2 Can the Black Superhero Be?

Blackness vs. the Superhero

I can change the order of things to suit my desperations.

—Essex Hemphill, “The Edge”

One of comics’ cognate representational forms—also defining late modernity, though preceding comics in their post–Action Comics form—is film. Much has been written about the entangled and mutually destructive (not of each other but of everything else) relationship between film and race. A few slivers chipped off that massive nightmarish iceberg provide a useful way to begin to understand how the pairing of blackness and the superhero—carefully twined together in chapter 1—presents a formidable challenge to the acts of being and doing that I’m ascribing to fantasy-acts.

On blackness in film, my go-to theorist for this initial consideration will be again, and again perhaps surprisingly, Fanon. Here in three among several instances in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, we find Fanon in a descriptive and reportorial rather than incisively analytic mood: “Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him. Look at children’s comic books”—this, as you may recall, is the same moment we encountered in chapter 1. Fanon goes on, “In films the situation is even more acute. Most of the American films dubbed in French reproduce the grinning stereotype Y a bon Banania. In one of these recent films, Steel Sharks, there is a black guy on a submarine. . . . He is a true nigger, walking behind the quartermaster, trembling at the latter’s slightest fit of anger, and is killed in the end.”1

Later Fanon describes the acute predicament of watching movies while black: “I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself. Those in front of me look at me, spy on me, wait for me. A black bellhop is going to appear. My aching heart makes my head spin.”2

Elsewhere Fanon expands on this description after observing that “a host of information and a series of propositions slowly and stealthily work their way into an individual through books, newspapers, school texts, advertisements, movies, and radio and shape his community’s vision of the world.” Here he drops a footnote: “We recommend the following experiment for those who are not convinced. Attend the showing of a Tarzan film in the Antilles and in Europe,” Fanon suggests. “In the Antilles the young black man identifies himself de facto with Tarzan versus the Blacks. In a movie house in Europe things are not so clear-cut, for the white moviegoers automatically place him among the savages on the screen. This experiment is conclusive. The black man senses he cannot get away with being black.”3

These observations should bring us back to one of the problems posed when looking at Nubia in her leopard-skin skirt.

Contrast Fanon’s account of moviegoing with that of his contemporary Gore Vidal, another perhaps-unexpected guide here, but like Fanon someone whose writing style is married to a politics that I admire and from which I learn. Vidal here writes circa 1992 and thus forty years after Fanon, recalling his own more rhapsodic moviegoing but mostly describing films from the same period, the 1930s through 1940s. Vidal’s account is not explicitly or even implicitly about race in the movies, and yet, read in light of Fanon’s testimony, what he has to say is almost unintelligible to the neighborly interstellar visitor from Alpha Centauri without an understanding of race in relation to the movies:

As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art took precedence over the cinema. Unfortunately, neither ever proved to be as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen. Thus, in a seemingly simple process, screening history.

As a writer and political activist, I have accumulated a number of cloudy trophies in my melancholy luggage. Some real, some imagined. Some acquired from life, such as it is; some from movies, such as they are. Sometimes, in time, where we are as well as were, it is not easy to tell the two apart. . . . For instance, I often believe that I served at least one term as governor of Alaska; yet written histories do not confirm this belief. No matter. Those were happy days, and who cares if they were real or not?4

Vidal’s dreamlike association between watching movies and memories of an otherwise unrecorded gubernatorial sojourn in Alaska link up in the Harvard lectures that this quotation is drawn from, which braid together memories of movies, memories of personal life, and references to world and national history. Vidal’s first novel, Williwaw (1946), is set in Alaska, and the writing of the novel, Vidal muses, depended in a curious way on watching movies. Convalescing in an army hospital in Alaska after “having been frozen in the Bering Sea,” Vidal concludes,

I had, by then, started a novel, about a ship in a storm in the Bering Sea. After the hospital, I was transferred to the Gulf of Mexico. I was unable to finish this novel until I went to see Isle of the Dead [1945], with Boris Karloff. As Boris Karloff first haunted my imagination in The Mummy [1932], so Boris Karloff, as a Greek officer on an island in a time of plague, broke, as it were, the ice and I completed my first novel right then and there. . . . I have no idea what was in the movie that did the trick.5

The kind of haunting evoked by his encounter with moving images on celluloid is of course markedly different from the haunting of similar images for Fanon and his imaginary-cum-clinically-observed-patient Black Everyman. For Vidal, the fantasy evoked is of decidedly white American male imaginary possession of political territory—“my unscreenable Alaska,” Vidal calls it.6 Fanon and his black moviegoer, meanwhile, suffer vertiginous anxiety attacks and are all but hounded out of the cinema. Notice that identification with the hero or the villain, that somewhat misleading vector of engagement with comics discussed in chapter 1, is not required for Vidal’s fantasy of plenitude as it mingles with and becomes indistinguishable from memory. It is the very milieu of the film-as-story, the agreed-upon assumptions that facilitate the suspension of disbelief necessary to imaginatively enjoy via observing the film, everything about the movie and movies themselves, that guarantee the possibility, indeed the enticement, of an intermingling between past recorded image and present imaginations of the past.

This seamless transfer of information across the boundaries of real and imaginary, the active production of fantasy as world, world as fantasy, requires the payment of a particular ticket (to evoke James Baldwin): entry is difficult, and perhaps even barred, without white skin and, probably, without male embodiment. Both “white” and “male” here should be understood as socially designated, with very little give accorded to those persons who are not socially designated white/male but who might nevertheless think, dream, and imagine both themselves and the world in accordance with one or both those designations. Fanon’s Black Everyman was Tarzan in the Antillean theater, but cannot escape becoming savage or bellhop in the theater in Paris.

Yet I’ve been trying to think about and describe the ways that the very faculty beckoned into collusion by movies—imagination—is in comics not rigidly determined either by the one-to-one correspondences of identification or by the social position and embodiment of the comics reader. And we know, too, how nimble movie viewers’ imaginations can be in response to such proffers of the terms of entry and identification, and that one need never look at a movie star onscreen and experience a complete disjunction between him or her and one’s own self-conceptions. See, in this regard, almost anything written in the 1980s and 1990s in then-young cultural studies texts, but especially those of the black British cultural studies school. See Baldwin’s attachment to Joan Crawford in The Devil Finds Work (1976). See José Muñoz’s Disidentifications (1990).

I noted in the introduction how I could simultaneously both imagine having the privileges of whiteness and yet fail to fully invest in such an imaginative proposition. Another way of describing this contradiction—a way that parallels and neatly traces the contradictory elements—is the impasse I’m staging here between Vidal and Fanon at the movies. In both cases, the activity of fantasy is at once ignited and impeded. What I have begun to suggest in considering superhero-comics reading as a key paradigm of fantasy-acts is that superhero comics in both content and form also meet this impasse, and surpass it.

As a comics reader, my attention is not as limited as Fanon’s Black Everyman by the director’s construction of the camera’s frame in the movie theater. Yes, I reading a comic might “wait” cringingly for a too-familiar racist rendition of my own image to appear, I might see myself therein, I might perform seeing or viewing along the lines of a constant restless quest for identification and self-reflection compelled by my embattled sense of self among similar brethren in an antiblack world. Reading comics in the 1940s, as Fanon observed, there are images laboring to achieve precisely this end. See here the dreadful Whitewash Jones, pickaninny sidekick to the team of Captain America’s and the Human Torch’s sidekicks, Young Allies, in the summer of 1941 (figure 2.1).

But in my reading of comics, I don’t have to perform seeing and viewing according to these racist mandates, because the multiplicity of images splayed across the page’s grid (or other arrangement of panels), even if they repeat themselves with slight differences, don’t compel the monological focus inherent to the camera’s frame. This multiplicity offers more, even, than the comparatively capacious proscenium span of the theater’s stage in a playhouse. The multiplicity of images invites, or at the very least the images permit, a dispersal of attention across a number of points, and in various combinations and sequences. Hence the quest for identification, if I have (foolishly) embarked on it, may be productively frustrated, rerouted to other quests or brought again and again to a failure to achieve identification.

What is offered by the comics page—something obscured in chapter 1 with our focus on the iconic singular image, however multilayered, of Nubia on the cover—is a kind of manipulability that lies not only in the hands of the author and artist (the analogue to the film director), but in the mind of the reader/viewer. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, the comics page is less like the movie screen and more like the computer screen in its availability to, and requirement of, “viewer” action. We may be (mis)led, Mitchell opines, to consider comics via the medium’s “inevitable rootedness in the extremely old media of drawing and writing; or its technical pedigree in the very modern invention of the printing press and the rise of newspapers and magazines; or its contemporary articulation as a kind of bookish and materialist alternative to the dominance of virtuality and screen-based media.”7 But we should rather see comics as “transmediatic,” “moving across all boundaries of performance, representation, reproduction, and inscription to find new audiences, new subjects, and new forms of expression. . . . Comics is transmediatic because it is translatable and transitional, mutating before our eyes into unexpected new forms.”8 In this way, we can see comics formally “as a media platform that, like the computer, can host every form of mediation. The main difference between these two platforms is that computers provide a mechanical-electronic platform via a screen interface whereas comics offer a manual-neurological platform via the page interface.”9

Whereas, then, as we see via Vidal, cinema—long understood as bringing into being a “male gaze”—also performs the inculcation of a white male gaze, which roves like Sauron’s Eye in search of differences to assimilate and territories to conquer, the comics transmedium offers a perspective that invites relationships to representation that do not assume and cannot compel conquering, assimilative responses that obliterate the threat posed by difference. “But what is the perspective of comics?” Mitchell asks. “Is it the point of view of comics artists? Or is it something impersonal, built into the very structure of comics as a medium? How can an impersonal system have a perspective? Is there a comic view of the world?”10 These are questions only answerable with/via the participation of readers. Comics’ “perspective” is not unlike the perspective of a computer—not just its screen, but what we do that registers on the screen. Thus “closure” provides the answers to Mitchell’s questions, but this means that the answers are as various as the kinds of closure, the kinds and qualities of participatory imagination, the kinds and qualities of fantasy-acts, that many readers provide to the comic singularly and in the uneven collectivities of fan communities, conventions, online message boards, printed letters pages, and so on.

I have circled back to comics-reading closure because it is central to the idea of fantasy-acts, and because it is with closure(s) that we put the sword to the Gordian knot tying together my imaginative adventure of having the privileges of whiteness and yet failing to fully invest in such an imaginative proposition. Put another way, this is where my inquiry crosses paths with a number of other currently urgent inquiries in African Americanist, Afro-diasporic, and Afro-pessimist thought, which we can see from such disparate and overlapping projects as Saidiya Hartman’s and Tavia Nyong’o’s discussions of critical fabulation and “Afro-fabulations,” and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016): which is whether it is possible to have fantasies of freedom and power in the hold of the slave ship—if such ontological captivity is where we always remain, post-1492—and if so, what kinds of fantasies and to what, if any, avail.

Thus prepared, let’s now consider at greater length the questions I bracketed in chapter 1 that raised the strong possibility that a superhero cannot “be” a superhero and “be” signified as black at the same time. Let’s consider what “black” and “white” mean, and could mean, in the two-dimensional paper and digital world of superhero comics and in the multidimensional imaginations of their readers.

Black Superhero, Black Name

The white privilege in watching movies that gives rise to Gore Vidal’s fantasy of being a governor of Alaska is the same as, or linked to, the fantasy that forms the superhero in the character of Superman, in 1938. That the Superman character might be read as Jewish and therefore only aspirationally or provisionally white—he is the alien other who awaits the crown granted him by assimilation—supports rather than undercuts this proposition.11 Superman’s history recapitulates the history of whiteness for American immigrants, as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Thus the paradigmatic comic-book superhero is in important ways conceptually white: if a superhero isn’t white, then the hero is an exception, a different case, since part of what defines the hero is his whiteness. Viewed conceptually, the superhero figure is historically “white” and cannot be understood except in relation to fantasies inspired and underwritten by social positions of whiteness.

It is worth noting, however, that since the comic-book superhero is a figure summoned into its fictional existence via the process of drawing and writing, its whiteness is also always the production via the ink, color, or digital process indicating the character’s “white” “skin” tones. This is a production that is both simple (because its practice has sedimented into a convention of the craft) and laborious (because the practice of coloring a character “white” requires work and finagling, just as giving Bruce Wayne and Superman black hair required playing with blues and blacks up through the Bronze Age). We can therefore perceive this production of the effect of whiteness as both conscious and unconscious in comic-book superhero creation and representation.12

Jeffrey A. Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (2001) provides a field-initializing analysis of how the black superhero, in the fantasy universe where Whitewash Jones blazed the path, at first—if not always—threatens to burst apart as incoherent, as a potentially fantasy-busting derangement of the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief. Brown’s focus is on the male superhero, because the superhero is also conceptually male, not unlike the way the “perspective” of Vidal’s (and Fanon’s) movies embedded the male gaze. Nubia’s departures from the norms of superhero representation—the departures that make her rich as a source for readerly imagination, both mine and many others’—are, again, transgressions of expected race and gender representation (a twinning of transgression that almost necessarily summons to mind other nonnormativities, including those of sexuality, thus giving rise to queer readings of various kinds, as I’ll discuss shortly). This is notwithstanding Wonder Woman’s iconic industry-standard status; Wonder Woman was always an outlier and, for many reasons, a queer figure.13

Jeffrey Brown argues that comic-book male superheroes’ extreme hypermasculinity (armor-plated musculature, varying degrees of invulnerability, etc.) presents various kinds of potential anxieties for superhero comics’ mostly male readership, not least the inevitable negative comparison between the hero’s drawn physique and the reader’s own. However, these anxieties are generally well managed within the conventions of the genre. Brown is working from the assumption, shared, as we saw, by Wertham and Fanon, that identification is the source and the end product of superhero-comics fandom or of reading superhero comics. Thus, Brown implies, the superhero characters’ represented effect of gender presentation—I parse this phrasing in order to again remind us that the characters are an achievement of drawing and writing, rather than beings of flesh—may impede the ease with which a putatively juvenile reader can “identify” with the male superhero, but nevertheless the channel for identification is sufficiently clear to be traversed and for the match to be made.

But Brown suggests that race—or rather, not adhering to or achieving the standard represented effect of whiteness—poses a less surmountable obstacle. The management of the anxieties about the possibilities of identification and idolization does not work well when the superhero is a black male, a figure already overdetermined in Western cultures as an exemplar of extreme, out-of-control physicality. “If comic book superheroes represent an acceptable, albeit obviously extreme, model of hypermasculinity,” Brown notes, “then the combination of the two—a black male superhero—runs the risk of being read as an overabundance, a potentially threatening cluster of masculine signifiers.”14

The evidence for the operation of this risk and threat lies not only in the relative paucity of numbers of black superheroes, male or female; that is a sin that can be laid at the door of the overwhelmingly white male creators of the superhero comics. The evidence lies chiefly in the fact that superhero comics featuring black male superheroes as their primary characters have historically underperformed commercially, even with the lower sales expectations that obtain for post–Golden Age comics. Black male superheroes in their own comics generally don’t sell very well relative to the majority of white superhero titles, and no title centrally featuring a black superhero has yet had the ongoing commercial presence of Superman, Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man, etc.

The phenomenal ticket-sales and pop-culture-zeitgeist success of the 2017 Black Panther movie—which coincided with the 2016 restart of the fifth iteration of Black Panther comics, written by MacArthur Genius Award winner Ta-Nahesi Coates—may ultimately make the Panther the exception to this rule. But Black Panther series (including its first iteration, Jungle Action) have begun with a flourish and then been canceled for lack of sufficient sales four times previous, which means that, so far, the Panther has been the strongest evidence for this rule rather than its outlier. It’s true that many, perhaps indeed the majority, of superhero titles are also canceled when the hero isn’t represented as black or a person of color. It’s also true that superhero titles featuring white women superheroes have traditionally suffered this fate, too, with Ms. Marvel / Captain Marvel having had almost as many cancellations and restarts as the Panther. Yet it is the case that none of the enduring single-hero titles that hail from the Golden Age of the 1930s and ’40s, like Superman, Batman, and Captain America, or that hail from the Silver Age of the 1950s and ’60s, like the Flash, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Thor, and the Hulk, are represented as black or as a person of color.

The black superhero is always therefore an oddity, perpetually a lame duck anticipating his constitutionally mandated removal from protagonist status.

The names of black superhero characters once they arrived in the 1960s and ’70s exemplify the underlining and emphasis on the difference of blackness in the comic-book world. The fact that comic strips are a visual medium means that the creators’ drawings and color will prompt a reader to see that such a character is black—though as noted earlier with respect to the representation of whiteness in comics, this involves a not-uncomplicated series of illustrative choices for the artists and colorists. Note, for example, the peculiar cross-hatchings denoting shadow or melanin that Charles Schulz chose to place around the edges of the face of Franklin, the only black character among his round-headed cartoon philosophers in Peanuts.15

But the visual rendering of blackness was not enough of a representational gesture for the comic-book creators who crafted the early black superheroes. These creators often took the tack of also choosing a character name denoting blackness, as though offering instructions to the colorist who would enter the production process well after the drawing and writing were completed: Black Panther, Black Lightning, Black Goliath. We have already seen that the 1970s black version of Wonder Woman was called Nubia—and that even as that character has only fitfully reappeared since 1973, almost never with her Wonder Woman powers intact, she nevertheless retains and is identifiable by that name. This insistent tack is revealing in the way that someone’s saying, “He’s a male stripper,” is revealing—the redundancy shows that the speaker assumes that strippers are by definition women; as the early naming of black superheroes reveals that superheroes are by definition white.

The conventions of representation that provide the ground for superhero-comic-book literacy, then, retain as a lingering effect the unacknowledged white-supremacist assumptions at work in the establishment of the genre in the late 1930s and ’40s, when pioneer figures Superman and Captain Marvel burst onto the pop-culture scene. The black male superhero disturbs or fails to comply with assumptions established in the genre’s infancy; he is not entirely legible within those conventions. Due to the “overabundance” of signifiers coalescing around a black superhero figure, readers are not quite able to see, or are resistant to seeing, black superheroes and taking them on board as they do with Spider-Man and Superman.

Brown’s argument thus applies the well-established analysis whereby we understand the black male figure as exemplifying, indeed exaggerating as a thrilling spectacle, the contradictions and instabilities that inhere in the pairing of masculinity and power, of male bodies and the Phallus, in our patriarchal and misogynist cultures. The black male figure is generally described in cultural analysis as operating according to a kind of erection/castration paradox (to put the matter in vulgar Freudian terms). The figure is thus contradictory, at once hypermasculine and feminine. The powerful allure-and-threat of the black male figure’s insistent phallic preening is also an index of its bearer’s degraded social status, its position as object prone before an observing subject, which fears, desires, and aspires to control it. The two, degraded status and potential power, are inextricable from each other.

Here, then, in the realm of the consumption of black male superheroes, which is the consumption of images and narratives of fantasy, the black male figure, because he is at once ultramasculine and without masculine power, is both a spectacle (because he is different and cannot but shout his difference to all before whom he appears) and not fully visible (because he is different and the filters dictating what can be recognized do not recognize the peculiar data of his presence).

Black Superhero: Bad-Ass and Criminal

We can pose this problem that the black male figure as superhero presents at a slightly different angle, as well, which illuminates further the pressures besetting black male superheroes and throwing up hurdles to the successful elaboration of such a fantasy. Filmmaker Reginald Hudlin, the cocreator of commercially successful films centrally featuring African Americans, such as House Party (1990) and Boomerang (1992), took over a retooled Black Panther title in 2005. In an afterword Hudlin wrote for a collection of his first six issues, he describes the guiding principle of his vision of Black Panther and what he believed would probably ensure the title’s success. Hudlin says he was determined to align the Black Panther with what he saw to be most appealing about black male cultural icons in the “post-integration, post-Reagan” hip-hop era: black male cultural icons were bad-asses, Hudlin observes, and Black Panther needed to be bad-ass, too. Hudlin writes that what Spike Lee, P. Diddy, “Malcolm X, Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali, all have in common, is the knowledge that the act of being a black man in white America is an inherent act of rebellion. They are WILLING to be bad@$$es. . . . That’s what hip hop is all about. Being a bad@$$. Everyone wants to be a bad@$$. That’s why white kids have always loved black music. . . . Black music is the music of bad@$$es.” And “The harder the Panther is, the more appealing he is to both black AND white audiences.”16

It’s tempting to quibble with Hudlin’s reading of the history of black music pre-hip-hop and undercut his general cultural observation. We might counter by tracing a genealogy of his point of view back to like-minded comments made by the mid-1960s LeRoi Jones. Jones (before becoming Baraka) wrote when there was a prevailing tradition of images of black males that were rather more castrated than erect, and far from bad-ass—which Jones’s essays, poems, and plays often strove with all his rhetorical might to overcome. Nevertheless, Hudlin’s reasoning and choice of how to depict a venerable superhero character that he was tasked with making popular highlights for us the narrow gamut that the black male figure runs, and demonstrates another of the various traps which that narrow range lays for conceiving black superheroes. Hudlin assumes and tries to work productively with the spectacularity of the figure of the black body, the fact that its visibility is produced as an indication of difference that signifies hyperembodiment (with its implication of being inversely possessed of intellectual capacities) and/or “perverse” sexuality, elements that Hudlin could mine in creating the fantasy image of a bad-ass capable of dispatching any number of foes and villains—and, à la the Blaxploitation hero, attracting more than his fair share of adoring women.

But though a superhero beats up villains, a superhero in its basic conception isn’t necessarily a bad-ass, while a villain or an antihero very often can be one. The claim of the black male figure to bad-ass-ness owes a debt to histories of rebellion, as Hudlin notes, but it is also owed to the nigh-systematic production of the black male figure as exemplifying a difference so alien that it justifies, even seems to compel, surveillance, policing, imprisoning, and assassinating. The paradox at this angle simply reconfigures its basic terms: the black male is an “inherent” rebel in “white America,” which is thus to wield a kind of power, but the fact that he cannot but appear so on the stage of an America rendered white by his presence is the very achievement, indeed perhaps the foundational achievement, of white-supremacist conventions of representation and perception. The black male bad-ass is also thus a criminal.

It’s difficult to overstate, and difficult too to fully encompass, the extent to which the equation of blackness and criminality tangles the knot of signification presented by the black superhero—female as well as male. The black hero runs counter to that strain of superheroic ethos that’s all about the celebration and mythologizing of policing. The great majority of Superman’s and Batman’s early adventures involved hunting down bank robbers and murderers and other criminals, such that in many ways they were, and yet remain eighty-odd years on, costumed superpolice.

We begin to see, then, how the superhero is constitutively white insofar as whiteness is defined by, and is the offer of, innocence. To be or to have innocence is to be free of guilt, and to be free of guilt is to be constitutionally insulated from the consequences of harmful actions. To be innocent or guilt-free is never to have engaged in harmful actions (which is why it can be ascribed to the constitutionally irresponsible: children), or to have such harmful actions purged (“redeemed” or “forgiven,” notions obviously highly charged by Christian mythology in Western and Western-dominated cultures). The latter, the purging of accountability for consequence, is most efficiently accomplished via the allocation of overweening responsibility to a guilty party, whose presence and repeated condemnation thus secures the other party’s claim to innocence. The fusion of innocence versus guilt with whiteness versus blackness has of course been accomplished in history with all the vicious obsessive determination that our political, economic, educational, and cultural institutions could have brought to bear on that project—so evidently vital to the making of modernity—and continues to be feverishly, bloodily reiterated, primarily though not only via police violence, in the present.

To illuminate the machinations of innocence, guilt, and racial marking, I refer us to philosopher J. Reid Miller’s Stain Removal: Ethics and Race (2016). Miller challenges the enshrined conviction that ethics is a field of inquiry without necessary purchase on the racialized character of lived realities and thus ideally without antiblack bias. Miller exposes how a racially “neutral” ethical valuation can never be honestly proposed: imported into, and constitutive of, ethical categories themselves, is a foregoing valuation, a valuation that is newly inherited with each birth into the social world, as race. Miller carefully examines the biblical story of the curse of Ham, the son of Noah, mythological progenitor of post-Adam humankind, sifting through commentaries and teachings on the story that Miller argues establish it as a foundational text in the development of Western epistemes. The myth of Ham, as we know, has been deployed both to “explain” the otherwise apparently inexplicable presence of “black” people on the Earth and to justify their enslavement.

Of central import for Miller in the story of the curse of Ham is the fundamentally formative role played by inheritable guilt in giving meaning to the category of the human. Criminality founds the human. And the inheritable nature of criminality founds the notion of race. Miller shows that in the story of Ham, one is criminal not because of an act, but rather as a function of status over which one has no control, which is the nature of inheritance and legacy. Key here is that the law precedes the crime; the law makes the act a crime by designating the actor a criminal. Examining fundamental prohibitions that “Thou shalt not kill” and the incest taboo, Miller writes,

“Murder” and “incest” . . . are . . . conceivable as such only as what the law has already thematized as perceptive possibilities. If, therefore, the law does not merely judge these acts as crimes but simultaneously and actively “founds” them, this could occur only via the identification of phenomena as criminal within an existing economy of value. Moreover, even if a crime or its anterior prototypes could generate directly a law it still could not found the law: that which remains . . . a vast yet shallow procedural technology whose manipulability—that by which one could think and act “outside” or against the law—confirms it [the law] as an inessential apparatus rather than a worldly expression of value.17

Ham’s crime, for which he was punished by the curse of servitude and degraded status relative to his brothers, apparently involves the obscure offense of seeing his father naked, but otherwise is never satisfactorily detailed in the biblical texts or in their commentaries. What is important in the story is that Ham is given the position of bearing a guilt, however mysterious in origin or dimension, that is henceforward inherent to his being and that then is borne as an inherent “stain” by those on whom Ham’s role is imposed down through the ages. That it is the mythical Ham and his mythical lineage of descendants who bear the “stain” of criminality, without which there can be no ethics, is arbitrary; it could have been someone else, some other lineage, some other race. But it is this very arbitrariness that entrenches the power that orders human relations according to hierarchies and according to chosen “values,” that is, the fundament of ethics.

Thus,

The crime of Ham does not receive from the law a name upon its commission. . . . The transgression does not violate a rule, formula, or principle but rather strikes at the very source or possibility of rulemaking, threatening the assemblage of the law-producing machine. . . . Ham . . . represents . . . [a] means by which power is not so much redirected as it is enchanted in its effects. In a drunken display of indiscretion, the law, like Noah, lies exposed; but this revelation in which there is nothing to reveal is necessary for its acquisition of a “body.” The stain of value . . . generates discovery of the “body of law” in its naked or pure state of “natural law”—a nakedness covered and defended by its progeny who must invoke routinely that unstained purity as the law’s original and authoritative subjectively constituting force.18

Miller’s readings of the many versions of the Ham myth strongly suggest that the structural possibility of subjectivity is subjectivity’s antagonistic pairing with criminality. This criminality is apportioned to Ham’s lineage (the black) as the mode of confirming its opposite’s “blessings”—though even the blessed are never free from the precarity of being swept into criminality, because criminality is what determines and safeguards the privileges of blessing by serving as their limit. In Miller’s reading, all subjects of the West’s imperially created globe stand or take shape as subjects in relation to criminality, but Ham’s lineage is definitely “cursed” with the burden of taking shape as almost coterminous with criminality, rather than in distinction to it.

In this light, we can hazard that the superhero figure captures our collective imaginations in part by partaking of and playing out in bright colors and grand Kabuki gestures the drama of the Subject and his defining criminal, of Noah and his blessed sons defined by Ham and his cursed descendants. The superhero as figure performs as a fantasy-act the pleasures in fantasy and the offer via fantastic aspiration (insofar as identification is the pivot of the reader’s engagement with the superhero) of innocence—“unstained purity,” which, naturally, needs its guilty opposite in order to be innocent. The superhero is violent, yes, and he is engaged in fantastically consequential acts of beating others up, but those others, the villains, are the guilty—whose very names and modes of appearance and structural position in comic-book narratives indicate that their raison d’être is to harm the innocent.

The hero in turn becomes the innocent by receiving the villain’s harms or by violently punishing the villain—not only for his actions but, in a way that passes through the reader’s consciousness without comment or question because it is so unexceptional, for being the villain. The villain is a kind. The villain, when the map of his story is held up against the map of Western ethics as Miller sees it, is playing the role of the criminal race. This structure of story, repeated weekly in countless variations decade upon decade, can—or must—in this light be seen as a vigorous performance of the fantasy of whiteness: thus the superhero is constituting or effecting whiteness in the realm of fantasy: the superhero is doing (in a minor way) and being (in a major way) whiteness as a fantasy-act.

Black Superhero: Monster

The black male figure is of course often criminal or menacing, especially if he is presented as “strong” or “powerful.” His power is not infrequently in his criminality and his threat, which is what Hudlin implies.

The Marvel horror-comic superhero character Blade provides an example of how all these matters get knotted up in the practice of conceptualizing and presenting a black superhero. The vampire-hunting part-vampire Blade was the lead character in a three-movie film franchise starring Wesley Snipes (Blade, 1998; Blade II, 2002; Blade: Trinity, 2004). Blade is an example therefore of the Hudlin bad-ass black male hero, and was a precursor in film to the zeitgeist cultural apotheosis of Black Panther. Blade’s spike of popularity in the late ’90s and early 2000s did not appear to translate into lasting strength of presence in the imaginations of superhero-comic-book readers, however. As of yet, the character has enjoyed no title of his own that was not either a miniseries or canceled for lack of sufficient sales, though Blade frequently guest-stars in other popular series such as Deadpool, and as of this writing, he has been a recurring cast member in The Avengers and a lead in the new team series Strikeforce.

Blade was originally a supporting character—and nemesis—of Dracula in the 1970s Marvel horror-comics series Tomb of Dracula, written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by the great Gene Colan (figures 2.2 and 2.3). In this first incarnation, the character was a more or less normal human being rather than a superhero—appropriately enough, since Tomb of Dracula was not a superhero series, even if superheroes occasionally guest-starred in it. Blade’s visual signature—the elements by which he was distinguished from other figures on the pages of the comics, not a few of whom carried wooden stakes just like he did—was brown-colored skin tones and a short afro, and a set of clothing choices that appeared to do the work of racial marking in that they were faintly redolent of Blaxploitation film icons Shaft and Superfly: these included a short, sometimes-green, sometimes-brown peacoat (supposedly leather, though it never looked it) and green goggles (evidently to help him see at night when hunting vampires).

Blade’s raison d’être was a vengeance mission: a vampire had killed his mother, and he was determined to eradicate the species from the Earth. In pursuit of his revenge, Blade struggled with a doppelganger who was, in fact, a vampire that had been mysteriously created via mysterious nineteenth-century German superchemistry at the behest of Deacon Frost, the same vampire who murdered Blade’s mother. For a few issues of Tomb of Dracula, this doppelganger killed the original Blade and managed to somehow absorb Blade’s memories and knowledge. But this challenge to Blade’s identity and mortality was soon rectified by the timely magical assistance of the Son of Satan—a half demon with father issues and hence a superhero in his own right. When Tomb of Dracula came to its end after about seventy issues, Blade and his green goggles and vampire-hunting heroics sank into comics limbo with it.

In the movie franchise and in the comic-book appearances inspired by the films’ success from the late 1990s onward, Blade became what the comic character had fought not to be, a vampire-human hybrid—thus, in two senses of the word, revamped. This new, more existentially troubled Blade became retroactively the result of Deacon Frost biting Blade’s mother while Blade was in utero. The filmmakers and Snipes chose a number of visual and behavioral alterations in order to impress upon viewers Blade’s more highly charged and now superheroic status—as well as his otherness, his difference, which was, as it turned out, the primary source of his power and superheroism, more so than vengeance and the pursuit of justice. Blade’s look was transformed: the brown/green leather peacoat and goggles became sexy tight leather pants and a flowing cape-like black leather duster coat; the original Blade’s ’70s afro became what appeared at the time as a 1980s-style fade (the fade not yet having had the renaissance it currently enjoys), with a widow’s peak ever more severe with each subsequent movie. Blade’s persona, previously voluble and unconvincingly hip during the talky thrashings he would administer to the evil undead, became Hudlinesque bad-ass, his face always stony or clenched in inexpressive-to-angry expression and his speech laconic and replete with growls and grunts. Plus the revamped Blade sported the big muscles of a bona fide superhero (the old one’s leather jacket was too loose to discern much by way of physiognomy), he bristled with exotic weaponry, and he had big fangs.

Figure 2.4, from the cover of one of the short-lived series inspired by the movies, is an apt rendering of Snipes et al.’s redo of the character. There and in figures 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 from the comic, we can observe the way that Blade’s superhero image steps into that narrow range of bad-ass appeal allowed to the black male figure. The authors of Blade’s look clearly mine the black male figure’s tendency to signify threatening difference itself—and thus frequently to appear in various discourses as alien, nonhuman, or animal—into a constitutive aspect of Blade’s superhero power. The contrast with the appearance of the Superman paradigm is evident. Blade’s post-film-franchise revamped look emphasizes his being other than human, while Superman, who is also not human, passes for human, albeit human of a white paragon sort.

The emphasis on Blade’s vampire nature in his look can be said to tap into the menagerie of grotesque images commonly used to elicit audience discomfort in the horror genre. In this respect, Blade takes up an aspect that the other paradigmatic superhero, Batman, was originally meant to exemplify (though in Batman’s case, with only occasional success throughout the character’s long history)—that of being frightening, presumably to his enemies but also, in the thrilling way of horror, to his readers. But this representational tactic is given a particular twist in Blade, in that it is the black male body—always already borderline monstrous—that is the bad-ass hero, a hero who is visually as or even more terrifying and more potentially productive of nightmares and horror than the vampires he hunts.

In the movies, especially the first entry, most of the villains, including Deacon Frost, played by the slim, seraglio-eyed Stephen Dorff, are dressed chicly in nightclub attire and bright colors and look more or less like the attractive young white people usually cast as victims in a slasher flick. (Deacon Frost in the comics was a white-bearded old man, depicted wearing a kind of shapeless robe that completed his vaguely biblical look.) Snipes, whose good looks and smoldering onscreen sexiness made him more than adequate to play romantic and heroic leads on several occasions, is in the film’s reconceptualization of the comic-book character a different genre of black male body, one that is the site of discomfort with an erotic frisson, and perhaps of horror (with its usual erotic frisson).

The comic-book images repeat and actually push this representational tactic farther, as though making up for the lack of audible growls in Snipes’s onscreen performance with elaborate visual disfigurements. Thus the post-’70s popular Blade is both the monster of whom the audience is horrified and the hero who slays the monster. His figuration at once capitulates to and exploits the familiar erection/castration paradox.

Blade is an extreme, but he is not alone in the universe of comic-book black superhero depictions in being other and inhuman in his appearance and in tending to be depicted as less than Superman-handsome. Note figures 2.8 and 2.9—cover renderings of the first black superhero, Black Panther, at his most cat-like, and you’ll recognize that the hero with whom he’s most closely visually identified, Batman, boasts greater contrast in costume colors and a partially visible, and therefore humanizing, face.

Along parallel lines, but with more subtle references to monstrosity, we see in figure 2.10 a 1973 cover of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. Cage is the often-parodied but also beloved paradigmatic 1970s black hero, crafted by creators who doubtless spent instructive time watching Blaxploitation films. Not unlike Blade in his original version, his attire was a costumey noncostume, minus the typical cape, domino mask, or cowl. Cage wore a canary-yellow shirt, blue pants, yellow boots, an iron chain as a belt, and an iron headband to accent his short afro. (A well-crafted and generally well-received Netflix dramatic series—reported to be the fourth-most-watched show on the streaming service in its 2016 first season—adapted the character into live-action film capture. Among many other knowing nods to the various credibility-busting aspects of the 1970s comic-book series, the series lampooned the comic’s yellow-and-blue attire when Cage, played by the beautiful Mike Colter, was forced to don an absurd yellow shirt in one episode.) In figure 2.10, Luke Cage looks more like the monstrous Hulk than the heroic Superman, complete with clenched, menacing facial expression, quite unlike Superman’s typical splash-page serenity.

Underlining the general stress marking Cage’s appearance is the fact that his signature yellow shirt is being bullet-flayed from his body, so that the achieved color effect of his “black” skin is exposed. Indeed the ripping of Cage’s clothes (mostly his shirt, but sometimes his pants were shredded as well) and the exposure of the muscular dark-skinned body beneath was arguably itself Cage’s “costume” for the bulk of his early appearances. Certainly it was a signature visual trope of Luke Cage the superhero—like Batman backgrounded by shadows or perching on a rooftop. Of the first twenty-five issues of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire (renamed after issue 16 as Luke Cage, Power Man), which appear between the issue dates of June 1972 and June 1975, I count thirteen covers depicting Cage’s shirt and other clothing being ripped from his body. Within the pages of the first twenty-five issues, only twelve do not show Cage’s shirt being ripped away (though the thirteen where Cage’s clothes are being ripped off inside the comic are not necessarily always the same comics as those where Cage’s shirt is ripped on the cover).

The ostensible logic justifying the repetition of Cage’s clothes being ripped was that his superpower is his diamond-hard skin. To acquire this power, Cage agreed to be subjected to a scientist’s dangerous experimental treatment, because he hoped doing so would earn him parole from prison, where Cage languished on trumped-up charges. (In order to receive his power-granting treatment, Cage had to be naked—of course—and this was depicted with shadows artfully covering the figure’s crotch. This scene was pivotal in issue 1 and repeated whenever Cage’s origin was recounted; I have not counted issue 1 or any of its replays as one of the issues in which Cage’s clothes are flayed.)

This superpower, essentially a take on Superman’s fabled invulnerability, allowed Cage to be seen with bullets bouncing off his chest just as they always bounced off Superman’s. Unlike Superman, however, Cage’s clothes lacked the resistance to bullets that is evidently a property of Kryptonian flying togs. In a bid for the “realism” that Superman’s adventures fighting-in-costume lacked, when Cage was shot or knifed or ray-blasted, as he always was, Cage’s clothes could not and did not survive. This was, however, a dictate of realism that had been bypassed in the depiction of the iconic Marvel Comics heroes the Fantastic Four, whose clothing morphed with the changes of their bodies (stretching, invisibility, bursting into flame) and kept their modesty intact. This representational convention maintained the Fantastic Four’s depictions within the strictures of the Comics Code Authority, presumably, but was explained in the comics stories to be the result of the scientific genius of clothing made with “unstable molecules.” (In a typical Marvel Comics crossover, Cage meets the Fantastic Four and their resident scientific genius, Mr. Fantastic, in issue 9 when Cage battles the Fantastic Four’s archnemesis, Dr. Doom. He borrows a rocket to fly to track down Doom, but neither asks for nor is offered a canary-yellow shirt made with unstable molecules.)

The availability of the figure of the black body to “pornotroping,” as Hortense Spillers elegantly terms it, is obvious here.19 But let’s place aside—for the moment—the meanings and possibilities for imaginative flight that coalesce around superhero-comic storytelling that repeatedly relies on unclothing a black male superheroic body in comics read by a great many if not a majority of consumers who were white, male, and young.

It is noteworthy that the defining visual insignia of this superhero character is to recur to the slashing of his shirt. As though this repeated shirt-slashing and body-baring were a stand-in for the violence directed against black male bodies in practices of lynching and routinized punishments of slavery, imprinted in the American cultural consciousness. As though the violence of ripping his clothing apart were a kind of counterweight necessary to render more appealing or more believable the concept of a black man possessed of superheroic power, the other side of a coin needed to make the currency of the image recognizable for the exchange of fantasy inherent to the commercial life of the comics industry. As though the writers and artists gauge that we readers need, or perhaps simply crave, an underlining, a reassuring or bracing reminder, of the black superhero’s blackness: that is, if we can’t get what it’s deemed we need in the character’s name—“Luke Cage,” “Hero for Hire,” and “Power Man” lacking the signal “Black” that is so conveniently appended to the Panther, the Lightning, the Goliath, and lacking the inherent blackness of “Nubia” or the telltale minstrel flavor of “Whitewash Jones”—then the character’s costume must be ripped away to reveal the color of the fantasized “skin” underneath: this, in a universe of disbelief-suspensions and shared imaginative conceits where a superhero’s costume is the very thing that shows us they are a superhero if they happen not to be doing something clearly superheroic in a given panel (like flying, or punching through a wall).

At every turn, what we see is that an adjustment in expectation, a reframing and rethinking gesture, must be made in the text or the image or both where the black superhero has the temerity to appear. The superhero is white; when or if they aren’t, new visual vocabularies or nomenclatorial legerdemain must be put into play. Or so the creators of the superheroes have apparently gambled.

Black Superhero: Power to the People?

The adjustment needed in the minds of the creators of the white (male) paradigm superhero, of their later followers, and of their imagined readers and buyers—at least as evinced by their creations—is not only visual and textual. A conceptual adjustment is also needed. Luke Cage’s problem (and Black Panther’s and Blade’s) might well be that as a black figure he’s confined by the history that produces blackness, a history that a range of shorthand cultural references renders into a history of defeat and loss and suffering.20 In this vein, we might surmise that part of what prepared the warm reception for Superman in the imaginations of millions of readers is that he arose alongside the World War II triumph of US military and economic dominance and the post–World War II United States’ arrogant international exportation of US cultural products: thus the triumphs of superheroes in the fight against evil on the comic-book page were, and still are, secured in the readers’ imaginations by the perceived political, economic, and military triumph of the nationality (and people or race) of which the hero is a super representative. Given such a context, it’s difficult, then, to pose even an edgy antihero character like Blade, even in the postintegration, post-Reagan hip-hop era, in which Hudlin detects a tendency to worship the black male bad-ass. This is because by simple dint of the character’s blackness, he is tethered to a history in which triumph has by and large not been secured in reality or in the readers’ imaginations. (Again, he is a bad-ass insofar as he is an inherent dissenter from an order from which he is a dissenter because he does not control it.) Blade is a super representative of a historically subordinated or defeated group or, at least, a group that is so perceived: How can comic-book creators, fantasy purveyors, and we who consume their creations as templates for our own fantasies imagine a powerful black hero who is triumphant, given such a history? And if he is truly powerful, why does he not use his power to transform the history he lives through to effect justice for his people?

Three ways to solve the problem:

One way is for such a hero not to be noble in his intentions, that is, for him to be shady, quasi-criminal—as Luke Cage originally was. The way the character’s creators, Archie Goodwin (the writer of Hero for Hire) and George Tuska (the artist), both white men, conceived Cage’s origin story, Cage was put in prison for a crime he didn’t actually commit. (The inker for most of the first twelve issues was Billy Graham, who was black; Graham was the sole credited artist for issues 13, 14, and 15.) The story that Goodwin and Tuska invented was that Cage’s compadre Willis Stryker planted narcotics in Cage’s home to punish Cage for stealing the affections of a woman they both desired, Reva. But prior to this Stryker and Cage had become bosom buddies—“closer than brothers,” Cage testifies in issue 1 (see figure 2.11)—by surviving the “streets” and “slums” of Harlem together. Their mutual survival involved engaging in petty crime: the panel art shows Cage and Stryker counting the money of a purse they’ve stolen, knocking out a white man with a stick, and grabbing a fistful of bills from a cash register. It is during the time that Cage forges his brotherhood with Stryker that Cage becomes a proficient and feared fistfighter, earning “street gang leader” status due to his pugilist skills.

The differences are striking between these images and those of baby Superman lifting a tractor on a farm, or of the mild-mannered Clark Kent in his glasses choirboy-ing it up in the offices of the Daily Planet, or of the images of wealthy Bruce Wayne and his parents accosted by a similar kind of criminal (a mugger) that Cage is depicted to be. The story of Luke Cage’s origin, the story, that is, that introduces him to readers and that justifies his powers and his position as a superhero, is a story of criminality, however petty. The story of how Luke Cage becomes a hero is a story that partakes of and cements one of the most widely believed dictums of white-supremacist meaning-making—blacks commit more crime; blacks are criminals. In precisely this way, Cage is a super representative of his race. What makes him a black superhero, then, is his criminality. Luke Cage’s criminality is the past of his origin, the kernel and seed of his elaboration and unfolding: it is through this gate—a bloodstained one, à la Frederick Douglass?—that Luke Cage enters into the sphere of imaginary superhero fantasy. Cage’s origin is in criminal associations.

It’s true that the trajectory of Cage’s development is that he breaks free from criminal activity in his journey toward heroism, after a purgatorial sojourn in prison. But it must be said that even the break from criminality is sidetracked by the character’s creators’ “realist” innovation of having Cage hang out a shingle as a “hero for hire,” rather than offer his services gratis to a needful public. This innovation was actually a retread, the same tack having been tried and quickly discarded within the space of a single issue by spider-bitten Peter Parker, who gives up trying to make money with his powers once he learns via tragic loss that with great power comes great responsibility. Cage, however, holds onto the idea of mercenary heroism much longer, as though, in order to answer the questions raised by the very concept of a black superhero, he has to remain connected to his “hustler” past for a time, fully as much as he has to be stripped of his clothing for a time. (After issue 25, Cage’s episodes of having his clothes flayed from his body decrease.) Thus the condition for Cage’s becoming a hero—where “condition” refers both to a state or mode of being, and to a prerequisite or stipulation without which the performance of a thing cannot proceed—is his criminality. Following J. Reid Miller’s observations of the concept of the guilty category as preceding and founding the law that apportions guilt to acts and persons in that category, we would expect nothing different.

Black Superhero: Victim of History

A second possibility for conceptually appending “black” to “superhero” is that the black superhero can be a victim en route to the acquisition of his powers, so that his history recapitulates that of the people whom he represents. In this way, the operation of that history remains undisturbed, offering no challenge to our imaginations of what blackness signifies and thus neatly cordoning off avenues of imagination along which we might travel toward blackness with hitherto-undreamt meanings—or, for that matter, toward conceptualizing the superhero in ways we haven’t before. Blade exemplifies this tack. Like Superman, he is an orphan, whose lost parentage is the source of his superheroic difference: Superman is the son of aliens from Krypton, Blade the offspring of a vampire. Both are made heroes by leveraging what is imagined to be a biological difference in order to fight against evil. Essentially like Superman but to a much lesser extent, Blade is super strong and fast and is always able to heal from injuries (i.e., he is invulnerable). Yet this triumphant and powerful and even, in fantasy or ideological terms, paradigmatically (white) American position—escaped or exiled from the Old World, willfully remade stronger and better in the New—is for Blade the result of a curse: a vampire bit his mother and/or murdered his father, depending on the version of his origin. The curse is of course an apt, if never fully adequate, abbreviation of the position of blackness and black people in that quintessential American mythology of rebirth: this part of our common ancestry, the large portion that “arrived” in order to be made black, did not escape and was not precisely exiled—rather, they were condemned to be made anew. If the black hero is a victim (as Cage is, too, in addition to being a criminal), then the white-supremacist order requires no imaginative restructuring.

Here in comics as elsewhere, the historical and culturally sedimented truth of white-supremacist domination over black people becomes a stumbling block to the imagination of black characters possessed of power and to the imagination of blackness articulated to power. What this speaks to is that in addition to what Brown observes as the surfeit of signification that attends the black male image in superhero comics, there is also the conceptual problem of imagining a black hero in comics when white supremacy is or has been the actual order.

Contrasting this second tack with the first, it appears that it is not only the ontological attributes of blackness—that is, to be black is to be criminal—that must be kneaded to fit the shape of a superhero concept that otherwise resists or cannot accommodate such attributes. The stories that white creators of black superhero characters have told provide the trace of yet another level of conceptual wrestling: what is confronted in this second tack is the presence of a history, a social history, which the putative blackness of the superhero summons inexorably to the comic-book page.

In this light—revising my observation earlier—an ontological attribute of blackness is history. As Fanon describes in that fateful moment on the train when his Black Everyman persona is assailed by the cry, “Look, a Negro!”: “I couldn’t take it any longer, for I already knew there were legends, stories, history, and especially . . . historicity,” Fanon declares.21 Historicity attends the interpellation of the black man. In our context, this observation suggests that a story told and/or imaged in superhero comics where blackness or black(ened) bodies appear(s) must be a story importing into it a certain referentiality, a pointing toward meaning and story beyond the simple appearance of the black character (inevitably a supporting character, of secondary importance): the black image and body is different from the norm (it is queer) and thus compels explanation or storytelling devices that situate its nonnormative presence—hence, it conjures the presence of history. Or we might, following Fanon, say that the appearance of blackness carries the weight, otherwise unacknowledged, a subsurface undertow, of the histories that produce whiteness and blackness but that the effectuation of whiteness necessitates remain concealed and ignored: whiteness is masked as “normal” and hence requires no explanation; but whiteness does require blackness, somewhere and somehow, or else it will not be white, and part of blackness’s function in securing whiteness is to carry the burden of signifying the historicity without which neither racial category has any meaning at all.

References to or evocations of history have no necessary purchase when the hero is colored “white.” Indeed, a foundational premise of the (white) superhero is that the fantasy in which we as readers participate leaps beyond the limits of any particular historical condition. A man can only leap tall buildings in a single bound in an imagination unfettered by—or (to return us to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and the origins of Superman) an imagination actively seeking relief from the fetters of—all the histories told and untold when humans have not flown. If the (white) superhero belongs anywhere in time, then it is to a posthuman future—or to another planet, where the extraterrestrial is the figure for the speculation of histories alternate to our own.

Regarding the latter, it would seem that the representational tactic of mining the ore of alternate history is richly promising, if we’re trying to break through impasses of imagination when creating a black superhero or taking a black superhero up as the template for our own fantasy-acts. Surely one way to hurdle these problems is not to concede to the history that produces blackness as the victimized handmaiden of white supremacy but—since this is fantasy—to refuse the link between blackness and its particular history. Imagine a history that played out counter to our own. There is, after all, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) solution: You’re creating fantasies, so why not make the story you tell have a history that diverges from the one we know? In Tarantino’s film, Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and the whole of the Nazi command were machine-gunned and burned to death in the makeshift crematorium of a theater fire in Paris in 1944 at the hands of an avenging Jewish woman and her black male friend (and perhaps lover) and employee.22

In the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, with a flourish, “Man’s misfortune, Nietzsche said, was that he was once a child. . . . As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white.”23 In that statement and in much of the argument of his first book, Fanon not only replaces a supposedly raceless but actually white/European normative account of child development within a patriarchal family with the history of racial formation. I understand him also to be describing the way that we are always, as I’ve written before, abject to the histories that precede and make us, imprisoned within a network and a frame and perhaps above all a language of “rules” and “the way it is” and “reality” that are not our creations or choices, but the sediment of preceding events and their calcification in practices and discourses that support and decree the continual repetition of those practices.

What is lovely to me about fantasy-acts is that it is possible to propose, to conceive, and to begin to flesh out a different rule and a different “way it is,” which can be because the fantasy society occurs someplace and somewhen else, and its history is different. Instructive as to the project of this kind of motivated fantasy-act is another ringing statement of Fanon’s “By Way of Conclusion” in Black Skin: “The problem considered here is located in temporality. Disalienation will be for those Whites and Blacks who have refused to let themselves be locked in the substantialized ‘tower of the past.’ For many other black men disalienation will come from refusing to consider their reality as definitive.”24

Comics in its form, and not only in its superhero genre variety, provides a powerful tool for refusing to consider an unjust reality as definitive, precisely because it presents its information, stories, and effects in and on readers’ minds by rendering temporality, and the problems entangled in the chains of linear temporality, as malleable. Hillary Chute, borrowing from cartoonists and comics-theorizing luminaries Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud, observes, “Comics . . . most fundamentally, ‘choreograph and shape time.’ . . . In the vocabulary of the comics, the other key element aside from the gutter is the panel, also known as the frame. Comics shapes time by arranging it in space on the page in panels, which are, essentially, boxes of time.” Chute continues, “The conventions of comics would seem to dictate that each panel is a moment, . . . [but] time in comics . . . is weirder than that. The weirdness of time in comics is part of the medium’s force as a storytelling form. . . . Comics has the ability to powerfully layer moments of time.”25

Chute’s observation here is primarily about the challenge in comics’ representational form and representational tactics to temporality as we live it (i.e., the past is gone and irretrievable except via inexact and incomplete methods of reconstruction; only the present exists, etc.). Chute also guides us to an understanding of how we can—and do—read comics in ways that play with and refuse ordinary linear temporality.

When we try to find umbrella terms for the study of comics, we tend to privilege the sequential relation of comics’ image-and-text boxes, as in Deborah Whaley’s book title Black Women in Sequence (2015). But Chute, Spiegelman, and McCloud all suggest that sequentiality as it’s generally understood may not actually account for or define comics. Here W. J. T. Mitchell describes a commonplace of comics reading: taking in the whole page at once, skipping ahead to the end, returning to savor and reread the earlier pages (the past of the story). Analyzing a thank-you note given to him in the form of a comics page by cartoonist Nathaniel McClennen, Mitchell notes, “So far my analysis of Nate’s comic has emphasized its multiple temporalities and alternative pathways through sequences of images and words. But there is another way of looking at this work that is specific, if not unique, to comics, and that is the possibility of seeing the whole thing as a unified, synchronic structure, . . . a unified, yet internally differentiated body, playing upon temporal sequence and spatial synchronicity.”26

Following Chute’s method of looking to the testimony of comics creators themselves, I find a passage in New Zealander Dylan Horrocks’s comic book Hicksville (2010) especially helpful for describing what’s useful about comics in working with what Fanon identifies as “the problem . . . located in temporality.” Hicksville layers multiple stories: in the main narrative, the reporter Leonard Batts travels to remote Hicksville to make biographical inquiries about the hometown origins of a famous comic-book creator named Dick Burger; this is laid alongside several ministories in which favorite classic comic strips like Peanuts, Tin-tin, and superhero comics are lovingly parodied, and in which Batts seems to interact with Burger’s creations in “real” life.

In one of the ministories, a character called “the New Zealander” mimics Batts’s investigative journey as he travels to “Cornucopia”—a land bounteous in imagination, it appears—to interview “their greatest cartoonist, Emil Kópen.” The New Zealander asks the sage comics creator Kópen, “How is a comic strip like a map?”27 Kópen, naturally, speaks Cornucopt, helpfully translated for us into English with the help of a third character, a woman who translates between the New Zealander and Kópen. In Cornucopt, the New Zealander learns, the word for comics translates as “text-picture.”

The conceit buttressing this exchange is that the world-famous cartoonist Kópen has previously referred to himself, somewhat mysteriously, as a cartographer. Nevertheless, the New Zealander’s question strikes an odd note, appearing to assume connections that no casual reader of comics would be likely to make. Indeed, it is the kind of question asked by a more-than-casual reader, one who brings to the question a set of conclusions about the centrality of sequence to comics form and a clarity he thinks is commonplace about the metaphoric relation of comics’ formal sequentiality to the kinds of directions provided by a map—enfolding within the choice of metaphor a conviction that the relationship between a map and places in the world is one of transparent accuracy.

I read this conversation as a dramatic staging of a philosophical and formal question—or about philosophy of form? about the forms philosophy can take?—which has to do with asking how a comic strip relates to that very “reality” that Fanon urges us to refuse. The philosophical and formal question is how a comic strip relates, then, to something that so profoundly is that it’s the contours of the Earth we stand on; and this is thus a question about the relationship between the fantastic and the real.

The sage Emil Kópen replies to the New Zealander’s question,

They [comic strips and maps] are the same thing; using all of language—not only words or pictures. . . . Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind—the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time—or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time. . . . I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes? . . . The things we crave are either near us or far. Whereas time is about process. I have lived many years and I have learned not to trust process. Creation, destruction. These are not the real story. When we dwell on such things, we inevitably lapse into cliché. The true drama is in these relationships of space.28

The translator, perhaps speaking for the New Zealander, perhaps raising her own objections, interjects, “But a flame, even a touch, are processes, not things.” Kópen answers, “But behind such processes, there is a stillness; and in that quiet exist spatial relationships which transcend time.”29

This is a reckoning of comics form—which we must understand as therefore an account of reading/seeing comics, of the reader’s active engagement with the formal properties of the comics and their contents—that may perhaps verge on the megalomaniacal or the messianic, appearing to claim for comics what only our guesses of divine or transuniversal perspective could boast. Nevertheless, combining Horrocks-via-Kópen with Spiegelman, McCloud, and Chute, we can surmise that the most conventional of comics storytelling devices need not lead to the most conventional representations of blackness: if comics form does not conform to linear temporality, if comics transcend time, if comics may delve beneath process to find stillness, then as a form, comics offer, and should indeed entice and encourage, opportunities to knock that devil history off his horned feet.

Comics’ spatialization and thus transcendence as well as layering of time, comics’ disarrangement of even the linearity of the sequence on which its structure relies, the queer temporal indeterminacy of the way comics tell stories and the way comics compel reading, all are useful tools for fantasy-acts. Comics can make historiography itself cartographic—what the reader and the comics creator both are enabled to do is to leap not just buildings but epochs, to scramble cause and effect across time. Rendering historiography in the mode of cartography can be aimed at Fanonian “disalienation,” can bring forth keys for unlocking the ironbound “tower of the past.” And at the same time as one can come to comics with such goals in mind, the very reading of them can provide a demonstrative example, a “map,” that unspools in the readers’ minds the possibility of refusing reality.

As we know, such moves are entirely precedented in African American and African Americanist letters.

See Ashraf Rushdy’s observations of how neo-slave narratives (the novels by African American authors that thematize slavery from the 1970s to the 1990s) repeatedly return to the trauma-curing tactic of reimagining traumatic events in a manner that empowers the traumatized:30 For example, in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), the protagonist Ursa’s inheritance of the intractably traumatizing legacy of her foremothers’ rape and forced incest at the hands of a Brazilian slave master—Ursa’s own great-grandfather—imprisons Ursa in a kind of stuttering replay of her foremothers’ lives. This cycle breaks when Ursa begins to reimagine the stories of her foremothers’ assaults with a recognition of how pleasure as well as pain inhere in those experiences, and in her reimagination, she assumes a position to choose which (pleasure or pain) she desires. And in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), a folktale of fugitive enslaved black people who were reported to have killed themselves to avoid being recaptured is transformed from a story of despair and futile defiance to—from a West African cosmological point of view, adopted by the novel’s narrator—a story of joyful reunion with beloved ancestors and a figurative return to Africa, once the narrator, a historian, reimagines the folktale as his own version of “real” history.

See also Saidiya Hartman’s pathbreaking essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). Hartman calls for historians of enslavement to confront the violent erasure in the historiography of the slave trade and slavery of enslaved black women’s consciousnesses and being (such erasure being a foundational act of the trade, the practice, and the historiography that accounts for it) via the adoption of “critical fabulation,” a practice that turns a gimlet eye to the authoritative claims of orthodox historical method:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling, . . . laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. . . .

The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. “Fabula” denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A fabula, according to Mieke Bal, is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors. An event is a transition from one state to another. Actors are agents that perform actions. (They are not necessarily human.) To act is to cause or experience an event.” . . .

By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.31

These, however, are precedents for us. The creators of Luke Cage, of Blade, of the Black Panther, and of Nubia conceived their characters without the benefit of such examples—though it is probably not unfair to suppose they would have been unaware of this trend in African American letters even had it preceded them or been contemporaneous. Creators of black superheroes for Marvel and DC might have taken up the challenge to thoroughly or convincingly imagine black triumph via an alternate history in order to conceptualize their black superheroes. But often they didn’t.

In this sense, the limitations I’ve been stumbling over trying to articulate “black” to “superhero” may be limitations enforced by chosen representational tactics, rather than due to the inherent properties of the superhero figure. Were these representational tactics inscribed within the figure of the black superhero in Marvel and DC comics because Luke Cage’s, Blade’s, and Nubia’s creators were white and unconsciously or consciously inured to white privilege, with commitments unconscious or conscious to white supremacy such that they could not or would not dare imagine a black character unfettered by the subordinate status that white-supremacy requires, despite the powerful tools offered by comics form?

Doubtless, yes. An important example from comics history would tend to support drawing this conclusion, at least insofar as we can discern in this history comics creators being concerned not to challenge the white-supremacist assumptions and white privilege of their assumed readers.

In 1973—many of the seeds of my own personal fantasy-acts of antiracist or anti-antiblack revisions and additions to the superhero figure were planted by superhero stories published during those early-1970s years—Marvel Comics debuted the character Killraven in Amazing Adventures. The second Marvel title of its name, Amazing Adventures’ 1970s run had previously featured characters who played supporting roles in Fantastic Four (Black Bolt and the Inhumans) and X-Men (the Beast). In issue 18, Marvel offered readers a spin-off of a version of H. G. Wells’s sci-fi classic War of the Worlds. “BASED ON CONCEPTS CREATED IN THE PROPHETIC NOVEL BY H.G. WELLS!” the cover proclaims.

The claim for Wells’s late-1890s scientific romance, detailing an imperialist Martian invasion of England, as prophetic—whether viewed from 1973 or now—is obscure, unless the creators of the comic, in their attempt to make Amazing Adventures stand out on the newsstand where it competed with dozens of other titles, were taking too seriously the soon-to-be-full-fledged series’s conceit and judged themselves as well as Wells to have precognitive powers. Amazing Adventures, featuring War of the Worlds, took place in the future—a future dated 2018 AD—in which Killraven, a white male freedom fighter wielding a sword in one hand and a futuristic laser gun in the other, fought the good fight against Martian colonizers who’d successfully enslaved the human race, after having failed their first attempt at conquest “more than a century ago” (i.e., when Wells’s anti-imperialist fantasy was first serialized).

Killraven’s visual signature was striking. He had long hippie-ish red hair and, unlike nearly every other male superhero at the time, wore very little clothing, at least in his first appearance: in figure 2.12, Killraven’s knee-high boots and star-blazoned singlet with thin shoulder straps, laced with a bit of corset stringing that rendered ineffectively modest the singlet’s deep skin-baring plunge from shoulder to the nether regions between navel and doll-smooth crotch, was the kind of costume more often given to heroes with “woman” or “girl” as part of their names.

This combination made Killraven a potentially volatile mash of butch masculine androgyny that hinted of the then-young gay liberation movement and of disco. Or more than hinted. As comics creator genius Grant Morrison, in his almost equally genius guise as superhero-comics historian, writes of similar costume developments during the 1970s in DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes, “The modest Girl Scouts of the Legion of Super-Heroes were being made over by the artwork and costume design skills of artist Dave Cockrum into Studio 54 disco bunnies with bell-bottoms and bunches, belly cutaways, plunging necklines, and high-heeled, thigh-high Paco Rabanne space platforms. It was an equal opportunity era and the Legion’s substantial gay following was catered to with new costumes for characters like Element Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Colossal Boy that emphasized lurid cutaway panels and acres of rock-hard exposed muscle.”32 Morrison’s observations are of a period following Killraven’s debut, and thus what Morrison describes of the Legion’s costumes should be seen as following Killraven’s influence. By my reading, Cosmic Boy’s costume was first stripped down to its bare essentials in Superboy #215, with a cover date of March 1976, three years after Killraven first appeared (figure 2.13).

Thus, set in a future “prophesied” by H. G. Wells, and premised on a fanciful rewriting of the past in which Wells’s fiction became a report of historical events (much as Orson Welles’s celebrated radio-broadcast revision of the novel in 1938 was apparently taken to be a live news broadcast by many audience members), Killraven’s Amazing Adventures fully partakes of comics’ flexible play with temporality. We can see Amazing Adventures incorporating in its visual representational choices the imagination of a future characterized by departures from early-1970s norms of gendered clothing—at least for its men—and, implied by these choices, a concomitant guess that such attire might reflect more “liberated” gender and sexual social arrangements in the future. These guesses responded to the post–Stonewall Rebellion, early-1970s present of the comics’ creation, allowing Morrison to recall an identifiable “substantial gay following” for the Legion of Super-Heroes, a following that could be known to comics creators by the middle of the decade, when such a following of any number would probably have been difficult to identify, much less cater to, ten or twenty years prior.

Alterations in gender and sexual relations are often confluent with alterations in race relations. This is because the boundaries between so-called races, the concept of race itself, with all its delirium-inducing totems of “blood” and “lineage” and “purity” and so forth, cannot hold without constant policing of sexual relations: in particular, the coherence of a racial concept requires that women must be forced or cajoled into “choosing” to sexually reproduce with men bearing a similar phenotype to their own; otherwise, the phenotypes “mix,” and the race loses its “purity,” which is to say its identifiability.33

Accordingly, the Killraven comic’s visual flirtation with queerness manifested most tangibly in a story element in which an interracial black-man/white-woman romance blossoms. (In light of the mutually constitutive entanglements between gender/sex and race I’ve just briefly mapped, the trajectory of this examination of Killraven comics suggests that interracial sexual and/or romantic relationships are themselves—in a world where a keystone of normativity is the reproduction of race—inherently queer.)

Don McGregor took over scripting Amazing Adventures featuring War of the Worlds in its fourth issue, when, as he describes in the preface to a collected edition of Killraven’s comics appearances, the comic was assumed to be doomed. McGregor was a rising star and fan favorite among Marvel’s writers because of his work on Jungle Action, a title that featured the Black Panther—about which more shortly. In the process of trying to save War of the Worlds from cancellation, McGregor decided to make Killraven’s supporting characters, his band of “Freemen” fighting against the Martians, more individualized, with their own dramatic arcs. Among the most prominent of these changes was his decision to romantically pair the comic’s one black male supporting character, M’Shulla, with a white female character, Carmilla Frost, giving rise to what would become famed (or infamous) as the first interracial kiss in mainstream comics.

(Quick side note on names here: McGregor didn’t create the character M’Shulla, as the character was first named in issue 19, written by Marvel stalwart Gerry Conway. McGregor writes that he “suspect[s]” the name M’Shulla “came from the Parkway in the Bronx.”34 The Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx is a name or word from the Algonquin language. If McGregor is correct, Conway took a Native American name and gave it a faux-African tinge with an orthographic transformation, and the resultant sound of the name was suspiciously close to one of the few other black male characters one could find among Marvel’s comics in 1973: T’Challa, the Black Panther. And is it possible that McGregor’s selection of the character Carmilla Frost’s surname forewarned—or seeded the unconscious requirement—that her whiteness would be emphasized by her pairing with a character that visually and by nomenclature exemplified blackness?)

McGregor’s creative decisions to pair the two secondary characters—Morrison describes the writer as “radical” and says that his “work burned with the holy fire of a just and loving wrath” and excited a “passionate” fan base35—were met with skepticism and racist resistance by his coworkers and his editors. “I know it’s difficult for some people to know where this country was at in 1973–74,” McGregor writes. “There were certainly no interracial couples in comics. There were certainly no gay couples in comics.” (Again, note the rhetorical braiding here of alterations in the codes governing sexual and gender relations and those governing race relations.) In the short essay “Panther’s Chronicles,” McGregor’s account of how he came to write the first series featuring the Black Panther, he succinctly details,

It was a different time, the early ’70s, and what many people take for granted now in storytelling media—and especially what can or can’t be in comics—then was verboten. Writing about race, or sexual preferences other than heterosexual were virtually nil. In the world of comics these and other topics were considered a taboo.

Many of the rules in comics are unwritten, but get inside the conclave, and they are there, some insidiously, some absurd, some shrewd. But the rules are there, and it didn’t take long for me to begin to realize they shaped what I could do as a storyteller.36

Elsewhere in his recollection of his writing of Killraven stories, McGregor similarly notes,

As I look back on it, I realize I was so naïve. I believed in the Bullpen [Marvel Comics’ name for its collection of writers, artists, inkers, etc.]. I’d read about in the comics growing up. It was a creative environment, but the Hallowed Halls could be a minefield. I didn’t realize that there . . . were people who would be prejudiced and did not want any color but white in the books, and certainly no intermingling between people of different races. . . .

. . . If you pay attention, you’ll note early on that there are scenes in Amazing Adventures where M’Shulla and Carmilla have a moment together, just the two of them. . . . Then, someone complained to an editor that if I were doing a “salt and pepper” relationship in “Killraven,” he wanted off the book.37

This unnamed coworker and cocreator’s racist threat ultimately resulted in McGregor appealing to the executive editor, the man whose name and work were strongly stamped on Marvel Comics’ creations by the 1970s, and even more so now: Stan Lee. “I felt if I appealed to Stan’s desire for Marvel to innovate, I could get his approval. Rumor had it that DC might do an interracial kiss in one of their romance comics,” McGregor recalls, “so I told Stan, ‘Wouldn’t it be a shame if DC has an interracial couple before Marvel?’ Well, Stan clearly didn’t want that. . . . What a shame it would be if DC did it first when our fans loved Marvel being the more progressive company.” Lee, though famed for his liberal (if often stridently anticommunist) screeds both in his “Stan’s Soapbox” column that appeared in several titles and within the comics stories themselves, evidently was not at ease with being a racial trailblazer, at least not in this instance. “Stan asked, ‘But does she have to [be] white, Don? Can’t she be green?’” McGregor remembers. “Stan was concerned that some Southern states would hold the comic up at a PTA meeting, protesting what their kids were seeing.”38

The cautionary picture that McGregor reports Stan Lee conjuring—the almost bizarre and certainly nonsensical idea of “a Southern state” sufficiently personified to wave around a comic at a PTA meeting (in that same state? in some other state?)—is interesting, suggesting the ways that a popular entertainment form dismissed as mere fantasy was nevertheless understood (and feared) by the industry’s arguably most powerful editor—no doubt in light of the Comics Code Authority’s many restrictions on what could be depicted.

In addition, Lee’s rhetorical question pertains to what had been established at Marvel as a fairly common representational and editorial tactic. Along with Jack Kirby, Lee had created the X-Men, superheroes born with their powers and therefore mutants. For reasons never wholly logically coherent, mutants, despite being costumed just like other superheroes were and being engaged in the very same crime-busting superheroic acts of salvation of the nonsuperhero public, were shunned objects of prejudice because they were mutants, that is, because they were a different “race” or perhaps a different “sexuality.” Thus stories written about the prejudice faced by the mutant X-Men—all of whom, originally, were depicted as racially white—could always be read, and were intended to be read, as partly about the prejudice faced by black people or other “minorities.”

In this established Marvel tradition, it no doubt made sense to Stan Lee in 1973–1974 to deflect any unwelcome censorious attention that might be drawn to an interracial relationship in his comics by representing a metaphorical or fanciful interracial depiction—like a black man and a green woman. Indeed Lee’s initial editorial decision was to allow the interracial kiss to occur (and thus beat DC to the punch) but to literally color the panel depicting the kiss in such a way as to obscure what was being represented. “Finally, it was decided . . . that the panel where M’Shulla and Carmilla kiss would be done in knockout colors,” McGregor writes. “Essentially, that term means both characters would be done in one color, both of them purple, or something like that. This way, I guess, the thought was no one could hold the page up in high dudgeon and rant about race purity or whatever the hell it is they do.”39

Ultimately McGregor along with his artist P. Craig Russell and colorist Petra Goldberg performed an end run around this decision, and the panel was not produced in knockout colors when issue 31 reached the stands, but was colored “naturally,” with the races of the two characters conventionally denoted (figure 2.14).

I recount McGregor’s recollection at length because it reveals the extent to which the everyday operation of comics creation under editorial direction has historically been undertaken with the assumption—not uncommon to arts and entertainment production across various media—that comics, immersed in fantasy as they are, should never dream dreams without white supremacy.

We are, after all, talking about two-dimensional figures drawn in pencil and ink and mass-reproduced on cheap newsprint paper (at the time), colored in by a pixelating process that at best imitated but could never represent with full accuracy even a narrow range of actual human skin tones. Somehow these two-dimensional drawings appeared to be a threat to “race purity” in the eyes of at least one of the comic’s creators (evidently not the writer, penciller, or colorist; perhaps the inker, the letterer . . . ?)—so threatening, in fact, that this colleague of McGregor’s threatened to quit work on the comic. And it was thought the drawings would certainly appear to be a threat to the politically powerful southern reader-slash-PTA-provocateur imagined by one of the industry’s premier editors.

Since M’Shulla and Carmilla are not “real” and cannot actually reproduce sexually, they logically cannot pose any threat of any kind in reality to (an always-already insupportable anyway) “race purity.” (To suppose that these figures could do so is of course to demonstrate the feeble hold of racial purity on reality.) They only do so by presenting images to young minds who, it is somehow presumed, will immediately or proximately upon closing the book rush out to imitate what they have seen. They do so only—but, as I’ve been arguing with respect to fantasy-acts all along, significantly—by challenging the imagination of racial purity.

This challenge to the imagination of racial purity amounts to a negative act as much as a positive one—that is, McGregor et al.’s innovation was as much not following the unwritten but pervasive rule that superhero comics should not depict “any color but white in the books,” as it was affirmatively representing the hitherto-unseen spectacle of imaginary people with imaginary races imaginarily pressing their imaginary lips to each other.

The kind of behind-the-scenes battles between politically liberal creative decisions and publication pressures that McGregor describes indicates that we shouldn’t ascribe a monolithic white-supremacist view or stubborn lack of awareness of racial injustice to white comics creators. As we have seen, the concept of the superhero appears to be tethered to its being imagined as an exemplar of the imaginary qualities of whiteness—that strange and incoherent, and so necessarily fanciful and fantastic, combination of innocence and invulnerability, absolute good and absolute power. But, as we’ll see shortly, the concept is subject to being reworked and reshaped so that the superhero does not have to be fundamentally white. The reshaping of the concept—wholly possible, we would think, because it is an imaginative enterprise and thus capable of overcoming, as Ernst Bloch elegantly phrases it, “the resistance of the empirical”40—is actively resisted in McGregor’s account. White-supremacist conventions of superhero representation and the practices that adhere to those conventions are owed to avowed white-supremacist allegiances on the part of individual comics creators (the inker/letterer who “wants off” any book figuring “salt and pepper” relationships) and/or to relatively spineless accommodations of those announcing such allegiances (the editor who wonders if we might avoid the whole problem by making the white character green), and to the continual repetition of these avowals and their accommodation from 1938 onward.

These are failures, willful or weak-minded, of political imagination: wherein we see that where blackness is figured in superhero comics, the fantasy is of political matters. To fantasize blackness in superhero comics is not to fantasize something wholly unreal but to fantasize possibilities of the disarrangement of temporal and social realities.

Wakanda Forever: The Sovereign Maroon

Thus the third way to conceptually link “black” to “superhero” is to take seriously that if blackness is a fact, as an early English translation of Fanon averred, it is a political fact, and to address blackness or to represent it in the fantasy worlds of superhero comics demands explicitly political invention. Representing blackness in the fantasy worlds of superhero comics demands a reimagination of the sine qua non of politics in modernity: the nation.

This is the third tactic in my accounting but historically the first. The first black superhero in Marvel or DC comics—the first black superhero character of mainstream comics—was created by the selfsame Stan Lee who later cringed at the thought of an interracial embrace between two-dimensional figures. Working in collaboration with the great, boundlessly generative artist Jack Kirby—it remains a point of heated contention as to which of the two, Kirby or Lee, contributed the greater part to the fecund list of the pair’s many cocreations—Lee and Kirby hurdled the limits that seem to have plagued the imagination of a black superhero, by rendering the figure inherently political, in 1966—even if politics was something that, as we’ll see shortly, Lee wanted to avoid (though Kirby didn’t).

In this third way, we imagine an alternate history of blackness that exists alongside “real” history, tucked into its folds, hidden away. This tack draws for its use on a common trope of superhero comics and of comic-strip adventure stories, to which superheroes are heir: the hidden land that follows its own histories, its own customs, and shelters its own versions of humanity: Atlantis, home of Namor the Sub-Mariner in Marvel Comics and, in DC, of Aquaman, and of the water-breathing Atlanteans; Paradise Island, home of Wonder Woman and the immortal Amazons; Asgard, home of Thor and the Asgardian gods. In the case of the black superhero, this, then, is the way of the sovereign maroon. And thus we come at last to the Black Panther. But arguably more significant than the Black Panther himself, we come to the hidden nation of Wakanda.

In 2000, Stan Lee’s introductory essay for a deluxe reprinting of early Fantastic Four issues, including July 1966’s issue 52, in which the Black Panther first appears, has an interestingly laconic recollection of the creation of the Black Panther. “Another favorite [story from Fantastic Four] of mine is ‘The Way It Began . . . !’ featuring the mysterious and charismatic Black Panther, the first African super hero in comics,” Lee writes. Lee is referring to issue 53, in which the origin of the black superpowered character, who attacked the Fantastic Four in the previous issue and appeared to be villainous, is revealed, and the Panther’s essential superheroic goodness is affirmed. “I’ve always strongly believed [the Black Panther] . . . has all the qualities necessary to become one of the most popular, best-selling heroes in all of comicdom. When you combine his unique and glamorous panther power with the strange gripping legend of the Wakanda nation and add the fact that T’Challa is guardian of the world’s only priceless store of vibranium, you’ve got a combo that’s hard to beat.”41

Lee’s pithy assessment of the Black Panther’s potential—but as of 2000, not-yet-realized—commercial appeal becomes the title for the introduction to the reprint collection as a whole, which bears the title “A Combo That’s Hard to Beat.” The title of the introduction suggests that the Black Panther’s story is the most enduring signal creation of the run of issues 51–60 that this collection covers. But even so, Lee has no more to say about the Black Panther and considerably less to say about him in this introduction than about how much he enjoyed writing the Thing, the Human Torch, and Mr. Fantastic (Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, is unsurprisingly of little note in Lee’s catalogue of character favorites in this introductory essay). The political import of the character is given no shrift in Lee’s account. The nearly undeniable fact that the Black Panther as superhero character evinces a kind of sideways, glancing confrontation with the race politics of the United States circa 1966, a time of no small ferment on that front, and the likely fact that the historical moment was influential in the process of the character’s creation, do not rise to the forefront of Lee’s recollection.

By contrast, this context and its political implications are acknowledged, and stand near or at center stage, in the account of Lee’s collaborator, artist Jack Kirby. Kirby was certainly the creator responsible for the Black Panther’s costume and overall look, but quite possibly also the moving force behind the introduction of the character, period.42 In a 1986 interview, Kirby recalls that circa 1966 he “got to hemming and hawing”: “‘You know, there’s never been a black man in comics.’ And I brought in a picture [that he, Kirby, had drawn] of the costumed guy which was later modified. . . . The Black Panther came in, and of course we got a new audience! We got the audience we should’ve gotten in the first place.” Years earlier, and closer in time to the events in question, Kirby told an audience at the San Diego Golden State Comic Con (forerunner to the present-day cultural event the San Diego Comic-Con) in August 1970, “There was no pressure [to add a black character]. I thought it was time to do it. I found that there was a lack in myself. I found that I, myself, had not been doing it, and I felt it was my responsibility to do it, and I did it, because I’d want it done for me.”43 (Kirby, it should be noted, was the artist who first drew Whitewash Jones, twenty-five years before he drew and cocreated the Black Panther.)

Kirby’s 1970 statement foregrounds his sense of personal political and artistic responsibility and deflects or holds at a distance any connection or response to larger political events—“There was no pressure,” he asserts, which seems to be prompted by an audience member’s or interlocutor’s question asked with the dubious (and perhaps sinister) assumption that Marvel Comics could conceivably be under “pressure” from the civil rights and Black Power movements to create a black superhero for the movements’ political gain.

It was this very suspicion or accusation that we may guess dogged Stan Lee’s chary 2000 introduction, which is uncharacteristically lacking in Lee’s usual self-congratulation. Indeed, we find Lee in his own 1970 interview suggesting that the Black Panther had faltered in the popularity contest of superheroes due to his being overidentified with race and blackness in the United States—not so much because of the character “being” black but because of the character’s name.

Marvel Comics introduced the Black Panther character months prior to the announcement of the organization of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in October 1966 (though Fantastic Four #52’s cover date is July 1966, it would have appeared on newsstands weeks earlier than that date). There was, however, evidently no connection between the superhero and the selection of the name for the new political movement; rather, the overlap was a case of coeval invention.44 It was an unhappy coincidence, to hear Lee tell it, as he is reported saying in a 1970 interview, “I made up the name Black Panther before I was conscious that there is a militant group called the Black Panthers,” Lee says. “And I didn’t want to make it seem that we were espousing any particular political cause. And because of that we’re not able to push the Panther as much, although we’re still using him.”45

Lee’s feeling of having had his character’s fortunes hijacked by political fates beyond his control is obliquely confirmed in a report by Roy Thomas, who was assistant editor to Lee at Marvel in 1966 and late that year began a long and popular stint writing The Avengers, a superteam that soon included the Black Panther. As his contribution to an anthology that adapted Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning literary-fiction superhero the Escapist (the character is an homage to Lee and Kirby’s—and Siegel and Shuster’s—Golden Age superheroes) for bona fide comics, Thomas concocted an imaginary publication history of comics featuring the Escapist. Inventing a Silver Age publication existence for Chabon’s superhero and mixing this account with real history, Thomas notes that in an iteration of the Escapist supposedly published by “Conquaire Comics,” “‘the publishing arm of Conquaire Grooming Products, manufacturer of hair-care and skin-care products for African-Americans,’” the Escapist, though always otherwise white like any Golden Age superhero, was drawn as black. “Conquaire dubbed its version [of Escapist comics] The Black Power of the Escapist,” Thomas writes, as the puns accumulate. “‘Black Power’ was a phrase just coming into vogue,” he adds with a hint of wry amusement, “as was ‘Black Panther,’ a name Lee and Kirby used . . . just as the recently founded African-American organization of that name began to gain notoriety and cause considerable consternation up at Marvel.”46

Thus Lee’s consciously brave, even pious declaration in 2000 that he “always strongly believed” the Black Panther “has all the necessary qualities” to be a best-seller and front-rank superhero along the lines of Spider-Man is a concession to the view—a view that Lee evidently imagines to be settled at least as of 2000—that, possessed of necessary qualities though the character may be, the Black Panther has not been a best-seller or front-rank superhero. And this failure would be, must be, because he is black and, worse, affiliated by name to an evidently notorious political movement for black people’s human rights.

Lee’s 2000 statement also appears to slightly cloak his character’s blackness behind the perhaps less threatening, racially neutral-ish pseudonationality of “African.” The Black Panther was “the first African super hero,” Lee notes—not wholly inaccurately, at least with respect to US-based major comics companies. But certainly this is an incomplete and tellingly fudging epithet to bestow on the Panther, since really he is the first black “African” and thus the first black, period, superhero. Lee’s relatively restrained, even shell-mouthed, introduction of the Black Panther reads as though as late as 2000—thirty-six years after what appears therefore in retrospect to have been something of a commercial gamble Lee undertook with Kirby in Fantastic Four, but seventeen years prior to the phenomenal commercial and cultural-zeitgeist success of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther movie—Lee still felt compelled to kowtow to the “unwritten rules” against “writing about race” that Don McGregor cites.

Little wonder, then, that McGregor has no memory that Lee offered him encouragement when McGregor set out to write a Black Panther–centered comic set in the imaginary black African nation of Wakanda. McGregor recalls, “An all-black cast in a comic book, from a major company, at that time? Wasn’t happening. . . . Believe me, no one in the editorial hallowed halls was applauding this approach. In fact, I can’t recall a single, encouraging word from editorial during the entire run of the series [Jungle Action].”47

In fact, the hallowed halls of Marvel editorial, where Lee at the time held the highest seat, were clearly troubled by the violation of those unwritten rules. “Along the way, issue after issue, editorial wanted to know where the white people were,” McGregor remembers. “Always, ‘Where are the white people?’ And my response was, ‘This is a hidden, technologically advanced African nation. Where are the white people supposed to come from?!’ . . . They wanted the Avengers in there. They wanted white people helping black people out.”48

They wanted, in other words, for the stories in McGregor’s Black Panther series to follow the formula established by the kinds of stories that preceded Black Panther’s arrival in issue 6 of Jungle Action. McGregor writes of his early months at Marvel, “One of my jobs was to read all the [Marvel] reprint titles. One of the titles was Jungle Action, a collection of jungle genre comics from the 1950s, mostly detailing white men and women saving Africans or being threatened by them.”49

Yet Lee had already violated the Mr. Livingston–colonialist–fantasy rules meant to frame the depiction of black Africans in inventing Wakanda. Lee and Kirby’s creation Wakanda was like Atlantis and Asgard and Paradise Island, a world unto itself, with magical properties and full of magical, impossible people (water breathers; immortal women warriors; Norse gods) with wildly advanced and inconceivable “technology” (like the telepathic radios and Purple Healing Ray of the original Wonder Woman and the insane weapons of Kirby’s Asgard, like “the Odinian Force-Arrow”). But unlike them, Wakanda’s conceit placed it within a terrestrial political entity as its home—the at once mythic and concrete “Africa.”

Moreover, the magical properties of Wakanda’s people were, precisely, that they did not adhere to the colonialist assumptions by which they were supposed to have been imagined; they were magical Negroes who, given that they were conceived to be hidden, supersecret, and possessed of impossibly advanced technological marvels, were not magical by dint of being Negro in any other way than being placed in Africa and being colored black; their magic lay in their having to be, in order to be at all, apart from, secessionist with respect to the history of Africa and of blackness itself. This, in truth, was theirs, and the Black Panther’s, superpower.

This is all to underline that the Black Panther, and the legendary invention Wakanda of which he is representative and that is in story terms an extension of him and his raison d’être, is a superhero by virtue of confrontation with the concept of the superhero as inherently racialized and therefore presumably white, a concept calcified by the continual practice of “unwritten rules” and conventions of superhero-comic representation. As McGregor recalls thinking about how he would write the Black Panther series in Jungle Action that he had been assigned, “I . . . realized that Wakanda was a concept, but that detailing how the country worked had never been explored.”50

McGregor felt it was his task in taking on Jungle Action to elaborate on assumptions underlying the character that had never been pursued—if Wakanda was hidden, supersecret, technologically “advanced,” a comic depicting it would not be full of white people, and stories told in such a comic would not center white characters, and white characters would neither save nor necessarily be threatened by the black Wakandans. Lee, by contrast, did not think these implications through in a sustained act of conscious world-building, judging from his abbreviated, race-eschewing, sorry-not-sorry endorsement of his own Black Panther creation.

We may judge the lack of thinking-through, too, from Kirby’s visual rendering of Wakanda in its first appearance: unlike the wild inventiveness of monumental sci-fi Asgardian architecture that Kirby so beautifully rendered as a routine matter in Mighty Thor comics, or similar flights of visual fancy in depictions of the land of the Inhumans, who like the Panther were supporting characters in Fantastic Four, Wakanda in its 1966 version is a land of huts and grassy jungle with men and some women dressed in loincloths, headdresses, and draperies that hint of dashiki, all set with conscious incongruity alongside fantastical machinery and outlandish weapons.

It seems, then, that Kirby and Lee came to their character and his country via intuitive leap, which in recollection Lee refers to, at once blandly and tellingly, as “the strange gripping legend of the Wakanda nation.”51 It is strange, yes, because the conjunction of blackness (even hiding behind a spurious Africanity) with power, let alone superpower, is odd, out of kilter with the assumptions underwriting, framing, and determining the antiblackness and white-aspiration of modern civilization’s cultures—Wakanda is odd, not-like, and threatening. It’s gripping for the same reasons, since what is strange and threatening grips the imagination; but it is also gripping in that the adhesiveness of such imagination, the swirling undertow to which it makes the imaginer present, is a grappling with the strangeness, the essential unrealness, of racial categories and their power to form and deform. It is a legend because such a challenge to the assumption of blackness as always-necessarily-already the lesser of whiteness can only be a story, an imaginarium plucked from an otherworld temporally and spatially distant, as in the past where legends lie or in the future where legends will be. And it is a nation—much more than Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island is a nation or Thor’s Asgard is a nation—because these appeals to and effects of strangeness, of threatening and thrilling grip, and of the legendary are all twists of political import, creations of political imagination: Wakanda is an alternate, perhaps an involute, of the known political history that produced and produces blackness as well as “Africa.”

I use the adjective and noun “involute” here to describe the Black Panther’s and Wakanda’s relation to the histories of blackness as well as of comic-book superheroes and propose that it might be equally descriptive of how I guess Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s invention of Wakanda to have proceeded: intuitively, propositionally, heuristically. For Lee and Kirby, I guess their creative process to follow a trajectory that begins, if the superhero is black, then there are a number of “qualities” that he must possess, a number of touchstones to which he must refer and from which he must at the same time depart, and the result might look like this but unlike that: a succession of deductions, syllogisms, and suppositions that we cannot precisely chart or follow but that have a conclusion we can, via the act of fantasy, bring into being. The black superhero will have to be black, but black in a different way, and a superhero in a different way.

For me, my intuitive, memory-ransacking search for a word that describes the Black Panther’s relation to history brings me to “involute,” where that word carries its meaning of margins rolled inward, and of whorls obscuring the axis around which they wind, and of long, curving grammatical construction. Here, then, to make the black superhero, to conjoin black with what is imagined (but largely due to imaginative failure or cowardice) as constitutively white, we travel via curl and curve backward from the margins of the latter-day productions of the meaning of blackness and the moment-ago-modern production of the comic-book superhero toward the origin points, the central axes of these terms’ meanings, not to return to what was and what was meant then or now, but to retell the story of origin using hitherto-undreamt rearrangements of its constituent elements, such that what was meant before becomes obscured in favor of what is desired after.

This describes the Black Panther’s involute relation to the superhero. The original idea, its casual, repeatedly practiced and therefore seemingly naturalized dependence on white positionality is not destroyed, not shattered, not upended, not gone. But so long as we sustain our imagination of the Black Panther and Wakanda, both what it means to imagine being black and what it means to imagine a superhero mutually transform each other in such a way that the original, consensus-enforced, real meanings of both become obscured by the diaphanous dress of our repeated, individual and collective, divergent and coordinated, whorled action of fantasy. And since what it means to imagine being black or to imagine blackness can never be completely cleaved from, and must be understood as on a continuum with and messily contiguous to, the being of blackness, here again with the Black Panther we can perceive an instance when fantasy acts, when if it is a minor form of doing, it is nevertheless a powerful or at the very least not-negligible form of being. To imagine the Black Panther, to participate in the imaginary worlds of Black Panther stories, to invent such stories—to take up imaginary residence in Wakanda—is to make, to do, to be black: but a different black, an involute black, perhaps some inchoate version of that black existing in the habitable imaginary where, as I proposed in the introduction, one brings both a knife and a velvet camisole to a gunfight—since in Wakanda, after all, a knife made of vibranium or a camisole laced with it might stand up surprisingly well against hostile bullets.

The act that is fantasy in the case of the Black Panther and Wakanda has implications that curve backward toward the center from which they emanate, à la the action of involution—that is, the fantasy-act participation in the worlds of the Black Panther and Wakanda has effects in the political life of blackness at this latter-day point in the production of blackness’s meaning.

We can divine these effects with a closer look at a present-day version of Black Panther comics featuring his sister Shuri—a character of late provenance, first appearing in the fourth distinct Black Panther series written by Reginald Hudlin starting in 2005—and with a look at Coogler’s 2017 movie version of the comic.

My discussion of Coogler’s wildly successful movie adaptation, I must caution, pays attention to the film itself only insofar as the film illuminates aspects of audiences’ or readers’ fantasy-acts in relation to the comic-book character. I am therefore most interested for present purposes in engaging how the Black Panther superhero-comic character has become a cultural phenomenon.

Nevertheless it is significant, perhaps even of the highest significance, that Black Panther could not claim its cultural status (about which more shortly) existing solely in its medium of origin. The character’s position as a known quality depends on the popular reach of the movie form and the story’s dissemination as a blockbuster film. Its content and narrative are nested within an array of other commercially successful (and not-so-successful) movies of the so-called Marvel Universe franchise, much as every Black Panther series is tied by many threads to comics that precede and are contemporaneous with it published by Marvel Comics.

There is the typical prosaic chicken-and-egg mystery here—typical, that is, to the phenomenon of adaptations across form and media—as to which medium provides the motor of the character’s and story’s great present popularity (which Stan Lee in 2000 lamented it might never achieve). This mystery has manifested—from my perspective, devolved—in a recent contretemps in which those towers of film art Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola rail that “Marvel Universe” movies are “not cinema.” Marvel Universe movies are not cinema, it’s said, because the stories they tell have baked-in audiences, and the movies are thus oriented toward “fan service”; and so the “risk” that Scorsese et al. see to be inherent to “real” cinema, where “art” and the grand unifying vision of a director are at stake, is lacking.52

In fact, the extent of comic books’ popularity among various entertainment media is, as noted earlier, actually considerably less than it once was during the industry’s one-hundred-million-copies-sold-per-month heyday. It is less than clear that if the corporatized top-down moviemaking that Scorsese decries—I’m sure with very good reason—were truly devoted solely to servicing its ready-made fandom, that such servicing would actually be a winning formula. Hollywood’s various forays into superhero-comic adaptations even from as late as 1989’s Batman (directed by someone with a claim to standing somewhere in the skyline of cinema artistes, Tim Burton) have had at best mixed results: one can scarcely claim baked-in success of commercial or critical variety, for example, for Ben Affleck’s 2003 Daredevil or Jennifer Garner’s 2005 Elektra, early versions of linked-story Marvel Universe franchise cinematic assays. In this light, if “risk” is what makes for cinema, only selective attention and truncated historical memory will support the claim that “Marvel Universe” films altogether lack it.

In any case, Scorsese and Coppola can hardly imagine that Black Panther at least did not have some aim, like the “art” they rightly see themselves making, of beautifully or innovatively representing through its form a vision of meaning or significance that reaches beyond the content of its story, its visuals, and its performances; or that with its nearly all-black cast, it lacked risk—especially since all-black casting is the kind of risk that neither Scorsese nor Coppola have ever taken. As Kirby recognized and as Lee wished to dissimulate, there is risk and there is meaning—political meaning, and therefore always also potentially artistic challenge—in rendering a black superhero, for all the many reasons this chapter has detailed.

Black director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther mined this meaning as the film rose to and surmounted the challenges to its commercial success, surpassing a gross of $1 billion globally. The New York Times Magazine proclaimed the film a cultural watershed in a February 2018 feature story titled “Why ‘Black Panther’ Is a Defining Moment for Black America.” The Times, the so-called journal of record, ran no less than forty-four stories with references to the movie in their headlines in 2018 and 2019. Hence, the movie, its character and story, and most especially its fantasy setting of Wakanda have become a cultural phenomenon, an achievement that cannot be adequately explained by the movie’s placement within the Marvel Universe franchise, or by its particular film genre of superhero movie—with the dubious claims of each to ephemeral ready-made audiences—or even to the popular reach of movie entertainment and art.

I make the claim that this achievement finds its high level because it brings “black” and “superhero”—where “black” is a name for a diaspora and not just a population within a country or even its world-striding cultural products—into dazzling contiguity despite the wide array of forces that have in the past made the terms mutually repellent.

I’ll begin with a scan of some of the responses to Black Panther as cultural phenomenon, most particularly quotations from the concluding chapter of Michael Eric Dyson’s What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation about Race in America (2018). Dyson’s conclusion is called “Even If: Wakanda, Forever.” I’m going to let these quotations largely speak for themselves without my gloss. Taken together, these excerpts ring like a sermon.

Dyson begins,

I beg you, as the youth are wont to say these days, please don’t judge me, but I’ve got a confession. I believe that most of the ills that I address in this book—the racism, the sexism, the homophobia— . . . might all be solved if we all took a trip to Wakanda. I know, I know, it’s cheesy that I’m capitulating to the hype around a blockbuster superhero film, surrendering the high aesthetic moral ground to a piece of popular entertainment. . . . But . . . everything about Black Panther is right, timely, and, dare I say, prophetic—even black prophecy at its best—a visual witness to the aspiration and ideals we harbor in our black chests when we let our imaginations roam free.53

Further, Dyson describes the movie as “a fictional version of what our society can’t provide us every day—a place where race is not an issue and our blackness is taken for granted.”54 “Wakanda is the name of our paradise and possibility,” Dyson says. “Wakanda is the place of our unapologetic blackness, a blackness that is beautiful and ugly, that is uplifting and destructive, that is peaceful and violent, that is, in a word, human in all its glory and grief . . . [with] the infinite possibilities, and any and all options available to the human being. . . . In Wakanda, we finally get the chance to just be.”55

He continues, “We went to see Black Panther time and again because time and again we had to remind ourselves that the denial of our beauty, time and again, is not real. That what is real is what we see projected as a fantasy, but which we know, in our hearts, in our black bodies, to be true. We are that great. We are that intelligent.”56 “Wakanda exists because what we should have is not here. Justice. Truth. Love.” “Wakanda is Black Love,” Dyson proclaims. “Wakanda is Black Brilliance,” and “Wakanda is Black Blackness.” By the latter, he means, “Not a blackness manufactured by others to satisfy their lust for our coolness, our suave, our earthiness, our grittiness, our sensuality, our sexiness.”57

Perhaps most ringingly, he says,

Wakanda is where [murdered child] Trayvon [Martin] reigns as a King. As a Warrior. Most important, as a Man. Because he made it past a youth that is forever in peril in a culture that doesn’t prize our breathing.

Wakanda is our insistence that we will choose how to be black. Wakanda is our insistence that we will choose what to be black about.

Hint: everything.

Wakanda is our refusal to let others tell us what is important to us. About us. For us.

Wakanda is our refusal to anymore pretend that what is happening to us in the real world, in real time, is really real. This is the illusion. This—this notion that oppression is natural, that violence is inevitable, that hate is normal, that whiteness is a birthright, that subordination is good, that empire is a goal, that control is a virtue—this is what is unnatural, false, fake, undesirable, should be banned and bashed and banished.58

And finally Dyson adds a statement apropos of our investigation of fantasy-acts: “Is it sad that all of this was inspired by a movie? In a way, perhaps, but then works of art have always inspired us to see ourselves in ways that aren’t permitted when ruthless and narrow versions of reality pass for truth. . . . So, yes. It may seem silly, or kitschy, or needy, or downright desperate. Makes no difference. Wakanda exists in our minds and souls because our minds and souls have never existed as they should.”59

I’m marshaling Dyson’s paean to the movie’s inspiration in part because it captures something of my own affective response to the movie (though of course my perspective is that of a person who doesn’t assume that comic books or popular movies or the melding thereof automatically land in the category of the “cheesy” from which they must be rescued, or that to engage these seriously involves evading the pitfalls of a “surrender” of “high” “aesthetic” “moral” “ground”). Dyson’s of course was not the only response of the black intelligentsia and literati to the 2018 movie, which generated a spirited and passionate ongoing series of responses in social media and editorial pages on a variety of platforms. Among the forty-four-plus stories the Times published headlining the movie is Salamishah Tillet’s article “‘Black Panther’ Brings Hope, Hype, and Pride.” There among the things said about the movie by prominent black New Yorkers, Tillet quotes,

“Wakanda is a kind of black utopia in our fight against colonialism and imperial control of black land and black people by white people,” said Deirdre Hollman, a founder of the annual Black Comic Book Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. “To the black imagination, that means everything. In a comic book, it is a reality, and through a major motion picture, it’s even more tangibly and artistically a reality that we can explore for ourselves. There’s so much power that’s drawn from the notion that there was a community, a nation that resisted colonization and infiltration and subjugation.”60

And, “For Frederick Joseph, a marketing consultant who created the #BlackPantherChallenge, a GoFundMe campaign to buy tickets so youngsters can see ‘Black Panther’ in theaters, the complexity of Wakanda takes on new meaning in our current moment. Compared with President Trump’s disparagement of Haiti and African nations, he said, ‘You have Wakanda as a place of Afro-futurism, of what African nations can be or what they could have been and still be had colonialism not taken place.’”61 Of particular interest to me, in Dyson’s published remarks and in the observations produced by interviews in Tillet’s article, is the sway, the power, of the wholly fantastical place of Wakanda in what Dyson et al. find meaningful about the movie: Wakanda fittingly is nowhere since it is a utopia, because as we know, Thomas More’s styling of “utopia” was a political fantasy conceit named for its meaning, “no-place.”

The other reason I’m starting with Dyson is to provide a useful contrast to the work of the accomplished novelist and now comics creator Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian American writer whose publications, including the young-adult series Binti (2015–2019) and Akata Witch (2017–2018), the adult fantasy novel Who Fears Death (2014)—the latter reportedly being made into an HBO series with the adaptive assistance of Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin—have garnered wide critical acclaim and popular success. She is the winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award, the highest honors in the fields of sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction.

Okorafor has written a Black Panther miniseries called Long Live the King, and an ongoing superhero comics series called Shuri, which centers the Black Panther’s sister.62

In Okorafor and Dyson we see an intriguing, and arguably productive, divergence in how a fantasy entertainment initially created by two white, Jewish American comics creators sparks political imagination. Okorafor’s and Dyson’s differing views on Wakanda illustrate a fact—which we might otherwise consider a challenge, politically speaking—that theorists of the African diaspora such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Kenneth Warren, and Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley, among others, have rendered de rigueur in African-diaspora cultural studies: This fact is that a unity of viewpoint among members of the diaspora, the wide-flung dispersal of peoples of identified African descent across the globe, is elusive if not impossible, since different, even if overlapping, histories of engagement with the slave trade and colonialism and their aftermaths, have produced very different ways of cognizing the evils of antiblackness and of the despoiling of African peoples, and very different methods for addressing these evils.

Dyson’s riff on Lee and Kirby’s (and McGregor’s and Reginald Hudlin’s and Ta-Nahesi Coates’s) Wakanda is not only the more effusive and optimistic and fan-like of the two writers I’m juxtaposing (where a fan is most receptive to, and likely to generate, fantasies of their own based on fantasy templates provided by fantasy stories). Dyson’s view also emphasizes in useful ways the degree to which Wakanda is American in conception (in much the same way a superhero is conceived from a white point of view, as discussed earlier), and the degree to which Wakanda was at its inception and in much of its present glory a dream about the dream of Africa. This of course is the prettified (but nonetheless not inaccurate) language: the “dream of Africa” was always first an imperialist’s dream—the dream of exploitable coffers of agricultural and older-world cultural wealth as viewed by the hungry eyes of conquering ancient-world Rome—which was then overlaid by a settler-colonizer’s dream in the depredations that reached their nadir in the “scramble for Africa.” “Africa,” too, in this sense was (and is) a kind of no-place insofar as the continental name and its invocation’s too-hasty reduction of myriad cultures, histories, nations, peoples, and terrain to a single “dark” entity is a product of political imagining—the sinister, ruthlessly antihuman political imagination of a place that is an endlessly exploitable resource.

In the 2018 collection of the Marvel Comics limited series (which originally appeared in digital form) Black Panther: Long Live the King, Okorafor appends a “Hello, Black Panther fans!” afterword. In a few paragraphs, Okorafor notes what she thought of the Black Panther figure when she was invited to write the limited series, as a Nigerian American author of speculative fiction usually centered in various African locales and almost always from the perspectives of characters on the African continent.

Okorafor’s assessment of the Panther is skeptical and critical rather than inspired in the mode of Dyson. Wakanda for her is a fantasy place that does not immediately or most prominently offer chances to reimagine possibilities with regard to blackness and its perpetually embattled political and ontological crises. For her, the concept of Wakanda raises thorny but generative questions about the siting of the imaginary nation in Africa, with a recognition of how the continent is too often imagined as a place about which one can have summary and indeed monolithic knowledge. This conception of Wakanda is less utopian than practically political—and thus Okorafor’s chosen title for the series foregrounds the imagination of Wakanda’s governmental structure.

“I came into this [writing the series] looking at King T’Challa and Wakanda out of the side of my eye,” she admits. “I’m Igbo”—Okorafor breaks to explain to readers that this is a Nigerian ethnic group, which should usefully remind us that neither she nor her editors at Marvel presume that Black Panther comics readers are at all knowledgeable about real places and real peoples in Africa. “Amongst the Igbo,” she continues, “there’s a popular saying, ‘Igbo enwe eze,’ which means, ‘The Igbo have no king.’ Being a more democratic society consisting of many small independent communities, historically, Igbos never had centralized government or royalty. I’ve grown up hearing this phrase and between this and also being an American, any type of monarchy gets my side-eye of disapproval, . . . even a mythical one.”63

While Dyson views “a visit to Wakanda”—Wakanda as envisioned by Ryan Coogler and the filmmakers of the Panther movie—as a method for thinking and therefore practicing problack freedom, Okorafor sees her own visit as a contemporary cocreator of the Black Panther’s ongoing fantasy story not as travel to an imaginary home or political paradise—not, therefore, as an exultant “return” to a place of home, the dream of any diasporan—but as travel to a site in need of repair, a place that is an unsatisfying, perhaps even damaged, imagination in need of revision in order to better serve the desires its fantasy stokes. “Writing BLACK PANTHER felt like visiting a country for the first time, and not as a tourist, but as a diplomat. I couldn’t be passive during my visit.”64

(Lest any of us smugly suppose that Okorafor’s diplomat-visit metaphor extends the disbelief-suspension inherent to working with an imaginary place into absurdity, note that (1) apart from the many, many evocations of Wakanda on T-shirts, iPhone cases, posters, and other paraphernalia that one can chance upon nearly anywhere, Wakanda was briefly listed by the US government as a trading partner of the United States—albeit as a beta test of a governmental online tracking system used by the USDA65—and note also (2) the tenacious hold of imaginary places even beyond More’s paradigmatic Utopia, as evinced by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, first published in 1980 and expanded and revised twenty years later with multiple printings; Umberto Eco’s The Book of Legendary Lands [2013]; and Laura Miller’s Literary Wonderlands: A Journey through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created [2016].)

Okorafor “visits” Wakanda cognizant of its shortcomings, aware of what it doesn’t do: she considers the present-day political implications of the idea that Wakanda is removed from the history of African colonization and concomitantly was immune to the devastation of the slave trade, the twin modes of scatter that initiated the African diaspora. As suggested earlier, in fact these are fantasy conceits that neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee, the creators of the character and of the country, explicitly engaged, and they may never have given extensive thought to these conceits: the Kirby/Lee Wakanda was a “hidden” nation primarily in that it masqueraded as an undeveloped patch of jungle, revealed to be a paradise of sci-fi technology when the Fantastic Four are invited to the country to be prey in Panther’s test of his martial skills (figure 2.15). The original conceit had little to do with any imaginative divergence from the history that produces blackness but rather to do with the narrative surprise and imaginative leap—the fantasy—that an African “tribal” people could be something other than primitive.

Thus the Kirby/Lee conception of Wakanda partakes for its narrative power of the construction of an “Africa” that is synonymous with “darkness” and “primitive,” with the jungle and the wild, and carries the assumption that this is the common characteristic of the entire continent. That Wakanda should be a place of the future rather than of the “primitive” past is a well-intentioned and rather progressive vision, to be sure—and, as noted earlier, we can see such a narrative ploy as partially aligning the character Black Panther with the future-oriented temporality of the (otherwise white-identified) superhero concept. We might guess too that Lee and Kirby’s progressive imagination here took some of its cues from the wave of African independence struggles post–World War II, which introduced into the visual and cognitive lexicon what would at the time have appeared to any “educated” white American eye to be the wholly novel and nearly fantastic image and notion of a black African leader who didn’t wear a loincloth and headdress. In this sense, Wakanda is a kind of avant la lettre Afro-futurist conception.

But nevertheless for Lee and Kirby, the fantasy of Wakanda is completely dependent on the fantasy of a “naturally” “undeveloped or underdeveloped” and predictably monolithic “Africa.” In figure 2.16, an image that appeared two issues prior to Kirby’s rendering of the huge metallic panther in figure 2.15, we see that despite the narrative revelation of technology antithetical to the comics creators’ views of “Africa,” the visual imagination of the place of Wakanda is still firmly ensconced in, and repeats, the established assumption of Africans as “primitive.”

Of these Kirby images in “some of the very first Black Panther comics,” Okorafor is quoted in an interview as saying—diplomatically, perhaps?—“Heh, those were interesting.”66

Such visual renderings were refined in various ways over the years through successive additions, extensions, and revisions of the Panther story in the hands of other artists and writers (mostly white American but sometimes black American), with an effect of ever-deepening entrenchment of the idea of rich, technologically superior Wakanda as a hidden society, a secret miniworld removed from all else.

A digression here on the matter of Wakanda monarchy: Wakanda’s secret, technologically superior miniworld status makes it not unlike other Marvel Comics imaginary sites: Dr. Doom’s Latveria, of which he is king, or the Sub-Mariner’s undersea Atlantis, of which he is king, or Black Bolt’s Attilan of the Inhumans, of which he too has almost always since the character’s invention in Fantastic Four been king. Okorafor gives Wakanda’s monarchical government the side-eye, and that same feature has aroused the critical attention via storytelling revision of recent Black Panther writer Ta-Nahesi Coates, who worked in his version of the Panther to undercut the monarchy and democratize Wakanda’s governance. The New York Times film reviewer Manohla Dargis, no fan of superhero movies (so much so that I wonder why the Times continues to send her to review them), takes up this same antimonarchical stance in her otherwise uncharacteristically approving review of Coogler’s Black Panther. “The movie . . . rather too breezily establishes Wakanda as a militaristic monarchy that is nevertheless fair and democratic,” Dargis writes.67

Since it doesn’t seem as politically pressing to mark one’s antimonarchical position in the 2010s as it would have in the 1810s or 1910s, I assume that Okorafor, Coates, and Dargis raise their objections precisely because they’re approaching Wakanda in a manner parallel to Dyson—if not as a guide to how to feel and how to be as Wakanda is for Dyson, then as a Thomas More–style guide to the actual political constitution of a utopia. Their criticisms do not, however, account for how the convention of monarchy in superhero-comic-book storytelling functions. The selection of government structure in these cases has, I think, somewhat less to do with any thinking-through of the relative features of monarchy and democracy than with the narrative necessity of explaining these particular characters’ difference from other heroes and of course from real, ordinary humans. (Lee and Kirby were the originators of Dr. Doom and Black Bolt and had formative hands in the Silver Age elaboration of the Sub-Mariner.)

Black Bolt and Sub-Mariner are representative of a different species (Inhumans and Atlanteans), which is of course just a conceit for an alternate vision of humanity. Dr. Doom and the Black Panther are representative of different, hidden nations, which is of course just a conceit for an alternate vision of how and under what arrangements humans might live. Such alternate visions are the meat of speculative fictions. There’s a narrative economy in having characters who come from an imaginary site that is meant to serve as a world with different assumptions than our own arrive on the page as that world’s singular ruler, rather than having to provide readers with a complicated description of that world itself. In effect, by making the characters monarchs, you world-make and character-create in the same flourish. We should see this monarchical feature as a storytelling device that the medium and genre beg for, not as a product of monarchical political sympathies: in a medium where the visual representation of a different, alternate world must manifest itself in a collection of single panels of art, often amounting to less than and almost never more than a couple of pages in any given issue, and at the same time in a genre where the superheroes’ travel to other worlds at base necessarily provides an occasion and a setting for them to fight someone, the representational payoff and entertainment value of pausing to draw or to textually describe a functioning democracy (or radical anarchy or some other preferable nonauthoritarian governmental arrangement) is not high—and the effect of dull familiarity that one might achieve by referring to the Sub-Mariner as “the president / prime minister of Atlantis” presents no greatly appealing dramatic choice.

Thoughtful reconsiderations of the imaginary government of an imaginary nation are on the one hand a luxury afforded by the fact of characters’ and titles’ elongated production, which invites constant revision and retelling. On the other hand, these retoolings of governmental structure are perhaps a near necessity of the built-in demand for revision that such elongated production entails: if you are telling the story of an imaginary nation for fifty years and more, chances are it will look like an appealing narrative device to shake things up from time to time. (One now-conventional aspect of superhero comics that flows from these commercial imperatives, and which I as a fanboy do not love in the least, is the constant recourse on the part of Marvel and DC to (1) destroy Paradise Island, Asgard, Attilan, Atlantis, etc. for ever-cheaper thrills, only to rebuild them to be ready for the next destruction; and (2) to kill superheroes off with great hype and ever-lesser thrills, only to “resurrect” them later with the mise-en-scène of the characters’ lives slightly rearranged, their costumes or power sets tweaked, and everything else exactly the same as it was when the character became popular enough for the editors to think they could squeeze some extra sales out of fake-killing them.)

Thoughtful consideration of how Wakanda, specifically, can be said to have existed in our world and in relation to “Africa” and its history, is something I would argue that might well have been undertaken in the conception of the Black Panther character, because, as readers of Black Panther comics have since seen, it might have been accomplished with relative narrative economy (several pages’ worth of panels and less than a full modern issue), even if the implications of such a move take longer to unfold. Don McGregor, progressive as he was, did not rethink Wakanda in relation to the actual history that produces blackness or the histories of African nations. It was when Reginald Hudlin came along to write Black Panther in 2005 that these histories were woven into the retelling of Black Panther stories, and thus changed Black Panther’s conception as a superhero. Here, then, we see a pattern of black creators from other media or genres of representation, engaging in their own fantasy-act creative activity, twining the whorls of their own new renditions around the ever more obscured source material (the source material is ever more obscured in that it is not, finally, Lee and Kirby’s Black Panther that leads Dyson to the sermonic heights of “Wakanda is Black Love” but Coogler et al.’s retelling of Lee and Kirby).

Hudlin along with artist John Romita Jr. articulated a vision of Wakanda as a place where, obviously, slavery couldn’t have happened and, obviously, colonialism could not have been established. He took the conceit of Wakanda as a hidden secret society personified in the Black Panther and made it a kind of maroon society, except reversing the historical exigencies that produce marronage:

In a seventeen-page sequence in Black Panther #1 (accounted in Marvel Comics history as “Volume 4,” being the fourth run of Black Panther–centered comics including McGregor’s Jungle Action, which is “Volume 1”), Hudlin and Romita Jr. depict in wide-screen filmic panels two temporal moments: In the first, during the fifth century AD, spear-bearing African men try to invade the fabled land of Wakanda, only to die in droves, slain by unseen warriors who leave a lone survivor to spread the legend of Wakanda’s martial fierceness. In the second sequence, pale Europeans in the nineteenth century bring the firearms they have every reason to expect will be superior weaponry—including one of the feared Gatling guns—to the same Wakandan border. The European invaders kill some tribesmen, carry off some booty, and then spy a giant panther statue from afar. The panther statue heralds the arrival of a man wearing a version of the Black Panther’s costume (in fact, a costume that hails Jack Kirby’s original discarded drawings for the character that became the Panther). This nineteenth-century Black Panther warns the Europeans before unleashing the firepower of a futuristic Kirby-esque weapon on them; and they all die, except one, who is left to carry the news of Wakanda’s indomitability back to the would-be colonizers.

The first trade paperback collections of Hudlin’s Black Panther, published in the 2000s, typically bound about five or six single issues together. The opening page of the trade paperback would provide a short introduction to the character. The first of these, for the collection Black Panther: Bad Mutha (note the obvious Shaft, masculine-Blaxploitation shout-out), reads, “PREVIOUSLY: THERE ARE SOME PLACES YOU JUST DON’T MESS WITH. WAKANDA IS ONE OF THEM. SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME, THAT AFRICAN WARRIOR NATION HAS BEEN SENDING WOULD-BE CONQUERORS HOME IN BODY BAGS. WHILE THE REST OF AFRICA GOT CARVED UP LIKE A CHRISTMAS TURKEY BY THE REST OF THE WORLD, WAKANDA’S CULTURAL EVOLUTION HAS GONE UNCHECKED FOR CENTURIES, UNFETTERED BY THE YOKE OF COLONIALISM. THE RESULT: A HI-TECH, RESOURCE-RICH, ECOLOGICALLY SOUND PARADISE THAT MAKES THE REST OF THE WORLD SEEM PRIMITIVE BY COMPARISON.”68

In a later issue, Black Panther Annual #1 from 2008, Hudlin collaborates with artists Larry Stroman and Ken Lashley to tell the story of a future Wakanda. In “Black to the Future,” the mutant Storm—the other African Marvel superhero, a Kenyan American whose membership in the best-selling, in-its-own-right cultural phenomenon X-Men series made her unquestionably the most popular black superhero, until Coogler’s film—tells one of the children she has in her marriage with T’Challa about the history of Wakanda. “As you know, Wakanda has not involved itself in the affairs of other nations unless it was absolutely necessary,” she says in a text box tucked into the corner of yet another wide-screen panel where unidentified African people labor in the vicinity of huts. “The rise of European slavery sorely tested that policy,” she admits.69 Wakanda itself of course easily repelled any attempts to invade or enslave its people, but Storm describes a debate about how best Wakanda should respond to the continent’s devastation. “These developments threaten the long-term interests of Wakanda,” a Panther-monarch of the past announces. “They cannot go unchecked.” Storm then describes how Wakandans at first infiltrated slave markets to buy Africans who were then “brought back” to Wakanda, “where they were trained for military acts.” A long guerilla war ensued, with Europeans initially unable to locate their African adversary. Eventually, however, Wakanda—or rather, its monarch—decided that it would have to go to war against the whole world to end the slave trade. “Maybe [Wakanda] would have won” the war, Storm explains. “Maybe it would have lost. But the very act of attacking all of the major western powers and their puppet states in Africa would have required a ruthlessness that would threaten the moral fiber of the nation. Instead, the decision was made to take a long view. Even if it took centuries, the world would eventually learn that the Wakandan way is the correct path. And if not, God bless them, for they would not survive.”70

In staging an answer to a question not raised in the comics but easy enough to ask for most black fans of the Panther—Why didn’t Wakanda stop the slave-trade?, a version of the same question we noted must dog the black superhero: If the hero is so powerful, why doesn’t he or she end the oppression of black people?—Hudlin provides the basis for the dramatic opposition of T’Challa and Erik Killmonger in the movie Black Panther. Most importantly, Hudlin gives Wakanda a history it never had, even during the thoughtful McGregor-penned run. Indeed, in the Lee/Kirby origin story for Black Panther, while the Wakandans seem for some undetermined span of time to have stood guardian over “the Eternal Peak,” which was actually a mound of the precious mythical ore “vibranium,” their technological prowess seems only of recent vintage, a result of the prodigious brain power of T’Challa, who was driven to take revenge after watching the murder of his father, T’Chaka (another version of the Batman story, then), the “greatest chieftain of all” (but not a king). Such people would surely have been as subject as any other to the depredations and exploitation of colonialism and the slave trade; again, it is only the “surprise” of technological advance—dependent in Lee/Kirby on the concept of vibranium—that marks Wakanda out for a departure from the mythical “dark” “primitivity” of “Africa.”

Thus Hudlin’s Wakanda—a Wakanda that is not explicitly visualized onscreen but surely is the imagined historical background for Coogler’s—is, as I see it, a sovereign maroon society. Rather than a refuge created by people fleeing enslavement, Wakanda is a refuge for those who, having been born into the safety of immense martial prowess, need never have fled but need only stay put, or a refuge for those whom Wakandans deign to rescue: it’s a refuge from history, an imaginative conceit that—for Dyson at least and presumably for many who flocked to and thrilled in the movie—serves as a maroon state of the imagination.

For Okorafor, though, this refuge from history signifies as a state of privilege. She writes, “I feel like I know T’Challa now,” having written the series Long Live the King: “I’ve seen him face his privilege, and get checked about it.”71 The singular possessive pronoun suggests Okorafor means the monarchical privilege that she, Coates, and Dargis find so troubling, but really hers is an indictment of the imaginary nation of which T’Challa is, in the usual comic-book terms, a synecdoche. Hudlin’s collection précis underlines this. The “tagline” that introduces the Black Panther isn’t about the Panther and his great powers or scientific genius: it’s about Wakanda and its superiority to the rest of the planet. (The recognition that Black Panther is a synecdoche for Wakanda should lessen, if not purge us altogether, of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worries about the tyranny of kings.)

The privilege, then, that Okorafor sees the need to check is not quite white privilege, for it isn’t based on race: it’s non-African privilege, in that it describes unearned rewards based on Wakanda’s imaginative siting in an Africa the history of which it refuses—and a history for which, as Okorafor sees it, Wakanda refuses responsibility. Evidently Okorafor is no more convinced of the efficacy or morality of “Black to the Future” Storm’s “long view” than Michael B. Jordan’s eloquent Killmonger is in the movie.

In the movie, Wakanda’s privilege is called out by the half-Wakandan exile Killmonger’s explicit fury that Wakanda not only never intervened to save him and his father from the perils they endured as black people in America, but that it hasn’t used its technological prowess to effect revolutionary change on behalf of the world’s oppressed peoples. Killmonger’s is a view that one might say is definitionally African American, one that probably has to be sited in places that lie on the other side of the Atlantic or of the Mediterranean. Indeed, one definition of diaspora in diaspora theory is that the far-flung communities in exile from their homeland can at least imaginatively, if not politically or militarily, appeal to the protection of their mother country (or flee back to it) if they’re mistreated abroad.

The observation of Wakanda’s splendid isolation and the puncturing of its privilege is a running theme in Okorafor’s series Shuri, which started in late 2018 and stars T’Challa’s technological-wizard sister. This version of Shuri is almost entirely based on the Ryan Coogler film version. In the comics prior to the movie, Shuri was a highly able member of the royal family who was capable of taking on the mantle of the Black Panther at need and wielding the position’s considerable superheroic powers, but she was not necessarily a genius tech geek, as she became in Coogler’s rendition of her and as she is in Okorafor’s comic.

Okorafor’s vision as it’s articulated in Shuri takes a view of Wakanda’s privilege, as it were, from African shores. A great deal of the revision of the Panther mythos she undertook early in the series was to connect Wakanda to Africa, to bring Wakanda into the flow of African history now. Whereas Killmonger in the film chastises Wakanda’s isolation as a failure to act against antiblackness, that is, to act for black people worldwide but especially black people in the United States, Okorafor’s Shuri implants story lines and dialogue that mount an implicit and sometimes fully explicit criticism of how such a “mythical” country ought to be held accountable for having failed to offer aid and succor to its fellow Africans on the continent.

One of the initial multi-issue plots has T’Challa go missing when a spacecraft that Shuri has designed to facilitate Wakanda’s successful entry into the space race mysteriously disappears. Shuri is urged to take up the mantle of the Black Panther in her brother’s absence. She does so not as a ruling autocrat, since Wakanda under Ta-Nehisi Coates’s dominion has been transformed into a constitutional monarchy, but rather as a symbol of Wakandan power and superheroic problem-solving acumen around whom the Wakandan people can rally. As Shuri searches for her brother and fights off new extraterrestrial threats that menace not just Wakanda but other places on the continent like Timbuktu, two “secret” gatherings of counselors emerge from the shadows to aid Shuri: one is a gathering of Wakandan women who call their group “the Elephant Trunk” and say they are working with Queen Mother Ramonda as a kind of shadow cabinet of advisers in times of crisis (figure 2.17).

The other secret council is “Egungun,” named after one of the traditions of Nigerian masquerade.72 The Egungun council announce themselves to be a “Pan-African alliance,” “a seed group of . . . ‘Africa Forever,’ a two-way flow of information and resources between Wakanda and the rest of Africa” (figure 2.18).73 “Africa Forever” as a slogan is obviously a revision of the phrase made so resonant in the Coogler film and among its fans and the array of paraphernalia celebrating the film: “Wakanda Forever.”

One of the notes sounded in the dialogue that Shuri and Okoye the Wakandan Dora Milaje warrior have in the Egungun meetings with other Africans is how arrogant Wakandans have been. When the Egungun’s establishment of a two-way flow of resources is announced, Okoye asks, “What could Wakanda need from you all?” Another member of the council reports, “Something’s happening in Mali. No one’s alerting you? Heh. Maybe the news isn’t important enough for you Wakandans” (figure 2.19). The needling continues when another Egungun member wryly notes that it’s easy for the council to hide in a Wakandan community center, since Wakandans, the continental narcissists, seem not to value community (figure 2.20).

The “secret” councilors of both the Egungun and the Elephant Trunk are a microcosmic analogue within Okorafor’s revision of the Black Panther mythos for the “secret” nation of Wakanda itself. The two councils serve to open the secret and turn it upside down. They function in the story as mechanisms, appendages almost, for completing the implicit reversal of the maroon idea that Wakanda has become: now the conduit of resources, the pathway to greater freedom, is to run from Wakanda the secret nation to the proximate places from which Wakanda has historically hidden. “The Egungun was created to bring together all the disparate parts of Africa. . . . Africa is a false creation that over time grew a soul. It still needs a unifying symbol,” the council avers. “Who better than the absent child returned home?” This question figures Wakanda as at once the diasporic exile and the maroon. “Princess Shuri . . . Bring Wakanda back to us” (figures 2.21 and 2.22).74

Okorafor’s is an articulation of the continent of Africa as a product of imagination, as being its own diaspora of sorts, if by “diaspora” we can refer less to scattering, displacement, and exile, and more to a far-flung network of diverse communities aware of overlapping if distinct histories: as one member of the Egungun secret group says, “Africa is quite . . . big. And it has worlds to offer.”75 Implicit here is that Africa is a fecund source of imaginary worlds, and that Wakanda is not only or even primarily an imaginative site for dreaming a defeat of antiblackness but one for for dreaming a healing of the histories of dispossession and depredation that created the at once politically real and politically mythical “Africa.”

Okorafor scales up Wakanda from Lee and Kirby’s “strange gripping legend of the nation of Wakanda” to a more familiar dream of Pan-Africanism, from a nation of borders and a maroon redoubt to “nation” as Fanon sought to redefine it in The Wretched of the Earth: which is to say “nation” as the expression of peoples united in the ongoing task of a revolution that will achieve self-government and liberation from domination for all—nation that knows no racial limit and no geographical boundary beyond those of the atmosphere of the planet itself. Fanon recognizes this process of revolution to be in all practical terms unrelenting and unending and that the possibilities of its failure—of the success of counterrevolution—are nigh infinite. It’s easier for Okorafor to represent this Fanonian idea in Shuri. Why? One reason of course is that Okorafor is creating art/entertainment. Another is that she is doing so in the medium of the superhero comic book.

I’ve argued that white supremacy is not inherent to the concept of the superhero or even necessarily to the representational conventions of stories in superhero comics, but is more accurately ascribed to failures, willful or weak-minded, of political imagination on the part of various comics creators. Here I’ll amend that observation to say that although white supremacy is not necessarily inherent to the concept or the conventions of superhero comics, there are limitations inherent to the form of superhero comics, and practiced in the conventions of superhero comics storytelling, that lend themselves to the form’s practical repetition and accession to white supremacy.

These limitations are in part limitations that I suspect—but cannot say for certain—that no art form can escape: the limitations imposed on any artistic creation by its creator’s inescapable immersion in, and indeed their personal expression of, a world of discourse that renders meaning through the identification, nominalization, and hierarchical valuation of terms of difference. In part, then, I’m only restating in other language what I noted before and that anyone can observe: that the racism of the world in which artists create infects them, they are themselves in various ways and degrees racist, and their work will in some measure reflect or at least refract this fact.

But this set of limitations, which we have reason to suppose is universal, finds a particular formal expression in comics’ central (but not wholly defining or pervasive) reliance on sequence: the sequence of panels, of units of time, arranged to suggest the flow of linear temporal progression; the material binding of these reproduced panels into comic books or issues, which suggest a “complete” episode. Since innovations introduced by Marvel Comics under Lee’s auspices and others during the 1960s, the scope of superhero comics’ sequentiality multiplied, as these single issues themselves became significantly sequenced into multipart stories, linking with stories that preceded it and that followed it, and with stories staged as “occurring” concurrently: for example, the Avengers fight another group of superheroes, the Defenders, over the course of several issues appearing in both Avengers and Defenders comics; concurrently, over the course of many issues, Captain Marvel encounters and fights the mad death-obsessed god Thanos, whom the Avengers also fight in one of their issues subsequent to their fight with the Defenders. As Stan Lee, writing in 1993, observes of the Fantastic Four comics that introduced Galactus, “Never . . . had any super-hero sagas prior to that time made such exciting use of the mini-series formula, one of Marvel’s most successful innovations, a formula that the television industry has since adopted and brought into worldwide prominence.”76

The form of superhero comics, as discussed earlier, became paradigmatically a form of producing sequences of stories, of retelling and revising those stories (with the expectation of reader rereading). In this sense, sequence produces the effect of duration in time, and sequence with the effect of duration in time and linear progression produces the effect of history. Superman is not alive, but he “has” a history; or to clarify for our purposes, he “is” the repeated practical expression via text and image of the history of the character’s representation. We may say that this formal and conventional investment in the production of the effect of history makes comics pliable, perhaps even well fitted, to the parlaying of any project of racial supremacy. This is because a project of racial supremacy (or indeed of any other supremacy premised on social category) cannot be mounted without a step beyond identification and nominalization of race (or other social category). It must place what it identifies into a hierarchy: x is superior to not-x—which is to arrange a metaphorical sequence of identifications with an emphasis on precedence-as-value and value-as-precedence. In this regard again, comics are not unique among art or representational forms, since many also rely on the production of a narrative effect.

But, as I’ve also noted, it is also centrally the case concerning the reading/seeing of comics that sequence can only be suggestive and can be defied, and that linear progression may be utterly ignored. This means that the very form that allows comics to buttress projects of white supremacy by producing the effect of history is also the set of formal properties, and the kinds of reading that those formal properties both demand and enable, that can defy or ignore or challenge white-supremacist projects, if the creator of the comic—like Nnedi Okorafor in Shuri—and/or the reader is motivated to mount that challenge.

To bring us back to earlier observations in this chapter regarding comics’ layering of time and comics’ disarrangement of temporality: the ever-lengthening history that is the effect of issues produced, distributed, and sold as episodes within a sequence (again, repeating the sequential arrangement within the comics issues themselves)—the endless retellings and revisions of origin stories, for example—invites comics readers’ participation, that is, their active fantasy, their active invention of alternate pathways for story procession or active invention of untold stories that “happen,” as it were, between issues, fully as much as such comics-reader participation is mandated and necessary within the story at the site of the gutter. The form of “reading” inculcated in an encounter with any individual comics issue—any individual sequential arrangement of panels that come to an “end”—establishes the foundation for, sows the seeds of, inventive participation across the whole span of sequential arrangement, a kind of participation, of fantasy-act, that necessarily uses but also exceeds and sometimes obscures beyond retrieval the source material of the comic, that is, the original sequence, itself. This is, again as noted earlier, how comics are always practically (in the encounter of reading/seeing) and always potentially (in the form) queer.

Thus it is the practical and formal queerness of the Black Panther and Wakanda, with its “history” that nonetheless produces a “strange gripping,” queer kind of blackness—which is nothing less than the practical and formal queerness of the superhero comic—that enables the relative ease with which Okorafor can scale up from nation to pan-nation in her Shuri series. The panel is always at least (if not more) a springboard for imagination at the site of the gutter; the comic is always at least a springboard for imagination well beyond the material confines and story content of the comic itself.