“Am I Black Enough For You?” The Respectability of CW’s Black Lightning
The CW’s Black Lighting represents the split between Black respectability and radical politics in a singular figure.
Mo’ Meta News: How Collecting Shapes The Middle Spaces
As the year ends, let’s look to 2018 and beyond by considering how comic book collecting and critical nostalgia shape The Middle Spaces blog.
Striking Back: Black Lightning and Reading Race (part two)
When Black Lightning rejects the Justice League he is rejecting white supremacy.
Striking Back: Black Lightning and Reading Race (part one)
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 (re)Collection Agency #4: A Conversation with Brian Cremins
The latest in our conversations with comics scholars: this time Dr. Brian Cremins talks comics and nostalgia as pitfall and strategy in (re)constructing personal and historical narratives.
On Collecting Comics & Critical Nostalgia
Identity is a constant retcon.
Images for “Black Communities of the 30th Century: Racial Assimilation and Ahistoricity in Superhero Comics” in the June 2014 Issue of Apex Magazine
Images for an essay published in the June 2014 issue of Apex
Black Lightning Always Strikes Twice! – Double-Consciousness as a Super-Power.
Jefferson Pierce’s “blackness” is explored in relation to his superheroic identity, but doesn’t get anywhere.
Black Goliath: “Some Black Super Dude”
Black Goliath is a title that never got a chance to really develop and it suffers from the problems of a lot of early attempts to bring ethnic characters into the limelight.
