After five decades as sidekicks, secondary characters and niche titles, the black superhero’s time has finally come.
This month Marvel releases its eagerly awaited Black Panther movie, centred on a young African king who doubles as a clawed, catsuit-clad crime-fighter. Netflix has unveiled Black Lightning, an African-American educator with electrical superpowers. Add in Netflix’s Luke Cage and that’s three African-American-led superhero titles in 18 months; a situation previously unimaginable.
Recent developments could be seen as having paved the way: the Black Lives Matter movement, debates over representation sparked by the #OscarSoWhite debacle, the resurgence of white nationalism and institutional racism resulting from Donald Trump’s presidency.
But the trend is driven by commercial concerns as much as cultural ones. Cheo Hodari Coker, producer and writer of Luke Cage, said recently: "The only colour that really matters is green [backdrop for CGI scenes] ... I don’t know if it’s as much altruism as much as it is a combination of being commercially viable, the stories are interesting, the music pops and people think, ‘Why not now?’"
The superhero market is Hollywood’s primary earner: in the US alone, superhero movies earned more than $US2billion ($NZ2.7billion) in 2017. After a decade of titles led by white males, however, studios are aware that viewer fatigue could burst the bubble. They are constantly looking for new ways to reinvigorate the genre. Last year’s Wonder Woman movie proved that a female-led superhero title is now a viable option; this year looks set to do the same for black superheroes.
But questions remain about how "political" mainstream audiences want their comic-book entertainment to be. Black Lightning overtly addresses the racial climate. In its opening minutes, the first episode sketches out a landscape of gang violence, institutional racism and street protests, quotes Martin Luther King and and plays Billie Holliday’s protest song Strange Fruit.
Luke Cage, in the Netflix series beginning in 2016, also reluctantly brings his superpowers to bear on the organised African-American crime ripping his Harlem community apart. It operates at a blaxploitation-filtered remove from the present day, but still addresses issues of politics and racism. Black Panther is a more fantastical prospect, but no less significant a cultural moment. Expensive, action-packed and effects-heavy, it is led by black talent, including director Ryan Coogler and actors Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan and Lupita Nyong’o. The story’s fictional setting of Wakanda is a prosperous, technologically advanced African nation; a marked contrast to previous, stereotypical depictions of the continent.
Marvel comics introduced the character of Black Panther in 1966 (a few months before the launch of the Black Panther party). He was followed by Falcon (1969), Luke Cage (1972) and Storm (1975). Black Lightning began in DC comics in 1977.
Even before the superhero movie took over Hollywood, Marvel (now owned by Disney) had set about diversifying its overwhelmingly white stable. A key change was the character Nick Fury, head of fictional spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and chief of superhero team the Avengers. In his first incarnation, Fury was an archetypal tough Caucasian ex-soldier with an eye patch. In 2000 Marvel reinvented Fury as an African-American, specifically modelled on Samuel L. Jackson, who went on to play the character in the movies.
Regardless of the motivations, Black Panther, Black Lightning and Luke Cage suggest that comic-book movies can continue to function as a form of global diversity-awareness training.
"We’ve reached a time where people are hungry for diversity," Black Lightning actor Cress Williams says.
The next hurdle would be a black female superhero. With that in mind, it is significant that Black Lightning’s two daughters possess superpowers of their own, as could Luke Cage’s accomplice, Misty Knight, and Black Panther’s younger sister, Shuri. The ground is being prepared.
— Guardian News and Media
