And occasionally green. That’s the Legion of Superheroes above, DC comics’ 30th century superhero group, with heroes from all over the galaxy but still mighty white. As the team was originally concieved and developed in the whitebread world of early sixties DC this is not too surprising, but over the decades and with various reboots some colour had been added to the team, through new characters and re-imaginations of older ones. All for nothing though, as yet another continuity reboot for the LoSh series has dumped them back to their pristine white roots. They’re a good example of what Chris Sims calls the racial politics of regressive storytelling:
And much of the time — not always, but enough that it’s more than notable — they’re being passed back from a non-white character to an Aryan ideal. Jason Rusch is still part of Firestorm, but it’s back to being Ronnie Raymond’s Caucasian body. Kimiyo Hoshi is still Dr. Light, but that name’s been permanently soured by “Identity Crisis” and the fact that James Robinson had the original Dr. Light threaten to rape her children on the Justice League Satellite. Even the regressions of ostensibly white characters often have racially charged consequences: Wally West’s interracial marriage to Linda Park has been sidelined in favor of on-the-go suburbanites Barry Allen and Iris West, and Kyle Rayner (who was created as an Irish-American but later “revealed” to be the son of a Mexican-American CIA agent) has suffered the strange fate-worse-than-death of a fictional character who gets demoted from a starring role to a supporting one. He’s still a Green Lantern, but he’s not the Green Lantern.
This is pretty much a DC only problem, Marvel has always been slightly better (though not great) at having non-white characters and also has done much less rebooting of their main characters — they tried to remake Spider-Man into a funkier version in the early nineties and it backfired horribly. Though much of DC’s endless fidgeting has been awful, it did mean more room for characters of colour in a starring role. But in the last few years the pendulum has swung back as writers who grew up with the originals took over and started to “restore” them to their rightful places. The end result is the draining of colour that Chris describes. It does nothing to dissipate the idea that superheroes are for white folks only, or that superhero fans are uncomfortable with heroes of colour…