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A quick thing about Isaiah on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.
About a decade ago, I interviewed Robert Morales, who invented that character for Marvel in 2001. The result was "Truth: Red, White, And Black" which recast the story of Captain America's origins as part of a Tuskegee Syphillis Study-like plot.
In Robert's story, the US rounded up hundreds of Black GIs in a segregated battalion during WWII to use as guinea pigs. The US is trying to re-create the procedure used to turn Steve Rogers into Cap.
They get it wrong — a lot. Almost all of the Black men they round up die.
They get it wrong — a lot. Almost all of the Black men they round up die.
Only five of the 300 Black men subjected to the super-soldier experiments survive the process; of that five, Isaiah is the only Black super-soldier who survives the war, and he is thrown in prison for decades.
"It was so depressing I didn't think they would approve it," Robert told me. ""But it was depressingly realistic. And *likely.*"
Robert died in 2013. But his revision of the Cap story was part of a wider on-page reckoning w/ the whiteness of the stories in the mainline MCU/DCU.
Robert died in 2013. But his revision of the Cap story was part of a wider on-page reckoning w/ the whiteness of the stories in the mainline MCU/DCU.
The Kents of Smallville, as one example, were reimagined as radical abolitionists — Free-Staters who settled in Kansas to oppose the state from becoming a slave state. Clark Kent, then, would be directly downstream from the principles of his forebears.
It's a very liberal inclination — positioning the Kents on the side of justice for a century-plus before the space-ship landed on their farm.
but it skips over some bigger, more important question about race and power: like how is it that whiteness was literally so universal that both a Kansan *and* a Kryptonian might possess it?
Black mainline comics writers kept playing with these premises. The legendary Dwayne McDuffie, wrote his Black superman analogue Icon as having become Black upon imprinting on the enslaved Black woman in the American south who found and adopted it.*
*why this character was still -male- is...yeah.
anyway, a lot of mainstream superheroes, in their reimaginings, have to nod to the oppression in this country. (There was an aside in one of the Nolan Batman jawns that positioned the Batcave as originally a hideout the Waynes used for fugitives on the Underground Railroad.)
And i think that speaks to how deeply embedded the whiteness of these characters is.
The Green Lantern's power ring had to scan the earth for the bravest person in a world of billions of people and...decided that its rightful bearer was a white fighter pilot from the Midwest?
The Green Lantern's power ring had to scan the earth for the bravest person in a world of billions of people and...decided that its rightful bearer was a white fighter pilot from the Midwest?
anyway, more later!
okay, so young Kal-El rocketed across the cosmos as a baby in a spaceship before crash-landing in a field in Kansas. He was Kryptonian but also, somehow, a white boy. Which brings us back to this question upthread: whiteness could literally span the cosmos?
in those Silver Age days, that's literally how they explained it: he could be a white American because there were white Kryptonians.
This was underscored by the fact that they created distinctly *Black* Kryptonians — who lived in a place called Vathlo Island.
This was underscored by the fact that they created distinctly *Black* Kryptonians — who lived in a place called Vathlo Island.
Vathlo Island "retained its independence throughout history and did not join the planetary federation, though good relations were maintained."
Kryptonian Wakanda, I guess.
Kryptonian Wakanda, I guess.
(Yes, I know i'm mixing universes to make that metaphor work. calm down, nerds.)
Not long after that first (and one of the only) references to Vathlo Island in 1971, Neal Adams, a white artist at DC, asked his editor a q: what happens if Hal Jordan — the Green Lantern — dies? The editor told him that there would then be a backup Lantern.
The backup Green Lantern they had in mind was a white gym teacher who used to play Big 10 football.
Again: the bravest person in the world was a white USian dude.
Again: the bravest person in the world was a white USian dude.
Adams eventually pushed back, and along w/ Dennis O'Neil, created a Black character to take over the GL mantle: an ex-Marine named John Stewart.
(Adams told me his editor originally wanted to name the character Lincoln Washington, but he talked him out of it. Phew.)
(Adams told me his editor originally wanted to name the character Lincoln Washington, but he talked him out of it. Phew.)
Again, y'all see the problems here — the bravest person in the world is still a male, a USian and a member of the US, military? — but as representation went, Stewart was better than a lot of the other Black superheroes that DC tried their hands at.
In the 70s, DC created Black Lightning (who was black and electrical), Black Goliath (black and a giant), and Nubia ( black...and Wonder Woman). And at Marvel there was Luke Cage, who, in his earliest pre-dab incarnations, was a jive-talking powerhouse in butterfly collars.
Anyway, the upshot here is that John Stewart taking over the Green Lantern mantle...stuck with Dwayne McDuffie, who created the Milestone comics imprint under DC in the 1990s, featuring all characters of color.
(Milestone's Superman analogue, Icon, mentioned upthread, became a way to embody and critique a certain kind of ascendent respectability politics; he was, after all, essentially a Black cop. Milestone was already playing with chewier ideas around race than mainline DC.)
McDuffie would eventually become a the principal player in the DC Animated Universe. When they were creating the Justice League animated series, underlined that there way that the show could have a team in which everyone — even the aliens Kal-El and Hawkgirl! — were white.
so instead of Hal Jordan, the original Green Lantern, taking his traditional place as at the Justice League table , the animated series launched with John Stewart in that role.
The show debuted in 2001 and became a huge hit. McDuffie often pointed out that, as a result, a generation of younger fans who were introduced to the character through the animated series had only ever known a Black Green Lantern.
(There were a lot of reasons the 2011 Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie failed, and the "who tf is THIS guy?" factor probably played some role in it.)
There's a lot more, obviously. But some of these IPs — Batman and Superman and Captain America, in particular — are 80+ years old. They're holdovers from a pre-Civil Rights Act America, a pre-Stonewall America, etc. They represent a bunch of stuff that is ever harder to update.
And it will be interesting to watch how that chafes against the the fact that they are more valuable and popular than they've ever been. Could a critique of the premises of the Cap origin story, like Robert Morales', even happen today?
two small cxns: John Stewart was originally an architect; he was later re-imagined as a marine.
Black Goliath was a Marvel character, not a DC character.
Black Goliath was a Marvel character, not a DC character.
Oof, that #TheFalconAndTheWinterSoldier 
finale illustrates just how easy it is to treat this stuff as ornamentation.
finale illustrates just how easy it is to treat this stuff as ornamentation.
