In Defense of the Legion of Super-Heroes
Sep. 10th, 2007 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jmatonakThis is another response to someone else's blog post. I'm not here to refute anything this time.
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odditycollector hates the Legion of Super-Heroes. It seems to be one of those love-hate things. The part she hates is that everyone is so god-damn white. Those are my words, not hers. Hers are here:
http://odditycollector.insanejournal.com/1908.html
She has a point. They're not just white-skinned, the LSH characters. The future is monocultural. They're a bunch of WASPs in space. But, like Karen, I read the LSH starting at a very young age, and the thing that tripped me up was that the comic was presented in English, whereas occasionally the characters would say they were speaking Interlac. Like Star Trek, I wasn't seeing what was "really" going on, but rather a translation of it. So I assumed, pretty much from the outset, that the Legion really wasn't as whitebread as all that. I didn't question the specifics, but I knew the Legion's future was "really" different. I knew that the characters "really" didn't resemble me as much as they seemed to. They were presented as "like me" to make me feel comfortable. (Why I should be this comfortable and my black neighbors didn't have the same luxury was not, alas, a question that occurred to me.)
As the feature went on for years and years, I noticed that less and less of this translation was being done. We started to see Interlac in its own font and not translated into the familiar lettering. (It was still just a transliteration, but it was something.) It turned out the LSH's universe was a lot less like the Jetsons than it first appeared. And we began to see Legionnaires who were less white. Caucasoid was still, implausibly, presented as the default, but the cast wasn't so alike anymore as they used to be.
The Legion has a privileged position in comics continuity. It is, as Jim Shooter points out, a whole comics universe contained in one book. All it takes is a decision by one creative team that they'd like to, for example, draw Karate Kid as more Korean, and it is done. And some of the creative teams have done this. My point here is not that the LSH stories Karen criticizes are enlightened after all; for better or worse, they aren't. My point is that LSH, for a comic book, changes incredibly rapidly- and it has a tendency to get more complicated, more nuanced, and more diverse, in every sense of the word.
So, yeah, the future is pretty white. I have faith that it won't stay that way much longer. It will take some time to reach the main cast, but we'll see a rainbow Legion long before we see a rainbow Justice League.
(At Newsarama, someone else criticized the released promo art for the upcoming run for having costumes that show too much skin. I think, as one among many, Phantom Girl's costume is just fine, thankyouverymuch Newsarama person. I also like that there are many Legion females for Phantom Girl to be among.)
odditycollector hates the Legion of Super-Heroes. It seems to be one of those love-hate things. The part she hates is that everyone is so god-damn white. Those are my words, not hers. Hers are here:http://odditycollector.insanejournal.com/1908.html
She has a point. They're not just white-skinned, the LSH characters. The future is monocultural. They're a bunch of WASPs in space. But, like Karen, I read the LSH starting at a very young age, and the thing that tripped me up was that the comic was presented in English, whereas occasionally the characters would say they were speaking Interlac. Like Star Trek, I wasn't seeing what was "really" going on, but rather a translation of it. So I assumed, pretty much from the outset, that the Legion really wasn't as whitebread as all that. I didn't question the specifics, but I knew the Legion's future was "really" different. I knew that the characters "really" didn't resemble me as much as they seemed to. They were presented as "like me" to make me feel comfortable. (Why I should be this comfortable and my black neighbors didn't have the same luxury was not, alas, a question that occurred to me.)
As the feature went on for years and years, I noticed that less and less of this translation was being done. We started to see Interlac in its own font and not translated into the familiar lettering. (It was still just a transliteration, but it was something.) It turned out the LSH's universe was a lot less like the Jetsons than it first appeared. And we began to see Legionnaires who were less white. Caucasoid was still, implausibly, presented as the default, but the cast wasn't so alike anymore as they used to be.
The Legion has a privileged position in comics continuity. It is, as Jim Shooter points out, a whole comics universe contained in one book. All it takes is a decision by one creative team that they'd like to, for example, draw Karate Kid as more Korean, and it is done. And some of the creative teams have done this. My point here is not that the LSH stories Karen criticizes are enlightened after all; for better or worse, they aren't. My point is that LSH, for a comic book, changes incredibly rapidly- and it has a tendency to get more complicated, more nuanced, and more diverse, in every sense of the word.
So, yeah, the future is pretty white. I have faith that it won't stay that way much longer. It will take some time to reach the main cast, but we'll see a rainbow Legion long before we see a rainbow Justice League.
(At Newsarama, someone else criticized the released promo art for the upcoming run for having costumes that show too much skin. I think, as one among many, Phantom Girl's costume is just fine, thankyouverymuch Newsarama person. I also like that there are many Legion females for Phantom Girl to be among.)
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to optimism!
Date: 2007-09-10 09:31 pm (UTC)It would take a *lot* of new characters of colour to make up for the current cast, and at the moment even the background shots are lacking.
Re: to optimism!
Date: 2007-09-11 05:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-31 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 06:29 pm (UTC)