The Black Proteges

Those of us brave, obstinate, curious, or bored enough to follow the discussions that develop on the rec.arts.comics newsgroups sometimes encounter threads questioning, defending, or accusing the superhero comics medium for mistreatment or nontreatment of superheroes from African, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian backgrounds. Sometimes it becomes difficult not to notice the overwhelming blondness of superhero teams composed of typically EuroAmerican characters; some readers (and nonreading kibitzers), with some justification, protest the general absence of high-ranking characters from outside the acceptible parameters of a National Socialist eugenic breeding program.

One subset of these characters, however, does hint at a relationship between the default class of Caucasoid superheroes and the individual Black heroes. The Black protege hero suggests a worldview typical of sixties thinking, where the "limousine liberal" caste presumed unto itself both a duty and an ability to mentor the entirety of a race to help said grouping better reach its destiny. Modern race politics seems to have moved to different channels, with self-help becoming a more politically credible concept, and a broader range of thoughtful persons questioning the mentor-protege model of relationships between EuroAmericans and the vast body of peoples we might dismissively categorize as "everyone else."

The protege model provides a logical explanation for the creation of a new superhero, but must so many Black superheroes come into the trade through the benign influence of White benefactors? Put bluntly, do these stories represent something the curmudgeonly branch of American conservatism might describe as the "comics superheroic plantation system?"

Giant-Man and Black Goliath

Black Goliath, who became Giant-Man not long after his creation, originated during the high era of Blaxploitation films and seemed to represent a typically seventies attempt to contribute to one of a number of period fads. Marvel probably created him explicitly to have another Black character; that company had already shown that the market would not support an independent title with a character with such abilities, and the first Giant-Man and the second Goliath had come and gone without much affect on readers (in both cases, the characters changed names, costumes, and powers and would not again take up the mantle for many years).

Marvel took a supporting character, Henry Pym's laboratory assistant Bill Foster, and attempted to recreate him as a superhero. In the process, they never got around to making him very interesting, although late in his development they finally improved his costume to something considerably less cheesy than his original outfit.

However, Marvel did allow the character some dignity. Though his history did implicate him as a protege of a white superhero (ultra-blond Henry Pym developed both the powers and persona without aid or input from Foster in any particular), his stories downplayed this role. Instead of Pym convincing him to take up superheroing, Luke Cage ("Power Man") made the suggestion. Black Goliath therefore did not have to follow around a father / mentor figure attempting to achieve validity by pleasing him; where he had to prove anything to anyone, he had to please himself.

Black Goliath / Giant-Man would have presented a considerably more interesting character if he had not borrowed his growing powers from another man's science. This implies that he lacked the necessary scientific ability and had to turn to benefactors (White ones), something that made him somewhat less admirable as a character; the old standard origins of acquiring power through some implausible scientific accident (like Spider-Man, the Flash, or the Fantastic Four) or as the result of a program to create a superheroic being (Captain America, Manhunter, parts of Wolverine) would have done nothing to belittle the character. Some writers might have even allowed the character to discover the means to acquire the power independently, ignoring the "Pym particle" premise altogether.

Marvel ultimately faded the character out. First they wrote stories where Black Goliath expected to die as a side effect of his powers or something that happened when he had used them; later on, a story stripped away the growing powers from all characters who used some form of "Pym particle" (including today's Hawkeye, Bill Foster, and Pym himself).

Writers might be able to do something someday with the character, but probably not until they dispense with the pretext of the juvenile apprentice notion. Grownup characters do not serve long or well as proteges, regardless of how a writer feels about superheroes "sponsoring" characters from (presumedly) less fortunate backgrounds.

Captain America and the Falcon

The Captain America / Falcon relationship represented one of the better mentor / protege relationships across racial lines, at least until Marvel utterly destroyed it with an ill-advised revision of Falcon's history shortly before Jack Kirby returned to the title in 1976.

Captain America found himself trapped in the body of the Red Skull and stranded on an island while the Skull freely used Captain America's body, identity, and the considerable power provided by the overused "cosmic cube." He needed someone to help him and found the conveniently-shipwrecked Sam Wilson on his island, recognized him as a good man with considerable potential as a crimefighter and trained him more as a peer than as a junior sidekick. The Falcon therefore hit the ground running, rather than needing Captain America to drag him into the role, and the early stories frequently placed him in different (albeit connected) scenarios, handling crime more on a street level than the superheroic.

In the years 1969-1975, talented writers (mostly Steve Englehart) portrayed the Falcon as a character who openly resented anything but full peerage with Captain America, and this led to his independent seeking of some gimmick to increase his own effectiveness when Captain America gained a boost in strength during one story. Even though Captain America offered to point the Falcon towards gadgeteers Henry Pym and Tony Stark, Falcon declined, brazenly stating that he preferred to resort to another Black man for this; so he visited the underused Black Panther in the imaginary precincts of Wakanda, where the Panther built him a set of glider wings that allowed him to fly.

Falcon, therefore, unlike other sidekicks, began to diverge from the concept of his protege. If a character like "Kid Flash" possessed identical powers and costume of his protege and lived for the imitative role in his earliest days, Falcon chose the complementary approach. He could travel faster and go places Captain America couldn't, and represented more of a partner than a student.

Marvel, of course, blew all of this when they printed the stories that reworked his history. Falcon thereafter became a creation of the Red Skull, who had taken a common street hoodlum, rewritten his memory, and placed him on the island with Captain America as a sort of time bomb in case the Captain should defeat the Red Skull's current campaign to take over all of reality. With Wilson's history restructured from that of an inner city social worker to a reformed gangster who required his relationship with Captain America to regenerate the moral authority he frittered away by wearing zoot suits and chewing toothpicks on streetcorners, he became a penitent rather than a peer; he lost the entirety of the difficultly-created equality that made the Captain America / Falcon pair work; and he quickly vanished from the title.

Thereafter, Falcon would occasionally appear here and there, including a few years in the Avengers title, but bad writing had damaged the character very badly, and only recently writers have attempted to return him to his roots (to the point of recreating his original green-and-orange costume, which, in spite of its dreadful color scheme, serves to define much of the original feel of the character as an unpowered urban defender).

Writers seem to know, however, how close they had come to doing it right before everything went horribly wrong; and future stories could (conceivably) undo the awful "Snap" Wilson debacle completely.

Hal Jordan and John Stewart

Back in the days when political comics took chances (albeit from a single corner of the American political spectrum), Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams stuck out their necks to create DC's most noteworthy early Black superhero. Although DC typically remained (at least) several years behind the industry standards Marvel kept redefining back in the vigorous period of discovery we call the Silver Age of comics, the incroachment of baby boomers into the industry meant that tidal waves of both progress and decadence would inundate inland DC just as Marvel had, itself, found itself awash.

John Stewart represents a later generation of Black superhero than the archetypical Black Panther, whose logic and history allowed that figure some distance from the social changes in America and particularly America's often-vicious racial politics. O'Neil and Adams, however, chose to introduce Stewart during a phase of Green Lantern stories where urban settings, current events, and a newly realistic approach to the character meant the first Black Green Lantern would represent, at least as his fair-hued creators saw, the sort of man one might actually run into in places real people might see outside their windows.

John Stewart, while demonstrating the requisite heroism to earn the honor of Green Lantern reservist, nonetheless departed in serious particulars from the heroic model that created his mentor, Hal Jordan. For example, he demonstrated ill-temper, discourtesy, and an unconcealed dislike of White Americans (albeit subsequently toned down). Nor did he allow Hal Jordan's tutorial position to intimidate him; he spoke his dislikes with impunity, and did not fail to include pejorative interpretations of Hal and his character when the situation demanded or the mood struck him.

The question "How can we work together when we don't even get along" would come up more than once in John Stewart's career as a Green Lantern (which included various periods between 1970 and sometime in the early 1990s).

In many ways, he presented an excellent lens to analyze the way heroism relates to racial issues in America; the question of a hero who saves people he dislikes illuminates important aspects of the hero concept, and further expands the horizons of the hero beyond the chivalric stereotype that represented superheroes for their first twenty years.

At least in his original concept, John Stewart's creators tried with great emphasis to refuse to condescend. That the character frequently seemed locked into a perpetual snarl and sometimes annoyed more than impressed may represent a success of the concept, at least as far as comics can demonstrate where the parameters of heroism lie. Some future treatment of the character, whether within or without the constraints of a "Green Lantern Corps," might reveal to the market the possible breadth inherent in the character.

Iron Man and War Machine

The Iron Man / War Machine relationship began on better terms than later storytellers ended it. James Rhodes first appeared in Iron Man in the late seventies as a helicopter pilot working for Tony Stark. Rhodes ("Rhodey") had acquired his piloting skills in the armed services during the Viet Nam War and existed as an able and resourceful character for some time before he took on the protege role.

Rhodey appeared about the time that Iron Man writers decided to cast Iron Man / Tony Stark as a particularly vehement alcoholic, and this concept brought about circumstances that required Rhodey to fill in for Stark as Iron Man. So far, the position and circumstances of the character did not contain a note of paternalistic condescention. In fact, for some time, the Iron Man title included the adventures of Rhodes, not Stark, in the armor; the circumstances began to mirror the disinformation Tony Stark used to feed the press about Iron Man serving as his official bodyguard and general protector of Stark Enterprises.

When Stark began to dry out somewhat (after a long, long series of stories where he wandered around unshaven in a dirty tuxedo drinking himself into a stupor and falling into whatever convenient gutter the situation presented), he resumed his role as Iron Man, but provided Rhodes with a modified suit of Iron Man-type armor with a slightly different color scheme (a rather unappealing gray and white combination). Rhodey became "War Machine" and allowed both Avengers books, Avengers and West Coast Avengers, to have an Iron Man.

The concept became unfortunate at this point, because Rhodey, who had demonstrated considerable ability (if different superheroic ethics) in his role as Iron Man, became and came to see himself as a protege and subordinate. Within Avengers West Coast (the late run of West Coast Avengers), this matter came to a boil and War Machine left the team altogether rather than serve in the shadow of an unwanted mentor.

It seems rather difficult not to sympathize with him on this. Rhodey managed to steer clear of the bottle, took considerable battering on behalf of the booze-sotten Tony Stark and the reputation of his creation Iron Man, and received, as his reward, the dubious honor of appearing to the world as "Iron Man, Junior."

One can note with some maudlin feeling that War Machine did not figure in the volume three version of Avengers during the stories when almost all past members appeared with the team.

Superman and Steel

In Steel we have a character who does not need a mentor figure. His writers gave him a history that only marginally touched upon the subject of a mentor at all. John Henry Irons had worked in the military as a weapons designer until he found his creations going into a black market where terrorists and street gangs used them for rapine and pillage rather than any purpose resembling defense. After viewing the result of a massacre involving his creations and derivative hand-held devices, he took a new identity, vanished from the life he led before, and took up a job working high steel. Then, as the early origin story related, he fell off a skyscraper skeleton while saving another steelworker who had stumbled on a beam.

Hence began the unnecessary portions of his story. Superman appeared just as if Lois Lane had fallen out of a window and brought Irons to the ground unharmed, sardonically suggesting that, if he had saved Irons' life, Irons should do something with it (do we smell condescention here?). Therefore, in the aftermath of the notoriously impermanent "death" of Superman, Metropolis found itself in the middle of a crime wave, including drive-by murders using a variant on the weapon Irons had created.

Irons created an armored suit and accompanying weaponry of a style not really suggestive of Marvel's Iron Man, though critics of the character like to compare the hardware of the two characters. He became a superhero, inspired by the defunct Superman, and incorporated themes from Superman into his costuming, including an "s" on his chest and a red cape with an "s" on the back. He even dubbed himself the "Man of Steel," though this also reflected his role in a broader series of stories concerning four replacement Supermen.

While Steel can represent a very intriguing character when handled rightly, some readers may find his protege relationship to Superman unnecessary and mildly insulting. Some critics decry both his tendency to sermonize and his function as Superman's apologist and mouthpiece, though some writers manage to avoid such unfortunate treatments.

Regardless, though, one should consider whether the Superman themes that surround this character remain necessary or appropriate any more. Like Iron Man, Giant-Man, Mister Fantastic, the Atom, and a number of other characters, Irons possesses a history as an ingenious inventor. He needs Superman neither for training nor for protection. In fact, Steel could, any time, begin to produce his own proteges, if he desired them, unlike characters like the Dick Grayson Robin, who remained unfit to become much of an independent superhero for some forty-four years of printed stories; his character became complete and autonomous before Superman ever met him as a superhero.

Cutting Loose?

In most of these cases, the problems of the White mentor / Black protege relationship diminish somewhat once the student hero earns the "wings" that indicate his ability to act independently of his original teacher. Unfortunately, comics writers often fail to bring the characters to this point. For instance, Bill Foster sits in a limbo created by his retirement from the Giant-Man persona, and won't really redeem himself until he invents something superheroic and non-derivative himself. Similarly, Steel needs to dispense, as far as he can, with the role of superhero-in-training; he established his competence before he assumed the protege relationship and does not, realistically, owe Superman for his powers or success, barring one life-saving incedent.

Cases like the Falcon and John Stewart established a more plausible autonomy, and thus hold more of an untroubled future (without the need for messy break-ups that each has gone through at least once with the outgrown mentor hero). In such a position, they can freely interact with there onetime teachers without lessening their own stature, at least when handled by a writer who pays attention to the problem.

Some cases, however, seem fairly insoluble, at least until some shining insight allows a writer to resolve the status of a character who does not need or want to play a secondary role to some other character who logically should no longer overshadow him. In Rhodey / War Machine's case, this may take adopting an altogether different persona that in no way borrows or derives from that of his unnecessary mentor; whatever solution comes about will have to wait until a writer with the interest, vision, and talent to undo the knotted relationships that surround that character decides to do something about it.