Whack History Month

Many of the more questionable stories involving race throughout the history of supercomics can and usually are dismissed with the simple observation that the creators' had their "hearts in the right place." It's easy to look at Ebony White and Pieface and see callous racism, but by the mid-60s most of the parties involved in mainstream comics had eliminated or at least toned-down the instances of outright bigotry. In the place of bigotry was a gradually growing awareness of diversity issues. By the late 60s, that meant two things: a small but growing category of ethnically diverse superheroes and adventure characters - i.e., Gabe Jones, T'Challa, the Falcon; and a profusion of "issues" stories.

Most people are usually kind to "issues" stories even if they - as a rule - age horribly. Everyone knows these panels:

The Best of Us



I've written this first sentence a dozen times. Nothing I write seems quite right in tone or content. It's especially hard considering that this isn't an essay anyone thought they'd be writing for a good many years: even considering how much he'd already accomplished, Dwayne McDuffie wasn't even fifty yet. How the hell are we supposed to make sense of that?

I didn't know McDuffie the person. I never spoke with the man or exchanged words with him online. The only way I knew MCDuffie was through his writing. And I guess, as awful as this is to have to say, I never really appreciated just how much his writing meant to me until I heard he was dead. In mainstream terms he wasn't particularly prolific, but everything he wrote seemed to matter. He didn't seem like the kind of person who ever gave less than his all for any assignment, either writing for his own projects or work-for-hire scripts. The best kind of compliment I can pay any writer, especially in such a debased medium as superhero comics, is that he always took the time to think before he wrote. He meant every word.

All of which is well and true, but what does it mean? I never knew McDuffie, but I knew his work, and his work has meant the world to me. There aren't many people in comics whose work has had quite the influence on me that McDuffie's did. When I read he had died, it felt almost like I had lost a member of my family. I regret, probably more than I will ever be able to express, that I never got the chance to shake his hand and thank him for the stories he gave me.

Is This It?



This Is Happening has been out for almost a year, but it took me a while to warm to it. In truth, it took a few months of occasional listening to really wrap my head around the disc, before I could even begin to give it a fair shake. It's not as immediately inviting as Sounds of Silver, which is still one of the best albums of the last decade. But I've slowly disabused myself of any notion that This Is Happening is an inferior follow-up to its universally-beloved predecessor. It's different.

Checking the Register

A few basic observations out of the way: no one at any point ever sat down with the intention of creating a fictional entity called "the Marvel Universe," or "the DC Universe." These fictions were constructed over the course of many years of seemingly accidental and slow-moving accretion, with numerous separately conceived individual pieces being fit together in haphazard fashion. No comics universe that was conceived as a holistic unit from its outset has ever survived past a few years from the moment of its origin. Effective fictional universes arise from the union of individually popular properties whose connection brings some form of benefit either real or imagined to future iterations of the properties in question: the universe itself cannot be a selling point unless people already care about the stars in the firmament. An argument can also be made, under this principle, that the very idea of a large multifaceted superhero universe works against the purity and strengths of original character concepts, and that in many notable cases the leavening effect of superhero continuity actively dampens the specific virtues of many properties. Captain Marvel is the best example of this, but the argument could be made that any superhero created before the mid-60s suffers somewhat from having been retroactively shoehorned into a larger context against the wills of their creators.

But with that said, shared universes have been the norm in superhero comics for almost five decades.

Happy Valentine's Day!