Notes of a Native Son of Krypton

[samedietc]

For a break from my reading on Sunday I went to a library or bookstore, and there read an Elseworlds from DC Comics (that's their imprint for "what if" or sometimes "what about" books): Red Son asks the question, what if Superman fell on Russia instead of Kansas. I don't want to ruin it for anyone who wants to read it, but the ending does bear

Comments

[worthididnity]

to answer the question "what if Superman was black?", one would first have to define the essential elements of Superman, in order to look at how they would be impacted by the change (i could get into a lengthy argument here about how it's not necessarilly the case that the cannonical Superman ISN'T black, but like i said, lengthy

[elahadrun]

wait huh?

Jews have superpowers?

well no WONDER you're trying to convert....

[samedietc]

I was debating all that "black" to "black-looking" in my original post -- of course, superman as a passing story could as well be a story about the successful passing of a light-skinned black man. I guess what I am now interested in aren't questions of Superman's passing (a lecture I went to at the beginning of last summer basically--and problematically, I think--said that the Jew-as-other was a cultural fiction: the Jew doesn't have to pass as a white person in reality, but we pretend that the Jew is other, and does) but of the failure to pass

[tragic_ohara]

An idea we talked about in an economics class at Bard was how entwined all the American social-rights struggles are (race, class, gender), and how disingenuous it is for them to distance themselves from one another. All three are part of our national fabric, and each affects the others: the essential class-conflict takes women and minorities as casualties if they all aren't considered as part of a troublesome whole. So I guess the question is more: is a story containing a black man wrong not to bring up racism? Does it fail somehow (put another way, can we assert that black American literature is by its nature a literature of struggle, if it is to be adequate to its time)? Imagine a black Superman who's unconcerned with passing as white, or who takes a defeatist/nihlistic view of America's institutional prejudices and just goes about throwing cars at people, if that's how they're going to be. (That last is a little ridiculous, but I'd enjoy reading it as a one-off issue

[unsi_sempai]

Not having read much of Superman, was his alienness ever addressed in biological terms? Like, did he have six lungs or no kidneys or anything, and just *look* human?

In any case, I don't think Superman-as-black could have happened in the 1930s. Heck, even today, the "black man as alien" concept would be difficult to pull off without making people uncomfortable, especially considering that american superhero comics still seem overwhelmingly the realm of the white man - to have a strong, non-white hero be also not human would be somewhat problematic.

Besides, I thought X-men was about being black in a white world. THe original, that is. Uncanny X-men is about being gay in a straight world.