Miles Morales: The Hero America Needs
What a past couple of years it has been. It’s only been about 14 months since Marvel’s VP of Sales said, “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.” Not inflation due to print costs, the fact that readers (like TV watchers) have grown used to binging (via online content or through graphic novels), or that specialty comic book shops have closed doors across the country. Nope. Can’t be any of those. It has to be because in an effort to revive their dying titles, Marvel made Thor a woman, Ghost Rider a LatinX, and Captain America an African-American. Though they came to look at it as a mistake, I know that I was among the thousands of nerds that praised this initiative.
I used to buy comics a lot — and when I say that, I mean until I was about 15. I was very poignantly aware, at that period, that while I loved those characters, there was no way, under any circumstances, I’d ever get my hands on issue #1 of the X-Men or the Silver Surfer or Venom. I would never get the full sense of their backstories apart from reading a summary on the back of a trading card. Besides, I never had a dependable ride to even get to school every day, let alone the comics shop. So it was easy to transition over to Japanese comics, manga, which were fairly new to the American market, and thus easy to start from the first issue of an English translation and continue all the way through. And they were thicker, which allowed many of those stories to become more philosophical and analytical. As a 15-year-old, I was sure that my relationship with American comics was over.
Of course, then there came the movies. Even though Fox’s properties like Spider-Man and X-Men films got progressively worse with each new installment, Marvel/Sony captivated audiences by introducing S.H.I.E.L.D., a government agency that brings superheroes together apparently, early on — blanketing all their films with a hope that all these characters could join forces. I still wasn’t hooked though — by this point, I was already in the Wes Anderson phase of my life and looking down on cheesy action films. And don’t think I didn’t notice you replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle. They don’t even look alike.
That’s about when Disney bought Marvel. And while Marvel Comics as a subsidiary was lamenting creating changes in diversity within their comics, Disney was up to something bigger. Something better.
Now, I’m going to be the last person to praise Disney as a corporation based on Walt Disney’s perspectives alone, including misogyny and bigotry. Or how Disney brand movies continue to warp the thoughts of young women toward body issues and subservience. It’s not like they go out of their way anymore than anyone else to make sure that their toys aren’t made in hazardous conditions or how they have a pretty infallible monopoly on entertainment media either. They pose as much of a threat to American society as Facebook or the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Disney has just been around longer, so they can do it better.
But Disney is the definition of magic in that strange way only Disney can be in the American Gothic zeitgeist. While some people may get super pumped over things like the royal wedding, I still feel my heartstrings tug during what might be considered the utmost of cheese in some of those animated Disney flicks — even new ones, like Big Hero 6 and Wreck-it Ralph (but not Up, because that movie was just terrible no matter how hard you try to convince me). And I know I’m not the only person who’s held his breath for thirteen years awaiting the next numbered release of Kingdom Hearts. And let’s face it — Disney theme parks are actually kind of awesome, in that they’re both fun and romantic and you only have to go once and then never again.
And since they had taken the helm of Marvel, they’ve started a subtle shift in the narrative about what the superhero is supposed to be. I thought I was done with comics, that I had been for more than ten years. Film, books, and video games filled the superhero-shaped hole in my heart enough that I didn’t need that kind of hero anymore — who does, when you have Jean Valjean, Toshiro Mifune, or Cloud Strife? But that was when Marvel/Disney introduced me to Luke Cage.
I admit, I loved Jessica Jones when I first saw it. Never had I seen a superhero story so elegantly address the issues of rape and domestic violence. And just when I thought Marvel couldn’t do one better, they brought us the bulletproof Black man from Harlem. Obviously, he wasn’t new — this character was originally created by Archie Goodwin in 1972 to ride on the coattails of the blaxploitation trend in films. But like Jessica Jones, Disney/Marvel found a valuable, overlooked asset and built a relevant hero for the times around him. It’s no surprise that the first season of Jessica Jones was shortly followed by the #MeToo movement. Just as tensions rose to a crescendo with the introduction of that story, the same necessity to speak out against gun violence and police brutality came with Luke Cage.
Unlike those that followed (like Iron Fist, with a privileged hero who fetishizes the first Asian girl he meets, or The Punisher, which defends the necessity for freely arming civilians), Luke and Jessica speak to the woke millennial generation that wants their hero to fight more than just an egregiously powerful and meaningless super villain. Luke’s just trying to protect his neighborhood from drugs and gang violence, while being relentlessly pursued by the police because, frankly, he’s Black. I wish I didn’t know so many young people who described their own life that way, and yet we all do — or we should. You’re going to have to figure out how to make a friend of color on your own though, buddy.
On the other hand, you can say that Marvel/Disney is exploiting movements like third-wave feminism or #BlackLivesMatter for their own benefit. And they are — but they’ve also introduced us to a wave the wave of superheroes we deserve. Black Panther became the 10th highest grossing movie of all time and audiences didn’t feel exploited. It collected such accolades because, for most people who want to see a superhero who looked like them, they had already always felt exploited. It just gave them the right to feel like a hero too. Additionally, Black Panther illustrated African exceptionalism in a way that they hadn’t experienced, because the white majority hadn’t let them experience it. Not in films, not in real life. The very notion of an African nation that evolved without white means, beyond white means, and beyond white hands isn’t just a fairy tale — it’s the reality that colonialism stole from us. Deep down, even I like to pretend I’m a lost Prince of Iran, and that vestiges of my kingdom remain hidden from the colonial grip of America as it waits for my return. We all like to dream.
Miles Morales may be animated, but he’s like me. He’s mixed — though I’m half-Persian, he’s LatinX and Black. He gets dumped with a tragedy early on in the comics and spends the rest of his life confused about who he is — that’s my story too. He may not exist in the canonical cinematic Marvel universe, because apparently this new animated film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is going to be set in a mirror-universe that “looks and sounds like yours, but it’s not.” It’s not going to have the same impact as Black Panther did or other future films of superheroes of color might have (and also, because Donald Glover wasn’t cast in the role of Miles). But Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse might be to mixed-PoC what Black Panther is to African exceptionalism. A story of what could be to highlight the wrongs of the world as it is. At least, the wrongs of our universe.
Now I don’t think that this is going to be to ethnically ambiguous brown people what Deadpool is to cis-gendered white males, but it’s the next step to changing the superhero narrative to address social justice issues in the same way that Miles’s predecessors, as mentioned here, did before. And hey, finally a Spider-Man who looks like he might be from New York instead of South Dakota. To me, this isn’t a movie about the Marvel universe. It’s not even really about Spider-Man, when you think about it. It’s about racial power dynamics that continue to drive the narrative of this country. “With great power comes great responsibility.” What if they never let you have power?
That’s why this is a movie for us. This is the Spider-Man we deserve.
This isn’t:
See you at Christmas time, Spider-Man.
My Upshot?
This Is America, by Childish Gambino (Donald Glover), is the anthem of our generation. I really wanted to write a whole post about this, but there’s nothing I can say about it that hasn’t already been written. But I have a little more to add.
I never thought I would see the day when Childish Gambino would become more relevant than Kanye West, but here we are. I could say that I’ve been listening to Childish since Community, that I know every lyric of Freaks and Geeks by heart, and then I’ve seen him live at least twice. He was the one artist that I would push on all my friends to listen to, and I assure you that if you ask them, they will all agree that I never shut up about him. But I could have never seen this coming. Out of his magic hat, Childish Gambino cooked up the most relevant commentary on modern America and the treatment of Blacks since James Baldwin.
It addresses violence against Blacks as both acts of physical and systemic racism, while hinting at historical racism including lynchings, minstrelry, and the political pressure that Nixon’s War on Drugs and that other presidents used to push Blacks into heavily policed ghettos and to build a neo-slavery prison system. Often, the props, setting, and background say more than what Childish is saying — including allusions to the value of guns over Black lives, especially in the context of the Charleston Massacre, and the use of video from cellular devices as a defense against the police and establishment. Most of all, the video ends in Childish essentially lamenting that he, like most Blacks, cannot escape.
I know some people haven’t seen it yet, but I insist you do so anyway. Even if it’s “too violent” or “too political” or “I don’t like rap,” just open your mind for a second. We can’t keep turning our back on injustice.
Fight the good fight, brothers.
