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Diego Ibarra (@GreatStuffDiego) asks: How can the Big Two better handle diversity characters: re-cast their existing properties, or make ‘em new?

Brandon: Listen. As a relatively young white male, I feel as though this question is an attack on me personally. You guys have no idea how hard it is out there for relatively well off white males these days. What about our rights? Amirite ladies?

(God dammit, white people are the worst.)

Diversity in comics is a bit of a tricky beast. It shouldn’t be, but the industry is trapped in a mix of old habits and bad behaviour that often make positive change a direct opponent of profit. I don’t remember a lot from my high school days (a comment more on my general memory skills than any kind of substance abuse), but I can remember a few lessons with some clarity. One that has stuck with me is the fact that media tends to latch upon its formative characteristics, and seldom budge from their initial purposes. Newspapers were used as the prime example, as their functions tend to change depending on what you’re reading and where. In Britain, for instance, your paper of choice will tend to feature a strong political bent, this bleeding back to the newspaper’s formative purpose being soap boxes for political beliefs back when that particular industry formed in that particular country.

I often feel as though this mindset often bleeds outwards into… well, pretty much everything. Once something is going, once something is formed, it’s very hard to morph it from it’s original intended use without damage occurring to whatever bottom line happens to be attached to said product or lifestyle of form of media or whatever. Talking about comic books specifically, you can track intention and the changes (or lack thereof) in regards to the format going right back to their formation. Just like pulps, they were created to be cheap and disposable entertainment for the masses - and by masses, I mean white males. Sure, the romance comic experienced a boom due to it’s female readership, but have you actually read those old books? Their audience might have been largely female, but the core viewpoint came from a very traditional white male place. Women were dashed and accepted by the desired male in question based off of his wants and whims. The formula rarely, if ever, budged. This also manifested itself in superhero comics, where the majority of the protagonists were white males, and the few female or non-white superheroes that populated the four colour funnies where characatures at best. (Or, I suppose if we’re talking women, far-too busty and/or bondage fetishists.)

While a lot of the overtly sexist and racist overtones have been shed as the times have become less accepting of intolerance, the base idea remains: superhero comics are, by and large, made for a white male audience, because it’s always been that way. Attempts to push outwards on that have been either transparently zeitgeisty or perceived as such as a means of ignoring quality product because it’s not what the core audience seems to want: white dudes punching other white dudes with busty ladies and non-white sidekicks as garnish. It’s the foundation, and it (sadly) has yet to be profitable to maintain a course that would change this.

What we need is a good flood - by which I mean, lasting change has occurred in comics when risk was palatable. Over the last several decades, the comic industry was almost dead several times over. Each time, a reinvention spurred the medium onward, such as when superheroes arrived and “took over” for horror and sci-fi, or when the direct market arrived and turned the entire industry upside down, from distribution to content and everywhere in between. The old washed away to a certain extent, and the new became a fertile ground for new ideas.

I think we’re in the midst of a good flood right now. While things didn’t get dire necessarily (hello, mid-ninties) but I think that the arrival of digital and the mass distribution channels that it has opened can prove to be a place where decent change can take place in terms of diversity. It’s my true and honest belief that a book like Ms. Marvel has never stood a better chance of surviving and catching on than it does right now. Distribution is not dependant on Diamond and retailers that refuse to grow alongside a medium that is honestly trying it’s best to be better, and also DC. (Sorry DC, but the unintended result of “bringing back the old guard” means you’re building a world on characters from an era with an older mindset on gender and race - and your blanket policies on things like “marriage” and “limbs” and “Things Everyone Want To Read” are not helping.) The product will be available to an audience beyond what has sustained the fairly narrow-minded genre.

As for your actual question, I would have to say that the best plan of attack is to re-cast. Admittedly, my reasons for backing that horse are a bit cynical. It’s the difference of noise between a book like Blue Marvel and the upcoming Ms. Marvel, both from Marvel Comics. I would wager the majority of readers (and non-readers) have no idea who Blue Marvel is. The character originally appeared in a five issue mini-series from the company around the “Heroic Age” era, and is featuring a resurgence in the pages of Mighty Avengers right now. He has been met with complete and utter apathy. But let’s say Marvel called this Superman-like hero… I dunno, Hyperion or something. Or hell, what if they had started calling him Captain America for a few months. The noise difference would be palpable, and the results would be astoundingly different. Yes, there would be a lot of push back, but in comics, noise is always better than apathy, because it means people care. Nothing, after all, dooms a book quite like complete and utter critical acclaim in the comic book arena - which is another article for another time. That, combined with the new distribution channels that are popping up to bypass gatekeepers with their own biases (or laziness), makes for a more successful book, and a more successful book means that there’s more room for the industry to change and incorporate a wider range of ethnicities, religions and sexual preferences - and that can’t be a bad thing.

James: There is a relatively easy answer, actually. Just fuckin’ do it. Of course, the fact that there still isn’t a Wonder Woman movie or even a solo movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe about a woman or a person of colour indicates that there are other issues that make it all the more complicated.

The big one, as Brandon intimated, is linked to the genre’s birth as one with a target audience for boys and, later, young men. A big problem has ended up being that when Stan and Jack and Jerry andJoe and Bill (fuck you, Bob) were creating iconic characters, they didn’t really think they were creating characters who would become multibillion-dollar revenue machines. We know this, of course, because we’re still dealing with them signing terrible contracts that have shaped an entire industry’s history on creators’ rights. And when they were creating characters for young white dudes to quickly attach themselves to (i.e. who looked like them), not only were they not thinking about the legal battles they might have to fight in the future, but they weren’t thinking about those characters being so iconic that they’d make it harder for new characters, let alone ones who looked different, to establish themselves decades later.

All this gets compounded with the next big reason things don’t just change because Catching Fire sets a box office record or Frozen becomes Disney Animation’s most successful release since The Lion King: inertia. And not only that, but multiple types of it. Corporations (and remember, the Big Two are a parts of even bigger two) tend to be conservative, and as a result they tend to take fewer risks. Spider-Man made you rich? Ride that pony until it dies! It doesn’t mean Spider-Man isn’t great (he is), but it makes it harder for decision makers to take a chance on something new when their something old is still reliably profitable. And then, you add the exponential effect of having a ton of properties exactly like that situation, and it gets hard to effect substantial change no matter how much the audience actually changes.

And it has. Women and people of colour read comics and love superheroes, in ever-growing demands, but there seems to be this idea that the audience is the same. When game developer Naughty Dog was testing their latest release The Last of Us, they had to actually fight to have women included on the play- and focus testing teams. The assumption - in the year 2013 at a real professional research firm - was that only men played video games, and it’s that kind of attitude that looks at massive box office returns for Catching Fire or all the enthusiastic fandom for Batwoman and still thinks that this is some weird coincidence. This is again compounded by the fact that other reasons for failure (like genuinely bad movies, like Catwoman) get ignored in favour of “It’s because of women!” arguments, and by now vocal upset male/white/cis nerds and geeks can be when something is different. A bad movie that people justifiably ignore - or a quality comic that doesn’t land because the odds are against it - get turned into “See? SEE?!” arguments that further contribute to missed opportunities for change.

Personally, I’d like to see Marvel and DC just power through those doubts whenever possible and just pick their moments to affect change. Look at how Marvel marketed the hell out of the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel relaunch, prominently expanded her role in their universe no matter how many CBR forum complaints there were, and now are using that success as a springboard to relaunch it and a new, totally original hero who is Muslim, a person of colour and a woman, with a diverse creative team to boot. Or how they introduced Miles Morales as the new Ultimate Spider-Man, by again marketing the hell out of him and underscoring it all with great stories and patience. Their film world is still a bit lacking, but they’ve made moves in their comic work for diversity, and that kind of dedicated effort is what’s needed. People will always tell those trying to change that they’re stupid for doing it, and the hardest part can be living through a couple of failures and staying dedicated to making something better and more representative. Nerds and geeks are noisy and obsessive. Sometimes, that’s great. Sometimes, they overreact to something like a casting announcement. Just ignore that shit and make good art.

I don’t care which it is, honestly; recasting/legacy characters or making new ones. It’s possible to make a half-black, half-Hispanic Spider-Man without erasing Peter Parker and it’s possible to make a new character. It’s all about picking the right moment, choosing the right team and supporting them, and being patient when you don’t immediately sell a million copies. But those increasingly-hard-to-ignore hits are signifiers that the culture is more receptive than naysayers might think. I mean, at one time Superman was a long shot, too.

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That’s it for the one hundred and twenty-third instalment of Um, Actually. Check in every Monday and Thursday for a brand new column. If you have anything you’d like answered, hit up our contact page! If you submit anything via Twitter - to @blogaboutcomics, @Leask, or @soupytoasterson - remember to include the hashtag #UMACTUALLY so that we don’t lose it. Remember: you can ask us anything. Seriously, anything.