Slow, Cheerful Doom

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Madeloud, way back when.
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Bunkur
Nullify
Three Stars

One single seventy-eight minute ultra-slow doom metal track from Holland. It starts off with some clanging which resolves itself into the sound of a train starting up. You’re not on the engine though, nor even on the caboose. Instead you’re sitting on the track in the middle of a barren plane, listlessly whacking at one of the rails with a two by four. Occasionally, a massive, drooling derelict leans towards you from the platform above and spits out phlegm-pocked gibbets of indecipherable apocalyptic imagery. The PA system crackles with more and more insistent feedback, inspiring you to hit that rail harder and harder, and the derelict to try more insistently to cough up a lung.

This all goes on for some time.

Still going.

Stilllllll gooooinnnnggggg.

Stillllllllll gooooiinnnnnnngggggg.

The loudness of the feedback changes some; the shrieking varies a bit; and every so often there’s a sound like a rusty gate being dragged across a chalkboard. But basically, nothing happens until past the 45 minute mark. At that point, the percussion shifts from single thwacks to a series of leaden drum rolls, the feedback resolves itself into a recognizable tolling, and suddenly we’ve got something that almost seems like a groove.

That lasts for about ten minutes before the momentum frays and cracks into more insistent feedback drifting above lumbering percussion and the same hideous screaming. And then it goes on like that for a surprisingly long time again, till eventually the screaming and the bashing drop out, and you’re left with just the feedback chords, which phase in and out, finally suggesting a train again laboring off into the distance.

Nullify is one of the more extreme examples of doom, and as such it encapsulates the genre’s paradox. In some ways, doom, is absolutely the quintessence of metal — metal stripped down to its bleak, black, featureless soul. It almost isn’t even music anymore; just a giant, repetitive pummeling; a noise stripped of all meaning except pure, blind force. It’s the overwhelming soundtrack that lets you, the tiny hobbit, know that the great Sauron is upon you, moments before he crushes you beneath his heel.

And that’s why, at the same time, it ceases to be metal at all. Doom really does function almost as a soundtrack; background shoegazy ambience for a pleasantly Tolkienesque apocalypse. Being pummeled very, very slowly is, as it turns out, kind of restful. Almost despite itself, the nihilistic Nullify, promotes a spirit of peace and goodwill, as extreme metal fans and non-metal fans join together for 78 minutes, of slow nodding to the same non-beat.
nullify

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.”

Saga and Trauma

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Philip Smith

For those who have not yet encountered it, Saga is a science fiction fantasy series set against the backdrop of a long-running interplanetary war. The main characters, Alana and Marko, are deserters from opposing sides of the conflict who, with their daughter Hazel, find themselves pursued by bounty hunters and other interested parties. Saga is a comic about war, not only the actuality of war but the politics, and, perhaps most profoundly, the psychological and social reverberations of conflict. All of the main characters have, at some point before the story begins, witnessed and participated in acts of violence on the field of battle, and their lives have been shaped by the trauma they have lived through. This provides writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples with fertile ground to approach the question of life after war. What makes their approach unusual among comic creators is their attempt to make contact with readers who are either current or former members of the military. This means that in the letter pages of Saga the rubber meets the road as it were; Vaughan and Staples attempts to depict the effects of war can be measured against the experiences of their readership.

One way in which Vaughan and Staples approach the veteran is through the portrayal of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma, to use Roger Luckhurst’s words, ‘issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge.’ The traumatic moment is too overwhelming to be integrated with the individual’s understanding of the world. It is thus pushed beyond the bounds of accessible knowledge and becomes, instead, a kind of ghost event which repeatedly erupts into consciousness. The U.S. Department for Veteran Affairs assert that between 11 and 20% of US soldiers to return from Iraq and Afghanistan describe symptoms consistent with PTSD. This results not only from witnessing warfare but, for 23% of women veterans, from sexual assault.

Attempts to depict trauma in literature often employ repetition, symbolism, substitution, and temporal disjunction. Comics are a particularly effective medium for describing trauma, as has been demonstrated in works such as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Brian Bendis and Dave Finch’s Avengers: Disassembled. These comics leverage the simultaneity of the comics page, the overlapping of panels, and the capacity for the visual dimension of comics to repeat and distort images to communicate the experience of living with trauma.

One visual exploration of trauma in Saga appears in #27 where Marko, in the grips of an ‘F-spiral’ brought on by taking a bad batch of the drug Fadeaway, recalls accidentally killing a civilian. On the following page we are taken from Marko’s face as he realises what he has done backwards in time through a series of panels, first capturing first moments of violence, then his time with his former lover Gwendolyn, to more violence, being given a sword as an adolescent, learning to create fire, reading violent comics, to, in the lower right of the page a bleed of Marko the child with his face frozen in a grimace. The background for this final image is rough brush-strokes of orange which invade the panels of the images above, creating a blood-splash that runs across these multiple time periods. There is no speech assigned to the child Marko, but the last words from the splash page before, when the son of the civilian Marko killed calls ‘PAPA!’ certainly resonate. This montage of images suggests but denies temporal order, with time periods and identities symbolically informing one another.

Marko is not the only character whose life has been shaped by trauma. Prince Robot IV’s head is a television screen which involuntarily flashes images as they enter his consciousness. Vaughan has described the TV screen as ‘a way to visualise post-traumatic stress disorder’ (The Comics Alternative Jan 19 2015). This is introduced in #1, in which the image of a severed horn flashes onto his screen to indicate both a pun on sexual dysfunction, and a literal image from the bloody conflict in which Prince Robot IV was involved. He has physically returned from war, it seems, but the violence through which he has lived has made a psychological return impossible. Later, in #2, as he questions a soldier about Alana and Marko, the image of a man engulfed in flames suddenly flashes on his screen. These images serve as a panel within the diegesis, allowing the past to visually invade the present as traumatic memories burst into consciousness. This trauma is explored more explicitly in #12, which opens with Prince Robot IV in a war zone. He witnesses a medic dying from exposure to gas. The scene ends with him covered in blood. Subsequent panels show that this scene has been playing out on his screen as he sleeps. One is reminded of Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story in which the story of witnessing a man being killed by a landmine opens with the sentence ‘This one wakes me up’.

Vaughan also explores the social impact of war and strategies used to mitigate trauma. In #26 we learn that a would-be convenience store robber was a veteran and was carrying drugs. Marko asks why, to which he is told ‘Why would a veteran of the Wreath army be carrying Fadeaway?’ ‘Because he’s a veteran? Honestly, you’re probably one of the only vets who’s not using.’ The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence report drug dependency among soldiers is more than double that of civilians, and that this number is rising. This is Alana’s route of escape; during the comic she becomes a habitual drug user and the theory that she does so in order to manage trauma is made explicit in #26.

The depiction of trauma within the comic has been accompanied by an attempt to engage readers who have seen conflict. As early as #4 Vaughan asked in the letters column for any readers who were members of the military to get in touch. It was not necessarily straight-forward to assume that those who have been involved in a conflict would want to read about war and its aftermath, but Vaughan’s question yielded results. In response, #6 featured a partially redacted postcard from SSG David C in Guantanamo Bay which read ‘XXXX SAGA XXXX is XXXX the XXXX best.’

#7 saw a letter from SPC Allen P. who, at the time of writing, was an intelligence analyst on active duty in Afghanistan. He wrote ‘my job is to track down insurgents to capture/kill’. He reported that he bought his comics online. The fate of Allen P became a narrative within the letter pages; in #9 Vaughan reported that the comics sent to Allen P had been returned to them and urged the writer to get in touch. Allen P wrote again when he got back to San Antonio in #11 to assure Vaughan that he is well.

#7 also featured a letter from Ogden MF Curtis, a medium machine gunner who was also in Afghanistan. He received his comics by mail – a friend bought two copies of each issue and mailed him one. #9 included a letter from Airman First Class Taylor, who was deployed in Qatar and reported that he also acquired issues digitally. In #26 a survey of Saga readers showed that many listed Iraq and Afghanistan as countries they had visited, suggesting a high number of veteran and active duty readers.

Many of these readers hint at or explicitly confirm that they struggle with trauma. In #17 Dick L. from Prescott, Arizona wrote ‘I did pretty okay in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yeah, some guys got blown up, but I made it home in one piece … physically, at least.’ EMC Timothy Van Kleek, VSN aboard USS Elrod, whose letter appeared in #20 was more explicit:

‘I have been serving now for 15 years, and the country has been at war for most of it. I’m not on the front lines every day, but there isn’t an aspect of my life, of society as a whole, that the conflict hasn’t touched. I can feel it hanging over me constantly, like the Sword of Damocles. I may not always agree with it, and I certainly realize that what I do is a direct cause of the deaths of my fellow human beings (a fact that has caused me serious psychological trauma on more than one occasion), but I continue to do it.’

What is perhaps surprising, however, is that the aspect of Saga which seems to appeal most to readers with military backgrounds is not the depiction of trauma but the exploration of parenthood. EMC Timothy Van Kleek goes on ”Why? Many reasons. Seability. Pay. Skills training. But mostly because I have a family […] The trick, and perhaps this is why Alana is so bitter, is to not let it affect you negatively. I never tell my little girl that “I’m doing this thing I sometimes hate just to take care of you.” And I never bring my frustration or anger from work home with me.’

#7 featured a letter from Major Sam DeWind, a veteran of Iraq and an officer of 16 years service, who was, at his time of writing, based in South Korea ‘within the effective range of a couple thousand pieces of North Korean artillery’. Major DeWind’s sentiment rhymed with that of EMC Van Kleek ‘I’m really connecting with your protagonists and their struggles as parents in a perilous world […] during the periods of heightened provocations and tensions here, most notably the shelling of Yeonpeong Island in 2010, you learn something about who you are as a parent’. By contextualising war within their role as a care-giver, these veterans and active duty officers engage in what Robert Kraft calls ‘seeking the resonant influence of social support, redefining the event [and] finding meaning’. Family becomes a touch-stone, in other words, which allows them to partially mitigate the impact of trauma.

What these letters suggest is that the (albeit small) sample of veterans who read Saga not only empathise with the depiction of trauma in the comic, but that they also strongly identify with the coping methods which Vaughan and Staples portray. It is perhaps noteworthy that, while Saga engages explicitly with war and its aftermath, it does so in a fantasy setting, thereby applying a filter to war which mimics the substitution and symbolic engagement which characterizes the trauma narrative. The act of writing a letter may also employ a well-established means of addressing trauma through narrative. Saga is thus immanently relevant to a place and time when conflict damages the emotional lives of many, when men and women kill and die, and come home broken from conflicts overseas, when living with trauma is a reality for many, and the question of the place for veterans in society affects us all.

Please Don’t Hunt Me Down and Harass Me

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Things about your writing you never want to hear:

“It’s just disturbing.”

“No, no, this can’t be.”

“That’s a little terrifying to me.”

And my all-time least favorite:

“How are people not going to hunt him down and harass him when this book comes out?”

The book is On the Origin of Superheroes, due out next fall from the University of Iowa Press. You can probably guess it’s about the pre-history of the superhero genre, or, as the subtitle says: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1. So that’s literally everything up until Superman, including—and this is the disturbingly no no hunt-me-down terrifying part—the Ku Klux Klan.

But first a major thanks to Major Spoilers. The comic book podcast recently interviewed superhero scholar Dr. Peter Coogan, and the conversation centered on my article “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero.” It was published in England’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics in 2013, and its argument is part of the book: superheroes are descended from the KKK. Actually superheroes are descended from all kinds of things, and the Klan is just one of them, an idea Major Spoilers still found “hard to swallow.”

So did Peter Coogan when he first reviewed the essay, but he came around quickly, recommending that JGNC publish it: “This is one of those articles that once you’ve read it, it seems impossible to unthink it. I’m going to incorporate this idea into my teaching and my own work. I can’t believe I didn’t see this connection.”

Pete (we’ve since become friends) also warned me by email about his Major Spoilers conversation before it aired: “I wanted to give you a heads up because the hosts had a reaction that some of my students had, which is to feel uncomfortable about Superman having any genealogical relationship to the Klan. People just don’t like that idea.”

No, they really don’t. And I don’t either. The first time I introduced the notion in class, my students and I searched for every possible way to define superheroes in a way that excluded vigilantism. It’s hard to do. Secret identities, codenames, costumes, chest emblems, the KKK has them all. Pete tried too, arguing that superheroes only “supplement the police” and so “support legitimate authority” by “turning criminals over” after stopping them with “minimal level of violence necessary.”

And that does describe plenty of superheroes and proto-superheroes. The 70s Avengers even became a department of the U.S. government, each employee earning a tax-financed salary of $1,000 a day. As far as violence, the Lone Ranger’s creators Fran Striker and George W. Trendle were one of the first to lay down the law for their radio writers: “When he has to use guns, The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill, but rather only to disarm his opponent as painlessly as possible.”

But there’s a lot of violent gray zone. Martin Parker’s 1656 “Robbin Hood” didn’t kill, but he did merrily separate clergymen from their money and their testicles:

No monkes nor fryers he would let goe,

Without paying their fees;

If they thought much to be usd so,

Their stones he made them leese.

Worse, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko considers superheroes “moral avengers” who must kill criminals in order to champion “a clear understanding of right and wrong,” even if that means violating the “pervading legal moral” code. Pete would place Ditko’s homicidal Mr. A with the 70s Punisher, who, like lots of pulp heroes of the 30s, constitutes his own one-man legal system, marshal-judge-executioner.

The problem is that ill-defined term “vigilante.” Instead of a toggle switch—either you’re a lawful hero or you’re a lawless villain—I see a spectrum. Spider-Man, like most superheroes, swings somewhere in-between, chasing crooks while cops chase him. But whether gunning down the bad guys or leaving them wrapped with a bow in front of police headquarters, superheroes are independent operators. Which means when they disagree with the law and the government, they make their own judgments. Even star-spangled super soldier Captain America turned noble criminal rather than obey a law that violated his own sense of morality. And while Iron Man backed the Superhuman Registration Act, it wasn’t from blind allegiance to his government. He backed it because he personally thought it was right.

The KKK were the product of a very different Civil War, but their fictional characters in Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansmen and D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation play by the same rules. Pete read aloud their mission statement on Major Spoilers:

“To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal; to relieve the injured and the oppressed: to succour the suffering and unfortunate . . . “

Sounds like any superhero, doesn’t it? Until you get to the last phrase:

“and especially the widows and the orphans of Confederate Soldiers.”

“Hey,” said the hosts, “he tricked us!”

They eventually concluded that the difference between a hero and a villain is a matter of perspective, because probably even Lex Luthor thinks he’s helping the world. Pete also swooped to the rescue with Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a superhero’s “ontological vocation of humanization.” In other words, a superhero has a deep calling to become more fully human and to help others to do the same. Clearly the KKK’s attacks and lynchings fail that criterion.

Pete’s point sounds exactly right, and the hosts “sighed a little bit of relief,” but for me this is where the Klan parallel is most disturbing. Even though Major Spoilers acknowledged that I am “not advocating for the Klan” and that I am “not saying superheroes are racist and fascistic,” Dixon and Griffith didn’t consider the KKK racist and fascistic either. Unlike Lex Luthor, who knowingly turns others into his tools and so is not helping them become more fully human, the Klan did not consider African Americans to be human. From Dixon and Griffith’s grotesque perspective, ex-slaves were subhuman obstacles preventing white Southerners from actualizing themselves. So in the most perverse reading of Freire possible, the KKK fixed the problem. In their minds and in the minds of their fans, they were superheroes.

Which is to say, yeah, please don’t hunt me down and harass me when the book comes out.

Figures of Empire: On the Impossibility of Superhero Diversity

Posted on May 12, 2015 by James Lamb

“But before I be a servant in White heaven, I will rule in a Black hell.” Killer Mike, “God in the Building”, I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind, Vol. II

Promotional poster for Belle, directed by Amma Asante

Early in Amma Asante’s socially conscious romance Belle (2013), audiences spy a British nobleman walk with purpose through a lower class section of an unnamed port city. Humid, overpopulated streets obstruct the uniformed Royal Navy Captain’s passage. The nobleman enters an attic dimly lit by a small window and sparse candles where a middle aged Black woman waits for him. Dressed in everyday homespun and a worn apron she stands alongside a quiet tan child with brilliant brown eyes. Prepared and dressed by the matronly woman, the silent girl holds a simple doll and stands impassive, unmoving, and observant; her simple hairpin struggles to contain an infinite cascade of light sienna locks. After the untimely death of her mother, the nobleman plans to whisk the little brown girl away to his family, to her birthright. To privilege. The nobleman kneels, and offers chocolate. Reluctantly, the girl accepts. The year is 1769.

“How lovely she is,” the nobleman exclaims softly. “Similar to her mother.”

It’s easy to regard the nobleman’s plan as obvious and uncontroversial given today’s standards. Leaving for the British West Indies on a navigational expedition, the Captain intends to leave the child in the care of his uncle, William Murray, 1^st Earl of Mansfield, and Lord Chief Justice of the British Empire. With family. However, late Eighteenth Century Great Britain revolves around its slave economy; colonial procurements replete with agricultural wealth, exotic goods and slave labor revolutionized British high society. Propriety, refinement, culture — these were the watchwords of an Enlightenment where civilized humans were encouraged to exert the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters”, according to Immanuel Kant [i]. Kant and his enlightened contemporaries judged persons of African descent incapable of higher order reasoning; animalistic Blacks offer stark counterpoint to virtuous White humanity. British nobles viewed Africans as subhuman beasts, unfit for culture, education, or reason. As slaves, Africans lacked any capacity for aesthetic sensibility, according to Enlightenment thinking. Slaves were property, and property does not think, feel, or reason. Given this, the nobleman’s request runs afoul of his homeland’s strict social order; a global empire that demanded unfree labor for economic stability could not conceptualize Black humanity. One locates diasporic Blackness during this period on balance sheets, cargo manifests, and maritime rapists’ salacious reports, not within British mansions’ gilded contours.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782),
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Lord and Lady Mansfield reservedly accept the little brown girl, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, into Kenwood House, a massive estate in Hampshire Village, London. Left alone soon after her arrival, Dido walks among Kenwood House’s massive portraits, and through her wary brown eyes viewers spy a visual synthesis of Enlightenment individualism and slavery apology. Painted by preeminent portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, a founder and inaugural president of the Royal Academy, exhibited at the Academy in 1783 as Portrait of a Nobleman,[ii] and housed today within the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782) welcomes all to eighteenth century British machismo.

Stanhope, encased in unblemished armor, stands upon an active and sweltering Caribbean battlefield, sword in hand, both preternaturally calm and oddly petrified. An adoring brown youth holds Stanhope’s plumed helmet and gazes above, awestruck at his master’s magnificence. Reynolds paints Stanhope as desperate to impress all with martial skill earned in the slick red mud of the courageous and the damned but enhanced in an elite art studio; this oil-on-canvas press release asserts virility to contemporaries and whispers vulnerability to posterities. Stanhope, barely a man, plays at war. [iii] Below foreboding clouds Stanhope’s pale, effete visage peers above glistening golden armor; his pointed, boyish chin, hairless face, and perfect, Proactiv complexion force modern viewers to regard English nobility as special, refined, comfortable, free from want or struggle. Contrast this against the adolescent Servant shoved against Stanhope’s left, against guileless brown smiles trained by the lash, against another Marrakech rich in human capital but poor in civic defense, and Stanhope’s serenity approaches incredulity. Under Reynolds’ direction Stanhope does not stand with us, but above us; there’s no sweat upon his ghostly brow, no dirt under his manicured fingernails, no blood on his thin steel blade.

Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page. (1725)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

One can easily imagine Reynolds’ conversation with Stanhope upon completion of this commissioned work; the abject flattery, the direct reassurances, the stroked ego, the payment for service rendered. With this portrait Reynolds both thunders Anglo-Saxon dominance and whispers sly rejection of that fantasy, a noble veteran revealed as farce without his helmet. Modern criticism of this object centers on the anonymous Black Servant whose illiberal assistance literally frames Stanhope’s polish. Similarly, in Belle, Dido’s inarticulate frustrations with her uncle’s desire for a commissioned portrait of herself and her cousin Elizabeth Murray is centered on her silent disapproval of the dark servant shadows who frame British portraits during this era, contrasting White civility with Black servitude. Paintings like Bartholomew Dandridge’s A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page (1725) and Arthur Devis’ John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William (between 1754-1756) typify Enlightenment prejudice against Black personhood; baby-faced background slaves assist blanched central figures who thoroughly enrapture the pitiful anonymous with sophisticated British grandeur.

With dark, curly hair and infantile wonder, the Servant in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant anticipates every cute Black child ever seen in Western popular culture, from Keisha Knight Pulliam and Raven-Symoné on The Cosby Show to Noah Gray-Cabey on Heroes and Marsai Martin on Black-ish. Cherubic and brown, servile and friendly, these children of the darker nation deflect others’ revulsion toward their melanin with youthful gaiety and infectious innocence, and Reynolds co-opts this to both parallel the untested manhood on display and show Stanhope’s privileged freedom as natural and moral.

The peculiar institution’s American apologists often invoked the artless Sambo stereotype to justify their generational plunder of Black labor, wealth, and self-determination; it is easier to justify the transatlantic slave trade’s depraved criminality when we consider those reduced to beasts of burden emotionally underdeveloped and cognitively deficient.

“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. … I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV (1784)

Arthur Devis, John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William. (between 1754 and 1756)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Art historians speculate wildly about the Servant’s life, and the lives he represents. Whether colonial acquisition or indentured employee, the Servant signifies Great Britain’s longtime human trafficking and exploitation; modern viewers experience Stanhope as majestic, proud, and free, largely because history’s judgments identify the barbarous subjugation and domestic terrorism behind the Servant’s awestruck gaze. Mouth agape, eyes wide, the angelic brown face registers wonder at a life without whips and chains and commands and fear; a life lived free. Liberated. The Servant illustrates lifelong submission to chattel slavery; Reynolds’ otherwise unmoving portrait appropriates the systemic plunder of Black bodies and the bureaucratic corruption of Black labor to establish and augment Western global hegemony. White dominance. Notice the intricate detail attended this secondary, unnamed, background figure. Regard the Servant’s cowering awkwardness and unsure social position, both justified by the coerced assistance he renders. Compositionally, the patient attendant holds the viewer’s gaze and conscripts recognition of the static central figure. The Servant’s immaterial, indiscernible, questionable humanity fascinates, today more than yesteryear; because the Servant is inferior, Stanhope is superior. Because Blackness cannot equal freedom, Whiteness approximates divinity.

Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers. Man and Superman.

The intended narrative of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant operates as an eighteenth century White male power fantasy. Modern superhero comic media fans easily recognize this dynamic; mainstream superhero comic companies publish cartoonish variations on this worn, well-traveled groove ad nauseam to meet monthly operating expenses. Whether as friendly bystanders, costumed sidekicks, everyday henchmen or caped vigilantes, race and gender minorities exist in superhero comic media to validate and define the normative Whiteness central to the genre’s narratives.

Take Captain America: The Winter Soldier: early in the film we watch an athletic Black man sprint effortlessly around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Wearing exercise shorts and a shapeless grey sweatshirt on a crisp spring day, viewers indulge athleticism, defined. Landscape shots capture republican majesty at the Washington Memorial and the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly a blurry blonde humanoid whizzes past, and frenetic limbs pump faster than the naked eye can detect. Comical frustration darkens Grey Sweatshirt’s expression: once, twice, thrice, the splendid blond beast laps the public track while Grey Sweatshirt bellows disbelief at his strained cardiovascular system’s futile effort. Played for laughs, this scene introduces viewers to Sam Wilson, the cheerful brother with an easy smile and Marvin Gaye on standby who extends friendship to a man living outside his era and outside his war, and who reminds viewers of the extra-normal abilities experimental industrial steroid injections granted this Greatest Generation throwback. “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the Earth,” Jesus Christ teaches in Matthew 5:5; Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The First Avenger imagined that inheritance as tactical perfection augmented with avant-garde biochemistry and electroshock therapy. Doubtless, the screenwriters and producers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier applaud their intentional rejection of Black male stereotype, but to watch Steve Rogers literally run circles around Sam Wilson establishes a questionable on-screen dynamic that complicates this superheroic bromance at conception. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, viewers experience the White protagonist’s superior physicality in contrast to a Black inferior, Charles Stanhope on creatine painted by Industrial Light and Magic. All this, to deify military service.

Captain America and the Falcon. Photo Credit: Zade Rosenthal ©Marvel 2014

Superhero comics employ violence to establish justice. To ensure domestic tranquility in Gotham or Hell’s Kitchen or Space Sector 2814 jackbooted vigilantes adorned in colorful, form-fitting leather and Kevlar ground and pound the criminally confused outside all legal authority. The superhero concept appeals to the adolescent desire to compel order through brute force, to define peace as the absence of credible threats. No matter how intellectually gifted or technologically adept or physically remarkable or preternaturally perceptive or unabashedly godlike, superheroes use violence to solve problems, foreign and domestic. The depictions of Charles Stanhope and Steve Rogers mentioned above show unsophisticated, immature White males who wrest manhood from their military experience, who telegraph masculinity by glorifying war. Yesterday’s crude colonial plantations and human trafficking syndicates drained profit from a world order enforced by eighteenth century British naval expenditures; today’s multinational technology conglomerates and global financial institutions wring fortunes from American guaranteed global stability. In this unipolar world, where the American hegemon assumes responsibility for political and economic stability from Minneapolis to Medina, from Seattle to Shenzhen, from Albuquerque to Addis Ababa, superhero action figures like Captain America argue the Athenian position in the Melian Dialogue; Rogers’ very existence symbolizes undisputed American technological supremacy. Of course, Rogers is not Cable, or Magog, or the Punisher, all logical extensions of the super-soldier concept updated for modern, antiheroic eras where callous scribes and tragedy pornographers painted scarlet horror in rectangular comic art panels while illiterate dealers and nihilistic gangsters sprayed arterial abyss on letterboxed nightly news broadcasts. Frozen in the cheery bombast of the last just war, Rogers’ outdated moral binary and Franklin Roosevelt phonetics convince comic fans that the extra-normal abilities he exploits service peace; given this conceit, we watch Rogers conscript Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov into an ad-hoc terrorist conspiracy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier to incapacitate and scrap three floating, flying aircraft carriers authorized by American policymakers, funded by American taxpayers, staffed by untold hundreds, worth untold billions, because he alone determines the strategic advantage of perpetually aloft gunboat diplomacy counterproductive, an existential threat to world peace. The floating nuclear version at sea today does not enter the debate.

)Su•per•he•ro (soo’per hîr’o) n., pl. – roes. n., pl. – roes. A heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers, extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, character, powers, or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generically distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret. superheroic, adj. Also super hero, super-hero. — Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, ©2006, pg. 30

Cyclops & Wolverine dismantle Sentinels. Comic unknown.

The superhero is a deceptively simple concept. The reactionary militarism, the thoughtless violence, the binary morality, the unquestioned righteousness, the colonial sociology — all of the superhero genre’s boyish charm reinforces the Western imperialist impulse to control, to order, to rule. The superhero genre does not promote fantastic Western imperialism alone: science fiction, espionage fiction, and medieval fantasy win popular culture’s hearts and minds with similar power fantasies designed for adolescent White straight males, sold globally. Still, every Wednesday, carrot-topped Caucasian perfection dons skintight primary colored lycra to unleash energetic ruby strobes at giant purple killing machines crafted in man’s image while a hairy Crossfit junkie with indestructible metal claws hacks and slashes fundamentalist cannon fodder amid blasé exurban spectators numb to repetitive superhuman brawls but unnerved all the same. Every Wednesday, superheroes seduce the innocent with disturbing commentaries on justifiable public conflict, acceptable casualty rates, and unspoken racial hierarchies. Superheroes are White male power fantasy distilled to narcotic purity, blue magic on white cardboard wrapped in clear polypropylene to show variant cover art. Consider Jim Lee as Frank Lucas.

Peter Coogan, founder and director of the Institute for Comics Studies, defines the superhero through a narrative triumvirate: selfless mission, amazing ability, and secret identity, all symbolized by a special moniker and distinct costume that elevates the new extra-normal persona to cultural iconography. The Batman’s elementary school ambition to channel elemental fear and unspeakable tragedy into a personal war on crime impacts everything about the character, from his costume’s shadowy color swatches, morose blue-grey later rendered midnight black, to his scalloped cape’s predatory motion silhouette, to his variable but always recognized centrally placed Bat-logo. Like Michael Jordan, we recognize Batman in profile with nothing more than dark cranial contours as evidence. Everything Bat-related identifies with a central simplicity: punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy. †Law and order, uncomplicated.

“Despite what you may have heard, Superman is not a complicated character. He’s an extremely simple idea: A man with the power to do anything who always does the right thing. That’s it.” — Chris Sims, “Ask Chris #171: The Superman (Well, Supermen) of Marvel”, ComicsAlliance.com

This is the problem. For nearly eighty years, superhero comics etched the world in bright Crayolas, without emotional nuance or political complexity, to display imagined realms where the mundane and the fantastic coexist without incident. When the soapy X-Men adventure in the Savage Land’s meteorological impossibility, when the stately Justice League intercept planetary conquerors unfazed by Earth’s gravity or thermonuclear weapons, everyone drawn and colored and inked and lettered in panel conducts themselves in accordance or in conflict with mainstream, middle-class White American social ethics. The ‘right thing’ Chris Sims believes Superman insists upon remains a moral good defined in panel by rural Midwestern Protestants, and the superhero concept’s resultant normative Whiteness enjoys broad, international appeal. Most superhero comic fans regardless of race or creed or national origin judge Superman and his compatriots as truth and justice’s universal avatars, Golden Rule morality made myth. Because of this fantasy, fanboys and fangirls of color imagine themselves as living Kryptonian solar batteries who ignite still, unmoving skies with chaotic blue flame as they race through lower Earth atmosphere trailing angry pyrotechnics and leaking ozone while millions watch breathlessly, transfixed at an ungodly spectacle where petrified cosmonauts expect certain death after heat shield failure during reentry only to meet a scarlet and navy blue blur branded with hope’s own chevron in the upper stratosphere. The darker nation also wants to play the hero; they too, wish to be redeemed.

Make no mistake: this is a redemption song. The desire for full inclusion in superhero comics both behind the cowl and before the camera by patient progressive integrationists yearns to humanize those dismissed as unfit for heroism by superhero comics’ irrepressible identity indifference. Race, gender, sexual orientation: hashtag activists and comic bloggers clamor for more representation of all these political identities in superhero comics, television, and movies; whether straight-to-Blu-Ray animation or tentpole summer blockbuster, non-traditional superhero comic fans cajole, threaten, and shame mainstream superhero content creators into diversifying superhero and villain properties. Everything’s appropriate — racebending established heroes when franchises jump from print to live-action, with unconventional character origins that discard existing character history, cross-racially casting superhero protagonist roles, even cowl-rental, the shift of established major superhero properties from White male classics to new-age minority sidekicks — so long as nerds of color and their progeny revel in superheroes who approximate their phenotypes. I charge that this desire for inclusion — this need to see oneself in the corporate culture one consumes — is not ethical. When applied to the superhero concept, this inclusion is not possible.

Coogan’s definition is incomplete. To craft a superhero, add Whiteness to the mission-powers-identity troika; coat liquid latex and electrostrictive polymers onto the White body, code the costume design with identifiable brand marketing, apply catchy appellation. Done. Artistic license and open casting calls nurture false hope among nerds of color desperate for private sector social approval; these patient progressive integrationists forget that characters who wear their faces but forget their cultures do not promote their interests. These nerds of color also neglect history. Professor Derrick Bell, civil rights lawyer and intellectual progenitor of critical race theory in legal scholarship, wrote in the landmark “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation” (Yale Law Journal, 1976) on the widening interest divergence between Black parents who sought high quality educational opportunities for their children, and the civil rights attorneys who fought to dismantle state-sponsored Jim Crow segregation with legal remedies applied to public education. For the lawyers, the grand revolutionary movement to desegregate American classrooms secured with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS (No. 1.) the right to ensure “equal educational opportunity” in government funded public schools. Equal educational opportunity meant integrated schools, because for the lawyers only racial integration could guarantee Black children and White children received identical instruction. A generation after Brown, when public school districts needed forced busing to achieve numerical racial parity and angry middle and lower income White parents took to the streets to protest social experiments that designated their children test subjects, national civil rights attorneys from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund held firm to the conviction that integration alone prophesied American race relation nirvana. This ignored, in Bell’s view, mounting social science evidence that chronicled forced busing-imposed student difficulties, class discrepancies in American integration experiences, and the ethical quandaries presented when civil rights attorneys routinely disregard or rebuff client perspectives.

An ahistorical pretense argues that integration presents the only salvation for an American experiment plagued in infancy by torture, rape, and genocide; chattel slavery and rampant land theft are not ‘birth-defects’, to paraphrase Condoleezza Rice, but cornerstones. From bondage on, Black political thought’s enduring fault line debates separation versus integration; from the titanic Frederick Douglass (“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”) through Booker T. Washington’s glad-handing industriousness and W.E.B. Du Bois’ pan-African intellectualism, through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham fury at White liberalism and Malcolm X’s snide disdain for White patriotism, through the uneasy synthesis of partisanship and revolution from post-Civil Rights Movement Black elected officials and the criminalized irrelevance of Black Nationalist counterculturalists, the darker nation continually questions American citizenship’s lofty promises and David Simon realities. Casting integration as the sole pathway to postracial Eden in public education, superhero comics, or any other grand American tradition substitutes race visibility for race uplift, and confuses simple appearance with documented progress.

“To sum up this: theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 4, No. 3, The Courts and the Negro Separate School. (July 1935), pp. 328-335

Fevered battles over forced busing ripped bare Northern antagonism toward civil rights advocacy; center-left White parents who nominally tolerated nonviolent civil rights activism responded to federal desegregation orders with the same massive resistance found below the Mason-Dixon. Casting the neighborhood elementary school as a ëWhite space‘ where John Q. Public easily sidesteps racial difference strikes cosmopolitan citizens today as antiquated, backward logic, like Salem’s witch trial groupthink or Cold War domino theory. Still, nerds of color walk behind enemy lines every Wednesday to stay abreast of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers or Geoff Johns’ Justice League; for many the local comic book shop’s mainstream customer base mirrors the standard-issue suburbia within biweekly superhero stories. Progressive integrationist comic fans poorly navigate the irony around which Disney and Time Warner craft business models: regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, superhero comic fans wholly accept the antebellum identity politics of both the superhero concept and its target audience. Diversity does not sell superhero comics — nostalgia does, and this nostalgia hearkens back to postwar America, with its effervescent, bubbly nationalism, cleanly delineated racial hierarchies and obvious, unquestioned gender roles, even in private. For this reason, superheroes maintain their appeal to adolescent straight White males; everything in superhero narratives is designed to make Whiteness comfortable, to intensify the power of the privileged. Even nerds of color marvel when Captain America orders Sam Wilson to serve as his personal air support; computer generated scenes where Anthony Mackie’s sepia tones flit across Washington airspace spraying submachinegun rounds at unmasked Hydra agents while the winged brother evades rocket propelled death with hairpin banks at upchuck velocities satiate those who devolve superhero social justice into a Black actor’s screen time. Progress, for the superhero integrationist, requires nothing more than a regular census: survey the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender superheroes, and count the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender writers, artists, inkers, editors, and executives within the superhero comic industry. Tweet results with practiced outrage. Rinse and repeat. Qualitative analysis of minority portrayals violates the chirpy bluebird’s one-hundred forty character limit and does not engender comment.

Sam Wilson as The Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, in
Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The only reputable progressive position on the superhero advises abandonment. The superhero concept’s narrow simplicity cannot possibly render human difference with substance or nuance. Corporate superhero fiction cannot dramatize the adrenal fear and visceral loathing police officers’ feel during traffic stops, sidewalk detentions, and no-knock warrants any more than it can judge the abject terror and furious anger the darker nation conveys through candlelight vigils, ‘I Can’t Breathe’ t-shirts, and Chris Rock’s unfunny selfies. “America begins in Black plunder and White democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor of The Atlantic, in his landmark feature “The Case for Reparations“; in contrast, superhero comics lack all political theory more intricate than the Powell Doctrine. When Noah Berlatsky, writing at the Hooded Utilitarian on Static Shock, notes that the easy synergy between superheroes and law enforcement transforms Black superheroes into unwitting avatars for a modern mass incarceration state that translates public criminal justice into prison conglomerate profit, he should recall that urban post-Civil Rights Black elected officials championed draconian drug possession sentences with tough-on-crime rhetoric usually associated with Richard Nixon or Rudy Giuliani.

According to Yale Law School professor James Foreman, Jr., incarceration rates from majority Black cities “mirror the rates of other cities where African Americans have substantially less control over sentencing policy.” Black people, in the pulpit or the ballot box, can support robust and militaristic law enforcement initiatives deployed against their communities without tension, and those members of the darker nation with the financial stability and leisure time to engage electoral politics represent Black America’s most established, integrated, and conservative elements. What patience can veterans of color have with the dope pushers and domestic batterers and petty thieves and flamboyant pimps within their communities whose criminal enterprises depress already anemic property values? These old-school race men, with military precision and patriarchal inflexibility, assume the uplift of the race as personal responsibility; taught to kill by a country that hates them, taught to overcome prejudice with hard work and determination, the Black veterans who constitute the core of the Twentieth Century Black middle class personify bootstrap conservatism to chase economic inclusion, not revolutionary overthrow. This Black middle class, perennially called to account for a dysfunctional, systemically impoverished Black underclass left uneducated by dropout factory public education and unemployed by Silicon Valley’s outsourced manufacturing, loses its patience with both neighborhood criminals and municipal White political structures who concentrate drugs and violence and death in urban communities. Given this, Black elected officials these men chased the same militarized solutions to combat rising crime statistics during the 1970’s and 1980’s as their White counterparts, and municipal city councils stocked with pious Morehouse men and holy Spelman sisters proved no sturdy bulwark against dreaded million dollar blocks, no matter their local political success or state budget dependence. Unfortunately, when mostly non-Black superhero comic writers depict Black superheroes that support punitive carceral state solutions for minority criminality, no one references this history.

The problem here involves the superhero concept’s inability to envision non-White straight males as fully realized humans. The agony and the ecstasy of Black cultural and political complexity — from Jesse Jackson’s frustrated expletives in July 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible moral centrism to Jesse Jackson’s joyous tears in November 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible electoral victory — overloads the superhero’s straightforward make-believe. Black Panther, Black Lightning, Bishop, Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern, John Stewart, and U.S. War Machine: different power sets, different publishers, indistinguishable skin tones and identical personalities, all inflexible, assertive, upstanding old-school race men known more for quiet dignity than solo bombast, these characters present White male metahumanity shellacked with a moist black paste of burnt cork and water. I suggest that culturally authentic minority superheroes do not and cannot exist: all people of color receive from the superhero publishing industry replaces authentic and innovative characterization with race and gender drag. Sam Wilson’s instructive: these empowered Negro automatons unmask as superhero comics’ eternal sidekicks; they highlight White heroism’s astonishing brilliance and sacrifice race minority self-respect. This uncontroversial nostalgia justifies Black superhero inclusion in nearly every mainstream superhero team of note and illustrates an antiquated genre’s authorial recognition that the superhero concept cannot handle human difference. Every Black superhero is Will Smith drained of charisma, Denzel Washington without sex appeal, Barack Obama absent Michelle Robinson. All the same, all forgettable, all inhuman. Anonymous, nameless, Black. Other.

Michelle Rodriguez, captured by TMZ.com

When actress Michelle Rodriguez bellows “Stop stealing all the White people’s superheroes!” to a TMZ reporter, the initial backlash from superhero integrationists used digital condemnation and public shame to exact mob justice; within a day, Rodriguez’s pseudo-apology explained her disdain for superhero cross-racial casting as a desire to find multiple cultural mythologies Hollywood representation. Her critics remain unconvinced. I believe their skepticism toward Rodriguez’s perspective stems from the fact that everyone interested in posthuman and/or augmented, empowered human fiction in America today starts with seventy-seven years of superhero comic history as their main reference point. Imagine a future without the superhero. Imagine a future without the notion of a single person who can direct world history’s meandering river with unsanctioned activities that violate state sovereignty and ignore the rule of law. Imagine a future without the White male power fantasies that differentiate the superhero from the Gilded Age’s mystery men or Graham Greene’s quiet American. Imagine tomorrow as cosmopolitan cacophony, as an urban jungle gym where Asian Americans both support and oppose affirmative action, where Black Americans both support and oppose gay marriage, where gay men both support and oppose immigration reform, where Mexican Americans both support and oppose contraceptive mandates, where women both support and oppose religious freedom. Imagine tomorrow as remotely affected by today, and acknowledge that the superhero outlived his usefulness. The anachronistic Superman does not speak to individual aspiration, but to herd anxiety. Superhero films today comment upon unlimited power’s impossible paradox; Superman and his contemporaries personalize the unipolar American hegemon’s failure to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility with Call of Duty martial advances at ready disposal via Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin. The superhero concept dramatizes White male power fantasy to express virile manhood through war and conquest; these figures of empire police unruly colonies populated with indiscernible aliens untouched by rational thought and Judeo-Christian order. Plot manifests from variable pacification success rates. The superhero’s great power lacks all sense of responsibility; it simply persists, unmoored from anything more complicated or complex than ‘punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy’.

Adding melanin is no cure for unchecked militarism, fictional or otherwise; two Black Secretaries of State advised President George W. Bush before and during the Iraqi quagmire. Only rank racial tribalism exalts the need to view one’s own face in the corporate culture one consumes; this ethnocentrism leaves no room for critical examination of the superhero concept itself. Diversity initiatives in superhero comics fail because the superhero concept rejects human difference; every recent example of misogynistic cover art or fandom backlash against superhero cross-racial casting stems from general superhero creator/audience acceptance of the White male power fantasy as natural and normal. The term ‘Black superhero’ identifies a logical impossibility with a pejorative. Nerds of color who refuse to discard superheroes and wrangle superhero narratives with alternative reading practices to fit their politics and complement their group identities deny reality — there is simply no way to cast the Servant as Charles Stanhope.

Stanhope’s ethereal polish and command posture require chattel subjection. Reynolds’ portrait depicts a British nobility fueled by tortured adoration from broken children whose urgent pleas for respite from arduous toil and impassioned prayers for return to beloved parents go unheeded and unnoticed. The superhero is not a natural evolutionary step for reality or fiction; it’s a seventy-seven year old straight White male privilege delivery system. Those who believe superhero media’s reactionary excesses can be soothed with increased race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity wish only to substitute themselves for their oppressors, and combat nothing.

JLA: Liberty and Justice (2003), written by Paul Dini with art from Alex Ross

The DC Comics’ art from painter Alex Ross outlines the superhero concept today: in his JLA: Liberty and Justice, written by DC Comics’ animation legend Paul Dini, the Justice League characters feature smooth bulk and rounded brawn, adult muscle paired with primary colored paunches. Men are active but middle-aged, steely and determined, without care for clogged arteries or hypertension. Perfectly shaven with Brylcreem pomade and hip-hugging leotards, Ross’ work recalls Norman Rockwell’s America, where respectable Americans consumed conspicuously and segregation preserved decent communities. Like Matthew Weiner’s heralded Mad Men, Ross transports the audience to a postwar American economic success defended by flinty men with squinty eyes and absolutist ethics while readers enjoy safe genre futurism on every page. Batman’s cowl, tight enough to transmit facial expressions, locks into a perpetual scowl as he deconstructs villainous master plans. Ross’ Batman stands pudgy, comfortable; his grey contours testify to expense account living replete with three-martini lunches. Witness nostalgia as comic art, before Alcoholics Anonymous and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wrecked the party.

Unknown artist, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray (1779).
Scone Palace, Perthshire, Scotland.

Ross’ antiquated Establishment action figures present the superhero self-image integrationists accept, defend, and then beg to subvert on the margins. It’s not enough. Brown palette swaps that color over George Reeves and Adam West recreations prove meager reparation for superhero comic whitewashing. This too, ignores history. Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray appear together in a portrait from the late Eighteenth Century, friendly, enigmatic, and equal — to a point. Dido, in a Indian turban plumed with ostrich feathers and exotic silver satin, enters posterity an exaggerated Oriental, a perpetual foreigner totally without definition unless visually justified by non-Western affectations. The unknown portraitist does not imagine smiling brown Dido, a free English woman born from British imperialism, with the prim reverence afforded her cousin and countless other noble British ladies. The skin still matters. Today, art historians’ alternative analysis of Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant interrogates the time-lost lives behind servile brown eyes, and speculates that this tortured gaze scans something past Stanhope’s shiny armor. Perhaps the Servant spies tomorrow, Jubilee, a new birth of freedom. We can never know. To my mind, Reynolds’ portrait allows superhero integrationists a prophetic metaphor: however difficult, look past the intended narrative of one’s age. Imagine tomorrow. Envision a world where your humanity depicts more than a detailed frame for someone else’s daydream.

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[i] “An Answer to the Question: ëWhat is Enlightenment?'” — Immanuel Kant, 30 September 1784

[ii] Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014

[iii]Stanhope sat for Reynolds two years following his regiment’s deployment to Jamaica to battle back French incursion that threatened Britain’s largest slave colony. — Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014

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The entire roundtable on Can There Be a Black Superhero? is here.

An Open Letter to Art Spiegelman

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Françoise Mouly, Art Spiegelman, Gerard Biard (CH editor in chief), Jean-Baptiste Thoret (CH film critic) and Salman Rushdie at the PEN awards. (photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images)

Dear Mr. Spiegelman,

I’m addressing this to you, not as an empty rhetorical ploy, but to emphasize the fact that what I’m writing is personal. It always is. I’ve seen a lot of impassioned opinions about Charlie Hebdo offered in the guise of irrefutable pronouncements. I’m tired of reading cultural commentary from writers who act as though the objective truth fell, fully formed, from the sky and into their laps, the function of their words being to simply describe it. Their strange bloodless certainty, the pretense of personal remove, is central to comics commentary and reporting today, and at best it’s a farce.

There is no such thing as objective criticism or journalism; like comics, these forms are always, first and finally, an extension of the self. That’s perfectly natural, but it’s also limiting. What drew me to comics, and what I admire about your work, is its ability to explore and even exploit these limitations, locating truth (or something close to it, anyway) in the very process of acknowledging the obstacles we face as we try to perceive it.

I found myself thinking about subjectivity as I read Laura Miller’s piece about how you rallied comics luminaries to stand in for the six writers who dropped out of the PEN gala in protest of the organization’s plan to honor Charlie Hebdo. Which first of all, let’s face it, was sort of a dick move not unlike crossing a picket line. In one corner of Miller’s story we have you, Alison Bechdel and Neil Gaiman—the trifecta of literary comics—serving as champions of free speech and protectors of a maligned art form; in the other we have hundreds of unnamed writer types hissing like they’re something less than human at the survivor of a mass shooting. It’s a classic story of heroes versus villains. The headline, a quote from Gaiman, frames the faceless hoard’s take as pro-murder: “For fuck’s sake, they drew somebody and they shot them, and you don’t get to do that.” The implication is of course that the PEN protestors think that you should ~totally~ get to do that.

(Of course they don’t think that. Literally no one does.)

I’m not writing in an effort to change your mind about what I obviously regard as a racist publication, or to debate the validity of that PEN award, though it straight up makes me want to barf. I disagree with your opinion, but I also respect its right to exist. I have even tried to make room in my heart for the possibility that there’s some truth in what you say. While I find myself skeptical about how much expertise is required to, say, parse an image of a black person who’s been drawn as a monkey—and the tendency of experts like you to characterize other people’s “inexpert” reactions to images like that as unintelligent—I freely admit that you’re better informed than I on almost any given cultural milieu in play, including comics, satire, and the (supposedly) inscrutable kingdom of France.

Despite those vast stores of knowledge, you’re plainly no expert on race. Frankly, I’m not either, though I’m savvy enough to have recognized how ironic it was when you criticized readers for lacking sophistication even as you rallied a bunch of famous white people behind a slogan you appropriated from an oppressed minority. I don’t even know where to start with your unfortunate riff on “Black lives matter,” a movement that was spawned in protest of the George Zimmerman verdict, and reignited after the death of Michael Brown. Like “All lives matter,” the racist rejoinder to the original slogan, “Cartoonists’ lives matter” ignores one central fact: no one really thinks cartoonists’ lives are worthless except for their murderers, and they are all extremists who have been roundly denounced.

I really wish I could say the same for Eric Garner, or Tamir Rice, or Walter Scott, whose murders have been deemed, variously, as understandable and even warranted by public servants, the judicial system, people in my Facebook feed, and members of my own family. I don’t want to reduce our nation’s disregard for black lives to the deaths of those three people. It’s just that I’ve watched the indisputable evidence of their murders with my own two eyes, yet somehow still find them at the center of a bitter national debate. The “Black lives matter” slogan was borne in response to deep, appalling societal injustice, and my feeling watching you, a white man with uncommon privilege, adapt it in the name of propagating your opinion on the “bravery” of drawing Muhammad as a porn star lies somewhere far, far beyond my ability to articulate it to my satisfaction.

As a slogan, “Cartoonists’ lives matter” draws a false equivalence between one universally criticized attack and what has become a veritable institution of state-sponsored murder in our country. Where you attempt to make a comparison, it’s far more instructive to contrast. The Hebdo massacre was understood instantaneously, implicitly, to be of universal significance, and that’s because the killers represented the most hated enemy of the Western world—militant Islamism—and most of the slain were white. No one has disputed the dead’s status as innocent victims, though that position is routinely invoked as a straw man. They have been mourned all around the world for the better part of 2015.

Back in January, in an article for the New Yorker, Teju Cole asked readers to consider how the victims of Charlie Hebdo became “mournable bodies” in a global landscape where so many other atrocities are barely remarked upon, much less condemned. “We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world,” he wrote, “but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.” As it happens, Cole was one of the six dissenting writers who you and your friends replaced as table hosts at the PEN gala. Were you thinking of him, I wonder, when you told Laura Miller that your “cohorts and brethren in PEN are really good misreaders”? Do you really imagine that Cole, who is an art historian, doesn’t have the “sophistication to grapple with” comics? Or what about Junot Díaz, who was one of the 200-some writers who undersigned Cole’s decision? Like you, Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winner. His work has been illustrated by Jamie Hernandez, one of his heroes. Do you think that Junot Díaz doesn’t have the chops to read comics, Mr. Spiegelman? With respect, who do you think you are?

When you framed the Charlie Hebdo controversy as a matter of your vaunted expertise vs. what you call inexpert readers, you weren’t speaking in the abstract. You directly insulted the six writers who started the protest, as well as hundreds of their peers—individuals who wrote their names at the bottom of a letter, just as I’ll sign off at the end of mine. You also indirectly insulted countless other people in comics who object, publicly or privately, to “equal-opportunity offense” that somehow always, always manages to offend the same people no matter how many times old white men try to tell us that we’re just not reading comics right.

How is it that you failed to extend the basic courtesy of assumed literacy to those who struggle with the legacy of Charlie Hebdo? What does it mean for a white cartoonist to appropriate “Black lives matter” and then describe the argument of people who disagree with him—many of whom are people of color—as a failure of reading comprehension? Does your own mastery of the form really preclude the possibility that, say, Cole and Díaz, two of our smartest and most lyrical writers on race, might discern something in those images that you can’t (or won’t?) see? Or hey, what about Jeet Heer, who says that arguments like yours ignore the fact that aesthetics matter as much as intent? Is it just possible that you’re the one who’s not reading these comics correctly?

Look around you, man. Of course cartoonists’ lives matter. I realize that comics still has a whole thing about legitimacy, but Françoise Mouly’s assertion that the PEN protesters are literary snobs simply doesn’t track with the reality of comics culture today. Maus is more or less required reading in high school and college curricula. Neil Gaiman has more than 2 million followers on Twitter. Alison Bechdel is a MacArthur genius with a Broadway musical about her life. Tell me, did you actually hear anyone hissing at the PEN gala? It’s my understanding that Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief received a standing ovation when he accepted that award.

I think of the work of you and Alison Bechdel and am flabbergasted that two people who built their careers on endlessly recursive autobiographies lack enough self-awareness to acknowledge the positions of privilege from which they speak. I don’t know what’s worse about “Cartoonists’ lives matter”—that it’s so masturbatory, that it represents such an egregious misunderstanding of the issues at hand, or that willfully misrepresents the positions of your opposition in lieu of engaging with them. You criticized the protest of the writers you glibly dubbed the “Sanctimonious Six” as “condescending and dismissive” even as you framed their argument as a fundamental failure of literacy. That’s not just hypocritical; it is demonstrably false. You leveraged your authority as the person who put comics on the map as a literary form to publicly smack down artists who are less famous than you simply because they objected to the valorization (not the existence) of Charlie Hebdo. That you chose to badmouth them in your capacity as Captain Comics (protecting a literary gala from evil, no less) is deeply embarrassing to many of us who care about this art form.

Unfortunately, it’s not just you. Your Hebdo comments follow a pattern I see all the time here on the bully beat at the Hooded Utilitarian: Comics calls for nuance when it’s in the service of understanding the transgressions of white men. But when it comes to the other side of the argument, opponents are characterized as unlearned, as uninitiated, as overreacting. Last week at TCJ Dan Nadel bemoaned how comics are still perceived as low culture by the ignorant masses. Increasingly I wonder if it’s the discourse surrounding comics that’s perceived as unsophisticated. It often caters to the sensibilities of white men who are forever foisting their racist sexist takes on comics onto the world under the noble guise of history. They actively alienate readers from other demographics, and routinely mock and celebrate that alienation. They (and you) dismiss people’s deeply felt reactions to comics’ trenchant racism and sexism as empty “political correctness,” stripping protesters of their very humanity, denying their capacity to think and feel in the genuine way that you do.

Your star shines brightly, Mr. Spiegelman, though I know you have a difficult relationship with fame. I often think about how, in a “corrective” book about Françoise Mouly’s many accomplishments, Jeet Heer chose to use your name twice (once more than Mouly’s) in the title. Heer’s shortcomings belong to him, not you, but I want to circle back on the point I began with: it’s impossible to extricate our individual experience from our work and beliefs. The things we find meaningful—what’s important to us, as well as what’s not—emanate from the place of deep personal bias on which we build a life. It’s always personal, an idea that Heer explores ably through the rest of that otherwise excellent book. But acknowledging those connections is a wholly different project than casting everything in their shadow.

The world is large, and each of us exists within it, not the other way around. It’s incumbent upon us to try to overcome our natural tendency to center everything on the self. Real criticism thrives in multiplicity. It can’t live in the certainty of a person who shoots down opposing points of view, whether it’s with bullets or rhetoric. It demands room for doubt.

Comics culture needs to face the uncomfortable truth that its faves are problematic, which is not to say they’re worthless or irredeemable. As the author of this letter, I can tell you it’s not a whole lot of fun. But I also believe that speaking honestly and openly about the flaws in the things we care about is even more important than celebrating an artist, promoting an art form, or defending a cause, however heartfelt our admiration may be.

Murderous terrorists have long been the known enemies of cartoonists everywhere. But the lack of empathy and cultural awareness you have demonstrated is a much more subtle, grave, and pervasive threat to the health of comics today. You’re in a unique position to promote meaningful conversation on a constellation of issues that matter to a lot of smart people. Take a long hard look at yourself, Mr. Spiegelman. You are failing.

Kim O’Connor
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All HU posts on satire and Charlie Hebdo are here.

Patreon: Threat or Menace?

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Okay; so last week I talked about maybe using a kickstarter to fund my book (on the topic of Can There Be a Black Superhero?”. The collective reaction was, meh.

So as an alternative, I thought that I might possibly shut down the blog for a few months as a way of getting time to work on the book.

Alternately! If people really don’t want the blog shut down, I could try to do a Patreon to fund the blog so I could work on it in good conscience, and then do the book as the hobby.

Any thoughts on that as an option? I guess I’m not confident that anyone would want to pledge to the blog, but it couldn’t hurt to find out. My one concern is that it would be crappy for me to take money for the blog when contributors aren’t paid…I don’t know. Thoughts?

John Jennings and Stacey Robinson, from the Black Kirby project.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: May 2015