Kerry James Marshall pushed out of his chair and bounded to the back of his Bronzeville studio. He giggled quietly, almost secretly, moving with the efficient certainty of someone who had been asked to show off a childhood obsession and knew exactly where Exhibit A was stored. Which, in a sense, he did: I had asked, casually, if he was a big comic book fan. I knew that he was, that he had spent part of the past 17 years researching and developing a superhero comic book — and a related graphic novel and animated movie. What I didn’t know is how big a fan. So Marshall, one of the hottest American artists of the moment, a 60-year-old South Side resident with an unwavering geniality, admired by the first lady, his work collected at ever-skyrocketing prices, with a hit career retrospective that recently left the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Met Breuer in New York City, just had to chuckle.
“Am I a big fan?” he asked.
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He climbed a ladder in front of a tall bookshelf and began handing down zipped binders, binder after binder, each one heavy, until he had pulled a half dozen, enough to prove a point. He left many similar binders behind. He sank into a chair and unzipped the first and flipped through its pages: Each page, a plastic sleeve, held a comic book featuring a black character or cast. As he flipped he noted the heaviness of the drawn lines in some books, and the amateur-hour cheese in others. He noted which were developed by Marvel or DC, and which were independently made. His collection of comic books with black characters is immense, thorough, a history lesson; indeed, with each book, Marshall had prepared a page of background about its history. He read aloud the titles, “‘Black Goliath,'” “‘Black Lightning,'” “‘Black Panther,'” saying each with irony, or admiration, or a wince. “Uh … ‘Chocolate Thunder,'” he groaned, looking at a superhero dressed as ’70s rhinestoney as Earth, Wind & Fire. Then added: “At least this guy got into the game.”
Marshall’s own paintings are steeped in history and generally address the absence of black faces in visual arts. He thinks a lot about parity, in high and low culture, and has spent a lifetime considering how, and what, a black superhero should be. He stopped on a copy of “Luke Cage,” the first black superhero comic, an issue No. 1, from 1972, in near-mint condition. The hero wore a yellow shirt unbuttoned to his waist, a silver tiara, a belt of heavy chains. The character, conceived by white writers who since admitted they didn’t know too much about black culture, comes off like a caricature of black masculinity. I asked Marshall if he looked forward to the new Luke Cage Netflix series.
“That’s complicated,” he said.
A growing universe
When there are wrongs to be righted, as usual, we still call on Batman, Spider-Man, Thor, Green Arrow. But the superhero universe, a web of soap-opera complications and proliferating menace, is starting to look a lot like the rest of the universe: In recent years we have also been offered a Chinese Superman, a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a half-Latina Hawkgirl, gay X-Men. No superdemographic has exploded, though, quite as exponentially as African-American superheroes (and villains). “Captain America: Civil War,” the second-highest-grossing film of the year so far, has three black heroes; “Suicide Squad,” another hit, had several; next year’s “Justice League” film will co-star an African-American Cyborg on the squad.
As The Washington Post put it, however inelegantly, “black capes matter.”
Black Panther, the first black superhero, protector of the mythical African nation Wakanda, established as a supporting player in 1966, has been a breakout star since spring. (Helps that his latest comic is being written by MacArthur genius author Ta-Nehisi Coates.) A Black Panther movie is coming in 2018, and a spinoff comic, about the women of Wakanda, is due next month, from acclaimed essayist Roxane Gay. Miles Morales, one of Marvel’s most popular iterations of Spider-Man, is biracial. And the latest Captain America, Sam Wilson, former sidekick Falcon, is black. A flight attendant recently told him: “You’re sure as heck not my Captain America.”
Last summer, David Walker, an African-American who had previously written a “Shaft” comic (and is working on another version of Luke Cage), debuted “Nighthawk,” staring a black Batman-ish hero taking on trigger-happy Chicago cops and gentrification-friendly aldermen. Walker, who lives in Oregon, said: “I wanted it to touch on violence, police brutality, race. As much as I love Chicago, I find it scary. Marvel is owned by Disney, and so I thought we could only go so far. But my editor, if anything, wanted to push further.”
Meanwhile, on TV, one of the fall’s most binge-worthy new series is the Netflix adaptation of “Luke Cage.” Cheo Hodari Coker, executive producer, retooled Cage subtly, nodding to his roots (the character was created by Marvel to cash in on the blaxploitation film craze) while giving Cage a more noirish, Walter Mosley-like gravitas, albeit with a bulletproof chest. He said: “I knew a show like this would play to a lot of demographics, sure, but I also knew it was an opportunity for a cultural moment, to talk about gentrification in Harlem, to hit on issues in black communities — and to be told in such a way no one felt turned away. Even five years ago I doubt we could have done a superhero story that way. This is an unadulterated black story, deep into black culture.
“But understand,” he added, “being black doesn’t give you a license to do ‘Luke Cage.'”
If anything, the proliferation of superheroes of color has introduced to the superhero universe a raft of familiar cultural questions, about tokenism, legacy, resonance — about who gets to tell someone’s story. “Nighthawk,” for instance, was canceled after a few issues. Walker said readers were asking for a revenge fantasy, but the character was too obscure. Though comic book companies are often quick to pair black heroes with black writers, a black writer with a black hero is no promise of success. Adilifu Nama, who teaches African-American studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, sees this as a breakout moment for black superheroes, a recognition from publishers that the world is a multicultural place. “But the introduction of a black superhero is an opening for a confusing laundry list of deficiencies: ‘Why does Luke Cage have to fight in Harlem? How about saving the world?’ Or ‘Why is he saving the world? Couldn’t he save Chicago?’ Blackness in America is also so rooted in issues of authenticity and notions of oppression it’s hard for people to suspend disbelief when it comes to black characters in extraordinary situations. Luke Cage’s skin is like steel. Yet black men are being shot and dying, every day. Luke Cage is a fiction, so there’s dissonance there.”
Devoted collector
Five minutes after Marshall began flipping through his binders of superheroes, he was still flipping. “Black Lightning,” he noted, is getting a TV series soon; this comic is by Spike Lee’s brother; that one is essentially a “black ‘Archie'”; this one is from a Chicago artist.
I asked how he got interested.
He said that although he has lived in Chicago since 1988, he grew up in the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles, obsessed with Marvel comics. “One time I hid out in the bathroom when everyone else went to class, and I climbed the school fence and walked to a used magazine shop that sold comics. I was obsessed, in possessing things, in collecting certain titles, ‘Daredevil’ and ‘Thor,’ but I had no sense of distance. So I left school at 1 p.m. and reached the store at 4:30 p.m., and got home at 9 p.m. that night. Before going in the house, I hid my comics in the bushes, so my mother wouldn’t know where I had been. I was obsessed with art, but that these heroes were all white — never crossed our minds. You accept that when you are born into it. And then Black Panther appeared in ‘Fantastic Four,’ issue No. 52, and he changed everything.”
But like many comic book fans, Marshall lost interest in his teens, then came back to comics as an adult, with new appreciation for the art, and a sizable degree of nostalgia attached. He said he began collecting voraciously, and later, when his art practice took off, began buying original comic art. (He owns a particularly large collection of original art from “Friday Foster,” the first comic starring a black woman.) He studied the evolution of black supermen, and came to a few conclusions: The majority of black characters are stand-ins for white characters that exist. Or sidekicks. The scope of their narratives is small. They were asked “to fix the black psyche” before engaging the world. “Unlike a Spider-Man, you didn’t have black teens burdened by power they might acquire.” And so to give black superheroes some parity, he began to think of solutions.
Exploitative or inclusive?
The history for the black superhero is thin. Dell Comics debuted black sharpshooter Lobo in 1965, but that was a Western; nine months later, at the peak of the civil rights movement, Marvel unveiled Black Panther, the first true black superhero, a creation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (who initially called the character “Coal Tiger”). Then came Falcon, Captain America’s sidekick; in 1971, DC (historically lagging on diversity in its pages) had its first black superhero, a new Green Lantern named John Stewart; Luke Cage arrived next; followed by Storm of the X-Men, the first black female hero (played by Halle Berry in the movies). Said Walker, who is 47: “I had a love-hate thing with these characters. They would lack dimension and humanity. Everyone else on the Justice League or Avengers got their own back story. These guys were the ‘angry’ characters.”
Steve Englehart, who wrote many of the original “Luke Cage” comics, said the late black artist Billy Graham was hired for the comic initially because he was black, that though the comic was developed with sincere politically conscious intent, “how much (the writers) knew about the black experience was debatable.” For research, they would leave Marvel’s New York offices and study black men in then-seedy Times Square.
In early ’90s, to right these wrongs, a small group of black writers and artists started Milestone Comics to develop black superheroes, some of which, such as Static Shock, remain cult comic figures. But many never caught on and when Milestone stopped publishing in 1997, DC acquired the rights. A feeling developed, particularly in the burgeoning independent black comics community, that DC and Marvel wanted to co-opt black characters, define them, without much sensitivity to how black audiences felt. Even as black superheroes become more frequent, their milieu remained narrow, at times taking place in parallel universes. Black Panther (and later Vixen, a black DC heroine) stuck around Africa; Cage stayed in Harlem. And so, when a black superhero didn’t take off, “limited appeal” would get the blame. “It became a double standard,” said Turtel Onli, a Chicago artist who started drawing independent black comics in the ’70s. “Batman works in Gotham, that’s mainstream. A black character does it, that’s ghettofying?”
Indeed, a core argument — whether major publishers were being opportunistic and insensitive about black characters or progressive and pragmatic — never went away.
Brian Michael Bendis, one of the superstars of contemporary superhero comics, is the writer behind Miles Morales, aka the biracial Spider-Man. Next month he debuts a black Iron Man, named Ironheart, a woman from Chicago, a victim of gang violence, endorsed by the original Iron Man. Bendis, a self-described white Jewish guy from Cleveland with a multiracial family, said he’s heard fans call these attempts at diversity by Marvel a gimmick, but that the questions raised by characters of color come up every day at Marvel. “The success of Miles proved some audiences have been wildly underrepresented, though as an African-American artist friend leaned on me about, diversity in this world can be a trap that stops at skin color. I think we’re seeing now that the way to do these books thoughtfully is to recognize diversity of experience matters, too. That gets lost in the conversation over what the skin color is sometimes. And it’s just a start.”
Artists’ legacy
One solution, Marshall decided, was simple, but not easy: black artists should create original characters, fresh superheroes, removed from the Marvel and DC universes. Talking to African-American comic book artists, you often hear a common theme: Ashley A. Woods, the Chatham native and on-the-rise artist-writer behind indie favorite “Niobe: She is Life,” told me she decided early on to take full ownership of her characters, otherwise “you’re stuck being asked to do black versions of what exists.” Jiba Molei Anderson, a longtime Chicago comic artist whose work is often based in African mythologies, said: “I’m creating my own legacy — I don’t need to create a black Batman, I need to create my brand.”
Since 1999, Marshall has been firmly in this camp, developing a comic/art project named “Rythm Mastr,” pieces of which are part of his retrospective. He has studied how comics are reproduced, drawn, inked. He describes the story as epic, set at the nexus of 35th and State streets, joining gang violence, the Illinois Institute of Technology, African sculpture, the decline of the Chicago housing projects. “It’s about the conflict between tradition and modernity,” Marshall said. Then, with irony, a wry acknowledgment that any modern superhero he creates has to soar beside a sky full of superheroes that have become part of American pop tradition, he added: “And all it has to do is last 40 years.”
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