I thought I was going to have to drop Mighty Avengers because
Greg Land’s art is so off-puttingly plastic. (That great art above is by Ronald Wimberly.) But the series is too damn good
for me to abandon. I might even like it more than Daredevil or Hawkeye.
I love Mighty Avengers.
Written by Al Ewing, drawn sometimes by Greg Land or Valrio Schiti, it’s one of
my favorite titles being currently published by Marvel Comics. I love what how
its grassroots, street-level superheroics reflect ethnicities, ideas and
sensibilities that are under-represented in the rest of the Marvel Universe.
When Blue Marvel/Adam Brashear and Luke Cage have a tense conversation about
how their pasts inform their symbolism to the people who look up to them, it
feels a lot like the kind of cross-generational tension that percolates
between, say, Harry
Belafonte and Jay-Z. Having more than one black person in a book means
conversations like this can happen:
If you take the long view, mainstream comics ostensibly
aren’t any better or worse than other avenues of pop culture when it comes to
diversity. There’s room for improvement everywhere. But comics are where part
of my imagination has lived for decades and every time I found out that certain
creators were black, it meant more to me than just seeing black and brown characters
on the page. It meant that there were dimensions of possibility in the real
world that I hadn’t previously been exposed to.
It’s great that Marvel can assemble rappers, artists and
editors to praise the
black characters of the company’s history. I just wish that I could imagine
that Marvel’s stable of talent looked more like the cast of this book.
