The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  The striking cover art and rage-filled declaration of revenge telegraphed a sensational racial drama inside the comic book. John Stewart’s first mission as a superhero was to protect a white politician who is an overt racial bigot. The politician plans to stoke racial hostilities by having a white police officer killed as a result of a phony attempt on the politician’s life by a black gunman. John Stewart begrudgingly accepts the assignment to save the racist from harm and later foils the nefarious scheme to instigate a race riot. As a result, Stewart gains Hal Jordan’s respect and trust. If ever there was an origin narrative that was overdetermined by race, this is truly the one. Rather than having John Stewart use his power ring on his first mission to defeat some generic monster-alien or save a bus load of tourists from plummeting off a broken bridge, he had to protect a comic book version of George Wallace from harm. In his debut, unfortunately, his character was buried under a mound of racial rhetoric and anxiety concerning the type of Black Power politics John Stewart symbolized in the beginning of the story. Early in the issue when Stewart first dons his Green Lantern costume, Stewart informs Hal that he better be called “Black Lantern,” and he rejects wearing a mask because, “This Black man lets it all hang out! I’ve got nothing to hide!” Stewart is a cocky, anti-authoritarian, angry, and race-conscious figure. Near the end of the truncated origin narrative, however, Stewart proclaims that color is not an important criterion for judging character. His change of heart is clearly an ideological nod toward Dr. Martin Luther King’s axiom that people should be judged by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin. In keeping with that approach, the Black Lantern moniker is rejected and he is subsequently referred to as John Stewart.

  Admittedly, the overt hostility toward white authority that Stewart initially expressed and the racial melodrama his story represented were crude and sensationalistic. Yet the reliance on racial antagonism as the driving force for John Stewart’s origin reflected a broader trend. During the early 1970s, films such as Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song (1971), Super Fly (1972), and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), to name only a few, exemplified how Blaxploitation cinema was often a sexually gratuitous and bloody referendum on white authority. Of course by showing blacks killing, fighting, humiliating, loving, and winning against whites, many mediocre movies were able to make good economic sense. In the process, Blaxploitation films increasingly relied on sensationalistic depictions of racial strife, wherein crazed and corrupt whites appeared to live only to plot for the black protagonist’s death and, by symbolic extension, black peoples’ defeat in the struggle for racial justice. Unfortunately, real racial issues were increasingly presented as spectacle, and various social movements of the period had degenerated into political theater and posturing.15 A similar impulse cropped up with Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adam’s Superman vs. Mohammed Ali (1978) comic. The cover was exquisitely evocative of deep-seated yet familiar racial antagonism present in the American body politic. Although the narrative inside the comic has Superman temporarily forfeit his powers to Ali, combined with a feel-good racial reconciliation message, the magnitude of the racial symbolism presented on the cover dwarfs any concessions concerning Superman’s abilities.

  Displayed on the cover of the oversized comic book are Superman and Muhammad Ali, wearing boxing gloves, facing each other at the center of the ring, and preparing to throw the first devastating punch with a massive crowd of superheroes, celebrities, and everyday folk as spectators. Ostensibly the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali bout concerns the fate of the planet, as the winner will have to box the representative of an alien race to defend Earth. But symbolically the cover was a potent signifier of American race relations, given that the heavyweight-boxing tournament has historically functioned as a public staging ground for dubious notions and desires concerning race to play out when one opponent is white and the other is black.

  In 1908 Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight boxing champion, which inspired the distinguished American writer Jack London to call on a great white hope to reclaim the title from Johnson. In response, James Jeffries, a former undefeated heavyweight champion was urged to come out of retirement to restore the heavyweight championship title to its previous luster. Billed as the fight of the century, the boxing contest was a racial spectacle that inspired black celebration and white violence in the wake of Johnson’s victory.16 Unfortunately, subsequent titleholders inherited this racial subtext virtually anytime a black fighter and a white fighter were matched against one another. Take for example, Joe “the Brown Bomber” Louis’s two heavyweight bouts with Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938, where Adolph Hitler’s perverse ideas about Aryan racial supremacy and Nazism underscored the boxing contests between the two. Four decades later, when the Irish slugger Jerry Quarry faced Muhammad Ali the former was dubbed a “great white hope,” and the same theme appeared again when Gerry Cooney boxed Larry Holmes in 1982 for a shot at the heavyweight title.

  For decades in America, no matter if the contestants embraced or rejected the racial roles they symbolized when a white and black boxer faced one another in the ring, racial anxieties and personal prejudices were projected onto each fighter as representatives of their respective race. Accordingly the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic book cover signaled not only the spectacular nature of a fight between two American icons but easily drew on the potent racial history associated with heavyweight championship fights that had occupied America’s public imagination for nearly seventy years. On one hand, the cover easily reads as a comic book clash between two titans, a contest that pits the “Man of Steel” against “the Greatest of All Time.” On the other hand, an epic battle between a white man that represents “truth, justice, and the American way” and a black Muslim who refused to fight in an American war he was drafted to serve in dredges up deep racial anxieties not fully settled or forgotten since Jack Johnson’s heyday, much less Ali’s recent racial past.

  A decade before the release of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, Ali was a vocal member of the Nation of Islam, a controversial black nationalist religious organization. The “Louisville Lip” rose to fame as a loudmouth heavyweight-boxing champion, but his personal convictions, as a follower of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and later a voice of poetic dissent regarding the Vietnam War, made Ali a despised figure for many white Americans. By the time the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic was released, Ali was less of a political lighting rod. He had regained his title as the heavyweight champion of the world which, for the most part, supplanted his past status as a black Muslim and draft resister. Yet his radical black nationalist past remained resonant if not as equally recognized as Ali’s status as “the greatest of all time.” In this sense, the cover illustration of a white superhero that trumpets “the American way” combating a black man that was a vocal critic of America signified a colossal confrontation of epic racial proportion. Ultimately, however, the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic book is best framed as marking the beginning of the complete transformation of Muhammad Ali from one of the most despised black athletes in America to one of the most beloved icons in American popular culture.17

  Arguably the fact that Ali stuck to his principles in the face of severe professional sacrifice and regained the heavyweight title as an underdog challenger to George Foreman helped remake his image and paved the way for his acceptance as a mainstream and tremendously popular American icon. The American public values the underdog narrative of the little guy winning against the odds, and more than anything Ali’s triumphant comeback dovetails with a cornerstone of all superhero narratives: meeting harsh resistance and overwhelming odds with integrity and perseverance. Ali, like most superheroes, succeeds not because of superior strength but by moral determination in the face of severe opposition.18 In this sense, the re-release of the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic book fits with Ali’s transformation into a mainstream hero who upholds American values, a theme that was signaled in the original narrative but that can now be fully embraced, thirty ye
ars later, with a story about Superman and Ali working together to save the Earth against alien invaders.

  By the late 1970s the kind of socially relevant and racially engaged superhero figures that O’Neil and Adams had created had nearly disappeared. Admittedly their work was not perfect, but it spearheaded a transformation for how superhero comics were written and thought about. Comics were no longer just for the kiddies, and were increasingly recognized as another medium where ideas concerning American racial morality and the cultural politics of a society trying to come to grips with dramatic societal shifts were also seriously engaged. As the end of the 1970s approached, DC Comics introduced a new black superhero that loosely represented a continuation of the superhero social relevancy tradition established by O’Neil and Adams. Black Lightning was the first black superhero in the DC Comics universe to get his own title series, and as a result he could not avoid symbolizing black self-determination or serving as a symbolic reminder of racial tokenism.

  Black Lightning is Jefferson Pierce, a former Olympic athlete and a teacher in Suicide Slum, one of Metropolis’s toughest areas. When danger appeared or when justice was needed, Jefferson would don an Afro wig attached to a mask, squeeze into a bluish body suit accented with lightning bolts, slide on his buccaneer boots, check his power belt, and then hit the streets as Black Lightning.19 Dressed to impress, Jefferson would proceed to kick and shock various henchmen and their crime lords into submission. Despite his nearly laughable disco-chic look and the embarrassingly awkward black jargon Jefferson used when he became Black Lightning, he articulated a serious set of class and racial politics. Jefferson Pierce was a striver, a black guy who fought his way out of ghetto squalor to become an accomplished athlete, a successful educator, and, finally, a ghetto superhero. Black Lightning’s upward-mobility narrative registered subtle elements of Black Power politics concerning self-determination and black social responsibility, but his black middle-class status was also a source of multiple anxieties. His black bourgeois sensibility clashed with a superhero persona that delivered affected black dialect, a crude racial signifier that attempted to demonstrate that Black Lightning was an authentic black hero not alienated from the inner-city streets he swore to protect.

  Despite Black Lightning lapsing into stock phrases to convey his blackness, he communicated several interesting points about black agency. Here was a black superhero situated in the same city as Superman who decides to dedicate his life to single-handedly fighting the rampant crime, drugs, and delinquency that threaten to take over his neighborhood. Moreover, by having Black Lightning combat symbols of white oppression, like Tobias Whale, a white fish-headed crime boss, the comic articulated an acceptable (albeit formulaic) version of Black Power politics as black social responsibility.20 Even if Black Lightning was a comic book holdover from the Blaxploitation-film era, he was a subversive repackaging of Black Power notions, like community control and black middle-class anxieties over economic empowerment and racial authenticity.

  Black Lightning symbolized a critique of black Americans who had joined the American middle class in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements but abandoned their less fortunate brethren still stranded in black ghettoes across America. Regardless of his successful socioeconomic upward mobility, Jefferson Pierce as Black Lightning was going to take his fight to the streets, keep it there, and do it on his own terms, a theme strikingly rendered on a cover of the Justice League of America comic book.21 The cover illustration depicts Superman inviting Black Lightning to officially join the ranks of the “World’s Greatest Superheroes.” Black Lightning adamantly rejects the invitation. Eventually, however, Black Lightning becomes a reluctant member of the JLA and serves periodic stints as a member of a loose consortium of superheroes fittingly named the Outsiders.

  In retrospect Black Lightning arguably tried to incorporate the quest for social relevance concerning race in the same style that O’Neil and Adams pioneered in the Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow series. After a mere eleven issues, however, Black Lightning folded. The character subsequently became a sporadic guest star in other superhero titles and has periodically regained a solo title several times since. Along the way his look and his powers were constantly revamped, he became increasingly driven by more interior struggles and eventually Black Lightning was rebooted for the new millennium.22 But for me, the original, late 1970s version is the most dynamic because it showed Black Lightning rejecting membership in the JLA and joining a group of superheroes called the Outsiders, a clear racial critique of black tokenism. Ultimately Black Lightning was a black superhero that symbolically stressed self-reliance, critiqued tokenism, and most importantly symbolized how African Americans were simultaneously insiders and outsiders in American society.

  For a brief moment, O’Neil and Adams’s socially relevant and thought-provoking material captivated the comic book world by having imaginary superheroes tackling real social issues. Instead of serving as escapist fodder for an increasingly jaded youth market, superheroes provided a more complex and messy morality for readers to consider without totally abandoning the ethical high ground usually associated with the American superhero. O’Neil and Adams’s groundbreaking approach to superhero comics also provided a framework for comic book professionals like Frank Miller and Kurt Busiek to create gritty, emotionally unsettled, self-reflective, and socially provocative comic book superheroes and characters. Nevertheless, this type of symbolic and literal exploration of social ills, like the racism witnessed in both the Green Lantern and Green Arrow series and, to a lesser extent, Black Lightning, went out of fashion. Consequently, O’Neil and Adam’s significance to the comic book field has overwhelmingly been consigned to the past. Often overlooked is the fact that Dennis O’Neil and Neil Adams laid the foundation for a black man to vigorously compete with his white predecessor for center stage in the contemporary American public imagination as the definitive Green Lantern.

  Accepted wisdom links the Blaxploitation-film fad to the emergence and stylistic cues present in black superheroes. Ironically, during a later period, in which Blaxploitation no longer existed, the African American Green Lantern became the lead character in a major superhero comic book series. For roughly two years, from 1984 to 1986, John Stewart held the Green Lantern title and in doing so became an important outpost for black representation. Certainly John Stewart’s stint as Green Lantern in the mid-1980s appeared to symbolically express contemporary white anxieties about unqualified blacks replacing whites in the workplace as a function of affirmative action. Stewart’s early tenure as the black replacement for the white Green Lantern appeared to mimic such racial paranoia because he was a tentative and mistake-prone superhero that inspired doubt and indifference.23 This changed, however, when Stewart was teamed with the exotic, auburn-colored alien female Katma Tui.24 Their pairing provided an emotional complexity and dramatic arc to Stewart’s reign as Green Lantern. Katma is a Green Lantern guide, partner, and Stewart’s future wife. The blossoming romance was unique among their superhero peers. Up to that point, black superheroes rarely had a female superhero counterpart as the object of their interest and affection. Superhero coupling of that sort was traditionally reserved for white superheroes, like Mr. Fantastic and Sue Richards, the Wasp and Hank Pym, Scarlet Witch and Vision, Cyclops and Jean Grey, along with Green Arrow and Black Canary.

  The animated television series Justice League/Justice League Unlimited (2001–2006) provided a similarly complex version of John Stewart. In the JL/JLU series, Stewart was one of several members of the superhero team, yet his character was fully fleshed out due to the brilliant foresight and writing of Dwayne McDuffie. He was even given a signature characteristic: Stewart’s eyes have a green glow as a consequence of heavy exposure to the radiation emitted from the green power ring. Across sixty-odd episodes, considerable screen time, story arcs, and character development are devoted to Stewart’s Green Lantern. He is also shown with several different love interests: his past relation
ship with Katma Tui is revisited, and he gets tangled in a love triangle with Vixen and Hawkgirl. This type of character development remains extremely rare for a black superhero sharing the narrative spotlight with other prominent white superheroes. For example, in the long-running animated series Super Friends (1973–1986), figures like the laughable Black Vulcan and the poorly developed Cyborg are rarely included in any superhero adventures. Accordingly, compared to the Super Friends, John Stewart’s tenure as the lead Green Lantern in the comics and animated television series was quite refreshing. The Green Lantern: Mosaic (1992–1993) series is arguably the only other version of John Stewart that was dynamic and interesting. This incarnation of John Stewart was one of the most experimental expressions of superhero blackness ever represented.

  The black ring-slinger of the Mosaic series was literally light years away from the original John Stewart in style and the field of action. In Mosaic, Stewart did not just occasionally venture into space—he relocated there, on the planet Oa, located at the center of the universe. There he battles with various alien creatures to save worlds. Later he becomes a Guardian of the Universe, a godlike entity responsible for protecting life. Although the intergalactic nature of these narratives placed Stewart in various alien milieus and distant planetary locations, the series reads like an existential meditation on black racial identity in America. The inaugural issue and the impressively complex and compelling fifth issue are notable for how they poignantly dialogue with the wonderfully peculiar burden of being a black man in America.25 The latter has Hal Jordan engage in an epic battle inside Stewart’s mind, confronting the various interdependent racial identities that are part and parcel of Stewart’s real self. The Mosaic title only ran for eighteen issues, but each one reads like a chaperoned acid trip through a wonder world of Dadaist imagery and beat poetry. The beautifully bizarre Mosaic presented one of the most daring and complex representations of Afrofuturistic blackness of the time and arguably since. On this distant terrain John Stewart is a cosmic version of the prodigal son, a black star-child returning to his galactic beginnings.