The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

    Let’s give ethnicity a true representation in comics

    Megan Simon's Headshot

    I would first like to begin by saying, I am a comic book lover. I love comics, the stories, the graphics, but most importantly, I love the characters, especially of the superhero kind. Personally, I lean more towards Superman, but I enjoy many other comics from both DC and Marvel universes. 

    Both Marvel and DC comics have recently decided to embrace different ethnic groups by changing certain characters, such as Green Lantern and Ms. Marvel, from their Caucasian race to other ethnicities, even going as far as to highlight certain religions associated with these groups.

    While I am all for embracing different cultures and ethnic groups, I feel it isn’t right to change characters’ looks and designs just to fit a different ethnicity. They were already made a certain way and the change is disconcerting to a long-time comic book reader like myself. 

    Besides the first point, what really is most off-putting about this for me, is that it seems like the creators of these comic series are not fully embracing the idea of incorporating different races into the world of comics and superheroes. This is mainly because instead of creating a completely new character belonging to a different ethnic group with their own design, look, personality and story, the creators used existing characters and just changed them. They still had the same design and background, just morphed to fit the different ethnicity assigned to the character. To me, this is complete laziness. Why can’t they just create a new superhero and really do different ethnicities some justice? 

    Doing this will only take away from the potential this project could have had. There are so many interesting and different perspectives diverse ethnic superheroes could have, such as how they go about daily life, their interactions with people, relationships and how they address certain problems they might encounter both on the job and in daily life hassles. Perfect examples of this are Storm from X-Men, Virgil Hawkins as Static Shock and more recently, Bunker from the New 52 Teen Titans. All these characters were given unique backgrounds and personalities all from scratch and were also from different ethnic groups. 

    The creators could have gone in any direction if they would have just donated the time to create a brand new and unique character. Changing an already existing superhero that is as iconic as Ms. Marvel will only narrow the overall concept of a superhero depicting another race. 

    I believe if we really want to embrace different ethnicities by incorporating them into comic books, there should be new characters made instead of just cutting corners and going only halfway. To truly embrace different cultures, we should do our due diligence and create a true representation of particular ethnic groups, not just an already existing character that looks like its color scheme was changed. 

    Comic Toon on equality in comics

     

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