is Bumblebee on Tiny Titans. I didn’t count the covers Damian appeared in, but probably should have, as he is at the very least part Arab and part Chinese. In contrast, there are eight alien characters who have recurring roles and seven blonde teenage girls.

So, please. Tell me about how you “strive very hard to have a diverse DCU.” There’s an equal number of talking monkeys and black women on your covers. Scooby Doo is on more covers than that.

John Stewart is the only Green Lantern to not show up on any covers. Hal, Kyle, Guy, Alan, all of those guys get covers. Hey, pop quiz! Does the JLA have a Luke Cage? No? Well… name a black supporting character in a DC Comic on the level of a Sam Wilson! Steel? Now name another. Or hey, name one on the level of a Robbie Robertson. Just Lucious Fox? Really? Whatever happened to Ron Troupe? Remember him? Married to Lois Lane’s sister, had a kid with her? Oh, right. Lucy Lane is back and superpowered. Ron and the baby are a footnote and a question mark.

DC Comics isn’t a racist company and it isn’t run by racists. This does not, however, mean that they cannot do and say stupid things that are racist. Killing Ryan Choi is not, in and of itself, racist. Ditching Ron Troupe and marginalizing John Stewart is not racist. Replacing Jason Rusch with a more boring version of Firestorm isn’t racist. These are perfectly valid story choices that, in a better world, would have taken place in stories that were worth reading.

The problem is the trend. Jason Rusch gives way to Ronnie Raymond. Kyle Rayner and John Stewart give way to Hal Jordan. Wally West and his multiracial family is replaced by Barry Allen and Iris West, a good ol’ down home American couple. Ryan Choi is replaced with his equally unlikely to support an ongoing series predecessor. Milestone is publicly courted and wakes up to find money on the dresser, with a note saying “Lose my number.” Despite the fact that white people are a global minority today, the official future of the DC Universe is about as lily white as it can get and most of the aliens are white people. In what world does that make sense?

When you consider the trend of how DC has treated its non-white characters (and the fact that this argument has to be phrased in terms of white vs ______ is foul), DC Comics comes off looking pretty stupid. I don’t care whether these characters fit into their Silver Age nostalgia or not. When, as a company, you have made a habit of marginalizing a specific type of character, introducing new characters that you’re going to let die on the vine in an attempt to show how “diverse” you are, and then talking out the side of your mouth in public…

Whatever. I don’t have time for things that don’t respect me. Kick rocks.

rest in power ryan choi we gon neva forget u

Return of Bruce Wayne 01
words by grant morrison, art by chris sprouse/karl story/guy major/jared k fletcher, cover by andy kubert

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