Keeping It Unreal by Darieck Scott

Author:Darieck Scott [Scott, Darieck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040 Literary Criticism / American / African American
Publisher: NYU Press

Figure 2.12. Killraven bares nearly all in Amazing Adventures featuring War of the Worlds #18 (May 1973). (Neal Adams, artist)

Figure 2.13. Cosmic Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes follows Killraven in Superboy starring the Legion of Super-Heroes #215 (March 1976). (Mike Grell, artist; Jim Shooter, writer)

Alterations in gender and sexual relations are often confluent with alterations in race relations. This is because the boundaries between so-called races, the concept of race itself, with all its delirium-inducing totems of “blood” and “lineage” and “purity” and so forth, cannot hold without constant policing of sexual relations: in particular, the coherence of a racial concept requires that women must be forced or cajoled into “choosing” to sexually reproduce with men bearing a similar phenotype to their own; otherwise, the phenotypes “mix,” and the race loses its “purity,” which is to say its identifiability.33

Accordingly, the Killraven comic’s visual flirtation with queerness manifested most tangibly in a story element in which an interracial black-man/white-woman romance blossoms. (In light of the mutually constitutive entanglements between gender/sex and race I’ve just briefly mapped, the trajectory of this examination of Killraven comics suggests that interracial sexual and/or romantic relationships are themselves—in a world where a keystone of normativity is the reproduction of race—inherently queer.)

Don McGregor took over scripting Amazing Adventures featuring War of the Worlds in its fourth issue, when, as he describes in the preface to a collected edition of Killraven’s comics appearances, the comic was assumed to be doomed. McGregor was a rising star and fan favorite among Marvel’s writers because of his work on Jungle Action, a title that featured the Black Panther—about which more shortly. In the process of trying to save War of the Worlds from cancellation, McGregor decided to make Killraven’s supporting characters, his band of “Freemen” fighting against the Martians, more individualized, with their own dramatic arcs. Among the most prominent of these changes was his decision to romantically pair the comic’s one black male supporting character, M’Shulla, with a white female character, Carmilla Frost, giving rise to what would become famed (or infamous) as the first interracial kiss in mainstream comics.

(Quick side note on names here: McGregor didn’t create the character M’Shulla, as the character was first named in issue 19, written by Marvel stalwart Gerry Conway. McGregor writes that he “suspect[s]” the name M’Shulla “came from the Parkway in the Bronx.”34 The Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx is a name or word from the Algonquin language. If McGregor is correct, Conway took a Native American name and gave it a faux-African tinge with an orthographic transformation, and the resultant sound of the name was suspiciously close to one of the few other black male characters one could find among Marvel’s comics in 1973: T’Challa, the Black Panther. And is it possible that McGregor’s selection of the character Carmilla Frost’s surname forewarned—or seeded the unconscious requirement—that her whiteness would be emphasized by her pairing with a character that visually and by nomenclature exemplified blackness?)

McGregor’s creative decisions to pair the two

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