In the 12th installment of our series of talks with comics scholars and teachers, we talk with Dr. Rebecca Wanzo, about her new book, the difference between caricature and stereotype, and not remembering a beginning of a political consciousness.
A guest post in the form of a preview of the forthcoming anthology, Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics.
Interrogating the complex legacies of racial injustice in Hazel Newlevant’s No Ivy League and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude.
Considering the role of Latinidad in Araña’s comics despite a decreasing representation of of its so-called “authentic” markers.
How well do Marvel and DC’s 1985 comics meant to raise aid for famine relief in Africa tackle the tragic events they are addressing? Short answer? Not well.
A return to Howard the Duck after a nearly three-year hiatus from the If It WAUGHs Like a Duck series. . .
Does the 2013 comic adaptation of Django Unchained’s inclusion of an unfilmed sequence provide insight into the figure of the black woman slave?
Using Teen Titans #41 to think through token characters and slavery as a narrative trope.
The CW’s Black Lighting represents the split between Black respectability and radical politics in a singular figure.
Part Two in a scholarly round table examining Kelly Sue DeConnik and Valentine De Landro’s Bitch Planet.
Exploring the intersection of legacy and race in superhero comics through Kurt Busiek’s Astro City
When Black Lightning rejects the Justice League he is rejecting white supremacy.
The clumsy way superhero comic books of the post-Civil Rights 1970s explicitly address race can provide a site for imagining productive racial consciousness for black characters, while also highlighting the limits of that kind of resistant reading.
The social nature of personal identity in Brian K. Vaughn and Marcos Martin’s The Private Eye.
Even comics that are not particularly “important” can tell us a lot about the attitudes acceptable in the editorial environments in which they were developed
Leveraging Marvel’s underwhelming Civil War II to think about Black lives in the Marvel Universe.
The role of race in reconstructing the Bronze Age.
Exploring the limits of diversity in a white supremacist framework through a five-in-one look at 1978’s Marvel Two-in-One.
What do we need to do to get a decent Afro-Latinx superhero?
Because you can’t trust even the best-intentioned white Captain America to know what’s up.
Putting Fear the Walking Dead’s allusion to national zeitgeist regarding police brutality into context.
