The Racial Politics of Regressive Storytelling
In this month's comic book solicitations, it's been revealed that Ray Palmer is making a return to comics as the Atom, following in the footsteps of characters like Hal Jordan and Barry Allen in what I like to call "regressive storytelling." These are stories that look to the past instead of the future, setting things back to the way they were rather than progressing them to what they should be next, rendering huge swaths of their fictional universe irrelevant because they didn't star the One True Version of a character.
In a lot of ways, it's an unavoidable aspect of the way comics work, in that most creators started out as (and presumably still are) fans first. And for fans, the One True Version of any given character is the one that made the biggest impact on them when they were growing up, be it Cary Bates' Flash or Adam West's Batman, and by and large, the fan mentality doesn't lend itself to innovation. Instead, it prompts the same desire that leads to fan-fiction: They want to play with their favorite toys, and if the universe they're working with doesn't allow that, then it's the universe that has to change, not them.
"The Good Old Days" have become a driving force in the comics industry in particular and DC Specifically (and Geoff Johns even more specifically, as DC's Creative Director who is personally responsible for regressing Green Lantern, Flash, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Hawkman, Aquaman and others), and it's all built around a desire to recapture a feeling these creators got when they were kids. And that's not necessarily a bad thing -- I'm certainly not an exception to fan culture, and there are stories that push my "Oh hey, I remember that" buttons as hard as anyone else's -- except that the form it takes ignores that much of what made Jack Kirby or Cary Bates or Alan Moore or Frank Miller so exciting wasn't what they were doing, but that they were doing things that hadn't been done before. Instead, we're in an industry right now that wants to constantly reset itself, running on nostalgia rather than innovation, moving backwards instead of moving forwards, and while I complain about it both often and at length, it seems to be what the majority of comics readers want, no matter how wrong-headed I think it is.
But there's an unintentional side-effect to all this regression that often goes ignored: The piece-by-piece white-washing of the DC Universe.
Before I go any further, I want to make it absolutely clear that I'm not suggesting that creators like Geoff Johns are racist, or that their stories are consciously motivated by racism in any way. I don't think that factors into what they're doing at all; the motivation is one of nostalgia and resistance to change, not race. I don't think the racial consequences of what they're doing even cross their minds, which is an entirely different, and in some ways, more insidious problem.
(more here)
