Digging Up Ghosts: Teen Titans’ Mal Duncan & His Token Power
Using Teen Titans #41 to think through token characters and slavery as a narrative trope.
Alpha & Omega #9: Poetic License to Kill
The ninth installment of reading both versions of Omega the Unknown (from 1976 and 2007 respectively) against each other.
Jack-in-the-Box: Race & Legacy Superheroes
Exploring the intersection of legacy and race in superhero comics through Kurt Busiek’s Astro City
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 #2: A Conversation with Qiana Whitted
The second in our on-going series of interviews with comics scholars.
Astro City: Shedding Light on Race in the Dark Age
The role of race in reconstructing the Bronze Age.
Marvel Five-in-One: Prominent, Notorious and Invisible Black Lives of the Marvel Universe
Exploring the limits of diversity in a white supremacist framework through a five-in-one look at 1978’s Marvel Two-in-One.
The Captain White America Needs
Because you can’t trust even the best-intentioned white Captain America to know what’s up.
Do Zombie Lives Matter? Fear the Walking Dead & Zombie Politics
Putting Fear the Walking Dead’s allusion to national zeitgeist regarding police brutality into context.
“I Know It When I See It”- Race, Relatability, and Reading Practice
The ways fans of color engage with characters and stories can re-circuit and re-interpret those stories in ways that provide the kind of productive identification that challenges that tired old repetitive and thoughtless representation.
Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body
Could Cyborg be the comic book superhero representation of white supremacy’s effect on the black body? To have a black person transformed from a metaphorical machine to an actual one?
The Man Who Lived Twice! (If You Can Call That Living): Marvel’s Brother Voodoo
The fourth in a series of posts about black superheroes. Marvel Comics’ Brother Voodoo—a character to feel really conflicted about.
Robocop: Representation By Erasure & The White-Washing of Detroit.
For a movie set in Detroit, it seems awful white.
Super Hegemonic Team-up! Spider-Man, Daredevil & “The Death of Jean DeWolfe”
In this story, Spider-Man and Daredevil demonstrate a hegemonic framework for understanding urban crime (part of SUPER BLOG TEAM-UP #4).
On Collecting Comics & Critical Nostalgia
Identity is a constant retcon.
Days of Future Now: Reflections on X-Men Comics & “Days of Future Past” (Part Two of Two)
This is Part Two of a two-part series of posts on the classic X-Men comics arc, “Days of Future Past.”
2013: Reviewing The Year It Wasn’t
An overview of all the posts I planned to write or started writing but that never quite came together.
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.
“Invisible (Watch)Men: The Impossibility of the Black Superhero”
Miles Morales or Trayvon Martin are more likely to be victim of a “heroic” vigilante than to be one.
“I AM A MAN!” Machine Man, Robot Desire and Racial Assimilation
The generic “human” these robots want to be is a white human.
