Black Superheroes Research Articles

The Birth of a Black Female Superhero in "Watchmen" (2019)

The article analyzes the development of a Black female superhero character in HBO’s Watchmen (2019) series. Inspired by Adilifu Nama’s “critically celebratory perspective” used to discuss Black superheroes, it focuses on how the show bridges the gender gap in representation of Black superheroes by introducing a strong female character in her thirties, how it deals with themes of racial discrimination, and how it offers a portent of racial utopia within the context of US history, culture, and politics. Furthermore, the analysis includes a reference to Alan Moore’s original comic of the same title and argues that through the Afrofuturistic aesthetic, the show transforms the disappointing white male superhero narrative into a potential story of success of the Black female superhero, making Angela a rightful heir to Doctor Manhattan’s superpower and perhaps someone who will be capable of making a change both in terms of a cultural and political change.

Hypermasculinity and infantilization of black superheroes: Analysis of Luke Cage and Rage origin stories

This study covers the relation between popular superhero culture and racial difference, specifically, narratives about black superheroes. With the analysis of the origin stories of two black superheroes, Luke Cage and Rage, the paper will point out how their stories consequently and predominantly form discourses of representing difference through the process of infantilization, and by perpetuating stereotypes saturated primarily in hypermasculinity. By theoretically framing the notions of representation of difference within the works of Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, this analysis argues that hypermasculinity, anger issues, and infantilization came as specific subversive popular culture texts to respond to social and cultural challenges and problems in American society. In so doing, these discourses formed new stereotypes and maintained their circularity in expressing differences between the dominant white area in America’s society and various ethnic and racial minorities.

‘A cross burning darkly, blackening the night’: Reading racialized spectacles of conflict and bondage in Marvel’s early Black Panther comics

Abstract All superheroes embody cultural messages and negotiate cultural conflicts. Yet black bodies, introduced to the New World as property and rigorously and often violently regulated by interconnected cultural and institutional forces ever since, have always occupied an especially vexed place in American culture. While all superheroes face repeated threats to their physical integrity, America’s first black superhero, Marvel’s Black Panther, created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, faces the specific – and specifically risky – challenge of performing black embodiment without succumbing to the stereotypes of black embodiment, most notably the stereotype of black bodies being more bodily (re: more violent, more sexual, more animalistic) than white bodies. This article argues that although Black Panther’s early appearances in The Fantastic Four (1961–present), The Avengers (1963–present) and his first solo series, Jungle Action Featuring: The Black Panther (McGregor et al. 1973–76) exploit the superhero genre and comic book medium’s propensity for fantasy and iconic imagery to envision a blackness that is beautiful and liberating, depictions of Black Panther’s conflicts with racialized supervillains and animals as well as his routine depiction within gratuitous spectacles of suffering and bondage demonstrate a simultaneous – and occasionally overwhelming – tendency to appropriate the black body in the service of white desires and anxieties. Ultimately, this article asserts that Black Panther’s early stories prove both the power of comic book images and the danger of that power for subjects who are still fighting an uphill to be seen without being reduced to their visibility.

Identity and Representation in US Comics

Identity and Representation in US Comics

Luke Cage and Police Brutality

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Arts and CultureNo AccessLuke Cage and Police BrutalityJ. Corey Williams, M.A., M.D.J. Corey WilliamsSearch for more papers by this author, M.A., M.D.Published Online:1 Aug 2017https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2017.120805AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail At first glance, you might think the new Netflix series Luke Cage is just another platitudinous superhero drama from Marvel Comics. But, there is something quite different about this hero: the hero is a dark-skinned black man dressed in a black hoodie. A celebration of this kind of image is radical change from the prototypical white male, caped crusaders casted in Marvel’s most recent popular products (i.e., Ant-Man, the Avengers, Captain America, etc.).The cultural and psychological significance of the show lies not just in having a black superhero, but also in the specific superpower of being bulletproof that may strike an emotional cord in the black consciousness. As a show character proclaimed, “There’s something powerful about seeing a black man bulletproof and unafraid.”The show sheds light on several issues: exploitation of black bodies in correctional facilities, misuse of police force on black bodies, and, perhaps more subtly, the experience of living in predominantly black neighborhoods under concentrated police surveillance.As a resident working mostly in urban centers, I regularly hear patients, especially African-American patients, tell me that they are afraid of the police and worry about being a target. The fear is omnipresent and palpable. Perhaps being an African-American physician makes patients more likely to reveal to me these concerns.Because we, as physicians, do not typically inhabit the same neighborhoods and are not subject to the same unjust institutional practices as our poor, urban patients, we may have a difficult time relating to their worries. The socioeconomic discrepancy between the physician and patient may make the physician more likely to distort or misinterpret a patient’s psychological reaction to a very real threat in his or her community. As a colleague once said after a patient described his fear of the police, “The patient may be suffering from delusional paranoia.”As an African American, I too am concerned about being a victim of police brutality. When I drive down the street and see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror, my grip around the steering wheel becomes a little tighter. One misunderstanding, one false move, could result in my untimely death. This hyperawareness is not simply the result of a few minor acts from “bad apple” officers, but from decades of tension and distrust between communities and law enforcement.The narrative of Luke Cage does not offer a logical, cognitive response to the problem of police brutality. Nor does the show offer social or political solutions to racial impropriety of law enforcement. However, it offers a symbolic representation of unapologetic black strength and resilience, which can speak to people in a powerful way. As we work with minority patients, we must be careful as to what we choose to pathologize about their experience, given the tragic victimization of the black community from police brutality and mass incarceration. As the TV show Luke Cage may provide an emotionally evocative narrative, clinical encounters can serve as an emotional outlet if clinicians listen with a non-judgmental ear to these experiences.Dr. Williams is a third-year resident in the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byViolence in the American Imaginary: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Superheroes13 September 2021 | American Political Science Review, Vol. 116, No. 22017 in ReviewRobert Freedman, M.D., David A. Lewis, M.D., Robert Michels, M.D., Daniel S. Pine, M.D., A. John Rush, M.D., Susan K. Schultz, M.D., Carol A. Tamminga, M.D., Rachel Katz, M.D.1 December 2017 | American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 174, No. 12 Volume 12Issue 8 August 01, 2017Pages 12-12 PDF download History Published online 1 August 2017 Published in print 1 August 2017

A new black pantheon: Kwezi as an epic of African postmodernity

ABSTRACTA recent special issue of Journal of African Cultural Studies focusing on the African superhero attests to a continent-wide desire for new imaginings of African identity. As Duncan Omanga notes in that collection, these superheroes are not merely appropriations of American pop culture, but rather syncretic adaptations of the genre for local cultures. This paper examines the South African superhero comic strip Kwezi in this context. Kwezi, I argue, stages a series of entanglements between different forms of black identity in a ‘post-transitional’ South Africa in which the metanarrative of black emancipation has receded from primacy. I show how the series’ array of black superheroes and supervillains functions as a contemporary pantheon of competing versions of black identities – predatory, transformative, traditional – that range from the hypermodern to the ‘ethnic’. I then place the strip within the traditions of black modernity that arise from pan-Africanism, arguing that by reference to a deep past that peripheralizes white presence on the continent, the series attempts to construct black identity affirmatively and self-referentially. At the same time, its dispensing with a progressive narrative of modernity centred on the nation-state leads me to characterize this as a ‘postmodern’ rather than ‘modern’ narrative of blackness.

Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction by André M. Carrington

Reviewed by: Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction by André M. Carrington Diana Mafe andré m. carrington. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016. 304 pp. $25.00. Book-length studies on blackness in speculative fiction and media remain few, and andré m. carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction is a welcome addition. carrington grounds the study in his own role as both critic and fan, and seeks to “establish a basis in the interpretation of popular culture for a more expansive understanding of what it means to be Black” (2). What is most compelling about this work is the range of media that it covers—“novels, short fiction, memoirs, performance, film, television, comics, amateur publishing, and works circulated on the Internet” (2). carrington eschews a restrictive sense of the speculative in order to cast a wide net and critique representations of blackness in the popular imaginary. The Introduction, “The Whiteness of Science Fiction and the Speculative Fiction of Blackness,” lays the necessary theoretical foundation for the book, including the author’s definition of speculative fiction, his critical race and feminist priorities, the implications of genre, and a “chiastic” approach to speculative fiction as a white cultural tradition that nonetheless facilitates creative and empowered interpretations of blackness. Indeed, carrington explicitly resists “paranoid reading” (a term borrowed from Eve Sedgwick) and recourse to defensive and combative analysis where the genre and its potential shortcomings are concerned. With a careful and thoughtful Introduction in place, carrington takes the reader on a remarkable journey over the course of six chapters—the genesis of black science fiction fandom, the political and cultural resonance of Nichelle Nichols and her Star Trek character Lieutenant Uhura, the subversive incarnations of Marvel’s Storm, the crossover success of the black-owned Milestone Media, which produced the [End Page 81] comic book series Icon, the novelization of Deep Space Nine, and fan fiction on marginalized black characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series. carrington’s own pleasure in these case studies comes through in his close reading. He provides sociohistorical contexts and literature reviews, but also creative attention and intellectual curiosity. The fact that some of these examples may be more obscure to readers—the work of the 1950s’ black SF fan-fiction writer Carl Brandon (an alter-ego for the white SF fan-fiction writer Terry Carr), or the radical Milestone storyline in which the teenage black superhero Rocket becomes pregnant and considers an abortion—merely adds to the value of this study. On the one hand, the texts and examples may seem strung together and the leap from Brandon to Nichols and from Nichols to Storm, and so on, potentially jarring. On the other hand, the weaving together of media, fictional characters, writers, and actors serves the overall investigative project on speculative blackness. Whether the reader claims specialization in science-fiction studies pertaining to race or not, they will learn something from this book. For all that the work is exhaustively researched and current in its agenda and scope, there are periodic oversights or simply curious omissions. For example, there is no mention of the work of Adilifu Nama, whose respective monographs, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (2008) and Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011), are arguably the primary extant studies on “speculative blackness.” I concede that carrington is doing very different work, but the author could make that point more explicit in contextualizing his own contribution to these fields of study. In shoring up the theoretical scaffolding of the book, the author sometimes compromises the clarity and accessibility of his prose. For example, in “Dreaming in Color: Racial Revisions in Fan Fiction,” the lengthy preamble on fan-fiction scholarship and theories of race and diaspora is somewhat heavy-handed, and delays the highly original close reading of characters such as Kendra in Buffy and Angelina in Harry Potter (as they have been reimagined by fandom). But these are minor criticisms of what is otherwise an engaging read. For the most part, carrington minimizes jargon and successfully balances his role as...

Nama, Adilifu. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino

In Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino, the prolific Adilifu Nama, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, pursues his study of the interplay between identity politics (race, as well as gender and class) and genre in popular culture initiated in his previous books Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film and Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. The first full-length study devoted to ...

‘Introducing the Sensational Black Panther!’ Fantastic Four #52–53, the Cold War, and Marvel’s Imagined Africa

This article discusses Fantastic Four #52–53 (July–August 1966), in which Black Panther, Marvel’s first black superhero, premiered. It argues that the character as he appeared in these issues is best read as an example of ‘white on black’ representation, or white images of blacks centered on white interests, filtered through Marvel’s then-prevalent Cold War focus. The article first looks at the Fantastic Four as Cold Warriors to contextualize Black Panther. It then goes on to look at how Wakanda, Black Panther’s tribe, and Klaw, the storyline’s villain, are configured in relation to this context, in order to highlight the importance in the story of Cold War conceptions of and fears about the process of decolonization that was taking place on the African continent. Finally, it argues that Black Panther is rhetorically ‘Americanized,’ to better fit with US self-conceptions and to alleviate worries about what Africa’s then-recent decolonization might mean for United States of America.

Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction

Book Review| March 01 2013 Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. By Nama, Adilifu. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2011. i, 180 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $24.95.Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. By Saunders, Ben. New York: Continuum. 2011. iii, 178 pp. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $21.95; e-book, $15.99.Race in American Science Fiction. By Isiah Lavender III. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 2011. iii, 269 pp. Paper, $24.95. Ramzi Fawaz Ramzi Fawaz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2013) 85 (1): 199–202. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1959652 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ramzi Fawaz; Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction. American Literature 1 March 2013; 85 (1): 199–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1959652 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Super black: American pop culture and black superheroes

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Color Them Black Chapter 2. Birth of the Cool Chapter 3. Friends and Lovers Chapter 4. Attack of the Clones Chapter 5. For Reel?: Black Superheroes Come to Life Notes Bibliography Index

Brave black worlds: black superheroes as science fiction ciphers

Without a doubt, superheroes have played a significant role in presenting idealised projections of ourselves as physically powerful, amazing and fantastic versions of ourselves. Superhero comics also invite readers to imagine a world where advanced science, UFOs, aliens, space exploration, time travel and high-tech gadgets are common occurrences. Accordingly, the genre draws significantly from the science fiction (SF) idiom, making what is drawn and written across a multitude of superhero comics extremely significant as an expression of SF and American culture. Often overlooked, however, in the intersection between superheroes and SF is the place black racial representation occupies in the genre. This article examines how black superheroes, ensconced in a SF motif, function not only as counter-hegemonic symbolic expressions of black racial pride and racial progress but possibly even as transformational Afrofuturistic metaphors for imagining race and black racial identity in new and provocative ways.

The Super Black Macho, One Baaad Mutha: Black Superhero Masculinity in 1970s Mainstream Comic Books

The Super Black Macho, One Baaad Mutha: Black Superhero Masculinity in 1970s Mainstream Comic Books

Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity

Previous articleNext article No AccessNegroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban ModernityJacqueline Stewart Jacqueline Stewart Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 29, Number 4Summer 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/377724 Views: 694Total views on this site Citations: 34Citations are reported from Crossref ©2003 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jennifer C Dunn, Stephanie L Young Why are you just watching?: polyvalent Korean spectatorship and critical Western spectatorship in Squid Game, Communication, Culture and Critique 11 (Oct 2022).https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac034Shardé M Davis, Timeka N Tounsel Transfiguring Theaters for Disrespectable Leisure: An Ethnography on Black Womxn’s Ratchet Performances in Movie Showings of Girls Trip, Journal of Communication 71, no.44 (May 2021): 598–622.https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab016Assatu N. Wisseh Mapping Mammy 2.0: Insecure and the Middle-Class Black Woman's Burden, Howard Journal of Communications 30, no.55 (Jun 2018): 391–410.https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2018.1471755Constantine V. Nakassis, Amanda Weidman Vision, Voice, and Cinematic Presence, differences 29, no.33 (Dec 2018): 107–136.https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-7266494Andre Cavalcante Affect, emotion, and media audiences: the case of resilient reception, Media, Culture & Society 40, no.88 (Jun 2018): 1186–1201.https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718781991Mara Mattoscio What's in a Face?: Sara Baartman, the (Post)Colonial Gaze and the Case of Venus Noire (2010), Feminist Review 117, no.11 (Nov 2017): 56–78.https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0090-7Robert L. Mack A (Truly) Captive Audience: The Twilight Zone and Mid-Century American “Television Rooms”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33, no.11 (Dec 2015): 64–82.https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2015.1094333Priya Dixit Interrogating representations of “militants” and “terrorists” in the United States’ Militant Imagery Project and the Counterterrorism Calendar, Critical Studies on Terrorism 9, no.11 (Apr 2016): 97–119.https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2016.1147761Jennifer L. Barnes Fanfiction as imaginary play: What fan-written stories can tell us about the cognitive science of fiction, Poetics 48 (Feb 2015): 69–82.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2014.12.004Ayesha K. Hardison Where Author and Auteur Meet: Genre, the Erotic, and Black Female Subjectivity, Meridians 12, no.11 (Jan 2014): 88–120.https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.1.88Sarah Knudson Crash courses and lifelong journeys: Modes of reading non-fiction advice in a North American audience, Poetics 41, no.33 (Jun 2013): 211–235.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2013.03.002Kevin Smets, Philippe Meers, Roel Vande Winkel, Sofie Van Bauwel Pride and popcorn: consuming the idea of community at film screenings in the Turkish diaspora, Identities 20, no.22 (Apr 2013): 115–132.https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2013.781944Sarina Pearson Cowboy contradictions: Westerns in the postcolonial Pacific, Studies in Australasian Cinema 7, no.2-32-3 (Jan 2014): 153–164.https://doi.org/10.1386/sac.7.2-3.153_1Kgomotso Michael Masemola Between Tinseltown and Sophiatown: The Double Temporality of Popular Culture in the Autobiographical Cultural Memory of Bloke Modisane and Miriam Makeba, Journal of Literary Studies 27, no.11 (Mar 2011): 1–27.https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2011.557226Page Laws Not Everybody's Protest Film, Either: Native Son among Controversial Film Adaptations, The Black Scholar 39, no.1-21-2 (Apr 2015): 27–33.https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2009.11413479 By Reid Miller A Lesson in Moral Spectatorship Reid Miller, Critical Inquiry 34, no.44 (Jul 2015): 706–728.https://doi.org/10.1086/592541Anna Beatrice Scott Superpower vs Supernatural: Black Superheroes and the Quest for a Mutant Reality, Journal of Visual Culture 5, no.33 (Dec 2006): 295–314.https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412906071364 Eve Oishi Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure Oishi, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, no.33 (Jul 2015): 641–674.https://doi.org/10.1086/498988 Introduction, (Jan 2006): 1–17.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-001Heather K. Love Forced Exile, (Jan 2006): 19–43.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-002Martin Puchner The Aftershocks of Blast, (Jan 2006): 44–67.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-003Michael LeMahieu Nonsense Modernism, (Jan 2006): 68–93.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-004Laura Frost The Romance of Cliché, (Jan 2006): 94–118.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-005Rebecca L. Walkowitz Virginia Woolf’s Evasion, (Jan 2006): 119–144.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-006Sianne Ngai Black Venus, Blonde Venus, (Jan 2006): 145–178.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-007Monica L. Miller The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist, (Jan 2006): 179–205.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-008Douglas Mao A Shaman in Common, (Jan 2006): 206–237.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-009Joshua L. Miller The Gorgeous Laughter of Filipino Modernity, (Jan 2006): 238–268.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-010Lisa Fluet Hit-Man Modernism, (Jan 2006): 269–297.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-011Jesse Matz Cultures of Impression, (Jan 2006): 298–330.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-012 Bibliography, (Jan 2006): 331–352.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-013 Notes on Contributors, (Jan 2006): 353–354.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387824-014 Recent Scholarship, Journal of American History 91, no.44 (Mar 2005): 1566–1633.https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/91.4.1566Lauren Rabinovitz Past Imperfect: Feminism and Social Histories of Silent Film, Cinémas 16, no.11 (Jun 2006): 21–34.https://doi.org/10.7202/013049ar

Anne Allison. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 225pp. Cloth $29.00, paper $18.95. - Jeffrey A. Brown. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001. 256pp. Cloth $46.00, paper $18.00.

Anne Allison. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 225pp. Cloth 18.95. - Jeffrey A. Brown. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001. 256pp. Cloth 18.00. - Volume 43 Issue 4

Black superheroes, Milestone comics, and their fans

What do the comic book figures Static, Hardware, and Icon all have in common? Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives an answer that goes far beyond tights and capes, an answer that lies within the mission Milestone Media, Inc., assumed in comic book culture. Milestone was the brainchild of four young black creators who wanted to part from the mainstream and do their stories their own way. This history of Milestone, a creator-owned publishing company, tells how success came to these mavericks in the 1990s and how comics culture was expanded and enriched as fans were captivated by this new genre. Milestone focused on the African American heroes in a town called Dakota. Quite soon these black action comics took a firm position in the controversies of race, gender, and corporate identity in contemporary America. Characters battled supervillains and sometimes even clashed with more widely known superheroes. Front covers of Milestone comics often bore confrontational slogans like Hardware: A Cog in the Corporate Machine is About to Strip Some Gears. Milestone's creators aimed for exceptional stories that addressed racial issues without alienating readers. Some competitors, however, accused their comics of not being black enough or of merely marketing Superman in black face. Some felt that the stories were too black, but a large cluster of readers applauded these new superheroes for fostering African American pride and identity. Milestone came to represent an alternative model of black heroism and, for a host of admirers, the ideal of masculinity. Black Superheroes gives details about the founding of Milestone and reports on the secure niche its work and its image achieved in the marketplace. Tracing the company's history and discussing its creators, their works, and the fans, this book gauges Milestone alongside other black comic book publishers, mainstream publishers, and the history of costumed characters.

Rollins, Representation and Reality

Rollins, Representation and Reality

Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero

Following in the footsteps of feminist scholarship there have, in recent years, been a number of studies which have begun to consider masculinity, particularly heterosexual masculinity, as a social construction. Masculinity, always regarded as a natural, stable gender identity, is in the process of being deconstructed on a variety of levels from social politics to pop psychology. Moreover, the masculinity of our media-generated heroes is increasingly recognized in much the same way that femininity has been understood, not as a real and unified subject position, but as a carefully orchestrated performance - or, in other words, as a masquerade. But if the heterosexual male is the site of gender and sexual privilege in North American culture, as he is perceived to be, then we might ask just what the masculine masquerade disguises? And how might black masculinity fit into the equation? It is feasible that a clue to these questions lies in the very notion of the masquerade and the implication of an underlying, unstable level of gender identity. Indeed, the split personality implied by the concept of a masquerade seems to be one of the most archetypal metaphors for the masculine condition in Western culture. Whether in Jungian psychology or low-budget horror films, great literary works or modern comic books, masculinity has often explored its own duality. The male identity in the twentieth century is perceived in extremes: man or mouse, He-man or 98-pound weakling. At the one end is the hyper-masculine ideal with muscles, sex appeal, and social competence; at the other is the skinny, socially inept failure. But these two male extremes are not so far removed as they might seem. Warrior and wimp exist side by side, each defining the other in mutual opposition. On the following pages I want to explore this concept of duality in masculinity - and more specifically black masculinity - as it is currently presented in one of Western culture's most rudimentary and instructional forms, the superhero comic book. At its most obvious and symbolic level, comic book masculinity characterizes for young readers a model of gender behavior that has traditionally struggled to incorporate both sides of the masquerade, yet has recently slipped into the domain of the almost exclusively hypermasculine. My particular interest in the comic book depiction of masculinity has developed in relation to an ongoing ethnographic project dealing with the emergence of Milestone Media Inc., a black-owned and controlled comic book publishing company launched in 1993, and the readers of its comics. An innovative twist on the almost uniformly white-bread universe of comic book characters, the Milestone line of comics offers a small variety of well-defined African American superheroes. Milestone is the brainchild and the legal property of three young black men who are experienced comic book and publishing veterans: Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, and Derek T. Dingle. As a creator-owned publishing company with a multicultural approach to comic book characters, Milestone occupies a unique position within the comic book industry. Other African American comics publishers exist, but as true independents the quality and distribution of their books are often limited by financial restrictions. Milestone, on the other hand, was able to strike a groundbreaking deal with industry giant DC Comics whereby DC would print and distribute the Milestone titles without interfering with content or ownership rights. This unique relationship allows Milestone to reach a much larger audience than any other African American comic book publisher has ever been able to(1). Currently Milestone publishes three core series: Icon [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], featuring a super-powered brother from another planet who is also a staunch republican and fights injustice alongside his partner Rocket, a single, teenaged mother and Toni Morrison fan from the projects; Hardware, starring the character of Curtis Metcalf, a scientific super-genius who builds an incredible suit of armor to confront his racist employer and to fight crime; and Static, which tells the story of the slightly geeky but fun-loving teenager Virgil Hawkins, who battles supervillains and school yard bullies after he accidentally gains the power to control electricity. …