Diversity in the Batman line

[K. Jones]

godisawesome beat me to the punch on Dick and Damian's mixed, American-mutt and quite diverse qualities, and as an Irish-boy myself I always saw a lot of myself in Jason and the red hair didn't hurt. The palette swap thing stems from the tendency for whoever is "Robin" to look, well, like Robin. But I'd love artists of a bit more thought and skill to show off those differences, and that includes a tan on Damian ... and an anti-tan on Jason. Of course, in general I can't and won't argue that Gotham doesn't need more diversity. Cassandra Cain and Renee Montoya seem like the best, easiest fixes (or Crispus ... or freaking Josie Mac ... Josh Azeveda ... or Dagmar Procjnow). Of course, we're talking purely "Bat-Family" here - the villains are a little more diverse, actually. But they too could use a bit more color.

Onyx was a Green Arrow character guesting in the bat-books and I think she's back where she belongs. Batman Incorporated helps a bunch, but they're not really core, because they're not Gotham local. As for Batwing, that's a tricky one. I like what they're doing with Luke, the whole Batman Beyond vibe. I feel like the Foxes get first dibs if anyone is going to mine old characters to create new ties and bring in a bit of diversity, because Lucius is core Batman and is grandfathered in back to the late 70s.

Dead right about the early-to-mid 2000s though. That period, along with the late 70s are the two peak points of injecting a bit of color into DC Comics. Reactionary times - but times that were absolutely called for, and told good stories regardless. One of the nice bits about the New 52 I suppose could be that Orpheus could come back.

I've got some high damn hopes for Annie Aguila.

[Diggy]

It's not that big of a deal honestly

[Tasty_Chaos]

It's not that big a deal to you. Don't speak for everyone.

I can only speak for myself when I say diverse representation is important. It lets different groups of people know a space is safe for them. Seeing female characters as disposable sex objects on the page instead of realized characters can be off-putting to female fans as does the parade of all-white heroes tell minorities they are not acknowledged as heroes by the mainstream.

Its just better business sense to attract as many readers as possible.

With the Batfamily, many members were acknowledged as having diverse ethnic backgrounds pre-New52, which seems to have been wiped out in the reboot. There's nothing wrong with bringing that back and making all the Robins more unique. I have this whole headcannon about Jason's Irish-Asian ancestry(so it's not so farfetched that Shiva could have been his mom in A Death in the Family)

Long first post I know but one more thing: Cass is half-Vietnamese, not Chinese, which made the decision to shunt her off to Hong Kong all the more baffling and slightly racist. Sorry, that whole affair really bothered me

[MASTER-OF-SUPRISE]

I personally don't see the problem.

[Dzetoun]

godisawesome beat me to the punch on Dick and Damian's mixed, American-mutt and quite diverse qualities, and as an Irish-boy myself I always saw a lot of myself in Jason and the red hair didn't hurt. The palette swap thing stems from the tendency for whoever is "Robin" to look, well, like Robin. But I'd love artists of a bit more thought and skill to show off those differences, and that includes a tan on Damian ... and an anti-tan on Jason.

That's a very good point about Robin. Tim Seeley, in another context, touched on this last week when he noted how comics speak in two languages simultaneously, the written and the visual. Of the two, the visual is often the more important. All the male Robins tend to look alike because, quite simply, Dick Grayson was Robin for 44 years and thus established what a male Robin looks like, and pretty much what a Robin looks like since female Robins have been, honestly, novelty items. That raises all sorts of problems for diversity, but as Seeley said, you have the image there in four colors pretty much forever and twenty years from now, or forty years, or sixty years, you want someone to pick up a comic and go, "oh, I know him, that's X." These visual traditions are just incredibly powerful, and work to override difference through time. No matter how much you write Dick Grayson as Roma, or Damian as half-Arabic, or whatever, the more important visual language will tend to revert to type. You can make a conscious break with the past, of course, but that's difficult and dangerous, as the current controversy with Wally West shows.

Maybe part of what Snyder is doing with Bluebird, and with the new character in the cave we saw in the flash forward, is to establish new character spaces not so bound by visual tradition. You can do more things with Bluebird or Lark or whomever because the powerful visual traditions are not set.

[exile001]

I would welcome the return of Orpheus. He actually had a unique place in Gotham as opposed to most other Bat-Family characters.

Onyx was recently re-introduced in Green Arrow (which everyone should be reading from #17).

I would be happy to see Crispus Allen and Akins again, as long as they are just MCU cops.

It is shocking that Renee Montoya has not returned yet. She had a lot of interaction with the Bat characters and several great P.O.V. issues even before the Gotham Central run that made her a star. I was always a big fan of the character and would love to see her again (although I hated that she became the Question).

I never particularly liked Cassandra Cain, so no big loss for me.

Shiva could play a solid role in Gotham, especially BOP, but I think she has been relegated to generic martial artist/assassin in the New 52.

I dropped Batwing once it left Africa... and the new guy in the suit was Lucius' son from Gotham. I can't abide that kind thing and found it incredibly lazy. Also, it kind of felt like DC saying that black guys are interchangable.

It has been mentioned that Batwing will have a major role in Eternal, but I have the suspicion that this is because he will die. The first issue mentioned horrible things will happen to the Bat-family, and who else could they kill off?

I would like to see both the classic Jean-Paul Valley and Michael Lane as Azraels. Imagine how well they'd get on... It could be really fun having them war over whose crazy band of religious zealots are "right". Then LeHah could return and ruin everyones day!

[PyroSikTh]

It's not that big of a deal honestly

I personally don't see the problem.

This, pretty much.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm a white male, but when I read comics, race is the last thing that pops into my head. I couldn't care less if the character had pale skin or dark skin, I couldn't care less if their mother was Irish and their father was Chinese. I certainly don't get attached to characters because of relatability. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I don't go leaping off buildings catching criminals every evening.

[Shimarenda]

If you count Birds of Prey as part of the Batman line-up, we have Stryx and Condor. But I agree that more can be done in this direction.

[Lorendiac]

Plus you've got Killer Croc. Show me another comic that faithfully portrays crocodile men as well as Batman does.

You got me to smile, anyway!

Incidentally, the way I remember it from his origin story in the early 1980s, he was supposed to be a black kid who had grown up in a bigoted Deep South town -- back around the 1950s and 1960s -- and first turned violent when a bunch of white kids were taunting him mercilessly about his unsightly skin condition. The local cops (white men) automatically supported the white kids over the black kid, and Croc's life went downhill from there.

This reminds me of a time a few years ago when Judd Winick was quoted as having said in an interview that the original Silver Age JLA roster was "six white guys and a white gal" -- a serious lack of diversity. I saw a thread commenting on that interview, and I said various things about why I agreed or disagreed with some of his points, including a suggestion that it was hilarious that he'd forgotten that one of the founding members of the JLA was not a white guy -- The Martian Manhunter had naturally green skin, as seen on many covers of that era. My point was that "six white faces plus one green face" may not be a very realistic combination, but it's still more diverse than having the JLA clubhouse be full of "white faces and nothing but!"

[ABH]

I'd like to see more of Michael Lane in Gotham. He was last seen in Batman Inc., when Bruce went to him to get the Suit of Sorrows. So, he exists in the New 52, as much as you consider Batman Inc. to be canon (it's where Damian died, so).

Not a Batman character, exactly, but because my first exposure to him was a Batman comic, I've always wanted to see more of Bronze Tiger/Ben Turner in Batman's world. Ben's martial arts prowess should surpass Batman's (imo), because, as much as I love him, Batman should not be the Alpha at everything. I'd like the whole Were-tiger thing to be dropped, eventually.

I's also like to see Batman put the Outsiders back together, and have Black Lightning be the "Cyclops/field commander" of the team, and have Katana be his second. Sadly (to me, anyway), it seems both the "Outsiders" name and Katana now belong to the Green Arrow book.

Bringing Rene Montoya back to Gotham is a no-brainer, and I know it was discussed recently (by the Eternal crew, I think), so, at the very least, we know there's a desire to bring her back.

I loved Cass Cain as Batgirl, and I like her as Blackbat too, but I get the feeling that DC doesn't want to use her much anymore. I do recall reading that Batman would be teaming up with Mr. Unknown/Batman Japan soon (Eternal?), and would be heading to Hong Kong... so fingers crossed.

[Neowing]

This thread hurts my head.

Diversity is a joke, we don't relate to characters just because they have white skin or black, It's the personality and the personality.

Unfortunately many so called diverse characters suffer from this, Batwing (Lucian or w/e his name is) for exemple is boring and is another bland Batman. And the ones that are truly interesting, DC refuses to support them.

[Lorendiac]

This, pretty much.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm a white male, but when I read comics, race is the last thing that pops into my head. I couldn't care less if the character had pale skin or dark skin, I couldn't care less if their mother was Irish and their father was Chinese. I certainly don't get attached to characters because of relatability. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I don't go leaping off buildings catching criminals every evening.

I agree with you up to a point. Let's put it this way: If I walk into a store and pick up a new issue of a Batman title, I'm not consciously thinking: "Gee, I can't remember the last time we saw Batman (or Bruce Wayne) have some significant interaction with a character who was obviously of Vietnamese heritage -- I sure hope that's going to change in this story! Nothing else could make me happy!"

What I want is a well-written and entertaining story in exchange for my hard-earned money. If the story grips me, then I won't be marking a Racial Quota Scorecard as I go along. (That would go this way: "Okay, how many lines of dialogue have been spoken thus far by black characters? By East Asian characters? By Native American characters?" And so forth.)

That's "focusing on the little picture" -- when I'm reading a new story, I just try to appreciate it on its own merits (assuming it has any). As opposed to judging it in terms of "statistical trends in the last two hundred stories I've read about Batman and his supporting cast."

But there's nothing wrong with sometimes looking at the big picture for a change of pace and saying something along the lines of, "Gee, the current roster of this superhero team seems to be about 83 percent 'white guys and gals with names suggesting Western European ancestry' -- with one token character whose ancestors came from another part of the world. A bit unbalanced. Maybe DC (or Marvel, or whomever) could afford to mix things up a bit more?"

It all depends on what sort of mood I'm in at any given time. Sometimes I try "crunching the numbers" on something and I learn some interesting things about long-term patterns which I hadn't consciously noticed before.

[Tupiaz]

Was never explicitly stated anywhere but can be inferred considering he's Ra's Al Ghul's grandson. Also, not exactly half, more like a 1/4, max.

Depends on who her mother is. As far as I know that has never been revealed?

Really, it's not being done as some attack on entertainment or to make a political statement - it's a means to expand comics readership by including characters that people can see themselves in. The marketplace is a diverse beast, and if you have a smartly written black character in this book, you greatly increase the chances that a black guy or girl reading the book will go 'Huh, I can identify strongly with this person - I want to check out their adventures on a monthly basis'. Or for the book unafraid to have two main male characters kiss on-screen, you will have straight allies going 'Huh, this book isn't afraid to give some decent space and dialog to a gay or bi character - I think I'll stick around to see what else they might do'.

If you look at the demography black/minorities don't buy comics. So the changes for the book should succeed because of minorities but it is rather slim. It would need support of te general book (white men). Also here you want to make a book purely because of politics not because you want to tell a good story - which is the purpose of making a story. The story should be central for making a good story. Making money, politics and so on is something there should be of less reason for making the book.

[Lorendiac]

Damian was... half... Arabic?

Was never explicitly stated anywhere but can be inferred considering he's Ra's Al Ghul's grandson. Also, not exactly half, more like a 1/4, max.

Depends on who her mother is. As far as I know that has never been revealed?

I'll take a crack at answering that! (Bearing in mind that my "evidence" goes back to long before Flashpoint, and thus the "historical facts" might well have mutated into something else in the modern New 52 continuity.)

Denny O'Neil is the guy who created Talia and Ra's back in the early 70s. A couple of decades later, he wrote a graphic novel called "Birth of the Demon" which showed us the origin story of Ra's al Ghul (his first discovery of the Lazarus Pit phenomenon, for instance). In that one, it was stated that Ra's met Talia's mother at the famous Woodstock event. The lady was of mixed Chinese/Arabic heritage, as I recall. I tend to take that as definitive since O'Neil was the original writer for Ra's and his daughter, and thus ought to know more about the family background than anyone else does. Also, he was also the editor in charge of the Batman group of titles all through the 1990s, so it stands to reason that he expected his own graphic novel to be Totally Canonical at the time it was published. (Granted, in the New 52 continuity, who knows how much has changed?)

"Birth of the Demon" also indicated that Ra's al Ghul was born and raised hundreds of years ago in a city somewhere in North Africa. (The city was not named for us; apparently it is no longer inhabited.) No telling how long his family had lived in that region -- he might have Berber blood, Moorish blood, Egyptian blood, who knows?

But if we arbitrarily assume Ra's is practically "pure Arab" in his genetic heritage (which I doubt), and that Talia's mother was a simple half-and-half mixture of Arab and Chinese (which may not be the accurate percentages), that would give us something along these lines:

Talia would be 3/4 Arab (from three grandparents out of four), and 1/4 Chinese (through one of her mommy's parents).

If so, then Damian would be about 3/8 Arab, 1/8 Chinese, and the other 4/8 would be whatever Bruce Wayne's own racial/ethnic heritage is. (Heavy on the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry, I expect, although at least one Bronze Age story indicated that he is a direct descendant of a bunch of Waynes who were successively the lords of an old castle in Scotland, which is not necessarily the same thing as "Anglo-Saxon" per se.)

[Orpheus]

I'm seeing some comments on how diversity is not important and how people only care about the story... I grew up in New Jersey and frequently made trips to Philadelphia and New York. Anyone who lives in this area of the country knows how diverse it is especially in the Metropolitan areas that Gotham represents. If you can read a Batman story without thinking about diversity then good for you, but for me diversity is crucial to Batman's team. It is no secret that many inner cities have trouble with violence and high murder rates, and many times minorities are the victims of these crimes. My point is that if Gotham resembles anything like a typical American city, it would have its share of minority people who have either witnessed or have been victims of violent crime. The theme of many Bat characacters is that they had troubled and violent upbringings, and their experiences made them determined to become heroes. Well guess what, a lot of the people experiencing the most violent upbringings in crime ridden neighborhoods are minorities. In the world of Batman, it is ludcricrous that the inner cities are barely addressed and that there are no minority characters responding to their own tragedy like Bruce or Dick. I'm not saying I think every minority character should come from an inner city or have a harsh upbringing, that would just be stereotyping. They should obviously come from all walks of life just like the white characters.