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Misinterpretation of expression due to “colormuteness” 

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Misinterpretation of expression due to “colormuteness” 

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I thought this comic was a great example of what we are talking about! A student asked a very important question as instead of the teacher simply answering, she avoided any conversation on race. The teacher’s respond I think can me interpreted in many ways, but for this student, he know thinks race should be silence and how it doesn’t matter. This is a rich comic.

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This website, CBLDF, recommended a list of comics based on diverse authors expressing racial issues within their comics. These comics vary with diverse characters to challenge the thoughts of diversity in society. The comics that are represented in this link will help bring diversity to libraries and classrooms. They vary with age and social, racial, and historical reform and issues.

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Diverse Comics for Classrooms and Libraries: Race – Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

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Happy Banned Books Week! In this series, we compile a list of comics that have diverse content and creators for which we have developed resources. For this column, we take a look at comics that deal with racial issues and feature racially diverse characters and creators.

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I was so excited to come across this article! Diversity extends more than just the conversations of race! Comics can also help educate students on disibilities or struggles that other students may deal with. Disibilties are another conversation that is silenced in schools!!!! This comic can help teachers and students understnad that all students have different needs.

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-by Jarod Roselló ***
Jarod Roselló is a Cuban-American teacher, cartoonist, and writer from Miami, Florida. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in curriculum & instruction from Penn State University. In August 2014, he will join the creative writing faculty at University of South Florida teaching cartooning and fiction. Jarod's comics and stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Hobart, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Sonora Review, and The Sorry Entertainer. On nights and weekends, Jarod runs Bien Vestido Press, a small press for hand-made books, out of his living room. You can find Jarod online at www.jarodrosello.com.

This entry was posted in From the Gutter, Uncategorized and tagged comics, From the Gutter, How to Move, Jarod Rosello. Bookmark the permalink.

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On the embodied poetics of making comics. -by Jarod Roselló *** Jarod Roselló is a Cuban-American teacher, cartoonist, and writer from Miami, Florida. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in curriculum & instruction from Penn State University.

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This article is a teachers’ blog on expressing comics within the classroom! it starts with how and what the teacher and parents wanted their students to be educated on  then led to the many issues our society faces today. Seperate from diversity, they talked about the matters of rape, social hierarchy, stereotypes, and other prominent topics, especially in the school enviroment, that continued to not be talked about as much as they should be. Examples of those who identify with LGBQT+ community and females are being incorporated in comics leading readers to be feel more excepted and educated. They give a great example about the comic, Thor.

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My students and I founded a Project Lit chapter in our high school and I could not be more excited. My first experience with Project Lit was in my daughter's middle school, founded by the inspiring Sarah Levy (@teachreadrepeat).

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Black: A comic based on black superheros

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Black: A comic based on black superheros

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This link provides the first chapter to Black, A comic based on the question, “What is only black people had super powers?”. This powerful comic connects not only the “power” these superheroes would have or how they would save people, but how it is in order to protect themselves from the world.  This comic also connectst he police brutality and the stereotypes still present in today’s time. An interesting and inviting read!

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"In a world that already hates and fears them-what if only black people had superpowers?" This question is at the core of Black Mask Studios' superhero series, Black, immediately setting it up as a riff on Marvel's X-Men, who have "sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them." The characters in Black may have costumes and codenames, but they're focused on their own survival rather than protecting the world at large. Black people are already systematically targeted by white supremacists, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system, and if the world knew that they also had superpowers, they would be in even greater danger.

Written by Kwanza Osajyefo with designs by Tim Smith 3 and artwork by Jamal Igle, Black was a Kickstarter success story before being picked up by Black Mask, and its willingness to engage with the major issues facing black Americans makes it a daring, exhilarating superhero title. The collected edition of Black goes on sale this week, and The A.V. Club has an exclusive look at the series' entire first issue to introduce readers to this new superhero world. From the very start, Black doesn't pull any punches, beginning the story with three innocent young black men gunned down by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The proceeding issues address lynchings, mass incarceration, and involuntary scientific experimentation, all incorporated in a story that never skimps on superhero thrills.

Jamal Igle is an artist with extensive experience in mainstream superhero comics, and his understanding of the genre gives Black an extra element of spectacle while the script gives him the opportunity to explore more grounded storytelling. The starkness of the black-and-white artwork (inked by Robin Riggs with tones by Derwin Roberson) makes the book even more intense, and Igle has to make his artwork even more expressive given that he can't rely on coloring to emphasize emotional beats. Readers can join Kareem on his journey of superpowered self-discovery by picking up the Black collection on Wednesday, and hopefully Black Mask will continue to explore this promising superhero concept with a second series in the future.

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Read all of Black #1, the politically charged comic about black superheroes

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"In a world that already hates and fears them-what if only black people had superpowers?" This question is at the core of Black Mask Studios' superhero series, Black, immediately setting it up as a riff on Marvel's X-Men, who have "sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them."

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This article not only discusses who gets to be superhero but also delves into gender when thinking about superheroes. It also briefly mentions how hard it is to be a comic book fan when you are a woman and how just walking into a comic book store as a woman can be scary because of the misogyny that is involved in the comic book world.

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Copyright Laws preventing diverse comics?

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Copyright Laws preventing diverse comics?

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This article talks about how congress needs to repeal or change the termination-of-transfer and works-for-hire sections of the Copyright Act. Or how marvel really should just create new and more diverse characters rather than just their old rather undiverse superheroes.

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In 2015, Marvel Comics announced a revamp of its publishing line dubbed the "All-New, All-Different" Marvel. The initiative replaced the white, male versions of its longstanding superheroes with members of groups underrepresented in the superhero genre. The mantle of Captain America passed from Steve Rogers to the African-American Sam Wilson. The Norse-god Thor was replaced with a female goddess. Miles Morales-an alternate version of Spider-Man of Afro-Latino heritage introduced several years earlier-received new prominence, and the Korean-American teenager Wolfgang Amadeus Cho supplanted Bruce Banner as the Hulk. The titular armor of Iron Man now protected a 15-year-old African American girl named Riri Williams. Just two years later, in 2017, Marvel announced yet another rebranding, known as "Legacy," that restored most of its characters to their traditional white male identities. Around the time of that announcement, David Gabriel, one of the company's vice presidents, explained that comic fans "didn't want any more diversity.... We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against."

While Gabriel's comments were widely criticized and refuted, Marvel's initiatives fueled debate over whether the company was truly interested in diversity or inclusiveness. Missing from this discussion was a crucial component: the role intellectual property law plays in encouraging-or, in this case, discouraging-creativity. The work-for-hire contracts utilized by the comic book industry disincentivize creators from developing innovative works. The comic book industry has a creativity problem, and it is intertwined with its diversity problem.

Innovation Discouraged

For decades, the business practices of the American comic book industry have suppressed originality. The industry's earliest and most prolific creators-including Jack Kirby, who was responsible for co-creating most of the characters who still drive Marvel's publishing line today, and Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman-were embittered and angry about the lack of remuneration from their ideas. Seeking just restitution, these creators and their heirs sought to reclaim the ownership of their characters under termination of transfer-a provision of the Copyright Act of 1976 intended to benefit creators who signed away the rights to their work before realizing how much it was worth. For various reasons, however, their efforts were largely thwarted in the resulting legal battles.

Later generations of creators, witnessing the struggles of their forebears, learned a lesson and refrained from developing new characters, understanding that they too would likely not share in the financial benefits from their ideas. "I didn't want to create characters that much," said Roy Thomas, one of Marvel's best-known and most prolific writers in the 1970s and 80s. "I knew I would get resentful if they ever made movies and TV shows and merchandising out of it that I didn't get money and credit for." Similarly, writer Mark Millar, who has written more recent storylines for Marvel, has said "I try not to create new characters for Marvel or DC. I try to just do spins on their existing characters so they can't make a movie based on something I've created."

This unwillingness to innovate led to a dearth of new characters. The driving characters in Marvel's publishing line remain largely the same today as they were in the 1960s, including Captain America, Thor, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Iron Man. These characters, created in the media landscape of the 1940s and the 1960s, were all white men. Efforts to diversify the line were underway as early as the 1960s, when Kirby created the African hero Black Panther. During the 1970s, however, comic creators, disenchanted by the struggles of their forebears, focused increasingly on working with already-developed properties, and efforts to create new characters-diverse or otherwise-ground to a halt.

the "Legacy Heroes" Approach

Instead, publishers make use of " legacy heroes "-instances where the mantle of a particular superhero is passed from its original bearer to a successor. The problem with legacy heroes-whether introduced to bolster diversity or otherwise-is that they are transitory; inevitably, the replacement heroes step aside for the return of the original characters. A vicious cycle thus emerges, where writers unwilling to create new superheroes focus their efforts to foster diversity around legacy heroes, who eventually cede their roles back to the character's original, white identity. Even some Marvel writers have admitted that the company appeared to be setting its own characters up to fail. G. Willow Wilson, who created Kamala Kahn, a Pakistani-American teenager who supplanted the white Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel-one of the rare legacy heroes to find success apart from their predecessor-wrote on Twitter that "launching a legacy character by killing off or humiliating the original character sets the legacy character up for failure. Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?"

Rather than relying on legacy heroes, Marvel should encourage its writers and artists to create new heroes altogether, and design them to better reflect the cultural norms of the 21st century. Indeed, the most successful, enduring non-white-male characters, like Wonder Woman or the Black Panther, were wholly original (and, not coincidentally, developed before the draught of new characters began in the 1970s).

Copyright Reform

To better incentivize creativity-and, in turn, spur the development of diverse characters that actually have staying power-Congress should revisit the termination-of-transfer and works-for-hire sections of the Copyright Act. While fully unraveling current work-for-hire laws would be untenable, there are myriad ways in which the industry could better meet the goals of copyright law to better reward creators for their efforts. One such possibility is a system of mandatory payments to creators once the value of their creations in the marketplace has been fully determined. Instating such incentives for creators would better embrace the fundamental principles of copyright law, described by the U.S. Copyright Office as to prove "the necessary monetary incentive to write...creative works." Taking such steps might ensure not only greater remuneration for creators but an opportunity to make an "All-New, All Different" Marvel that would last.

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How Copyright Law Perpetuates the Lack of Diversity in Comics - JCRED

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In 2015, Marvel Comics announced a revamp of its publishing line dubbed the "All-New, All-Different" Marvel. The initiative replaced the white, male versions of its longstanding superheroes with members of groups underrepresented in the superhero genre. The mantle of Captain A

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In this article, the author points out how white men are mostly the leaders of the comic book world. Although, this author gives a list of women comic creators, BIPOC comic creators and more diverse illustrators and writers that create great work and are encouraged to support.

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Women, non-binary folk, and POC artists and writers are finally making inroads in the largely white male world of comic books

Jen Bartel turned her love of comics into a career as a popular artist. Jen Bartel

We are often told that fewer and fewer Americans are reading fiction each year, but those numbers don't seem to include millennials. While their older counterparts are apparently eschewing fiction, 80% of millennials have read a book in the last 12 months. Meanwhile, girl centered graphic novels are dominating the middle grade market; my kids (11 and 7) are deeply in love with Dork Diaries and similar books. "Anything by Raina Telgemeir, Mom," my 11-year-old told me recently. "Anything by her. Just buy it for me." And then, belatedly, "Please?"

The world of comics has broadened in recent years, so much so that it's even making waves in mainstream comics (defined for the purpose of this article as superhero comics put out by the Big Two, Marvel and DC). When Shea Fontana's DC Super Hero Girls series launched in 2015, I was skeptical, but my kids fell in love with the concept hard and fast. Since then, they've been much more interested in my own collection of Marvel titles- Ms. Marvel, Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl, and Unstoppable Wasp, to name just a few that have been borrowed from my shelves.

A lot of the new perspectives in comics has come from a crop of new, diverse creators. For a long time, the world of comics was dominated by white male creators. While women and trans people have a long way to go before achieving any kind of parity, there are some amazing creators making waves and bringing fresh new stories into the world - superhero or otherwise.

If you know much about comics, you've probably heard of Gail Simone from her work on Batgirl, Birds of Prey, and Wonder Woman. Captain Marvel and Kelly Sue Deconnick are closely tied together, especially with the Captain Marvel movie coming out on March 8-and yes, I'm absolutely bringing my 11-year-old to see it.

Here we're highlighting some creators that you may not have heard of, those who are most marginalized-women and trans folks (primarily those who identify somewhere between trans femme and agender) who are non-white and queer.

The first thing I realized while making this list is that there are a lot more women working as artists than as writers. This makes sense, in a way; there are more vehicles for people to put art online and have it discovered (often reducing some gender biases by seeing the finished piece before meeting the person or seeing their real name). Jen Bartel is a great example of this; her fan art on Deviantart got her noticed by Marvel, and she has since become one of the most sought after artists for mainstream variant covers. This led to a creator-owned ongoing, Blackbird, launched with writer Sam Humphries.

The road to writing comics, especially for the Big Two, is much harder, and is often laced with more backlash. When word broke that Eve Ewing would be writing Ironheart, for example, the naysayers were loud before they'd even seen previews. Ewing has a long list of incredible publishing credits, but since she hadn't written comics before, she was immediately doubted.

So with those things in mind, here are folks in comics that you should be watching out for:

Jenn St. Onge is a Canadian artist best known for her work on Jem and the Holograms and Nancy Drew.

Noelle Stevenson created both Lumberjanes, one of my kids' favorite comics, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, currently airing on Netflix.

Marjorie Liu is a Chinese American writer who has been writing both comics and novels for years, and they're all fantastic. Right now, she's best known for her work on Monstress, a fantasy based comic inspired by East Asian myth and mythos, and drawn with Japanese artist Sana Takeda.

Nidhi Chanani is an Indian creator who has worked as an illustrator for kids books and board books before, but her first graphic novel, Pashmina, is out now, and getting rave reviews.

Leah Williams is a bi author of nonfiction and young adult books, and is now writing multiple titles for Marvel, Dynamite, and Lion Forge.

Erica Henderson is an Asian-American artist who won an Eisner Award for her art on The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl - one of the most fun and adorable comics that Marvel has put out.

Brittney Williams is an incredible Black artist with a rounded, easy style that my kids love. She's worked on Goldie Vance, Patsy Walker: AKA Hellcat, and Rainbow Brite.

Gurihiru is actually the team of Japanese artists Chifuyu Sasaki and Naoko Kawano, who have worked on multiple American comics. Their most well known titles are Avatar, The Unbelievable Gwenpool, and the second (current) The Unstoppable Wasp run.

For a very long time the world of comics has been thoroughly dominated by cisgendered white men. It's truly fantastic to see more diverse creators working their way into the world of graphic storytelling. It's going to be a long time before we see any kind of true parity in the work-but it's good to see the first steps being taken.

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Diverse comic creators you should know about | Grok Nation

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Women, non-binary folk, and POC artists and writers are finally making inroads in the largely white male world of comic books We are often told that fewer and fewer Americans are reading fiction each year, but those numbers don't seem to include millennials.

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Diverse race is not the only thing that isn't represented enough in literature or comic books, but in this article, the author gives plenty of options of comic books that deal with LGBTQ subject matter, including same sex parents, gender roles, and relationships between LGBTQ kids.

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Diverse Comics for Classrooms and Libraries: LGBTQ

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Happy Banned Books Week! In this series, we compile a list of comics that have diverse content and creators for which we have developed resources. For this column, we take a look at comics by and/or about LGBTQ individuals. Many of these books are frequently banned or challenged.

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I literally am dropping the link to this because I am so excited about it. The main character switches from an all deaf school to a new school where she's the only one with a hearing aid. But it brings a superpower, hence, "El Deafo" the superhero. Will be ordering this for my future classroom!

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health & daily living - physical impairments

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children's books/ages 9-12 graphic novels

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comic strip fiction / graphic novels (children's / teenage)

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health & daily living - physical impairments

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juvenile fiction / comics & graphic novels / general

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juvenile fiction / health & daily living / diseases

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juvenile fiction / social themes / friendship

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juvenile nonfiction / comics & graphic novels / biography

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juvenile nonfiction / health & daily living / physical impairments

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juvenile nonfiction / social topics / friendship

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juvenile fiction/comics & graphic novels - general

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juvenile fiction/disabilities & special needs

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juvenile fiction/social themes - friendship

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fitting in; hearing aid; deaf child; deaf protagonist; disabled child; being different; female protagonist; girl power; ableism; childrens book; homeschool; inclusive childrens book; inclusive library; superpowers; confidence; self esteem; hearing world; comics

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juvenile fiction / comics & graphic novels / general

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juvenile fiction / health & daily living / diseases

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juvenile fiction / social themes / friendship

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juvenile nonfiction / comics & graphic novels / biography

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juvenile nonfiction / health & daily living / physical impairments

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juvenile nonfiction / social topics / friendship

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juvenile fiction/comics & graphic novels - general

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juvenile fiction/disabilities & special needs

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juvenile fiction/social themes - friendship

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children's books/ages 9-12 graphic novels

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comic strip fiction / graphic novels (children's / teenage)

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El Deafo [Bell, Cece] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. El Deafo

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The article below discusses how the criteria of who is able to be a superhero is expanding. However, often with comics marginalized groups are stereotyped, therefore not giving equitable representation to all. The article also discussed how race-bending in the entertainment industry often leads to an uproar because white males have been prioritized in the industry for decades. However, this does not mean that we should continue the use of white supremacy in comics and should instead continue to allow people of all groups and identities to be superheroes!

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

subscribe to Code Switch podcast

The X-Men comic franchise has proven remarkably sturdy in the half-century since its launch. They've spawned dozens of animated series and four major Hollywood films with a fifth due out this summer. A big part of that is due to its central premise - a minority of superpowered humans called mutants are discriminated against by their government and fellow citizens - which has functioned as a sci-fi allegory for everything from the civil rights movement to the AIDS crisis.

"The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants," Chris Claremont, a longtime X-Men writer once said. "So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice."

In many stories, those themes are underlined and circled using language from the real world. The X-Men's leader, Charles Xavier, and Magneto, his nemesis, are on opposite sides of an ideological debate over whether they should try to integrate with humans or not. They're referred to by writers and fans explicitly as analogs to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In the first second X-Men movie, a teenager revealed that he was a mutant to his parents in a scene that was framed as a kind of coming out. ("Have you ever tried...not being a mutant?" his mother asks.)

But an artist named Orion Martin noted that the X-Men comics have skirted around the depiction of the people on the receiving end of much real-life discrimination: the main lineup in the X-Men team has been mostly straight, white dudes. Martin nodded to the work of Neil Shyminsky, an academic who's written about the X-Men's complicated relationship with real-life racism:

[He] argues persuasively that playing out civil rights-related struggles with an all-white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples ... "While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality - it actually reinforces inequality."

So Martin decided to reimagine them, recoloring some famous panels so that the main characters are brown - a gimmick that changes the subtext and stakes for the X-people.

In the new re-imagining, Wolverine, known for "his snarling, predatory aggression" becomes "a stereotype of angry black men." My Code Switch teammate Matt Thompson, who didn't have a much previous knowledge of the Emma Frost character, said the contrasting images of the X-Men heroine as black and as white underscored how hypersexualized her portrayal is.

But the remixing also drew attention to the ways that metaphor doesn't work, and some of the other ways race informs comic characterizations and fandom. So we decided to pick the brains of some serious, thoughtful geeks. If you want to read the full unabridged version of our chat, you can find it here. Otherwise, here's the TL;DR synthesis of the discussion:
Race-Bending And Remixing
A theme that came up repeatedly in our conversations was just how often characters are remixed by fans all the time.

Kendra Pettis, who blogs at the popular race and pop culture site Racialicious, says that she's been "race-bending" comic characters in the fan fiction she used to write and when she cosplays. (Pettis is black.)

"When I was starting out in role-playing it helped me identify more with the characters I was writing," Pettis sid. "Jean Grey was easier for me to write as Zoe Saldana than as Famke Janssen. And since there weren't exactly an overwhelming amount of P.O.C. characters to play - I played no fewer than six versions of Synch - race-bending gave me more options if I was looking."

On America Chavez's fan tumblr, she posted pictures of the X-Men mainstay Emma Frost opposite Beyoncé to make the pretty irrefutable point that Beyoncé is essentially Emma Frost. (Or maybe that's backwards.)
Who Gets To Be A Superhero
While fans of color are race-bending comics all the time, there's usually an outcry when that reimagining happens in the official canon or when it happens on the big screen.

The influential comics writer John Byrne notoriously railed against casting the multiracial Jessica Alba as the traditionally blonde, blue-eyed Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four movie:

Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino women with blond hair look like hookers to me, no matter how clean or "cute" they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don't work for me with lighter shades. Like I said - personal prejudice.

A rumor that Fruitvale Station's Michael B. Jordan might be cast as the Human Torch set many fans' teeth on edge. ("Now is not the time," a writer at the site Comic Book Movie said, arguing that a black Human Torch would "confuse a lot of people.")

"It's the natural result when the industry spends decades prioritizing white male characters - you have white male fans getting twitchy over this sort of casting while accepting white-washing or all-white stories," said Arturo Garcia, the managing editor of Racialicious. (He referenced the novelist Junot Diaz's famous quip that many geeks "will read a book that's one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and [white people] think we're taking over.")

The result is a sense that some demographics in fandom are seen as less authentic and less valuable consumers of geek culture. Paul Dini, one of the architects of DC Comics' wildly successful animated superhero franchises of the last two decades, told Kevin Smith that their recent series, Young Justice, was cancelled not because it didn't have enough viewers, but because too many of those viewers were .

Garcia referenced the novelist Junot Diaz's famous quip that geeks 'will read a book that's one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and [white people] think we're taking over.'

There was a belief among network executives that girls didn't buy as many toys as boys, Dini said. "It's like, 'We don't want the girls because the girls won't buy toys.' ... Boys buy the little spinny tops, they buy the action figures, girls buy princesses, we're not selling princesses.'"

Those calculations about what the audience looks like and should look like almost certainly influence the kind of stories that get told in comics, and which characters get to star in those stories.

"A lot of this has to do with the category of person publishers and filmmakers think of as being familiar [with and] identifying with the characters," Pettis said. "What's the nerd stereotype? The guy who looks like Kevin Smith, or the [brown] girl who's been loyal to the same comic shop for years? There's a worry, subconscious or not, that if white males have no one to identify with that the readership vanishes. No amount of trend-bucking - take Miles Morales, for example - is going to change that."
Minority Themes Can Make Characters Richer
While there are lots of brown superpeople in the fictional universes that these heroes inhabit, they're usually tertiary characters. But their identies open a range of thematic possibilities.

"In the comics, Ra's al Ghul certainly seems shaped by his cultural and ethnic background, but the multifaceted nature of his personality prevents him from being reduced to an easy stereotype," Kanayama said, referring to the Middle Eastern supervillain who has been one of Batman's oldest foes. "He's a father, a leader, a conflicted nemesis/mentor figure, a man who's lived through centuries and seen empires rise and fall."

But Liam Neeson was cast to play him in the blockbuster Batman Begins movie. "All of that could theoretically have been brought out in the movies, and if it had, the studio could have cast a Middle Eastern actor in a role with nuanced, intricate characterization," Kanayama said.

As my Code Switch colleague Matt Thompson noted not long ago, characters of color often bring unintended but fascinating resonances to their stories. He cited George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which came to be seen as subversive critique of 1960s-style American racism:

After Ben - the film's black protagonist, played by Duane Jones - rescues the hapless Barbra from the rampaging horde of zombies, he finds himself trapped on a lot with a group of white folks whose behavior ranges from unhelpful to malevolent. Barbra quickly becomes paralyzed by shock, Tom and Judy get themselves blown up, Karen turns into a zombie and starts munching on folks and then Harry locks Ben out of the house before trying to shoot him. Finally Ben escapes, only to be shot by a white sheriff's deputy. Given the backdrop of 1968, it's hard not to read the movie as a commentary on the trials facing blacks at the time. (Romero has said that the night they finished editing the movie, he heard the news of Martin Luther King's assassination.)

Thereare ways in which mutants of color complicate the mutant-as-minority metaphor, too. There's a moment in the most recent X-Men movie in which Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender, is making his pitch to a group of young mutants, and he makes a fairly on-the-nose allusion to real-life racial discrimination. Almost all the mutants of color and the mutants who are not otherwise obviously human decide to roll with him. The white kids who looked "normal" teamed with Xavier. It was hard to miss the subtext: the people who can't simply "pass" were going to find it harder to be accepted, and so assimilation was a much harder sell. That's a lot of heavy stuff to cram into a scene featuring people in ridiculous leather outfits who can move things with their minds.
How Central Is Race To Characters' Stories

Martin's project meant to explore the implications of race-bending some of the Marvel Universe. So what, if anything, might that fundamentally change about those characters and their stories? Are there white comic characters for whom whiteness might be so central to their stories that they're impervious to race-bending?

Kanayama thought it would be tough to pull off with the comic world's many billionaires - your Batmans and your Iron Mans - because their old-money wealth and privilege might not neatly map onto characters of color.

"The only way I could imagine [Batman] being a person of color would be to remove the element of the Wayne millions and billions and to cast him as a hyper-intelligent, hyper-diligent guy who'd made his way up the socio-economic ladder by himself," she said. "It could work, but it would certainly suck a lot of the power out of almost anything that happens in Wayne Manor - its significance in his stories doesn't come from the fact that that's where Batman lives, but from his family's and ancestors' histories that come with the manor."

But Arturo Garcia, Racialicious' managing editor, didn't think it would be too big a stretch to conjure up a brown Batman. "Set the story in San Diego and you can easily create a [Batman]-like character who's the scion of a rich Tijuana family, learned English as a child, and went to a nice prep school," he said.
Not All Marginalization Is The Same
Some high-profile storylines in the X-Men universe have underlined just how strained the mutant-as-minority metaphor can be. One recurring theme is the requirement that mutants register with the government. But many fans point out that the government does have a security interest in monitoring citizens who can level city blocks by accident. People of color or LGBTQ folks - whose identities are mined for narrative effect in these stories - hardly pose the same societal threat.

In another storyline, a high-profile mutant named Havok - a white guy with blond hair and blue eyes - gives a speech in which he tells the assembled that he doesn't want to be labeled a "mutant." (He refers to it in the comics as the "M word.") He wants to be seen simply as a person. For many readers, it was an assertion that seemed frustratingly tone-deaf:

Even if "mutant" were a slur beyond reclamation, Havok presents no alternative language. The movement away from the terms "negro" and "colored" to identifiers like "African-American" wasn't about rejecting labels. It was about rejecting the labels forced upon you and choosing your own. But when a reporter asks Havok what he wants to be called, he says, "How about Alex?"

The speech leaves us to believe that Havok doesn't want there to be any word that describes his minority identity. He's not saying that he's not just a mutant, but that "mutant" is not among the things he wants to admit to being.

That's not a message of inclusion. That's a message of assimilation. That's a message of erasure.

The comic-hero-as-social-outcast is a cliché at this point. But it allows readers to feel empathy for the main characters. (Because really: who hasn't felt like an outcast at some point?) After Orion Martin explained his artwork, a commenter named Cole Dawson highlighted the ways the mutant metaphor leaves a lot of be desired.

I think the X-Men actually work best as a metaphor for adolescence, in a lot of ways...

The thing is, children really do face oppression in certain ways, so it's not completely ridiculous to link minority status to adolescent status, or adolescent sub-cultures. However, adolescent sub-cultures often glom on to signifiers of other oppressed groups (minorities, the poor) in ways which are fairly unfortunate. And the X-Men have that problem as well.

This is why those explicit Martin Luther King allusions from X-Men writers come with so much baggage. The experiences of different minority or oppressed groups are not neat metaphors for each other. They may resonate with each other but they can't substitute for each other.

The same phenomenon plays out in real-life. People often compare today's civil rights movements with the black civil rights movement, and while there may be similarities and echoes, there are just as many substantial differences. We can look for patterns without drawing equivalences.
If you've read this far, you may as well go and read our whole conversation. And again, we'd like to thank Arturo Garcia, Kendra Pettis, Kelly Kanayama and Alan Yu for talking with us.

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Who Gets To Be A Superhero? Race And Identity In Comics

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast The X-Men comic franchise has proven remarkably sturdy in the half-century since its launch. They've spawned dozens of animated series and four major Hollywood films with a fifth due out this summer.

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In this article, the author discusses how since superheroes lacked diversity from their beginning, people have grown use to the characters they grew up with and reject change. Therefore, leading superheroes of color to be cast a sidekicks or left out completely. However, this does not mean that we should honor white fragility and not create a more diverse cast of superheroes or use race-bending. Representation is essential, even if it makes some people uncomfortable.

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This guest post is part of our blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason.
Spider-Man is black. Or more precisely, Miles Morales, the son of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother is currently Spider-Man. Well, he's one of the Spider- Men. It's complicated. Miles Morales' Spider-Man originates in Marvel's Ultimate Universe. Ultimate Marvel was an attempt at rebooting the Marvel universe and starting fresh, ostensibly giving creators license to tell new stories unburdened by years of continuity heavy history. Comic book continuity is the collection of character and comic book world history that shapes and evolves the medium's fictional landscape. The Ultimate Marvel experiment has now been scrapped. The Ultimate Universe came to an end, its inhabitants either meeting their own end or ending up collapsed into the main Marvel Comics continuity. Miles is one such character who made the jump. He is now Spider-Man, along with Peter Parker and Ben Riley (Peter Parker's once thought dead clone). I told you, it's complicated.

The unmitigated whiteness of popular superheroes is part and parcel of their origins. Superhero comics have been going strong since the late 1930s. This is when many of the iconic superheroes were first published: Superman (1938), Batman (1939), Captain America (1941), and Wonder Woman (1942). They have a legacy that has helped to propel them into popular culture as near mythic characters. By contrast, the first black superhero published by a major company is Marvel's Black Panther in 1966 (and he doesn't get his own series until 1973). The marked lack of black superheroes has an insidious inertia to it; their "history" is brief. The most popular characters tend to be those that were created during comicdom's golden and silver ages. These superheroes were created during times when racial representation was not prioritized for the comics industry (or the nation as a whole for that matter) but also, the lack of creators of color meant that there was zero impetus on the creative side for racial inclusiveness.

Thus the golden and silver age superheroes represent a tableau of stark whiteness. The superheroes that have become fixtures of pop culture are almost entirely white. Additions to this modern day pantheon have often not fared well. New comic books and their characters are released and cancelled on a revolving basis. Comic book audiences have shown a predilection for familiar heroes, the ones that they grew up with. The repercussions of this for new superheroes of color are that they are often relegated to side characters or simply forgotten. Superheroes of color have failed to capture a wide enough audience that generates enough sales to justify their existence.

Racebending already established characters is a tactic that has been used to sidestep this problem. Racebending refers to the practice in comic books (and other media) of taking an established character and rebooting them as another ethnicity. Racebending is often conflated with the practice of whitewashing. I argue that whitewashing and racebending are two distinct practices, with different motives and consequences. They exist in entirely different contextual histories. Whitewashing contributes to the erasure of an already miniscule pool of non-white characters. The reimagining of established white characters as African American, Asian/Asian American, and Latinx allows audiences of color to see themselves represented within popular comics narratives. It does not seriously threaten the white hegemony of comic books.

Racebending is one of the major paths that comic book publishers have taken to address criticism that claims that people of color are underrepresented within the medium. When Marvel launched their new Ultimate Marvel title, The Ultimates (a take on the Avengers), their SHIELD Director, Nick Fury, had been reimagined as a black man with a striking resemblance to actor Samuel L. Jackson. The racebending of a previously established white character was successful enough that the Marvel Cinematic version is based upon this portrayal. By racebending an established character, Marvel created a new character that seems to have some staying power. Of course, it is probably neither a coincidence, nor does it hurt that Samuel L. Jackson is the highest grossing African American actor (and second highest grossing actor overall) in Hollywood.

Captain America, The Atom, Nick Fury, Johnny Storm (the Human Torch), and Spider-Man all have been racebent, that is, reimagined as being of different racial identities. Recently, Marvel has released a new IronWoman, RiRi Williams, an African American teenaged prodigy. In DC's WB television universe both Wally and Iris West are now African American. Actor Idris Elba portrays the character of Heimdall in Marvel's Thor movie. The reimagining of these characters ethnicities has helped to create comic book universes that more accurately reflect our own society's multiculturalism. Rather than replicating the original starkly white tableau of superheroes, we are now seeing stories that more accurately reflect society. People of color are not merely background characters in these new representations; they are heroes. Racebending effectively creates multiculturalism within the comics' medium, while also giving fans the characters that they have cherished for decades. It is also a practice that has engendered a great deal of criticism from audiences and creators.

Why is there such resistance in the comic book community to racebending? The comic book community is imagined to be a largely white audience. If one examines the online spaces devoted to comic books, they would find the pushback from many fans is that they want the comic book world to remain a bastion of whiteness. Racebending of popular white superheroes is perceived as an explicit attack on white dominance over comic books. White comic book fans seem to view this as a zero-sum game. Greater visibility for people of color equals an erasure of whiteness for these fans. White characters are engulfed by blackness; white supremacy loses tractable ground. For many comic book fans, the default whiteness of their favorite characters is integral to their being. The arguments from comic book fandom are often couched in notions of authenticity. By this logic, changing the race of a comic book character invalidates their authenticity.

This argument is steeped in notions of white supremacy. This is especially apparent when the authenticity argument is juxtaposed with the ever-changing narratives that constitute comic book continuity. The Batman of 2017 is not the Batman of 1939. The Superman of 2017 is not the superman of 1938. Their characters, powers, and even history have evolved over the decades. This is true for all of the heroes that have lasted since the early half of the 20 th century. There is very little that is historically "authentic" about characters that are constantly being reinvented to meet audience demand and continue to tell new stories. The authenticity argument is merely a smokescreen for arguing that comic book characters must conform to white racial expectations. This is a transparently invalid argument in a medium where reinventing is the name of the game and history is rebooted and reimagined every couple of years.

In the minds of comicdom's largely white audience, non-whiteness needs an explanation. When characters are racebent, critics are quick to decry "political agendas," they claim that the integrity of the character is being erased. The inclusion of newly imagined black versions of superheroes is labeled as pandering to political correctness. All of this calls into question the idea of authenticity. Are the characters authentic? Are the people who wish to see non-white superheroes authentic fans? Ultimately, why is authenticity in comic books linked to whiteness? Comics luminary and professional curmudgeon, John Byrne, opined on his website:

It is currently a fad in Hollywood - bordering on a fetish, it sometimes seems - to swap out White characters for other races and ethnicities. And I am frankly amazed that the Black community is not outraged by this patronizing modern version of blackface.

Ignoring his ahistorical comparison to blackface and minstrelsy, what Byrne has failed to address is new superheroes don't sell broadly. The established superheroes are the ones that have cache. Audiences of color have a desire to see themselves represented in the medium. The simplest solution to both of these dilemmas is racebending. Critics like Byrne have made the argument that racebending is akin to erasing the ethnic identity of characters. The counter to that argument is that whiteness for most of these characters are not a part of an ethnic identity; it is merely a default setting.

Accepting this argument necessitates that one accept the just-world hypothesis, the idea the world is just and fair and that everyone is on equal footing, and ignore the context of structural and systemic racism that prohibited creators of color from becoming established in the golden and silver ages of comics. It requires one to ignore the dearth of characters of color and the overwhelming whiteness of superheroes. It requires one to assume a stance of "color-blindness," where race is not a factor in representation. This "color-blind" world that critics like Byrne appeal to does not exist. Of course if it did exist, it would preempt their rejection of racebending. Racebending of characters would just be another flavor of superhero identity. Miles Morales' multiethnic Spider-Man is a representation of what the comic book world could be.

Bryan Cooper Owens is an adjunct lecturer at Queens College, CUNY. He is an educator who has split his time between both the museum world and academia. He holds graduate degrees in both African American Studies and African Studies with areas of focus in art history, anthropology, and history. At Queens College he teaches courses in African American history, and African history and culture. Follow him on Twitter @anansithespider .

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Racebending and Representation in Comic Books

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This guest post is part of our blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. Spider-Man is black. Or more precisely, Miles Morales, the son of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother is currently Spider-Man. Well, he's one of the Spider-Men.

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The Literary Canon, Comics, and the Classroom.

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The Literary Canon, Comics, and the Classroom.

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In this article, Jabari Sellers discusses the ways in which comics can be useful in the classroom. Comics can be used to introduce complex concepts, such as race, in a way that students could better comprehend. The use of comics can also help to expand past the literary canon and show students that important information and lessons can be found in places other than just traditional literature.

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My mother was a master of deception. Committed to the long con of getting me, her pickiest son, to eat something more than macaroni and cheese, my mother tricked me into eating healthy food. On homemade pizza night, she snuck baby spinach under the mozzarella with the stealth of bootleggers during prohibition.

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The article below discusses racial stereotyping in comics. Typically, exaggerations of physical features of personalities were the most common stereotypes used within comics in cartoons. However, this was not just a thing of the past. Racial stereotyping is still very prevalent today. It is important to recognize stereotyping and address it when we see it.

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Physical exaggerations are nothing new to the comic book medium. Artists and creators utilize art as a way to create a narrative above and beyond the shortened text bubbles and portrayal of their comic book characters. While this gives their medium its life-form, it also leads to a simplified paradigm of what heroes, villains, and everyone in between should look like. Any generation can look to a titular character with herculean muscles or perfect hair as a higher example of what we should strive to be. Still, there is a darker past in comics when it comes to the depiction of marginalized ethnicities, races, racial stereotypes, genders, and lower socio-economic individuals.

The Irish have long been depicted as ape-like brutes in English comics, with these images being infamously denoted as "the Irish monkey." Although this was a conscious effort to make the Irish seem less than human in comparison with their English counterparts, these animalistic juxtapositions are not unique to one group. In some collections such as Maus, these comparisons are utilized to show power imbalances between the Jewish people and Nazis at the time. In nefarious works, these are used to create an "other," where artists can create a separation from one group to play on a society's status quo of the times.

In fact, the examples of racism and racial stereotypes in comics towards people of color were often so clothed in stereotypes at the time that readers (children in particular) absorbed this content without question and adopted it into their everyday perceptions of this "other." One primary example, as noted by Fredrik Strömberg's Comic Art Propaganda, is Moon Mullins (by the late Fred Willard), who showed black characters in strictly servitude positions to the comic's white characters. These bumbling characters reflected not a reality, but what society thought of these people as a whole. Even Tintin's creator, Belgian artist Hergé, retroactively defended his portrayal of children in the Congo as a "story that was made in the spirit of the times."

Not to tear down the comic book medium for its historical and problematic typecasts, there have been prominent movements in the industry to correct the wrongs of its predecessors. The most notable and earliest publisher to create content to celebrate and not compartmentalize black people at the time was called Golden Legacy, founded in 1966 by a man named Bertram A. Fitzgerald. In a surprising twist for Fitzgerald, he was able to get his newly created comics line sponsored by none other than the Coca-Cola Company, which helped his stories become a commercial success. Stories that told the life of Martin Luthor King and Jospeh Cinqu were finally available for the mainstream audience. Slowly, the subvert racism and racial stereotypes in comics began to shift towards a more positive and realistic message. Bringing this content to audiences who customarily perceived black people in pigeonholed roles coincided with the Civil Rights movement. They acted as a weapon against the supremacy that had such a stronghold in the 1960s.

Even though the history of comics is problematic, these successes deserve to be highlighted and supported as part of the mainstream historical narrative. Golden Legacy had a short run (only sixteen issues), but more importantly, have stayed in print for decades...long surviving the troublesome releases that paved their way.
This post is part of a multi-part series: Comics & Complication .
Chelsy Bloomfield is an artist, cosplayer, writer, and comic book aficionado. She is the founder of Utah's Graphic Novel Book Club, the first of its kind in Utah, and has hosted monthly meetings since 2011. If she is not writing or preparing for the next book club meeting, she can be found yelling about conspiracy theories on the internet or playing with her perfect puppy, Puffin.

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Comics & Complication: Racial Stereotypes and Golden Legacy Comics

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Physical exaggerations are nothing new to the comic book medium. Artists and creators utilize art as a way to create a narrative above and beyond the shortened text bubbles and portrayal of their comic book characters. While this gives their medium its life-form, it also leads to a simplified paradigm of what heroes, villains, and everyone in between should look like.

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This article lists common stereotypes in comics that many do not realize are racist.  Three stereotypes that I feel I have witnessed the most are indigenous people associated with mysticism, black individuals being seen as "angry", and asian characters always knowing martial arts. There are countless examples of these stereotypes at play in pop culture and they often go unnoticed. It is important to view all texts through a critical lens and ensure that we are standing up against racism when we see it; whether it be in pop culture or in our day to day lives.

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Racism in comics is a subject that has seen a surprising amount of ink in recent years. What started out as power fantasies for teenage white males has become a worldwide phenomenon that represents a cross section of socio-political and cultural demographics. Simply put, everybody loves comics. Since people invariably want to see themselves reflected in their entertainment choices, diversity in comics is a topic at the forefront of the comics discussion.

Comic creators have made great progress in that area, and have thusly created distinct and fully realized characters that are as vibrant and varied as the people who read their stories. But even with all the strides made toward inclusion, stereotypes still manage to find their way into the mix. While the xenophobic images of times gone by remain a thing of the past, there are elements of racism and stereotyping that persist to this day. Here are 15 Racist Stereotypes You Didn't Know Were Still In Comic Books Today.

15 The Death Of Ryan Choi

Ryan Choi a.k.a. the Atom heads home after defeating the Floronic Man and his control of all plant life. Upon his return, Ryan is attacked by Slade Wilson and his new Titans team and brutally murdered in cold blood in Titans Villains For Hire Special #1. The death is pointless; it's not connected to any greater story thread, and it's meant solely to kick off the Villains for Hire storyline by illustrating just how vicious and capable Slade and his rogue team of ambivalent meta-humans are.

One of the most clichéd tropes of the last two decades has been the killing of beloved but relatively obscure characters to emphasize how bad or sadistic the antagonist of the story really is. The problem here is that Ryan Choi wasn't really all that obscure a character. He was one of the very few Asian heroic leads in all of comics, much less DC. The fact that DC was able to so blithely write out a character who represented far more than just a foil for Ray Palmer, the "real" Atom, shows a pretty sizable lack of awareness, in addition to poor writing. It's the variation on the "girl in the refrigerator" trope that is doubled down on here -- with a side of racial insensitivity.

14 Sooraya Qadir - "Dust"

In New X-Men #133, Wolverine carves up a cadre of Middle Eastern terrorists to liberate a young woman who is being sold into the mutant slave trade. After taking a hellacious amount of gunfire, Logan tracks the unknown mutant to a camp in the mountains of Afghanistan. There he finds the super-soldier Fantomex holding a burka-clad young woman who happens to be the mutant in question. Later, when the New X-Men return to their Mumbai headquarters, they find Wolverine sleeping off the effects of his healing factor on the obscene amount of damage he took, but the young mutant nowhere to be found. Ultimately, the mutant is discovered, as she reforms from the sand scattered around X-Corp headquarters, saying only " Turaab" over and over. Wolverine murmurs that the word means " dust ", and that it's all she says. He then rolls over with an admonition for them to keep it down while he sleeps.

To begin with, creating a Muslim character that has a power that allows her to actually become sand may have been ill-advised. It's a questionable move at best. At worst, it's a bad joke. While surely unintentional, it's a tone-deaf gaffe that got lambasted by the fans. The wince-inducing White Savior and Male Gaze tropes that infect Marvel's approach to this character, plus dubious representations of both Natives and Asians in this particular comic, add up to one uncomfortably hot mess.

13 Black Protégés

In 2014's All-New Captain America #1, Sam Wilson did step up to become the new Star-Spangled Avenger, after having filled in for Rogers several times in the past. The event is generally considered a positive move by the predominantly left of center comic book hive mind. But there was an outcry playing primarily along predictable racist lines. Whereas Dick Grayson was more than sufficient to fill the cowl of Bruce Wayne with nary a hiccup, the idea of Sam Wilson, (black) Captain America was anathema to some fans.

There were scattered outbreaks of fan rage, with some apparently forgetting that the super-soldier serum was originally tested on Black soldiers, and the original Captain America was, in fact, a black male. Even so, Sam Wilson was still considered a stand-in, a placeholder to hold down the fort until the "real" Cap came back. Steve Rogers has returned to the role of Captain America as of the time of this writing, with Marvel striving to continue their forward momentum by having two separate Captain America titles, one with Sam Wilson and the other with Steve Rogers.

12 Indigenous Characters Are Always Connected With Mysticism

If the character is native, expect spirit animals, totems, feathers, or some leather fringe to show up at some point. The native character is never an auto mechanic who likes cheeseburgers and happens to fire energy bolts from their pinkies. Red Wolf, Puma, Thunderbird, Shaman, Wyatt Wingfoot -- if the character is of indigenous origins, their characterization and depiction is indelibly tied to their ancestry. Much like Sooraya Qadir, such stereotypical treatment reduces indigenous identity and spirituality to gimmicks or parlor tricks, as if they are somehow outside the realm of common human experience. While parallels among non-indigenous characters do exist, they're a small percentage by comparison.

11 Representation

Some are conspicuous in their absence, and almost an inverse trope. The only Pacific Islander known among the entirety of Marvel characters is Mondo of Generation X, and he turns out to be a traitor before being murdered in Generation X v1 #25. He returns later on, with the traitorous Mondo having been a clone sent to infiltrate and destroy the fledgling mutant team. The real Mondo turns out to be an actual antagonist in Generation X #61. Awesome.

10 Streetwise, Antisocial Black Characters

Everyone was waiting for the new incarnation of the man who had been the third Scarlet Speedster to make his appearance. There were a lot of ways DC could've gone with the reintroduction of such a well-known character, and what fans got wasn't any of them. In an effort to introduce more diversity to the New 52 universe, DC had fumbled their way into pandering racial stereotypes. When readers meet Wally West in The Flash (2014) #35, he's a "troubled" Black youth and a cornucopia of Black tropes. From wearing the ubiquitous hoodie, to scrawling graffiti on a wall and getting in trouble with the law, Wally is a mélange of tired "urban" clichés. While this was surely intended to make him relatable, it actually does nothing but suck the energy out what should've been a defining moment in this new DC continuity.

9 Havok And "The M-Word"

Then, Alex says how he considers the word " mutant " divisive, and that to him, the "M-word" is a derogatory one. Writer Rick Remender enters dangerous ground here, and it turns into a public relations firestorm that paints both him and the scene in the worst possible light. Allusions to all forms of discrimination as being analogous to anti-Black racism is a painful cliché. The experiences are not in the least bit interchangeable. Regardless of how the scene was intended, it cannot be stated strongly enough that the term "mutant" is not and never could be considered a corollary to the N-word. Doing so reads as a lame attempt to downplay hundreds of years of inhuman oppression and genocide, now and always.

8 The "Black" Prefix For Black Characters

There are only a few characters left that carry this moniker, but in its time, the "Black" prefix ran rampant through comics. Fairly recently, Robert Kirkman's Invincible for Image Comics featured a Black male character named Black Samson that ran for a number of years before Kirkman killed the character off. Kirkman has had a questionable run when it comes to minority character representation in the past, and in fairness, he's adjusted his approach in response. Another variation on the "Captain Ethnic" trope, this cliché still manages to rear its ugly head from time to time.

7 The "Default" Setting For Superheroes Is The Straight White Male

One of the biggest tropes in the history of geekdom is that of the straight, white male as the epitome of heroism. Djimon Honsou, who plays the villainous Korath in Guardians of the Galaxy, put it succinctly when he spoke of his son, an avid lover of superheroes. According to Honsou, his son told him one day that he wished he were light-skinned, so he could be Spider-Man -- because Spider-Man has light skin.

Mr. Honsou's kid speaks to a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of pop culture. Of course the hero is a white male, what else would he be? This trope has been chalked up to a lot of factors, but it always seems to boil down to marketability. From international box office numbers on superhero movies to action figure sales, the argument is invariably a take on lagging numbers for projects featuring people of color. It's a safe bet, however, that given the billions generated by superhero franchises (and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular), if the industry really wants to change this paradigm, they can certainly afford to.

6 Wong As Stephen Strange's Manservant

2016's Doctor Strange was another successful smash for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie and the character itself were not, however, without their fair share of controversy. The idea of white heroic figures becoming enlightened or enhanced by way of Asian influences is a cliché as old as the hills, and one that's still being used today.

This trope isn't even the most troubling one to be found in the world of Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. The character of Wong has been a sore spot among the ranks of comic book fans for many years. In the well-received cinematic adaptation of the Marvel character, starring Bumpercar Creamycrud, Wong is a guardian of the library of Kamar-Taj and a seasoned warrior in his own right. This stands opposed to the role of sidekick or even lowly assistant that Wong was relegated to in the comics for some time, and to some degree, he remains so today.

5 Amanda Waller - Angry Black Woman

One of the most enduring stereotypes in popular entertainment is that of the sassy black woman. This is no more clearly evident than it is in Amanda Waller's boundary-breaking portrayal over the years for DC Comics. Borrowing from a wide array of stereotypes, Waller as a bossy ice queen has remained her standard depiction. Despite a tragic origin story that plays as a successful rags to riches tale, rarely if ever is Waller shown in a definitively positive light. The strong, black woman trope plays heavy with her character's beginning as a widowed victim of violence in crime-plagued Chicago.

Even so, her character design has been revamped from older, plus-sized Earth Mother to a disappointingly typical "hard nosed bombshell" cliché. Sadly, this just plays into more stereotypes. Waller as a large woman at least moved away from a comic landscape littered with Mr. Olympia class male physiques and fashion model females, all decked out in paper-thin spandex whenever possible.

4 Daredevil And The Hand

From the wildly successful run by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson right up to the current popular Netflix series, readers are treated to a variety of Asian tropes in Daredevil storylines. Matt Murdock is a white male who has been immersed and steeped in the vagaries of Asian spirituality and fighting arts. Doubling down on the pseudo-Asian gimmick that Frank Miller used to propel the Man Without Fear to the top of the sales charts, his primary nemeses include an 800-year-old army of mystic ninjas known as the Hand.

The Hand in and of itself is a treasure trove of stereotypes. Asian bodies are faceless cannon fodder that can be slaughtered with abandon by either the blind hero or his hyper-violent love interest, Elektra. Asian philosophy and spirituality play strongly into the myths of the shadowy band of assassins, and it is invariably the white, heroic figure that must stand up to the menace they pose.

3 Asian Characters Who Always Know Martial Arts

Another glaring example is the X-Man Psylocke. From her start as a supporting character for Captain Britain, Betsy Braddock didn't really have much going on in terms of hand to hand combat. By melding her character with an Asian assassin named Kwannon in Uncanny X-Men v1 #256, Psylocke was immediately able to kick tail with the best fighters in the Marvel Universe. To top it off, Psylocke is sexualized in a way that Shang-Chi never was, once again catering to the primary demographic of comic fandom - straight, white males aged 13-25 years old.

2 The Scary Black Male

No article on racist stereotypes in comics could be complete without mention of the gold standard of racial tropes, the one and only Luke Cage, Power Man. Cage first appeared in 1972's Luke Cage, Hero For Hire #1 , and was pretty much meant to be a cliché from the start. Luke represented an attempt to cash in on the success of Richard Roundtree's Shaft and countless other blaxploitation archetypes that were selling movie tickets to both white and black audiences like hotcakes. In the years since then, Luke has been developed as a character with varying levels of cringe-inducement, depending on the writer.

At the center of the overwhelming majority of topics focused on race and "urban" scenarios, Luke Cage has been the ambassador for the black community in the Marvel universe for years. The epitome of the scary black male, Luke Cage "Sweet Christmas-ed" his way through the first twenty years of his existence. Since then, there have been more than a few attempts to address what Cage stands for in terms of racial stereotypes and the comics genre, some more effective than others. But the stereotype of the intimidating Black male with the shaved head and the street savvy attitude remains a solidly clichéd move that has been in play since Avery Brooks portrayed Hawk in Spencer: For Hire. It's getting old.

1 Black Lightning

One example of a white comic writer getting tone and theme dead on point is Tony Isabella's Black Lightning. Originally intended as a white racist who would become a black superhero during times of stress, the character was handed to Tony Isabella to salvage. Instead, Tony implemented his vision of a reluctant warrior who responds to the suffering of his community even at the cost of his own happiness. The concept of the Black Bomber as it was pitched was patently offensive. So it was easy for Tony to sell the idea of his character to the editors at DC, who were looking for a Black superhero to feature. Jefferson Pierce represented the upending of those painful ethnic stereotypes. He played off them deliberately by using the jive talk and flashy costume to disguise his secret identity as a straight-laced school principal and former Olympic decathlete.

DC's efforts have been rewarded, and these days, we have a Black Lightning TV series to look forward to.

--

Comics continue to make great strides in creating universes that acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of the fans that love them. While there is a ton of work to be done, comics have made tremendous strides towards inclusion and away from racist portrayals of minority characters over the years. As comic creators of color continue to flourish, fans are anticipating more depictions of characters that look like them and reflect their experiences without being typecast or forced into boxes to fit white impressions of what these characters should be. What are some examples of unfortunate racial stereotypes that you've come across recently? Tell us about it in the comments!
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15 Racist Stereotypes You Didn't Know Were Still In Comic Books Today

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Racism in comics is a subject that has seen a surprising amount of ink in recent years. What started out as power fantasies for teenage white males has become a worldwide phenomenon that represents a cross section of socio-political and cultural demographics. Simply put, everybody loves comics.

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In Orion Martin's project, he reimagined Wolverine as a stereotypical "angry black man." This makes the viewer makes the connections between the persecuted X-men and those who are persecuted in the real world.

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The X-Men comic franchise has proven remarkably sturdy in the half-century since its launch. It's spawned dozens of animated series and four major Hollywood films with a fifth due out this summer. Part of that is due to its central premise - a minority of superpowered humans called mutants are discriminated against by their government and fellow citizens - which has functioned as a sci-fi allegory for everything from the civil rights movement to the AIDS crisis.

"The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants," Chris Claremont, a longtime X-Men writer once said. "So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice."

But an artist named Orion Martin noted that the X-Men comics have frequently skirted around the depiction of people on the receiving end of real-life discrimination: the main lineup in the X-Men team has been mostly straight white guys. Martin nodded to the work of Neil Shyminsky, an academic who's written about the X-Men's complicated relationship with real-life racism:

[He] argues persuasively that playing out Civil Rights-related struggles with an all white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples... "While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality - it actually reinforces inequality."

So Martin decided to reimagine them, recoloring some famous panels and covers so the main characters are brown - a move that changed the subtext and stakes for the X-people.

In this reimagining, Wolverine, known for "his snarling, predatory aggression," becomes "a stereotype of angry black men. My Code Switch teammate Matt Thompson, who didn't have a much previous knowledge of the Emma Frost character, said the contrasting images of the X-Men heroine as black and as white underscored how hypersexualized her portrayal is.

We wanted to mull over the role of race in the X-Men universe - and in comics more broadly - so we decided to pick the brains of some serious, thoughtful geeks. Here is the full chat, but if you don't have the time, you can read the tl;dr version of this convo here. [ Editor's note: Many of the links below include salty language. Be forewarned.]

Arturo Garcia is the managing editor of the influential race and pop culture blog, Racialicious. Kendra Pettis is Racialicious' TV Correspondent. Kelly Kanayama writes about geek culture, mainly for Women Write About Comics. Alan Yu is a Kroc fellow here at NPR.
What were your initial reactions to Orion Martin's decision to recolor the X-Men?
GARCIA: Visually striking, of course. Even if you don't buy the premise of Martin's argument, it does underscore the lack of diversity in Marvel's - and the comic industry's - choice of protagonists and franchise centerpieces.

YU: At first, it didn't look that different to me, and this requires a little context. I didn't come to the US until four years ago and didn't know much about the civil rights struggle before taking American history classes in earnest. I never gave a second thought to the fact that most X-Men characters are white (though I think Storm is a notable and important counter example) and so recoloring them didn't change much for me.

Now I see it differently, but not because I see the X-Men as an analog to civil rights, moreso due to the general lack of diversity in comics.

PETTIS: The first thing I wondered was whether or not they would have looked less surprising to me if he hadn't used such iconic pieces of artwork. The idea of race-bending iconic characters and switching up their perceptions and characters is nothing new to me - I was a journal-based role-player over on Livejournal and the like for years and race-bending was my MO - but seeing the change on well known covers and panels does a lot more to emphasize the lack of diversity in the franchise despite what the characters as a whole are supposed to symbolize. Despite years of putting my imagination to work, it's still strange to see it on actual canon work.
DEMBY: Could you explain how race-bending works?
PETTIS: Basically, it's just a reimagining of a traditionally white character as a person of color. When I was starting out in role-playing it helped me identify more with the characters I was writing. Jean Grey was easier for me to write as Zoe Saldana than as Famke Janssen. And since there weren't exactly an overwhelming amount of P.O.C. characters to play (I played no fewer than six versions of Synch), race-bending gave me more options if I was looking.

YU: When I think of race-bending, the first example that comes to mind is actually Nick Fury. The first time I saw him (I think it was the '90s Spider-Man cartoon) he was white, but then he became a black man in the "Ultimate" line. I don't think it really changed what I thought about him though.

KANAYAMA: It definitely stood out, partially because (as Kendra says) these are iconic characters, but also because there were hardly any black or dark-skinned X-Men when I was a kid. I do see Martin's point about falling into stereotypes with the re-coloring - in the case of crazy-eyes Jean Grey, for instance, there's an overly angry/crazy/out-of-control stereotype that gets applied to women from a lot of non-white races. However, I think part of the problem is that we just don't see very many black/dark-skinned/obviously non-white characters in comics, and that this is what contributes to creating the stereotype trap.

With the original coloring, I don't think people would say that crazy-eyes Jean is a stereotype of white women, or that the aggressive Wolverine is a stereotype of white men. That's because we see so many white characters in comics and popular media in general that one problematic portrayal and one grizzled/savage portrayal doesn't contribute to building a stereotype (although the ideology of the Phoenix storyline with regard to women and power is pretty troubling, but that's another point for another discussion). Even if these two characters are somehow seen as carrying negative implications, they're drops in the ocean. But once you visibly portray them as non-white, that ocean shrinks to a puddle, and every drop counts for a lot more.

On a less-analytical note, black Emma Frost looks fantastic.

PETTIS: She does, doesn't she?

KANAYAMA: But her hypersexualization has always stood out to me, to the point where I'm amazed anyone could miss it (no offense, Matt Thompson!); for instance, this and this are covers of actual comics that got published. It's what turned me off from reading about her previously. Once Frank Quitely et al. allowed her to wear a shirt, thus placing the focus on her speech and actions rather than using her as the subject of a straight male gaze, I was right on board.
DEMBY: A lot of people have pointed out that mutants aren't good analogs for marginalized groups; gay people can't blow up buildings with their eyes or read people's minds. The idea that the government would want such people to be registered doesn't seem too crazy, right? I'm stacking the deck here a bit, but: do you think the X-Men have any utility for the way we think about real-life discrimination?
KANAYAMA: Grant Morrison's New X-Men did pretty well in its portrayal of how minority cultures are fetishized, appropriated, and vilified, often all at the same time. There's a moment in one issue where a (white) man expresses hatred of mutants just before he confesses an enjoyment of the music of an all-mutant band. This is a world where there are mutant singers/musicians, fashion designers, and other celebrities. Superficial expressions of mutant culture are the new hot thing, but interacting with and accepting mutants in everyday life is apparently impossible.

The strength of this approach is that it isn't exclusively applicable to a single minority group. Minorities have their culture appropriated and fetishized by the majority while still being unable to have an equal voice in everyday public discourse, or even to have their displeasure with that misuse be recognized as a legitimate grievance.

GARCIA: I certainly think part of the franchise's appeal has been to act as a point of identification for readers who feel they "don't fit in." (Much like Marvel's No. 1 act, Spider-Man.) Ideally, that's an entry point for people to consider broader issues. And - not to jump the gun on a point you make below - Marvel certainly hasn't shied away from playing on those types of themes in telling their stories.

But as we've said at Racialicious, Marvel undercuts itself by confining mutants to X-related books; you don't see anybody with a relatively benign power like, say, "mild" super-speed acting as a courier in Daredevil. Kitty Pryde, who has been written as maybe the team member best able to "pass," has never gotten a chance to live a life outside of the team's sphere of influence. (The UK-based Excalibur team had a few connections to the X-realm, so I'm not counting that.)

So that's the problem: you can't say you're making a sincere effort to deal with race and race relations when your stand-ins for marginalized communities are stuck in one brand, and not part of your larger universe. And that's how you get hot messes like Rick Remender's "don't call me a Mutant" debacle in Uncanny Avengers.
DEMBY: Could you explain the Remender thing?
GARCIA: Background: The series was pitched as a coalition of the X-Men with the Marvel Universe's preferred superhero team, the Avengers. What it was was: Captain America picking mutants he thought were "good," including Havok, the brother of Cyclops, who is now a fugitive for "killing" Charles Xavier.

Havok is appointed team leader, and he states in a press conference that he doesn't want to be called a "mutant."

Now, when that's the only term that's been used - and even reclaimed as a point of pride - by this community, for a guy with a history as a government operative to come out against it is problematic, particularly when he can pass for a "regular" human. But when faced with legitimate pushback from people like Comics Alliance editor-in-chief Joe Hughes and others on Twitter, Remender (himself a white cis-male) wrote in part that critics should "drown [themselves] in hobo p*ss."

Only the comics industry would let comments like that go on a public forum without any disciplinary action.
DEMBY: Yikes. Does this kind of antagonism from creators change your reading habits as people who love comics and also care about diversity?
GARCIA: I've stopped reading that book for pleasure, if that's what you mean. Now I just keep tabs on it to watch for more race-fails. But, again, the lack of consequences reminds me that, on the corporate level, Marvel only wants to discuss "diversity" when it can make a buck. The company also made a big deal about a gay character, Northstar, getting married, but hasn't done much with him since.

PETTIS: I lost my longtime love Barbara Gordon to the Nu52, but generally I try not to let creator's opinions mess with my enjoyment of their books. I've been reading Bill Willingham's Fables since '02 despite the fact that he's using the book as a (poor) metaphor for the Israeli-Palestine debate and has some real life politics I can't agree with. But Fables itself is fantastic.

KANAYAMA: If a comic appears to espouse racist/minority-unfriendly/sexist worldviews, I tend to just stop reading, especially if these drive plotlines. Otherwise, I get too angry. Sadly, this has meant saying goodbye to DC, at least for now. Like Kendra, I do try to read comics as independent from their creators (I unashamedly enjoy Sin City, except for the creepy Asian fetishization surrounding Miho) but in some cases creators' views seep in and taint the whole thing.

On a more optimistic note, although many comics and comics-related properties are still hugely problematic when it comes to race, there does seem to be diversity in comics that didn't exist before - and it's great to have those options. When I was growing up, the only Asian female characters I regularly saw in comics were Jubilee and Psylocke (it was the 90s) - the spunky teen in rainbow brights and the sexy ninja type with a perpetual wedgie. And there were no Asian male protagonists that I can think of. We finally got Amadeus Cho and Tony and Toni Chu in the last decade (along with the terrifying-but-fascinating Talia, who only got her first real spotlight role a couple of years ago, albeit as a villain), and while it's shameful that it took them so long to get here, at least they're here now.
DEMBY: Are there any comic books that you feel deal with real-life racial issues in a thoughtful way? Any specific storylines?
KANAYAMA: Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is one of the best treatments of contemporary racial issues I've ever seen in comics. It deals with the conflicts between how we see ourselves represented by the media, how those closest to us (family, etc) seem to represent us, our cultural and shared histories, and how we represent and conceive of ourselves.

Scalped is also wonderful for this. It doesn't place racial issues front and center - at least not for the most part - but that's partially because most of the action takes place within a community where everyone is Native American, so there isn't as much racial contrast between the characters. It also turns the fetishization issue bloodily on its head by casting a white character obsessed with Native American culture as a violent, murderous maniac who's one of the most dangerous people in the series. And it examines the historical and socio-economic factors involved in being a racial minority in contemporary America with a thoughtfulness that I haven't seen in any other comics.

PETTIS: Race isn't a central part of the Image series Chew, but it is one of the few books I can think of that centers around an fully developed Asian-American protagonist with a life and fully envisioned (also Asian-American) family.

DC's Batwing solo book (RIP), was the first mainstream hero (that I can recall) to come out of the Congo. Long story short: Batwing (David Zavimbe) was first known as "Africa's Batman" during Grant Morrison's Batman Inc., but finally graduated to his own series in DC's New 52. He was a former child soldier in the Congo whose parents had both died of AIDS and spent a good chunk of his run taking down a warlord in the Congo, which made him a first in many respects. So while the book didn't necessarily deal with race, it was unique with an almost entirely African cast and its setting.

KANAYAMA: I completely agree about Chew. Not only does the protagonist Tony have great characterization and a hilarious family, but he's also in a relationship with a white woman (and his former work partner is a bisexual man, which is clearly part of who he is as a person but isn't his single defining characteristic). Both Tony and his twin sister Toni stay well away from the stereotypical portrayals of Asian men and Asian women respectively without it falling into overcompensation: Tony is shown to have fully operational sexuality - directed towards an all-American, fresh-faced blonde! - and the Caucasian characters in the series are sidekicks or otherwise secondary to him, while Toni's portrayal a) isn't sexualized in the least, b) steers clear of the Dragon Lady/hot assassin trope, and c) casts her as the outgoing, daring one.

But as Kendra says, Chew doesn't really deal with racial issues; in fact, it's become notable partially for not talking about race while offering a diverse cast of characters.

GARCIA: My favorite moment actually isn't from the comics. There was an episode of Static Shock in which the hero, a Black teenager, visits Ghana with his family. He has an adventure, of course, and teams up with an African hero, Anansi. But there's also a moment when Static phones his white friend/colleague, Richie, back in the U.S. and tells him something to the effect of, "It feels different here. Here I'm just another kid." And Richie doesn't get it, but he doesn't give Static grief over it, either. He just accepts it.

For me, having grown up in Mexico before emigrating to the U.S., that moment resonated down to my soul. I immediately felt happy for any kid getting to watch that and experiencing that moment. And I'll always be grateful to Dwayne McDuffie (R.I.P.) for bringing that to the viewers and fans of Milestone Entertainment - despite, it should be said, opposition from the corporate forces at DC and Warner Brothers.
DEMBY: Kendra, it seems like the Batwing thing is the latest in a long tradition of creating new heroes of color whose identities are predicated upon the identities of some more-established white characters. There's the new Muslimah Ms. Marvel, or the Green Lantern John Stewart.
PETTIS: DC is traditionally pretty big on that. They'll always circle back to their original Justice League, even after killing someone like Bruce Wayne. They're the company's prestige characters and so that's why you get 50 different books for the Bat-Family, while someone like Katana (DC's Japanese soul capturing martial artist) gets one solo book since her first appearance in 1983, and it only runs for 10 issues.

John Stewart has always been an interesting case, though. I grew up with Green Lantern Kyle Rayner (who is Mexican-Irish-American), but as DC's animated 'verse continued to grow, John Stewart became sort of the Green Lantern despite spending a good deal of the '90s retired and partially paralyzed. If you ask kids who the Green Lantern is, for the most part they name John not Hal. Yet, when it came time for the Green Lantern film, studios - in their continued desperation to make Ryan Reynolds happen - went with Hal Jordan. The prestige character who - fun fact - isn't even the original Green Lantern (that's Allan Scott), so there goes that excuse.

There's a moment when Static, the black teenage superhero, phones his white friend/colleague, Richie, back in the U.S. and tells him something to the effect of, "It feels different here. Here I'm just another kid." And Richie doesn't get it, but he doesn't give Static grief over it, either. He just accepts it. For me, having grown up in Mexico before emigrating to the U.S., that moment resonated down to my soul.

YU: That's actually what happened to me. I was first introduced to Green Lantern from the Justice League show, so when I read the Green Lantern Secret Origin book (which came out around the same time as the movie) my first reaction was, I thought Green Lantern was a black guy?

KANAYAMA: I recently spoke to an American university lecturer who told me that when the GL movie was first announced, several of his students thought Idris Elba would be a good fit for the role, because to them the Green Lantern is black. I also heard from someone else that their friends thought the casting of Ryan Reynolds was whitewashing/racism for that same reason. But I'm willing to give DC the slight benefit of the doubt, in that their approach for the last few years has been to please who they see as True Fans, despite said fans making up a small proportion of the money-spending public. To people who primarily or only know the Green Lantern through comics published before the 90s, he's Hal Jordan, all-American white guy. Hence Ryan Reynolds.
DEMBY: Dwayne McDuffie, who wrote much of those Justice League episodes, once said that he pushed to make sure John Stewart was the Lantern in the cartoons, and said exactly what Alan did: "If you ask a kid who Green Lantern is, the kid will say it's John Stewart," Adams says. The black guy.
GARCIA: Kendra brings up a very good point: The DC Animated Universe was a bastion for characters of color; the League cartoon gave Stewart relationships with a white woman, Hawkgirl, and a Black woman, Vixen, that were arguably more nuanced than many prime-time romances. (Stewart/Hawkgirl was healthier than Fitz/Olivia, I'll say that much.)

DEMBY: Everything is healthier than Fitz/Olivia, Art.

GARCIA: Just playing to the crowd!

But I digress. The point is, between the League's show, Young Justice, Brave and the Bold and Static, characters of color had multiple spotlight opportunities. So seeing the New 52 get moved to the animated arena in last year's "Flashpoint Paradox" feature felt like a defeat. Geoff Johns and Dan DiDio hunger for the Silver Age like Galactus does the Earth.

DEMBY: This is more of an observation than a question. The disconnect between the characters' races and the book's larger theme sometimes seem at odds. Charles Xavier, the X-Men's leader, believes that humans and mutants can peacefully coexist. Magneto, their most persistent foe, believes that the survival of mutantkind rests in their separating from mutants. But there's a really good moment in the most recent X-Men movie, in which Magneto makes a fairly on-the-nose allusion to real-life racial discrimination, and almost all the mutants of color or mutants who are not otherwise obviously human decide to roll with him. They're the people who can't "pass." All the white kids who look human roll with Xavier. (Abigail Nussbaum had a pretty thoughtful take on this dynamic in X-Men: First Class as well, although she looked at its allusions to Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust survivor Magneto's quasi-Zionism.)

KANAYAMA: Grant Morrison's New X-Men tried to remedy some of this, with the introduction of "good" mutants with unattractive non-human features, but Shyminsky (as referenced by Martin) makes the salient point that the leader of the "good", assimilation-oriented mutants is still a white WASP-ish man, whereas the leader of the "bad", conflict-oriented mutants came from a cultural minority and underwent and witnessed incredible suffering, which came about when a monoculture attempted to assert absolute dominance. During Magneto's early life, I'm sure that he saw people around him trying to fit into the dominant culture, at least enough to not get killed, and then saw that this didn't work. Professor X may have suffered discrimination because of his mutant abilities, but that's nowhere near on the same scale as seeing everyone around you, including your loved ones, be slaughtered en masse when you're a child. So I'm more inclined to believe him than Professor X about minority issues.

I'm not saying that Magneto Was Right, but he makes a couple of good points.
DEMBY: I remember seeing that scene and thinking that Magneto Was Definitely Right.
GARCIA: Actually, Beast sticks around with Team Charlie, and he was already blue and furry by that point. And don't forget the scehe where Sebastian Shaw makes a remark about slavery and we get an EXTREME CLOSE-UP of Darwin.

KANAYAMA: My analysis is coming purely from the comics here, but Beast did go to Harvard (and in the movies is played by Kelsey Grammer, who got famous by portraying a white male character associated with wealth and high social status). I didn't take Darwin into account, though - and that's one heck of a loaded name.

Whenever someone floats the idea of casting a person of color in the movie role of a superhero previously deployed as white, there's an outcry from fans and occasionally even some writers. A writer at Comic Book Movie was adamant that casting Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch in the forthcoming Fantastic Four movie, would "confuse a lot of people" and "now is not the time." Does this kind of defensiveness around the whiteness of a character underscore the centrality of race in the creation of white characters?

GARCIA: Yes. Because it's the natural result when the industry spends decades prioritizing white male characters - you have white male fans getting twitchy over this sort of casting while accepting white-washing or all-white stories, as Junot Diaz memorably observed. So you can't even have a nice preview spread for the new Ms. Marvel book without jackasses like these rushing into the comments section:

So much for geeks being the "enlightened" sort, right?

This reliance on a racist, misogynist, homo- and trans-phobic fanbase was recently brought to light by Paul Dini's statement that the Young Justice cartoon, a wonderfully diverse work that spotlighted women, women of color and young men of color, was canceled because too many women were watching the product.

Dini's story was foreshadowed by a Bleeding Cool report from 2011 mentioning that DC Comics told retailers they were specifically targeting men in the 18-to-34 range. I'm gonna guess they're not including P.O.C. in that description.

Now, one could argue that Marvel has shown more diversity, and the creation of the new Ms. Marvel and the Mighty Avengers book, a book with a team mostly comprised of P.O.C. But the sticking point is equity; the odds that any of these characters would be centerpieces in a crossover or multimedia properties, has historically been low.

The news that Luke Cage will be featured in a Netflix series is encouraging, but there's no indication that he'll be "promoted" to the movie universe - or even that his series will get a decent shot at success if the numbers aren't in the realm of Orange Is The New Black.

PETTIS: Y'know, I'm not sure if I even need Luke Cage in the movie 'verse so long as the Netflix show is given the opportunity to shine the way OITNB was. I'm putting all the potential I saw in SHIELD into my hopes for Luke Cage. If Tracie Thoms doesn't show up as Misty Knight, someone has failed.

Marvel has a really diverse group of minor characters at their disposal, they're just failing to utilise them on the big and small screens.

But yeah-- a lot of this has to do with the category of person publishers (and filmmakers) think of as being familiar/identifying with the characters. What's the nerd stereotype? The guy who looks like Kevin Smith, or the P.O.C. girl who's been loyal to the same comic shop for years? There's a worry, subconscious or not, that if white males have no one to identify with that the readership vanishes. No amount of trend-bucking (take Miles Morales, for example) is going to change that. Otto Octavius can be Peter Parker for a year, Chris Evans and Ben Affleck can play two iconic heroes each, but Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch is too confusing.

YU: I think it's also partly because people (publishers, but some authors too) think most comic book readers are white males, and while that's true (for now), the demographics are changing. I'm thinking of the now-infamous panel where Mark Millar and Todd McFarlane said comics aren't for girls.

GARCIA: I think if you can take Agent Coulson from the movies to an underwhelming (thus far) TV show, you can work the pipeline the other way. There's already fans clamoring to see Ming Na's Agent May on the big screen, and I can't blame them for that - it shows how badly fans want to see more than just white people on the screen. It's nice that Miles Morales is the lead in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic, sure, but it blunts his impact when the Ultimate Spider-Man TV show still trots Peter Parker out.

KANAYAMA: Kendra, there does seem to be an unfortunate mentality in the Big Two that diversity is for kids. Everyone who knows the Green Lantern as John Stewart seems to have gotten that from the cartoon, whereas I've never met anybody who knows the Green Lantern as John Stewart from the comics alone (which are aimed at adults). I've heard that Marvel's animated properties have several fairly standout minority characters (e.g. White Tiger) who rarely show up in the comics, which again tend to be aimed at adults. Young Avengers isn't bad on the diversity front - their most functional couple is a gay male couple, Prodigy is a bisexual black teenage boy/young man, and America Chavez looks Latina, despite being from another dimension - but this title is aimed at teenagers as well as adults. Not that there's anything wrong with that, because young people need good comics too, but diversity isn't a matter of course in comics for grownups the way it is in cartoons for children.

GARCIA: Slight point of order - White Tiger is currently appearing in Mighty Avengers, alongside Luke Cage, the new Power Man, the Blue Marvel and Monica Rambeau, who was stripped of the mantle of Captain Marvel because Marvel was preparing Carol Danvers for the movies. So she's around. But it's anybody's guess how much attention she'll get.

PETTIS: I like that theory. It boils down to the idea that the comic book industry knows that they need to create new consumers in P.O.C.s, but once they have us hooked they don't feel the need to cater to us.

The DC/WB shows of my youth ( Smallville, Birds of Prey, Lois and Clark) were painfully white (yes, despite Shemar Moore and Sam Jones III), a trend which clearly continued into the films. I mean, let's take a minute to remember Marion Cotilliard and Liam Neeson being cast as the al Ghuls in Nolan's Batman flicks.

(currently on the CW) isn't perfect; it's diverse, but the P.O.C. characters played by Kelly Hu, Manu Bennett, and Kevin Alejandro among others, are overwhelmingly villains or of a certain moral ambiguity. But on the super-white CW it's definitely a change in the racial landscape and aimed, I would say, more at a 20-something female demographic. Now that I think about it, I don't actually know any white males who watch that show.

It's strange, because as a kid I'd go from Static Shock and Batman Beyond on Saturday mornings to Smallville during the week. The lack of diversity never bothered me then because I had options. As a 20-something who has a hard time getting into cartoons now-a-days, I really start to notice what was still missing then in the more "adult" stuff. There's no Maxine Gibson to take refuge in.

Sharing characteristics with a stereotype doesn't make someone a stereotype.

KANAYAMA: Giving the benefit of the doubt on the al Ghul situation is difficult for me, because they're one of my favorite fictional families. However, I wonder if the studio's casting of white actors was driven in part by a desire to avoid accusations of stereotyping, which would definitely have happened if they'd cast Middle Eastern/brown-skinned actors as global terrorists (although everyone involved seemed fine with setting up the excellent Ken Watanabe as a disposable decoy villain, but - as the terrible, terrible Die Another Day teaches us - it's different when Asians are involved).

Of course, this wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we had more Middle Eastern characters in popular media, and/or if the studio had been willing to engage with the complexities of the al Ghuls' characters. If there were more Middle Eastern faces, voices, perspectives and experiences being represented to the general public, seeing two antagonists with that ethnic background would be less problematic, the same way that having white villains in American movies isn't said to reinforce stereotypes of white people, because a wide variety of white people's and characters' experiences are represented in our popular media.

Besides, sharing characteristics with a stereotype doesn't make someone a stereotype. In the comics, Ra's al Ghul certainly seems shaped by his cultural and ethnic background, but the multifaceted nature of his personality prevents him from being reduced to an easy stereotype (unless the writers are really bad). He's a father, a leader, a conflicted nemesis/mentor figure, a man who's lived through centuries and seen empires rise and fall. All of that could theoretically have been brought out in the movies, and if it had, the studio could have cast a Middle Eastern actor in a role with nuanced, intricate characterization.
DEMBY: On the other side of this: Could you think of any characters whose whiteness is so central to their characterizations that they couldn't be reimagined as a person of color?
KANAYAMA: Unfortunately, I'm going to have to say Bruce Wayne. His ethnicity isn't central to his story in and of itself, but the social position afforded to him and his family by that ethnicity certainly is. The only way I could imagine him being a person of color would be to remove the element of the Wayne millions/billions and to cast him as a hyper-intelligent, hyper-diligent guy who'd made his way up the socio-economic ladder by himself. It could work, sort of, but it would certainly suck a lot of the power out of almost anything that happens in Wayne Manor - its significance in his stories doesn't come from the fact that that's where Batman lives, but from his family's and ancestors' histories that come with the manor.

YU: I would agree with you. I was going to say Angel (later Archangel.)

PETTIS: On that same Bruce Wayne note, Tony Stark is another one whose privilege, parentage, and Hamptons lifestyle probably wouldn't translate completely. His family wealth stretches back into the Industrial Revolution.

Captain America, too. There was the "Truth: Red, White and Black" storyline back in 2003 that explained how the Super-Serum was tested on African-American soldiers first (Tuskegee Experiment style) before it got anywhere near Steve Rogers. But Steve Rogers, American symbol of hope and courage during WWII, could not have been Black, Latino, Asian or anything but a blond, white guy. I mean, I can't get away with dressing as a USO girl from the film without someone commenting about how there weren't any black USO girls ( false, by the way). I just can't see a non-white Captain America working and staying in context.
DEMBY: A few years ago, I interviewed Bob Morales, who wrote The Truth. "It was so depressing I didn't think they would approve it," Morales told me. "But it was depressingly realistic. And likely." (Morales died last year, way too young.)
GARCIA: I have to disagree just a little here, if only because I was used to seeing rich, privileged Mexicans on television growing up. A Bruce Wayne-like figure who is a prince of the Mexico City social scene isn't that hard for me to imagine.

PETTIS: Fair. Would Zorro (despite being Spanish) be a horrible analogy?

GARCIA: I don't think that's a bad template. And, heck, the Waynes went to see a Zorro film the night Everything Changed, right?

KANAYAMA: I think the whole story would have to be relocated, though. Bruce Wayne has to be a white guy if he's in America.

GARCIA: Disagree; set the story in San Diego and you can easily create a Wayne-like character who's the scion of a rich Tijuana family, learned English as a child, and went to a nice prep school.

KANAYAMA: Ah, I can see that working. But San Diego is still pretty far away from pretend-New-York, where it's dark all the time and full of skyscrapers with flat roofs for Batman to crouch on.

GARCIA: But we're talking about Bruce Wayne. His character archetype still survives the translation.

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Superhero Super-Fans Talk Race And Identity In Comics

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast The X-Men comic franchise has proven remarkably sturdy in the half-century since its launch. It's spawned dozens of animated series and four major Hollywood films with a fifth due out this summer.

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James Gun, the director of Suicide Squad and the Guardian's of the Galaxy moves responded to th negative comments in an interesting way. He pointed out that there has been more backlash about casting a black actor in a "white role" than when he made Drax and Mantis aliens instead of humans.

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The Suicide Squad director James Gunn has defended the racebending of characters who were originally white in the comics.

For some time now there has been an ongoing debate over the casting of characters in superhero films. Sometimes an adaption will feature characters who are traditionally white in the source material but are portrayed by a person of color which has become more and more common as the years have gone on. Some, however, do not approve of the practice and have made their voices on the matter known. James Gunn, however, is one director who does not have a problem racebending traditionally white characters.

Last month, a new featurette for James Gunn's The Suicide Squad was revealed and showed off the full roster of the latest incarnation of Task Force X which also solved the big mystery of who Idris Elba was playing in the upcoming film. At one point Idris Elba was almost cast as Deadshot as a replacement for Will Smith who was unable to reprise the role. He was eventually revealed to be playing another character. Someone, however, had wondered what James Gunn had thought about the casting of Will Smith in the first place given that the character is white in the comics. In his response, James Gunn defended the racebending of white characters, noting how the character's personality has nothing to do with their race:

"Again, that's pretty simple - people aren't making movies about unknown superheroes. In addition, it's innately discriminatory to think what makes a character a character is his or her ethnicity and not his or her personality. What is it, if not racism, that David Ayer, for casting Will Smith as Deadshot, and John Watts, for casting Zendaya as Mary Jane, got thousands of times more shit for those choices than I did for making Drax and Mantis aliens instead of humans in Guardians?"

What do you all make of James Gunn's comments? Do you agree with his statements on racebending white characters? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

The first Suicide Squad followed a team of supervillains who were recruited by the government for a dangerous black ops mission in exchange for reduced sentences. The ensemble cast included Will Smith as Deadshot, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, and Jared Leto as The Joker. However, James Gunn is expected to deliver on the fresh take on the team in his upcoming movie.

Written and directed by James Gunn, The Suicide Squad stars David Dastmalchian, John Cena, Jai Courtney, Joaquín Cosío, Nathan Fillion, Joel Kinnaman, Mayling Ng, Flula Borg, Sean Gunn, Juan Diego Botto, Storm Reid, Pete Davidson, Taika Waititi, Alice Braga, Steve Agee, Tinashe Kajese, Daniela Melchior, Peter Capaldi, Julio Ruiz, Jennifer Holland, Viola Davis, Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, and Michael Rooker.

James Gunn's The Suicide Squad is currently set to be released on August 6, 2021. Stay tuned for all the latest news on James Gunn's The Suicide Squad and be sure to subscribe to Heroic Hollywood's YouTube channel for more original video content.

Source: Instagram

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The Suicide Squad's James Gunn Defends Racebending White Characters

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The Suicide Squad director James Gunn has defended the racebending of characters who were originally white in the comics. For some time now there has been an ongoing debate over the casting of characters in superhero films. Sometimes an adaption will feature characters who are traditionally white in the source material but are portrayed by a person of color which has become more and more common as the years have gone on.

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Though we have mostly been focusing on race bending (rightfully so), this week in comics, it is important to note how women are perceived in comics. They are often killed-off in order for their male counterpart's story to become more complex. This is something necessary to keep in mind when looking for comics to show your class because this is not a showing women in a good light.

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#2 Women in Refrigerators (Tropes vs. Women)

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I was researching why we should include comics in the classroom, and I came across this image. Another side of including comics in the classroom is allowing students the creative liberty to make their own! If they unfortunately can't find themselves in a comic-- they can make their own! This was inspired by Toni Morrison's famous quote "If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

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This comic is actually by UNICEF and depicts students throughout the world being affected by smog. This is a very interesting topic because it's not about superheroes, but about a global health crisis. It teaches the reader to be responsible for their contributions to greenhouse gases and what they can do to keep themselves safe.

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Kids fight Smog Magazine with 16 Pages from pcimediaimpact.

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How Should People React to Comics Depicting Racism?

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How Should People React to Comics Depicting Racism?

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This article demonstrates how comic book enterprises all have a past that is not exactly clean of faults. Comic book industries must be open to self evaluation and acknowledge if they have published anything racist, white washed, stereotypical, and inequality.

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If there is anything that the past few weeks have taught us about our country, it's that there is no individual, entity, or organization that shouldn't be taking a long, hard look in the mirror at their past (and present) to determine what biases did and do exist. Everything from governmental departments, the military, companies, nonprofits, universities, and countless other aspects of our daily lives are under the microscope as they are finally reckoning with their past actions and current reactions.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the comic book industry is not immune to this self-examination. Let's explore some comics with seemingly racist overtones and discuss what should be done with them.

More recently than any of us probably care to admit, comics were a breeding ground for stereotyping, whitewashing, and generally stomping out the idea that people are equals - even as some of them have powers beyond our imaginations. For an industry that has existed in this country for more than 100 years, you can only imagine what types of content exist.

How Should Comic Collectors Respond to Racist Comics?

As responsible comic book collectors, investors, and speculators, it should be up to us to help repair (not erase) that part of this hobby and make it clear that we don't stand for that type of treatment of

characters within the pages of our favorite books.

With that in mind, I want to point out some of the more egregious and prevalent comics from our past with an eye towards removing these symbols of ass-backward thinking from current and future comic book lovers. Many of these are going for a decent amount, although I would not consider any of these books as major keys.

I am decidedly not a book-burning advocate. I've read Fahrenheit 451 and I understand the dangers of censorship. But I personally feel strongly that we should be removing these symbols of racist comics from our collections. Do they represent a different time, a part of our past that was culturally different? Yes. But in 2020, they likely belong in the trash, not praised.

(Much of this list comes from writers who have wonderfully researched these issues including articles from Complex, Guff, and Ranker.)

Racist Comics From the Past

While some of these offenses show up in single issues, several also span the entire series. The following are merely a sample of the comics that fit this description.
The Depiction of Black Sidekicks in Young Allies and Captain Marvel
It won't surprise you to learn the 1940s and 1950 were not a time that was generally kind to African-

Americans in print. Exhibits 1A and 1B would be the Bucky Barnes' led group Young Allies and Captain Marvel's run, both published at the height of World War II. I suppose the publishers at the time thought these were redeemable and acceptable characters because they were fighting the evil Nazis, but in hindsight, they ended up being racist caricatures that were all too common in those years.

Bucky's ally, Whitewash Jones, not only had a superficially racist name but was drawn in a way that made him look more creature than an animal. He was sloppily dressed and had a protruding mouth and lips, he spoke broken English and was generally represented as a simpleton. Whitewash was often a device that forced Bucky to have to overcome additional obstacles instead of just assisting in the fight against the Germans. Marvel would later denounce the whole series, but it doesn't wash the pages clean of this ugly representation.

Elsewhere in the industry, the early Captain Marvel had a sidekick named Steamboat. "Sidekick" may be too generous of a term because he essentially served as Captain Marvel's de facto servant until 1945 when, on appeal from school children, the character was no longer used. Whatever awful features were used to depict Whitewash Jones were amplified with Steamboat, and he carried himself with the same poor English and bumbling persona as his Young Allies counterpart. To say these depictions of black characters were uncommon at this time would be a lie, and it is useful to understand that while we were fighting injustice and oppression on one side of the world, we were buying it up left and right on our own soil.

I use these two examples as representative of a larger problem that existed in that timeframe. Whether it was these two derogatory sidekicks, Batman frequently calling Asian foes "Chinamen", Captain America battling "yellow" Asian foes,, Green Lantern's Eskimo pal "Pieface", or Superman and Jimmy Olsen working alongside red-skinned Native Americans, this period of comic history has more than its share of repulsive images.
Black Goliath - Power Man #24
The comic industry, unfortunately, has a long history of labeling African-American superheroes as "Black" Something. Familiar names such as Black Panther, Black Lightning, and Black Racer come to mind immediately, but Black Goliath, introduced by Marvel in 1975, is a particularly interesting case study.

William Foster was born and raised in the ghetto of Watts in Los Angeles (stop me if you've heard this

stereotype before). Marvel deserves credit for giving Foster unbelievable intelligence which allowed him to attend the California Institute of Technology and become a lab assistant for Hank Pym. After years of working with Pym, Foster decided to try the Pym Particles on himself, enlarging his stature to 10 feet. With Pym's blessing, Foster takes on the moniker of Black Goliath and works his way to a life of crime-fighting. Before this happens, however, he does end up as a circus sideshow for the Circus of Crime for a period of time. Why? I don't have a clue.

It's interesting why Marvel and Hank Pym - who had given up the Giant-Man/Goliath moniker - didn't just give Foster the Goliath name outright. That didn't happen until four years later in 1979 when he would change to Giant-Man in Marvel Two-In-One #55. So for as much credit as organizations like Marvel and DC should receive for introducing strong black characters like Falcon and John Stewart's Green Lantern, we shouldn't forget that these publishing houses still found it necessary to give these characters the "Black" description, a label never given to any white heroes, as far as I can tell.
Sam Wilson as a Mobster - Captain America #186
Unfortunately, Falcon's story across the 1970s wasn't all that Stan Lee originally planned for it to be. In Captain America #186, Marvel essentially rewrote Wilson's backstory, giving it a much darker influence. Wilson was originally described as a hard-working social worker from Harlem whose parents had been murdered and who had turned to birds as a passion and a hobby. His original backstory had his crash on a remote island while on a work assignment, where he was subsequently trapped by Red Skull. Eventually, with the help of Captain America and Black Panther, Wilson was able to escape and adopt the mantle of Falcon (and eventually Captain America).

But in the mid-1970s Marvel decided to redo that story and make Wilson a mobster who moved to Los Angeles from Harlem. Giving him stereotypical pimp outfits, this issue tried to recreate a character's whole story, but a combination of backlash and common sense led to a retcon of this story as merely something Red Skull planted in Wilson's brain to try and manipulate him.

It's difficult for me in 2020 to try and justify a reason why this would be necessary for a popular character, especially one who helped usher in a strong decade of black heroes, but sometimes implicit biases and stereotypes creep in - no matter how hard we try - and we get stories where an upstanding black hero is reduced to a criminal.
Lois Lane is Black For a Day - Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane #106
As you can probably tell, the 1970s were not a kind decade to the idea of progress in the comic industry. For every step forward there seemed to be two steps back. But sometimes those were leaps

back instead of steps, as in the story-line in this issue where Lois Lane - with Superman's help - changes from white to black for a day to write a story where she can better understand what it meant to be black in the "Little Africa" part of Metropolis.

As a black woman, Lois encounters many hardships. She can't catch a cab, for example, and is taught what she feels are valuable lessons about the differences between people of different races.

Where the story falls flat and proved so controversial is that it grossly underestimates what it means to live a life as black. Lois Lane can't come close to comprehending what it is like after only a day or two, so while the creators meant well, it came off as lacking empathy and trying to whitewash a problem.

What Should We Do With Racist Comics Now?

For starters, we could all go full Michael Corleone and renounce these comics and images for what they are: racism. While it is helpful to understand how far we have come, we must not forget how far there still is to go. Your money is better spent on stronger, more well-rounded minority characters than these depictions of past stereotypes.

Here's hoping you will join me in purging our collections of a dark part of our country's past. What are you doing with these and other similar comics? Let me know in the comments.
GoCollect is the #1 comic book price guide for tracking sales data of all graded comic books in real-time. Fair market values are now at your fingertips. Check out all the features at www.gocollect.com.

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What Should We Do With Comics Depicting Racism? - GoCollect

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If there is anything that the past few weeks have taught us about our country, it's that there is no individual, entity, or organization that shouldn't be taking a long, hard look in the mirror at their past (and present) to determine what biases did and do exist.

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Evaluating Highly Racist Moments in Comics

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Evaluating Highly Racist Moments in Comics

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This article evaluates the most racist moments that have occurred in comic book history, and the truth behind them.

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Tonight, The CW closes out the first season of their latest superhero series, Black Lightning. Over the course of these 13 episodes, we've seen a hero of color that we can be proud of. The series not only brought Black Lives Matter and the importance of having an education to the forefront, but it did so with authenticity, giving viewers a black hero they could believe in. For POC comic book fans, who have long had many reasons to abandon the medium altogether, this is a significant advancement.

Like most forms of entertainment, the comic book industry has long been in the hands of white guys. That fact, paired with the terribly racist history this country has endured, has resulted in some of your favorite characters involved in racist or, at the very least, very problematic storylines. Hell, Black Lightning is legit from the Southside of Metropolis.

With that truth in mind, here's a look at some of the most racist moments in the history of comics. From poor "White Savior" tales to the vilest depictions of black people in popular comics, your favorites have been on some bullshit. Let's continue to do better.

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The 7 Most Racist Moments in Comic Book History

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Comics might be the epitome of diversity today but some of your favorite superheroes-from Superman and Batman to Captaim America-had extremely racist storylines back in the day. Here's a highlight of some of the most offensive racially insensitive moments from Marvel, DC and other popular comic books.

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Documentary on Racism in American Superhero Comics, 1938-1945

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Documentary on Racism in American Superhero Comics, 1938-1945

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This video gives a great look into the racism that occurred within early comics, including in Superman and Captain America. It is a short documentary, approximately 8 minutes, so it keeps the attention on the facts very well.

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This article sources multiple comics that can be encouraging during the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, and depict black heroes who fight crime and the social injustices of the world today.

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For a lot of people, comics are something they read as a way to escape from the world around them. Comics have always been a refuge for me, but with everything that's been happening in the world with regards to the systemic racism of this country's police forces, trying to take shelter in comics has been rough.

While waiting for the news one night, I was watching a comedy that had a joke about comics and mansplaining. I rushed to social media to share the joke with people, but when I got there I ran straight into reality. Between the images and videos being shared and all of the sirens and helicopter flybys, I didn't sleep well that night.

Marvel Comics always talks about its connection with readers as being because their heroes exist in 'the world outside your window.' Right now, though, I don't have the words to truly capture and convey my feelings for what's happening outside of my window.

I make no claims to be a hardcore journalist like the people out there risking their safety. Professionals (as of June 4th, Forbes reports over 300 press violations and counting) and everyday people on the street, armed only with their cameras, are being targeted by the police. What I can do is list how the comics community has been documenting and presenting the systemic racism of the police for years.

In what was the genesis of key Milestone Media characters gaining their powers, the Police Department of Dakota orchestrated the use of an experimental radioactive dye to be used against the Gangs of Dakota, who were gathering for an ultimate gang battle known as the Big Bang. Having learned of the imminent event, the Dakota PD planned to tag the gang members like animals with this experimental gas. Things go wrong when another sinister organization uses this event to analyze/capture the unexpected effects on the gang members, cops and civilians that are killed and deformed. As a result, the cops cover it all up by killing as many survivors as possible, blowing up the bridge that connected Dakota to Paris Island (where the Big Bang took place), and blaming everything on the gangs and their violence.

(Milestone Media 1993)

On the flip side of the Milestone Universe, the first issue of Icon brings us along on our heroes' first night out fighting crime - and becoming the "criminals." When Icon and Rocket arrive to offer assistance to the police, they are immediately surrounded by cops in tactical gear and told to put their hands up. The following issue really gets into the police's overzealous response to Icon and Rocket's appearance. Taken at face value, the joke of the situation is comical, but the pain and hurt still packs a powerful punch after the laugh almost 30 years later.

(Marvel Comics 2016)

When this book first came out I tried like hell to get more eyes on it, as this book was talking about more than the typical superhero fare. Nighthawk is a gritty hard-hitting book set in Chicago on the heels of a cop's trial for killing a black man in custody.

Nighthawk fights bad guys day and night on both sides, from the white supremacists who sell guns and drugs to the crooked cops who profit off of these transactions, all while working to fight against the gentrification and displacement of city residences. While this title had a very short run, you can get a copy of this trade. It's an amazing dissection of the issues faced by an America that struggles with racism and how it disproportionately affects the Black community.

Considered one of the top campaigns for Kickstarter, Black tells the story of a world where only Black people have superpowers. Our introduction into the story is through Kareem Jenkins, our hero, and proxy into this world, as he finds out that he's one of them when he is gunned down by the police. Unlike most victims of police brutality, Kareem was able to come back to life and join a secret organization of superpowered Black revolutionaries.

LaValle's 2017 mini-series brought the Frankenstein Monster into the modern era of police brutality when Dr. Josephine Baker, a descendant of Victor Frankenstein, loses her only child to a police shooting. This tragedy pushes her to the point where she embraces her family lineage, and being a bona fide nanotech genius, she uses that intellect to repeat what Victor did and bring her son back to life.

An amazing spin on the Frankenstein Monster myth, this story is a heavy fantastical tale of rage and hope focused on a mother's grief and anger at a world where having the wrong skin color is a crime. Unfortunately, this trade can't be found everywhere in print but I'm sure it can be found online, and it's well worth the search.

(Lee & Low Books 2017)

This original graphic novel spotlights the death of an innocent young man at the hands of the police, and the impact that the titular character's death has on the community.

In the category of great minds think alike, fellow Comics Beat contributor Ricardo Serrano Denis wrote a brief piece about this book last week.

If in any way you find yourself arguing with someone about the police and systemic racism, the importance of protesting, taking a knee, or Black Lives Matter in general, point them in the direction of these comics if the many videos already online aren't enough.

Odds are in the time it took you to read to this point George Floyd still had a few minutes of life left. We weren't there to help him and all the others like him, but if you would like to contribute to the peaceful protests that are taking place around the world and help those on the frontlines, please make sure you're registered to vote, you've answered your census and, if you have the means in these very hard economic times, check out and donate to one or more of these organizations, or any of the others around the country.

Bail Funds by City/State

George Carmona 3rd is an Artist/Designer/Writer, former Milestone Media Intern, former DC Comics paper pusher, book lover, lifelong comic geek, has been in 4 Star Trek novels, rocked the tactical station on the Bridge Crew Simulator and held down the DS9 team on a panel at the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. Follow him on Twitter @gcarmona3.

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Black Lives Matter Comics: Systemic racism in comics police - The Beat

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For a lot of people, comics are something they read as a way to escape from the world around them. Comics have always been a refuge for me, but with everything that's been happening in the world with regards to the systemic racism of this country's police forces, trying to take shelter in comics has been rough.

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This article delves into the new culture of racism and how it plays out into comics today. This new ideology in America has already weaved itself into comics, and the concept is explored here.

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Whiteness is an enduring construct of privilege and power that systematically shapes and maintains racial inequality, resulting in a hierarchal system of oppression toward people of color (Feagin & Elias 2013). Systematic racism requires generations of people reproducing racist institutions and the white racial framings that support them (Feagin 2013). According to Feagin (2013), the white racial frame is a broad concept encompassing racist practices, imagery and discourse throughout US society shaped by and for the primary benefit of individuals considered white by society. In all eras of American history, manifestations of racism contain the ideological underpinning that justifies racial inequality. Moreover, the societal grip of white racial framing underscores the gross reality that America's racist foundations are regularly unacknowledged (Feagin 2014; Bonilla-Silva 2017).

When matters of white racism are overlooked or ignored, the issue is forgotten among most whites. Feagin (17) emphasizes that "the collective memory of racism also involves a collective forgetting" and underscores research finding older white Americans recalling the Jim Crow era as a time of peace and equality between races. After slavery became illegal and before the civil rights movement, Jim Crow laws legalized 'separate but equal' realities of segregation. These laws personified a system of racial inequality barring black Americans from voting and owning land, deliberately blocking every opportunity to intermingle throughout legal, political or social settings in American society (Feagin 2013; Bonilla-Silva 2017). To some, the end of the Jim Crow era represented the end of racism. Race scholars argue this thinking has only produced an emerging 'new racism' since the late 1960s (Bonilla-Silva 2017).

New racism necessitates subtle, more clandestine strategies that continue to preserve white dominance in society; in other words, undercover forms of racism are replacing traditional and explicit forms. Beyond white racial framing, dominant ideologies of new racism subsume a variety of interrelated concepts that include racial apathy and colorblindness. Apathy and indifference toward racial inequality generally means 'to not care', 'pay attention' or 'know about' ongoing racial inequality. Avoiding racial conversations sustains ignorance and indifference, further cementing new racist ideology. Racism, in this way, is surreptitiously preserved, becoming more firmly embedded within society, broadening systemic issues of inequality. Thus, ignorance and indifference reproduce racial inequality and, as a form of contemporary racial prejudice, racial apathy is an extension of colorblind racism. Scholars (Bonilla-Silva 2015; Jacobson 2015; Mueller 2017) generally describe colorblind discourse as the way people enact colorblind logic through language and text. Whites and nonwhites draw on colorblind frames to make seemingly non-racial claims about what is, in fact, irrefutable evidence of racial inequality. Bonilla-Silva (2015: 119) further emphasizes the media's role in exploiting racial stories, only to reframe and reconstruct them in ways that validate racial angst.

Pop culture and mass media representations are mechanisms that enable larger issues of systematic racism to develop the utility and ideology of new racism. For example, Jacobson (2015) examines how race, class and gender projects overlap and finds participants generate racially constructed selves from the standpoint of a white racial frame using colorblind language and logic. "By using the white racial frame and colorblindness, participants discuss consequences of systematic racism without recognizing the intentional structural organization of social groups" (Jacobson 847). Furthermore, Jacobson (2015) finds participants assume a low socioeconomic status to explain why more black and latina women appear in hip hop videos compared to white women. These findings explicate the social consequences of white racial framings and colorblindness and how they are transmitted and internalized regularly throughout pop culture media. Feagin (92) refers to this kind of response as 'social alexithymia', or "the inability of whites to understand where African Americans and other Americans of color are coming from and what their experiences are like."

New Racism Ideology & Marvel Fans

Historically, comic books have been a cultural space dominated by white, masculine characters and audiences, leaving narratives for women and minority characters as significantly underrepresented or portrayed in stereotypical contexts (Hall & Lucal 1999; Singer 2002; Davis 2013). More recently, comic book narratives are being adapted into film and television series, propelling the subculture into mainstream pop culture. Moving into mainstream media has encouraged traditionally underrepresented voices to become more prominent in the world of comic books, as women and people of color have been creating and consuming comics at an increasing rate. However, traditional leaders in comic books, Marvel and DC have been slow to diversify their characters and creators and have been subject to substantial criticism for maintaining the dominance of white male characters. Considering the wider societal context of racial representation throughout pop culture and mainstream media, I set out to research how fans of comic book culture discuss the way Marvel films depict superhero characters. Employing a qualitative content analysis of an online forum tailored to comic book culture and superhero movies, my research explores how fans of Marvel comics negotiate their continued fandom amidst claims that the comic book industry is discriminatory towards people of color.

Framings of new racism illuminate a racial hierarchy palpable through the way framings are normalizing perceptions of white dominance. My findings are commensurate with the new racism canon of literature and reveal fan perceptions of diversity are constructed by implementing a white, racially framed perspective to explain both white dominance and overwhelming absence of women and characters of color in Marvel films. Themes of new racism throughout forum discussions implied that only overt racial content suggests race/racism matters. Despite craving more diverse comic book movies and characters, most discussions reverted to maintaining a character's origin story, even if that means character roles remain white and male. Pop culture consumers frequently adopt frames of new racism to make sense of media content that is predominantly white (Feagin 2013, Jacobson 2015, Mueller 2017). Fans not only rely on the use of white racial framings to account for a lack of diversity, but also to explain continued expressions of white dominance occurring throughout pop culture media. Accordingly, it is through the lens of white racial framing by which fans both reinforce and normalize white dominance in media and pop culture contexts, frequently asserting that the fan base is and will remain, predominately white and male.

New Racism Ideology & Marvel Films

Representations of race are producing new and more subtle forms of racism. Historically, comics and film have exhibited ways that reflected overt racism and sexism of the past. The recent surge in Marvel superhero films are a pop culture phenomenon that has been highly criticized for a lack of equal character representation on screen. White men are still considered as the primary consumers, creators and central characters throughout the genre; neglecting women and characters of color or casting them as the perpetual sidekick or hypersexualized love interest (Singer 2002; Wolf-Meyer 2003; Davis 2013). Fan discussions collectively concur that film companies, like Marvel, are primarily profit driven, leaving women and characters of color for secondary roles because it would simply be bad for business. Yet, fan perceptions are inconsistent with independent market research, as young women are predicted as the fastest growing demographic of comics (Pantozzi 2014). Furthermore, Marvel comic book films are slated for release through 2028 and beyond, however, these adaptations continue offering representations that do not match up to their changing demographics (Keyes 2014). Women and people of color are more likely to go to the movies, are purchasing comic books more than ever before and are just as likely to attend comic conventions (Comichron 2016). However, male characters outnumber women 9 to 1 at both Marvel and DC franchises and an estimated 79% of comic creators are white (Hickey 2014).

In April of 2017, The Federalist, a conservative web magazine, released an edgy piece that politicized issues of character diversity and argued that political correctness is causing Marvel to lose money. The editorial further claimed that creativity would continue to decline unless there was an increase in Christian values and a decrease in "extreme leftist" values staff in Marvel's writing room. To defend these claims, the author cited a trade magazine's interview with Marvel's vice-president of sales, David Gabriel, who declared that fans did not want more diversity or female characters (Del Arroz 2017). What is not explained in the article is that the author misquoted the VP of sales. Gabriel went on to say that the numbers indicated a lower interest in some of the more diverse films but that that did not necessarily match up with fan desires and that Marvel would therefore continue to promote diversity in film (Griepp 2017). The conservative argument was effectively using underhanded strategies to generate and spin conflict against diversity in comic films. Not long after the film adaptation of Marvel's Black Panther hit a number of records at the box office, IndieWire (2018) released an article with the headline: "Marvel Movies Are Now 'Required' to 'Reflect the World in Which They Are Made'." According to Marvel Studios president, Kevin Feige, proof of increased diversity lies not only in the blockbuster success of Black Panther, but also in the talent behind the camera. Feige asserts that most of the Marvel creators are limited to the collaborative imaginations of filmmakers and because conversations about increased diversity throughout the industry are beginning to produce results, Feige subsequently yields to the success of the African-American-directed Marvel film Black Panther, as the driving force to continue creating stories with "diverse talent." (Erbland 2018) Moreover, Marvel will continue the pace of increasing diverse roles with Captain Marvel, expected to be released in 2019 and is "Marvel's first film focused on a Superheroine." (Erbland 2018) Furthermore, Feige claims that this project marks the first time a woman has been involved in the directing process. Working as a co-director alongside Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden is the first woman behind the camera for Marvel. While this may be a major milestone for Marvel, it is a small step for mainstream millennial fans, as they make up most of the movie-going audience and are on track as the most educated, multicultural and liberal of any generation to date (Pyles 2013; Gao 2016; MPAA 2016; Milkmen 2017).
Whitney Hunt is a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in the department of sociology at Wayne State University Detroit, MI, USA. Her research interests include inequality of race/ethnicity, sex/gender and class, socialization, media representations and transmedia. This guest piece briefly talks about her recent research, which is forthcoming this year in Media, Culture & Society.
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By Whitney Hunt New Racism Ideology In the USA Whiteness is an enduring construct of privilege and power that systematically shapes and maintains racial inequality, resulting in a hierarchal system of oppression toward people of color (Feagin & Elias 2013). Systematic racism requires generations of people reproducing racist institutions and the white racial framings...