I swear, I could just fill this column up by talking about DC Comics every week. And I’m not talking about creative missteps – that I could do daily. This is just clubhouse stuff. Like the way they relaunched their entire line, 52 titles, and managed to have exactly one female on the creative side. (In all fairness, they’re all the way up to three and sometimes four now.) Or the time they launched a new series, starring a character who was also appearing on a series of Cartoon Network animated shorts aimed at young girls, with an attempted rape in the first issue. Or going back two years, when they scrubbed an issue of Superman introducing a Muslim hero at the last minute and replaced it with an inventory story about Krypto.
Now, I’m saying all this as a guy who loves DC Comics. They’ve been a huge part of my life since I was just a little shaver explaining the concept of Earth-2 to my kindergarten class. Yes, they managed to just about break me with the 2011 reboot, but I still want the best for them. Even if the audience that they’re courting doesn’t include me, I want them to do well. But if they insist on making almost everything that isn’t about Batman kind of terrible, then I can’t really stop them. The point is, I take no pleasure in their recent raft of miscalculations and PR nightmares.
Last week, a couple of writers quit their new DC books before the first issues of their runs had even come out. That’s a sadly common occurrence of late, but one of them seems especially pertinent here. Joshua Hale Fialkov was scheduled to take over two books in the Green Lantern franchise (Green Lantern Corps and Red Lanterns. For the record, Red Lanterns is a series about aliens who are so angry that they constantly vomit blood. That’s not important, but if I have to know it, so do you.), and then he announced that he would not be writing either book due to conflicts with “editorial decisions”. Eventually, the specifics leaked out, and several outlets reported that Fialkov left because the editorial team demanded that he kill John Stewart.
John Stewart is Green Lantern. Well, he’s a Green Lantern. There are a lot of them. He’s not the one from the movie, but he starred on five seasons of the Justice League animated series. And he’s African-American. In fact, he’s DC’s longest-running African-American character having first appeared in 1971. (Yes, 1971. DC took a while to experiment with diversity.) Along with Cyborg and Lucius Fox, he’s DC’s most prominent and recognizable black character, to the extent that young Justice League fans were heard to complain that movie Green Lantern was played by a white actor.
I’m not a fan of killing characters for a sales bump, but sometimes the story warrants it. The recent death of Robin (No, not the one you’re thinking of.) in Batman, Inc. was an important beat in a long-running story, foreshadowed for several years. But that was writer-driven. The death of John Stewart would have been an editorial decision. The suits picked somebody to die, and Fialkov was hired to pull the trigger. Even if we were talking about Generic Hero Number 11, that would be pretty distasteful. But we’re talking about the company’s first prominent African-American character.
I don’t necessarily think there was any malice on DC’s part. They’re just a little bit tone deaf, but it happens a lot. Yes, there are a lot of Green Lanterns, and I think John’s the only one who hasn’t been dead for at least a little while (don’t ask). And I would never argue that minority characters have to be functionally immortal, but I think any writer or editor should really think it through before killing one of the depressingly small number of minority characters. Could you tell a good story about the death of John Stewart? Probably. But is that the story you want to tell? There are kids who see themselves in Stewart when they watch Justice League or pick up Green Lantern Corps, and I don’t think there’s anything served by giving them a whole bunch of white Green Lanterns instead. His prominence in media and his historical status makes him an icon in a way that I don’t think DC understands.
There’s this famous page in an issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow shortly before Stewart’s first appearance. An old African-American man yells at Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) about how he works for the “blue skins” and he saved the “orange skins”, but he hasn’t done a darn thing for the “black skins”. Yes, it’s awkward as hell but it was kind of revelatory in 1971. (Now it just seems patronizing, but that’s what forty years will do.) This is a “come to Jesus” moment for Hal, who then starts driving around the country with Green Arrow and confronting societal ills. The whole this is ridiculous in retrospect, but it seems pertinent now. There are Green Lanterns with fish heads and a planet who’s a Green Lantern. Trees, squirrels, sexy ladies with magenta skin, robots, and plenty of white dudes. Just about every type of alien in the DC universe is represented in the Green Lantern Corps, but there’s exactly one John Stewart. There is one African-American Green Lantern, and he was nearly dismissed with a casual editorial execution order.
After all this, DC has reversed their stand and we’ve been assured that John is safe. But it took a big-name writer quitting and public outcry to get them to but two seconds of thought into it. For the most part, they mean well. Despite not knowing how to market them, DC has launched multiple books featuring people of color in lead roles. Granted, most of them have been cancelled, but they’re having a hard time keeping anything that isn’t related to Batman or Green Lantern going at this point. And they keep trying, recently launching Vibe and Katana (series with Puerto-Rican and Japanese-American leads) and splashing the Justice League logo all over the cover. Bless their hearts, they’re trying. But they have to remember that they have readers who aren’t white, male, or straight. There are kids who grew up watching Justice League who love John Stewart as much as I love Batman or Wally West. But if something happens to their hero, they don’t have a thousand other characters with whom they can identify. I mean, I was authentically sad when the reboot removed Wally and Ted Kord and Vic Sage from existence. I can’t imagine what somebody who looks at the Justice League and sees exactly one person who looks like them would feel about watching John get his throat slit in service of some mainstream media coverage.
I admire Fialkov for taking a stand and refusing to be the guy to kill DC’s first black character. And maybe this will send a message to the company to think about the messages they’re sending. Between Fialkov’s resignation and their inability to find anybody to draw a noted homophobe’s Superman comic, it almost seems like it’s easier just to do the right thing in the first place. And I really don’t think anybody at DC means any harm, I just don’t think they’re used to considering the audience beyond the clubhouse. Hopefully we can chalk this up to a misstep, somebody thinking about a USA Today story without considering the ramification. I have to believe that DC is trying, and one day they’ll get good at it. Hopefully, they can get to a point where their biggest problem is that Superman’s new costume is terrible. And all of us, regardless of sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation, can find common ground on that issue.
