Crafting our champions: on superheroes, diaspora, and embodying our stories

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
– Maya Angelou

Let me tell you a story. To paraphrase Sophia Petrillo from The Golden Girls: Picture it. Cleveland, Ohio. 1930. Two second-generation Jewish immigrants, boys in the throes of adolescent shyness and science fiction fandom, meet at Glenville High School. They begin a creative partnership that lasts nearly two decades, from a sci-fi fanzine to rejected pitches for newspaper comic strips to the then-new world of comic books, where they unwittingly launch a phenomenon that continues to grow to this day.

The living memory of pogroms, expulsion, and genocide hangs over their upbringings; their parents fled Lithuania and Russia to escape anti-Semitic persecution, truncating their names to assimilate into their new homeland. With them they carried their Jewish cultural and religious traditions, their stories of loss and hope and exodus, and passed them on to their sons.

In 1938, these sons debut their new creation, a hero who reflects the pain and glory of those who came before them, as well as their own individual struggles living as Jewish people in America as Nazism sweeps not merely through Europe but across the Atlantic. Their new hero’s beginnings echo the story of Moses, except rather than being sent down the Nile in a basket to save his life and being adopted by an Egyptian princess, he’s sent across the galaxy in a tiny spaceship to save his life because his planet is exploding and is adopted by an Earth family. Far from his birthplace, making his home in a new land, he soon discovers that he possesses abilities far beyond those of any human: he can bend steel with his bare hands, move faster than a bullet, and leap one-eighth of a mile in a single jump.* 

Yet his extraordinary abilities are implicitly haunted by tragedy. The catalyst for his super-strength and super-speed is the utter destruction of his people**, and with them their language, traditions, knowledge, and histories – a connection forever lost to him. Unable to save the people he came from, he turns his powers to serving the collective good of his adopted home, setting straight corrupt tycoons and politicians, abusive husbands, and slumlords: those who use their power to exploit the disadvantaged and marginalised, a category that includes the duo that created him.

All I need to tell you now is his name. Many of you might have guessed it already – and even if you haven’t, what else could he be called but Superman?

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When the Wheel of Discourse turns once again to whether superheroes are good/fascist/irrelevant/juvenile/Not Just For Kids Anymore***, as it inevitably does, I think of this story. Superheroes now may be merchandised all to hell, re-re-rebooted for the sake of the zeitgeist and maintaining strangleholds on copyright, but once upon a time they started out as the dream of a marginalised writer and artist who just wanted to do something with their creativity.

I think of this, too, when the question of 🌟🌟🌟DIVERSITY🌟🌟🌟 arises regarding superheroes. There’s a lot swirling around “Establishment Superhero But This Time…Brown?!”, and much less examining the crucibles that shape the marginalised and diasporic identities that contribute to said diversity.

It is human nature to create our own champions, but for us as writers and creators of colour in the 21st century, how can we be sure that the champions we create are ours, and not merely melanin-washed defenders of the imperialist, colonialist, whiteness-centred structures that confine us? How do we grapple with the painful, traumatic aspects of our histories without our heroes being overtaken by them? How do we come up with heroes who embody our stories and cultures without unduly burdening them – and ourselves – with the fallacious responsibility to be the sole representatives of our infinitely complex identities? 

There are no easy answers to these questions. But what we can do is develop the tools to begin exploring them on our own terms.

Tomorrow’s workshop with Etienne Kubwabo about building (super) heroic worlds is a step towards embracing that power. It’s a chance to create worlds that prioritise the visual and narrative landscapes from our own cultures and daily lives, from tenements to temples to indigenous textiles to musical instruments and more; worlds where heroism not only flourishes but can be defined by decolonised values and senses of space. It’s a chance to take the refractions of diaspora and otherness, of evolving intersections of identity, and draw out their infinitely prismatic pain and glory to create stories that only each of us can tell.

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NOTES

*Some powers thought of as foundational to Superman’s character didn’t come around until a couple of years later. For instance, he didn’t have X-ray vision or super-hearing until 1939, and wasn’t able to fly until 1940. 

**Of course, comics being what they are, long-lost denizens of Krypton have since turned up all over the place. But in 1938, the days of Superboy-Prime, General Zod, Kandor, etc. were still a long way off.

***Sample take: “Why doesn’t Bruce Wayne just invest in Gotham City’s infrastructure instead of spending all his money on costumes and punching?”