The Lost Essay Found! - Luke Cage's Mouth...
I found it! it's not online anymore, but I found the text. Whew!
This was the essay I wrote for Comic World News back in 2002 about black superheroes in the comic marketplace. This is an addendum to the conversation that was going on the other day around these parts about Black Panther. This is more about how I hate Luke Cage than it is about BP, but it's still very relevant and BP does get a mention. This essay got me some rough words from Dwayne McDuffie at the time, but in fairness, he did like my other essay about how racist The Spirit was/is.
Please bear in mind that this was five years ago. I'm not saying I don't believe what I wrote then; just that much of it was informed by the industry at that time and I might have used different langugae in spots if I wrote it now. Here's hoping LJ doesn't jack up the original formatting.
You just can't take me nowhere.
Luke Cage’s Mouth and Other Reasons Why Black Superheroes Don’t Sell
by Scott Woods
May 2002
Author’s Note: This started out as a response-review to the review by Ed Cunard here at CWN of the new mini-series Cage. Ed and I have never had any contact, and I didn’t find his review deficient in any way. It just opened up a can of worms for me, and conversely my review turned into a bit more than intended as I progressed through my issues with the book. It is almost impossible to give any serious treatise on a character like Luke Cage without delving to some degree in the history from which his character, and characters like him, spring.
That said, my official position on the book to date (issues 1-2) as a piece of art entertainment is: great art (Richard Corben), consistent writing (Brian Azzarello). If you want to buy a book that’s pretty, laced with some muted action and some Kurosawa-inspired intrigue, knock yourself out for the $12.00 it’s going to set you back (the book is a ludicrous $2.99 per issue). If, however, you’re one of those people who’ve always had this funny feeling pricking you in the back of your neck every time you heard Luke Cage yell out something like “Jesus Christmas!” in battle, or just wanted to see what an actual Black comic book reader thought of Black superheroes in general, then I implore you to read on.
The partial quote below is taken from the April 2002 issue of Source magazine’s article about the new Cage mini-series. The quote comes from Cage editor Axel Alonso:
"The new Cage is going to look like the kind of guy that's all brawn and no brains, but that's one of the things he plays to his advantage…The fact that Cage hasn't had his own book in so long seems ridiculous to me... it's time for a comic book that's led by a Black male for a change."
Here’s another one, this one from Comicon.com, same guy:
“It's gonna have the pacing and rhythm of your favorite Blaxploitation flicks of the '70s, only it'll be in a more modern context. Part and parcel of that is cussing and big booties, guns and drugs and all the rest.”
Already, from the top of the title’s team, we have problems. I’m going to hit them all, but you’ll have to stick with me for a while. I’m basically livid, but just so we get off on the right foot: I’m Black, I’ve been collecting comics off and on all my life, and even though I have a favorite Blaxploitation flick, I recognize that they were all more or less negative portrayals of Blacks through and through. No matter how noble the savage, the savage is still a savage, so to speak.
I do not, however, get the impression after reading the book’s first two issues that Axel Alonso gets that.
I don’t think anyone who’s been reading comics for any reasonable length of time would argue why Luke Cage hasn’t had his own series in a long time: the character doesn’t sell books. Maybe he’s not people’s cup of tea, maybe he’s a corny character, maybe his time is up. Whatever the reason, the facts on the fiscal issues surrounding the character are inarguable. Putting him in other books doesn’t drive their value up, and this particular series probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it weren’t being done by one of the hottest comic writers out right now and one of the industry’s legendary artists. That said, he’s one of the more resilient cockroaches of Marvel Comics stable of characters: you can squash his series, but give him a few years and he’s going to pop back up in some incarnation or another.
The question is: why do his books keep failing?
Luke Cage a.k.a. Power Man was created in what I un-affectionately refer to as the “Soul Brother” era of comics; when the characters created (usually by whites) were often as stereotypical as the prejudiced times and issues they claimed to be addressing. He was an escaped ex-con who sported an afro, spoke in ridiculous jive and came from the ‘hood. He set himself up to help people for money, but not in pure mercenary fashion. He still walked amongst the people and did the random good deed, but mostly by accident, through an emotional tug-of-war or with a hint of the freebie honor system. He was, in essence, the original superhero pimp.
And he spoke in really, really ridiculous jive.
Now he just speaks in really, really trashy slang, puts justice on hold while he sleeps with strippers and generally doesn’t play well with others. I’m trying to not take the fact that Marvel released this series as some sort of ode to Black History Month personal, but it isn’t working. I shudder to think what they might have planned for Kwanzaa, and they’ve all but ensured that I’ll be buying Vertigo and indie titles for the foreseeable future and doing my Marvel reviews from a reading at the store racks. The fact that traits like this have never been something that creators who have taken a whack at him chose to strip from the character has hurt every series he has been attached to, since his powers aren’t particularly overwhelming. He’s super-strong and bulletproof. Big deal. When that’s the totality of your super powers, you’d better have a lot more to your character than some rapid-fire hip jive, cat-daddy.
Which brings us to an even bigger issue: why comic books fronted by Black heroes typically don’t sell well. For the record, I’m going to give you the answer. As a lifetime Black buyer of comic books and a critical thinker, I think I might have a little say in the matter. I don’t think being Black entitles me to an inside track on the issue: there are tons of white people in Marvel’s marketing department that will give you the same reasons I will. However, voicing these issues as a Black comic book audience member stops editors and company representatives for speaking on my typically silent minority’s behalf, while at the same time removes whatever reasoning compels them to say mind-bogglingly insensitive things like Marvel’s Bill Rosemann’s suggestion that “I would ask them to wait until the entire series is actually published before (detractors) judge it” (courtesy of Hannibal Tabu’s “Ethnic Cleansing or Rattled CAGEs” article, www.SpinnerRack.com). The problem with this kind of passive live-and-let-offend debate philosophy is that I have to buy the books first and put money into the other side’s pocket for him to respect my opinion, and the only noise most companies the size and breadth of Marvel hear are the ringing of cash registers, which always equals success, no matter what gets said about the book after the fact. If you ask people to buy something that might potentially offend them and implore them to wait until the punch line comes 4-5 months down the line to see if they’re REALLY offended, you’re asking for more than too much. You’re asking for…well. Kind words escape me.
The problem with the lagging success of Black hero-led titles has been twofold: that the books have traditionally attempted to cater to an audience comprised mainly of whites in all the wrong ways, and that the characters have often been lampooned on every imaginable level to meet some ill-conceived notion of what works with said audience. The comic industry’s attempt to address this disproportion in its audience has traditionally been to create characters, books or comic lines that somehow reflect other cultures and views. Most have failed miserably to stretch the audiences of comics on any noticeable level for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the characters crafted to address this disparity. Black Panther, Black Vulcan, Black Lightning (noticing anything?) and Power Man/Luke Cage are all shining examples of these dynamics in action. These characters came out at a time when racial tensions were simmering after a hot political decade and the characters’ names were direct nods to the language, ideologies and political statements of the audience they were attempting to mollify (or profit from, depending on who you ask). The problem with the characters that were created is that no one at companies that released these superheroes seems to have done more than watched Shaft a half dozen times. In issue #14 of The Authority, in which the group faces off against a group of super-powered black-ops soldiers, one of the villains sports an outfit that is a direct riff on Black Panther…with the addition of a red beret and rifle slung across his chest. I’m glad someone at Wildstorm gets the joke. For those of you who don’t, here’s the punch-line: No matter how many times you refit a character born of racist impressions, you still have, at the core, a badly-conceived character.
Don’t even get me started on the canned hip-hop music that comes in on the Superman cartoon whenever Steel makes an appearance, or the fact that Black hero titles are typically hamstrung by the introduction of even more ludicrous Black villains, and every month at that. Is the message that the white villains wouldn’t deign to soil their hands playing with the B-list players? Not to say I blame white villains for calling in sick during the ever-doomed run on a Black-led book. Dr. Doom has no business facing off against Meteor Man (a nightmare of both failed characterization and merchandising), but then again, Meteor Man has no reason for existing, especially if the editors of the title aren’t going to treat the book seriously.
Which brings us squarely back to Marvel’s lovely Black History Month offering.
The re-envisioning of Cage (2002) by Richard Corben and Brian Azzarello is supposed to address these historical missteps somehow by making Luke Cage more contemporary and in touch with where the audience’s head is at. The problem? The audience is still predominantly white, relatively young and watches TV twenty-three and a half hours a day when they aren’t reading comic books with the remaining half hour. Most people’s exposure to other cultures tends to come from non-direct sources: comedians, television shows, music videos and movies. Even the editor’s take above on the direction of the book bleeds with this kind of arm’s-length indoctrination. And while Azzarello is a great chameleon of characterization and dialogue, and Corben a legendary artist, this re-envisioning comes off as an update of the traditional stereotypes of Black characters in comics. One gets the feeling while reading the book that the meeting that spawned the re-launch went down something like this:
Azzarello: Say, we should do something with his look. The yellow shirt and tights thing is played. And who is Cage kidding with that chain belt?
Corben: That’s holdin’ up nothin’. What should he look like this time out?
Azzarello: Well, he’s in the ghetto. Lives there, makes his living there. It’s where he comes from, the streets. I do street characters all the time. You’ve read 100 Bullets. I got that whole language thing down.
Corben: So no yellow shirt?
Azzarello: Uh-uh. I know! Let’s watch some rap videos! I mean, you can draw gritty streets all day, but when it comes down to it, the clothes make the man.
Corben: And a gold tooth! Let’s load up Dolemite while we’re at it.
Azzarello and Corben: Ha haha ha ha haa…
Unfortunately, no one’s bothered to ask either of them where any of the technical decisions of the book came from (aside from the editor’s desire to craft a book in the spirit of Blaxploitation films), so the audience is left to draw what conclusions it can from what we are given, the history of the character, and the history of characters like him in comics. And if the decision-making process of this title played out anything like the scenario I scripted above, it’s time to just off the character and be about the business of instituting some sensitivity courses over at the House of Ideas.
Now, on to a thing that is officially going to make me unpopular on both sides of the dialogue concerning the representation of Blacks in comics: Milestone comics.
The short-lived DC/ Milestone comic line of the early 90s was a nice (maybe even a good) idea, but the books that ended up hitting the shelves were horrendously stereotypical and not great comics. The fact that the creators of most of the titles were Black doesn’t change that fact. Suggesting that Blacks are incapable of being consciously or unconsciously racist - or that only they can present good Black characters and stories - is ludicrous. There was more foul language, out-of-place X hats, self-canceling messages and pointless political iconography in most of those 250 + books than in thirty years of Power Man and Black Panther comics combined. One glaring example of this is in Blood Syndicate #1, in which a character’s first words - a character laden with Islamic symbols and imagery (extremely hot at the time with the subject of Afrocentricity and multiculturalism suffused into America’s intellectual dialogue) - are: “Who’s the bitch?” in reference to a white female reporter. The story titles were ripped straight from then-hot political rap music’s headlines, with such loaded callings as “America Eats Her Young” (Blood Syndicate #1), “Angry Black Man” (Hardware #1), and “May We Bang You?” (Icon #5).
Was this Milestone’s idea of balance in comics? Granted, a lot of this was upended in most of the titles not a year after the line’s launch in 1993, when the books took on a more universal tone (meaning they couldn’t be picked out of a crowd of other bad comics in terms of dialogue or storylines). What it ultimately proves, however, is that driving a political stake into the heart of your comic isn’t entertainment, it’s propaganda, and white creators clearly don’t have a monopoly on that. If Black creators’ notions of the Blackness they choose to infuse into their comics is comprised mainly of hip-hop references, thug life mannerisms and flip-flopping politics, what does that say about the more than 50% of the Black population that exists over the age of thirty, is mainly female, and doesn’t read comic books in any discernable number? Clearly the fact that the market explosion of rap and Black film in the early 90s opened the door for the creation and wider distribution of such titles, but what was done with the opportunities aside from feeding further into negative ideas about Black people that were already flawed and determined by white creators before them? It’s telling that the better part of the titles that came out during that time period - and not just from Milestone (Malcolm-10? Ugh) - aren’t worth even their cover prices now, aren’t being looked for by comic fans of any stripe or interest, and failed to sell in any significant numbers even with the inordinate amount of non-comic-related press some of these books received when they were released. Not only were the books politically suicidal, they were not viewed as being worth buying by even die-hard collectors. You can only chalk so much of that up to the natural level of racism from a predominantly white audience faced with a Black title. At some point, nobody wants to see what appears to be a Muslim with a gat that hates crackers, and not because we’re scared of the character, but because he’s corny and the stories were generally poorly written.
I’m not breaking any big news by stating that the audience for comic books has always been traditionally white and male. The age of the audience has fluctuated into higher ranges over the past fifteen years or so, but the ethnicity and gender of the audience has remained basically the same. The audience for comic books from the 70s and 80s - a great time for comics - has gotten older, and has opted to not set aside their desire to purchase comics in the same numbers of previous generations. It’s the same reason why the Rolling Stones still have an audience even though they haven’t released an album of note in twenty years. Not to mention that the comics have grown more mature with its audience in an attempt to keep it and to expand its boundaries as an art form. However, when it comes to ethnicity and gender issues, comics are still only about two steps up from a Cro-Magnon dating service.
I think it’s interesting that the characters whom Blacks that are aware of comics at all are smitten with are those created by white people. The casting of Storm in the X-men movie (2000) was a surprising point of conversation in the circles I traveled in that normally had nothing to do with comics. I would be in a barbershop around the corner and people who didn’t own a single comic book were suggesting that Angela Bassett should play the heroine, a sentiment popular in fanboy circles over the years as well. Not to mention the incredible success of Spawn, who, while normally portrayed as a demon and not as his original Black character of origin, has a strong supporting cast of Black characters and a main love interest of color. If Spawn talked like Ice Cube, however, the book would have stopped printing eight years ago. Why? Because we’ve learned from a hero made Black only as a secondary consideration (but never totally written out, which is as it should be) that ethnicity and racial politics doesn’t have to be the drawing power of the book. Good art, an originally compelling idea and solid characterization all around will sell your book every time.
Black superhero books can be fun, poignant, politically mindful and draw an audience, but not by listening to the hottest rap record and super-imposing slang and baggy jeans onto the book. And while I’m sure Cage is doing some sort of reasonably decent business, I imagine the title owes that more to the drawing power of the writer and artist combo of Azzarello/Corben than it does to the gold tooth-sporting, three-ring wearing racist metamorphosis of Luke Cage. Unfortunately, most of the audience for comic books wouldn’t know if the representations of the Black characters in most of these titles is stereotypical or not because a) they don’t bother to buy the books more times than not (of which I am both happy and sad), and b) a lot of them probably only come into contact with Black culture through media outlets, and we know how misleading those particular Trojan ponies can be. If your primary source for discovering Black people’s value systems, notions of legacy and inter-group dynamics comes from MTV videos, then this version of Luke Cage is probably right up your alley. He likely seems more Black to you, in so much as you define being Black as one monolithic rap video of experiences.
The fact that Black people have oftentimes historically jumped to the defense of some of these characters is a weak counter for those who think I’m way off base. Blacks have traditionally been so starved for representations of themselves in any number of entertainment avenues that many of us flock around the meager scraps dropped from the table of certain industries just to see ourselves portrayed, and in relation to comic books particularly. Comics have so rarely introduced Black characters that to do so almost becomes a media event. That’s why you’re reading about it in The Source: people (particularly Blacks) go into shock any time the comic industry puts a Black person in a lead role of a book. Unfortunately, the shock seems to short out our critical radars to the point that we don’t bother to check if the book is doing something wrong with its portrayals until it’s too late.
Not that Marvel should have to take all the heat. No matter how much you might enjoy the DC-created Super-Friends cartoon from the 70s, its later shows had some of the most racist portrayals of minorities in comic form in one place ever or since. Super Friends offends across more ethnicities than probably any other comic-related property ever, and before many of these minority groups had public platforms like the internet to voice potential issues with the representations of their people in such a politically-charged climate. Assuming, of course, that people were even bothering to watch Apache Chief (Native American), Samurai (Asian), Black Vulcan (uh, Black) and El Dorado (Latino) parade around the Hall of Justice in their mostly shirtless and stereotypical glory. I’d venture to guess that if Aquaman (Atlantean) had the audacity to pull the helmet off of villain Black Manta (what do YOU think?) that odds were there’d be somebody with an afro under it.
We may finally see a Luke Cage book that actually sells above expectations (again, due mainly to the creators associated with the title this time around, despite the questionable portrayal of the character and his world), but the question that needs to be answered is, at what cost?