On Marvel and Magical Thinking

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Marvel Comics just managed an astonishing sleight of hand, reaping accolades for addressing a diversity problem it supposedly never had.

Last week, the world freaked out upon learning that Marvel has hired Ta-Nehisi Coates—foremost thinker on race in the U.S. and one of our best writers, period—to sell its comics. And also write one of its titles. You know, whatever. He’s hired.

It is no doubt an important moment in comics—a cool project that will have positive long-term effects for both the medium and the industry—but it strikes me as strange that Marvel, and not Coates, is the one receiving praise for it. Marvel has not enacted a vision; it has leveraged an opportunity. I’m sure if President Obama agreed to revamp X-Men tomorrow that Marvel would frame it in the same self-aggrandizing way.

It has been fascinating to watch the narrative around the news solidify. Curiously, part of it seems to be that Coates’ hire was in response to—or at least somehow in conversation with—the diversity-related critiques surrounding Marvel’s All-New, All-Different campaign, particularly people’s frustrations with its hip-hop variant covers. In a piece that delved into the significance of Marvel hiring an “activist writer,” for instance, The Beat asserted (and reasserted) that Marvel had taken that criticism into account as it made the hires for Black Panther.

From where I’m standing, Marvel hasn’t taken that criticism into account at all; if anything, it continues to revel in its own perfection. But impressions aside the timing is off. Though we don’t know precisely when the Black Panther project coalesced, we do know it stemmed from a conversation about diversity that Coates had with Marvel editor Sana Amanat in May. The variant covers conversation peaked in late July. Alonso’s response to it (“Our doors are open. Always have been.”) went live July 24—and he was already teasing Black Panther. Given how far along the concept seems to be now, you can bet that by late July, Coates’ Black Panther had been in the works for a while. Part of why Alonso could afford to be so smug and dismissive in that CBR interview was because he knew he had an ace up his sleeve—and that ace was Coates (or at least the firm-ish prospect of Coates).

In any case, it seems unlikely that the Coates/Stelfreeze team was conceived of as an emblem—sincere or otherwise—of Marvel’s commitment to inclusive hiring practices. It is a major marketing gimmick (Important Writer Does Comics) with a secondary marketing message (Marvel Is Very Good at Diversity). Note the way in which many major platforms (including, to some degree, Marvel itself, in a press release crowing about Coates’ erudition) gave the news a “You won’t believe what this Serious Man is writing next” treatment. The New York Times piece that announced the project led with that angle. Later in the article, when the author got around to mentioning diversity in corporate comics, it was presented as an industry trend, not a controversy. “Diversity — in characters and creators — is a drumbeat to which the comic book industry is increasingly trying to march.” (The militaristic metaphor is…interesting.) Marvel, we are meant to understand, is leading that march, and to untrained eyes, that’s been happening for a while. Quoth Time, for example: “Marvel has been undergoing its own diversity renaissance since Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso took over in 2011.”

Let’s take a moment to consider the phrase “diversity renaissance” in all its stupid glory. Diversity in comics is such a huge, multifaceted, and widely misunderstood topic that you can sorta-kinda gesture to it in one area and get your gold star. Thus the person on the street reading the New York Times or Time or whatever thinks of diversity in comics—if they think about it at all—as a positive trend instead of as a variety of ongoing, fraught conversations. They’re not savvy enough to distinguish between representation in Marvel’s fictional universe and its hiring practices, much less even subtler distinctions within editorial and other departments (editors versus writers, for example, or creating a one-off variant cover versus steady work).

Of course, there were plenty of writers with enough wits to describe Marvel’s approach to diversity as something closer to a shitshow than a renaissance. Vulture, for instance, provided a competent summary of recent critiques that have been leveled against the corporation. While that writer was careful to avoid assumptions about a causal relationship between the variant cover critique (and the critiques it dovetailed with) and the Black Panther project, the piece puts those events in conversation with each other in such a way that his caveats don’t count for much. Worse, the breathless awe and heavy hopes expressed in that piece and countless others like it contribute to this sort of nebulous presumption that Ta-Nehisi Coates will not only write a great comic, but also fix Marvel’s abysmal hiring practices, and maybe even Comics in general. And while it’s obviously true that there are ways in which his work for Marvel will help create more opportunities for writers of color, so far as I know, Coates isn’t in charge of hiring anybody. And hiring people (plural) is the quantifiable outcome that people are asking for when they complain about Marvel being too white, too male, and too straight.

“This is a period in superhero history where, more than ever, diversity is a clarion call for fans,” the Vulture piece concludes. “Coates is answering the call, and it will be fascinating to see what he has to say.” Cutting through the considerable buzz surrounding what Coates will say, critics like J.A. Micheline have rightfully emphasized what Marvel has yet to do. With the momentous hire of one (1) black writer, Marvel has been widely perceived as addressing—or at least beginning to address—the deficiencies pointed to by the hip-hop variant covers critique. But in my view, to even begin to address those deficiencies, Alonso or some other prominent person at Marvel must first acknowledge that they exist. Then there needs to be a plan of action—and here I mean a thoughtful, sustained effort towards inclusion, not a glorified product announcement or two—that addresses those deficiencies in a proactive, meaningful way. There should also be a moratorium on Marvel’s lip service to its milieu as a meritocracy, which is obviously a total fucking farce.

Based on Alonso’s statements in that July 24 CBR interview (“interview”), I see no indication that any of that will happen any time soon. What I do see is a man waving around Killer Mike’s approval like a talisman, using him and other people of color—well, men of color—who are icons in their (non-comics) field, hoping to make money off some of their smart thoughts on race by association. Never mind that those men were commenting on the covers themselves, not Marvel’s hiring practices, la-la-la, or that the critiques leveled against Marvel described systemic racism, not individual malice. Axel Alonso is a goddamn Mexican American who gets lots of compliments and he doesn’t intend to let a bunch of white college brats give him grief. No sir!

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Hey Comics, Axel here. If you want to level a critique against my company’s hiring practices I suggest you take a long hard look at my ~compliments collage~.”

The Coates hire is sort of Alonso’s “look better by association” strategy on steroids. This time he found a way to get more than just a blurb. Now he’s getting a whole comic. For that, I give Marvel no credit. (Or should I say points?) Where Marvel has positioned itself as bold, progressive, and innovative regardless of what happens next, Coates is the one who will do the work under the weight of watchful eyes. Let’s give him all the points. He’s the one who’s giving a gift to comics—a gift that Marvel, however unworthy a recipient, will incidentally benefit from.

And like a lot of people, I’m super excited about it, with reservations. Chief among them is my suspicion that Marvel is counting on one shining star to eclipse all critiques forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. Already, there’s this: In a week of countless Marvel-centric headlines, not one of them was that Val D’Orazio quit comics.

For every exceptional and uplifting story that Marvel promotes (and how many of those do we get?) there are the stories people swallow. And it’s really hard to write a headline about something or someone that can’t exist. For all intents and purposes, they were never there.

In an industry filled with men endlessly recycling other men’s stories, D’Orazio is another woman whose story is ash in her mouth—a love for comics that died in the spiritual equivalent of a garbage fire.

There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in discussing how dreams die at the hands of bigwigs at the Big Two, who are ready villains. But how many would-be creators have been repulsed by the Progressive Comics™ apparatus that quietly welcomed back Chris Sims after his self-imposed exile from the Internet? Though let it be said it was a torturous 30 days for all involved, I’m so sure.

How many stories were ushered out of this world by the likes of gross creators like Brian Wood? Rumor has it his industry newsletter about the connection between publicly discussing sexual harassment and male suicide went out to some of his female colleagues unsolicited—much like his predatory advances.

How many people have failed to be inspired by less gross creators like G. Willow Wilson, who is waging what must surely be one of the saddest wars in feminism?

How many people internalize the lazy punk rock ethos of well-meaning white men who routinely use conversations surrounding women and PoC in corporate comics to assert their paternalistic, off-topic “you’re so much better than the Big Two” opinions?

There are different degrees of complicity fueled by different motivations, including greed, desire, cronyism, and sheer oblivion. They’re not all bad in themselves, but the fact remains that collectively, they are a problem.

And we will fix it—if we fix it—by looking at those many, many motivations at both the individual and institutional levels. There are no shortcuts. The Reckoning will not be some tidy storyline about a savoir who fixes comics. No one, not even Ta-Nehisi Coates, can live up to that kind of hype.

19 thoughts on “On Marvel and Magical Thinking

  1. “The Coates hire is sort of Alonso’s “look better by association” strategy on steroids.”

    Very true. It’s a stunt-casting exercise. Pair the company’s most well-known black character with the black writer with the highest public profile at the moment. However, when you stop to think about the hire, it doesn’t make any sense.

    Coates is an essayist and memoir writer. He has no published fiction that I know of, much less anything in the adventure genre. He has no experience writing anything in the comics form, either. He’s a complete novice to the modes he’ll be working in.

    On top of that, the Black Panther has no connection to the topics Coates writes about. While the Black Panther is black, he’s not African-American. He’s an African national. He’s also a very fanciful character in a way that goes far beyond his being a costumed adventurer. He’s the ruler of a highly developed, technologically advanced African nation. There’s little connection to the real world there. I don’t see that Coates could be expected to write anything more worthwhile with that character than a white writer would. The Black Panther is as remote to his interests and experience as Doctor Doom. As such, the series is probably going to be just as choked with cliches as a version by a Marvel regular.

    Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s good for Marvel to be thinking outside the box. I’m glad they’re making at least a gesture towards diversity in doing so. They need to be doing a lot more of both, and any step in that direction is welcome. But I don’t have any expectation that this project is going to be any more worth a reader’s time than their usual fare.

  2. I think Kim has made some irrefutable points, as did Robert, but I can’t bring myself to be as overly cynical on the basis that the book hasn’t come out yet. I prefer to hope that it’s as thoughtful and engaging as a comic as Coates’ previously written works. Maybe it will turn out to “be just as choked with cliches as a version by a Marvel regular”, but I’d much rather think positively about the opportunity his hiring presents than that. Hell, because of the Val D’Orazio controversy making headlines, maybe than can help precipitate change in the company’s attitudes towards harassment from now on.

    I get that the Coates hire is being mistaken as a cure-all palliative for Marvel, but a little can go a long way and I’m still very excited to see what he does with BP.

  3. I disagree with Robert that TNC has no relevant experience or interests here. In the first place, the Black Panther has often had adventures in a US setting; there’s no reason Coates couldn’t put him over here again. Second, the Black Panther draws on a history of African-American engagement with and interest in Africa, as a history and an ongoing area of interest, hope, aspiration, and imperial history. Coates is very, very familiar with all those traditions, as his writing makes clear.

    He’s also a comics fan from way back, which is why he got the gig in the first place. And the truth is the standard of craft and professionalism at Marvel is not so stratospheric as to lead you to think that a writer from a different medium would be unable to match it.

    I don’t know that Coates’ Black Panther will be great. But I think there’s every reason to think it’ll be better than average by the current Marvel standards.

  4. Robert, Coates has been a storyteller in his memoir writing, and the quality even of what’s considered a top-flight mainstream comic is so poor I don’t see why letting a smart novice take his shot is really so dire. There’s a good chance the product will be interesting whether or not it succeeds. As for the realism of Black Panther, I think you’re being too literal for the genre. I could wish it was drawn by Gene Colan in his prime…

  5. One issue Kim doesn’t quite talk about is the way you could see this (if you were cynical) as Marvel saying that they’ll hire a black creator, as long as that black creator is a rock star. Coates is now far and away the most famous and accomplished creative person Marvel has on staff. Hopefully this will mean they’ll hire more people of color even if those people of color are not celebrities…but we’ll have to wait and see.

  6. I’m not going to get into arguments about Coates’ virtues here. In my view, he’s a good, if overrated, writer whose main talent is for impressing bourgeois liberals who pride themselves on their views on race issues. I don’t really care if people agree with me or not, and I have no interest in getting into what I know will prove an interminable debate over it. Like Obama, a figure of similar appeal before he became President, Coates’ fans think he walks on water, and there’s no convincing them otherwise.

    But let me note a few other things about the Black Panther.

    The character is a just a black good-guy version of Doctor Doom. (I wasn’t making a random comparison in the above comment.) His home country of Wakanda is pretty much the same as Doom’s home of Latveria. It’s just located in a dumb pulp fantasy of Africa instead of a dumb pulp fantasy of Eastern Europe.

    Now, I suppose one could write Doctor Doom stories rooted in an engagement with the cultural hopes, history, and aspirations of the actual Eastern Europe. But I think it’s a big mistake to engage with that subject matter with a fantasy character rooted in anachronistic pulp portrayals of the region. The results are likely to be trite, offensive, and completely tasteless.

    By the same token, one could also write Doctor Doom stories set in the neighborhoods populated by Eastern-European emigres and their descendants here in the U. S. But again, I think the character is so conceptually discordant with the setting that any such treatment is going to be wretched.

    The Black Panther, like Doctor Doom, is a fantasy adventure character who works best in stories that aren’t preoccupied with real-world settings and concerns. That’s how Jack Kirby handled the character he co-created, and I think he was right. The efforts by Don McGregor and so forth to invest the character with real-world “relevance” were pretentious embarrassments. I see no evidence that Coates has the inclination or skills to handle the character in the Kirby manner. If he wants to go the McGregor route, which I suspect he does, well, I can’t see why that would be anything to get excited over.

    Now, there could be a third way, which is a story that demonstrates, a la Moore or Kurtzman, the fallacies inherent in the character concept. I might give Coates the benefit of the doubt with that approach. But I don’t see Marvel willing to publish a project of that sort.

  7. “The Black Panther, like Doctor Doom, is a fantasy adventure character who works best in stories that aren’t preoccupied with real-world settings and concerns”

    I’m not super convinced. The Christopher Priest stories in New York were pretty good by Marvel standards.

    If you didn’t want people to argue with you about Coates, you probably shouldn’t have talked about your reading of Coates! I would say that Coates has a substantial black audience, and often addresses them directly. Bourgeois liberals arguing about how black writers are compromised by appealing to bourgeois liberals—I never find that line of country that compelling.(fwiw, I wrote what I think has to have been one of the harshest reviews extant of TNC’s first memoir. I liked his last book a lot more, though.)

    I think a lot of your argument comes down to saying that superheroes are pretty dumb and don’t handle race well, and that that will probably remain a problem. And that’s a perfectly reasonable argument! We’ll just have to wait and see how TNC negotiates the genres racial limitations (or doesn’t, as the case may be.)

  8. @Robert

    I agree with you. (Except I don’t think Coates’ fans think he walks on water.)

    On the other hand, as Noah and Quizling point out, he’s not exactly going up against Will Eisner here.

    @Noah

    Robert didn’t say the bourgeois liberals in question here aren’t black.

  9. “The character is a just a black good-guy version of Doctor Doom”

    I’d say he’s far more similar to Aquaman than Doctor Doom. Christopher Priest would say he wrote him similar to Batman.

    Actually I would read him as being a Superman figure at times, just replace “dude having adventures in America is from a fantasy outer space planet” to”dude having adventures in america is from a fantasy african country.”

    If you to want to play up the “advanced African country” angle and Kirby angle you can make him like Orion in New Gods, slumming in the non advanced United States.

    He can also be a stranger in a strange lane, like Wonder Woman, or you can focus on espionage, gadgets and politics like a Shield book or Iron Man.

    There was a time when the character was a Brooklyn schoolteacher who used to be a king, and a time when he was a crazy old man who had abdicated the throne, none of those interpretations stuck, but Christopher Priest did some interesting stuff with him.

    I think the character is probably very difficult to write, but that doesn’t mean he’s just black Doctor Doom.

    As a random idea, if you choose to emphasize the idea that Wakanda is the advanced super science nation and American is the comparatively third world nation, you can potentially do interesting things.

    These are all things Priest flirted with from time to time. Though Panther has got to be a really hard character to write and Priest’s run is kind of all over the place.

  10. “Robert didn’t say the bourgeois liberals in question here aren’t black.”

    I guess; perhaps Robert didn’t mean whites only. But accusing a liberal intellectual of writing for liberal intellectuals seems somewhat pointless in itself. And as public intellectuals go, Coates is way more well read and known than most; his book sold like hotcakes. His audience seems pretty broad, as these things go.

  11. I kind of wish they’d given it to Cornel West. Lots of long monologues about the black prophetic tradition and bitching about Obama during fight scenes.

  12. Honestly, I think that probably would have produced a more interesting comic book. (But let’s not judge prematurely, etc, etc.)

  13. Again I think Kim’s central point being Marvels’ recent lack of tact concerning responses for critiques on charges of cultural appropriation and harassment lends better to a hesitation or degree of cynicism for TNC’s hiring better than “Well superhero comics are dumb anyway and no black guy’s gonna change that”. That kind of thinking is just…ugh. To each his or her own, but caution is more more palatable than pessimism of a certain kind.

    But the party hasn’t started until J.Lamb gets in on this.

  14. re: the difference in coverage of Coates v. D’Orazio, a cynical observer might explain it thus — “Marvel hires someone who can actually write”, that’s news. “Woman suffers harassment, quits comics in justified disgust/anger”, that’s just another “dog bites man” story.

    Good thing no one here is a cynical observer.

  15. “I kind of wish they’d given it to Cornel West.”

    Shonda Rimes writing Black Panther would be an even bigger deal. But she’s probably too rich to even think about comics.

  16. “Rumor has it his industry newsletter about the connection between publicly discussing sexual harassment and male suicide went out to some of his female colleagues unsolicited—”

    Since you actually have to sign up for his newsletter, I’d like to know how that is possible.

  17. there’ve been several comments here stating that Coates would have no problem writing a comic, given the low standards prevailing.

    In fact, just about every outside writer — screenwriter, novelist, etc — brought in to do commercial comic books has stressed how hard it is, some saying it was the hardest writing they ever did.

    It’s a skill, you know, not to be taken for granted.

  18. I’ve written comics and prose. I don’t know; any writing is difficult. But Coates is a very good writer, and many people who write supehero comics are very bad. There’s no reason to think Coates can’t do better than them. It would be foolish to expect Watchmen, but “I would bet this will be better than Red Hood” doesn’t strike me as an outlandish expectation.

  19. But not all writers have skillsets that transfer from one form to another. Henry James, widely considered one of the finest English-language novelists, wrote some absolutely putrid plays for the theater. The excellent Samuel Delany wrote pretty terrible comics.

    You say you’ve written comics; have you ever written commercial comics? The fact that there are so many badly-written comic books out there just goes to prove that writing them is difficult.

    I’ve actually met Mr. Coates and talked to him for a couple of minutes. And he’s a real-deal hardcore superhero comics fan. So I’m going to presume he’ll do OK.

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