Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts: Marvel, Diversity and the 21st Century Superhero

Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts

Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts

Marvel, Diversity, and the Twenty-First-Century Superhero

Jeffrey A. Brown

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brown, Jeffrey A., 1966– author.

Title: Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts : Marvel, diversity, and the twenty-first-century superhero / Jeffrey A. Brown.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020012085 | ISBN 9781978809215 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978809222 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978809239 (epub) | ISBN 9781978809246 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978809253 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Comic books, strips, etc.—Film adaptations. | Superhero films. | Ethnicity in mass media. | Gender identity in mass media. | Superheroes. | Marvel Comics Group. | Marvel Studios.

Classification: LCC PN6714 .B76 2021 | DDC 741.5—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012085

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey A. Brown

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

For my sister Liane and my brother Doug

Contents

Introduction: Marvel and Modern America

Chapter 1. Spider-Analogues: Unmarking and Unmasking White Male Superheroism

Chapter 2. The Replacements: Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics

Chapter 3. Superdad: Luke Cage and Heroic Fatherhood in the Civil War Comic

Chapter 4. Black Panther: Aspiration, Identification, and Appropriation

Chapter 5. Iron Fist: Ethnicity, Appropriation, and Repatriation

Chapter 6. Totally Awesome Asian Heroes versus Stereotypes

Chapter 7. A New America: Marvelous Latinx Superheroes

Chapter 8. Ms. Marvel: A Thoroughly Relatable Muslim Superheroine

Afterword: Because the World Still Needs Heroes!

References

Index

About the Author

Introduction

MARVEL AND MODERN AMERICA

Marvel superheroes embraced the concept of a civil war, first in the 2006–2007 comic book event that crossed over into every Marvel title and then in the blockbuster feature film Captain America: Civil War (2016). Unlike the American Civil War between the North and South from 1861 to 1865, where disputes over industrial and agricultural changes, slavery, state rights, and secession redefined the nation, Marvel’s Civil War pitted superhero against superhero, divided over the concept of mandatory government registration for costumed avengers. While Marvel’s comic book and film versions of Civil War provided thrilling hero versus hero fights for fans, the larger political implications of the story line have served as a metaphor for the real-world debates over civil liberties, increased government surveillance, and personal restrictions in an unstable post-9/11 America (see Scott 2015). In a broader sense, Marvel superheroes have become engaged in a different type of civil war that has increasingly split Americans along political and ideological lines in the twenty-first century. Republican and Democrat, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, progressive and conservative, Christian and other religions, white and other ethnicities—to many people, America is a nation divided, a country at war with itself. One of the most visible ways that this ideological divide is played out in often contentious fashion is through popular culture. Many of these divisive social issues have been lumped together under a banner of culture wars. In the twenty-first century, Marvel’s superheroes have increasingly been drawn into these culture wars through debates about ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and religion. The popularity of Marvel’s iconic roster of heroes and the changing ways they are represented in comics, movies, and television programs have made them important markers of social change and controversy.

The ideological disputes over American culture and values—over what America is supposed to be—all too often turn into physical conflicts, sometimes with fatal consequences. Violent clashes between protesters and police on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, that raged for weeks after yet another young black man was shot and killed by a police officer; the over two-hundred-thousand-strong Women’s March the day after President Trump’s inauguration in 2017 in order to defend women’s rights against a misogynistic cultural shift; white nationalists parading through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting We will not be replaced! and being confronted by anti–white supremacist protesters; countless shootings at churches, mosques, synagogues, and schools—these tragedies and conflicts have raised the stakes. Ideological disagreements are now a potential matter of life and death in America: trans bathroom laws, antiabortion bills, antivaccine advocates, same-sex marriages, marijuana legalization. Moreover, the public response to these events only seems to entrench the ideological divide and has led to a cascade of cultural clashes that politicize nearly every aspect of contemporary American society. NFL players taking a knee during the pregame national anthem to protest the treatment of black Americans turned into racialized accusations of anti-American sentiments and ungrateful wealthy athletes. Similarly, when NBA superstar LeBron James commented that he did not think the majority of players were interested in visiting the Trump White House, Fox News commentators said LeBron should shut up and dribble. When the teenage survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, called for stricter gun control laws, members of the NRA accused them of being professional grief actors, merely opportunists looking to get rich and famous. When women in Hollywood spoke out about the horrific ways they have been sexually harassed and assaulted by powerful men in the entertainment industry, they initially had to endure a shameful public backlash calling them liars, sluts, and harpies.

James Davison Hunter characterized the importance of these conflicts as critical to the nation in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. While this war has carried on for decades, it has become far more pervasive and more volatile than when Hunter first described it. The hard-won rights for women, minorities, the disabled, people of nonheterosexual orientations, and other groups that have historically been discriminated against, ignored, and/or abused have been fought for by many and equally fought against by many others. Depicting the culture wars as a simple struggle between left- and right-wing beliefs, between social justice warriors and alt-right trolls, does not capture the complexity of the interrelated issues. But every political and social gain (or loss, depending on your views) is currently regarded as a threat to differing ideas about what the American way is. Even topics that may seem trivial at first glance have become lightning rods for controversy, with opposing sides seeing their worst fears embodied by those who disagree with them. Contentious ideological arguments have raged over the last decade in the news and on the internet about fast-food chain Chick-fil-A’s religious objection to hiring queer workers and arts and crafts store Hobby Lobby’s refusal to include birth control under employee benefits due to the store’s strict Christian beliefs. When Starbucks introduced red holiday cups, they were accused of leading a war on Christmas. All-female or gender-flipped remakes of Hollywood films like Ghostbusters (2016), Oceans Eight (2018), What Men Want (2019), and The Hustle (2019) are disparaged as feminist travesties that ruin great movies. From Supreme Court nominations to plastic straws, anything can ignite an ideological firestorm.

This volatile cultural environment was explicitly engaged by Marvel Comics as they began introducing new superheroes to their universe in 2011 with the creation of Miles Morales, an African American and Puerto Rican teenager who becomes a version of Spider-Man. Soon after, Marvel followed with a range of new and diverse characters taking on the names, costumes, and adventures of many of the publisher’s most famous superheroes. Female adaptations of Wolverine and Thor, an African American man as Captain America, an African American woman as Iron Man, a Korean American Hulk, and a Pakistani American Ms. Marvel. The interracial superhero couple Luke Cage and Jessica Jones were wed and became increasingly prominent in the Marvel Universe. The gay mutant hero Northstar married his partner in 2012 and attracted an incredible amount of media attention. Numerous major and minor lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning or queer (LGBTQ) characters were introduced, and a popular member of the X-Men, Bobby Drake, a.k.a. Iceman, who has been around since 1963, came out as gay in 2015. The first Marvel film to headline a nonwhite character, Black Panther (2018), became the studio’s highest-grossing solo hero film, and their first female-led film, Captain Marvel (2019), became the second highest-grossing solo Marvel movie. And on television, several Marvel series focus on diverse casts, including Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–ongoing), Cloak & Dagger (2018–ongoing), Runaways (2017–ongoing), Luke Cage (2016–2018), Jessica Jones (2015–2019), and Iron Fist (2017–2018). The world of Marvel superheroes was changing and diversifying in a way that reflected real-world changes and an increased awareness of identity politics. The editorial directive was that Marvel’s fictional universe should resemble the world outside our windows.

Behind the scenes, the demographics of Marvel creators were also changing in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Far more women and creators of color were involved in writing, illustrating, and editing Marvel superheroes than ever before. Ta-Nehisi Coates, G. Willow Wilson, Kelly Sue Deconnick, Gabby Rivera, Kelly Thompson, Saladin Ahmed, Magdalene Visaggio, and dozens of other diverse creators brought fresh perspectives to an industry long dominated by white male producers. Unfortunately, the increasing diversity of both characters and creators at Marvel did not sit well with everyone. Just as social media had become an important factor in relation to public debates about school shootings, LGBTQ rights, racism, and politics, new technologies allowed a particularly vile backlash against the increasing diversity in comics. When Marvel writer Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird #8 was released in late 2016 with the titular heroine depicted on the cover wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Ask Me about My Feminist Agenda, she was bombarded with hateful texts, tweets, and posts accusing her of destroying comics with her feminist crap. A few months later in early 2017, a group of young female staffers at Marvel posted a selfie of themselves getting milkshakes as part of their remembrance of pioneering publisher Flo Steinberg, who had recently passed away. The image of these seven young Marvel employees enjoying a work break immediately inspired a tidal wave of hatred from online trolls, dismissing these women as fake geek girls, Tumblr virtue signalers, false-rape-charge types, and the Right’s catchall insult, social justice warriors. The vicious and persistent online attacks forced Cain, the members of the milkshake crew, and others like trans writer Magdalene Visaggio (Dazzler, The Magnificent Ms. Marvel) and MacArthur Genius Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates (Black Panther, Captain America) to either engage with this ridiculous rhetoric or close down their social media presence.

The increasingly personal and threatening nature of the online backlash against diverse characters and creators was dubbed Comicsgate and attracted media coverage as yet another battle line in the culture wars. The Daily Beast declared it an ugly new front in the online culture wars [that] targets women, people of color, and LGBT folk in the comic book industry (Elbein 2018). The Washington Post observed, Comicsgate claims to be fighting against censorship and the politicized groupthink of leftist social justice warrior (SJWs)—anti-racists, feminists and marginalized people whom the right characterizes as oppressors. But again, like other movements, Comicsgate participants in fact work to silence opinions they dislike and voices they deem malignant (Berlatsky 2018). And the Miami Herald described Comicsgate as an affiliation of alt-right comic book fan boys united by their hatred of women, themes of feminism or diversity in comics and by their willingness to bully and harass (Pitts 2018). Marvel (and DC Comics) backed their creators as best they could and continued to endorse a more diverse lineup of characters. Likewise, dozens of other creators and comic store owners and thousands of fans came to the defense of diversity and denounced the narrow-minded views of the trolls lurking behind the Comicsgate crusade. In their attempt to parallel the real-world changes in American society, the comic book industry found itself embroiled in debates about identity politics, cultural values, and just what a hero is supposed to mean—and look like—in modern America.

Arguing over the ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation of fictional comic book characters dressed in colorful spandex while they punch alien invaders may seem ludicrous at first glance. Isn’t this just another example of immature superhero fans taking fantasies way too seriously? Perhaps. But it is also a sign of just how important these caped characters are in our culture at large, especially in a post-9/11 era that desperately needs heroic images and has turned to superheroes to fill that void. Superheroes are a uniquely American image of social ideals embodied in a few fantastic characters. Superheroes teach morals, values, and ideas about justice and the law to young and old consumers alike. To borrow the iconic catchphrase of the original superhero, these silly costumed adventurers model clear conceptions of truth, justice, and the American way. The problem is that concepts like these are not as clear as they may have been when superheroes first emerged with Superman in 1938. Indeed, with the unifying patriotism of World War II and the subsequent conservativism of postwar and 1950s America, truth, justice, and the American way were assumed to be natural ideals and clear cultural values. But following the turbulence of the 1960s civil rights era and subsequent women’s and queer movements, the meaning of concepts like the American way has become a point of contention. Radically different opinions about what exactly the American way is nowadays lies at the heart of all the conflicts in the culture wars, from Trump’s proposed border wall, to Starbucks’ holiday cups, to superheroes that fall outside a presumed white, hetero, masculine, Christian norm.

Marvel superheroes have interacted with issues of cultural diversity ever since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby redefined comic book relevance in the 1960s. Marvel introduced the Black Panther, the first mainstream black superhero, in the pages of Fantastic Four #52 in 1966. And by 1969, Marvel added African American superhero the Falcon (Sam Wilson) as a partner for Captain America. The Chinese Shang-Chi, a.k.a. the Master of Kung Fu, was created at Marvel in 1973, but Marvel had also published the short-lived series Yellow Claw in 1956, which featured Asian American FBI agent Jimmy Woo as the central hero. Marvel debuted White Tiger (Hector Ayala), the first Latino superhero, in 1975, and then the first Latina superheroine with Firebird (Bonita Juarez) in 1981. And in 1992, Marvel outed the mutant hero Northstar, a member of Alpha Flight, as the first openly gay superhero. The historical and continuing significance of these and other characters will be addressed throughout this book. But the most common way that Marvel superheroes have engaged with diversity and discrimination has been through the metaphor of mutants. With the first appearance of the X-Men in 1963, Stan Lee created the mutant as a means to explain an unlimited amount of superpowered characters without the need to dream up a unique origin story for each of them. Marvel’s mutants were described as humans’ natural evolutionary step wherein a mysterious X gene would activate in certain people during puberty, granting them special abilities. They were referred to as Homo Superiors. By the late 1970s, mutants were some of the most popular characters in comic books and allowed for a range of stories to address social inequalities as well as costumed adventures.

The conception of mutants in the Marvel Universe as genetic variations facilitated a type of narrative pathos for the heroes that was otherwise difficult to create for all-powerful characters. P. Andrew Miller (2003) argues that an important aspect of the X-Men is its series-encompassing theme of prejudice and bigotry. The X-Men and all mutants are often hated because they were born different from anyone else (283). This emphasis on the physical as well as cultural difference of mutants, Miller clarifies, can be seen as metaphors for any number of minority or marginal groups (283). Thus the idea of mutants as a heroic but ostracized group in American society has served as a thinly masked metaphor for racial and religious discrimination, anti-immigration sentiments, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and sexually transmitted diseases (particularly HIV). In other words, mutants have stood in for a wide range of groups that have been persecuted, including ethnic minorities, Jewish and Islamic Americans, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. Ramzi Fawaz (2016), in his insightful analysis of the ideological and political shifting between the relatively stable classic postwar superhero and the instability of heroes inspired by the countercultural movements of the 1960s, claims Marvel’s mutants helped bring into question the assumption of ideal American citizenship that had always been part of the aspirational qualities of superheroes. "By popularizing the genetic mutant as a social and species minority, the series [The X-Men] laid the foundation for reimagining the superhero as a figure that, far from drawing readers to a vision of ideal citizenship through patriotic duty or righteous suffering, Fawaz argues, dramatized the politics of inequality, exclusion, and difference (144). With the mutant heroes as cultural outsiders from a marginalized and persecuted minority, the stories managed to critique discriminatory beliefs without being so overtly political that readers might resist. The comic books (and later cartoons and movies) were still superheroic fantasy fiction about good versus evil, but the mutant story lines always included a clear message that anyone who hated the damn muties" simply for being different was a small-minded bigot.

Despite the incredible popularity of Marvel’s mutants and the success of mutants as analogous to real-world subaltern groups, the diverse heroes who have emerged at Marvel in the last few years have not been mutants. The mutant metaphor is a useful device for incorporating serious political issues into superhero comics, but it also allows the comics to avoid any direct involvement with controversial topics. As Fawaz notes, The elasticity of mutation as a metaphor for a variety of embodied and cultural differences made it a potent popular fantasy for vitalizing Marvel Comics’ cosmopolitan ethos at the level of both comic book content and public reception (2016, 144–145). As a metaphor, mutants are a relatively safe way to depict discrimination and bigotry as evil, all without much actual diversification of the fictional heroes. Relying too heavily on mutants as a metaphor for nonwhite ethnicities, nonheteronormative sexualities, non-Christian religious beliefs, and so on is akin to the comic industry’s outdated excuse that the superhero genre already included diverse characters of color because they included heroes with skins that were green, purple, red, and blue. The diverse heroes that Marvel has introduced in the last decade are purposefully not mutants (nor aliens, robots, gods, demons, etc.); they are Americans who just so happen to fall outside the parameters of the traditional white, male superhero.

For most of their over eighty years of existence, the figure of the superhero has combined and valorized the qualities of whiteness, masculinity, and nationhood. The superhero reflected—and offered fictional evidence of—America’s romantic self-image embodied in a hypermasculine Anglo-Saxon hero. Historically, comic books have been a cultural space dominated by White, masculine characters and audiences, observes Whitney Hunt (2019) in her analysis of audience interpretations of race, leaving narratives for women and minority characters as significantly underrepresented or portrayed in stereotypical contexts (86). When minorities did begin to appear more regularly in superhero stories in the 1960s, they were usually minor figures and/or presented as demeaning caricatures. The historical lack of diversity in comic books is, of course, not unique. Every form of American entertainment, every mass medium, has suffered from the same forms of underrepresentation and stereotyping. The slow change in American media through the last century from an overwhelmingly white landscape to a gradually more diverse one reflects changes and political advancements in the world outside of popular fiction and in America’s self-image. While the dominance of iconic white heroes is not unique to the superhero genre, the fact that superheroes occupy a position as idealized role models for children and as avatars for abstract cultural beliefs about justice and the nation means that the foundational whiteness of superheroes is particularly important.

In his work on geopolitics, Jason Dittmer (2013) focuses on how specific comic book characters like Union Jack, Captain Canuck, and especially Captain America embody and enact national ideals. Dittmer refers to this type of character as a nationalist superhero, a patriotic cultural figure who is defined as a hero (or very rarely, the heroine) [who] explicitly identifies himself or herself as representative and defender of a specific nation-state, often through his or her name, uniform, and mission (7). For Dittmer, the explicitness of the nationalist superhero’s alignment with the state is an important distinction from other heroes who may be prosocial, which Dittmer describes as fighting for the American people (among others) rather than for America as an abstract idea (7). All heroes may be champions of cultural ideals—defenders of the American way—but the fact that Captain America is intentionally depicted as the living embodiment of the American Dream (rather than a tool of the state) (Dittmer 2013, 7) makes his emblematic significance distinctive. Captain America is intentionally used by writers and understood by audiences as fighting for America as an abstract idea. In other words, the abstract ideal of American values is made concrete in the nationalist superhero. As a symbol for the nation, Captain America serves as a focal point for considering how superheroes reflect and construct America.

The symbolic resonance of Captain America as a fictional personification of the nation was apparent through the media’s and the public’s reaction to news of his death in Captain America #25 at the culmination of the Civil War story line in 2007. In writer Ed Brubaker’s award-winning arc Death of the Dream, Steve Rogers is gunned down on the steps of a