"She's a brick house" or "Ain't I a Woman?"

I've been reading A LOT of Milestone Comics this week and the character whose initial appearance has struck me the most is the lady above, a frequent character in the title Blood Syndicate, who following the song, is named Brickhouse.

By Blood Syndicate #2 or thereabouts, you learn that she's Puerto Rican not Black, but she's just too juicy for me to not talk about and I don't think we'll stray too far from our area of study. Take a peak at her, she's a big, tough dark-skinned lady with nappy hear and thick lips. Maybe this is just because I'm an African Studies concentrator and she may be Puerto Rican, but the first signifier that popped into my mind was the blackface minstrelsy character Mammy. Bill Foster describes the qualities of the Mammy archetype:

"The 'Mammy' archetype [is] the large, unattractive and non-sexual character. . .In her orignial manifestation she is a bossy, washer woman type who has her hands full trying to keep her lazy, good-for-nothing husband line. She is presented in direct opposition to white woman characters, which are blond, thin, and sexually desirable." (p. 14)

Brickhouse's first appearance is narrated by a skinny white middle class reporter woman who the members of Blood Syndicate have invited to the ghetto to write about their gang and the brutality of the police. To further bring home the point, the leader of the Blood Syndicate, Tech-9, clearly has feelings for the reporter. Juxtapose this with Brickhouse's treatment by her fellow member of Blood Syndicate, Wise Son:

Unlike the classical Mammy archetype, Brickhouse does not allow herself to become defeminized and dehumanized. In her proclamation of "I'm a lady," she echoes Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech. Though Brickhouse is a rock monster who has signifiers that code her as a Mammy, and who as we shall see in coming posts has more than her fair share of emotional problems, unlike the Mammies of blackface minstrelsy, she affirms her own personhood by standing up to sexist attacks.

What a woman.

Book Review: Looking For A Face Like Mine

Looking For A Face Like Mine
Bill Foster
$9.95 ($6.50 used on Amazon)

This collection of essays and interviews is a really useful resource for someone trying to get their footing in the realm of black comic books. Foster's essays deal with subjects as diverse as black superheroes, portrayal of blacks in underground comics from the '60s, the status of black woman superheroes and black musicians in comics, and African American trading cards. I found the book's ability to point me towards other source materials particularly valuable.

Two recurring arguments through out Foster's essays and interviews are that 1. We still need more diverse superheroes, but we could be doing a lot worse and 2. Despite myths to the contrary, black comics do sell. Both of these arguments are pretty sound, but the book's weakness is that through out many interviews and short articles it repeats them again and again without adding new depth to them.

I would suggest this book to two kinds of folks for two different purposes. 1. If you're a casual reader of comics who wants to have a better sense of how blacks have been portrayed over the years and maybe get some cool titles to look into, then this book is definitely for you. 2. As stated above, this book is useful to someone who wants a stepping off point for becoming more involved in the academic study of black comics but who doesn't know much yet. I would not advise coming to Foster's book looking for a rigorous academic study and criticism of black comic books. The book is less than 90 pages long and is cut up into 14 separate articles and interviews which, as stated above, tend to repeat themselves and as one can assume from their brevity don't delve very deep.

I'm really happy I read the book and get the sense that Dr. Foster is particularly knowledgable on his subject matter. However, it would seem that this particular book was intended for folks (like me) who don't know very much yet about the subject matter.

What I'm doing & why plus primary materials

I am entering into this semester long project of studying black superheroes in the '90s for a number of reasons. As someone who has from the time I could read been a fan of superhero comics and someone who over the past couple years has become very interested in race in general and in the field of Black Studies in particular, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to study the intersection of my interests. I think that the superhero genre, through various media (comics, cartoons, movies), has been and has the potential to be a very popular genre--the success of the Dark Knight this past summer has taught us this, if anything--and that as such it's particularly important to know what racial make up of superhero stories and the ways in which race is portrayed. I want to do a study of black subjectivity in superhero stories in general and in particular the subjectivity of black superheroes. Do white creators like Todd MacFarlane write black superheroes differently from black ones like Dwayne McDuffie? What are fan reactions, across racial lines, to these black superheroes? What are some of the links between African American literature and African American superhero stories? What are the differences between comics written for overtly political purposes like those from Ania and comics like those from Milestone that are first and foremost supposed to be good stories? What are the relationships between black superhero stories and the legacy of minstrelsy? So on and so forth. As you can see, there's a lot to think about.

While I am of the opinion that we need more superheroes from Third World backgrounds, I'm particularly encouraged by that every time I've mentioned this project to one of my peers, they ask me if I'm doing anything about the Green Lantern. As most of my audience will know, Dwayne McDuffie--one of the founding fathers of the black comic company Milestone--has been involved in the past decade the animated series Justice League which has popularized the DC superhero John Stewart--one of the many who have been the Green Lantern and the only one of them who was black. I'm incredibly encouraged that in the zeitgeist the man who is the Green Lantern is an African American. As comic book scholar Bill Foster has stated: "I am very optimistic about the variety of characters of color in today's mainstream comic books. We can do better, but we could have done a lot worse." (pg 24 in Looking For A Face Like Mine) I am also in agreement with Dwayne McDuffie that it doesn't work to have a single superhero from a particularly group of people, because of being an individual who represents one aspect of incredibly complex human experience, s/he ends up having to rep her or his whole group. (article available at http://www.dwaynemcduffie.com --follow the link under heading More About Milestone)

I have narrowed my area of study to the 90s for a number of reasons. First of all the explosion in the comic book market in 90s culminating in the regretable speculative bubble lead to the emergence of a lot of smaller publishers like Milestone and Image creating a lot of material to sift through. I am particularly interested in Milestone because it is to my knowledge the only instance of a comic book company founded by blacks and controlled by blacks producing a line of comics largely about blacks fairly successfully. The 90s also have the advantage of being recent enough that books are still largely affordable and accessible from Internet vendors and being long enough ago that some scholarly literature has been produced. It was also before companies cut out the letters page which I think can provide some interesting source material for my research. I'm really excited about letters pages.

SO, here are the comics, movies, and cartoons I plan on looking at. I want your help finding more good stuff for me to read or watch:

COMICS
DC Comics:
- Green Lantern: Mosaic
- Steel
Milestone Media:
- Hardware
- Static
- Icon
- Blood Syndicate
Milestone/DC crossover:
- World's Collide
Marvel Comics:
- Captain Confederacy
- Cage
- Heroes for Hire
Image:
- Spawn
- Amanda & Gunn
Millenium:
- Nanosoup
- ???
Ania:
- Purge
- Heru, Son of ???
- ???
MOVIES
- Meteor Man
- Steel
- Spawn
- Blade
- Demolition Man
CARTOONS
- Static Shock (yes, I know it's from this decade)
- that one episode of the Superman Cartoon with Steel in it

Any ideas?