A quick comment on the “Diversity” Controversy at Marvel Comics
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I had to surrender to the fact that I couldn’t find all of the online resources to do what I wanted to do for this posting (I’ve had no time to get to the research library and its invaluable databases) so i was searching for a story when an item about the recent comments of Marvel Comics’ VP of sales, David Gabriel.
Sam Thielman at The Guardian:
Last week, David Gabriel, Marvel’s vice-president of sales, told the comics industry trade reporter Milton Griepp that he had heard complaining from retailers about the company’s strategy of publishing books starring women and people of color in high-profile roles such as Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. The grousing, he said, correlated with a drop in sales.
The internet subsequently lined up to tee off on Gabriel, and perhaps understandably: the war between comics fans over whether to preserve in amber the cultural mores of a couple of kinda-progressive guys writing in the 1960s doesn’t feel like it has a lot of ambiguity in it. What’s been lost in the conversation is that Gabriel wasn’t talking about sales to bookstores, or, of course, box-office grosses, where diversity obviously sells – he was talking about the direct market: comic book stores.
I love going to comic stores and hearing people argue face-to-face about plot twists, retcons and character choices. Gabriel is not the only one who has heard moaning about Marvel’s penchant for dropping characters of different races or genders into costumes usually filled by white men. I’ve heard it, too: why is Thor a woman now? Why is the Falcon, a black superhero named Sam Wilson, doing double duty as Captain America? When do we get the old Hulk back?
There are a lot of elements in this brief excerpt; racial and gender diversity in Marvel Comics, a possible backlash against that newfound diversity, the distribution of comics, etc...but that a discussion such as this is taking place among fans of Marvel Comics seems very very... ironic to this old comic head and veteran of a rivalry seemingly as old and intense and bitter as the Michigan-Ohio State college football rivalry: DC v. Marvel.
I started reading and collecting DC Comics when I was 8...maybe 9 years old simply because I already knew some of the superheroes from watching the Super Friends on Saturday morning: Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, etc.
My brother, my cousins, and most of the neighbors my age (black and white) read Marvel Comics generally, and the X-Men specifically. The ethnic diversity of the X-Men was (and may still be) one of the reasons that the X-Men franchise remains popular today.
It was never simply the outward appearances of the characters, though; the metaphor of different-ness and the price to be paid for that difference is woven into the storyline (X-Men vs. US government robots, The Sentinels.
Yes, there were other characters of color; Luke Cage, Black Panther, The Falcon...even The Hulk, ...technically.
This diversity of characters and the way that diversity is woven into various Marvel Comics’ narratives and storylines is the essence of Marvel Comics...at least to this old comic head…
So...what gives…
I did my due diligence and looked up a few things and read literally hundreds of comments ranging from passionate and heated to trollish.
1) It seems that it isn’t so much the diversity that’s the problem, it’s the nostalgia for the old heroes within their old identities: Tony Stark is Iron Man, Don Blake is Thor, and so forth. The commenters, for the most part, seemed to like racial and gender diversity, just not in the older, more established characters.
Yeah, I kinda hated it when Kyle Rayner replaced Hal Jordan as Green Lantern (esp. since they already had a black Green Lantern) but the graphic designer kind of grew on me.
2) Often, these newer and more diverse characters are for alternate universes which messes up continuity within the “standard” Marvel Universe and...heck, it costs a lot of money that I surely don’t have trying to keep up with everything that’s going on, even if I like the storyline. Lots of complaints about crossovers/etc.
3) It has almost a decade since I spent hours in a comic book shop arguing about continuity and story plots (and yes, the arguments can go on for hours). On a lark, I decided to look up the location of comic book stores in the Chicago area and it’s about what I figured: mostly downtown and on the north side (I do live walking distance from one of those stores).
Give the price of keeping up with everything (“crossovers, etc.) and all the other competing avenues for fun (esp. video games), your “comic book” product had better be good in this environment.
Then again, there’s always the fallback of “too much diversity” and PC...yada yada that gets blamed for the simple fact that your product isn’t simply very good.
When all else fails, blame “the other”...a story as old as America itself.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Charline Bullock — “As a mother, it’s devastating to watch your child suffer and there is nothing that you can do to fix it.” The Root: Where Are All the Black Bone Marrow Donors?
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Her 5-year-old son, Asaya, suffers from immune dysregulation, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X-linked (or IPEX) syndrome, a rare genetic blood disorder that causes multiple autoimmune disorders.
“He is a such sweetheart, but he gets so angry because he is sick. He suffers from serious memory loss, body aches, stomach issues, has serious joint pain, and it basically hurts everywhere,” she added.
“He loves to learn, too, but can’t even go to school for a full week,” Bullock continued. “As a mother, it’s devastating to watch your child suffer, and there is nothing that you can do to fix it.”
Despite the severity of his disorder, Asaya has lived longer than expected.
When he was diagnosed at 8 months old, Charline and her husband, Vincent Bullock, were told that he probably wouldn’t make it past the age of 2. And while treatment has helped keep him alive, doctors were clear from the beginning that a bone marrow transplant was the only cure. Soon after, Bullock got pregnant, hoping that because siblings have a 25-30 percent chance of matching another sibling, her baby girl would be the answer to her family’s prayers.
Sadly, that was not the case. After receiving his sister’s cord blood, Asaya rejected her cells despite being a 7-point match out of 10.
“I just remember my husband breaking down when they gave us the news that it didn’t work,” Charline recalled.
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NORBERTO MESA, a 66-year-old grandfather, stands in the hot sun 11 hours a day, six days a week, guiding cars in and out of the parking spaces in front of a bustling farm stand. The 4,000 Cuban pesos ($170 at the official exchange rate) he earns each month in tips is more than ten times his monthly old-age pension of 340 pesos. Without it, the retired animal geneticist could not afford fruit and meat, or help his children, who work for low salaries, to feed his four grandchildren.
Though revolutionary Cuba had one of the region’s earliest and most comprehensive pension systems, in recent years retirement has almost vanished. Without further economic reform, and the cheap oil that used to come from Venezuela, the economy has stalled. Pensions have been frozen, and their value eaten up by inflation. According to the most recent government statistics, from 2010, a third of men past retirement age are working. Three-fifths of older people say they often have to go without necessities.
The insular socialist paradise supposedly offers a social safety-net, cradle to grave. But it is full of holes. Medical care is free, but most medicine is not. Retirement homes are scarce, and rules that mean residents must give up their pensions and homes put off many, since these are often a lifeline for younger relatives in equally distressed circumstances.
So old people can be seen on the streets of Havana selling newspapers and peanuts, or recycling cans. They are scrubbing floors in affluent homes or cooking for a growing number of private restaurants and bakeries. Ernesto Alpízar, an 89-year-old former agronomist, goes door-to-door selling strawberries and flowers. Even so, he remains an ardent “Fidelista”, grateful to the island’s late dictator for the free cataract surgery that saved his eyesight.
For even as the island’s old and infirm must hustle to survive, they have benefited from its success at providing health care. Life expectancy at birth is 79, not far short of most developed countries, and widely available birth control helps explain why family size has fallen further and faster than in most other countries (see chart). The flip side, though, has been a breakneck demographic transition—exacerbated by the large share of young and middle-aged Cubans who have fled to America. Over-65s now make up 14% of the population. The national statistical office estimates that the total number of pensioners will overtake the number of state-sector workers by 2025.
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Once refugees themselves, Ugandans look to ‘return the good’ to people fleeing war in South Sudan by offering land and help. The Guardian: Is Uganda the world's best place for refugees?
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A mix of Afrobeat and South Sudanese folk music resounds over the jumbled stalls and makeshift corrugated iron shops that form the trading centre of Nyumanzi, a sprawling refugee settlement in northern Uganda.
The settlement is home to more than 20,000 men, women and children who have arrived from bordering South Sudan, the world’s newest country, where conditions have been compared to Rwanda in the run-up to the genocide.
People who now call Nyumanzi home talk of leaving behind hunger, torture, looting and killings. Boys were forcibly recruited to join the fighting, women and girls raped.
But in coming to Uganda, they have struck lucky. Almost 400,000 people have fled to the country since July when violence resumed in South Sudan. They are treated perhaps better than refugees anywhere in the world.
“I call Uganda my second home,” says Jacob Yout Achiek, 36, who fled the South Sudanese capital, Juba, in 2013 and now runs a grocery shop. “The office of the [Ugandan] prime minister is like our government. If you have a problem, you call them and they will respond immediately.”
In the past, Ugandans have had to flee to other countries for their safety, says Godfrey Byaruhanga, co-ordinator of refugee services for the government. Now it their obligation to “return the good”.
“Most of our leaders have been refugees, so it has been easy for them to embrace this refugee policy,” he says.
This attitude is in contrast to other African countries struggling to cope with rising refugee numbers. In Kenya, home of the world’s largest and oldest refugee camp, Dadaab, refugees cannot legally work and their movements are limited. They also live under constant threat that the camp will close.
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The conversations can be endless. There are countless YouTube channels, blogs, social media pages, etc., dedicated to helping black women find #HairInspo, showing them wash routines and styling techniques and reviewing hair products.
But now there’s an app for that. Three black software engineers and entrepreneurs—Cassandra Sarfo, Esther Olatunde and Priscilla Hazel—have created Tress, an app they hope will become the one-stop shop for all your black hair needs, inspirations and appointments.
“We do this all the time: We see a hairstyle that we like. We stop people on the street just to ask them where they did their hair, how much it cost them, or ask them for their stylist’s number,” Hazel told The Root. “And my mom, she takes pictures of her TV screen and [messages] me and asks me where she can have it done. It’s a habit that we have that we do all the time.”
So the women put their heads together to come up with a solution for what they saw as an obvious demand, and the app Tress was born. The long-term goal is to make Tress a one-stop shop for all things hair, and for the platform to be a seamless integration between someone seeing a hairstyle and knowing all the products and procedures (and even people!) used to create it.
As it stands now, the search starts on the street or on social media with someone loving a hairstyle. Then maybe they have to search for tutorials on how to style the hair, or where to purchase specific products or extensions. Then it’s a matter of, can this be done with your own two hands, or should you put your life in a stylist’s hands?
“You’re constantly moving from one platform to the other, trying to figure out how to get information on one style you want to get done. So, for us, we thought it’d be cool if we could just build a platform where you can actually come and find hairstyle inspiration, interact with people who post their hairstyle, be able to purchase products for those particular hairstyles and then eventually be able to book stylists all on one platform,” Hazel said.
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