#Osvaldo Oyola
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Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 1
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Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 2
Osvaldo Oyola , J. Lamb and Noah Berlatsky (who hates super heroes on principle btw), along with other dumbasses, have often said they are male/white supremacist power fantasies.
Nah fam. They are nothing more and nothing less than a HUMAN power fantasy.
Follow me along here for a while.
Human beings are animals.
We are. That’s a simple matter of scientific fact.
When push comes to shove we are really, really, really smart monkeys who share something like 50+% genes in common with chimpanzees.
As animals and all forms of life the overwhelming majority of us are biologically hardwired towards one ultimate goal: survival.
The desire to survive drives us innately in ways that go unnoticed most of the time. As we evolved into smarter creatures with higher brain functions capable of comprehending the world around us and constructing complex relationships and societies, that survival instinct was reinterpreted through various means.
The survival instinct in human beings and other mammals takes several forms but most commonly can boil down to two things:
a) Survival through preservation of the individual
b) Survival through procreation
Type a) involves getting food, shelter, rest, avoiding and recovering from injury and of course defending one’s self from threats, which can take the form of other living creatures, including members of our own species.
Type b) involves spawning offspring and at the same time looking after their wellbeing.
But the survival instinct goes deeper than that because we are biologically hardwired to work towards the protection of our very species. That is the very reason why type a) and b) even exist. By preserving ourselves and our offspring our species survives.
We are also communal animals. Much like chimpanzees and gorillas we live in groups for mutual benefit and protection. Thus, as part of survival of ourselves, our offspring and our species, we have a biological investment in protecting members of our group and of our species.
But seemingly paradoxically we are also hardwired to compete with and fight one another. This likely a by-product of how in the wild we’d have to compete for resources like food and shelter. Sometimes this involves two different groups from the same species competing with one another for survival.
Why am I telling you this? Well, because deep down all those things I have just talked about are innate to 99% of all human beings. It is little wonder that as we as a species evolved we expressed these biological driving forces in certain ways no other creatures could.
This is where the concept of our deities, Gods and figures from folklore and myth come from.
Jupiter, Vishnu, Thor, Hercules, Sun Wukong, Sampson, the Biblical version of Jesus Christ.
Whether they adopt the form of human beings or other entities, virtually every single culture on Earth, even those in isolation of one another, have conceived of beings greater than themselves. Beings with abilities beyond the average human being. And they’ve also conceived of those beings from time to time using their abilities to defy the laws of nature (such as averting natural disasters), combat dangerous or malevolent forces/creatures/individuals, and/or safeguarding the lives of others.
It is a form of explaining the world around us, and an act of wish fulfilment of the human experience.
We want to survive and since we are by our nature group animals we desire to be protected. Thus we conceive beings greater than ourselves who could potentially do that.
We want to survive by preserving our individual selves, so we imagined beings that are so powerful that they are not as reliant upon rest and sustenance like normal people. And who are powerful enough that they either cannot be easily harmed and are are capable of defending themselves from potential threats.
We have within us a vested biological interest in preserving our species, and so are hardwired to protect members of our family/group; our kin. Thus as part of our human wish fulfilment fantasies we imagine beings we’d like to be who could have the power to protect members of our species.
We then come to the modern superhero.
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, etc. Fundamentally they are the exact same thing.
Individuals with powers beyond those of the average human being, who use those powers to help and protect people, typically from numerous threats (which most commonly take the form of individuals with malevolent intentions). This can include perceived social ills which plague society and by extension pose a threat to the survival or quality of life of ordinary citizens.
One can exchange Hercules fighting the mythological Hydra for Superman fighting Darkseid or Captain America fighting H.Y.D.R.A. terrorists and it is ultimately the same thing. Batman battling crime in Gotham city fundamentally is no different from Theseus defeating criminals and bandits on his travels. When Spider-Man swings into action to save Mary Jane from the Green Goblin, it is an expression of much the same thing the Indian deity Rama went through to save his bride Sita.
Many super heroes though are also vigilantes, someone who imposes their own sense of morality whilst working outside of the law. Vigilantes in the real world and in myths, folklore, fiction and so on can also be found throughout history. Perhaps the most notable example being Robin Hood, who denounced his noble status to steal from the rich and give what he took to the poor who were being over taxed and oppressed by a corrupt system. Other examples would be the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro.
What I am trying to say is that at their core, modern day super heroes are fundamentally modern riffs of the folkloric and mythic traditions and/or similar expressions of the universal human experience (which are informed by innate biological imperatives).
Ostensibly, in creating Superman (the first true superhero), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were either:
a) Consciously/subconsciously influenced by these older mythic stories when they created Superman (and thus birthed the entire genre), or
b) basically tapped into the same kind of thinking which birthed Robin Hood, Hercules, Sun Wukong, etc. in the first place. Across the centuries great minds seemingly thought alike
Superman in particular was possibly heavily influenced by the figure of super strong Sampson or the Clay Golem of Prague, both of whom are part of Jewish religion and folklore (Siegel and Shuster being Jewish immigrants). He might even be seen as a kind of Moses figure. Someone sent away from his natural people to grow up elsewhere, but nevertheless destined for greatness. Or maybe he was just a messiah figure. Whether Siegel and Shuster had Jesus Christ in their minds at all or not, the Jewish religion does (I believe) talk about a saviour figure and Superman could very well be an expression of that.
Figuring into Superman’s creation was 1930s depression and the shadow of impending global war as Hitler was gathering power and invaded Poland the year after Superman was created. In his debut Superman is not only superhumanly powerful but uses these powers as a vigilante to do things like:
· stop wife beaters
· rescue someone framed for murder, whilst apprehending the real murderer
· capture gangsters and rescue a kidnapped person (Lois Lane)
· bring a corrupt politician to justice
This was an expression of 1930s fears and frustrations. Of Siegel and Shuster’s desires to right the wrongs of a system which was perceived to be broken…or at least envision someone who could do that seemingly impossible task.
The next year in 1939, Batman would come along and express many of these sentiments even more acutely, in particular when it came to crime.
As time went by and the superhero genre was consolidated and evolved, many heroes had their histories altered in order to make them more coherent. In Batman’s specific case his home of Gotham city was painted as so utterly corrupt from the lowest criminal to the most powerful political figures that Batman was literally the one and only effective deterrent to crime. Hope of legal or political reform was next to impossible, thus Batman’s brand of vigilantism was the only thing which could stand in the way of criminals from just doing whatever they wanted.
Bearing all this in mind the idea that the superhero genre is an inherent white construction (and therefore inherently racist, deliberately or otherwise) is, you know…fucking bullshit.
There is a difference between something defined by someone of one race or another and it being something which in indicative to them ONLY. There is also a difference between something having ‘white supremacist undertones’ and something simply being created at a certain point in time when cultural norms were (sadly) different to what they became later on.
As originally created Superman (and by extension the genre) was functionally the same kind of wish fulfilment expressesed by countless storytellers from countless cultures across human history, all informed by universal biological impulses to survive.
Yes, the superhero genre was created and constructed by white people and is therefore literally a ‘white construction’. Yes there weren’t many (if any) non-white characters outside of horrible racial stereotypes. Yes many of them took the law into their own hands.
But that doesn’t mean they are in support of white supremacist notions ala the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact given that Siegel and Shuster were of Jewish immigrant descent, one could argue that Superman was a reflection of how minorities need to be BETTER than the majority to be accepted and/or he was arguably an expression of their frustrations at being mistreated themselves an minorities.
On the other hand let’s say that ‘white supremacy’ strictly meant that superheroes operated with the belief in white people being the default, and as the majority, they were better than the non-whites. Superman was created at a time of segregation after all.
The problem is there is no evidence I know in support of Superman, by his mere existence, is consciously implying that white people are better than non-white people. I wouldn’t put it past Siegel and Shuster to believe that given the times they were from, but ALL media was like that. To an extent they honestly didn’t know any better. But just because they believed that and the social context of the time informed people of this, that doesn’t mean that those ideas are inherent to the superhero genre.
Because again, the superhero genre ultimately embodies beliefs and practices which date back throughout human history and can be found in many non-white cultures.
Yes. Their brand of heroism and the beliefs about heroism they embody were gifted to them by their white creators. And those creators were informed by white social norms (as in the white society they grew up in informed Siegel and Shuster that wife beating was bad). But that doesn’t mean that the superhero moral compass is inherently something that is itself white by design. Rather, it goes beyond that to form a mostly universal form of morality. And lest we forget American society and its laws were mostly informed by Jewish and Christian religious beliefs and practices, which themselves were not only innovated centuries before American society, but by people who were NOT white.
Yes, these superheroes are vigilantes, many of which wear masks and employ secret identities. But not only is that a matter of practicality within their work, as well as part of generating drama within the narrative, but this does not (as the above mentioned dumbasses believe) mean they are inheriting a legacy from the Ku Klux Klan.
Theseus and Robin Hood acted as vigilantes of a sort who again predate the KKK. The Scarlet Pimpernel is widely regarded as the originator of the secret identity trope, and he was created by a Hungarian born British woman!
Just because a superhero might act as a vigilante and impose their sense of morality outside of the law (maybe even using force to do it) doesn’t equate them with the KKK, because it completely and utterly ignores the specifics of the circumstances. It is like saying anyone who kills is a serial killer, when they might have killed for justifiable reasons. Superman and Batman might be operating as vigilantes with secret identities but we the readers can plainly see that they are genuinely justified in what they are doing.
But that’s because the writer has established that!
I hear you cry.
Yes that is true...so what though?
If the writer has set up circumstances which justify the superheroes actions then you can’t just IGNORE those. You can’t just choose the evidence you take under consideration to fit the conclusion you want. In this case that’d be the interpretation of superheroes are endorsements of white supremacist notions ala the KKK or police officers who abuse their powers.
That’s like desiring to interpret Star Wars as the story of white supremacy because the ‘black’ clad figures of the Empire are ultimately overthrown by the white Rebel Alliance and the ‘light side' of the force. It ignores the respective actions of the Empire and Alliance in-story.
It’s is presuming the Empire to represent black people and the Alliance white people in the first place and then working backwards from there. Equally it is presuming superheroes to be stand-ins for ACTUAL police officers or KKK style vigilantes in the first place.
And that cop analogy inherently doesn’t work because superheroes are only SIMILAR to cops. The analogy ultimately breaks down because they aren’t subject to ANY legal sanctions, many of them do not kill and their crime fighting efforts stereotypically takes the form of them intervening ONLY if they hear about a crime/crisis ahead of time or if they observe it in progress.
I mean one of the above morons conflated Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense to be a stand in for racial profiling which is an utterly inappropriate analogy. The Spider-Sense was originally constructed as a clumsy plot device that first and foremost operated as a personalised danger sense to Spider-Man of threats. Outside of contrived writing it categorically doesn’t alert him to ANY potential crime or criminal. And it doesn’t discriminate the way racial profiling does. It more often than not allows him to pinpoint precisely who might be a potential threat because they ARE a potential threat.
Spider-Man or Superman or Batman in the course of their work have these skills and it enables them to be ABOVE things like racial profiling. Again, taking their stalking of a potential criminal to be a tacit approval of police methods is an interpretation being overlaid ONTO the superhero and then presumed to be factually what it is.
But it’s not.
It’s just an (mis)interpretation of what is going on informed by one person’s personal experiences and baggage through life. It is the same kind of logic which will take say a female character who has a male love interest as 100% definitely an enforcement of the idea that women ‘need a man’ to validate them when that isn’t necessarily the case of the story at all.
Building upon this is the oft-repeated interpretation that superheroes are fascists and are supportive of fascist values. That is an incredibly simplistic and literal reading of the superhero genre that ignores aspects plain as day on the page of the stories. It again is CHOOSES to see something in the concept which frankly misses the point but is nevertheless accepted as plain fact regardless.
An article in the Atlantic addresses this very eloquently:
This [fascist] reading of superheroes is common but wrong, a symptom of trying to impose political ideology on a universal, fictional myth. Superheroes do say something about the real world, but it’s something pretty uncontroversial: We want to see good triumph over evil, and “good” in this case means more than just defeating the bad guy—it means handling power responsibly.
The “fascism” metaphor breaks down pretty quickly when you think about it. Most superheroes defeat an evil power but do not retain any power for themselves. They ensure others’ freedom. They rarely deal with the government, and when they do it is with wariness, as in the Iron Man films, where Tony Stark refuses to hand over control of his inventions.
Indeed, superhero tales are full of subplots about how heroes limit their own power: hibernating once the big bad guy has been defeated, wearing disguises to live ordinary lives, choosing not to give into the temptation to ally with the villain or use their powers for profit or even civilizational progress. That’s because the creators of some of the most foundational superhero tales weren’t writing solely out of a power fantasy. They were writing out of a fantasy that a truly good people who find themselves with power might use that power only for good—and only in the face of extreme evil.
YES superheroes are a power fantasy.
But there is NOTHING wrong with power fantasies so long as one understands the distinction between the fiction and reality.
More than this...the hard truth is violence is part of being human. We are biologically hard wired to be violent and dominate others. That is innate to us like many, many, many animals. The flipside to that though is what also makes us human is the ability (and perhaps more importantly the DESIRE) to NOT be like that.
Most superhero fiction simultaneously offers us the opportunity to enforce those values whilst at the same time providing us with a safe outlet for our violent urges. We transfer those urges into the heroes and villains fighting one another. Kinda like how in Ancient Rome gladiator fights and other spectacles were used as a way of avoiding the populace of Rome from erupting into violence.
And don’t sit there and tell me that they ENCOURAGE violence.
If someone is going to be violent like that frankly there are almost ALWAYS further underlying factors often to do with their home life
And
Human beings have been killing each other and acting in immoral ways LONG before the invention of popular media. Preventing ourselves from being like that is an act of learned control as we grow up. It is otherwise innate to our instincts.
Furthermore the concept of superheroes as being police officers who enforce the status quo and therefore help keep white people in power is incredibly flawed.
First of all Doc Ock nuking New York city hurts everyone regardless of race. Second of all Batman stopping a mugger in the middle of assaulting someone isn’t upholding white power, it’s just safeguarding life. Reading it as more than that is a projection these asshats are injecting INTO the stories themselves when they aren’t warranted.
Finally, the law might be stacked in favour of white power and minority suppression. But that not only has a lot to do with ABUSE of the law, but at the same time large chunks of the law are there legitimately for the well being of EVERYONE. It is illegal to murder someone, to mug them, to exploit them. None of that ensures white power, it ensures the well being of everyone. The problem is that those laws are often warped when being applied to minorities by the police force.
But superheroes don’t represent the police force. They represent something grander than the police force whilst at the same time representing what the police force SHOULD be like. The message isn’t ‘this is what the police are like’ or even ‘the police are heroes so anything they do is therefore a good thing’. It is providing a strong moral ideal and saying ‘You and everyone else should try to be like this’.
It is because of this that the superhero concept REVEALS the warts and shortcomings of the law and law enforcement as it really exists. Which was a part of 1930s frustrations Superman et al were giving vent to. Again, Action Comics #1 showed us corrupt politicians, commentating upon a flawed system.
Basically Superman being who he is doesn’t tell people that a police officer is justified when he racially profiles a black person as a criminal. Quite the opposite, he reveals us that they were WRONG in doing that because Superman would NEVER do that.
Ultimately, yeah these characters were created within a white context, but my point is fundamentally the same thing was created in non-white contexts as well throughout history.
Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 2
Master Post
#Marvel#DC#DC Comics#Marvel Comics#Super heroes#Superheroes#Superman#Batman#Wonder Woman#X-Men#Spider-Man#mythology#folklore#Robin Hood#Noah Berlatsky#Osvaldo Oyola
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Apocalyptic antics abound! Hub is joined once again by Dr. Osvaldo Oyola, and they continue their coverage of the dramatic, (and surprisingly dark) conclusion of the Omega the Unknown storyline in Defenders #77! Come for the in depth analysis, stay for the licensed Russian nesting doll marketing scheme!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/titan-up-the-defense/id1024210268#episodeGuid=https%3A%2F%2Fttwasteland.podomatic.com%2Fentry%2F2020-06-24T19_49_10-07_00
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So I’m visiting The Middle Spaces and I’ve kind of been going down a rabbit hole that started with an article/essay by Robert Jones Jr. (“sonofabaldwin” online and creator of the similarly named social justice media brand)
It’s pretty well-known at this point, I’ve been aware of it since about 4 or 5 years ago but never got around to reading it: Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body
It feels like something @greatrunner has probably already read but if not, I think it’s something you would want to look at.
Likewise, I’m going through Osvaldo Oyola‘s articles (creator of The Middle Spaces) which has me linking to more stuff and what I’m saying is, is that I can at least lie to myself and say I’m not completely wasting time as I proceed to ignore a test I need to study for.
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If It WAUGHs Like a Duck #9: Flying North for the Winter! | The Middle Spaces. A review of Howard the Duck volume 1 issue #9 and Chip Zdarsky’s volume 6 issue #4
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This most comic book of all comic book movies
How Spider-Verse was like Obama’s 8 years
The superpower of invisibility vs hypervisibility
Miles’ charter school (waiting for Spider-Man not Waiting for Superman)
And why did we wait so long for a brown Spider-Man?
Aunt May/Doc Ock
Parallels between Miles’ Dad (Jefferson Davis?!?!) and Uncle
“Black Panther meets The Power-Puff Girls”
And Hollywood never being quite enough
Osvaldo Oyola teaches writing at New York University and serves on the executive board for the International Comics Art Forum. His blog, The Middle Spaces publishes work on comics, music and culture. You can also find images from and comments on his growing collection of both current and back issues of comics on his tumblr, Notes from Comics Collecting. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Felicia Perez is the Innovation Director at the Center for Story-based Strategy (one of the organizations behind Black Panther #FanActivistCon). She previously worked at the United Workers Congress, ACLU of Southern California & was a high school social studies for twelve years in the Los Angeles Unified School District where she was also an active union leader and chapter chair for United Teachers of Los Angeles. She reviews films at Lucha’s Flix Picks.
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Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse with Osvaldo Oyola & Felicia Perez. Listen to the Podcast on Demand!
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse with Osvaldo Oyola & Felicia Perez. Listen to the #Podcast on Demand! #movies #spiderman #spiderverse
Miles Morales’ feature film debut is breaking boundaries and winning accolades. Join us for a conversation about:
This most comic book of all comic book movies
“It’s like Obama’s 8 years”
The superpower of invisibility vs hypervisibility
Miles’ charter school (waiting for Spider-Man not Waiting for Superman)
Why did we wait so long for a brown Spider-Man?
“Black Panther meets The Power-Puff Girls”
O…
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A police tactic I've run into (but that is hard to avoid) is the cops will kettle protesters into a situation where you can't comply with one order without violating another.
— Osvaldo Oyola 🇵🇷 (@themiddlespaces) May 31, 2020
from Twitter https://twitter.com/ArbitraryStray
May 31, 2020 at 09:28AM
via IFTTT
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when I use the words “revisionist” or “revisionism” in terms of history, I do not mean this pejoratively in the least bit. History requires revision, not only because of the various social and cultural forces that obscure the achievements of and the crimes against various people of different races, genders, classes, etc… but also to counteract the ridiculous notion that there is a such thing as a monolithic “history,” as opposed to competing stories comprised of the different ways knowledge is created through analysis, research and story-telling. History needs continual revision because it is not only what is being told, but how it is being told.
Osvaldo Oyola in "Let's Rewrite Some History": Captain Marvel and Feminist Revisionsm
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Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 2
Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 1
Master Post
There were several points a bit more tangentially connected to my arguments in part 1. As a result I decided to leave them until now and hit them up in bullet points.
These are arguments against the superhero genre chiefly perpetuated by the tryhard trinity of Osvaldo Oyola , J. Lamb and Noah Berlatsky.
On the topic of the genre portraying ‘might making right’, the truth is this is part of the ancient inspirational aspect of these figures and can be found in stories like Rama and Sita, Rama of course ultimately never giving up his quest to be reunited with his lover. Which was not a Western influenced story.
Yes the genre involves ‘punching as conflict resolution’. I’m sorry, but that is part and parcel of the genre and the wish fulfilment/fantasy/narrative entertainment value of the stories. If you DON’T like that then frankly it’s like complaining that a romance story involves kissing.
It has been claimed that a black hero wouldn’t punch someone but again, the genre is entirely about people with powers using them to help people by preserving their life. And if they have no other choice but to K.O. a mugger who’s going to stab someone then a black person, or any decent person, would/should do it. But examining the meaning and repercussions of that realistically given the fact that they aren’t white in a white society is something that could benefit the genre.
A common critique of the genre is that crime happens sometimes because of a racist system, therefore fighting crime innately supports racism. Look, obviously we should remove institutionalised racism from the law. At the end of the day though if someone of any race is committing a crime which HURTS people they should be stopped, the reasons which drove them to that should be taken into consideration, but Spider-Man shouldn’t NOT stop a mugger because they’ve been driven to do that through desperation. There is often no time for that and without being able to talk to or trust strangers he or other heroes need to act in the moment.
Superhero fiction on one level is childish, but on a deeper level they’re representative of universal truths and desires which are often boiled down to fairy tales or simple stories. The above shitheads also claims that superhero fiction is written and consumed by children, when the truth is that in the last 20-30 years the opposite has been more true. THAT is partially why sales have been dwindling over the years.
Superman’s values are innate to the heroic and altruistic desires and ideals ALL humanity has expressed throughout its history. They are not inherently ‘white’
Apparently superheroes are white constructs because they reinforce the ‘status quo’. To quote the Atlantic article (see part 1) again:
“What status quo do superheroes reinforce? These heroes fight because everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The only fascists here are the supervillains who disagree.”
Also Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were created specifically to change the status quo of the fictional worlds they were created in. At the same time the entire Marvel pantheon were about changing the status quo of the genre by introducing people who were flawed and different and more human than the DC heroes
Superheroes, despite the assertions by the above fuckwits have at times interrogated the justice system. But generally their lack of interrogation is I think for the same reason their science is so wonky. They don’t know better. They just boil it down to the simplest terms. Muggings and villain threats abound. Hero prevents those. They don’t know enough to tackle something much deeper than that. This ties into the fundamentally flawed aspect of most critiques wherein they are looking to superheroes as intellectual pieces of academic and critical study when...that’s not what they are...at all…
One of the above douchebags once said:
An African American Superman, with kinky, close-cropped black hair, thick, half-reddened lips, high cheekbones, and wide nostrils all bathed in dark Lindt chocolate, resists White supremacist logic, negates Black inferiority mythology, and threatens the established order. Superman’s disconcerting physicality, tempered by his omnipresent cheerfulness calmed and invited White comic readers to imagine themselves as gaudy Caucasian perfection, the Anglo-Saxon ideal. Static in panel, without speech bubbles or thought balloons, Superman Black warps the absurdly developed skeletal striated muscle and eternal hopefulness fans rejoice into a clear and present danger to the American experiment, an unholy figure derived from Tea Party paranoia, Barack Obama’s calculation and Terry Crews’ musculature. Public Enemy’s prescience abounds – were Superman Black introduced on the game-changing Action Comics’ cover, White America would have yet another reason to fear a Black planet.
This entirely depends upon who is doing the perceiving. To someone of a different mindset a Black Superman could be just that. The same thing Superman is except he happens to have black skin.
Also, the author needs to take a major chill pill, Jesus Christ.
Here is another quote from one of them:
Only in White male power fantasies can people blessed with skin privilege and bodies carved from living marble wield heat vision or super speed or unbreakable claws against indigent criminals from broken homes who lack high school educations.
This is again grossly incorrect because the idea of individuals having superhuman abilities and using them to fight criminals predates American society, and if one accepts figures like the Hydra to be stand-ins for threats to human life then the superhumans have been fighting what the criminals represent for eons before the advent of American society. The criminals they use their abilities against are rarely stated to lack education or come from broken homes, but yes okay let’s say that they are that.
Having super humans go up against them and defeat them isn’t a white male power fantasy because their abilities are used to subdue and NOT kill. Injure perhaps but in real life sometimes force is sadly necessary and if someone is robbing a bank or holding a gun to someone in an alley it is justified no matter what skin colour anyone involved in is, or what society you find yourself in, for the perpetrator to be stopped in order to safeguard life. Just because the perp resorted to what they did due to social ills beyond their control, that doesn’t justify their actions at that moment. Stealing someone’s money or trying to murder them is never ever going to be acceptable no matter if we live in a white society or not.
Only in White male power fantasies would women display abundant porcelain cleavage or don starry microskirts to fight crime.
Yeah um, preeeeeeetty sure that actually that’s more of a male SEXUAL fantasy and less than a WHITE male POWER fantasy. That was never the topic of conversation.
Shuttle diplomacy or natural resource husbandry rarely bring metal-faced technological sorcerers to heel in superhero comics; superheroes often save planet Earth through fantastic violence judiciously applied.
Yeah, that’s part of the narrative FANTASY element of the genre that is intended to be escapist. Condemning it for being otherwise is asinine.
More than this, guess what, there are people whom Dr. Doom is a metaphorical stand-in for. And an awful lot of them legitimately can’t be negotiated with. I am of the belief that in the REAL world we should negotiate and use force when there is no other choice and even then only use what is necessary. But the Dr. Dooms and Lex Luthors of the comic book world represent grander themes of evil and social ills, whilst at the same time existing to challenge the heroes physically and mentally. They represent the unmovable types of evil that legitimately can only be dealt with via physical means.
This was the type of circular logic I talked about before. It is looking at the villains as stand ins for EVERY type of situation and therefore the super hero’s use of violence as ‘problematic’, when in reality the superheroes’ use of violence isn’t problematic because it is justified by the extreme circumstances they find themselves in.
Because those situations don’t exist in real life...like in World War II...which was literally about people using force in the face of failed negotiation to halt the advance of fascism…
I submit that the superheroic reflex to subdue evil with violence directly descends from Thucydides and Alexander, from Richard the Lionheart and Dwight Eisenhower.
Yeah...except it isn’t. Again...it came from the same place as Hercules and Sun Wukong, and those came from the natural human biological imperatives to survive.
Superheroic morality requires Western Civilization’s literary canon and political history to justify its callous disregard toward collateral damage. To be clear, superheroes routinely consider innocent noncombatants’ lives (if not their property) when they confront cosmic despots or sociopathic steroid abusers, but comics document the never-ending battle in colorful tomes largely sold after Nagasaki and My Lai, after the time when total ignorance of American military supremacy was vogue. When Wally West as the Flash pulls a hysterical single mother out of her overturned silver 2001 Honda Civic and carries her to safety from Apokoliptian cannons at breakneck speed, comic fans favorably regard his heroism; any dialogue from the frazzled thirty-something file clerk will remind readers how grateful she is to escape otherworldly horror with her life. Superhero comics don’t care about the destruction of this woman’s sole transport; when the gas tank explodes behind the Flash’s blurred strobe, this woman loses her credit cards, her driver’s license, her insurance documents, her six-year-old daughter’s vanilla birthday cake with its beloved artificially flavored strawberry icing. The comics don’t recognize the heroism of this brave woman’s seven-month struggle to rebuild her finances and maintain her identity following Darkseid’s incursion; all we know is for that poor woman, the Flash saved the day. He’s a superhero. Isn’t she grateful?”
Collateral damage and the disregard for it IS regarded. Hence the existence of Damage Control. Furthermore, that is AGAIN part of the escapism and fantasy element of it. THAT is the suspension of disbelief element of superheroes and taking it THAT realistically and criticising it for it is frankly just mean spirited and simply looking for an excuse to hate it.
Furthermore the reason the rescued woman isn’t focussed upon is because it’s not HER story. If you write a story about a protagonist THEY are your focus. Everything is for their benefit. That’s true of older non-white folktales as well.
And yeah readers are supposed to regard the Flash as heroic and the woman grateful because her kid’s birthday cake isn’t realistically as important as her life!!!!!!
This is criticising superhero fiction for being unrealistic even when it is being actively so The woman WOULD probably be grateful that she’s not fucking dead!
I wouldn’t mind seeing the survivors of something like this try to rebuild their lives. And superhero fiction has focussed upon that from time to time, but again...that’s not the point of the story. Criticising the genre fro this is like criticising Harry Potter for having the audacity to focus more upon Harry’s trauma in the wake of Cedric Diggory’s death than his parents’. Harry is the star. He gets the focus.
Superman is a White boy. Superheroes are White people. Superhero morality exacts the Melian Dialogue’s ‘might makes right’ overwhelming force realpolitik with every onomatopoetic Biff! Bam! Pow! gut punch and karate chop combo.
See what I’ve said before about how superheroes are not fascists and how force is often necessary
There exists no genetic propensity for group violence in the human genome. None.”
Er....yeah...there kinda is...that’s part of why wars happen.
racially-informed vigilantism.
This phrase in one of the articles itself sums up it’s own contradictions. Racially informed vigilantism is just one type of vigilantism, a type the superhero doesn’t subscribe to. A superhero would sooner join the likes of the Joker than the KKK style vigilantes and would be all too happy to apprehend them.
One of the articles seems to be conflating basically ALL criminals super heroes fight with people who’re labelled criminals due to racial profiling. Yes superheroes operate to an extent like police officers but you can’t truly complete the analogy whatsoever.
Few of them have legal sanction, which is partially why so many refrain from actually killing anyone as officer’s are allowed to do under certain circumstances. More than this when they take down criminals their methods are entirely different from regular cops. Apart from very loud and overt super villains who may or may not be on a rampage, most of the time when they tackle regular criminals it’s due to them either being informed of a crime that is going to happen (like a hijacking or something) or they literally see something happening whilst on patrol. They don’t profile people beyond what their super sensory abilities or logical observations tell them. Which is to say if someone is following someone else a little too closely then maybe, just maybe they are planning something. If their Spider-Sense or super hearing or something alerts them to something they will act.
Taking that, ignoring it, and then supplanting the superhero for a regular cop who would racially profile people and/or supplanting the criminals they tackle for racial minorities because those are the people who (stereotypically in the real world) would be targeted as criminals is very inappropriate. Not least of all since superhero comics obviously don’t present a wholesale realistic depiction of the real world so what they present isn’t entirely interchangeable with that. And what is more, erasure of minorities was so prevalent that overwhelming majority of all the criminals they ever encountered were themselves white, so again exchanging those for racial minorities who’re profiled as criminals is highly questionable.
It’s all just such a MASSIVE reach!
But I think the panels also work to point out that Miles himself “does not belong” in the superhero tradition. He, like most black and brown superhero characters in mainstream comics, is an outlier. In other words, people like Miles or Trayvon are unfortunately more likely to be victim of a “heroic” vigilante than to be one.
This is conflating the superhero vigilante with the majority of real world vigilantes who are overly violent (and frequently hard conservative) individuals who do take overly simplistic views of the law and use those to profile people. And it’s doing so whilst taking superheroes too literally, bringing their own personal interpretations to the mix and then overlaying them onto the superhero concept before finally accepting it as fact.
Police officers use violence against racially profiled people who exhibit unrest due to a societal system stacked against them. Well shit, Batman punches the Joker. It must be the same thing obviously!!!!!
Look. Without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as people of color, nothing about fanboy and fangirl culture makes sense. What I mean by that is, if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t make sense; if it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense; if it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense; if it wasn’t for the extermination of so many indigenous nations, most of what we call “first contact” stories don’t make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understand that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible. We are… in the Green Lantern Corps? We are the Oath. We are all of those things. Erased, and yet without us? We’re essential. This is an incredibly important project, because it puts front and center, not only a community that has long consumed and given power to these practices and consumer categories, but it’s a community without whose suffering and struggles, none of [these narratives] would make sense.
I agree with a lot of this but there are some problems with it.
a) X-Men makes sense also because they are a stand in for almost ALL marginalised groups. Racial minorities, disabled people, queer people etc.
b) Actually Star Wars makes complete sense with or without colonialism or imperialism, at least the kind which directly relates to the issues of racism. Imperialism, conquest, these are things which are much older than American society, dating back to even before Ancient Rome. It’s about freedom fundamentally and freedom is a desire shared by ALL human beings innately because at the end of the day we are animals who wish to be free and not caged. Being caged metaphorically within a tyranny is thus something we abhor
c) The Star Wars universe doesn’t begin and end with the story of imperialism. It’s about how Democracy can be turned into an dictatorship and how that has to be prevented, or re-addressed once it happens
d
When white comics readers claim that they did not need white characters to relate to and enjoy comics (as a way to argue against positive race-bending), that point to their love of Luke Cage or Spawn as evidence of their ability to enjoy characters across race, what they are failing to note is how black, Latin@, etc… identities in the superhero genre are framed by a system of white supremacy.
Again I don’t understand this one. I as a white reader can enjoy Luke Cage rescuing someone from a burning building because doing that is part of white supremacy????
It presumes a white power fantasy is inherently different to a black one. But the power fantasy element of the superhero relates to them having powers and using them to help others and defeat villains. A power fantasy by another race would still have that because it is inherent to the human power fantasy. Non-white power fantasies would logically have all that and more!
Much like Noah Berlatsky explains in his book Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948, part of what made Marston’s original Wonder Woman stories so wonderful, was his expectation that girls and boys would identify with the heroine, to value and idealize her compassionate strength and victory through submission, rather than through cyclical and ultimately futile fisticuffs of male dominion.
Many female readers enjoy the action scenes. Action scenes are good because it enables us to have a healthy outlet for aggression without taking it out into the real world. It is also NOT an inherently male dominion thing. Again this is THEIR projection. Fighting and violence is innate to human beings because we are animals biologically programmed towards it for the sake of survival. That goes for males and females. Furthermore far from fisticuffs just being about male ‘dominion’ the Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman comics were a reflection of impending war. A war that sadly required violence to be solved. That’s what the superhero typifies. Wish fulfilment action in situations where violence was (usually) a necessity. Diplomacy is good and should be our first resort. In life though sometimes things do come down to necessary violence.
There are many ways to craft a racial minority superhero, but if we consider racial authenticity as a foremost concern, today’s Hollywood is simply not prepared for that intellectual labor. The real diversity conundrum isn’t how to include the minority metahuman in the existing comic framework; that’s an art project, a casting decision solved by calling Michael B. Jordan’s agent. The real question is how to write that superhero in a way that moves the medium forward, past the Reaganomics antiheroes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller and past the hyper-emotive Silver Age redux of Geoff Johns and Brian Michael Bendis. Respectable, authentic diversity in superhero comics should redefine the nature of the meta-protagonist to his powers and his audience, with exhaustive attention to cultural detail. I’m not convinced that a Black superhero would wear tights. I strongly doubt that a Black superhero would solve conflicts with his fists. The Black superhero knows that his community watches him religiously, and that any false move will have public repercussions he cannot expect or control. If anything, the Black superhero template plays out on our nation’s cable news channels at all hours. President Barack Obama, with all his clipped vocal inflections and measured language and natural equivocation and faulty dealmaking and perfect family and limitless patience is the closest public figure to a Black superhero America has yet experienced, an international celebrity unthinkable before his ascent. Watching President Obama today, one feels expectation crush into his bones like a gravity well. No matter the political stimuli, Republicans oppose him. The concept of the Obama Presidency struck American conservatives like a Bernard Hopkins’ kidney punch, and in return, President Obama absorbs the vitriol of our coarse public debates more than any President to date (and progressives never tired of calling his predecessor a National Socialist). The agony and the ecstasy of Grant Park has given way for many Americans to the sobering fact that American authority, her global military supremacy and international economic primacy, is controlled and represented by a Black man. Disliked, hated, or worse, the Establishment is Black. I need the Black superhero in print and/or on-screen to reflect that paradigm shift. Superheroes in the popular imagination are Establishment figures; if the Black superhero I’m presented can’t interrogate what it means when the Establishment is Black, of what utility is her story?
A minority hero wouldn’t wear tights or punch people...why?
What do tights have to do with anything? As for solving problems with his fists this is conflating the threats superheroes face with ANY threat, when they are almost always situations which legitimately do require necessary physical force to resolve. If the black superhero patrols an area and sees someone about to stab someone else, yeah he should punch the stabber to save the innocent person if there is no time for anything else.
This is basically asking for the core foundation of superheroes (which transcends racial constructs and is innate to human wish fulfilment and mythic tradition) to be scrapped in favour of something else entirely. Barrack Obama isn’t a superhero. He is many, many things but what Mr. Lamb here is asking isn’t so much for a different template but for something just wholesale different. He doesn’t actually WANT a superhero story in the first place!
Super heroes aren’t establishment figures. Superheroes don’t uphold the law regardless. They uphold the law in so far as a greater need to safeguard innocent lives. Conflating them as inherently establishment figures ignores their origins and over literalises what they do.
At the same time the utility of their story is first and foremost as a story: to entertain and inspire.
It is inherently worthwhile for a little black kid to sit down and open up a comic book where someone who looks like them is being a good person, is helping people, is defending the weak. I agree that minority heroes shouldn’t just be white heroes who happen to have different skin colours. I think they need to reflect the realities of what it means to be black or Asian or Pakistani in white society is necessary and a superhero should do that and should have that inform how they interact with their powers. It doesn’t mean the whole genre needs to abandon what it fundamentally is or that those minority heroes should not do the things a superhero fundamentally do.
Ultimately, yeah these characters were created within a white context, but my point is fundamentally the same thing was created in non-white contexts as well throughout history.
Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 1
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#Osvaldo Oyola#Noah Berlatsky#Marvel#DC#DC Comics#Marvel Comics#Super Heroes#Superheroes#Wonder Woman#Robin Hood
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The flaw in this article is that it isn’t looking at the superhero genre symbolically as most people do.
Yes a black superhero would perceive things differently, that’s one of the things I actually think Miles Morales under utilizes in his stories.
But superheroes on their deepest levels are humanist power fantasies. Not strictly law and order characters.
They fight clear cut explicit examples of crime that would 100% harm innocent people. This is very different to racist police practices. Their brand of justice is ‘Oh I’ve seen a crime, I will stop it’ or ‘Oh I KNOW this bad guy is going to commit a crime and you the reader do as well because it’s been made crystal clear Doctor Murderevil is evil so I will stop it’.
Superheroes do not engage in racial profiling or stop and searches. To extrapolate them all the way to being the same as cops is frankly as much a mistake as wanting the pseudo science behind how Superman flies to tally with real world science. There has to be a suspension of disbelief.
I’ve read ‘Superman is a White Boy’ (linked in the above article) before and found it incredibly blindsided and unconvincing.
It again doesn’t take into account how other cultures have superheroes who engage in the same thing, or the fact that superheroes have immense appeal across race and gender and political beliefs. So obviously people just like superheroes fighting crime regardless and probably not because all them wholesale buy into the social politics that the articles are claiming the genre allegedly projects. It also only works as an argument if you simply do not question the notion of superheroes as a white power fantasy and already accept it, which I do not .
Like I said superheroes fight crime because the readers want to see the hero in a heroic light using their super powers and crime is a perennial source of conflict in the real world that everyone knows about therefore it’s easier and more engaging to pit the hero against crime than anything else.
Even in Priest’s run Black Panther when he leaves NYC, he is still hitting people who are clearly coded as evil and would by most accounts be regarded as criminals.
I also think that a problem with the above article and this one is that in equating white heroes fighting crime to a white power fantasy directed against poc it erases the fact that the majority of criminals that the heroes fight are themselves white . I’m not just talking about the super villains I’m talking about the nameless plain clothed criminals. Even in the 1990s most superheroes whenever there was a quick scene of them fighting regular crime were hitting white people.
And frankly I just...do not get the equivalency here. Superheroes fighting crime = racist? WTF?*
Similarly the above article grossly over extrapolates at points.
E.g. Spider-Man having insect like powers or Ben Grimm being a rock monster is a marker of immigrant/racial differences felt by it’s creators. That is an awful lot of just presumed projecting onto what was going on in the minds of 3 dead men (1 of which famously had a poor memory) from nearly 60 years ago. It doesn’t even hold up in Spider-Man’s case as he was an outsider even before he got his powers and acquired a friendship group later under the pen of one of his creators. At the time he was even working with someone of Italian decent. Italians also faced racial discrimination for a lot of American history.
In fact, therein lies the problems with so many of the ideas I’ve addressed in posts like this.
They’ve made presumptions of the genre or already decided upon foundational truths about it. And then they’ve perceived everything through those lenses.
But I’m not really surprised by that.
The article was written by Noah Berlatsky who’s work I’ve encountered before and found to be frankly utterly ridiculous.
This was the same person who argued the Hulk was metaphorical for angry black people and that Spider-Man’s isolation was all undeniably present because he was an allegory for othered immigrants...as opposed to you know maybe just allegorical to how a lot of teens (like all the ones who related to him who could’ve all have been othered due to racism) felt.
And for the record J. Lamb (cited in the article) was also the guy who argued against a Wonder Woman movie, that it wouldn’t work and that in fact no one even needed it.
Osvaldo Oyola (also mentioned) meanwhile was the guy who I kid you not wrote an entire article about how Spider-Man was himself at fault for what happened to him in Superior Spider-Man because among his various misdeeds he once ripped off the fake extra arms of Doc Ock when he was attempting mass genocide. He also IIRC literally stated the Spider Sense was an allegory for racial profiling which...I don’t even know what to say to that because it’s so ridiculous.
All three of them are part of a clique that engages in such interpretations of superhero comics and write from a Liberal perspective (which is fine, I’m a goddam Liberal!) but also from a perspective of clearly actively disliking the genre in the first place (which obviously colours their perceptions of it). Bertlasky has literally written a book taking apart different heroes one by one called ‘Why your favourite super hero sucks’.
Their arguments are contingent upon accepting the idea that superhero comics definitely are by their absolute inherent nature immutably white supremacist and assimilation power fantasies. Remove that foundational belief and their arguments fall apart.
One of them (I forget which) genuinely argued once that superheroes are the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan themselves. Masked Caucasian vigilantes. A disgusting and ridiculous statement when put into proper historical context.
Considering the superhero genre began when Siegel ad Shuster created Superman the idea that on any level they were engaging with the KKK ideology becomes a gross statement to make. Siegel and Shuster were Jewish and thus themselves targets of the Klan (who IIRC actually hated Jewish people MORE than black people) and more poignantly there has been historical precedent for stories of vigilantes dating back to Robin Hood at the very least.
So forgive me but I take a salt shaker with me whenever I see anything written by any of them regarding the genre.
*In regards to the genre supporting law and order, if most of the scenarios superheroes encountered occurred in the real world would there honestly be much ethical debate as to whether or not the villains were bad and should be stopped?
Someone who’s been framed for murder should obviously be freed and the person who framed them held accountable. Someone who beats his wife should obviously be stopped from doing that. A corrupt politician should obviously be ousted from office. All those things were in Action Comics #1.
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If It WAUGHs Like a Duck #5: The Bill’s in the Mail | The Middle Spaces
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