Last Black History Month, John Garrett of Hypertransitory did an amazing project with his 28 Days of Black Superheroes. He drew fan art of each character chosen, while writing up an analysis of the different heroes. Included were 28 great essays like the difference between WNF and BNF, the problems with Storm, and the insights behind his own character, Kid Hype.
I happened to win the 20X30 Poster of all 28 Characters, so I'm going to do my best to return the favor. Check the site out here.
Wow, that *is* an amazing project!
ReplyDeleteI also liked the Storm essay (I always thought it odd, too, that she had long, straight white hair and blue eyes; also thought the explanation they gave for it when she came back as a kid, about her features being all "the rarest" ones, made no sense) --- she is one of my favorite characters, and it did/does kind of annoy me to see her left off of so many of the recent X-teams.
(I had also never quite made the connection that she chose to marry T'Challa and retire from the X-Men at the same time as the Decimation was going on and there were only a few mutants left in the world. That definitely seems wrong for her --- although she has previously worried whether she hasn't made the wrong choice, abandoning her people to go running around battling supervillains with the X-Men, so I guess it's not *totally* out of the blue ...)
I also read the Misty Knight and Bishop essays, as those are the characters I'd read the most about after Storm. The art style in the panels from after Bishop apparently became evil in Civil War (I totally need to read Civil War) bothered me --- it looks like it's trying to make him as ugly and inhuman as possible. Which has all sorts of racist implications when the character is black.
Anyway, thanks for alerting me to these awesome essays!
Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteBishop's real descent into evil occurred in the Cable series following Messiah CompleX, where he believed that the messiah baby caused his dystopian future and stopped at nothing to kill the little girl. He was deliberately retooled to become an evil counterpart to Cable (who was raising Hope Summers), down to getting a cyborg arm on the opposite side of his body.
Which doesn't remove the racist implications, much less make it sound like they didn't completely shoehorn him into the evil Cable role.