The Utility of Dimension

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Donovan Grant

When aspiring to seek racial harmony through media, a little bit seems to go a long way. Instead of adding one black character to a film’s cast, add two. It does not matter that in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon never interacts with Don Cheadle’s War Machine, as they’re both appearing in the same scene. Captain America: The Winter Soldier went the extra mile by having Mackie’s Falcon and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury exchange two scenes of dialogue. The fact that their characters’ personal investment centers on white Steve Rogers should not erase the fact that they are two black men interacting with each other, for however briefly.

But it can, and it does. Most narratives in film or television are willing to show some degree of racial representation, but generally speaking the central focus of said narratives tend to be on other things. This is where stereotypes bleed in, and the marker of authentic representation becomes blurred. Too often the black hero becomes a minstrel. As a result, POC tend to examine media closely for authenticity and veracity, often with a good degree of skepticism.

The quest for authenticity reaches great heights in the FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Based on the book “The Run of His Life: the People vs. OJ Simpson” by Jeffery Toobin, the series’ inherent attraction is that it retells one of the most famous murder trials in American history. American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson has thus far enjoyed critical success due in no small part to its near-slavish recreation and theatrical swelling of the facts and events of the case. The actors (headed up by a string of A-list talent including Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran and Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark) have arrested viewers with their multidimensional and powerful performances.

The show’s fifth episode “The Race Card” focuses, as the title suggests, on the racial tensions that squeezed the OJ trial so firmly. Written by Joe Robert Cole and directed by John Singleton, much of the focus of racial anxiety centers on Prosecutor Chris Darden (played by Sterling K. Brown) and his nightmarish experiences in going up against the defense team led by Johnnie Cochran. The tone is set by an opening scene in which Cochran is harassed by police while driving his daughters to dinner (he lectures his children not to use the word “nigger” when asked if he was called that by the policeman).

Cole and Singleton’s script sympathizes with Darden, beginning with a press event for Cochran in which he argues that the inclusion of Darden (who is African-American) on the prosecution is a cynical example of tokenism. As the trial begins, Darden makes a case to the court that the use of racial epithets by LAPD officer Mark Furman should be deemed inadmissible so as to not inflame passions of the majorly black jury. Cochran, passionately, responds by accusing Darden of belittling the morality and emotional capacity of African Americans, reminding the court that they “live with offensive looks, offensive words, offensive treatment every day.” “Who are any of us to testify as an expert as to what words black people can or cannot handle?!” It’s a roundhouse blow to the prosecution, particularly to Darden as Cochran turns back to his seat and whispers to him “Nigga please”.

It is here that the episode turns from a recapitulation of a real life court drama into a trial of black identity. The court plans to tour OJ Simpson’s house, so Johnnie Cochran re-styles it as a more recognizably black home, replete with photos of black people and socially conscious artwork such as “The Problem We All Live With”, replacing Simpson’s Patrick Naegel collection and photos of his white golfing friends. Cochran tells OJ that the redecorating will get the mostly black jury on his side, and that it will help to frame the narrative of the trial as a case of police harassment against an innocent black man.

OJ responds “What’re you trying to say about me Johnnie?” before defending his lifestyle, arguing that he earned his wealth himself, and rejecting the idea that he could have done more for the black community. Those who wanted money or aid from him, he says, were just looking for a handout.

Darden’s character is sympathetic. From scenes in which he vents frustration to his parents to his vexation when he tries to explain to Marcia Clark how people downplay their racial bias by being polite, Sterling K. Brown makes the character thoroughly understandable. But Johnnie Cochran, while theatrical and tenacious, also generates inevitable suspicion. The episode presents Cochran telling the other lawyers that their job is to present a better story of what happened on the night of the murders than the prosecution. He also tells Chris Darden that he is in the trial to win – not be professional. Cochran says he believes in Simpson’s innocence, but he comes across as a ruthless individual who is utilizing race to meet his own vindictive ends.

You could perhaps say the same of the show’s producers. The series was developed by writing duo Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who co-produce the show along with Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Ryan Murphy. All of these creators are white. Though current national polls show that the majority of both white and black Americans believe Simpson probably killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, there was a much sharper divide between the races twenty years ago.

The series does not demonize Simpson; it only presents evidence previously recorded or corroborated during the trial. But real-life overwhelming evidence employed by the show helps shape an argument for his guilt. Suddenly racial diversity becomes a tool for furthering a belief held disproportionately by white people who remember the Simpson trial. Thus, every detail and scene of sympathy and humanization of black people is used to advance a narrative congenial to white opinion.

And so one could argue that the use of people of color, and of real world people and events, becomes a sinister Trojan Horse, or at least it can. But must that be the case? Must white creators inevitably infect a work with prejudice? It’s a popular theory held in several arenas, particularly comic books.

The March 2^nd 2016 issue of Spider-Man, starring half-Black half-Hispanic Miles Morales, was met with controversy when writer Brian Michael Bendis had the character express negative emotions towards his ethnicity. In the issue, amateur footage from a fight involving a tattered clothed Spider-Man with his skin exposed results in an online blogger enthusiastically broadcasting that the new hero is a POC. Miles responds with feelings of discomfort and angst.

“I don’t want that.” Miles says.

“Want what?” his friend Ganke asks.

“The qualification.” Miles responds.

The scene has elicited a number of responses from various groups of people ranging from GamerGaters praising the book for its rejection of “SJW” agendas to reviewers criticizing the issue for its attack on female fans. Black Nerd Problems.com wrote that says that the scene “is classic white liberal rhetoric” which “paints a world in which there are no problems…it serves as a tool to maintain the status quo.”

Brian Michael Bendis took to Tumblr to address the negative reaction with a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of response.

“As I’ve said many times before I used to work at a major metropolitan newspaper and I learned there that anything you say about politics, religion, sex or race… No matter what you say… Half the people reading it will vehemently disagree. that’s just the way it is.

so some writers either decide they want or don’t want the conversation. sometimes it’s a conscious decision and sometimes it’s an unconscious decision.”

When I first read the scene, I immediately felt uneasy in recognizing that the words of a conflicted black kid were coming from the mind of a white writer. Whether or not the scene was written with any sort of liberality couldn’t escape those indicting facts. I took it upon myself to determine, with my own sense of blackness, if I felt this was or not authentic, and it was. It was not believable to me that a thirteen year old would have a fully rounded concept of his own racial identity juxtaposed with the cultural context of the modern world. Not to suggest that he would be completely unaware, but to me Miles Morales would not be as expressive with his blackness as John Stewart was in his first Green Lantern appearance.

The complexity is self-evident. Each POC will see different kinds of representation with each character, as such defines our individuality. It matters not than Bendis’ own children are African American, or that he created Miles Morales. There will always be that double consciousness that pervades every story and creeps into the minds of every POC.

So what is the solution? It would appear to be having more POC producing more of the consumer’s material. That’s not always a surefire way to make a coherent story, but it is a first step. Those are more valuable than failure because each step towards perfecting representation produces a normalizing effect. It also re-contextualizes missteps taken by white people as cautionary examples to learn from. Perhaps they were not so ruinous if evading their failures gets us to where we need to be. After all, Shaft was created by a white author. But not every black person in America likes Shaft.

No one person knows how to totally represent their minority status. Social constructs do not come with a “How-To” kit – the instructions manual only includes a lifetime of misunderstandings and imbalanced power structures, with varying degrees of oppression from person to person. Integration helps us deconstruct the construct. We need the successes and failures of others and our own internal vetting process to get to where we want to be.

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Donovan Grant

A memorable scene from Community season 3’s episode “Regional Holiday Music” involves brainy overachiever Annie Edison (played by Alison Brie) indulging in a baby-doll styled performance of song and sex for Jeff Winger (Joel McHale). Donned in fishnets and high heels, Annie plays up the sex appeal of the childlike vamp, conflating an eagerness to be taught with sexual availability. The joke completes itself three times over when her song ends with the line “Boop be doop be doop doop sex!”, McHale’s visibly uncomfortable Jeff stating “Eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns on the sexiness.”, and Annie responding with a clump of incoherent babbling.

The point, quite clearly, is that the sex appeal traditionally found in female ignorance can evaporate quickly if over-exploited. It’s a scene I keep thinking back to when reading Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti’s current Starfire series. A revamp of the character made infamous in the title Red Hood and the Outlaws at the start of DC’s New 52 company lineup back in 2011, this version of Starfire is a narrative of an alien foreigner growing accustomed to ordinary human culture. As the series establishes its new setting of Key West, FL, it also presents the character of Starfire as ignorant to the point of idiocy. Her her mental state contradicts the level of reasoning and understanding she displaced in the years following the new 52. It’s ostensibly the same character trying to start fresh on Earth, yet concepts like currency, fruit and simple metaphors are completely new to her.

Beginning with the premise of the book, it’s easy to see why Conner and Palmiotti took this approach to the character. The blatant sex-object nature of her first appearance after the new 52 reboot was universally rejected. Starfire has a younger, larger and more female fanbase than many DC characters due to her appearances in the Teen Titans cartoon from 2003-2006. In that series, the character’s reaction to Earth customs (typically teenage Earth customs) was played up to be more wide-eyed and innocent than she ever actually was in the 1980s “New Teen Titans” comic where she first appeared. While the initial version by Marv Wolfman and George Perez had an intrigued and bemused fascination with human and American sensibilities, the cartoon version was decidedly more excitable and energetic. It’s a point made by an online fan comic that portrayed the cognitive dissonance between what new fans of the character enjoyed and what DC was presenting them with when showcasing her in Red Hood and the Outlaws.

The thing is, Starfire’s always been a problematic character. Interplanetary ignorance and alien sex appeal are both aspects of what makes her recognizable to fans of all kinds (the other being the warrior princess trope). Her character has historically championed free love, self-love and a refusal to stigmatize nudity, which is fine in and of itself. The problem is that she’s been depicted this way primarily by male writers, although not exclusively. Sex appeal was always a selling point of the “New Teen Titans” comic despite “teen” being in the title. George Perez flaunted both the male and female bodies in issues where the Titans take a day at a pool, spar and hone their fighting skills in a pool, battle to the point of ripped clothes and are generally sexualized in ways DC Comics character had yet to be seen up to that point in the mid-80s. Starfire was and still is generally remembered as the hot alien babe who took Robin the Boy Wonder’s virginity, and this is often played up in the fan discourse bleeding into the published work.

So in reinterpreting the character for the cartoon series, the producers used her fresh alien perspective and positive sense of self to present a character that eschewed negativity. She was less defined by the men and women around her and more by how she saw the world. In “Red Hood and the Outlaws” she was completely defined by how she was used to her male teammates advantage, at least initially (the public backlash to the first issue prompted a backing off on the sex toy aspect). Now in “Starfire”, the main recurring element is how everything she encounters is treated as a bewildering new experience for her.

It would be extremely easy to write Starfire off as untenable and suggest never featuring her in any type of presentation again, but I have to consider the potential audience for this type of character in a best case scenario. The Teen Titans animated series most certainly dumbed her down to a basic archetype, but it ended up being the least harmful. The original character of the 80s was the best of both the cartoon world and the New 52 world, being sexualized just as much as everyone else featured in the series. The only immediate problem is her relation to the men in her life, from being sold into slavery to being forced into a political marriage. Starfire would be best defined on her own in a solo title, so the solution for the current run is to not make her so unbelievably stupid. Degrees of naivety are aspects of her character, but too much of that clashes with common sense.

The central conflict is figuring out how to present a character who can embody several positive qualities without the objectifying narrative of the male gaze. Perhaps you can’t in the superhero genre, despite her book being written and illustrated by female creators, but a sense of relative intelligence shouldn’t be hard to include. There is nothing cute or appealing about a grown woman wandering around in a fog of ignorance in ways which defy logic. If Amanda Conner got rid of the foreigner aspect of the title, what else could she have to work with? Starfire could preach about acceptance of self, love of self and others and maintaining a positive outlook on life. This would undoubtedly clash with the genre the character exists in, but perhaps that’s the key. She doesn’t work well enough in the macho-fueled world of superheroes, so maybe she could be the first female alien Jesus Christ figure, preaching peace and love in ways which recall the original Wonder Woman. This would put her at odds with almost every single character she came across, but that’s the only reasonable solution to properly writing the type of person she generally is. The DCYOU marketing image for the Starfire title reads “She’s an alien warrior trying to find peace…and will fight anyone or anything to get it!”, which has nothing to do with the tone or direction of the book itself. If she however were to interact and present her views to the people of Earth and be put in a position to defend them, it would place her in the role of the protagonist that lends a sense of enlightenment as opposed to ignorance and removes the theme of the human way being the right way that is implicit whenever someone interacts with Starfire’s alien-sense of love and happiness.

I would very much like to see that character, but it doesn’t look like it will happen. For the forseeable future, as in the past, her creators don’t seem to be thinking very hard, and so Starfire is dumb.

The Neverending Battle Made Easy

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Donovan Grant

The July 2015 issue of Action Comics (vol.2 #42) has garnered instant praise from critics. In the current storyline, Superman has his secret identity revealed and his powers severely dampened. In a further controversial and news-making development, cops and SWAT teams confront local Superman supporters and engage in a violent attack that prompts the Man of Steel not only to defend the neighborhood from the onslaught of police, but to end the conflict with a right cross to the chief officer’s face.

The images of a riot instigated by police naturally conjure up memories of Ferguson Missouri. As a result, the issue has led such online publications as International Business Times and Business Insider to label the story “gripping”, “breathtaking” and “compelling”.

So why is it so lousy?

I’m unsure what’s worse, the lazy storytelling or the mindless praise for it. It’s as though the aforementioned websites happened upon Google images of the issue and quickly churned out a glowing recommendation for the benefit of appearing both pop culture savvy and socially conscious.

In the sotry, the denizens of the local neighborhood in Metropolis, calling their block “Kentville”, are showing their support of Superman, now publicly known to be Clark Kent. While Superman is away battling a giant monster, a SWAT team arrives to break up the assembly, and within minutes fire an errant canister of tear gas into the crowd. One of the citizens knock it back towards the police, and the neighborhood resigns to sit on the ground and commit to a silent protest, welcoming the oncoming march of the cops who are more than willing to beat everyone to a pulp. Superman arrives with a giant chain held over his shoulders, standing between the SWAT team and the crowd. The lead cop named Binghamton announces that he and the other police will beat everyone on the block including Superman, and then proceeds to do so.

With the Ferguson analogy inelegantly at the forefront, let’s describe how this doesn’t work and what makes its evocation of recent events improper.

1. The SWAT team is brought to disrupt the gathering for Superman without the presence of any sort of protest to disrupt. Unlike in Ferguson, where at the very least tensions had built over an already ever-present sense of racial profiling, the cops are only arriving due to the mustache-twirling machinations of the lead policeman Binghamton.

2. Binghamton’s problem isn’t portrayed as any sort of prejudice or distrust towards Superman because he’s an alien. He openly admits that he’s sick of the praise and adulation Superman has gathered over the years at the expense of the public’s recognition of regular police and firefighters. The conflict isn’t borne out of systemic and long-held prejudices; it’s created by one man’s jealousy of a fictional character.

3. As a result, the conflict between the police and Superman and the protestors is nothing more than a bad guy and his army attacking innocent civilians. It makes the conflict into a too simple case of good vs. evil, removing any semblance of reality. The situation makes the police into supervillains, so that they’re easy to recognize and easy to fight.

Thus any resemblance to tensions in the real world is removed, and the conflict can go down as easily as any other superbattle. Moreover the way in which the storyline uses the imagery and context of racism is nothing short of appalling.

For one thing, the image of Superman holding a gigantic chain to put himself between the police and the crowd is quite blunt. It’s no doubt supposed to represent shackles of oppression imposed by white authority, but in the hands of a white superhero, it ends up coming across as unearned cultural appropriation. A figure of super-authority such as Superman, powers or no, can’t subsume himself in the community of the subjugated masses when he has traditionally aligned closer to that of a policeman for most of his life. It rings hollow and condescending, as if the story is parodying the resistance to police brutality.

Worst of all is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people the police are attacking, the ones Superman is defending and the ones that serve to match the Ferguson protestors in this analogy, appear to be white. The firefighter who puts herself at the front of the crowd is recognizably black, but the neighborhood consists of a veritable “who’s who”, or “what’s what” in ethnic diversity. Folks young and old with large noses and middle class clothing make up the whole of the group, with black people ironically the minority of the whole block. This shows that the policemen’s grudge is really no more than a plot necessity that has no bearing in reality. A line by a Hispanic character reads “This is America! This is what I fricking fought for! I’m not gonna let them take that away!” which is answered by the firefighter “If you fight, people are gonna die. Our people. Is that what you want?” This would resonate so much better if both characters were black, not to mention if a majority of the crowd was. As nice as multiculturalism is to see in mainstream comic books, it doesn’t make sense within the context of the story this issue is trying to tell. The police are shown to have such a blasé disdain for the citizens they’re about to brutalize that it makes the story come off as anti-police propaganda more than anything. There’s no nuance, no sense that this could at all take place within the real world.

Superman is supposed to be a Champion of the Oppressed as evidenced by his original Golden Age adventures and later stories as well. He is most effective when battling real world society ills that his readers face every day. So what’s the point in making a story where there’s no actual ill of society or systemic oppression for him to overcome? Was the writer Greg Pak too gun-shy to actually engage in the topic his story’s imagery advertised? The connection between police brutality and racism is not a very difficult concept to grasp, and who better than the world’s first superhero (other than black superheroes) to tackle it head on.

Ultimately the story serves to say “Superman’s one of us!” in a way which doesn’t actually say that. He, like many other costumed heroes, is just like us presuming that we too have a specific and unrealistic villain to face and defeat, rather than the innate problems in our society. As much as people like to lambast the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow series, that comic at least had the respectability to tackle the problems it saw head on without thinking of misrepresenting it. It named what it saw as what it was and didn’t ignore difficult conversations in a bid for misplaced solidarity. I believe that super hero comics can truthfully engage in contemporary topics—that they can be relevant and contribute to a national conversation. It’s so unfortunate that when it comes to the most pertinent conversation in our nation today, the best superheroes can offer is Action #42.
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This is part of our ongoing series, Can There Be a Black Superhero?

The Possible Black Superhero

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Donovan Grant

Editor’s Note: Donovan had a number of comments on James Lamb’s recent piece about the impossibility of superhero diversity. I thought I’d highlight the first one here. I’d encourage folks to go read the whole thread…and of course, James’ original piece, if you haven’t yet.
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I have to say that while I agree with Osvaldo in that the summations of the superhero genre’s origins and continued practices of white supremacy and racism (and sexism) are totally sound…the conclusion of the black superhero as a contrariety feels too defeatist, too fatalistic to justifiably apply in accordance to real world history and in the face of actual social change. Because at no point are the instances of progressive comic work, however inefficacious or vain in their attempts, ever brought up beyond the naming of a number of black heroes. Did Captain America: TRUTH or Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 or Icon or Ms. Marvel just not happen? The industry has a long, long way to go in order to achieve true diversity and by doing so it will most probably have to upend the very foundation of defining what a superhero is and what their stories should be about. But I can’t see that as an impossibility in today’s fandom. There are too many outspoken fans and too many ambitious creators, however small their steps are being taken in, who are working and commenting on the works to be more progressive and are conversing about race to write off the whole of the medium as immovably white supremacist.

To me, it speaks to a larger myopia of our nation’s history in general. Yes, we still have a nation built on slavery that currently sanctions government to target black Americans, but that’s being directly confronted with right now as we speak. We’ve been through segregation and we’ve been through Jim Crow and we’re still going through those injustices in some institutions, but is the suggestion at the heart of this essay speaking towards a larger resignation of combating a socially destructive industry rather than working to make it better?

I almost hate to do this, because it’s the ultimate cheese-card, but I’ve gotta quote Dr. King in this instance as I feel he sums up the situation perfectly:

“The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place. Failing to understand this as a normal process of development, some Negroes are falling into unjustified pessimism and despair. Focusing on the ultimate goal, and discovering it still distant, they declare no progress at all has been made.

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.”

Chasing Utopia

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Donovan Grant

It’s been a whirlwind week or two here at the Hooded Utilitarian for discussing race in comics. Building on earlier treatises about Black Panther’s exercises in assimilation narratives, Black Lightning’s equivocation on race and the X-Men turning black Noah Berlatsky asserted that the original Milestone Static comics kind of suck. J. Lamb argued that the superhero genre is fundamentally white supremacist, which makes most all black superhero characters generally useless.

As a black comics fan, this is abjectly depressing.

Everyone knows that black comic heroes hardly register as competition against white heroes for popularity. They barely exist. The fact that having one non-white costumed character on the big-screen is typically seen as an enormous boon for diversity is pretty demoralizing. When you add this to the fact that, as J Lamb wrote, non-white heroes function “within a paradigm defined by Western perspectives on violence and ideal beauty, in an industry dependent on White male consumer support .” I’m left feeling outright bamboozled.

The truth wouldn’t sting so much if these essays were written some time last year, but they just reaffirm what I had concluded after reading All-New Captain America #1. One of the most banal, vapid comics I’ve ever read, All-New Captain America#1 truly underlined the utter fecklessness of the black super hero. We have Sam Wilson, the first African American super hero in the role of Captain America with all of the variant covers and implied importance that the role suggests, adorned in the American flag boasting a triumphant reach to the utopic mountaintop, published within twelve days of the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted for shooting Michael Brown. The book’s lack of self-examination makes the juxtaposition painfully jarring.

It isn’t as though I had ambitious hopes for the new Black Cap book. But I honestly thought the idea of a black Captain America would mandate a minimal degree of content, especially with books like TRUTH in Marvel Comics’ rearview. In this series, we’re presented with pages of wintry, hoary dialogue where Sam Wilson briefly recalls the death of his parents whilst dodging gunfire for no reason. He battles Hydra and fights Batroc, the French stereotype in a typical superheroic battle that is requisite for a Captain America comic, I suppose. However the concept of a black Captain America and what that means to him or anyone is completely passed over for an adventure typical for white Steve Rogers. The issue eschews moments of reflection from Sam, opting instead to toss in empty critiques of America’s obesity problem and government corruption. Remarks by the villains on how Sam’s nothing more than a sidekick are carefully worded; the reader can infer racial bias if he or she feels like it, or ignore it if the idea of a villain being racist is too upsetting or unpleasant.

Exploring the importance of Sam’s new role should be a no-brainer. Why else was an irrelevant Joe Quesada ushered back onto the Colbert Report to promote the book? Comic readers understand diversity is often an empty gesture in comics, but this is “Captain America”. I had no real fantasies about Sam talking about systematic racism or making birther jokes, but that the book literally says nothing about how the figure representing America as its premiere superhero is now black reveals how ruefully optimistic I was when expecting comments on the black super hero’s existence from a white writer.

The disappointment isn’t just mine. Writer and Public Speaker Joseph Illidge wrote about the first issue of All-New Cap on his weekly column for Comic Book Resources, “The Mission”. When reading it, you get the sense that he’s holding back a deeper sense of disappointment than he’s letting on. Lines like “I’m not going to make this a polemic on non-Black writers writing Black characters, because the dialogue on that subject may very well be reaching its golden years. That said, I would have preferred a Black writer handling this book.” Reading that, I can’t help but see an image of eyes clenched shut and a setback induced sigh.

He mentions the HBO series “The Wire” and says how it was a show where white writers presented black characters with a strong sense of authenticity. Illidge labels “The Wire” as an exception, and reiterates that white writers will almost always miss out on the nuances of the black experience. In the 50+ to 75+ years of Marvel Comics’ history the company has been generally viewed as the more diverse universe when compared to DC. Surely at some point, in all that time, one of those characters managed a convincing portrayal of the black experience.

As J Lamb wrote, black heroes can only do so much within the confines of the white establishment they exist in. Luke Cage may get his origin story from wrongful imprisonment and Tuskegee-inspired experimentations, but he won’t spend his super hero career warring on the treatment of black people by white authority. But it’s with relief that I recall a series of issues during Stan Lee and John Romita’s run of The Amazing Spider-Man where the sole black supporting characters Joe Robertson and his son Randy interact with each other in ways which feel honest and timeless.

In Amazing Spider-Man issues #68-#70, Randy gets involved with campus protesters who want the school Exhibition Hall to be used as a low-rent dorm for students. It leads into a number of scenes where Joe and Randy try to convince each other what’s right for a black man to do in the modern world of 1969. Quotes from Robbie like “A protest is one thing! But, the damage you caused..!” resonate sharply with the critics of the Ferguson protestors. The same goes for Randy’s comments about militarism, which mirror protestor Barry Perkins comments about feeling triumphant while fighting back against the police during the Ferguson protests.

A few issues on, in #73, the creators include a scene in which Joe and Randy discuss college. Randy protests his social placement, exclaiming “What’s the point bein’ a success in Whitey’s World? Why must we play by his rules?” Joe (or Robbie as he’s often called) maintains that by only educating one’s self can one truly bring about societal change. Randy, looking out at the reader, asks his father to explain why, if that’s true, educated black men in America haven’t prospered. Robbie has no response — he’s interrupted by J. Jonah Jameson bursting into the room ranting about Spider-Man. As in Static #4, where Holocaust’s grievances with racial inequality evaporate the minute he tries to kill a white child in cold blood, the discussion on racial inequity is silenced when the white guy (and, thematically, the white hero) enter the room.

But whatever it’s limitations, the fact remains that the two black characters in this comic are having a realistic discussion about racial injustice and how to deal with it. Randy isn’t presented as a hothead who doesn’t know any better (there was another character named Josh for that during the Campus protest arc), and Joe isn’t shown as a stodgy relic of the old guard. Education is said to be key to enlightenment, but Randy questions the very system providing the education. The scene is interrupted by a white man, but it has no easy answers for a white audience.

But the Robertsons aren’t super heroes.

So what’s the point? If black super heroes can’t engage in this type of discussion in any meaningful way, what does it matter that black supporting characters do?

If the super hero genre has been inherently, historically white, it’s all the more important to note those moments when white creators and black creators attempt to relay the black experience. It’s also important to note where they go wrong and to examine how, despite their efforts, superheroes continue to present a narrative of whiteness. The few successes can perhaps serve as a template for the future, so we don’t have another All-New Captain America to suffer through. Those few scene with Joe and Randy suggest that meaningful diversity is possible in a superhero comic, however unattainable the whole of the genre appears to make it.

Superman and Atticus Finch

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Donovan Grant

This scene from Superman vol.2 #81 takes place near the end of the “Reign of the Supermen” storyline, which was the final third of the “Death and Return of Superman” saga from 1993. In it, the real Superman has returned and convinces Lois Lane of his identity by quoting the last thing he said to her before rushing off to his death at the hands of the villain Doomsday. First, though, he references his favorite film. While this serves as a piece of trivia for the character, it also reaffirms the intrinsic nature of Superman, and what he values most as a “Champion of the Oppressed”.

Superman’s status as a defender of the little people was immediately established in his first appearance in Actions Comics #1. The opening scene has Superman using his extraordinary powers to save a woman wrongly convicted of murder, and to put the real killer behind bars.

At every moment of opposition, Superman refuses to let anything stand in his way and barrels through the likes of an armed butler and steel doors in order to set things right, spouting one-liners like “It was your idea!” after meeting the butler’s dare to knock down a steel wall.

This adventure, the first of three in the title’s premiere issue, serves as the perfect debut for the Siegel and Shuster Superman. Righter of wrongs, defender of democracy, this Superman fought everything from drunk drivers to the Ku Klux Klan to Adolf Hitler himself, in one form or another. It’s interesting to me that the very first superhero, the one whom all others would take inspiration from, was in his origins almost totally divorced from the confines of the superhero genre as it’s come to be known. Bring up a costumed crime fighter to an average person who doesn’t read comics, and they’ll imagine someone in a goofy suit with powers stopping a bank robber with an equally goofy suit and powers, with a silly name to go along with it. Hardly ever does a comic hero’s adventures address social injustice, and when they do it’s always presented ostentatiously. In this context, Superman’s roots as a fighter for social justice have been obscured, though not lost entirely.

One story that focused on Superman pursuing social justice is the best episode of the 1996 Superman animated series. “The Late Mr. Kent”. In this story, Clark Kent is presumed dead after a car bomb goes off while he’s in the process of clearing a wrongly convicted man days before his execution.

While this episode is rightly lauded for its taut direction, film noir atmosphere and insight into the mind of Clark Kent as opposed to Superman (to reference an age-old debate), one thing that never gets brought up is the racial themes that are implicitly addressed. The man, Earnest Walker, is a low-level thief who has been on death row for five years for murdering a woman and is now scheduled for the gas chamber. He claims to the interviewing reporter, Clark Kent, that he’s never hurt anyone in his life, and found the victim’s necklace outside his door and fenced it, concluding that he was framed. Right away Clark senses a calm heartbeat and figures he’s telling the truth. When Clark begins to investigate, everyone from the police detective to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen maintain Walker’s guilt. Later when Clark researches Walker’s alibi of eating pizza at home, he learns that this went uninspected by his public defender.

Clark finds Walker’s alibi on the Pizza Delivery company’s record disk and drives to the governor’s mansion, at which point his car explodes. With a witness seeing his car fly into the ocean, the dilemma of exposing his identity to save Walker’s life comes into play. After flying by his adoptive parents’ home and secretly attending his own funeral as Superman, Clark decides to explain the situation to the governor, secret identity be damned.

Of course that doesn’t happen, and the revelation of who’s behind the conspiracy soon arrives. At the end of the episode however, Superman is too late to stop the governor from attending Walker’s execution, so he bursts through the chamber and sucks the gas out into the sky where it disperses. The attending crowd is initially horrified at Superman’s sudden act of random destruction.

This takes the Siegel and Shuster story one step further, proving Superman wrong when he said that only the governor could save the condemned woman. This Superman doesn’t loudly boast threats or crack jokes at his opponent’s expense. He maintains a quiet resolve. Earlier in the episode he admits to himself that he wanted the exoneration of Walker to be a victory for Clark Kent and not Superman, yet he came to his decision to reveal his identity on his own.

In this, Superman is Atticus Finch in animated form. Nowhere do we see any sort of vaudeville comedy act with the Clark Kent persona differentiating the Superman persona. Like Miss Maudie says of Atticus, Superman is the “same in his house as he is on the streets”. The same quiet dignity that is often ascribed to Atticus can be found in Clark’s patient inquiries to Detective Bowman and the Pizza worker. He seeks justice to the best of his ability, first through his job as a reporter, then as Superman with the knowledge that his double life will come to an end should he further pursue Walker’s freedom. Whereas Atticus at his best failed to win Tom Robinson his freedom and ultimately save his life, Superman at his best brought the slain woman’s killer to justice and cleared Walker’s name.

Ultimately the episode ends with nowhere near as substantial a statement on race as To Kill a Mockingbird did. As I said before, virtually no one has commented online or on the series DVDs about the fairly visible comment on wrongful arrests and executions. To have it addressed in a Superman cartoon couldn’t have been a complete accident however. Although I highly doubt it was done as a roundabout way to tie in to the reference of Superman’s favorite film in the comics at the time, the social justice angle of the episode is too explicit to ignore. While the character would see a return to his roots as a “Champion of the Oppressed” in the pages of Action Comics vol.2 written by Grant Morrison, I like the more measured approach taken here. It feels more resonant and important to have Superman saving wrongly convicted black guys rather than kicking rich businessmen into street lamps. It teaches us, however obliquely, to oppose racial bias and always try to help the less fortunate. It’s a way to have us learn from Superman’s example, in the same way that Atticus Finch had us, and Superman, learn from his example.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Donovan Grant