Apex Magazine Issue 61 by Sigrid Ellis

Author:Sigrid Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Marvel’s Black Goliath had it even worse. His series only last 5 issues, and in those five issues and in his guest appearances in other places afterwards he is mostly depicted as an inept superhero. Rather than being relegated explicitly to a black neighborhood, BG’s own title took place on the west coast, which in the Marvel Universe is just one step above being a Great Lakes Avenger—it is where failed or second-tier comics go to die. Furthermore, he is depicted as growing up in Watts, a black community in Los Angeles, providing his blackness some “street cred,” even as his profession as a scientist for Stark Industries marks him as an exception. Black Goliath would never really make it into the big time. He’d briefly be part of the Champions (who?) and later the West Coast Avengers. Eventually he was served up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of the summer crossover event in 2006, when he’d be killed by a clone of Thor during Civil War. The subsequent outrage of his heroic peers was out of proportion to his actual role in the comic universe.

Even the more successful black superheroes are enmeshed in narratives of assimilation, or at the very least prioritizing the values of a world that would dismiss them over their own. Luke Cage, aka (Black) Power Man, inhabited a marginal space in the Marvel Universe for a long time. Both his insistence on getting paid (his original title was Hero for Hire) and the fact that he operated out of an office in the seedy Times Square of 1970s New York City, marked him as different from the mainstream Marvel heroes. And when the Blaxploitation fad that spawned his character began to fade, another character, Iron Fist, was bumped into his book, so that he and the wanna-be Asian-appropriating-kung-fu-superhero could continue to limn the edge of a world dominated by Captain America, Iron Man and even Spider-Man (I guess folks could tell he was white under his mask), until cancellation in the early 80s. It would not be until the early 2000s, after a failed gangsta rap influenced relaunch in the 1990s, when Cage would be invited into to join the New Avengers, that he’d make good. There is a scene, however, that cements his journey from a seedy “for hire” world to the world of the Avengers. He convinces Captain America and his fellow Avengers to perform “impact superhero work” in emulation of the NYPD policy of the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras, in which high saturation of a “bad neighborhood” with police ostensibly leads to a lowering of the local crime rate. In New Avenger #17 (2006), Cage brings superheroes to what seems like a modern-day-Marzal, Detroit—ignoring the history of white flight and loss of industry in favor of a narrative of black criminality. Luke Cage agreed to join the Avengers if he could do some things his way and different from the status quo, but he is actually just recapitulating tactics that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.