Diversity, or Lack Thereof

Chinese-American Jubilee

When you have a conversation about comics and action figures through a feminist lens, it also brings up topics like diversity and inclusion. If you happen to be a white male, maybe the lack of diversity in this medium hasn't really occurred to you, but if you're (for instance) a black female, you're reminded fairly often that there aren't many heroes or heroines who look like you. Quick! how many black superheroines can you name without looking them up? How many black characters, period? Or Hispanic? Or Asian? Or gay? Or disabled?

Disabled Lt. Sparks

It's a common piece of advice to writers, "write what you know," and there's not a ton of diversity in the offices of the Big Two. Mostly straight white males are writing about mostly white, majority male, predominantly straight characters. Things are changing, slowly. Gail Simone on Batgirl had Alysia Leoh confiding to Barbara that she's transgender (and bisexual) and shone a spotlight on LGBT characters. We've seen a few gay marriages in comics recently, too, with Marvel's Northstar and (surprisingly for some) in the Archie Comics town of Riverdale, to the horror of One Million [narrow-minded] Moms.

Mentally ill Aurora and her gay twin brother Northstar

Grace Gipson (one of the Black Girl Nerds) was interviewed by the Huffington Post about her research on black heroines. "I chose this research because I wanted to provide a voice from a black woman's perspective regarding comics, especially the black female characters." When She-Ra was popular, entrepreneur Yla Eason founded Olmec Toys because of her son. In 1985, there weren't action figures he could relate to as an African American boy, so she set out to make some. For all the issues involved later, she gave non-white children heroes they could aspire to be. The Bronze Bombers (AA G.I. Joes), Butterfly Woman (AA She-Ra) and Sun-Man (AA He-Man) were important, and showed that there was demand for these toys.

African American Storm

But why is all this diversity important? The world is both very big and very small. It got a lot smaller when the Internet made it possible for people all across the globe to share their passions. The days of living in a monochromatic world are gone, and even if you are a straight white dude, you have to acknowledge that there are people who are not like you, who have just as much to offer to the conversation. It's important because our children learn from us, and model our behavior -- bigoted behavior is learned. Violence against persons not like you is learned. You don't get to live in that tiny, isolated world anymore -- those days are over. And frankly, I don't get why you'd want to.

Hispanic La Lunatica

It's up to us as consumers to demand that our superheroes be as diverse a population as the world we live in. Support the writers and artists who bring us characters who are well-written and interesting, not just tokens of any given minority. Make your voice heard. They're creating this stuff for us to buy, after all.

Celebrate the similarities with your fellow human beings, and appreciate the things that make us different, too.



Relevant Links

World of Black Heroes
Black Girl Nerds
Black Action Figure
The Museum of Black Superheroes 

Prism Comics (nonprofit promoting LBGT comics and creators)

Lonely Gods: Social Minorities in American Superhero Comic Books

Ethan Lewis at Den of Geek has a series of "top 10" lists:
1/7: Characters with Disabilities
2/7: PoC/Hispanics in Comics
3/7: Non-Christians in Comics
4/7: LBGTQ Comic Characters
5/7: Women in Comics
6/7: Minorities in Comics: The Creators
7/7: Activism and Community

Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study, a book by Michael Sheyahshe

International Catalogue of Superheroes (not strictly non-white characters, but worth looking at)

Yes, Actually, My Gods DO Wear Spandex

Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes
©2007 by Christopher Knowles
Illustrated by Joseph Michael Linser
Published by Weiser Books (I think it's worth pointing out that Weiser Books is an established New Age/Occult book publisher, not your typical publisher for books about superheroes.)

When I saw this at Half Price Books, I was pretty excited. I was taking the Gender Through Comic Books MOOC and this seemed like just another way of looking at comics. The problem is, this book just doesn't hit the mark.

This is my full Amazon review (2 stars):
I wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, it reads like it was excerpted from Wikipedia articles, and I never felt the author had any real expertise or serious knowledge of the subject. The work is superficial at best, and in some cases wrong-headed. (For example, he lists Batman as being a Golem archetype. I have no idea where he's getting that crazed idea, even after reading it. The Thing, the Hulk maybe, but BATMAN?? No.) The brief section on female superheroes focuses a great deal on two things: 1) Marston (who created Wonder Woman) was into bondage and a polygamist, and 2) girls don't really read comics. Even though he quotes from The Great Women Superheroes (Trina Robbins -- a must-read), I'm not sure HE read it with any real comprehension.

The connection to the mystic/religious is spare. He spends so much time discussing Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley (and others) as well as various secret societies like the OTO, but never draws strong relationships from those mystic orders to the majority of the heroes he mentions. Superman is a Messiah figure. Hawkman comes from Egyptian mythology. But these assertions are not explored, examples are not given. I've had more in-depth conversations about these same characters in message boards.

Save your money and strike up a conversation with the folks at your local comic book shop.

It took me months to finish this book; it was just not at all engaging. Seriously, the "Amazons" chapter is a measly ten pages, and two of those are full-page illustrations. He wants to show our gods wearing spandex? He barely touches on Wonder Woman's close ties to the Greek pantheon before going back to bondage references. This paragraph beautifully illustrates why I don't like this book:

Whatever Wonder Woman's feminist virtues, the fact remains that she is a scantily-clad beauty taking part in stories engineered to appeal to bondage fetishists. To read Marston and Peter's Wonder Woman adventures is to confront stories that are absolutely drenched in transgressive sexuality and rendered in a style that betrays a distinctly decadent influence. And Wonder Woman's favorite exclamation is "Suffering Sappho," a reference to the poet laureate* of Lesbos. (p. 163)

He completely ignores so much of her history and creation to focus on Marston's personal life. And if he has so much bias and misinformation in discussing Wonder Woman, where else has Knowles glazed over history with his own beliefs? When I told my husband that he'd labeled Batman a Golem, he told me that he could see where Knowles came to that conclusion but that was really stretching it. Perhaps he's worked in the comics industry for 20 years, but he's no scholar, and his research and analysis are unimpressive.

The only thing I'll give Knowles a pass on is for not mentioning that Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent† was debunked by Carol Tilley at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He gets a break only because Tilley hadn't yet published her paper, "Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics" (Information & Culture, Nov/Dec 2012, vol. 47, no. 4).


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* Sappho was never a poet laureate of anywhere, as far as I know. Contemporary poets of her time were known to revile her.

† Seduction of the Innocent was the book that claimed comics were destroying youths, published in 1954, and was also responsible for the creation of the Comics Code Authority.