"Black Skins" and White Masks: Comic books and the secret of race

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Marc Singer

Other critics have delivered similar readings. In Comics as Culture (1990), M. Thomas Inge writes that

... comic book heroes also tend to fit most of the classic patterns of heroism in Western culture. ... Spider-Man belongs to the trickster tradition among folk heroes. ... It is interesting to note that the trickster figure in African folklore is often a spider. Most of the heroes of the world of comic books likewise fit these patterns which are as old as Western civilization. (142)

Yet African folklore is not Western civilization, as "the West" is traditionally defined; Spider-Man, like the funny-animal tricksters before him, may incorporate an African and African American character type, transmuting it into a deracinated comic-book image. Inge is nevertheless accurate when he asserts that "comic books have continued to maintain and develop these patterns [of cultural lore], translate them into forms more suitable to a post-industrial society" (142); racial images may be yet another "pattern" incorporated into the fabric of comics, through the processes Inge and Gordon describe.

In his book Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1992), Richard Reynolds offers an acute, if brief, analysis of the role race plays in superhero comics. Reynolds finds it difficult to ascribe one particular ideological function to minority characters because he views the superhero as a multivalent sign which "supports a varied and contradictory battery of readings. He is both the exotic and the agent of order which brings the exotic to book" (83). Such contradictions always lie at the heart of superhero comics for Reynolds, who takes an almost textbook structuralist approach in defining the genre as the product of numerous internal conflicts and tensions. These tensions result in a sort of equilibrated stasis which, according to Reynolds, "has made it difficult for black superheroes to inscribe any ideological values of their own" (77); instead they are absorbed into the generic ideology of the superhero, in which exotic outsiders--and few are so exotic in the comics as black superheroes--work to preserve Americ a's status quo. Any examination of race in superhero comics must consider these innate tensions, as the handling of race is forever caught between the genre's most radical impulses and its most conservative ones.

One such contradiction can be seen in the long-running DC Comics series Legion of Super-Heroes. Created in 1958, the Legion has always featured dozens of idealistic super-teens, each hailing from a different planet in the far future; for this reason, Legion writers of the 1990s cast the team as a symbol of multicultural cooperation and diversity. Yet upon closer examination, this diversity proves to be only skin-deep.

For nearly twenty years, the Legion's supposed racial diversity was mitigated--if not virtually negated--by the fact that, of all the races represented in the comic, only one group existed in real life: the white characters who comprised the bulk of the Legion. The first nonwhite characters were Brainiac 5, who was colored green only because of his connection to the preexisting Superman villain Brainiac, and Chameleon Boy, a shape-shifting alien with the ability to assume any appearance at will. Chameleon Boy would become the start of a long Legion tradition of locating racial difference in characters of no fixed physical form. In general, however, the Legion represented race in a manner very typical of Silver Age comics, replacing Earthly races with alien ones who differed from the normative white characters only in the exotic pastel colors of their skin. (2)