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Reread these this morning, and the first thing that jumped into my head (so quickly I went and googled it to make sure I wasn’t making it up in my head) was Haus in the 52 thread: I don't see the problem. This is comics. First people have one look, and they stick with it. Native Americans have feathers in their hair (Danielle Moonstar, the various Thunderbirds), Australians have loincloths (Gateway). It's like Battle of the Planets.
If Warren Ellis, on a throwaway book like Thunderbolts can avoid pointlessly insulting racial-shorthands and insulting stereotypes when dealing with American Eagle or the Radioactive Man, than so can anyone on a big-hype book, a prestige format ultra-realistic wrinkle-faced and grim-determination vanity project, or well, the rest of comics. The excuse that the creators are socially stunted because they read comics, or they were raised on comics? Works only insofar as we continue to presume they don’t live on the same planet as the rest of us.
It’s very fun to say ‘Shut up, Ellis’ here and there, I’m sure, but really, if he’s one of the six or seven white people in comics who can bother to dress up his nonwhite characters in modern clothes and take the savage othering gloss off them because it intrigues or comforts some imaginary white audience who can’t handle anything else, I want him to yell it a little louder. Especially the bit about a giant Chinese man beating up white Americans never being an easy sell, specifically to the sort of public who apparently, would require the Radioactive Man to speak and act asianly and parrot a bad parody of orientalism (or what would be a parody if it weren’t reflective of the actual othering-tropes) to be acceptable.
It’s Thunderbolts, y’know? If it can be done here, in a c-list book that amazes most often just for still having new issues on the stand, where’s the excuse for anybody else? Written by a guy most often accused of just writing himself with a plot around his Marysue. Drawn by someone not terribly lauded often. And it’s a book I really like for many reasons, at the moment, but seriously, if it can do it, any prestige-format vanity projects or publisher-hyped frontrunner books and universe-defining series have no excuse. Maybe it’s very easy for otherwise rational people, who get properly offended at other insulting and stereotyping portrayals, be they sexist, homophobic, or religiously based, to write off the racism. Maybe it doesn’t effect them in their day to day life, and maybe it’s really petty of me to enjoy seeing nonwhite characters in virtually anything American doing something remotely badass and not tethered to a parodic stereotype, but it’s not like it really is easier to write. It’s the same amount of words, the same amount of characterization required of any of the white men to write a similarly interesting nonwhite character, a female or gay (or –yeah, like it’ll be common – nonwhite lesbian) character. |
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