Many times literate comic book readers and writers address the psychological underpinnings of the stories and ideals presented in comic books. One of the writers that are invoked during these types of discussions is Joseph Campbell hence the previous quotes and his ideal of an archetypical hero and hero�s journey. Another literate comic book reader compares Superman and Thor (god-like characters) with Batman and Spiderman (?) (Animal masked characters or trickster characters).
I believe they are correct hence the creation of Image comics and some of it�s cookie cutter creations a Wolverine type character or a Superman type character or it�s super teams (which became a running gag used in the books themselves Wild Cats Volume III Issue 3 or so Voodoo in conversation to Maul Each team includes a big guy, a guy with guns, and some unknown chick. The extent of the correctness of archetypical characters is that there are themes, ideals and formats that transfer, translate or otherwise reflect the characters and stories from one comic to another.
What does this have to do with this site? Archetypes and their use in comic books allows writers to use certain characters with similar traits to an established character to tell expanded stories that you can�t, won�t or aren�t allowed to tell with the established character.
So my use of Archetypes to tell my stories is really my skewed version of DC and Marvel. It owes a lot to the original source material, of course, but it also owes a lot to Wild Cards the book series edited by George R.R. Martin. Wild Cards is a wonder and most of the writer�s stories were incredible -- sex, drugs, rock & roll, politics, law, aliens and superheroes. But this site also addresses a major shortcoming of the comic books published by the big two.
As a child I always wanted to read about Black Superheroes. I would recreate all the superheroes I saw as Black characters. On television "Young Samson and Goliath" became "Black Samson and Goliath" (it was the seventies putting Black on anything meant that we were making it ours, that we were taking possession of it).
Because of my purchasing habits my knowledge of characters and their histories was minor, so when DC came out with it�s original Who�s Who series it was a Godsend. Sometimes characters would appear in books and I�d have no ideal of their history or how they related to other characters so it was exciting to read about them in Who�s Who to finally know who we were referring to or a bit of the character�s history. In the course of reading Who�s Who I learned a lot the letters pages in the back were very informative, the series itself was incredible, the omissions and explanations of omissions of the original series were illuminating (hard to tell I was excited about it all, isn�t it?)
So, after my initial fascination with Who�s Who and at series end I went back to look for the Black Superheroes. I was disappointed to find out how few there were. I was saddened to see how stereotypically repetitive they were. I was challenged by the ideal that some of these characters could have been better used and that there was greater growth available. So I wrote a pitch I jokingly referred to it as Justice League Black and when I met Brian Augustyn at Wonder-Con I pitched it to him. He said, you can�t have an all-Black Justice League because... and he trailed off, I guess because he realized that he was editing the all-white Justice League. My original pitch was to include Amazingman and not too long after that meeting Amazingman 2 appeared and Bloodwynd so I could rightfully claim to be the father of Amazingman 2 and Bloodwynd.
Therefore this site will have Black Superheroes. To all the readers who don�t like Black superheroes. Tough! Superman is not white either.
The problem with Black Superheroes is that white men generally write them and white men tend to write BLACK stories. In the archetypal sense of storytelling if you take any similarly disposed Black character and placed him in a similar situation as a white character it doesn�t matter if the character is Black or White or Kryptonian, the story can be told. However, when a white writer writes Black characters we tend to have the Klan story (Black Panther or Captain America and the Falcon or Captain America guest starring the Falcon or Captain Marvel (Photon)) or what I refer to as the "my best friend is green story" or the "protecting my turf" story usually in combination with the my best friend is green story. Superman 85 -- the character was named Muhammad X which was one of the most ignorant explanations for a character name ever "I am named after two great men" (if the writer had bothered learning ANYTHING about the Nation of Islam he would have known that Muhammad X was a very common designation, and he would have also known had he bothered to read a book that Muhammad is the most common name in the WORLD) or Daredevil with the so called Hip Hop Luke Cage or Legion of Super Heroes Tyroc "The hero that hated the legion". Interesting side note in both the Superman story and the Legion story they go to the green character to discuss race, as if the racial question was about only the color of the characters and not the social meaning of race. Even more interesting is the hypocrisy of J�onn J�onzz whose human identity is a white man, saying how skin color doesn�t matter. So now I, a Black man, will write Black superhero stories -- the focus of the stories will not be White guilt or Black Afrocentrism, there will be Blackness involved the same way in Superman there is Kryptonianess involved. It is understood that he is Kryptonian, but it is not the focus of the story.
These themes and characters are not limiting factors, but are the basis of stories and you can start a thousand million stories with once upon a time.
Once upon a time
