*From “Black Panther” to “Marvel’s Luke Cage,” this year has been quite rewarding (for both fans and the studios) for African American superheroes.
LA Times contributor Lorraine Ali writes: They fight crime in old cotton hoodies, shimmering black capes and glowing LED unitards. They can repel bullets with their bodies, leap atop speeding cars like a svelte cat or dissipate in a puff of eerie smoke, all in the name of justice. But most impressive of all: They have a newfound power to break color barriers that were once considered impenetrable.
“It used to be that one show had to be representative of all black people,” says Cheo Hodari Coker, showrunner of “Marvel’s Luke Cage” and a former Los Angeles Times music writer. “Now you have several black superhero narratives on television, and at the same time you also have shows like ‘Atlanta,’ ‘Queen Sugar,’ ‘Insecure,’ ‘The Chi’ and ‘Power.’ There’s so many different elements of the black experience on television now, it takes the pressure off any one [show] to represent everybody.”
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Ali also notes that “Black comic book characters date to the 1970s, but on screen, they’ve historically been sidekicks or villains if not entirely absent from Hollywood and television’s ever-increasing adaptations.”
But Ku Klux Klan rallies astoundingly have become a thing again and unarmed black men and women are still disproportionately the victims of police violence, avengers of color couldn’t be more timely.
Cress Williams, who plays high-voltage hero Black Lightning, lists some of the ripped-from-the-headlines issues his character was up against in Season 1: “Crime, police corruption, political corruption, drugs, police brutality.”
He continued: “Sometimes in a fantasy context, it’s easier to look at truths because you see them from a distance. It’s like ‘Oh, it’s sci fi or superhero,’ so it’s a great medium to look at some of our ills. Even though [our show features] a fictional city, it’s kind of representative of so many cities across America that seem forgotten and lost. With the show, we can look at it from that safe distance.”
This year also brought us more black female heroes, though not in lead roles, such as Domino (Zazie Beetz) in “Deadpool,” the fierce Wakanda warriors of “Black Panther” and Black Lightning’s formidable daughters, Thunder (Nafessa Williams) and Lightning (China Anne McClain).
“The color Hollywood cares about the most is green,” says Coker, who worked on both seasons of “Luke Cage.” “Having more cultural heroes is lucrative. It’s different than seeing your average ‘expected’ superhero, and culture is the cheapest special effect around. Or I should say it’s the cheapest, but most profound, special effect available.”
Notably it was “Black Panther,” not a “Captain America” or “Iron Man” movie, that became the third highest-grossing film ever in America.
