Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics by Darieck Scott (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics by Darieck Scott D’Arcee Charington Neal (bio) Scott, Darieck. Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics. New York University Press, 2022. 280 pp, $89.00, $29.00. In his introduction to Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, Darieck Scott considers how rhetorical Blackness in various forms (whether visual, ideological, or fantastical) operates through the lens of the comic book. Asking the critical question of why the collective imagination seems unable to accurately capture the nuance of what it is to be Black, Scott “examine[s] representations of blackness in fantasy-infused genres . . . to theorize how fantasies of black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and antiblackness” (2). Through Frantz Fanon’s articulation of fantasy as an abject impossibility for Black people throughout the book, Scott utilizes Fanon’s Afro-pessimistic observations as a thread throughout the text. Later, he argues against the influential linguistic psychoanalyses of Fredric Wertham, Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis in order to construct a societal understanding of what comic books do both to and for their audiences. In Keeping It Unreal, the audience-specific focus takes up much of the space in the book as the central weapon that is stylistically wielded against Black imaginative power. As a result, Scott expertly weaves through a dizzying number of critics, artists, fanatical reports, essays, and Congressional testimony to showcase both the immense power and the masculine fragility of the readers who were consuming 100 million issues per month during the so-called Golden Age. Though that number has dropped significantly, the issues that came with it have not. Wertham’s argument is entertainingly remixed through the idea of what Scott calls “fantasy-acts,” refocusing fantasy’s supposed passivity toward the very real, accountable weight it carries through speculative actions and/or power (30). Scott points out that many of these acts are responsible for the censorship and rabid calls of homosexuality that loom throughout superhero comics’ criticisms. He is also adamant [End Page 93] in pointing out that although they are rarely considered for their subjective additions to literary canons, superhero comics exist as untapped libraries of creative ideals, further arguing that these considerations exist in comics at the intersection of masculine identity, feminine sensuality, and ableist assumptions of whole (and largely white) bodies. For Scott, paradigmatic constructions of fantasy or “phantasy . . . [as] the creative activity of imagination, rather than the reduction to whimsy and triviality that often occurs with the English word ‘fantasy,’” exist not as the sole property of whiteness but, instead, as the unexamined-yet-hugely-influential moments of Black characterization that are under the surface (72). This mantra is the singular track that Scott stays tethered to throughout the book as he examines the way that Black super-heroes—both male and female—have carved out a landscape assumed to be entirely white and straight, and why this is completely wrong. In the first chapter, he makes use of Wonder Woman’s Black sister Nubia and positions his own life story as a queer Black child through Dick Giordano’s 1973 cover of Wonder Woman #206. On it, as Nubia, in a tight leopard print outfit, battles Diana Prince, Scott recontextualizes Wertham’s incendiary argument about homosexuality to highlight how even negative patriarchal views leave no space for women (68). Bringing up various discussions of lesbianism, he points out that these are swept aside in favor of an overt sexuality that is essentially cloaked in two-dimensional fantasies of 1970s Black power. Curiously, Scott makes reference to the fact that DC Comics perhaps recognized the unsubtle racism suggested through Nubia’s initial artwork, citing the fact that her subsequent appearances are redesigned as either fully clothed and/or armored. Regardless, the core issue of identification that Nubia represents remains a staple for Scott, bolstered by Freudian comparisons to a suggestive Oedipal complex. This is represented in Jonathan Dollimore’s update to Wertham’s hetero-to- homosexual lens, which goes from “I desire you” to “I desire (to be like) you” (71, emphasis original). In the character of...