I imagine today that today that many of you do not have the dubious distinction of being a scholar of comics and its fandom. I also imagine that many of you have never heard of the Green Lantern title featuring the Cold War adventurer turned space cop with a magic ring, Hal Jordan or its spin off title Green Lantern: Mosaic, which starred Jordan's African American counterpart, John Stewart. And while I was originally tempted to give you a protracted history of Green Lantern franchise those of you who have seen Kill Bill will appreciate the vision I have of Uma Therman screaming, "How long is this going to last" as David Carradien's character when he proceeds to allegorically explain their relationship through the history of Superman.
However, we are not here to talk about my potential failure to hold an audience's attention. We are here to talk about failures and hopefully unique failures at that. It is for this reason I mention Green Lantern: Mosaic, one of the few comic books to have ever featured an African American as its protagonist. Traditionally, books featuring African American characters have failed artistically - because they have not accurately represented blacks and black culture - and economically - because they have failed to sell enough copies to sustain their prolonged publication. Mosaic, while its failures and successes touch on these issues, managed to fail in a way that runs contrary to the superhero genre: ethically.
Like many popular American genres, the representation of blacks in comics has been vexed. As early comic critic and proponent for censorship, Frederic Wertham noted, depictions of blacks in the 1940s were either comical Sambos or threatening looking Übermenschen to pound into the ground (Wertham, 32). However, after the industry-sponsored censorship board took effect in 1954, much to Wertham's delight, such portrayals were verboten. Unable to fulfill the role of comic jester of faceless threat, blacks remained unrepresented throughout most of the 1950s and 1960s. It was only in the early 1970s when publishers, noting the popularity of Blaxploitation films like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972), began producing black characters like Luke Cage, Mosaic's own John Stewart then dubbed "Black Lantern," and Black Lightning. While these portrayals were intended to be positive, they tended to be written, drawn, and edited only by white professionals, who reproduced stereotypical depictions of black culture from other media sources. As Christopher Priest, perhaps, comics most renowned African American creator to date, has noted:
Black society in comic books seems an almost invented culture, as made up as Smallville or the Legion of Super-Heroes' headquarters, sewn together by glimpses of television shows or movies. Black culture as represented by Sherman Helmsley or Jimmy Walker or Richard Roundtree. It's an RPG universe subset Black People, with a list of rules and hair styles and speech patterns, invented for the game, but bearing little resemblance to any actual culture (Priest, http://phonogram.us/comics/powerfist.htm, accessed May 03, 2003).
Black culture becomes as real as Black Lightning's Afro; it's just another accessory. This problem has been exasperated because, although there was an explosion of black characters created in the 1970s, the total number of black characters remains very limited. As such, black characters have been overburdened by having to represent all of African American culture with unprofitable results. Dwayne McDuffie, another successful African American creator, has stated his frustration with writing ethnic characters in an otherwise non-ethnic genre by saying, "As a writer. . . my problem . . . with writing a black character in either the Marvel or DC Universe is that he is not a man. He is a symbol. . . You can't do a character. . . Cage is all black people" (Norman 68 in Brown 31).
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