Comic books enrich their character mix

POW! Take that, racism. And – WHACK! – take that, homophobia. And – THOOM! KER-THWACK! KRUMMMMM! – take that, gender stereotyping, cultural bias and religious intolerance.

Identity – and not just the secret kind – has become the increasing focus of the masked heroes, mutants and super beings of the comic book world.

Batwoman will reemerge from the DC Comics drawing board in July as a lesbian. Blue Beetle has been reinvented by DC as a Mexican teenager. The Great Ten, a Chinese superhero team, is being unleashed this month as part of DC’s magazine 52.

But that’s just the tip of the multicultural iceberg.

Arana, a half-Mexican girl with Spider-Man’s super powers, is slinging her web through the Marvel Comics universe. Freedom Ring, a gay character, is part of “Marvel Team-Up.” An X-Men character, Dust (she can whip up sandstorms), is a Sunni Muslim in a burqa.

Then there’s the Marvel superhero team the Santerians, based on the Caribbean religion of Santeria.

Luke Cage and Black Panther, two African-American stalwarts, are getting lots of attention from Marvel these days: Cage as a leader of the Avengers, and Black Panther as the groom-to-be of X-Men’s Storm.

“This is our version of the wedding of Charles and Diana,” says Joe Quesada, Marvel’s editor in chief.

Overseas, capitalizing on the international success of the “Spider-Man” movies, Marvel has teamed with Gotham Entertainment Group to release Spider-Man India, in which Spider-Man Peter Parker is rechristened Pavitr Prabhakar for a South Asian audience.

It’s a far cry from the old days, when comic book heroes came in two varieties: blond hair and dark hair (which usually came out blue in the comic books). The only character with a specific national or ethnic origin was Superman. He was from Krypton.

Face like mine

Today’s superheroes, in contrast, aren’t shy about group identification: “X-Men” readers know that Wolverine is Canadian, Storm is African, Nightcrawler is German and Colossus is Russian. And did you know that “Fantastic Four’s” Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, is Jewish?

“We’re very multicultural and international,” Quesada says.

The fact that Quesada, originally from Sparta, is Marvel’s first Hispanic top gun is not the only reason he champions multiculturalism, Marvel style.

Comic book fantasy is believable, he says, to the extent that it’s grounded in the real world. And the real world is not exclusively white, Anglo-Saxon, male or heterosexual.

“To use the real world and not reflect (the diversity) is almost callous in a sense,” says Quesada, who is of Cuban descent. “If you’re going to play in the sandbox, let’s play in the sandbox.”

If comic book characters come in all colors, so do fans.

At the recent Big Apple Conventions Super Show (Steven Seagal, Robert Vaughn, Captain Lou Albano and a host of comic book creators were slated among the special guests), an estimated 5,000 people bought, traded, collected and talked comic books.

Among them: Hispanic fans, black fans, Indian fans, Asian fans, gay fans and women fans, says Bill Foster III, who will have a booth there.

“I’ve noticed an increase of people of color at comic shows, and an increase in women,” says Foster, an English professor at Naugatuck Community College in Connecticut.

His book, “Looking for a Face Like Mine” (Fine Tooth Press), is a study of superheroes of color – something that was in short supply when he was a kid growing up in Philadelphia in the early 1960s.

Back then, there was Lothar, Mandrake the Magician’s loin-cloth-clad assistant. And there was Sam Harlem the detective – if you were lucky enough to own a frayed copy of All-Negro Comics, a 1947 attempt to launch a black comic book line (it lasted one issue). When Foster was a child, to see a dark face in even a walk-on part was exciting.

“When I was reading ‘Spider-Man,’ I was thrilled to see a black student talking to Peter Parker,” Foster says.

In 1966, Marvel’s breakthrough character Black Panther (no relation to the political party) was like water in the desert to Foster and many other fans.

“He wasn’t just a background character,” Foster says. “He was introduced in Marvel’s premier comic, ‘Fantastic Four.’ And he was an African king.”

Crossover appeal

The trickle of “ethnic” characters became a steadier stream in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: not just Black Lightning, Black Goliath, Luke Cage, Nubia (Wonder Woman’s black sister) and Blade, the black vampire slayer, but also heroes like Arak, a Native American warrior. In 1992, Marvel’s Northstar was the first major superhero to come out of the closet.

Such characters not only gave minority readers of color a hero – or heroine – of their own, they also had crossover appeal. One well-known example: A white actor named Nicholas Coppola was such a Luke Cage fan that he changed his name to Nicolas Cage.

“I think you are going to see that (diversity) trend accelerate and broaden,” says Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC. “It’s a more interesting story line when everybody isn’t the same.”

Comic books, by their nature, will always have a special appeal to people on society’s margins – partly because they’re about people on society’s margins.

Think of Clark Kent, the wimp who can’t get a date with Lois Lane (if she only knew!). Or the “mutant” X-Men, superhero outcasts whose story lines have often been viewed as code for racial or sexual minorities (in the new movie “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the authorities try to “cure” mutants). Comic books have always, in a sense, been about people on the outside.

“In comic books, you have people who fight for justice,” Foster says. “That’s going to attract a certain number of people who feel they have been disenfranchised.”