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Superhero Comics and The Tyranny of Pew-Pew

uncanny-x-men

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes so compellingly about culture and politics for The Atlantic, talks to Vulture about superheroes and his love of (Marvel) comics:

Comic books aren’t perfect, but listen: In the 1980s, Marvel had a black woman — not just a black woman, a woman who was born in Harlem, a woman who was African-American and whose mother was Kenyan — leading their most popular title. And then when she lost her powers, she was still kicking ass. Like she still had enough to whip Cyclops’s ass. That was something they were doing. I can’t really think of anywhere else I would’ve went at that time to see something like that. Just today I was reading that Hickman one. And this kid, Manifold, is like an Aboriginal. This is incredible! I mean this has to do with Hollywood: You don’t actually see that diversity reflected on-camera. [Comics] are not perfect, especially around gender and the women’s stuff, but you start comparing it to Hollywood, it’s not even a conversation. I mean consider it like this: There could’ve been [a Hollywood] adaptation, a true adaptation, of X-Men in which Storm was the protagonist in the way that we were reading it; that would’ve been a true rendering of what the comic book actually was. But that’s not possible, that’s not possible in Hollywood. It’s deeply sad.

Meanwhile, at the Village Voice, Alan Scherstuhl ponders The Tyranny of Pew-Pew, or how fun fantasy violence became inescapable:

Just a generation before it came to dominate our culture, comic and fantasy violence was disreputable, a little underground, scruffy and impolite. It didn’t yet have clearly established rules covering what was and wasn’t acceptable: Note how the ‘Fangoria’-lite bloodiness of the first two ‘Indiana Jones’ pictures contrasts with the gentlemen’s fisticuffs of the third one, a course correction made after the public scolded Lucas and Spielberg for having gone too far with the heart-ripping and kid-whipping. But the sadism of ‘Temple of Doom or the ‘Daredevil’ Netflix series differs from that of the Marvel films or ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ only in tone and degree: At root, they’re all still about how awesome it would be to run around and kick everyone’s ass.