It’s not lost on as me as I think of the state of political discourse in America today that long before my time, a group of men got together to craft a document that holds as a self-evident truth, the notion that all men are created equal and that it would be the will of those citizens born to each other as peers that would bear the burden to set the status quo in opposition to the grand historical tradition of the status quo being defined by the whims of a few greedy & powerful men. This new status quo created by the people for the people would be the guiding hand that would craft the rule of law for the beginnings of a nation that has been f****** me up my entire life in practice but loves me dearly in ideal.
Yet here we all are more present in the theoretical idea of “the future” than any other population of human beings that has ever been or may ever be and somehow we’ve come back around to a new small and vocal group of cultural misers belying their will as “the way the world is meant to be”. Whether it’s a comparative few shouting their bigotry into the echo chamber of the internet and moving metaphorical mountains, or its the quietly held prejudices that keep their roots in the hearts and actions of those in positions of authority, rationalized to the the people as their own will; Too often we find the privileged minority screaming at the tops of their lungs at the rising tide for raising every ship, as an unfair affront to the singularity of their greatness. Wielding their disproportionate hold on the status quo over the rest of us with the bastard clumsy hands of an idiot racist god.
ANYWAY one morning I get a phone call from the HNIC at Comic Attack and official Barry White voice-double, Gid Freeman and he’s like…
“Did you hear the news?!?”
and before I could remove enough crust from my eyes to mount a suitable answer, he’s like
“…and I know you got something to say about all this backlash”
so right away I know somewhere white people are on some bulls***.
@Marvel @CBCebulski are you honestly going to put #Racist #TaNehisiCoates on the relaunch of #CaptainAmerica ? Was it not enough to #Retcon him to be a #Hydra #Agent under #NickSpencer ?
— John Garrett (@vapsman88) February 26, 2018
So as I continue to ready myself for the day, he shoots me a link to an article published in The Atlantic and then forwards me a couple of tweets and a few blogs and asks me if I want to do a piece about it all and I say sure. So I take a day to think about my approach. I read the articles, read the blogs, watch the vlogs, I do my research and finally after edifying as much as I could stomach, I find myself staring at a blank screen, ready to spit it all back up for your enjoyment… and yet there’s a thought I hanging over my head, pervasive as a sickness and threatening to suffocate my narrative before it even hits the page: Why the f*** is this a controversy?
One of Marvel Comics’ most talented writers and MacArthur Genius Fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to be writing Captain America for a while…and so the f*** what? An award-winning writer on a flagship title should not be news that elicits “controversy” from a company whose greatest writers and long standing figureheads have been accused of copping feels on non-consenting nurses in the old folks home. If the guy you put in charge of your company spent a portion of his career pretending to be an Asian man to write mediocre samurai stories and doesn’t apologize for it when the truth is finally revealed, and that doesn’t stir a huge reaction from the fan base, then I don’t see why the headline “Staff writer writes company character” should get so much more contention showered on it before anyone has even read the first page. Where is all this vitriol coming from? Coates is a well-received writer with a crazy art team backing him up (Alex Ross on covers and Leinil Yu as interior artist) who hasn’t had one page of his series published yet, so why all the hatred?
What’s that?
It’s basically that he’s a black guy?
That’s literally all there is to this?
Oh.
WAIT! THERE’S MORE, I SWEAR.
KEEP READING!
People don’t want Ta-Nehisi Coates to write Cap. America because the values Cap’n represents are alien to him. Coates has clearly never read a Cap book or even seen any of the Captain America movies (he expressed surprise that the Captain often resists government orders if they’re antithetical to American values). It comes down to your thesis being utterly wrong from the start. Coates is a terrible comic book writer and his Black Panther runs being cancelled in short order is proof of that. To grant Coates the right to headline two more comics after flubbing two lay-ups is the reason for the resistance. Your three pages to make it seem like the resistance to Coates is do to some sort of racist agenda is so far off the mark that it screams of clickbait.
Seems like you didn’t really read the article 😉. I only say that because you don’t seem to make one cogent argument addressing any point I have made but that’s perfectly fine. Reading the article would have only spoiled the fact that I knew you weren’t going to anyway.
In any case sincerely thank you for your patronage. Be well my friend.
So the criteria for being allowed to write a character is that comics have to be read and all movies watched before they get the job? You do know that PLENTY of comic writers do this little thing called research on characters and I’m sure Marvel and Coates are prepping for this. I see Jim Zub and other white writers on twitter all the time talking about research on characters they weren’t too familiar with in order to be better prepared to write them and no one jumps down their neck about it. So that argument is invalid.
Also since my whiteness has allowed me to be privy to hearing a lot of crap there ARE people who don’t want Coates on Cap simply because he’s black. Claiming he’s racist and making up false equivalency seems to be the go to for thsee people. Can you actually PROVE the values Cap represents are alien to Coates? You can’t because you’d rather make an assumption about this guy to fit your narrative about him. Black Panther is also NOT CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COATES lol Marvel is doing a “fresh start” and several titles are getting renumbered/restarted once again and I’m more upset about that than Coates writing Cap.
And to call the article click bait because YOU didn’t read it is the weak argument of someone who is too lazy to forge an actual thoughtful debate.
While I’m indifferent to Coates being attached to Captain America, I fail to see where the previous commenters points about why people are opposed to it are valid based on the piece provided. To say that the values Cap represents are alien to him are pure conjecture. And while I don’t always agree with Mr. Crump’s Correct Opinion, even you would have to agree that with the current social climate and certain peoples proclivity to denounce or sabotage anything black (review bombing and false reports of white people being assaulted during Black Panther screenings as examples) are most certainly a reality.
Having read the Atlantic piece to which he spoke about his taking on the Captain America story it would seem that he has quite a good grasp who Cap is and the legacy to which he is entering. Whether Coates “flubbed two lay-ups” with Black Panther is subjective as with most art forms there will be people who love it and people who hate it. Clearly, if Marvel saw his runs on Black Panther as “flubs” they wouldn’t have granted him the support of some of their best.
Eric gets it.
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