Arturo R. García looks at the demographics of Marvel NOW!:
Right now T’Challa, now established once again as The Black Panther, appears to be the only PoC character in Hickman’s New Avengers series, which will focus on the latest iteration of the secret super-cabal known as the Illuminati.
Joining him as diversity stand-ins will be both The Beast and The Sub-Mariner, the latter of whom most recently seen drowning a third of the population of T’Challa’s home, Wakanda, in the critically-pannedAvX cross-over, which pitted the Avengers against the X-Men for the purposes of…well, who the hell knows at this point. So, that will probably be awkward.
That said, it’s still a better representation than Rick Remender and John Cassaday’s Uncanny Avengers, a title spawned directly from AvX:
Brunettes! Blond white guys! Canadians! Smell the diversity, amirite?
Both Hickman’s Avengers and the new Uncanny X-Force get singled out for some praise, however, although All-New X-Men gets… well, somewhat the opposite treatment.
October 10th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
While I think his main point is pretty good, I am uncertain as to how the original X-Men are going to get more diverse (unless Iceman was secretly always black, and trying to be more white in more ways than one).
October 10th, 2012 at 1:14 pm
I also wanted to say it is a Bendis book, so it won’t be lily-white for long. If nothing else, Luke Cage will be regular guest star.
October 10th, 2012 at 2:41 pm
I’m more concerned with them telling entertaining stories than I am worried about what color ink they use for the skin tone of fiction characters.
October 10th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
As a “PoC”, as the article puts it, I couldn’t care less if characters match my skin tone. What I care about it good characters and great stories.
October 12th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
The author of the original article really doesn’t seem to have a point or overall motive. He’s basing a judgement on a single promo shot and has yet to even read the series much less get info on the first story arcs.
October 13th, 2012 at 6:23 am
This reminds me of a time when I was still working in animation, and some friends of mine were doing a short film. One was Chinese and the other was Mexican, their short film featured a little blonde girl. So I asked them, “why don’t you make the girl either Chinese or Mexican and make something different?”
Offended and visibly shocked at the question, they said, “It doesn’t matter what race she is!”
So they made her white.
I find that’s pretty representative of how creative decisions get done, “It doesn’t matter what race the characters are, but let’s make the hero, and the villain and the lead female all white…because it doesn’t really matter, right? They could be anything, so why not make them white?”
So to the poster who says it doesn’t matter, well would you read the same book if the fictional characters were all black? Would an all-black Avengers title be ‘controversial’? I humbly submit that it does matter. Heck even when black actors portray fictional characters it’s controversial. So to say that it doesn’t matter on a large scale is just not true. It may not matter to you, and it may not matter to many others, but it does matter to a large enough portion of comic book fandom that it has to be discussed.
I get where the author is coming from. As a person of colour (although white is a colour, so I’m not sure if that term has any real meaning), but as someone who is almost never represented in media, I get that this is important to some.
Frankly, mainstream comics have very little to say I think in an increasingly complex world. I personally don’t care what race they make the characters because the narratives are increasingly irrelevant. This is especially true to minorities and non-Americans.
You want black representation, here’s Luke Cage and the Falcon. Enjoy! Ugh…the world and human experience are so much bigger than what can be represented in characters created to serve a white male hierarchical system. You’re never going to get the characters you want or deserve out of a system that is designed to promote white male heroes. Period. It doesn’t mean everyone at Marvel is a racist, any more than it means everyone in the army just wants to kill dark-skinned people, but the system that they serve is simply much bigger than the people who animate it.
So an all-white Avengers…who cares?
Evolve.
SG.
October 15th, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Bravo, Someguy!