Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans

7. Drawing Conclusions

7 Drawing Conclusions In the early 1970s the public service advertisement used by the Black-Owned Communications Alliance asked, ‘‘What’s wrong with this picture?’’ A young black boy looked in the mirror and saw only the pale imaginative reflection of a white superhero. Well, the child from that advertisement has grown up and the world of superheroes has changed. In the 1990s Milestone Media, and other black comic book publishers, have replied to that decades-old question by creating a variety of new heroes, a variety of African American superheroes. In fact, on the editorial page of the twentieth issue of the company’s flagship series Icon (December 1994), Milestone reprinted a photograph (fig. 7.1) of Icon illustrator M. D. Bright standing next to a man dressed in an Icon costume for a comics convention. This single image speaks volumes about the changes in heroic ideals that are currently taking place in the world of comics. Young boys, and grown men, can fantasize and read stories about superheroes of all colors. Though the dominance of white-bread costumed heroes is far from over, it is clearly on the decline. Likewise, young fans can now foresee a world of possibilities as comic book writers and illustrators regardless of their cultural background. In juxtaposing the BOCA advertisement discussed in the introduction (fig. 1.1) with the photograph, reproduced here, of a grown man dressed as Icon, I do not want to imply that new fantasies are now available to young black comic book readers. To suggest this would, I think, be too literal-minded a way of viewing the workings of fantasy. In fact, I think the BOCA advertisement was too literal minded in its representation of imaginative play (though I do understand the very real problems of misrepresentation, problems that they were trying to counter at the time). If cultural studies’ approach to audiences Drawing Conclusions 190 7.1 Man dressed as Icon at convention. Courtesy of DC Comics and Milestone Media, Inc. Used with permission. and fan groups has proven anything, it is that all people are uniquely adept at transcending boundaries in their fantasies. In the imagination there are no rules. Even Freud observed, in ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’ (1919), that in fantasy people can occupy any number of possible subject positions, individually or simultaneously. I am quite sure that the little boy in the advertisement would have had no real problem imagining himself as a superhero, no problem seeing his own idealized reflection cast back at him from the bathroom mirror. What the new heroes from Milestone do offer readers is a wider range of fictions, a larger scope of formalized subject positions. Fantasies are typically a fairly personal practice, internally exercised and usually too private a pleasure to share with others. Mass-produced fictions, on the other hand, are collaborative , shared, and very public versions of fantasy, especially for audience members who are active within the various subcultures of media fandom. As Ang has pointed out, ‘‘We are not the originators of the public fantasies offered to us in fiction [instead, they are] offered ready-made to audiences’’ (1996, 93). These public fantasies then are inextricably linked to the mass-produced texts from which they emanate. This is not to say that public fantasy is restricted by Drawing Conclusions 191 the textual fictions; quite the contrary, audiences negotiate the texts in such diverse ways as to construct an almost infinite range of personalized interpretations . But the mass-produced fictions do provide a focal point around which specific fantasies can emerge. More obviously than in any other medium, the fans and the creators of comic books interact in a collaborative sense in order to fine-tune the fictions and the public fantasies. Fans and creators have an open line of communication through personal contact at comicons as well as through letters, computer bulletin boards, chat lines, and a corporate system that allows fans to move into the ranks of the creators. The readers and the publishers often negotiate the comic book master narratives long before those narratives’ conventions and internal mythology are deemed satisfying. So Milestone ’s creation of new heroes is not a birth of new fantasies out of whole cloth, but it is an important formalization of an imaginary subject position around which public fantasies can flourish. Milestone’s comic book universe is a formalized fiction that...