The first volume of Milestone Comics’ Icon asks two provocative questions: “What would a black superhero be like?” and “What would happen if Superman landed on earth in the antebellum South and was found by an enslaved black woman?” Unfortunately, as it turns out, these two questions are antithetical; trying to answer them both at once results in storyline that, despite some intelligence, resolves into incoherence, it’s most provocative possibilities drowned in genre default fisticuffs and capitulation to unexamined tropes.
But let’s start with the positive. Dwayne McDuffie, M.D. DBright, and Mike Gustovich’s answer to their first question is smart, funny, and so brilliantly obvious it makes you slap your forehead. What would a black superhero be like? they ask. And the answer is that a black superhero would be…a conservative Republican. Why on earth would a black man like Augustus Freeman, with Superman level powers, spend his time arresting low level criminals and attempting to aid the cops? Because he has politics like those of “Rush Limbaugh” (who gets a call-out) or Clarence Thomas. He’s a reactionary — and it’s that which puts him in line with the reactionary politics of the superhero genre. The iconic (if you will) moment of the series comes when he tells his young-but-hip sidekick Rocket that they need to aid the police. She tells him he’s nuts, and he replies pompously, “Don’t assume everything’s racial” — and then of course he asks the cops if he can help them, and they start shooting at him. “Don’t assume everything’s racial, huh?” Rocket says in exasperation. “I’ll try.”
McDuffie and his artists do that rare thing in black superhero comics — they acknowledge the tension between the law and order imperative of the superhero and the fact that law and order, in real life in the U.S., is inevitably directed against black people. Icon (both comic and superhero) work consciously to bridge or finesse that gap. The hero subscribes to a black conservative self-help philosophy that goes back to Booker T. Washington (who is mentioned by name): he tells black criminals they discredit the race (“Your behavior reflects poorly on our people and on yourselves”) and his goal as a superhero is to be an inspiration by showing black people that they can be heroes, and succeed, according to white cultural norms which he accepts — but which other characters, like Rocket, do not necessarily. (As she says upon learning Icon’s origin, “I think I just figured out how a black man could be a conservative Republican…You’re from Outer Space!”)
Rocket both inspires Icon to take responsibility for the black struggle, and (to some degree) argues with him about how to do that. Her own acquiescence in his brand of superheroing isn’t really thought through as well as it might be, but incidents like those with the cops, and a later pointless slugfest with some supergang members, nicely illustrate the problems of black conservatism and the contradictions of black superheroism. But while the comic sees Icon’s ideology as flawed, it also sees him as admirable and as having qualities — inspiration, hope, and (given his wealth and power) resources — to contribute to the black struggle. Black superheroes, Icon suggests, are silly and don’t always make sense, but, like black conservatives, they can still be valuable and meaningful. By acknowledging the contradictions inherent to black superheroes, Icon makes perhaps the best mainstream case possible for their value.
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But then there’s the answer to the second question. What would happen if Superman were a slave in the antebellum South?
Icon is an alien; he lands in a damaged ship on earth, and takes on the genetic imprint of the first human he encounters — a woman who is a slave. Icon then lives through the last century and a half plus of black history; he helps slaves escape through the Underground Railroad, fought with the Union in the Civil War, got a law degree from Fisk, met his wife during the Harlem Renaissance, and fought for the U.S. in World War I. “Icon” is not just his superhero name, it’s a description of his character — he embodies the black experience.
Symbolically, you can see the appeal. Logistically, though, it’s nonsense. Icon is, again, at Superman level powers. If there were a slave in the antebellum South with Superman level powers, would he be mucking around with the Underground Railroad and joining the Union army? Surely not; a superpowered slave would be able to have a much more direct impact.
Successful slave revolts were impossible in the South because of the massive disproportion of weaponry, personnel and power. The arrival of Icon would have changed all that irrevocably. You can think through various scenarios, but presuming Icon was not a pacifist (and he fought in the war, remember), surely he would have made some attempt to liberate the slaves. And given what we know of his powers and of technology in 1850s America, that attempt was likely to have been at the very least partially successful. There would have been successful revolts; you can easily imagine a free state carved out of large chunks of the American South, with Icon as a protector and guarantor. A black superhero in slavery times isn’t just a cool origin idea; it’s an idea for an alternate history. If Icon is Icon, then black history, and world history, could not be the same.
The comic can’t imagine that, though, precisely because it’s a superhero comic. For the most part, superhero comics say that the present is just like our present, except with powerful beings zipping around. There are revisionist exceptions (like Watchmen) but those are presented as exceptions. Icon wants to be just a standard superhero story. And as just a standard superhero story, it can’t radically alter history, or radically reimagine the present. McDuffie is able to criticize (with love) black conservatism, but in a broader sense he is wholly trapped by a vision more reactionary than even Clarence Thomas could manage. No matter how much power they had or acquired, slaves in Icon still have to wait on white people for their freedom.
Maybe these issues are explored in greater detail later in the series. But in the first collected volume, McDuffie and his cocreators have smart things to say within the limits of the superhero genre, but they have little ability, or interest in pushing at the edges. As a result, Icon can see the contradiction between superheroes and blackness, but can’t really address it beyond making a joke or two. Superheroes can fly to distant moons and free the inhabitants from tyranny, but when confronted with a giant prison camp in the Southern United States, all they can do is a bit of remediation around the edges. In the context of superheroes, the goal of black empowerment can literally mean nothing more than black people flying and hitting bad guys. A more just world is something the comics can’t even dream of.
Yeah, in the realm of exploring a black Superman it contradicts what the original Superman did in his first appearance in Action Comics. Freeing a woman on death row falsely accused of murder, he had no time for “law and order” and made things right with his own two hands. Absolutely, there’s no reason in the world Icon would’ve allowed slavery to continue in the way it did.
I guess in retrospect they could have built in an in-story explanation for why Icon didn’t make a big difference during the civil war like saying it took 100 years to absorb the yellow sun’s energy and become super-powered, or something.
From what I recall the book gets worse later on, or at least doesn’t feel like it has a reason to exist. They do a Luke Cage parody and and a crossover with Superman which is a parody of Secret War. Then they had some plotlines about space and Icon’s people. I kind of lost interest at that point.
There are various options; Icon could not identify as black, for example, despite his skin color, and so not have a personal investment in the plight of the slaves. Then you’d have a book about dealing with that, one way or the other. they sort of flirt with that; Rocket sort of tries to help him raise his consciouness. it doesn’t make much sense though if he’s been around for 170 years or whatever. What is Rocket going to tell him that he didn’t hear during the Civil Rights movement?
They also don’t say what he was doing during the Civil Rights struggle, I don’t think? Which is an odd oversight.
Static and Icon are the two Milestone comics that are most often mentioned as worthwhile; are any of the others any good, or is this pretty much the high point?
Xombi, Xombi was great in the 1990s, and I personally feel that it holds up today.
Noah, I think you’ve hit on another fundamental flaw in the elasticity of the superhero concept, at least as we usually see it realized — the fact that the world must be kept essentially the same as ours. Superman couldn’t keep stopping wars and shutting down exploitative industries. He would’ve had a fundamental sociological effect and changed the world. The same goes for the minority power fantasy that J. Lamb has written about. People who start attacking the status quo change the setting and the dynamic, and you can’t have that. The standard superhero fantasy is about having power in this world, not an inherently different one, so all superheroes must be conservative defenders of the way things are, even to the point of blunting their own effects on society.
Of course, the most interesting comics for me at my age are the ones that explore that sociological effect. You mentioned Watchmen, but there are many others — even just small moments in mainstream comics that make you think about how everyday life would be different in a world where a few people could lift cars or fly. And your Marston Wonder Woman comics were about a heroine whose stated objective was to change society (as was Marston’s, of course). No wonder you had enough material for a book.
I don’t have nearly as much antipathy toward superhero comics as some on this site, but the constant reset bothers even me. Metropolis is destroyed over and over again, but its people are never traumatized or crushed by despair. Advanced alien technologies are in use all over the planet, but they never trickle down to improve people’s daily lives or make some industry obsolete.
Obviously, I was supposed to put these things down when these questions started occurring to me and make room for an eight-year-old at the comics rack. But the characters and stories were enjoyable just often enough to keep me coming back and suppressing my disbelief. The writers even allowed some credible consequences to pacify me, like all the secret identities that wore thin and fell apart over time. It’s a good thing, too, because the assembly line was broken, and that eight-year-old never came.
Based on what you described, it seems like the problem has less to do with the superhero genre, which worked OK as a commentary of the racial politics of the day, and more with the effort to write the superhero into the past. Maybe the problem has less to do with race than with the presentism built into the genre?
Noah, I think Blood Syndicate was the best of the old Milestone stuff, and Xombi was quite good too, and stayed good when they rebooted it in the 2000s when DC pretended like they cared.
I haven’t re-read Icon in a while, so I’m blanking on why he didn’t lead a revolt, but I think a big part of it was that he was found as a child, so he may not have been aware of his abilities, and then slavery ended shortly after he reached adulthood. Despite that, though, I feel like doing quiet superheroic acts became part of his style later on, and he was pursuing more of a…non-interventionist (is that a thing?) approach. Help where he can on the micro, but try to change the system within the rules of the system on the macro. But like I said, it’s been a couple of long years, so I’d have to reread to be sure.
Interesting piece, too. I don’t think we would come to the same conclusions w/r/t this specific case, but the (er) gentle fascism of capes is increasingly fascinating to me. Torture is an accepted part of Batman’s style (unless there’s a new name for “beat someone up and hang them off a building until they talk”), Superman is this gentle daddy figure…cape comics can’t play fair with these concepts outside of works meant to critique the form because if you do, then the logical end point is humanity is irrelevant. Hence all the nonsense Superman talks about “we have to let them find their own way,” as if “letting” someone do something is any different from forcing them to do something. There’s still a power imbalance in there that does a pretty good job of defeating the goodness the idea is meant to display. I’m not reading new capes, but I’m attracted/repulsed by this aspect of cape comics.
“They hung Jesus, but they couldn’t lynch Icon no matter how hard they tried.” would be an incredible first line of a book about Icon leading a slave rebellion, though.
David, if he was found in 1832 (which is the number in my head) and, he’d have been 16 in 1848. That’s 12 years before the Civil War starts…and of course 17 years before the end, and you’d think his powers would have made a difference there.
He’s definitely not non-interventionist in the bit I read — so even if that comes later, you’ve got the problem of why he didn’t intervene when he was intervening. HIs being a child originally is weird too; he was an adult I think, and then regressed to a child? The origin isn’t very clear is the truth; maybe they flesh it out later though (I don’t know if all the comics are collected, unfortunately, though there’s at least one more book.)
I agree with you in general on the capes and power imbalances. It’s part of the suspension of disbelief usually — but I think that suspension is stretched to the breaking point if you’ve got a superhero from a marginalized group, precisely because (as with Icon and slavery) marginalization is accomplished through power imbalances, so if the power imbalance is changed…it just becomes hard to credit the refusal to think through actual social alteration.
And Nate, I think that speaks to your question? The historical issue I think brings the problems with superheroes into sharp focus, but I think those problems are always there.
I will maybe try zombie and the blood syndicate; thank you for the rec!
Xombi with an “X,” otherwise you might get some very strange books.
I do think that the better part of Icon is Rocket’s story: there weren’t (and there still aren’t) many teen supers stories in which the teen hero is an underage mom.
Rocket’s interesting…she doesn’t come into much focus in the first volume at least, I felt like. And she also feels stunted by the genre. It’s just not clear why she’s decided to be Icon’s sidekick, or why she thinks the thing to do with her powers is fly around hitting people. I think Ms. Marvel handles this somewhat better (though of course Kamala isn’t pregnant….)
Nice interview of Xombi’s creator on the 2011 revival at http://io9.com/5781811/the-return-of-xombi-the-1990s-comic-that-made-alan-moore-freak-out. I never read the original series because I found the art off-putting, but now that I look again the concepts are engaging.
So…the original Xombi seems like it’s unavailable, or hasn’t been collected? Is that right?
Yeah, I think you can only get it in floppies.
Oh…and this is an incredible line:
“They hung Jesus, but they couldn’t lynch Icon no matter how hard they tried.” would be an incredible first line of a book about Icon leading a slave rebellion, though.”
I would love to read that Icon comic.
The 2011 Frazier Irving/John Rozum return to the character of David Kim (Xombi) is both wonderful in its own right and pretty much a continuation of the 1994 series in tone and feel.
The 2011/12 Zombi rebook collected and cheap on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Xombi-John-Rozum/dp/1401233465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426608712&sr=8-1&keywords=xombi. Original series seems to not be quite so available.
reboot, that is.
I’ve never read Icon, but I did read Jeff Brown’s book on Milestone (I’ve also seen basically all of these series, as I lived one summer in the 1990s with someone who was buying them all). The whole premise, as the series develops, is that Rocket, an actual African-American, I believe, tries to teach the alien Icon about why he (an alien who merely appears to be black) should re-evaluate his politics, care about the black community, etc. etc. So, Rocket is maybe eventually more the POV character and the racial conscience of the series. I don’t know how well this works, but the fact that Icon does not act as one might expect him to in matters of racial politics is kind of the point. Rocket directs him, as she directs the readers, in this regard.
Right…but that makes no sense if he lived through slavery and the civil rights movement. He’s had 150+ years to observe African-American history up close, and supposedly participated actively in anti-slavery resistance movements. So, now all of a sudden he needs to be taught by a 15 year old?
Fun article, Noah. I recently read the full Icon arc, and although I agree with some of what you and others have written about Superhero conservatism and the confusion about what role these super beings have in their worlds, I don’t think that criticism is particularly applicable to Icon. As an alien from a coalition of aliens with infinite technology, Icon is stranded on Earth while he waits for a chance to leave. I believe there is some kind of restriction about making his true abilities clear, because Earth has not been deemed suitable for introduction into the coalition. Rocket convinces him he should abandon this restriction so that he can help people.
Icon back story aside, I found the rest of the series to be an interesting forum for McDuffie to explore some of the issues he faced in the 90s comic world. Buck Wild, the Luke Cage parody, is his attack on black characters who were modeled on Shaft and remained unchanged decades later. Rocket becomes more and more central to the story, especially when she becomes pregnant and has a child, and McDuffie says in the letters page that she is the focus of the book.
http://tmblr.co/Z7Nxfn1ZSlwe3
That’s interesting… I don’t think it necessarily negates what I say here, though maybe McDuffie is more aware of the contradictions than it looks like in the first volume. You’ve at least encouraged me to try to get the other available book….
First a few plot points to clear up, as I’ve recently done a re-read of Icon. He’s mentally an adult the entire time he’s growing up in the South, his escape pod re-wrote him physically into a child, but not mentally. He doesn’t lead a rebellion because the powers he ends up developing are a result of his re-write into a human form, they aren’t innately part of his being an alien. Further he doesn’t want to disrupt Earth development, as his culture basically has a Star Trek style Prime Directive prohibition in place. McDuffie has Icon say this explicitly when he returns to his people in the second book, including a line about him not realizing the full extent of his new powers until he fights for the Union in the civil war and takes a cannon shot to the chest. His return to his people also allows McDuffie to have Icon fully confront his life on earth and how much he had allowed himself to become isolated from the modern day black experience. He tells his people that he decided that the passing of the civil rights act meant that all black people had legal protection now, and could stand or fall on their own merits. His exact line on this is “I was born a slave and I made it. What’s your excuse?” He also admits at the same time that before Rocket broke into his house, it had been many years since he had mingled with any black people at all, and he was able to convince himself that the struggle was over. It’s not that he needed to be re-taught that civil rights matter by a 15 year old, it’s that he needed to be exposed to how much his privileged position had blinded him to what life was like in contemporary black life.
The broader point I want to make is that, as someone pointed out in a comment on your article about Static. McDuffie belongs to the same school of writer as Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid, people who love the unrealistic element of superhero stories. Having seen how Icon plays out, I would argue that McDuffie’s goal was not an intense investigation of the basic superhero tropes like you are looking for, but to stretch those tropes to contain the experiences of black life in the 1990s. This is why the starting point for superpowers in the Milestone universe is a thinly veiled version of the LA riots, for example, or how they built a company wide crossover around gentrification. I would guess, with the caveat that McDuffie is no longer able to speak for himself and I’m not a mind reader, that the reason Icon is not about black Superman leading a slave revolt in the South is because McDuffie wanted comics that reflect the contemporary experience, similar to how Astro City is about Busiek using the tropes of superheroes to explore different aspects of modern life, like aging (the current arc) recidivism (the Steeljack story) and parental anxiety (the one where Jack in the Box’s kids come from the future to kill him).
The final thing I would add is I don’t think you can separate commercial considerations from how Milestone’s stories were put together. It’s 1993, First Comics, Eclipse, and other 1980s mainstay publishers had died,Vertigo was still new and publishing it’s first generation of titles that were superhero plus books, and Image had just started with their “superheroes but EXTREME” titles. Creating new superhero universes was the thing new publishing companies did, and Milestone was as much a part of that as everyone else. While I would also love to read the Superman destroys the South title, I can’t see that surviving in 1993, and would make it impossible for the title to present “the world outside your window” that I think was the goal of the company. I also think McDuffie was aware of the limitations and compromises Milestone was making. As mentioned, the second book deals with the presentation of black characters in comics before Milestone, with a Luke Cage stand in who spouts jive talk and is shown to, at one point or another, have been ever single black superhero. McDuffie both satirizes and accepts what black superheroes had been in the past, in a way that suggests he felt that representation and progress are never perfect but are a process. Having the 70s style black characters was better than nothing, Milestone was better than they were, and the hope would be that what comes after Milestone would be better than they were.
Thanks! I think I’m going to read the whole arc, so may have another post about it. I would say that the conflict between Milestone’s commercial/genre interests and the ability to envision a world in which black people are empowered in substantive ways is in line with my thesis here.
I’d agree with you there. That conflict is what I find fascinating about Milestone in general.
Another thing I love about the company (that may also be germane to your reading) is McDuffie enduring a case of writer’s block due to Clarence Thomas. Shortly after writing the issues in the first trade, McDuffie found out that not only did Thomas read Icon, he loved it so much that he had his clerks go through each issue looking for quotes Thomas could use in speeches. This led to McDuffie being completely unable to write the character for several issues out of concern that he was helping the black neocon movement. He outlines the story here:
http://dwaynemcduffie.com/opinions/archives/BTYB10.php
The second trade skips all the issues McDuffie didn’t write, and a few company crossover issues he did.
Wow, that’s amazing…and also kind of disturbingly in line with this post. McDuffie’s a radical, but the superhero genre has its own voice and its own politics…
The second trade is kind of non-linear and really serves to tell the story of Buck Wild, the birth of Raquel’s child and Icon leaving Earth (spoilers), so there’s less of a through-line I find in seeing how the book comes together than the first trade.
Thumbs up on all of Jared’s points BTW