By Christopher Chambers
Our hero saga begins in a comic book shop, in a southern metropolis which, yes, we’ll call “Metropolis” in the state of “Y’all.” And the shop’s not some innocuous strip mall storefront manned by aging hippies or meth-addled teenagers. It’s gleaming, glitzy, glorious. Stocked with all of the titles and toys and Xbox/PlayStation/Wii games which Hollywood has now kidnapped and blasted into the American consumer’s psyche. Indeed, many of its patrons are grown children who captain some the biggest companies in Metropolis. They, in turn, bring their small children, on whom they lavish expensive action figures and the newest, bloodiest or most life-like computer games…
In walks Cristobal, Stevie, and Sujata. Cristobal is 28, Stevie and Sujata are eight and fraternal twins. They’re the kids of Cristobal’s girlfriend. None are imbued with obvious superhero powers other than curiosity and imagination. Their usual bonding exercise is to browse the latest comics, graphic novels, adventure books, sci-fi collections…and of course the toy collectibles to fire the blood of all true fanboys and girls. Cristobal is Latino, the twins are African American.
Cristobal asks the shop clerk—a freckle-faced dude wearing a tall-tee “wifebeater” and baggie denims pretty much matching Cristobal’s own—which books and comic books feature Hispanic heroes, black heroes. And not necessarily costumed crusaders who shoot Lord-knows from their fingertips, or can fly or breathe underwater or summon the power of heaven (or hell). Regular folk. Folk the captains of Metropolis, Y’all, regularly ignore…
The shop clerk eyes the pair. He’s seen them before and they drop a lot of coin in the shop, yet each time he thinks they’re only indoors to escape the
sun and muggy air, or use the restroom. He shrugs his shoulders at Cristobal’s query. He’s not racist. The black guys he hangs with at school love him for he “talk like them;” he skateboards with two Mexican dudes in the convenience store parking lot every Sunday afternoon when it’s warm out. Of course he dryly recites the usual fare: old “Blade” stories, Marvel’s new “Black Panther-Storm” wedding arc—but he asserts a couple of white customers consider it too “soap opera” or even reverse-racist! The Green Lantern is black in some issues…oh, and there’s a “Spawn” collectible…and as for prose books, well, he’s never heard of the late Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and a host of other writers of adventure, suspense, sci-fi, even history, mythology: black, Hispanic, Asian—female. Kyle Baker’s graphic novel Nat Turner? Nope. Phillipe Smith, the young brother who writes and illustrates Japanese manga? Sure, there’re goo-gobs of manga titles—G rated and adult—splashed all over the aisles. Unh-unh, never heard of him. Dwayne McDuffie…surely you know him? Even Stevie chirps that McDuffie works on his favorite TV cartoon, Ben 10.
“Huh? Who’s Dwayne McDuffie?”
Stevie squints at the clerk, puffs out a lip. Sujata tugs on the hem of Cristobal’s tall-tee. But rather than sigh in dejection, she muses, “Okay, then we’ll have to tell our own stories.” And her brother chimes in, “Good ones that everyone will like.”
In 2006, I passed this anecdote (the names and location are above changed to protect the not-so-innocent) onto crime author and L.A. legend Gary Phillips. He was visiting the East Coast for a conference and I drove up to Baltimore from D.C. for several beers. Two writers talking shop. We’d already bandied about ideas for something like The Darker Mask over email. Less comic book or graphic novel, more a homage to the pulp fiction and adventure stories which birthed the characters, plots, and themes in modern four-color comics. But we needed a tipping point.
For me it was the exchange at the glittering comic shop. Like the saloon in the 19th century and Starbucks in the late 20th, comic shops are now the cool place to hang. And if they sell/rent computer games, they’re even more plugged into a multi-billion dollar multi-media entertainment enterprise. One in which people of color are increasingly making their presence known. Unfortunately, whether readers or creators, we fight the same superhero battles against the evil forces of commercialism that we do in films, music, TV, and in the traditional publishing realm: too few of us as gatekeepers and editors, too many others pushing stereotypes and fluff. Or there’s the old bromide—too often passed by publishers and authors of more conventional African-American fiction—that people of color won’t accept adventure stories, or “literary” graphic novels.
I knew Gary was already ensconced in the graphic novel version of Angeltown, featuring his hard-boiled black detective Ivan Monk. Like him, I grew up on pulp fiction, on old tales of adventure like James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, to the contemporary collections like New York Times bestselling author Michael Chabon’s McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, featuring Aimee Bender, Neil Gaiman, and of course Stephen King. In them I even see the digital/virtual derring-do of the game HALO’s Master Chief. Master Chief is a brother, if you didn’t already know. Concurrently, a few traditional authors were beginning a foray into the comics medium, as with Hurston-Wright Award winner Mat Johnson’s scripting of Papa Midnite: Djimon Honsou’s character in the film Constantine, from the Hellblazer comics series. Mat was also noodling over what would become the critically acclaimed 2007 graphic novel about lynching in the 1930s American south, Incognegro. I was ruminating over how to serialize the stories of unsung heroes and real people into sequential art (the technical term for comics and graphic novels; “prose” is the catch-all for just book print), a la the 9-11 Commission and Malcolm X, in which Coretta Scott King Award-winning artist Randy DeBurke breathed vivid life. Of course there was Kyle’s seminal Nat Turner, as a model, and groundbreaking horror collections like Brandon Massey’s Dark Dreams series with stories by such diverse authors as Zane or Eric Jerome Dickey.
Gary and I decided to marry sequential art with printed fiction the way it was done old school: prose, with illustrations. Yet we still lacked a spiritual center. That element came in the voice of Walter Mosley. It was he who said we needed this Darker Mask. We, as in all readers, particularly folks of color. Not writers. Readers. Stories for regular people, about regular people. Ignored, abused, reviled, forgotten people. Not even the cheerleaders or comfortable suburban housewives you see on ABC’s Heroes.
In Walter’s universe, these “new” superheroes were not copies of white, male counterparts featuring some contrived character flaw. The women were not to be clones of large-breasted white glama-zon zombie killers: the rubric of adolescent male imaginations. We wanted nuance, edge. And reality. From that creed—an ingredient spicing the work of most writers and artists of color—we crafted our thesis for The Darker Mask. As Gary expounds, “My job is to try to bring some verisimilitude to the page and present a story that the reader will take away something of value; that they didn’t blow their [money] on ya-ya.”
Mindful not to offer ya-ya, we went about recruiting our own legion of super heroines and heroes: Sleepers author Lorenzo Carcaterra, who’s also scribed gritty dialogue for bestselling computer games (and who hasn’t seen the movie version with Pitt, DeNiro, and Hoffman?). Bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara. Peter Spiegelman. Private eye master Reed Farrel Coleman. Suspense bestseller Alexandra Sokoloff. Women-in-comics pioneer Annie Nocenti (creator of Dare-Devil). Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, fresh with their collaboration with Blair Underwood. Vibe, The Source and XXL journalist Mike Gonzales. Gary’s L.A. partner in crime Gar Anthony Haywood. Adventure-fable writer Wayne Wilson. Comic book author Doselle Young. Literary award winners Mat Johnson and Victor LaValle. Bestseller and book club favorite Leslie “LA” Banks. Walter Mosley, the mentor. And the late Jerry Rodriguez—playwright, filmmaker, scion of all things Nuyorican, Bronx, and Brooklyn and cool, already famed from a three-book deal with Kensington before his death from cancer. The artists are not to be messed with either: Shawn Martinbrough of Marvel, DC/Vertigo, and the author of How to Draw Noir Comics. Stars like Brian Hurtt and Sean Wang. Legendary magazine illustrator and painter Jeff Fisher.
Nevertheless, the advice from marketing mavens was and is to invite rappers or perhaps even video vixens to pen these prose stories or comics. Politely, we demurred. True, many rappers, including Method Man, are contemplating their own comics lines and they look damn good; hip-hop is a perfect compliment to the sequential art form. Yet recently at the phenomenon known as Comic Con in San Diego, even Method Man decried the silly, watered-down commercialization of his art. So while we didn’t approach rappers for The Darker Mask (maybe we will—stay tuned), we do have a story by hip-hop journalist Mike Gonzales, “The Whores of Onyx City,” illustrated by Sean Wang. And in this and other contributions you see our themes in action. “I’ve been drawn (pun intended) to comic books since I was a kid growing up in Harlem,” Gonzales relates. “I can remember going to a newsstand around the way every week and falling in love with the four-color fantasies that depicted my favorite heroes Batman, Daredevil, and the Hulk.” Some of Gonzales’ first fiction purchases weren’t just Chester Himes, or even Donald Goines or Langston Hughes’ poetry, but horror books like House of Mystery, House of Secrets and Creepy. Indeed, Gonzales credits influences such as “blaxploitation actresses, new wave flicks, Wu-Tang albums, the fiction of Chester Himes, David Goodis, and Paul Auster, as well as the crazy crack heads that populated my hood for over a decade” as inspirations for his story, and Wang faithfully interprets the flow in his artwork.
Speaking of urban artistry and flow, there’s PEN/Faulkner finalist Victor LaValle’s character Tony Flow, who, as a young black man in Brooklyn, has got no memories of his childhood, “but [has] some spectacular powers and in this story he finally learns to embrace the more heroic aspects of himself. Which bodes well for the world, I guess.” And for young potential heroes and heroines like our Stevie and Sujata…
LA Banks is already a veteran of the phantasmagorical with her wildly successful Vampire Huntress novels from St. Martin’s Press. African-American females supposedly are cold to horror/fantasy, to sci-fi, and adventure. Strange monsters and myths. Though Banks also counts herself as a romance writer, she’s gleefully smashed that particular myth about black women’s reading habits to atoms. Indeed Professor Jennifer Ryan asserts that adventure prose and graphic novels present an “important literary forum for black women’s voices.” Thus for Banks, it’s always a pleasure for her to attend the Hollywood-driven and supposedly white male geek-dominated Comic Con. “It was a total sensory overload of all things sci-fi, paranormal, and fun!” she gushes. “It’s like one of those things you can’t believe or fathom until you see it—sort of a human version of the running of the bulls.” Banks opines, “People like to read about others that have overcome vast challenges and dramas because that’s what they identify with. What about tension and struggle… what is heroic about being completely invincible? You might as well be God and then there’s no issue, right? Not interesting at all.” That’s why she works so hard to create a body of work for the grown-up versions of little Sujata.
Author Mat Johnson, who burst upon the traditional prose universe with the acclaimed novels Drop and Hunting in Harlem, expands this notion of hero as ordinary brotherman with Henchman, also illustrated by Sean Wang. Ain’t it Cool News fetes Henchman as one of the more creative works in The Darker Mask, yet for Johnson, the story’s genesis is fairly simple. “In a lot of stories of this genre, you always see these endless hordes of henchman and they’re anonymous, their lives are expendable and they have no stories, so I also wondered what they were about. I figured, in today’s economy, they would have to be temps, no more loyal to the company than your local Wal-Mart clerk. Also, my story is a riff on Batman, and what I find interesting about that character is the class dynamic he brings: here is this billionaire who wants for nothing beating the hell out of guys whose lives have been distorted by poverty, who are just trying to get by and have a better life. Morally, it’s actually really troubling. In that sense, the Joker is actually the hero: the performance artist who sees through the rich guy’s self righteous big-game-hunting bullshit and exposes his absurdity to the world.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Do you have to be black or Latina or Latino or from India or a woman to offer such tales to fans and new-comers? Not necessarily. James Patterson and Jeffrey Deaver invented Alex Cross and Lincoln Rhyme; Frank Miller of 300, Sin City, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns gives us the justice-doing young sister Martha Washington. The creator of cult-favorite manga hero Afro Samurai (now a cartoon voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) is Japanese. Yet we can’t entirely rely on others to tell and produce or publish our stories.
At the very least we can expect this new universe, these better stories, to be in full bloom by the time Cristobal’s charges, Stevie and Sujata, are old enough to buy and read many titles on their own. And Cristobal will see and read about people who look like him, struggle as he does, and not through the eyes of someone who can only guess how Cristobal feels. So here’s a hint of what’s to come in heroic literature by people of color.
While I lay up in my sickbed this past July, Gary Phillips and Doselle Young sat on a panel at Comic Con echoing these very themes of gritty reality, of ageless stories. To everyone’s surprise but not shock, the crowd was huge and diverse and wanted more. Our panel in turn complemented another panel, this one perhaps more hyped and glamorous, moderated by Michael Davis. This dais’s guests included Method Man himself, Dwayne McDuffie, actor-filmmaker Rusty Cundieff (Sprung, Tales from the Hood, Fear of a Black Planet), John Dokes from Marvel. BET’s Denys Cowan and entertainment chief Reginald Hudlin. Poet Faith Cheltenham gave The Darker Mask a shout-out, true, but the focus quickly shifted to future, not a grim past or uneasy present. There were comments like “leave hopeful,” and that these stories—whether literature, sequential art, film, and TV are meaningful for everyone—and not merely for a “niche market” of black folks.
We all need them, such stories. Probably more than ever. Almost every book or graphic novel or comic or clip reviewed in Rich Watson’s blog Glyphs on Popcultureshock.com, or studied by academics such as Jennifer Ryan and Professor William Fuller, II are about struggle and aspiration. These are the elements that make even superbeings human, as LA Banks says. Moreover, independent publishers are pumping out titles like Stagger Lee, or Southside Nefertiti, or Harlem Spider. We can expect more literary titles like Mat Johnson’s Incognegro.
Gary will offer the street parable High Rollers through Boom!Studios. Artist Shawn Martinbrough, former DC editor Joe Illidge, and I already have joint sequential art projects ready to launch through both traditional prose and comics publishers, including the 1930s true-life Harlem crime story, Gangsterland. Like our heroes little Stevie and Sujata said: our own tales. Better ones. Not just for fantasy junkies or comic/gamer fanboys and girls. For us all.
That’s why we donned The Darker Mask.