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Topic: Role of race in comics (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Wilson Mui
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 9:16am | IP Logged | 1  

Jason's comment in the Color Doodle thread about how cool it would be to have a series based on the character JB drew got me thinking...

What kind of role does race or ethnicity play in whether a series gets started by a comic company or accepted by readers, who seem mostly Caucasian.  Does it make a big difference?

I found an interesting interview by the late Dwayne McDuffie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u16sKK-1oLQ
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John Byrne
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | 2  

Comics tend to be targeted at their expected audience. This has always been true. The industry was founded in large part by Jews and Italians, yet you would have to search a long, long time to find representatives of those groups in the pages of early comics. Heck, even after the industry had been going for forty years or more, I was still able to create the first Jewish superhero -- at least, the first who was not a parody or a retcon!

In my own work, I have tried at all times for the "rainbow effect". If a script or plot did not specifically call for a character to be White, I would make him/her something else. That was how Jim Rhodes got to be Black, remember. (I also tend to make characters female, if the script does not specify otherwise.)

Mind you, the best laid plans can be scuttled by the most unexpected causes. Chris and I did a short story that featured a meeting between Storm and the Black Panther. One of the elements of this was a White Afrikaner sending an assassin to shoot Ororo as she walked down a New York street. I DREW what I thought was a pretty obviously skinny White guy -- White features and a crew-cut, which I left open for color. The color chosen was BLUE. And the character's skin was BROWN. Racial diversity, to be sure, but hardly appropriate to the scene! (The cosmic balance to this was in the second issue of MAN OF STEEL, where I drew what I thought was obviously a Black guy piloting a helicopter -- but the colorist made him White.)

One definite, and unfortunate, aspect of comics discovering there were people other than WHITE in the world (and that they were NOT here to be villains or comedy relief), was that, much like Hollywood, for a long time it seemed as if there was only ONE other race, and that was Black people. Asians were largely forgotten (unless they were villains or femmes fatale) and Native Americans, Arabs, sub-continental Indians, Polynesians, etc were hardly seen at all!

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Michael Penn
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | 3  

What kind of role does race or ethnicity play in whether a series gets started by a comic company or accepted by readers, who seem mostly Caucasian....?

***

I think, perhaps, race/ethnicity combined with nationality as a barrier-breaker. Unless I'm wrong, the first black superhero in Marvel was the Black Panther, not an American but an African, and the first Asian superhero in Marvel was Sunfire, not an American but Japanese. Maybe it was initially thought that introducing non-whites could be more acceptable if they were not American?

I sort of appreciated that the all-new, all-different X-Men were rather a united nations of superheros, given that mutant abilities would not know from differences in race or ethnicity etc.

On the other hand, I often also felt that Chris Claremont really abused the privilege of characters continually referencing their personal distinctiveness. For me, at any rate, it almost got to read as each of these non-American characters had a native-language tic.
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Mike Norris
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | 4  

The safe choice was and still is white male. So from a purely financial stand point thats usually going to be the default. I'm not sure what Stan's motivation was (personal conviction? An attempt to be "with it") when he introduced the Falcon in the pages of Captain America and then promoted him to costar.(with "co-billing" no less!) The choice of the Captain America title was pretty smart and gutsy, though. Something like the Hero for Hire title is a bit more obvious as it seemed to be Marvel's answer to the blaxplotation movies of the Seventies. Comics have long had a habit of following entertainment trends rather than setting them.

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Josh Goldberg
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | 5  

Two questions JB:

  1. Refresh my memory, who is the first Jewish superhero you created?
  2. I've long wondered about the reveal of Nudge being Korean "under all that makeup".  Did that have anything to do with Jerry Ordway's inking of the JLA miniseries?
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John Byrne
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | 6  

1. Kitty Pryde

2. No.

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Brandon Scott Berthelot
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | 7  

I think it's funny that the biggest (at one point in time
anyway) Black comic book character, Spawn, was really
unrecognizable as black most of the time. He wore a full
body suit, and under it he resembled hamburger more than
any ethnicity.

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Brian Hague
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | 8  

Not to be contrary, but DC's Seraph, a back-up character and occasional co-star in Super Friends, predates Kitty Pryde. Kitty Pryde is certainly the highest profile Jewish character created to that point, however.

 

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Mike Norris
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | 9  

Brians mention of Seraph, reminds of how "on the nose"  many of DC and Marvels ethnic characters were. Shamrock, Arabian Knight and Rising Sun come to mind. One thing about the All-New All Different X-Men is that for the most part they broke that pattern.( at least in names and powers).
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Caleb M. Edmond
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Posted: 27 November 2011 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | 10  

(The cosmic balance to this was in the second issue of MAN OF STEEL, where I drew what I thought was obviously a Black guy piloting a helicopter -- but the colorist made him White.)

************************************************************ ******************
Thankfully by the time the TPB was produced they changed him to his intended 'color'.
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Glenn Brown
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Posted: 28 November 2011 at 5:11am | IP Logged | 11  

Writers and artists tend to create subjects that are most familiar with themselves.  Not all, and not all of the time; hence, the qualifer "tend."  They also tend to create subjects that they feel will sell best in the marketplace.  Publishing, like show business, is very much about the bottom line at the end of the day.

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John Byrne
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Posted: 28 November 2011 at 5:40am | IP Logged | 12  

It speaks much to changing times, I suppose, that even as "recently" as when I joined the industry, in the Seventies, it was still not uncommon to hear concern expressed that if a Black character was prominently portrayed in an issue, especially on the cover, there would be a dip in sales "south of the Mason Dixon line".
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