3

Erotic Fantasy-Acts

The Art of Desire

Queer futurity does not underplay desire. In fact it is all about desire, desire for both larger semiabstractions such as a better world or freedom but also, more immediately, better relations within the social that include better sex and more pleasure.

—Jose Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Alan Moore has authored many of the most critically lauded and arguably genre-defining or at least trendsetting comics of the past three-plus decades: Moore’s revamping of the second- or third-tier horror comic Swamp Thing into the front rank of comic-book art paved the way for the crossover of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (also a revamp) from comic book to literary phenomenon. Moore’s mid-1980s Watchmen changed superhero storytelling to a degree not achieved since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s innovations in the 1960s and spawned various adaptations—Moore would call them thefts—in film and television after the turn of the millennium. Moore’s V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have also seen adaptation. And short assays of icons Superman and Batman from Moore’s pen yet remain milestones in those characters’ ongoing stories, influencing successive waves of writers.

If anyone has earned a right to speak and be heard about superheroes, then, it’s Moore. Given that Moore’s Watchmen, a deconstruction of superheroes that overshadows all deconstructions, “reveals” beloved heroic characters not unlike Batman, Superman, Doc Savage, and others to be racists, rapists, paranoids, narcissists, and mass murderers, it is perhaps not surprising—if nevertheless deflating for fans, especially for those of the Black Panther’s movie adaptation—that Moore, in a headline-making 2016 interview, was less than sanguine about the genre to which he has given so much thought and contributed so many rich and compelling stories.

“What was the impact of popular heroes comic books in our culture?” the interviewer Raphael Sassaki inquires. “Why are people fascinated by alternative realities?” Moore replies,

I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with a numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves—largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Shuster—would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand.

He adds, “I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.”1

Make no mistake—as my critical encounter with comics yet again entwines comics form with the forms and history of cinema—that Moore sees the hoods and robes of the racist “heroic” Klan in Birth of a Nation as the precursors for superheroes’ function and look, the figures from whose conceptual outlines, we might say, Siegel and Shuster’s imagination traced Superman and his ilk.

On the one hand, a recognition that superhero comics are as deeply informed by the project and history of white supremacy as well nigh everything else in and of the modern world can be no surprise from the vantage point, central in the undertaking of this book, of black studies. Most of the foregoing two chapters wrestle with this very problem. And from that view, Moore’s pithy rendering does little more than summon to a stage less customarily attended to the same grim stupefaction with which we must always, and always inadequately, reckon the costs and effects of the project of white supremacy in blood, bodies, misery, and mangled minds.

On the other hand, the larger part of the undertaking of this book has of course been to show that Moore’s “very good argument” does not and cannot tell the whole story of superhero comics. There are two elements that Moore does not account for, that I have been discussing: One, which Moore diminishes intellectually via recourse to measure of their numbers, is the element of the “smattering of non-white characters.” I have been arguing such characters are not marginal but significant, indeed perhaps central, when we describe them by dislodging the emphasis on whiteness in the adjective “nonwhite” to mark these characters’ conceptually impactful blackness. These conceptual impacts ought not be measured by numbers alone. And two, which Moore does not even mention probably because he’s not positioned to speak of it, is the element of the imaginative possibilities that Sassaki’s question about alternative realities and their fascination point toward but that Moore does not address—especially the imaginative possibilities propagated from the comic-book page for the black or nonwhite reader and fan.

This latter obviously concerns me, and I am positioned to speak of it; but the account of it is less personal than it is a phenomenological account of reading/viewing the superhero comic, which thus describes the ontology of reading/viewing the superhero comic: which I have been discussing as a fantasy-act, its minor doing and its major being. Fantasy-acts may respond to and thus never fully escape their “point of origin,” as Moore designates D. W. Griffith’s cinematic fantasy to be the origin for superheroes; but they also are not confined to or contained by the origins with which they dance and that, in the involutions exemplified by a phenomenological description of superhero-comics reading, they always obscure, often mitigate, and may transform.

I quote Moore’s hammering of the genre I love here not to restate my departure from his conclusions about superhero comics but to refocus my phenomenological account and to further hone it. I can better see what are the stakes or the core elements of my own account when held up to Moore’s account, which stands at a useful angle to mine.

Moore makes use of a not-uncommon critical judgment—often just barely masked as neutral observation—which is that superhero comics are “originally” for children. This, we may recall, was also Frederic Wertham’s concern and Frantz Fanon’s. For Moore, even today’s “supposedly adult” audience, he implies, are not actually adults but must really be children intellectually and perhaps politically, because their attachment to comics in their “original” aim indicates that these adult readers cannot relinquish their “relatively reassuring childhoods.”

This too is a statement that makes scant gesture toward understanding black children, children of color, girl children, or queer children, whose childhoods, statistically more vulnerable to the deprivations of poverty, racism, antiblackness, misogyny, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, do not necessarily—I might say, rarely manage to and, in my own anecdotal knowledge, never do—conjure up the word “reassuring” as their chief adjective. I’m not certain, either, based on the various representations of white, straight, cisgender male adolescence I’ve encountered in film, television, and literature, that their childhoods make for very reassuring memories either; but then this is a position Moore can speak of, which I cannot. And again, historically, the one hundred million copies of comics sold per month during the Golden Age included a hefty portion of young (white) men who did not qualify as child soldiers but were, rather, young adults.

Moore, Wertham, and Fanon for different reasons and to differing ends make central the child in their analyses of superhero comics. I would say they overemphasize the child to the detriment of our understanding of superhero comics’ history. But while I depart from many of their conclusions and quibble with their historiographical hermeneutics, I find what they assume useful now as I come back to the child in my own account of reading/viewing blackness in superhero comics as the exemplar of fantasy-acts. The child as I see it is not Lee Edelman’s futurity-invoking child that enslaves the present or even Kathryn Bond Stockton’s queer child. Rather, I see the child as it relates to superhero-comics reading according to what I see as common to the figure of the child in Wertham’s and Fanon’s and Moore’s analyses: the child’s structural position within an account of reading superhero comics fuller than those that these three propose.

For Wertham and Fanon, the child is dangerously guided toward identifications with superhero figures that threaten the order of society, or (for Fanon) that threaten the potentially affirming, empowering integrity of the black child’s self-conception. For Moore, nostalgia for childhood experience is a conduit transporting the adult reader back into the “reassuring” order of white supremacy (such a description is a fine rendering of Trumpism; and so it is no surprise that Moore articulates it in a 2016 interview). Ironically Moore’s remembered and sought-after child helps solidify the “order” that Wertham in particular fears the child’s reading of superhero comics threatens, though Wertham wants guarantees along the lines of normative gender and sexuality, while the order Moore perceives—which he doesn’t endorse—is an order of racial hierarchy. In all three, reading/viewing comics, via identification or imaginative affiliation, imputes or implies a process of self-transformation and self-making—such self always being tethered to and impossible to cleave from a world also in the process of transforming and being made to accommodate it.

Thus I see the child as a position that galvanizes our attention to the processes of identification. The parts of the processes of identification that I want to emphasize are those that organize around or have as their motor and mechanism the operation of desire. “Desire” here denominates an orientation toward myriad vectors of possibility, the possibilities of what one might “be” or what one might enact. Desire, just as we know it in its common meanings of ordinary speech, might be about dreaming ideals (which must be ideals because they don’t exist): the desire, no doubt, for the ideal of “whiteness” and its “innocence” and “purity” that Moore rightly decries. But I also mean to evoke another common valence of desire, which is the yearning for and movement toward proximity to other bodies, the desire for the embodied activation of the social—erotic desire. Recall Jonathan Dollimore’s neat proposition: “The necessary identifications of male bonding—‘I desire to be like you’—produce an intensity of admiration some of which just cannot help but transform into deviant desire. . . . And it occurs so easily—almost passively—requiring little more than a relinquishing of the effort of emulation, the erasure of ‘to be like’ and the surrender to what remains: ‘I desire . . . you’; thus: ‘I desire (to be like) you.’”2

This position of the child I’m thinking of as marking the potential (and potentially potent) activation of possibilities for imaginative self-making and social-world-making does not depend on or necessitate any developmental trajectory or metaphor of “growth.” The child here need not be, and is probably not, a child by measure of years and is not to be adequately described in terms that diminish them as the lesser, immature version of the adult.

It is important to note the racial character of this child position in my phenomenological account. (I am less sure that it’s important to note the gender character at this point, though as I consider specific texts later, this arena will be more clearly marked.) This child bears an indelible relationship to whiteness—and therefore also to blackness; and vice versa—but this child is not positioned as white. Let me underline this: I have argued that the history of the superhero figure makes the figure definitionally white, and that all manner of changes in both name and conception must be effected to render the figure otherwise. In this respect, I concur with Moore.

But the position of the reader/viewer of superhero comics, the position from which fantasy-acts emanate, is not by definition white. Indeed, I hazard that this child cannot “be” white, at least not wholly. The child-position I’m trying to describe is not innocent, because the child is not blank and unwritten, not an infant tabula rasa (if such can even be said to exist or to be captured in language). But it is precisely this kind of innocence that whiteness strives for—even if it, too, also always fails to stabilize it.

This child-position arrives to read and view her superhero comic marked by the families and societies of her world. This child has been initiated into a world of discourse, of symbols and images, and is—borrowing from Lacan by way of Bersani—the expression and product of that world. (As Bersani writes and I quoted earlier, “We are born into various families of singularity that connect us to all the forms that have, as it were, always anticipated our coming, our presence.”)3 This child’s fantasies would not and cannot take flight without her submersion into this world and her expression of it. Because of this, she is definitionally not fully in accord with, nor can she fully hold, the position of whiteness, with its irresolvable turn toward blank innocence and fruitless aim to achieve the endless pure potentiality truly granted only to divinity.

To recur to Bersani, “Whiteness . . . [figures] an indefinitely prolonged possibility of possibility.”4 Such indefinite prolonged possibility is not possible for anyone to hold. To the extent that it can be successful, it is dependent on the blackness that it (unsuccessfully) cordons off or abjects in order to define itself, yet it needs to always maintain its relationship to that blackness it avers that it despises; it must always hold blackness in sight. The racialized universe as Fanon describes it seeks, but only intermittently and unstably finds, a kind of frozen tableau of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic. In Hegel’s account, this dialectic between Master and Slave is inherently unstable, with positions that cannot be maintained. As I see it, even if or even when my child-position reads/views their superhero comic with the desire of a white supremacist, finding succor in the genre’s predicates as Moore describes them, or if and when they are interpellated into such a desire by those predicates, the position cannot hold its wished-for whiteness. Possibility is not prolonged, because its forms are chosen. Its form is Superman; and then it is whatever form of Superman the reader’s imagination develops, whether this is seeing or imagining oneself as a version of Superman, or seeing or imagining oneself in a world that would facilitate one’s interaction with Superman; and each of these forms is multiplied by the succession of different stories and different writers’, artists’, and eras’ versions of Superman, fan art, fan fiction, and fan interaction. Even if the choosing of form activates a quest for indefinite possibility, the quest cannot be initiated without recognition that the object of the quest is lost. Remember what Ernst Bloch said about the utopian imagination: “If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers,” Bloch says to Adorno.5 Likewise, if we (or you; this may not be a desire I share) had not already lost the dream of whiteness and its indefinitely prolonged possibility, we could not rouse ourselves to quest for it.

The Superman and Psychopathology

If the desire for whiteness and its reassurances of innocence is evoked but stymied in superhero comics—and, as I discuss further shortly, such desire is as much undercut and transformed as it is unremitting—the other valence of desire I’ve noted, erotic desire, with its connection to sociality, instead flourishes in superhero comics. Superhero comics, I argue, stimulate, call up, evoke, precisely what they do not, as a rule, explicitly depict (notably, they do not explicitly depict in a pictorial medium): the erotic as the feeling of, the perception of, not sexuality but sex. For a number of readers—perhaps many? here, neither numbers sold nor opinion surveys would suffice to accurately count—the sex that superhero comics evoke, in part precisely because of its codedness and covertness, is abnormal or shameful (this is why it is hidden), and thus nonnormative and thus queer sex. A lot of people, in other words, fear or think, and thus read and view, superheroes as queer or “homosexual.”

Hitherto I’ve been interested in discussing how comics, and superhero comics in particular, partake of queerness in their form. Now I want to consider the ways in which superhero comics—if considered phenomenologically—are rife with the content of queer sex and sexuality.

Earlier I linked Moore’s calling out of the white supremacy in superhero comics (and movies) to Fanon’s—a pairing that I imagine Moore would not find odious—and through Fanon to Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent—a pairing to which I guess Moore would object. But while Moore probably parts company with Wertham precisely as regards Wertham’s homophobic indictment of comics, both Wertham’s and Fanon’s ways of analyzing comics—their innovative calls to take comics seriously—owe a considerable debt to a deeply, indeed rabidly, homophobic attack on American comics by Gershon Legman in 1948.

Carol Tilley, in her deep dive into what Wertham claimed was wrong about Wonder Woman and the character’s “lesbianism”—which, again, occasioned US Senate hearings about the malign effects of comics reading and led to the development of the Comics Code Authority—discusses how Wertham and Legman, the latter an autodidact folklorist, were close associates, with Legman playing an important role in the development of Wertham’s thinking on the subject of comics. Wertham, Tilley reports, invited Legman to speak at the 1948 symposium on “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.” “Legman’s paper, ‘The Comic Books and the Public,’ was largely a precis of his essay ‘Not for Children,’ which appeared in his book Love & Death the following year,” Tilley says. “Judging from the hundreds of notes detailing conversations between Wertham and Legman, along with the letters spanning the decades from the 1940s through the 1970s that are part of Wertham’s manuscript holdings at the Library of Congress, Legman also served as a significant source of insight and information about comic books for the psychiatrist [Wertham].”6

Closely attentive readers of Fanon’s 1952 Black Skin, White Masks may recognize “The Psychopathology of Comic Books” as a title cited in a long quotation by Fanon in the chapter “The Black Man and Psychopathology.” There Legman’s article is cited under a French title, untranslated in either the Philcox or the older Markmann English translation as “Psychopathologie des comics.” This was an article published in 1949 in a French journal identified as Temps Modernes. However, Les Temps Modernes was a journal published by Fanon interlocutor Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sartre had translated the Legman essay into French from its original English.7 The original article, “The Psychopathology of the Comics”—not to be confused with the Wertham symposium of a similar name—appeared in the English-language journal Neurotica in its Autumn 1948 issue. The original article was itself adapted from a lecture given by Gershon in which he read part of the then-unpublished Love & Death to the American Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy.

In “The Psychopathology of the Comics,” Legman comes to much the same conclusion about the racial politics of superhero comics as Moore does seventy years later. “It is . . . [the] ability to transcend all human law, and be honored for it instead of punished, that makes the Superman formula so successful,” Legman observes.

He takes the crime for granted, and then spends thirty pages violently avenging it. He can fly, he can see through brick walls, he can stop the sun in its orbit like a second Joshua; and all this godlike power he focuses on some two-bit criminal or crackpot, who hasn’t even pulled a trigger yet but is only threatening to. Giant the Jack-killer. And of course, all of Superman’s violence . . . [is] on the side of right. . . . And this obvious flimflam suffices to blind parents & teachers to the glaring fact that not only Superman, and his even more violent imitators, invest violence with righteousness and prestige . . . but that the Superman formula is essentially lynching.8

Finally, “The truth is that the Superman formula is, in every particular, the exact opposite of what it pretends to be. Instead of teaching obedience to law, Superman glorifies the ‘right’ of the individual to take that law into his own hands. Instead of preaching the 100% Americanism that he and his cruder imitators express in hangmen’s suits of red-white-&-blue, Superman . . . is really peddling a philosophy of ‘hooded justice’ in no way distinguishable from that of Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan.”9 Despite his invocation of the Klan, Legman doesn’t tarry long with superhero comics’ associations with lynching—a metonymy that Legman mostly attacks for lynching’s lessons in extralegal justice, more so than its targeting of black people, the caricatured depiction of whom Legman does not list among comics’ evils in his twenty-eight-page screed. He is concerned with fascist undertones and fascist iconography, finding them so replete that he guesses that comics (or perhaps their creators, since comics do not possess actual minds) “are not unconscious of their function as pilot-plants for the fascist state.” We find in superhero comics, Legman says, “the same appeal to pagan gods for unearned powers” as we find in Nazism; we find crypto-swastikas in Captain Marvel’s and the Lone Ranger’s monograms; we find “the same glorification of uniforms, riding boots, and crushed caps.”10

It is with this observation of superhero comics’ sartorial creative choices that Legman begins to unveil a more insidious series of covert lessons imparted to young readers by superhero comics. Legman’s diagnosis of the psychopathology of comics overlaps, or might even be the same as, his diagnosis of the psychopathology of fascism: for both, what is psychopathological is the substitution of “normal” or healthy sexuality (or depictions thereof) with violent behavior and “perverse” sexuality. Yes, there is an odious presence of anti-Semitism in superhero comics as befits their possibly “not unconscious” Nazi leanings, but this receives only a single mention: “All the more sinister villains have ‘Jewish’ noses,” Legman observes. “In some cases the hook-nose is the only way to tell the equally bloodthirsty villain and (snub-nosed) hero apart.”11 More glaring than such racial tropes, and a matter to which Legman devotes the next seven pages of his article, is that in superhero comics just as in Nazism, “there is the same undercurrent of homosexuality and sado-masochism.”12 Homosexuality and sadomasochism are, in the comics and perhaps also in Legman’s imagination, largely the same thing; and to the point, both are very much the stuff of Nazism.

Legman finds a plethora of elements in superhero comics that he deems obviously homosexual. He reels off a list of these, which, frankly, having perused a fair number of reprinted collections of Golden Age comics, I find baffling to read, since I see little indication of them in the comics. Legman derides “the obvious faggotry of men kissing one another and saying ‘I love you,’ and then flying off through space against orgasm backgrounds of red and purple.” Such kisses and avowals of love I have yet to discover examples of in Golden Age (or Silver Age or Bronze Age or Dark Age) comics, but at least Legman tells us what the “knockout colors” that Stan Lee hoped to use to disguise the first interracial kiss in mainstream comics really mean: they’re the color codes of orgasms. Equally problematic but so ubiquitous as to cease to be truly important, Legman claims, are lamentable deviations from gender propriety: “the transvestist scenes in every kind of comic-book” and the common appearance of “long-haired western killers with tight pants.”13

“The homosexual element” of superhero comics—indeed, it seems, of comics in general—can also be observed in other figurations that Legman deems to rise to the level of comics tropes: “the explicit Samurai subservience of the inevitable little-boy helpers—theoretically identification shoe-horns for children not quite bold enough to identify themselves with Superprig himself . . . [and] the fainting adulation of thick necks, ham fists, and well-filled jock straps; the draggy capes and costumes, the shamanistic talismans and superstitions that turn a sissified clerk into a one-man flying lynchmob with biceps bigger than his brain.”14

Jock straps and biceps and drag, oh my! I’ll come back to consider a couple of Legman’s list items shortly. For now, I want to show that what Legman sees as a profusion of tropes within the comics, what he sees and reads on countless pages, leads him to conclude that he can know the sexual character of the comics’ creators. As his analysis balloons into a diatribe, Legman huffs about “the two comic-book companies staffed entirely by homosexuals and operating out of our most phalliform skyscraper”15—thus revealing a conspiratorial, metonymic linkage between comics storytelling tropes, perverse sexuality, and sinister politics that is so profound, so overdetermining, that its presence can be discerned in the architecture of the New York City skyline.

Yet as saturated as the superhero comic is with sexual and gender deviance, winking its evil eye at the impressionable young reader from every panel, the true “homosexual element lies somewhat deeper.”16 Naturally it would; hidden depths are ever the domain of the “homosexual.” And where does this element lie? It lies in the comics’ inculcation in the child of lessons of Oedipal failure. The bamboozled boy-reader learns from Superman not to rise to his Oedipal duty (and the girl-reader, though wisely spurning the comics featuring male superheroes, supposedly, gets led astray into man-hating lesbianism by Wonder Woman).

The really important homosexuality of the Superman theme—as deep in the hub of the formula as the clothes and kisses are at the periphery—is in the lynching pattern itself, in the weak and fearful righteousness with which it achieves its wrong. No matter how bad criminals (or even crime-comics) may be, in identifying himself with them the child does consummate his Oedipean dream of strength: the criminal does break through his environment. The Supermen, the Supersleuths, the Supercops do not. They align themselves always on the side of law, authority, the father; and accept their power passively from a bearded above. They are not competing—not for the forbidden mother, not for any other reward. Like Wild Bill Hickok, our own homosexual hero out thar where men were men—with his long silk stockings and his Lesbian side-kick, Calamity Jane—they are too unvirile to throw off fear, and kill as criminals. Instead, unseen and unsuspected in some corner, they put on a black mask, a sheriff’s badge and a Superman suit, and do all their killing on the side of the law.17

First, Superman and his imitators teach children to become fascist lynchers by acting as vigilantes outside the law; and their iconography is fascist and therefore homosexual. A couple of pages later, Superman and his imitators are homosexual because they act—but they don’t really act; they “act” passively—only on the side of the law, which is the side of the Father, against the criminal, who by contrast has the guts to take the reins of the Oedipal dilemma and compete with Father; and opposition to the criminal, especially, perhaps, given the criminal’s “Jewish nose,” can be seen as covertly fascist.

There is a response to the illogic and contradiction of Legman’s analysis that would answer the rather obvious call to psychoanalyze this speaker before the 1948 gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. If you see “homosexuality” everywhere, including the form of the building where the comics are made, then . . . But I’ll take a pass on this response, tempting as it is. I focus on Legman here for two reasons: One, as is probably evident, is that I want to offer up to the ridicule it deserves the thought of a person who influenced the direction of US Senate hearings and who powerfully changed the development of the comics industry by making a fearmongering argument for censorship. (Legman’s argument was also potentially for legal actions worse than censorship: Legman writes with chilling flippancy, “That the publishers, editors, artists, and writers of comic-books are degenerates and belong in jail, goes without saying.”)18

Two, I reproduce Legman’s calumnies (again, as a person influential in the development of the superhero genre and the comics medium) in order to underline that a phenomenological account of reading superhero comics—for this arguably is what Legman is doing, trying to describe what reading/viewing comics fundamentally is, the ontology of such reading—centralizes the active, conscious invention, imagination, and fantasy of the reader. Reading/viewing comics requires and invites closure at multiple levels, not just within the story but surrounding the story and across its many stories. This invention, this readerly participation and fantasy, moreover, is often an expression of the reader’s eros and is often sexual in content.

Legman himself is a fabulous example of this phenomenon. Let us return to one of the tropes Legman identifies. He observes hypermuscled bodies—ham fists and thick necks and biceps bigger than Clark Kent’s brain. Fair enough. We all see these, as my quotations of Jeffrey Brown in chapter 2 indicate. But Legman also sees something a bit more elusive: “well-filled jock straps.” Legman notes, “The Supermen have ridiculously over-inflated genitals.”19

Really?

The prospect of seeing how Golden Age comics artists drew overinflated genitals and well-filled jock straps is titillating. When I read Legman, I wondered if maybe in my admittedly somewhat dispirited past perusal of Golden Age comics (I take little pleasure, and only the most jaded interest, in encountering Whitewash and his ilk), I’d missed something. I subsequently searched for drawn bulges in Golden Age comics featuring Superman, Batman, Captain America, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and the Boy Commandos, as well as lesser-known figures like the Patriot, the Whizzer, Microman, the Falcon, Mantor the Magician, Jack Frost, the Vagabond, the Defender, Major Liberty, Rockman, and even the rather promisingly named—from a Legman perspective—Corporal Dix. I saw nary a one. That is, unless I tried to inflate with my imagination what sometimes but mostly doesn’t appear as at most a bit of ink shading or some lines that indicate a silken ripple where the outside-worn trunks meet the leggings of the superhero’s costume.

Superheroes in the Golden Age, like superheroes in the Silver Age, tended almost invariably to be drawn with the smooth, bumpless crotches one finds in Barbie and Ken dolls; such is the well-established convention, preceding even the watchful redactions of the Comics Code Authority. (The conventions have loosened but not disappeared in the present: it is sometimes, though not often, possible in contemporary superhero comics to see folds represented in the drawings of some male characters’ costumed crotches and little bump-outs in profile that suggest the presence of genitalia. In the November 2018 issue of Batman: Damned—a short series published under the rubric of DC Comics’ “Black Label,” intended for “mature readers”—artist Lee Bermejo shows us a naked Bruce Wayne striding nude through the deep shadows of the Batcave to choose his fighting gear. In not one but two contiguous panels, readers can see the shadowed outline of Wayne’s circumcised penis. This artful play with shadow was controversial, of course, and those penile outlines disappeared from the hardcover edition of the comic, which collects all the issues of the limited series.) My copies of the Golden Age stories are in reprints on glossy cardstock paper, with reinvigorated coloring and inking, so that I’m probably seeing more than Legman could have beheld in the cheap newsprint four-color pixels of the original comics.

That Legman did see what I deem to be entirely hieroglyphical indications of large genitalia in those same comics interests me. Is this not, then, a version of closure—a reading whereby a suggestion of a possibility provides the invitation, the foundation, and maybe the template for an imagined presence or movement? That Legman imagines, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of dick depicted on the pages of his superhero comics suggests that the unacknowledged discourse or foundational concept of the superhero is not, or at least is not only, white supremacy, as Alan Moore claims; what is underacknowledged but is insistently suggested is the presence of genitals and sex happening, though these are nowhere on the page.

Some sixty years later, Douglas Wolk gives testimony to the presence of sex in superhero comics as he provides his own analysis of many of the most intriguing creations in the comic-book universe, in Reading Comics (2007). This is, mind, an analysis far more straight in what it sees and what it looks for than Legman’s, lacking Legman’s powers to conjure phalluses. Wolk provides one way of accounting for the erotic stimulus provided by Superman and his superheroic brethren. He identifies the look of the superhero as a key component of the figure’s appeal. Wolk writes of the default style of most cartoonists drawing superheroes,

It’s designed to read clearly and to provoke the strongest possible somatic response. You’re supposed to react to it with your body before you think about it. Most of its characters, especially the heroic ones, are drawn to look as “sexy” as possible—wasp waists, big breasts, and flowing hair on women; rippling muscles on men. . . . The style gives a sense of even the most everyday actions and interactions being charged with sex, power, and beauty. Most of all, generic mainstream drawing is doggedly quasi-realistic—or, rather, it’s realness pumped up a little, into something whose every aspect is cooler and sexier than the reality we readers are stuck with.20

Perhaps, then, the depiction of “pumped up,” better-than-reality bodies, even bodies of doll-like smoothness, functions not unlike the gutter between panels: asking, even demanding, that the reader supply the anatomical completion of the imagined figure, such that “cooler and sexier” than real fulfills its teasing promise, Comics Code Authority and conventions of comics be damned.

This interplay of absence and presence, the one evoking the other as though illustrating the dynamics of a classic psychoanalytic fetish, in the minds of readers, and the ultimately political work accomplished in readers’ minds by what the creators of comics withhold and what they supply, is what Fanon finds of interest when he quotes Legman. Wisely neglecting the greater part of Legman’s claims, Fanon selects the very end of Legman’s analysis in order to reveal the antiblack identification into which black (male) comics readers are seduced. Fanon’s quotation of Legman is translated by Philcox thus:

Envisaging the repercussions of these [violent] comic books on American culture, the author [Legman] continues, “The question remains whether this maniacal obsession with violence and death is the substitute for a repressed sexuality or whether its function is rather to channel along the path left open by sexual repression both the child’s and the adult’s desire to aggress against the economic and social structure that with their free consent corrupts them. In both cases, the cause of the corruption, whether sexual or economic, is essential; that is why as long as we are unable to tackle this fundamental repression, any attack waged against simple escape devices such as comic books will remain futile.”21

But remember that Philcox has translated Fanon’s (borrowing Sartre’s) translation of English into French back into English. The original quotation in Legman’s article reads this way:

It is an open question whether the maniacal fixation on violence and death in all our mass-produced fantasies is a substitution for a censored sexuality, or is, to a greater degree, intended to siphon off—into avenues of perversion opened up by the censorship of sex—the aggression felt by children and adults against the social & economic structure by which and to which they allow themselves to be distorted. In either case the distorting element is basic, whether sexual or economic, and until we are prepared to come to grips with these basic repressions, any attack on mere escape-mechanisms like comic books must be futile.22

Thus, we see that Sartre and Fanon have translated the first instance of what Legman calls “censorship” into what Legman only later in the paragraph refers to as “repression.”23 Probably this makes Legman, whom, as we have seen, is far from consistent, more coherent. But censorship in English generally describes a political and legal process, and certainly the word refers to such in Legman’s article, since he is discussing at length all kinds of parent groups and librarian associations and Catholic decency watchdogs engaged in the purging of (hetero)sexual references in comics, while at the same time leaving intact and intensifying the depictions of violence. “Repression” we might think rather as referring to a psychological process that responds to political demand, and a politics that refracts psychological processes. Moreover, “repression,” as our Foucault-trained ears prick up reflexively to note, supposes a Freud-inspired preexisting fund of sexuality that reacts like a sensitive hydraulic system to various pressures that warp its “natural” expression and development.

The meanings accruing to “censorship” rather than “repression” are where I want to direct our attention in assembling a phenomenological account of superhero-comics reading as fantasy-act. Legman, however much he gets things twisted, tries to account for what has been expunged from the page (good, healthy, normal heterosexual sex) and what has taken its place (violence and sexual perversion). For him, in this cause lie readable the effects of reading/viewing the comic. His map of cause to effect draws only a straight line (however ironic such a description may be). Comics reading for Legman is a direction to imitation or some other form of inculcation; that is, “I see/read it; therefore, I will or I must do it” or “I see/read a version of it; therefore, I am inured to or unfazed by it wherever or however it appears.” I’m interested, rather, in mapping the process of comics reading along the lines of, “I see it; therefore, it inspires my imagination.” What, then, might it mean that imagination is sparked by a form that routinely engages in “censorship” of direct depiction of a queer sexuality that it otherwise evokes? Or, to mind our Foucauldian dogma, what might it mean that imagination is sparked by a form that routinely engages in shaping and bringing into consciousness a sphere of being that we call queer sexuality by ostentatiously censoring direct references to it?

Big Black Super-Black

To hazard partial answers to these questions, I will examine imagery of black male characters as implicit or explicit superheroes in pornographic comics. Rather than framing these depictions by reference to pornographic comics in general, I read these gay porn comics as they converse with the genre from which these cartoons derive their visual codes: mainstream superhero comics.

It should be unnecessary in the context of this book’s concerns to mount any special pleading that explains why I’m discussing comics centrally featuring black characters. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that the porn superhero-esque characters I’ve chosen to consider are black as well as sexually queer, because these comic strips implicitly bring to the fore both the underacknowledged projects of white supremacy undergirding superhero comics and the underacknowledged discourse of homoerotics undergirding superhero comics.

That these figures are black male rather than black female characters does require some explanation. First, the homoerotic dynamics evoked in superhero comics are largely evoked in relation to male bodies (or rather, to the drawn effect of cisgender male embodiment, where the figures drawn are of course not actually alive, were never born, and are not embodied but are suggested as having bodies). Here we can recur to Jeffrey A. Brown: “comic book superheroes represent an acceptable, albeit obviously extreme, model of hypermasculinity.”24

Second, the relative paucity of black female characters appearing in a superhero idiom in porn comics—and, from my anecdotal experience, their relative paucity in porn comics, period—while it contrasts sharply with a quite significant presence of black women in photovisual, film, and online-video pornography, is probably not unconnected to wider cultural dynamics identified by black feminist critiques (overlapping with antipornographic feminist critiques) of the representation of black women. Such critiques have demonstrated how representations of black women have had a structural position within the modern world as always-already pornotropes, tending toward, if not outright, caricatures. Jennifer C. Nash in The Black Body in Ecstasy (2014) provides a lucid overview of black women’s figuration in pornography and of critical responses to it, observing, “Black women’s projection on the hard-core pornographic screen has concerned black feminists precisely because it has been imagined to make explicit the exploitation that representation already inflicts on black women.”25 As Hortense Spillers describes, under the various practices and processes of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas, black people, but black women particularly, were transformed from whatever subject positions they may have enjoyed among African peoples to a kind of cultural resource (as well as, of course, a physical labor source), especially evident in the visual tropes routinely deployed to represent them: “the captured sexualities” of enslaved black women, she writes, “provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; . . . [and] as a category of ‘otherness,’ the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness.’”26

The profusion of black women’s pornotroping across representational forms and genres has thus facilitated blackness becoming and appearing as “a pornographic fantasy.”27 Challenging or at least complicating this well-articulated critique of black women in pornographic representation, Nash’s work, along with Mireille Miller-Young’s (A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, 2014) and Ariane Cruz’s (The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, 2016), has tracked the myriad ways that black women as sex workers, performers, artists, and consumers of pornography at once work against and within these constraints, showing how “black pleasures can include sexual and erotic pleasures in racialization, even when (and perhaps precisely because) racialization is painful, and . . . the racialized pornographic screen is a site that makes . . . visible the complex relationship between race and embodied pleasures.”28 Yet the screen seems so far to have had a different historical trajectory from the porn comic-strip page, even as the two overlap significantly today in the explosion of online comics: the fantasy of power that superhero comics trade in via images of “hypermasculinity” has as yet not been coupled with pornographic cartoons featuring black female characters to the same extent that the two have been paired with regard to black male characters (even as the latter does not comprise a huge proportion of porn comics with superhero references).

As we’ll see, there are advantages and disadvantages to having a racialized presence in the worlds of queer porn comics, payoffs as well as losses.

***

The creators and consumers of gay erotic cartoons have had an ongoing love affair with superhero comics. Felix Lance Falkon, an early observer of these comics, describes the artist Graewolf (a pseudonym for Falkon himself) as a paradigmatic gay erotica cartoonist in the following terms: “The greatest influence on his [Graewolf’s] development was the comic books—Superman, Captain Marvel, and the rest—for he taught himself drawing by tracing various well-muscled comic book heroes, leaving off clothing and adding erections of male organs. . . . Although he can build up a drawing from a sketch of his own, he is still most at ease working closely—perhaps too closely—with his reference material.”29 Rupert Kinnard’s superhero-esque cape-wearing character the Brown Bomber (named after the boxer Joe Louis), acclaimed as the first avowedly gay African American character in comics, began appearing in Kinnard’s comic strip in Cornell College’s student newspaper in 1977. Kinnard describes in the documentary film No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics how in the early development of his cartooning he gained notoriety among childhood friends as the boy who could draw superhero favorites like Spider-Man, Batman, and the Hulk. Kinnard narrates that as time progressed, “I moved on to a slightly embarrassing part of that period, where I would sometimes draw these superheroes in these erotic acts.”30

If early gay cartoonists, whether or not they were publicly producing erotica, honed their craft via quietly imitating and then revising superhero-comics iconography, in effect supplying and undressing the well-filled jocks that Legman only feverishly imagined, then the past two decades of comics have brought these previously censored and underground imaginations into full visibility. We see clearly homoerotic versions of Batman and Robin in almost all of Joe Phillips’s superhero images in his monographs, calendars, comic strips, and DVDs, for example, and read an at-length exploration of a superhero-sidekick romantic relationship (albeit between partners of comparable age) in Chayne Avery and Russell Garcia’s Boy Meets Hero (2008), as well as enjoy exuberant renditions of either the dynamic duo or Batman alone (he does have a distinct top daddy appeal) in the collected volumes of art by Glen Hanson and Patrick Fillion. There is even a Superman-Batman romantic duo—à la the now widely known Kirk-Spock “slash” fan-fiction phenomenon (the still-burgeoning genre embraces every other conceivable TV show or movie franchise pairing)—which is of prominence in the mainstream superhero-comics world: popular and critically acclaimed writer Warren Ellis’s creation of the characters Apollo and Midnighter, first for Wildstorm Comics and now appearing in DC Comics. Apollo and Midnighter are superheroes with clear references in their powers to Superman and Batman. Ellis, cheekily, in collaboration with artist Bryan Hitch, revealed the two powerhouses to be lovers in an early issue of the The Authority, when they kissed.

Here again is Falkon on the early underground of gay-themed graphic work:

The interest in the muscular physique as a subject for homoerotic art work . . . can be attributed to several sources. The ancient Greeks have a direct hand, through their surviving works, notably sculptures. . . . Another major cause . . . is the proliferation of comic book superheroes—Superman and his myriad of descendants—in costumes that usually revealed every line of their musculature. . . . On the other hand, the regular masked-hero comic books are strangely prudish in some ways, for they are drawn without any appreciable genital bulge and lack nipples even when shown bare-chested. Regardless of the intent of the artists, however, the comic-book heroes do much to establish clean-cut musculature as a virility symbol among adolescent boys, and even more important, to establish that symbol in pictorial form—as a drawing.31

Falkon’s emphasis on the sexiness of superheroic figures being the achieved effect of drawing is noteworthy for us because it grounds us again in the recognition of how central the activity of fantasy is in the production and reception of superhero comics, whether their queer sexual content is censored or set free. Queer and gay porn comics are on the one hand more realistic than superhero comics—they show what prudish conventions and the Comics Code Authority dictate cannot be shown, in the form of exposed nipples, pubic hair, schlongs that are prodigies. On the other hand, through this very “realism,” they draw attention to their being achieved, drawn, the results of imagination, since few “real” people are so muscular and so outrageously gifted in genital size.

As Thomas Waugh, a seasoned observer of pornographic photographs and pornographic cartoons, argues, porn comics are a fantastic, nonindexical genre of representation: “Graphics offer a richer spectrum of fantasy than do indexical images like photographs, often in inverse proportion to their importance as documentary evidence.”32 The richness of this spectrum is conveyed by a variety of representational techniques: Deborah Shamoon, writing about early Japanese boy-love yaoi comics (manga featuring tales of male homoerotic or homosexual relationships), notes, “Boy-love comics . . . feature a strong fantasy element. . . . Many boy-love stories have a fantastic, historic, or futuristic setting.”33 This same element of the fantastic distinguishes what Shamoon observes of Japanese pornographic manga aimed at female readers (which is not necessarily or exclusively homoerotic or homosexual). Shamoon notes that the biggest difference between these comics—widely consumed in Japan for a period—and the “frenzy of the visible” indicative of filmic porn is the ingenious methods used to show aspects of sexual acts or experience that are not visible to the eye: for example, signifying the wetness of a female character’s vagina and thus the level of her arousal by drawing what are plainly droplets of moisture throughout the panel, so that the scene itself is drenched; or indicating penetration via tricks such as cutting away from panels depicting the “action” much as a porn film would depict it, to panels where a woman’s skin appears to be transparent and the reader can see the penis or fingers within the body.34

Black male characters are of course relative rarities in the corpus of gay erotic cartoons, as they are in the mainstream superhero comics that have claimed my attention in this book. But insofar as they do appear, with their pedigree in the fantasy sex of porn comics and in the sex-saturated fantasies of power in superhero comics, the articulation of “black” and “superhero” in queer porn cartoons endows us with fantasies of blackness that are otherwise concealed or censored in superhero comics proper. In the next section, I discuss the dimensions of these intentionally, deliberately unreal figurations of blackness that illustrate the minor doing and major being that I’ve attributed to fantasy-acts as (1) evoking and stoking readers’ investments in the deeply problematic and yet imaginatively fecund imago of the Big Black Dick and (2) insinuating into readers’ imagination—perhaps their being?—a desiring relationship for blackness that pushes the affirmation of blackness that we see in both Negrophilia and its political opposite Black-Is-Beautiful cultural advocacy to its limit, and perhaps beyond.

Black Dick Power

Let’s look at the black male figure in pornographic comic strips of the cartoonists Belasco and David Barnes, whose work almost exclusively focuses on black characters, and Patrick Fillion, whose images are multiracial. All of these strips feature explicitly erotic black male superheroic figures or actual superheroes. In these images, the physical appeal and desirability of the characters—a fundamental characteristic, too, of mainstream male superheroes, but not generally acknowledged in fandom or deployed as a plot or thematic device—is emphasized, though it is also true that their beauty and desirability is bound up with, or at least cannot be extricated from, familiar racist images of black male hypersexuality.

The porn-comic genre is meant to sexually arouse, and Belasco’s, Fillion’s, and Barnes’s presentation of the characters as objects of desire, as well as possible (though, as noted earlier, far from necessary) identification—sites for the reader to sexually fantasize, like porn in any medium—renders them, within the terms of the genre, analogous to the hero in superhero comics. Whether the black superhero is a reference providing a foundation for how we read the porn comic or the porn comic protagonist is explicitly a black superhero, in fictional worlds where what would be a battle in mainstream superhero comics becomes the sexual act in sex comics (or the sexual act becomes the conclusion of a truncated version of such a battle), the black male character’s sexual or erotic desirability is itself a form of power, not unlike superspeed or laser vision.

It should be noted that how we recognize, feel, and assess the presence and operation of power in the context of a pornographic gay male comic already illustrates the ways in which that concept must always, understood properly, be seen as relative in a scale of measurement that also designates the not-powerful, and that therefore the content of power is not absolute but malleable, that in the blink of an eye the subject is subjected and an object, too. These characters (again, possible figures for identification as well as objects on the page to be desired or to prompt as-if fantasies of possession of them) are black male figures with big black dicks (BBDs), and thus ultramasculine in a way confirming the common linkage between the black male body and threatening (as well as desirable) violent masculinity; at the same time, that they are black male figures means the erection/castration paradox is in play, and the characters are “pussies” as well as human-shaped apparati for BBDs. And at the same time, too, since these representations are of all-male sexual worlds, another doubling is functioning, which Leo Bersani describes when he tells us that gay male fantasies work to both establish and disestablish masculinism, since such fantasies worship at the altar of phallic masculinity but also never cease to feel the appeal of masculinity’s violation (insofar as to be penetrated—as a male figure in a gay male fantasy can be and often will be—is to become or to risk becoming nonmasculine and/or feminine).35

That these paradoxes and confusions of signification should be at work in a supposedly simple genre where penises are enormous and where conventions of representation satisfy the wish for power with the fantasy of shooting lethal rays from one’s fingers or eyes is curious, to be sure. But it points to the way that exaggeration and caricature—which are in large part the work of the comics genre—are useful forms of analysis and revelation, and it underlines as well the heterogeneity and plasticity of what appears as though it is a rock-solid element of our human reality, like blackness.

Belasco is probably the most historically prominent of gay-male-comics artists whose work features black men. In addition to the collection of many of his strips called The Brothers of New Essex: Afro Erotic Adventures (2000), his strips, poster art, and illustrations have appeared in black gay publications like GBM, in porn magazines, in ads for clubs and events, and as cover art for editions of James Earl Hardy’s popular B-Boy Blues, since the early 1990s. A fan of cartoonists such as Tom of Finland and the Hun, Belasco, a commercial artist, hungered for “more imagery exploring a wider range of African American men” than he saw in those artists’ work or in popular culture generally. “Mind you,” he notes, “this was only shortly after the onslaught of all that Mapplethorpe hoopla and way before the advent of Tyson Beckford, D’angelo, Taye Diggs and many more who represent the plethora of striking images of black masculinity. The fact that people responded so strongly to my Marvel comic-y rendered examples of b-boys, ruffnecks and buppies in all honesty floored me and I’ve been obsessed with telling these sordid little tales ever since.”36

Belasco’s primary Marvel comic-y protagonist is Boo, a broad-shouldered, sculpted-physique, earrings- and baseball-cap-wearing Apollo who would in current parlance probably be called, appreciatively, a “thug.” Boo does indeed get involved in a number of “sordid” adventures, looking like a far lovelier and more overtly sexual version of Luke Cage. One of his forays, in the strips “Boo: Pleasure n’ Pain” and “Hard Knox,” finds Boo whisked off to a subterranean all-but-magical place where a band of black men whose clothing looks as though it were inspired by Earth, Wind & Fire album covers practice BDSM, and have captured Boo so that he will perform for their pleasure. Boo, heroically, endures his spankings and other trials but gets the sexual better of his fellow performers and eventually defeats the wizard-y warlock-y master, precipitating a general revolt among the captives and S/M brethren against the master’s cruelty. Boo, the captors, and the captives all have a lot of fun in the bargain.

Another strip, “When the Master Commands,” features the character Oasis, an exotic dancer and “the most scandalous brother in New Essex!” This strip takes the superheroic subtext of Boo’s adventures a step further. Belasco’s homage and debt to Marvel comics is evident in the strip’s opening (figure 3.1), which is like the splash page of a ’60s or ’70s Marvel comic, surrounding a large-panel rendering of the “hero” with text that enumerates his various “powers”—Oasis’s primary puissance being his immense sexual attractiveness, as is evident by Belasco’s rendering Oasis nude and erect. “Hard of body, head and dick, watch as Oasis gets in way over his head (both of them) in his first spine-tingling, pulse-pounding, dick-throbbing adventures!!!!”37 This list of noun-gerund adjectives is familiar to any reader of Marvel comics from the ’60s and ’70s, as its adrenaline-pumped style is pure Stan Lee.

Oasis touches off a melee at the strip club because the club patrons become obstreperous in their zeal to sample his wares, and as a result, he gets fired. Just as the splash page warns, “that body gets him [Oasis] into more trouble than his brain can handle sometimes!”38 Needing work, Oasis answers an ad for a sex worker willing to play out the fantasies of a recluse who lives in a suburban mansion. Once Oasis arrives at the mansion, he is told to wait naked for the “master’s” approach, whereupon the lights are doused, Oasis slips and falls hard in the darkness, and he awakens to find a shadowy figure licking him all over and generally having his way with him—treatment that hits Oasis’s “hot spots.”

Oasis wonders whether his assailant, who’s wearing a “strange body suit,” is black. A panel shows the mysterious man’s hands, partially gloved, grasping Oasis’s buttocks, and a thought balloon lets us in on Oasis’s sex-worker-cum-rape-victim process: “He’s got some big-ass hands! I wonder . . .” On to the next panel, where we see Oasis’s body pressed up against the shadowy body-shape next to him, and see two very swollen erections. “. . . I was right. Big-ass dick, too! He’s black.” The bodysuit in shadow with penis unsheathed proceeds to force a blowjob from Oasis and soon showers Oasis’s face with lovingly detailed tendrils of ejaculate—which upsets Oasis, who was more or less fine with the forced fellatio but finds the unexpected cum-facial to be disrespectful. But no matter, Oasis falls asleep, muttering, “Everything is blurry . . . Your . . . dick . . . was . . . DRUGGED?!”39

Strange bodysuits, sleep-inducing powers—Mr. Big Black in the Bodysuit clearly bears the hallmarks of supervillainy. But he’s a porn supervillain, revealed to be black by his fulfillment of black-man-is-a-big-penis cultural conjury (and he’s all the more so since the nearly-full-body-sheath makes him something of a walking black phallic symbol).

When the master finally reveals himself in the light, he is in fact attired in a form-fitting, face-concealing bodysuit replete with spikes running along the head, shoulders, ass, and crotch. He tells Oasis, “I wasn’t always the master. I was taught by the first master . . .” The picture of the first master on the wall, we see, is a ringer for Oasis. Now the current master wishes to teach Oasis to be a master as he himself was taught. This task involves Oasis’s elaborate submission: Oasis’s brief for the evening is to navigate “the maze of temptation” in the catacombs beneath the mansion. “If you can navigate your way out without succumbing to its carnal pleasures, i.e. cumming,” the master warns, “. . . you will be released . . . However, if you fall prey to lust and spill your seed, you lose and will be mine to do with as I please . . .”40

Oasis then prepares himself for his heroic task by donning his own version of superhero togs (figure 3.2). This skimpy costume, more Wonder Woman bathing suit than Superman long johns, is a curious development, since Oasis will not need clothes to have sex. It serves to underline the strip’s conscious reference to superhero comics. Subsequent to dressing this way, Oasis has sex of various configurations with several of the catacombs’ lusty denizens—one-on-ones and a three-way, getting expertly sucked, getting brutally fucked, and imperiously fucking others: all comprising a quick set of Herculean labors. Oasis triumphs over each “temptation” he meets by making his partner or partners ejaculate with his superior sexual skills and overwhelming allure, while he successfully manages his (black and) blue balls.

At the end of the strip, Oasis finally faces the master himself, who reveals that his supervillain suit has been adapted to transform him into a human vibrator (“The former master, my beloved Demetri, left me an array of tools to handle young bucks like you”)41—thus completing the master’s transformation into walking Big Black Dick (figure 3.3).

After the master and Oasis fight, the master tries to fuck Oasis into submission. Oasis finds the pleasure of the master’s suit-powered thrusts to be so intense that he risks dying “from ecstasy.” But Oasis finds a way to turn the tables, and, applying techniques of “erotic suffocation” in which his sex skills have made him proficient, he chokes the master into unconsciousness (figure 3.4). But in addition to defeating the evil master, Oasis also has other interests, and he continues to ride the big black cyborg dick. “This dick feels sooo goood!” he cries, in a panel that shows us Oasis’s penis in the foreground, nearly as large as his head and dripping with pre-cum, though it is the master’s unseen penis that is being spoken of—and Oasis orgasms, at last.42

Oasis’s ejaculate, like the rest of him, seems to be superhuman, since its mysterious properties are such that contact with the master’s bodysuit fries the suit’s system and completes the defeat of the master—so we see from the electric lightning-like lines frizzing around the master’s splayed limbs in the panel where Oasis sprays over him. Oasis’s ejaculate, his sexuality, is power, thus almost bearing a divine valence in the universe of superhero comics, where lightning and electricity are frequently the province of gods and mutants. According to the rules of the game as first established, Oasis’s ejaculation was to seal him into submission and defeat. But the rules are upended: the master who was once not a master and learned submission to become a master falls, while the captive hero triumphs, defeats his captor, and gains his freedom, thus breaking the cycle of mastery and submission through “losing”—though losing is orgasm, and it is by means of the glory of Oasis’s sexual skills and his Helen-like inducement of maddening desire that his triumph has been achieved. The borderlines between masculine-penetrator and feminine-penetrated, between domination and submission, master and slave—and of course the inescapable reference of these terms, in a context where black characters appear, to the history of slavery in the Americas43—are all crossed and blurred, even as each piece of them is touched upon and stroked to Oasis’s pleasure and, presumably, stroked too for the fantasizing pleasure of the reader.

Patrick Fillion is a white Canadian cartoonist whose work has been widely reproduced in a variety of venues where illustrations of sexualized male figures appear—anthologies of gay art, beautifully produced monographs, and a wide array of porn magazines. He is also the creator and impresario of a line of digital and print comic books, Class Comics, featuring lavishly illustrated stories of gay male characters (Class Comics publishes the work of a number of creators). Fillion’s characters include callboys, cops, strippers, aliens, demons, and most prominently, a large number of superheroes bearing names like Naked Justice.

The surprise—if we compare Fillion’s universe to that of gay male porn films and mainstream superhero comics—is how frequently black male characters appear: a lot. In fact, one of Fillion’s hardback collections of cartoon illustrations is called Hot Chocolate and is exclusively devoted to his drawings of black men. In figures 3.5 and 3.6, you can see that while Fillion’s black men are always sporting outsized members (again, often larger than the characters’ heads!) in an apparent fulfillment of the reduction to BBD that figurations of Blade and Black Panther conceal behind images of fright and horror, they are also illustrated as beautiful, via soft lines and the rendering of dreamy, romantic, happy expressions. (It must be noted, too, that all of Fillion’s characters, whatever their race or species, have penises longer and fatter than even Tom of Finland’s.)

One of Fillion’s stable of superhero creations is a character called Space Cadet. Like many of Fillion’s heroes, he’s gloriously good-looking and hugely endowed, and he’s also black, with blond hair. Space Cadet in his earliest appearances as a secondary character—and sex partner—in the adventures of Naked Justice (a red-headed solar-powered hunk whose lover was Latinx Ghostboy) wore an ungainly fishbowl helmet and sported a laser pistol and seemed to have the vague power set reminiscent of the classic mainstream Silver Age superhero Adam Strange, one of many “spaceman” creations inspired by the Cold War competition for space flight in the ’50s and ’60s. But later Space Cadet moved to center stage, getting his own series, and he doffed the helmet and acquired jazzier powers involving “radiation bursts” shot straight from his fingers and eyes (and in a recent adventure, his penis). Arguably his chief power, though, is to be such an apparently delectable bottom that he attracts the attention of horny villains and interlopers. On the cover of Rapture #3 (figure 3.7), we see his costume torn from his body à la Luke Cage, though his expression, unlike Cage’s painful-looking fury, is one of, well, rapture, as he’s fondled from behind by a demonic satyr who appears to have his penis deep up Cadet’s backside.

In the pages of the issue, we discover that the satyr, Vallan, has been spying on Space Cadet to determine whether he’s powerful enough to serve as a champion in Vallan’s realm, which is menaced by Baron Von Phallus. Space Cadet’s subsequent trip to the land of the satyrs finds him constantly being fondled, molested, and mounted (he’s stripped of his costume almost immediately—satyr customs and immigration at work, evidently). He’s also constantly called “the dark one,” as in “The dark one is glorious! What a magnificent warrior’s physique he possesses!” and “We could play with the dark one and Jakoor . . . would never know” and “Forgive us, my lord . . . We could not resist the beauty of the dark one!” Though Space Cadet complains that the satyr, fairy, and centaur folk he’s supposed to champion (but who’ve been busy having their way with him while he’s comatose) should call him by his name (Byron) rather than “dark one,” the very next line has Strider, the king of the centaurs, replying, “As you wish, dark one.”44 Later King Strider hits the double, saying, “You truly are a Nubian prince, dark one,” to which Space Cadet replies, “Okay, fine . . . you can keep calling me ‘dark one’ . . . if you kiss me.” The text caption after the two kiss makes the language of Strider’s dialogue its own: Fillion writes, “Strider swoops Space Cadet into his arms, hungry to get at the Nubian hero’s rigid member.”45

Byron, needless to say, does not hail from the ancient land of Nubia or its present-day national locations: the descriptive refers to his color, his race and heritage. Thus Space Cadet’s highly fuckable loveliness is black fuckable loveliness—and we see this, too, where Cadet faces the villain Icecap. Icecap has been lured to come out of hiding by the smell of Cadet’s free-hanging cock, and he wastes no time highlighting verbally what we can see, which is the two characters’ racial difference (indeed, Icecap’s whiteness is so unrealistically extreme that the confrontation seems to be between villainous ice people and heroic sun people, as though plucked from a simplistic version of a ’90s Afrocentric fantasy). “Oh, groovy! It’s my favorite fudgesickle!” Icecap taunts. “I’ve missed you! You’re the tastiest chocolate sundae I’ve ever had, you know!” (figure 3.8).46

The insistence here on language that does the unnecessary work of racial marking—and that makes the superhero-supervillain fight a racial confrontation—seems at first to be only another iteration of the practice that began with the racialized naming of heroes in the ’60s and ’70s. From this point of view, the conceptualization and depiction of an erotic black superhero figure differs between Belasco and Fillion along predictable lines, insider-black versus outsider-white. But there are perhaps surprising resonances between the two, similar methods of reconfiguring the black male image to achieve a desirable black male superhero, such that the view from inside blackness to black desirability is not altogether different from the outside view. For one thing, Fillion’s use of “Nubian” takes up (and eroticizes) naming that has its most recent provenance in then-popular Afrocentric parlance (the supposed ur-heritage of black folks being “the original Nubian”). Second, Fillion dedicates his volume Hot Chocolate—which, by the way, probably features as many distinct black male characters as, if not more than, appear in Belasco’s corpus—in these words: “This book is dedicated to the Beauty, Dignity, Strength, Intelligence and Power of the Black Man.”47

Key here is the definite article, though it remains uncapitalized: “the Black Man”—an appellation that is designated from a position outside blackness or black communities but that of course also has its uses enunciated from inside—as in this comment in Belasco’s foreword to The Brothers of New Essex: “The stories in this book only scratch the surface of the kinds of erotic tales I have in my head to tell. Luckily, there are other artists such as . . . David Barnes who have taken up the task of providing stories and imagery that explore the sexuality of the black gay (or same-gender loving . . . take your pick!) male.”48

All of this is on one level a demonstration of how the discourse of racialization has worked in the case of African-diasporic slavery and its aftermath: a hodgepodge of peoples naming their heritages with a variety of different names get called “black,” are forced to internalize this name, and later assert their presence, designate their historical experience, and demand redress for injustice using the names and terms they have acquired, the names that were central instruments in their subjugation.

In Belasco’s Oasis story, the villainous master, sheathed in a black shadow-suit, identified as African American by the size of his dick felt in the dark, and hyped up by the suit to be a human vibrator, is the Big Black Dick. Oasis is the black hero, who also has a big dick: one set of values (a protagonist’s centrality, heroism, desirability) becomes visible in part because it is broken off and distanced from a more exaggerated—and, in typical binary fashion, less attractive (the suit isn’t cute)—and problematic set of values (the über-dick, the bestial), which must come along with the black male figure. Oasis ejaculates—in symbolic terms, he is able to summon his own vital energy, the stuff of his genetic being, and it saves the day for him, though he has been told to keep it in check in order to survive—while riding the big black dick, which is a creation of the suit and which is thus artificial in the story, as a way of pointing to its chimerical nature in reality.

A comic strip by David Barnes, whom Belasco names as a cotraveler, provides an illustration of how this circuit of naming is also a circuit of ways of looking, and of ways of conceiving fantasy. It performs a different, but instructive, working with the split characteristics of the black male figure.

One of Barnes’s main characters is Radio Raheem. Raheem appears in Barnes’s zine The Erotic Adventures of Radio Raheem. Raheem is not a superhero, but his status is superheroic in the sense that he is the focus of the strip and his desirability is of such fantastic proportions that I deem it superhuman. Raheem is described in a splash page thus: “He’s part black, part Puerto-Rican, he’s young and full of cum . . . He’s a homeboy, he’s a playboy . . . He will rock your world . . .”49 I therefore treat Raheem as a superhero-like character here.

In the strip “At the Gym,” Raheem rocks the world of the lucky folks who happen to be present when he goes to work out. Note in figure 3.9 that while the story turns entirely on Raheem’s appeal, Barnes’s style is less hyperreal in the Marvel Way than Belasco’s and Fillion’s; it is instead more sketch-like, calling you to fill out the missing dimensions with your own imagination.

Barnes’s style might mean that Raheem’s positioning as a paragon of desirability—as the locus of erotic fantasy for the reader—is not as aesthetically apparent as Boo’s, Oasis’s, or Space Cadet’s. Rather, it is established by the other characters’ response to him. In this vein, the culminating panel of figure 3.10 catches the attention: Who are the two voyeur characters, extreme right and left, in the panel?

The two observing characters are white, while the sexual performers are black, and this of course is underlined by the younger man’s line, which spills out of the borders of the panel, “God, I love black men!” Neither of these figures plays any other part in the story or has any other dialogue. The older man appears here and nowhere else. The younger character appears prior to this moment, watching Raheem’s shorts bulge (figure 3.11)—though this appearance is ambiguous, since the similarity between this character’s face and the young voyeur in the shower is not pronounced; both simply appear to be “white,” as evinced by the rendering of the two figures’ hair.

This younger of the two shower-voyeur characters appears again—less ambiguously—after the cum-shot panel, standing around watching as the imminent arrival of the gym manager brings the play and exhibition to a close (figure 3.12).

Why are these white characters included?

To establish the response that Raheem garners, his power over men. The fact that they are voyeurs rather than participants might be a nod to the reader, a way to represent us in the story so that, as promised, Raheem rocks your world.

But it is surely significant that these voyeurs, and by extension perhaps you the reader, are white. There’s a considerable amount of watching, it seems, when black male characters are in the center of the porn comic, since Vallan watches Space Cadet, and Oasis gets observed at different times in his story, by the master and his servants or captives. In “At the Gym,” Raheem engages in exhibitionistic sex with Aaron, is duly watched by the unnamed white voyeurs in the shower and in the weight room, and then is watched by an unseen gym manager. In this way, we may surmise that the element of surveillance, which is a fundamental practice enforcing white supremacy, and the resultant effect of enclosure, are recognized as conditions under which the blackness of black men takes meaning, even in a porn comic. Barnes’s story makes a recurring black male character the protagonist and focus of the erotic and sexual desires activated in the story, but the story also represents as structural elements a kind of racialized framing for the setting in which that desire is activated—black bodies surveilled; black bodies as objects of a gaze that is Negrophilic, yes, but therefore also Negrophobic.

If Belasco’s inclusion of Barnes in the project he describes for his creation of Boo and Oasis et al. is an accurate description of Barnes’s oeuvre—the project of providing “more imagery exploring a wider range of African American men” as cartoon templates of erotic fantasy, then the line “God, I love black men!” seems to be a core statement of Barnes’s strip. It surely responds to and follows the famous late-1980s motto, “Black men loving black men is the revolutionary act,” a line that is ritually repeated in Marlon Riggs’s 1989 documentary Tongues Untied and that itself echoed Joseph Beam’s exhortatory, “Black men loving Black men is a call to action, an acknowledgment of responsibility.”50 To come to “love black men” with an exclamatory and divinity-beseeching fervor is an encapsulation of the tendency of Barnes’s strip and the object of its drive. The line confirms the desirability and lovability not just of Raheem but of Raheem and his gym paramour, Aaron, as representatives of black men in general, Raheem as the black man.

The line’s position in the flow of the story is significant, too. Barnes writes/draws it spilling out of the panel into the gutter. This might be a “mistake” having to do with the problem of containing all the text and picture that Barnes needs for each temporal beat in the story that the panel represents. Barnes might have run out of room. But even if that’s so, Barnes felt the need to have the line included in full, and to sacrifice the integrity of the panel to include it.

Reading this as a cartooning mistake, however, doesn’t quite hold up. Breaking the line of a panel is a fairly conventional convention-breaker in comic-book art, where figures or effects spilling over panel lines convey movement and dynamism or emphasize how what breaks the panel cannot be contained in a single temporal beat within the story, how it dominates what lies near it. The likely intentionality of the panel-line break is further suggested by the fact that the same spillage occurs only one other time in the nine-page strip, when the sound effect of Raheem’s penis getting erect is too much to contain (figure 3.13).

This “THROB” helps tell us something about Barnes’s similarly positioned “God, I love black men!” The word “throb” describes a movement we cannot actually see, of course. But the description of movement via a text word rendered in capital, visually hollow letters aligns it with the representation of sound effects in cartooning, something we routinely encounter in comics where fighting occurs and building walls come crashing down. This particular “THROB,” then, is a movement unseen, but also a sound we could never hear. It’s related to the “BOING!” and other such orthographical “sound” effects that flare above the head of the iconic character Archie Andrews when he sees Veronica and experiences a thunderbolt of desire that the Comics Code Authority (and perhaps the dictates of comedy) required to be dissimulated (figure 3.14).51

Both the statement “God, I love black men!”—exclamation, substitute for ejaculation, and revelation all at once—and the unhearable sound effect of a throbbing penis spill into the gutters of Barnes’s strip. Both statement and sound effect thus represent something dynamic, something that exceeds its moment. One reading of this parallel is to see the latter as informing, even causing the former: in such a reading, it is the BBD, the race-inflected and often or even mostly racist fantasy, that is the source of love. I think this line of cause and effect is operative, but the provenance of “I love black men!” in Beam’s and Riggs’s work—and thus the line’s background and meaning in an exhortation to combat how antiblackness sows black community discord—tugs my attention in a different direction.

The gutter is where the reader of the comic supplies the imagination of what is not represented on the page. It is the invitation to and requirement of the comics reader’s dreaming. Both the love for black men and the unhearable sound effect of Raheem’s penis’s throb are directions, orientations, that Barnes gives us for the conscious dreaming inherent to comic-strip reading and viewing. Legman’s filled-up jocks and inflated crotches that he never actually saw but nevertheless reported as ubiquitous give us an instructive, if also cautionary, example of how to track the significance of the unrepresented in comics. Barnes’s textual and text-effect spillovers point us to qualities of blackness that are not seen, that perhaps cannot be seen, cannot be captured in the figural and pictorial, qualities that lie beyond the visual field and the Fanon-described dictates of blackness apprehended via epidermalization—qualities of blackness suggested by the link between text and image that is the DNA of comics, qualities of blackness that one loves.

I see this as a love that at once coincides with, and is nonetheless out of scale with, embodied love—embodied love being that which exists in the temporal (the temporal is broken by the spillage out of the panel) and which conflates blackness-as-category with bodies-deemed-black. In a comic strip that tells a story about physical embodied love, the metaphysical and nontemporal is signified; but the two dimensions are linked, not cleaved. When we evoke the metaphysical not confined to the temporal, we are often invoking gods and divinity, which here we can for brevity’s sake sign as a category denoting what is ineffable with respect to a system of representation. The young white voyeur’s “God . . . !” signals the reader’s brief transition into this category as one reads. The process I’m groping for here is where metaphor and metonymy bleed into, and then infuse, causality. This is another way of describing magic. Comics reading here is “magical thinking.” But the dismissive judgment inherent to that phrase—for me, inaugurated in the diamond-faceted writing of Joan Didion and her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)—we must jettison in this context, in order to perceive the ontological features of what we are describing.

It is troubling, from an anti-antiblack perspective, to follow the pathway of Barnes’s strip to an excessive, metaphysical physical love of blackness and black men through the perhaps-unwanted interposition of a white gaze. It is troubling if in all these strips, the desirability of the black male figure is most firmly established—might well even require—the construction of a white viewer recognizing it, even in a fantasy created from a position supposedly in blackness or within black communities.

Belasco, Barnes, and Fillion come from different racial positions as they create their fantasy figures, but once they enter the discourse of fantasy, visual and textual, and that discourse shapes them as much as they shape it, what is the degree of difference between them in how they see the black figure? How different truly are Belasco’s and Barnes’s conceptualization from Fillion’s?

It may be that the appearance of a black male hero under the conditions established by superheroic fantasy fiction requires a distribution of the attributes of the stereotype(s) without which the blackness/maleness of a black male figure is nigh illegible: some other, related character or some part of the hero’s core story or some part of his list of powers, some aspect of his appearance, must sign the bestial and/or monstrous and/or hypersexual and/or menacing and/or outlaw. This, we may consider, is not unlike the appearance of a black man with political power—I’m coming back, of course, to Obama, who as I noted in the introduction shaped the visions of black supermen in comic-book pages in the 2010s: the black man with political power, who, having come to be under conditions of sociality defined by antiblackness, and under the aegis of a political system that made its principal structural foundation the conjuring of (white) freedom out of its constitutive contrast with the enslavement of visibly “black” demi-citizens, and that established its post-emancipation definition of order and nation via the relentless restriction of the movement of black bodies and prosperity of black persons, must signify a fundamentally unstable contradiction that tends always toward impossibility: powerful but actually powerless; or powerless but covertly powerful—a president, but one ever restrained and on the cusp of castration; a revolutionary leader, but assassinated.

Barnes, Fillion, and Belasco similarly manage this tendency toward impossibility—and recall, we are encountering this impossibility in fantasy, where we might expect that “the resistance of the empirical world is eliminated,” as Ernst Bloch says of art.52 Management for Barnes et al. involves constructing within their tales a position outside, as it were, from which blackness can be valued as powerful and desirable. An outside-black or nonblack position must be shaped within the narrative and shaped by the flow of tableaux, for seeing black desirability, because the domination of ways of seeing and valuing would make such beauty otherwise invisible, or conceal it beneath the more familiar veneers of monstrosity and threat.

Regarding such hegemonies of seeing and valuing, we have an insightful comment by filmmaker Isaac Julien. Here he comments on the phenomenon of the so-called snow queen, the black gay man whose apparent preference for romantic or sexual object is white men. Julien calls himself a snow queen in an essay about his 1993 short film The Attendant, though his use of the colloquialism reveals a complexity in the phenomenon that users of the term rarely admit or even wish to know.

In fact in this Western culture we have all grown up as snow queens—straights, as well as white queens. Western culture is in love with its own (white) image. The upholding of an essential black identity is dependent upon an active avoidance of the psychic reality of black/white desire. . . . The out black snow queen draws attention to the fact of black desire for the white subject. . . . Fixed ideas about racial difference are brought into play by both black and white subjects in their everyday transactions, mediated on a sexual and racial anxiety which is internal to every subject and which is based on the insistent denial of the Other within ourselves.53

Julien’s comment is of course to state in a (somewhat) different context exactly what Fanon says when he declares that there is only one destiny for the black man, and it is to become white.54

The dictates of the snow queen world mean that the difference of the black figure is inescapable, a given: blackness will be an object in the discursive eye, and it will be alien, though it can also, with effort, be a beautiful object, a gorgeous alien. I return briefly here to LaPlanche and Pontalis’s definition of “phantasy,” referenced in the introduction. Recall that, “It is not an object that the subject imagines and aims at” in phantasy, they note, “but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible. . . . The primary function of phantasy [is as] the mise-en-scène of desire.”55

Presumably any number of desires are at work for which a black superhero fantasy in porn comics provides the mise-en-scène. I want to suggest that among them, what is being structured and set in motion in these fantasies is a desire for blackness in its beauty, for blackness it-“self,” as a tangible, consumable object, which cannot become such an object unless its consolidation also renders us the fantasizers, through participation in the artist’s fantasies, as also thereby separated from blackness, whether or not we “are” black. We are then as readers all positioned as nonblack desiring blackness in these strips.

This returns us to the Julien formulation that we are all snow queens; but with these comic strips, we are snow queens whose melancholic attachment to a blackness that our very entry into a racialized world required us to abject turns around to greedily imbibe that blackness from which it has been alienated. Of course, the likely outside available—in a snow-queen world—is the white position that sees blackness (and creates it) as different, whether desirable or repellent. And then insofar as the image, flat on the page, two-dimensional, is the gateway to and the frame for this fantasy, is not the produced experience, however fleeting, one of having the privileges of whiteness? Doing whiteness in a minor key, occupying and being it in a major key? Which is in part to say to have the position of being unobserved observer, the unmarked presence, a momentary plenitude to be found in an actually—within the terms of the fantasy—consummated or fulfilled relation to necessarily (for the process to work) idealized blackness.

Clearly this is a good-news, bad-news observation: such effects we can see as utopian, because they model for us a reality in which a certain kind of privilege—an erotic privilege, a privilege to eroticize and enjoy—becomes common. Linda Williams makes an analogous observation in writing about depictions of interracial lust in porn and in the mainstream film Mandingo (1975). Williams notes that such depictions regularly exploit racist stereotypes in order to create pleasure for all viewers: “The excitement of interracial lust—for both blacks and whites—depends on a basic knowledge of the white racist scenario of white virgin / black beast. But the pleasure generated by the scenario does not necessarily need to believe in the scenario. Rather, we might say that there is a kind of knowing flirtation with the archaic beliefs of racial stereotypes. . . . The pleasure of sexual-racial difference once available to white masters alone are now available to all.” Williams adds, “though not equally to all,” which of course is the easy-enough-to-see bad news, since we find here limits that we probably don’t want even to utopian imagining in our fantasies: limits that appear in the narrowness of a conceptual structure, of a widely held cultural fantasmatic, that cannot find any more free, empowered, connected-to-pleasure position than that of “white.”56

This analyzes and describes our inescapably racist or race-informed ways of looking and erotic fantasizing. But before we fall too far down the deep, deep well of this particular despair, I would like to point out that even where we have to be interpellated into something like whiteness to see and desire blackness, we are at the same time seeing the conjunction of supposedly disjunct elements: power and blackness, beauty and blackness, superhero and blackness.

For there is another layer to the achievement of the representation of black desirability, subtending the apparently necessary construction of an outside-black or nonblack viewership, a layer that even Oasis’s villain helps us recognize: this is the way in which the black male figure can be or is powerful, desirable, even worshipful via its operation as a surplus, an excess, a double. We can discern the valuation of the surplus in an element of homosexual desire, which might not from a certain vantage be love of the same so much as it is love of more—that is, I love dicks. It is not enough that I have one. I have to “have” in whatever way possible many, many more, too. For Belasco and Barnes, creating from the point of view within a social position identified as black, black is or becomes gorgeous, loved, revered, but as more than their own, as an excess of blackness that appears in their creations in the mode of exaggeration: the master villain in the Oasis story. Or it appears as a transcendent value, a cobbling together of meanings that cohere into something like the divine—and by “divine” here, I mean to designate by way of nominative placeholder something that does not exist or cannot be measured in the human scale, something that is consummately a figure acknowledged to be larger than life (a dick that’s that big! cum that’s like lightning!) and operating as a container for a variety of aspirations, desires and wishes: the Black Man to whose Beauty and so on Fillion dedicates his work; the generalized “I love black men!” ejaculation that arises from watching two of the type fuck and that overspills the boundaries of the page.

It is this black-beauty-as-excess-and-surplus that, of course, a medium steeped in the fantastic like comics is particularly primed to facilitate our experience of: we can do it only in a minor key, perhaps, but we can be it, experience it as part of our reading.

This intimation of self-making or self-transformation I now turn to in conclusion.