Who Gets To Be A Superhero? Race And
Who Gets To Be A Superhero? Race And Identity In Comics
But an artist named Orion Martin noted that the X-Men comics have skirted around the depiction of the people on the receiving end of much real-life discrimination: the main lineup in the X-Men team has been mostly straight, white dudes. Martin nodded to the work of Neil Shyminsky, an academic who’s written about the X-Men’s complicated relationship with real-life racism:
[He] argues persuasively that playing out civil rights-related struggles with an all-white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples … “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.”So Martin decided to reimagine them, recoloring some famous panels so that the main characters are brown — a gimmick that changes the subtext and stakes for the X-people.
Make sure to click through from the article, too, to check out Martin’s original project and the connected essay.
This is an interesting and thoughtful piece on diversity, representation, race, and identity in superhero comics that I thought people would be interested in. It also talks about the interview where Paul Dini tells Kevin Smith that Young Justice was cancelled because the demographic had “too many” girls in it, as well as the intersectional element of how turning a white woman (example used was Emma Frost) into a non-white woman would change the way she’s perceived because of the combination of racial & gendered stereotypes.