Sherlock and the Women

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Alex Buchet

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

The above must be one of the niftiest opening sentences in pop literature. It begins the first Holmes short story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ which appeared in the June 1891 edition of The Strand, promising readers a fitting sequel to the two Holmes novels. “A Scandal in Bohemia” continues, in the voice of Holmes’ friend Dr Watson:

I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler.

Aha! So the temptress is named.

All emotions, and that one in particular, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion such as his.

The reader is invited to share such lofty anti-emotional rationalism, but the invitation, we sense, is ironic.

And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

At this point we could write the rest of the story with ease, couldn’t we? A tale of how this flinty, sentiment-hating, frozen character was brought to emotional life, awakened by the warmth of a passionate woman…

Well, no.

But before we continue, let’s look at the place of women in the adventures of Holmes, and in the life and mind of the great detective’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).

A.C.Doyle

Feminists might well snort with exasperation at the depiction of the average woman in the Holmes canon of stories. Most are victims, frail vessels in need of succor and rescue; even the rare crooks among them tend to be under the domination of a strong-willed male villain (cf. ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’).

And yet, and yet…

Doyle’s attitude to women was typical of a middle-class British man born and raised in Victorian times: one of patriarchal and patronising chivalry. Women were to be protected and provided for, but men were the leaders, almost surrogate parents.

This view, however, was tempered by Doyle’s admiration for strong women. The source of this can be inferred from the case of his own parents. While his father, Charles, was an alcoholic depressive and possible schizophrenic who effectively dropped out of the household and remained a burden on his family, Doyle’s mother, Mary, was the proverbial tower of strength. She provided for the family and despite poverty managed to send Doyle to study medecine at Edinburgh University.

So Doyle was conflicted about women. He opposed suffrage for them, but made exceptions for tax-paying property owners and unmarried professionals. He championed the cause of woman doctors and solicitors. He militated for a reform of the Divorce Laws, which were at the time cruelly stacked against women. A lapsed Catholic himself, he was angrily opposed to young Catholic women being buried in convents.

And if we look at the stories again, we find they show more than a few figures of strong women: the determined American runaway bride, Hatty Doran, in ‘The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor’; the chillingly lethal villainess Maria Gibson in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’; or even the quiet Mary Sutherland in ‘A Case of Identity’ who, though she has a comfortable private income, insists on working for a living as a typist.

And then there is Irene Adler.

Back to the story (beware spoilers):

A visitor arrives at Holmes’ rooms, introducing himself as Count Von Kramm, an agent for a wealthy client. Holmes quickly deduces his true identity:

“If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,”
he remarked, “I should be better able to advise you.”

The man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face and hurled it upon the ground. “You are right,” he cried; “I am the King. Why should I attempt to conceal it?”

“Why, indeed?” murmured Holmes. “Your Majesty had not spoken before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia.”

The King is engaged to a young Scandinavian princess. However, five years before he’d had a liaison with an American opera singer, Irene Adler, who has since then retired to London. Fearful that should the family of his fiancée learn of this the marriage would be called off, he had sought to regain letters and a photograph of Adler and himself together. The King’s agents have tried to recover the photograph through sometimes forceful means, burglary, stealing her luggage, and waylaying her. An offer to pay for the photograph and letters was also refused. With Adler threatening to send them to his future in-laws, which Von Ormstein presumes is to prevent him marrying, he makes the incognito visit to Holmes to request his help in locating and obtaining the photograph.

The next morning, Holmes goes out to Adler’s house, disguised as an out-of-work groom. He learns that Adler has a gentleman friend, the lawyer Godfrey Norton, who calls at least once a day. On this particular day, Norton comes to visit Adler, and soon afterwards the two go to a church. Holmes follows, and finds himself dragged into the church to be a witness to Norton and Adler’s wedding.

Holmes changes into another disguise as an old clergyman; he and Watson go once more to Adler’s house.

When Adler’s coach pulls up, a fight breaks out between men (hired by Holmes) on the street over who gets to help her down. Holmes rushes into the fight to “protect” her, and is seemingly struck and injured. Adler takes him into her sitting room, where Holmes motions for her to have the window opened. Watson tosses in a smoke bomb and shouts “FIRE!”

Adler rushes to get her most precious possession at the cry of “fire”—the photograph of herself and the King. It was kept in a recess behind a sliding panel. He explains all this to Watson in the street before being bid good-night by a familiar-sounding youth.

Illustration by Sidney Paget

We had reached Baker-street, and had stopped at the door. He was searching his pockets for the key, when someone passing said:—

“Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes.”

There were several people on the pavement at the time, but the greeting appeared to come from a slim youth in an ulster who had hurried by.

“I’ve heard that voice before,” said Holmes, staring down the dimly lit street. “Now, I wonder who the deuce that could have been.”<

When Holmes, Watson, and the King arrive the next morning at Adler’s house, her elderly maidservant informs them that she has hastily departed for the Charing Cross railway station. Holmes quickly goes to the photograph’s hiding spot, finding a photo of Irene Adler in an evening dress and a letter dated midnight and addressed to him:

“My Dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,

—You really did it very well. You took me in completely. Until after the alarm of fire, I had not a suspicion. But then, when I found how I had betrayed myself, I began to think. I had been warned against you months ago. I had been told that, if the King employed an agent, it would certainly be you. And your address had been given me. Yet, with all this, you made me reveal what you wanted to know. Even after I became suspicious, I found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind old clergyman. But, you know, I have been trained as an actress myself. Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives. I sent John, the coachman, to watch you, ran up stairs, got into my walking clothes, as I call them, and came down just as you departed.

“Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was really an object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then I, rather imprudently, wished you good night, and started for the Temple to see my husband.

“We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call to-morrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes, very truly yours,

“Irene Norton, née Adler.”

The King practically swoons with admiration.

“What a woman—oh, what a woman!” cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. “Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”

“From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes, coldly. “I am sorry that I have not been able to bring your Majesty’s business to a more successful conclusion.”

“On the contrary, my dear sir,” cried the King. “Nothing could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire.”

“I am glad to hear your Majesty say so.”

“I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward you. This ring—.” He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger, and held it out upon the palm of his hand.

“Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly,” said Holmes.

“You have but to name it.”

“This photograph!”

The King stared at him in amazement.

“Irene’s photograph!” he cried. “Certainly, if you wish it.”

“I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I have the honour to wish you a very good morning.” He bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set off in my company for his chambers.

(One enjoys Holmes’ barely concealed contempt for the King. Indeed, throughout the tales Holmes is singularly unimpressed by titles. Consider how quickly he swats down a fat-headed aristocratic twit in ‘The Noble Bachelor’:

“Good-day, Lord St. Simon,” said Holmes, rising and bowing. “Pray take the basket-chair. This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson. Draw up a little to the fire, and we will talk this matter over.”

“A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine, Mr. Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you have already managed several delicate cases of this sort sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society.”

“No, I am descending.”

“I beg pardon.”

“My last client of the sort was a king.”

“Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?”

“The King of Scandinavia.”

Snap! This disdain reflects that of Doyle, who grew up a Catholic outsider and was a self-made man; when offered a knighthood, the author only, reluctantly, accepted because of his mother’s insistence.)

So we come to the real understanding of Holmes’ admiration of Irene Adler. It has indeed nothing to do with emotion. Holmes feels the high regard a chess master feels for one who has bested him at the game; he acknowledges an intelligence at least equal to his, if not greater. From a narrative point of view, the turnabout at story’s end was a great surprise to the reader expecting a scheming hussy to get her just deserts from the great detective.

Nonetheless, one can discern in Irene Adler a type of woman who, at the end of the 19th century, was a source equally of admiration and of unease. Stars of the opera — Prima Donnas — and of the theatre, such as the legendarily wealthy and independent Sarah Bernhardt or her rival Eleanor Duse, held society enthralled even as they scorned its strictures, openly taking serial lovers. It was also the time of such famed courtesans as Cora Pearl and La Belle Otero. Irene Adler embodied these “adventuresses”, as they were called, and we can understand Dr Watson’s stuffy disapproval of her — ”the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” (Note the “late”– Adler must be punished, if only offstage, with death.)

Taken even further, this dismay at free and sexually powerful women brought about the flowering of the image of the femme fatale, a deadly seductress all too ready to entice and vanquish men — consider the painting The Vampire by Munch, or Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé — originally written for Bernhardt, and published in 1893, the same year as ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ was. (Doyle knew and much admired Wilde.)

Yet, as noted, Doyle admired strong women like those who were then entering the masculine fortresses of the professions. In sum, ‘Scandal’ reflects the attitudes of an intelligent but conflicted man of his times.

(In the modern-day update of Holmes, the TV series Sherlock, the sexuality of Irene Adler is unfortunately much heightened, with shocking scenes of nudity. I apologise to the reader for the image of deplorable filth below, and assure you that I only post it with the greatest reluctance in order to illustrate the current age’s depravity.)

Brazen actress Lara Pulvar as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’.

The full text of ‘A Scandal in Bohemia can be found here.

‘Scandal’ isn’t the only case in the Holmesian canon to find a woman besting him intellectually. Consider ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’. (More spoilers ahead.)

Mr Grant Munro, of Norbury, consults Holmes on his wife Effie’s strange behavior. She surprises him with a request for a hundred pounds; she seems to keep visiting a mysterious nearby cottage, at the window of which Munro spies a grotesque face of a ghastly yellow hue. Despite his entreaties and her promises he cannot keep Effie away from the cottage, nor will she explain the mystery. At wit’s end he has come up to London to consult Holmes, who interprets the story thus:

“The facts, as I read them, are something like this: This woman was married in America. Her husband developed some hateful qualities; or shall we say that he contracted some loathsome disease, and became a leper or an imbecile? She flies from him at last, returns to England, changes her name, and starts her life, as she thinks, afresh. She has been married three years, and believes that her position is quite secure, having shown her husband the death certificate of some man whose name she has assumed, when suddenly her whereabouts is discovered by her first husband; or, we may suppose, by some unscrupulous woman who has attached herself to the invalid. They write to the wife, and threaten to come and expose her. She asks for a hundred pounds, and endeavours to buy them off. They come in spite of it, and when the husband mentions casually to the wife that there are new-comers in the cottage, she knows in some way that they are her pursuers.[…]”

Homes, Watson and Munro go down to Norbury, where they bully their way into the cottage, and find Effie in the company of a dwarfish figure with a hideous yellow face:

An instant later the mystery was explained. Holmes, with a laugh, passed his hand behind the child’s ear, a mask peeled off from her countenance, and there was a little coal black negress, with all her white teeth flashing in amusement at our amazed faces.

Effie produces a locket, and shows them the portrait inside of a light-skinned African-American:

“That is John Hebron, of Atlanta,” said the lady, “and a nobler man never walked the earth. I cut myself off from my race in order to wed him, but never once while he lived did I for an instant regret it. It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine. It is often so in such matches, and little Lucy is darker far than ever her father was. But dark or fair, she is my own dear little girlie, and her mother’s pet.[…] And now to-night you at last know all, and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me?” She clasped her hands and waited for an answer.

Art by Sidney Paget

It was a long two minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.
“We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”

A sweet conclusion indeed; one that shows the mighty detective’s intellect once more outsmarted by a woman, as Holmes himself ruefully ackowledges in the tale’s final lines:

“Watson,” said he, “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”

The full text of ‘The Yellow Face’ can be found here.

The attitude towards a racially mixed marriage was astonishingly progressive for 1893. Doyle was an anti-racist, the result of a voyage he made to West Africa in 1881 as ship’s doctor on the steamer Mayumba. At first he evinced the depressingly normal Imperialist bigotry of the age against “savages”. But the more he came in contact with the local natives, and with the riff-raff whites who lorded over them, the more he was convinced that the British and other colonisers should leave the Africans alone. Doyle also struck a friendship that seems to have definitely turned his views on race: for three days the Mayumba carried as a passenger the American Consul to Liberia, a Black man named Highland Garnet. Garnet had been born into slavery in 1815. He was a militant abolitionist, an author and educator and public servant of great culture. Those three days of conversations were a revelation to Doyle, and shaped his views of race for a long time.

Not, alas, for all his life. Like many people, Doyle seems to have become more reactionary with old age. ‘The Yellow Face’ dates from 1893; ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’ from 1927, and how great the fall from the first to the second. It features a repugnant caricature of a Black thug…

The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room. He would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.

…who speaks in blackface:

“Which of you gen’l’men is Masser Holmes?” he asked.

…makes brutish threats:

He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend’s nose. Holmes examined it closely with an air of great interest.

“Were you born so?” he asked. “Or did it come by degrees?”

Holmes wastes no time insulting the insolent darkie in the vilest terms:

“I’ve wanted to meet you for some time,” said Holmes. “I won’t ask you to sit down, for I don’t like the smell of you, but aren’t you Steve Dixie, the bruiser?”

“That’s my name, Masser Holmes, and you’ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip.”

“It is certainly the last thing you need,” said Holmes, staring at our visitor’s hideous mouth. “

Holmes easily browbeats Dixie into cringing submission.

“So help me the Lord! Masser Holmes –”

“That’s enough. Get out of it. I’ll pick you up when I want you.”

“Good-mornin’, Masser Holmes. I hope there ain’t no hard feelin’s about this ‘ere visit?”

When Dixie scurries out, Holmes enjoys a good racist chuckle with Watson.

“I am glad you were not forced to break his woolly head, Watson. I observed your manoeuvres with the poker. But he is really rather a harmless fellow, a great muscular, foolish, blustering baby, and easily cowed, as you have seen.[…]”

The full text of ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’ can be found here. I don’t recommend it; even apart from the naked bigotry, it is a weak story.

In order not to end this article on a sour note, let us return to ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and its last lines:

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.

Son of Blade

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Tim Seibles cuts straight to the heart. When I met him at his hotel to walk him over to my wife’s poetry class, conversation leapt from “nice weather” to “parents with Alzheimer’s” in a single bound. He was giving a reading that night and—because his most recent book, Fast Animal, includes five poems about Blade the Vampire-Hunter—visiting my Superheroes class the next morning.

Seibles was in high school when Marvel launched the character in 1973. He’s not the first black superhero—Black Panther debuted in Fantastic Four in 1966 , the Falcon in Captain America in 1969, and Luke Cage in his own title in 1972—but he beat Brother Voodoo to newsstands by two months. The comic book market was slumping, so Marvel was desperately mixing its superhero formula with blaxploitation and horror. Shaft hit theaters in 1971, Super Fly and Blacula in 1972. Hammer Films had been pounding out low budget Dracula and Frankenstein flicks for over a decade, but the Comics Code prohibited “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism” until 1971, unless the horror was “handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high caliber literary works.”

Marvel pounced with Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula, The Monster of Frankenstein, and a half dozen other horror-tinged titles. He sounds like a pseudonym, but flesh-and-blood writer Marv Wolfman moved to Marvel at the same moment, and soon he and artist Gene Colan were adding a black “vampire killer” to their Dracula cast. I’ll let Seibles introduce him:

“Years ago, a pregnant woman was bitten by a vampire and turned. Her son was born with the thirst but, being half-human, he could walk in sunlight unharmed. Though vampires quietly dominate the world, he fights them—in part to prove his allegiance to humanity, in part to avenge his long isolation, being neither human, nor vampire. Because of his deadly expertise and weapon of choice, they call him: BLADE, THE DAYWALKER”

It’s hard not to read the character as a racial metaphor. Barack Obama turned thirteen when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade that year, and though President Nixon made no public comment, White House tapes reveal his opposition to abortion, except when “necessary,” as “when you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” I read all vampires as rapists, so it follows the horror of our cultural logic that the first black half-vampire would have to take a vow of blood celibacy. Note all those unconscious blonde women draped in Dracula’s arms too. Blade’s skin makes explicit more than one coded fear.

Seibles told my class that he saw the character as an “emblem of alienation,” a metaphor for what it feels like to be black in the U.S., to feel “both American and not.” The night before they heard him read his poem “Allison Wolff,” set in 1972 when “Race was the elephant / sitting on everybody.” Seibles was born in 1955, the year Emmett Till was lynched, and that horror haunts the teenaged Tim the first time he kisses a white girl.

Fast Animal includes a high school photo of Seibles, “circa 1971,” long before he met Blade. The half-vampire lurked around Marvel’s black and white magazines for a few years, vanished for a decade or so, then reawakened in the 90s. I showed my class the 1998 film, which opens with Blade’s vampire-assaulted mother bleeding out on delivery room table. David S. Goyer penned the screenplay, which also explains Goyer’s rise to dominance in the DC film universe since both his Batman Begins and Man of Steel screenplays open with the bloody deaths of their heroes’ mothers. Seibles said the two sequels weren’t as good, and both the Spike TV and anime series were news to him.

Apparently Wesley Snipes spent 2010-2013 in prison for tax evasion. He last played Blade in 2004, about when Seibles started using the character in his poetry. Seibles said it was George Bush who turned him, that feeling of “a deep trouble taking over the country,” or, as his Blade explains: “it’s almost like I can’t / wake up, like I’m living // in a movie, a kind of dream: / action-packed thriller.” Political essayist Jonathan Schell drew the same conclusion in 2004. Since 9/11 and the War on Terror, it seemed to Schell “history was being authored by a third-rate writer” compelled “to follow the plot of a bad comic book,” with the President turning “himself into a sort of real life action figure.”

The vampires in Fast Animal do have a Wolfowitz-neocon vibe: “the ones / who look in the mirror / and find nothing // but innocence though they stand / in blood up to their knees.” But Seibles-Blade address a much larger audience, everyone watching “the war on TV” while not wanting “to see / what’s // really happening,” all of us living “in / the blood,” fighting for “The right to live / without memory,” to ignore “So many / centuries, so much / death.” Slavery, Seibles reminded my class, is a kind of vampirism too, one of many ways America has exploited the world. Of course Blade longs for “this country / before it was bitten,” even as he mourns: “I don’t know how // to save anybody from this.”

Seibles called Blade his “mask,” a perfect term for my Superhero class. He used Blade to channel his rage, he said, likening the character’s name to a pencil: “Some days // I think, with the singing / of my blade, I can fix / everything.” That’s a poet’s superpower, to reveal through language, since “evil thrives best in the dark.” He even gave us his mission statement: to fight “inattentive dumbassery.”

Seibles also has a pair of poems in the new anthology Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (where my wife, Lesley Wheeler, and I do too). Swapping his vampire superhero mask for Natasha and Boris of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Seibles playfully critiques American capitalism, a theme one of my students asked him to expand on. Another asked how, if our leaders are as stupid as Seibles suggests, were they smart enough to come to power? But my favorite question came at the end of class: What would Blade do if there weren’t any more vampires to fight?

Superhero missions, like Batman’s quixotic “war on criminals,” guarantee never-ending battles. You never run out of bad guys. You never get to walk away. But instead of talking vampires, Seibles talked about his father. The idea of sitting in a room of white people and discussing race, his father couldn’t imagine such a thing. His father can’t believe there are white people who aren’t racists. Sure, at an intellectual level, of course he can, but the idea is meaningless at any emotional level.

I don’t know what year he was born, but let’s say circa 1930—a moment my class understands well in terms of American eugenics. We read excerpts of a standard high school biology textbook that explained the hierarchy of white supremacy and advocated the extermination of unfit gene pools. That’s not something you walk away from. That’s not a world that ever runs out of bad guys. Seibles described Blade’s life as a psychological and spiritual war—one his parents’ generation can never stop fighting.

The only hope, he said, is for Blade’s children.

What about Amanda Waller?

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Julian Chambliss

Figure 1:Suicide Squad from the CW’s Arrow

The superhero has emerged as the trending symbol of our mediated world. Musings over Marvel’s and DC Comics’ relative successes adapting characters to the big and small screen opens the door to some interesting moments of cultural contemplation. As Peter Coogan suggests in a recent essay entitled, “The Hero Defines the Genre, the Genre Define the Hero,” the link between the superhero and the genre are not incidental.[1] The selfless nature of the superhero and its genre reflect pro-social values Americans feared threaten by a rising urban industrial order. Changing the superhero then, echoes wider fears of disruption stemming from the loss of tradition. In this framework, the superhero becomes a measure of communal stability in some minds. As the superhero evolves enough to maintain its relevance, these characters offer context for cherished values placed in a modern world. As these characters are recreated for film and television audiences, they provide a window on the pace and scope of our collective evolution.

Over the last two seasons, the CW’s Arrow has emerged as an effective vehicle for adapting DC Comics characters to a broad audience. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe before it, the creative minds behind Arrow built their world by mixing decades of comic book adventure. Free to pick and choose, they adapted with an eye toward creating easy entry for new consumers and maintaining the loyalty of established fans. The recent appearance of Amanda “The Wall” Waller, on Arrow highlights the fact the current comic book culture is filled with questions linked to identity and gender. In deciding to adapt this character, the producers have entered into that dialogue. Taking their cue from the 2011 reboot called the New 52, Arrow’s Amanda Waller is a marker of larger identity concerns.

Figure 2: Suicide Squad #1 (2011)

The New 52 restarted DC comic publications from the beginning. Complaints about this reboot have focused on missed opportunities. Critics point to uneven characterization, failed opportunity linked to diversity and the reorientation towards new (hopefully younger) readers by abandoning continuity. These complaints are understandable, but perhaps unfair. In 1985, the company revamped the publication line with its Crisis on Infinite Earths mini series. Often lauded by fans, it was greeted with complaints as well. History has proven that story a milestone. With this in mind, we may see “The New 52” lauded for the push toward genre variety and the integration of formerly sacrosanct characters from Vertigo, the publisher’s mature reader line, back into the mainstream comic universe. Whatever history’s judgment, the immediate media spotlight has and will likely continue to question the depiction of female characters.

Concerns about gender and representation in comics are not new. However, in the context of the 2011 reboot, the re-imagined overtly sexualized look and actions of female characters such as Starfire and Catwoman triggered protest. Adding to these concerns, products, drawn from comic book source material, reflect a dynamic of gender objectification long cited by critics. In particular, the outcry over the failure to produce a Wonder Woman film and criticism about Rocksteady Studios’ depiction of Harley Quinn and Catwoman in its Arkham game franchise has troubled fans.[2]

Arguably the transformation of Amanda Waller is a crucial part of this dialogue. Introduced in 1986, the comic book Amanda Waller is an African-American middle-aged woman with a heavy build working as a government bureaucrat. She is a unique example of a black female authority figure in mainstream superhero comics. Her serious demeanor and steely determination managing a government-sanctioned task force called the Suicide Squad made her a fan favorite. Effective and dedicated, Waller commands the respect of villains and heroes alike. Animated television and film appearances have further embellished Waller’s status among fandom.

Figure 3: Suicide Squad Vol. 1. #10 (1988)

In revamping the publication line, DC editors made decisions designed to make character more accessible to a broader (less expert) reading public. Clark Kent/Superman is no longer married to Lois Lane (quasi-damsel in distress). Instead, he is dating Wonder Woman/Diana Prince, creating the ultimate “power” couple (Couldn’t help myself). Abandoning the Superman /Lois Lane relationship highlighted an edict that marriage is prohibited in this new status quo. This stance was perhaps made more frustrating because it was only fully articulated in the midst of a public furor over the editor’s decision to derail the same-sex marriage of Batwoman (Kathy Kane), the publisher’s most prominent lesbian character. The tumult surrounding that decision and the continued concern over female character placement and representation prompts me to ask, “What about Amanda Waller?”

Waller transition in the New 52 has received comparably minor protest. Arguably, while heroes and villains deserve the main scrutiny on a comic page, Waller’s transformation has a greater impact because of her unique status as a woman of color in a position of authority. The lack of concern about Amanda Waller’s presentation highlights gender and race intersectionality.[3] Articulated by black feminist intellectuals such as Frances M. Beal and Alice Walker, the interlocking nature of gender and racial bias creates overlapping barriers linked to race and sexism for women of color.[4]

Arguably, Amanda Waller has been affected by gender and racial expectations since her introduction. The original characterization could be seen as leveraging the nineteenth century mammy stereotype to great effect. Waller was a sexless maternal figure who valued her superior’s goals, but showed disdain for the team that acted as her quasi-family. Unconscious and unspoken, Waller’s placement as a “strong” and “principled” bureaucrat loyally working for the government confirmed some assumptions. Yet, with depictions of African-American women in the 1970s caught between a normalizing figure such as Diahann Carroll’s single mother professional in Julia (1968-1973) and Blaxploitation inspired icons such as Pam Grier’s tough vigilante Coffey (1973) Waller’s debut in the 1980s struck a more balanced note in a social and political landscape shaped by warring conservative and liberal views of African-American life and culture.

Neither objectified nor objectionable, there has been a consistency to creator’s attachment to Waller as a supporting character. Always in the background, always working for the “greater” good, her experience compounds the critical assessment that minority characters in comics are only allowed to function within a limited assimilative framework. Now, younger and more traditionally beautiful, Waller does not have the same gravitas. Waller’s function remains the same, but her appearance now creates a radically different context to understand her. Like other female characters in the New 52, her physical beauty brings her more in line with male expectations, but in her case those expectations have an added layer of racial exoticism. Now seductive as well as powerful, the new Amanda Waller hovers between a “predatory” Jezebel and a “malicious” Sapphire stereotype. At once desirable (Jezebel) and cruel (Sapphire), the new Amanda Waller carries the full weight of gendered racial expectations in a manner that does little to differentiate and everything to limit her character. The fact that this Waller has made the jump to Arrow reinforces the transformation in the pop culture landscape. Still, Amanda Waller’s transformation is a marker of a conversation we are not having gender and diversity in comics.

[1] Robin S Rosenberg and Peter M. Coogan, What Is a Superhero? (Oxford University Press, 2013).

[2] It worth noting the recent Arkham Knight (http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/03/04/batman-arkham-knight-father-to-son-announcement-trailer) game trailer featured a redesigned Harley Quinn that is arguably less problematic.

[3] “Race/Gender/Class ‘Intersectionality’,” accessed March 16, 2014, http://www.uccnrs.ucsb.edu/intersectionality.

[4]Frances Beal, interview by Loretta Ross, video recording, March 18, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2.

Julian Chambliss is Associate Professor History at Rollins College and co-editor of Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience.

Fear of Wertham. And Possibly of a Black Planet.

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week R. Fiore wrote a post at The Comics Journal defending the honor of Walt Kelly from the suggestion (made by Thomas Andrae in the introduction to Walt Kelly’s Pogo The Complete Dell Comics: Volume One) that maybe, possibly, you could see something slightly racist in the fact that he used blackface caricatures.

Fiore’s piece is a graceless performance. He spins and sneers, insisting that this image of a black child with a watermelon is not playing into racist jokes about blacks and watermelons because Kelly isn’t malicious and the black kid is portrayed positively so the watermelon must have ended up in there totally by accident, really, it could just as easily have been grapes. There’s no substantive engagement with, or really even mention of, the fact that Kelly’s cartoon blacks are based in blackface iconography, nor any effort to grapple with what that means.

The really depressing thing is that there’s an interesting article struggling to get out from behind Fiore’s special pleading. Jeet Heer, in the comments to the post, argues that (contra Fiore) Kelly did use blackface iconography but that (as Fiore says) Kelly’s depictions of blacks were in fact better than those of some of his contemporaries. Brian Cremins, who has written in an academic context about Kelly, also suggests in comments that the minstrel tradition was very important to Kelly’s art and humor, and that that’s something to be investigated rather than denied or fled from. I’m not a fan of Kelly’s especially, and haven’t read many of his comics, but it’s clear that there’s a discussion worth having about his relationship to race and racism. It sounds, in fact, like Andrae was engaged in such a discussion.

But Fiore isn’t having it. Kelly cannot have been touched by racism — or, if he was, that only goes to show how utterly awesome and virtuous he really is.

At the outset, we must presume that Walt Kelly was more enlightened than Thomas Andrae, or you, or me. This is because unlike Walt Kelly’s, our enlightenment is socially assisted. Walt Kelly had to come upon his all on his own. Now, any of us might have been one of the enlightened people in those days, and all of us think we would have been one of the enlightened persons in those days, but the odds say otherwise, and in the actual event Kelly was. We simply embrace the conventional wisdom of our time. Kelly swam against the tide.

The suggestion that you or me or Fiore have reached some level of enlightenment which puts us beyond the touch of racism, and therefore beyond moral censure or praise as regards racism, is perhaps the least of the idiocies in this paragraph. The vision of Kelly as great artist, achieving his goal of perfect equality and watermelons without any input from anyone, inventing anti-racism out of whole cloth, without the intervention or help of any actual black people anywhere, is, for its part, familiar in import. Anti-racism here isn’t really a goal in itself; reading Fiore’s piece, it seems fairly clear that Fiore couldn’t possibly care less about racism, or about black people. Anti-racism is just a accoutrement of (white) genius, like a punchy prose style or a pleasing ink line. Fiore admires Kelly’s humanism; if that humanism is compromised, so is the admiration. Ergo, the admiration being fulsome, no racism can exist. QED.

Fiore’s a longtime TCJ hand, and here he manages to embody some of the least enlightening aspects of old school comics fan culture: its hagiography; its crippling insularity (racial and otherwise); its smug distrust of academia; and most of all its defensiveness.

The last couldn’t be more counter-productive. A critical establishment that reacts with panic and dyspepsia to the suggestion that obvious blackface iconography is obvious blackface iconography is not a critical establishment that anyone beyond the most hard-core nostalgists is going to find welcoming. Join Team Comics! We were using watermelons in a totally non-racist way 70 years ago, pat us on the back! If you want to make your art form look clueless, ridiculous, and not a little repulsive, this would be the way to do it. Fiore’s handwaving doesn’t so much distract from the racism of comics’ past as it raises embarrassing and painful questions about the racism of comics’ present.
________
Update: Brian Cremins has a lovely piece about Pogo, race, and nostalgia here.

The Kids Are Mediocre, Albeit Not Utterly Without Charm

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week I wrote a post at the Atlantic where I talked about the game Desktop Dungeons and how its creators had discovered that, in order not to be sexist, they had to work really hard at it. The intention to be non-racist/non-sexist isn’t enough, because the default tropes used to imagine fantasy game settings and characters are racist and sexist. It takes imagination and effort to overcome that.

So Kieron Gillen and James McKelvie definitely deserve credit for the extent to which Young Avengers pushes back against decades of accumulated superhero whiteness and sexism. The team includes a gay couple (Wiccan and Hulkling), and a Hispanic child of a lesbian couple (Miss America),along with two other white guys (Marvel Boy and Kid Loki) and a white Hawkeye).

Perhaps more importantly than their numbers, the marginal characters aren’t treated as marginal or other or weird…and the decision not to treat them as marginal or other or weird is nicely linked to the supehero milieu. Hulkling is a green-skinned shapeshifter from another planet; Miss. America is a brown-skinned superhuman from another dimension. Hawkeye is sleeping with the alien Kree Marvel Boy, Wiccan is sleeping with the alien Skrull Hulkling. Amidst all the intricate incoherence of the Marvel multiverse (which Gillen and McKelvie gleefully toss about without much explanation for novices), a non-White superhero as the strongest member of the group or a gay romance as part of the proceedings hardly seems worth mentioning (except, in the later case, as a vehicle for the requisite quotient of intra-team melodrama.)

So Gillen and McKevie set the worthy goal of not being sexist, racist assholes, and they followed through with intelligence and some subtlety. Thus, the comic is good. QED.

Alas, would that it were so. Not being racist and sexist is hard work, but there are other bits of making a worthwhile piece of art too, and as regards them Young Avengers is less successful. In particular, the artist Jamie McKelvie is, even in the context of crappy mainstream super-hero art, not really any good. His figure drawing is clumsy and haphazard; his poses are stiff when they’re not default; his faces are not particularly distinguishable. But where he is really abysmal is in his layouts, which are consistently confusing and cluttered. Especially in his fight sequences, it’s often almost impossible to figure out what’s happening — and there’s no visual panache (as in say Bill Sienkiewitz) to justify the incoherence. A Chris Ware inspired page is almost laughably incompetent, with tiny figures boucning around in an ugly floorplan that manages to be at one and the same time bulbous, blocky, and boring, the whole thing ringed by uninspired mainstream action sequences, the color scheme of which contrasts garishly with the wannabe-Ware floorplan pastels. Descriptions of the action are set off in a kind of map legend and keyed to numbers because diagrams are what the latest hip comics artists are doing and McKelvie would like to be up to date and hip with all his heart. It’s sort of sweet, if you cover your eyes and don’t look.

Gillen is more competent than that; his dialogue is fun and snappy and pop-culture-aware in a way that seems, if not precisely true to teens, at least true to the sorts of things teens might read. When Kid Loki asks Ms. America why her former super-team broke up and she says, “Musical differences,” I snickered. Same when Hawkeye comments that she knew there was some world threatening catastrophe because Wiccan wasn’t answering his texts every 30 seconds. It’s not genius or anything, but it’s cute. If I can appreciate Taylor Swift, there’s no reason I can’t appreciate this too.

There’s some perhaps interesting thematic material as well, if you squint. We first meet Hulking when he’s shape-shifting in imitation of Spider-Man, hunting down bad-guys as Marvel’s most popular superhero. Later, Wiccan summons Hulking’s dead mother from another dimension…only it turns out to be a shape-shifting soul-eating demon. The other Young Avengers’ parents also end up coming back from the dead as evil glop. You could see the comic then, perhaps, as being about children turning themselves into their parents — or about the way that it’s not just parents who make their kids, but kids who make their parents. The evil parents and the clueless parents (adults can’t see the evil demon mommies) could be a version of the hippie “parents just don’t understand/anyone over 30 can’t be trusted” meme. But you could also see the bad/clueless parents as constructs or dreams — as make-believe parent kids want to/need to create in order to make their own lives. That’s underlined by the fact that the evil parents are the reason for the team coming and staying together; the threat is what makes the book diegetically possible.

Gillen doesn’t ultimately do all that much with this material though. There isn’t, for example, any real anxiety around the evil parents per se — dead moms and dads come back from the dead, but their kids don’t seem much traumatized, or even disturbed. They just trundle on through the by-the-numbers superhero battles, the only real emotional tension being the frustration caused by the fact that, based on McKelvie’s drawings, you can’t actually follow those superhero battles at all.

To some degree that’s fine; it’s a competent empty-headed superhero adventure with crappy art, and it doesn’t make much pretense to being anything else. But, inevitably, the mediocrity of the execution has implications for the treatment of gender/sexuality/race as well. McKelvie, for example, tends to draw the usual slim/hot female characters — he certainly doesn’t feel anything like Desktop Dungeons’ commitment to imagining women who don’t look they walked out of Cosmo. The full-length, blank-faced, hip-cocked, wait-let-me-stuff-this-cleavage-in-somehow Scarlet Witch is an especial low-point.

In a similar vein, Gillen’s insistently shallow writing makes it hard for him to do much with his diverse cast other than have them there. As I said, part of the joy of the comic is that difference is simply treated as normal, so that green skin isn’t much different from brown skin. But while that’s refreshing, it also can feel like a cop out. Is Miss. America really even a Hispanic character, for example, when she’s an advanced human from another dimension who has never experienced prejudice? G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel deliberately explores what it would mean for a Muslim girl to gain superpowers in terms of her perception of herself and others perceptions of her. Such subtlety is utterly beyond Young Avengers.

So, basically, making art that isn’t mired in stereotypes is hard. And making art that’s good is hard. And those two things put together are even harder, not least because, to some not insignificant degree, you can’t do one without the other.

The X-Men: Establishment Lackeys

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week Orion Martin wrote a post in which he argued that the X-Men essentially appropriate the experience of the marginalized for the white and middle-class. The X-Men consistently presents itself as a comic about the excluded and discriminated against, but under the guise of preaching tolerance, it actually (as as Neil Shyminsky argues) erases difference. The only marginalization that matters is being a mutant, and every adolescent white boy is a mutant; ergo, adolescent white boys are as oppressed (hell, more oppressed) than anybody. Let us, then, pay attention to their angst exclusively.

Anyway, I thought I’d test Orion and Shyminsky’s arguments against the original X-Men comic; that’s X-Men #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from way, way back in 1963. I’d remembered it as being an awful comic, and it is that; one of those Lee/Kirby efforts where proponents of Kirby would be well served by attributing as much of the writing to Stan as possible (and as much of the art too, for that matter; this is not within a mortar shot of being Kirby’s best work.)

Part of why the comic is so crappy is that it matches up with Orion’s thesis so perfectly that it’s painful. We first see the X-Men (Cyclops, Beast, Ice-Man, and Angel) in a palatial, exclusive private school. The first few pages are all cheerful boys’ school high jinks, enlivened only by the student’s obsequious deference to, and competition for the approval of, Xavier. It’s an unbroken collage of fusty preppiness and ostentatious privilege — underlined when Angel mentions off-hand that he’s a representative of “Homo Superior.” Is he referring to his wings or his class status? It’s not clear.

Be that as it may, the plot grinds on, and we hear that a new student is coming: “a most attractive young lady!” as Xavier tells his all-male students, before even communicating her name. Said male students then cluster around the window looking out, making various lewd observations (“A Redhead! Look at that face…and the rest of her!”) We are, in short, insistently positioned with the guys; we and they sexualize her before we even see her. When the X-Men do finally meet the new recruit, they spit out various stale and uncomfortable pick up lines, culminating in Beast trying to kiss her. Thus the first effort at portraying difference in the X-Men comic, the first introduction of someone who is not like the others, results in objectification followed quickly by sexual harassment. (Jean does use her telekinesis to put Beast in his place…but then refers to him sympathetically as “poor dear,” just so we know she’s not really angry or freaked out at having her fellow students trying to fondle her within ten minutes of arriving at her new school.)

>Yet more leering at Jean.

Somewhere in the middle of this edifying display of gender politics, Xavier gives with a quick speech about how normal humans fear mutants (“the human race is not yet ready to accept those with extra powers!”) and so he’s set up his luxurious refuge, where X-boys can leer at X-girls undisturbed by outside interference. He adds, though, that they have a mission to “protect mankind…from the evil mutants!”

ProfessorX_3

Shyminsky points out that the X-Men basically spend all their time attacking other mutants who aren’t sufficiently assimilated; their work is to further marginalize their brothers in the name of a justice of the privileged which is never questioned. That certainly fits this story, where Magneto’s plot involves attacking a US military base and disabling armaments and missiles. Again, the year here is 1963, deep in the cold war. Actual marginalized people at the time and earlier (like, say Paul Robeson or Woody Guthrie) were able to figure out that U.S. military power was used in less than noble ways around the globe, from Cuba to Indonesia to Africa. You’d think that a self-declared Homo Superior with experience of oppression like Magneto might be able to articulate that. But, of course, he doesn’t; he’s just an evil villain whose evilness serves deliberately to emphasize the justness and general awesomeness of the U.S. military.

As for the X-Men’s marginalization…it seems easily doffed. The military guys aren’t scared of them, but welcome their help. The most uncomfortable scene of difference we get is a three panel sequence in which Angel changes out of his street clothes, revealing that he trusses his wings up behind him to keep them out of sight. “After a while they feel like I’m wearing a straight jacket!” he says. But no one ever questions why he has to bother to tie up his wings, or make himself so uncomfortable for the convenience of people who (supposedly) hate him. In fact, the sequence seem much less interested in Angel’s discomfort than in the ingenuity of the disguise.

Shyminsky notes that this fascination with, and eager embrace of, assimilation can be linked to the biography of Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg, who changed their named to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in order to be taken, like Angel, for normal humans. There’s a poignance there, perhaps, in Angel’s discomfort — Lieber and Kurtzberg’s new names may have pinched them a little at times too. But they nonetheless persevered in tightening that truss, which, in this comic at least, consisted not merely of new names, but of what can only be called a servile, deeply dishonorable acquiescence in hierarchical norms, casual misogyny, and imperialist fantasies. I hated this comic already, but as a Jew reading it as a parable of Jewish assimilation, it makes me actually nauseous. James Baldwin says that black people hate Jews (when they do hate Jews) not because they’re Jews, but because they’re white, and this seems like a fairly withering illustration of what he was talking about; a sad account of how my people (not all my people always, of course, but some of my people too often) kick those further down the food chain in a craven effort to look like, act like, and be the ones in charge. Xavier isn’t Martin Luther King; he’s a neo-con, and/or Michael Bloomberg, so charmed by whiteness that he devotes his existence to telepathic racial profiling.

So, yeah; this is not just a badly written comic, but an actively evil one. Other X-Men stories may be better — and indeed, they’d almost have to be. But at its inception, the title was a stupid, craven, explicitly sexist and implicitly racist piece of shit.

What If the X-Men Were Black?

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Orion Martin

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

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

Imagine a work of fiction that focuses on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s except that in this work, white men have replaced all of the people of color. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both have white stand-ins and white followers. In fact, almost all of the characters are white men. It may seem bizarre, but this is the X-Men.

The first issue of X-Men was written by Stan Lee and published in 1963. The fictional world, which continues today in the Disney-owned Marvel Universe, featured super-powered teenagers who worked in a group as the X-Men. Unlike other characters that Stan Lee created, these teenagers do not become superheroes through a freak accident, but were instead born with a genetic mutation known as the x-gene that manifests as superpowers (“mutations”) around the time of puberty. They hide their identity as super powered humans for fear that they will be killed by angry mobs.

An image of mob violence from the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko era.

Stan Lee has explained that his main impetus for having the superheroes be mutants was that he wouldn’t have to invent origin stories for every new character. However, he also claims that the comparison to Civil Rights was present from the start. In a recent interview he said, “It not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the civil rights movement in the country at that time.”
Since the original, largely unpopular episodes written by Stan Lee, dozens of other writers (most of them white men) have built and expanded the world of the X-Men. New characters were added, and the discrimination that mutants like the X-Men face in the Marvel Universe was developed. Over time, the dynamic of the “feared and hated” mutants who nevertheless defend ordinary humans has been used to explore different dynamics of power and privilege*. These include anti-Semitism, racism, and LGBT issues (ableism and sexism, though extremely relevant, are almost never addressed).

Noteworthy X-Men events with social implications include:

—The founding of Genosha, a fictional country where mutants are enslaved – a direct reference to Apartheid.
—A genocide of 16 million mutants.
—The development of a cure for the x-gene mutations, causing a schism in the mutant community.
—The spread of the Legacy Virus, a disease that targeted only mutants. The virus is a clear reference to the AIDS virus and its impact on the LGBT community.

Despite the flexibility of “mutantity” to be a stand in for various aspects of privilege, the Civil Rights movement and racism are topics that come up repeatedly in the X-Men comics and films. Professor X is repeatedly compared to Martin Luther King, and the dream of “peaceful integration.” Magneto, his enemy, advocates for violent mutant revolution and quotes Malcolm X**. Characters in the comic use the fictional slur “mutie” and compare it to racial slurs.

This sequence from God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont shows how Storm and other nonwhite characters are used as props to legitimize the idea that the X-Men are an oppressed minority.

What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.

Neil Shyminsky 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. He concludes that, “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.”**

An unedited image from the comics.

I wanted to remix these stories and imagine what they could have been if they had dealt with actual instead of fictional dimensions of privilege. Searching through 50 years of X-Men comics, I selected a half dozen iconic images and scenes relating to discrimination. In these images, I edited the comics so that every mutant had a skin color that was some shade of brown.

In the alternate universe where the all mutants are black, many events in the X-Men history become actual social commentary because they are dealing with real dimensions of power. Reading about black teenagers standing up to a largely white mob is different than reading about white teenagers in the same situation. These images show that when the writers of the X-Men do comment on social issues, the meaning of these comments is hampered and distorted by the translations from reality to fantasy and fantasy back to reality.

Left, the original frames in which Colossus stands up to a mob. Right, the edited version of the same sequence from the project X-Men of Color.

Re-coloring the X-Men so that all mutants are people of color not only makes the themes of discrimination more relevant, it also introduces hundreds of non-white characters who are complex and fully realized. This is something that’s lacking from the current Marvel Universe. Why is Psylocke not only an Asian person of British descent, but also a ninja? Why is Storm not simply a mutant of color, but an African witch-priestess? As comics great Dwayne McDuffie said, “You only had two types of characters available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the he’s-smart-but-he’s-black characters.” There’s certainly more roles for a non-white characters now than when he said that in 1993, but most super hero comics are written about characters that were invented decades ago. By recoloring the comics, we can grandfather characters into the Marvel Universe who are not defined by their race.

Before and after comparison of Emma Frost.

Simply changing the skin color of the mutants obviously doesn’t address all of the issues around privilege in the Marvel Universe. The visual and narrative sexism that permeates superhero comics remains intact. Some characteristics of white characters also become negative stereotypes when applied to non-white characters. Wolverine is a symbol of wild, untamed, white male power, but when I recolor his skin to imagine him as a person of color, his snarling, predatory aggression reads as a stereotype of wild black men. This is a great demonstration of the way that white male characters are free to inhabit any role, whereas centuries of accumulated stereotypes shape the way we understand people of color in fiction***.

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

Promoters of the X-Men have spent years trying to convince audiences that these white characters are tapping into the struggle of black Americans. Strange as the substitution of white men for black activists may seem, it’s not unique. Fantasy universes often comment on social issues through the veil of imaginary prejudices****. My goal is that by looking at these images people will question whether an invented minority is really the best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence.

You can find a few more images at my website.)

Other resources related to this issue:
More NonSense: No More Mutants by Michael Buntag http://nonsensicalwords.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-nonsense-no-more-mutants.html
We Have The Power To Change MARVEL and DC Comics: Support Diversity, Support Miles! by Jay Deitcher http://www.unleashthefanboy.com/editorial/we-have-the-power-to-change-marvel-and-dc-comics-support-diversity-support-miles/44986

* The most appropriate metaphor for the original Stan Lee comics is probably invisible dimensions of power such as LGBT issues or religion. In the original comics, the X-Men hide their mutations in order to pass as humans (Angel uses belts to strap his wings down under a suit coat). In later generations, some of the mutants are visibly mutated to the point they could never pass as humans.
** Shyminsky also notes that recent generations of X-Men writers have reacted to the politics of appropriation in the series’ history. He cites Grant Morrison’s U-Men as an example.
***I think it’s interesting that the same characteristics that make Wolverine a white male icon are also regressive stereotypes of black men.
****I often think of house-elf slavery in Harry Potter, but it actually starts much earlier:

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: racism