Originally Posted by
Emperorjones
Black female characters have often had it worse when it comes to mainstream comics (but not in mass entertainment going over the last 40 years or so, there’s no Black male equivalent of The Color Purple, Waiting to Exhale, or Scandal, and there’s no concerted effort to really cater to Black males specifically as there is for Black females in everything from movies, television, to books, though comic books are lagging far behind the rest of the entertainment world in that). I don’t believe that you should build up Black males at the expense of Black females, or vice versa. I want to see more Black female superhero/comic book projects. It’s a shame that Marvel has never really pushed hard enough to make Storm a solo headlining character like they have even the female Wolverine, or that they continually underuse Monica Rambeau. I was very disappointed in the stereotypical take on Rambeau I saw in a Spider-Man book a couple months back where she was calling herself “Auntie Monica” for some reason. I could tell that it wasn’t a Black person writing the book.
Regarding Black Panther, I don’t have a problem with grappling with issues of governance. I’m a political science major, so that’s right up my alley. I’ve long been interested in seeing this examination, and some of the things discussed in the Coates-Ridley runs are not too unlike any other comic book that features a ruler as also a main character. Though I do think how it’s done, and how gleeful Coates and Ridley are in lambasting T’Challa, in making him specifically the problem, is different than in how say a Thor, Namor, Aquaman, or Hippolyta have often been handled. The language used to describe and condemn T’Challa comes right out of the Black feminist playbook and is reinforced by anti-Black male depictions across entertainment. The Aquamen miniseries actually has a kind of similar story to Ridley's "The Long Shadow" but it's notable to me that they didn't use that miniseries to castigate Aquaman for his "mistakes". It was more about him solving/resolving them, with the help of Jackson Hyde and Black Manta. (To be fair here, I only read parts of the miniseries. I missed an issue or two, but from what I read they didn't spend time talking about how bad Aquaman was and Mera wasn't holding him "accountable").
I find it dubious that Ridley will build T’Challa back up and is laying out subtle hints when he’s very specific when he has characters insulting T’Challa. He’s very blunt about that, but supposedly-hoped for-subtle when it comes to planting seeds for an eventual redemption? I don’t buy it. Comic books aren’t War and Peace, unless we are talking about Neil Gaiman. It demands a lot of readers to do just about eight issues of tearing a person down on the mere hope that they will be built back up by the end, whenever that might be. With these issues at $4 a pop or more that's really asking a lot of people, I mean that's a gallon of gas versus buying an issue with a meandering story that might eventually get to a satisfying resolution.
I find this kind of current deconstruction-of iconic mostly male characters (regardless of color)-in vogue right now (thinking of the Star Wars sequels and Star Trek: Picard). And after the inevitable pushback, there might be an attempt to “right the ship” that doesn’t feel organic to the story being told and felt tacked on, a compromise that doesn’t please anyone. That was also done in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, IMO, though the lead character there is a Black female.
And while this current creative affectation doesn’t only affect Black male characters, it has greater weight when it does because there’s not a large or great pool of Black male characters to pick in the mainstream, or Black male depictions even within the MCU. You have Falcon who ditched his identity for that of Steve Rogers’s, and will now be struggling with trying to be as good (it will never be better) than Rogers’s Captain America. I don’t see that as a win. When last we saw Luke Cage he was settling in as the new crime lord of Harlem (wonderful representation there; I guess Marvel felt there just weren't enough Black criminals in mass entertainment). And who knows where War Machine is? It seems like a no-brainer to me that he would be in the Ironheart Disney Plus series, or Wakanda Forever for that matter, but I guess they are saving all his best material for his supposed Disney Plus series that might not happen. And Nick Fury is hanging out in fake beach scenes with the Skrulls after Captain Marvel turned his character into a joke.
I need to reread the new Icon/Rocket series. I would have to check to see if I have all the issues. But Hudlin has been thorough when it comes to trying to depict Black people in heroic lights. I didn’t agree with every decision he made during his Black Panther run, but it was a lot better than just about everything I read that came after.
As much as I dislike Ridley’s take on Black Panther, I think his I Am Batman series is much better and feels like a better fit for him. I do have problems with his Batman series, though, with the most being the character doesn’t need to be called Batman. I would rather he have taken on the Orpheus identity or just become a brand-new Bat character, or taken on another code name. But the character himself I like, and he doesn’t get dumped on anywhere close to what Ridley does when it comes to T’Challa. I also liked Ridley’s Civil Rights era comic The American Way, that also featured a Black male hero. I need to reread the sequel to that though, it didn’t impress much when it came out.
Ridley does have it in him to create a nuanced, even ultimately positive Black male hero, so I do have to wonder how much of what has been done to T’Challa under his pen came directly from him, or from Marvel’s direction? And he became a willing hatchet man perhaps because what Marvel wanted to do aligned with his own conflicted view of Black masculinity.