Countering the anti-Blackness inherent in comics means truly centering the identities of Black heroes and the stories that shape them. Miles Morales and his Black creators are poised to carry this heavy and great responsibility.
I got my Black joy a few weeks ago when Sony dropped the trailer for Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the PlayStation 5 follow-up to one of my favorite games of all time.
The child in me marvels at how much the trailer gets right. Morales swings like an amateur to show his greenness to web-slinging. His winter jacket, surely a North Face (I just know it is!), has the crazy fur hood collar; I just know he’s rocking a crisp pair of constructs to complete the Harlemite look. Morales’ retains the costume that tastefully updates the classic look with a noir-ish black and red scheme. And most importantly, they fix the hairline issue that was the most jarring feature of his character in the previous Spider-Man game for the PlayStation 4.
The improved hairline design signals the work Marvel and the Black creators they hired have had to place into Morales to get the Black community to accept him. A significant hazard concerning Black characters — especially ones created by white creators — is that they cannot escape the white gaze. Even when they are earnest, white creators cannot help but to give us the Black heroes they think we want. Morales’ adoption by Black personhood was not pre-ordained. It followed a path other Black heroes from Marvel comics have followed in the 21st Century. Black creators corrected the earlier mistakes of Morales’ character and gave him a more authentic relationship with his personhood. As a consequence, Morales’ burgeoning narrative potential causes Black personhood’s to make an increasingly firm claim on the character.
“It’s About a Little Boy”
“What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presences, and what effect has that performance had on the work?” Toni Morrison asked in Black Matters(s) when critiquing early American literature. We can take this same framework to modern fiction in all forms. Using this lens, we find that Morales’ creators in the year of his genesis did not know how to realize the potential of a Black Spider-Man fully.
In a 2011 CBR.com interview, Morales’ creator and first scribe struggled with the presence of Blackness within his creation. “The idea of an African American Spider-Man was floating out in the ether in a bunch of different places,” Brian Michel Bendis reported, with his inspiration coming from a picture of actor Donald Glover in Spider-Man’s costume. Bendis seemingly opened the gateway for Morales’ ethnicity to drive stories, stating that “with Miles Morales, we started talking about what’s going on in New York City right now and what we haven’t seen done to death in these stories.” But toward the end of the interview, he then pulls back. “Miles is a different ethnicity than Spider-Man has ever been before, but he’s not going to represent all that is race in this country. That is not what this story is about. It’s about a little boy; where he comes from and what happens when power is put in his hands.” Bendis revealed his choice of intellectual feat when it came to Morales’ early stories — to make race ancillary to Morales’ personhood. Morales would continue to tell the story of Spider-Man’s philosophy, of great power demanding great responsibility, without interrogating how his racial background would influence his approach to crime-fighting.
Morales’ other influential support within Marvel shared Bendis’ attitude. “We realized that we were standing at the brink of America electing its first African-American President and we acknowledge that maybe it was time to take a good look at one of our icons,” Axel Alonso, the Marvel editor who approved Morales’ creation, stated. Later in the interview, he tries to neutralize any political motivations for pushing a Black Spider-Man. “It’s an easy accusation to make. I know that this doesn’t come from a PC place for anyone involved. I don’t think Brian Bendis, who created Miles Morales, considers himself to be PC. And I sure don’t consider myself to be. I’m liberal on some issues, conservative on some others. Simple fact is Marvel comics reflect the world in all its shapes, sizes, and colors. We believe there’s an audience of people out there who is thirsty for a character like Miles Morales.”
The 2011 interviews from Bendis and Alonso engaged in that political era’s sign of the times — the belief among the liberal intelligentsia that Obama’s election inaugurated the birth of post-racial America. Race would simply become a marker of personal identity. The days of race assigning your place within Western political hegemony was now, with the election of the nation’s first Black president — with the excising of America’s sin of slavery — would only be relevant in history textbooks and classes. “I love the face that my son Tito will see a Spider-Man swinging through the sky whose last name is ‘Morales’ — and judging from the response, I can see I’m not alone.” Alonso trafficked in the wisdom of white America during Obama’s presidency. Ethnicity and race, for Morales and his fans, would be a marker of where you came from, and not a signal of where this nation expected you to stay. While benign in conception, this is still anti-Blackness.
Anti-Blackness is the conscious or unconscious decisions that led people to treat Black personhood as an object (think “I project my desires upon you”) instead of a subject (“I want to understand your desires and give you the power to enact them”). Bendis and Alonso, submitting to the enthusiasm kindled by Obama’s election, thus made one of their flagship heroes Black. They pledged full responsibility for what they considered their primary commitment — moving the Spider-Man mantra into the 21st Century. However, they were unprepared to reckon with the second half of their intended work. His early, white creators placed Morales’ Blackness on the shelf. Bendis and Alonso felt a post-racial society would regulate explicit racial focus to pure historical discussions.
As a consequence, the early new Spider-Man stories suffer. Miles Morales had so much working against Black personhood’s acceptance of him. His father was a cop named Jefferson Davis. I repeat — his father is a COP named JEFFERSON DAVIS. With his “Venom Blast” ability, he joined the expansive and stereotypical ranks of Black heroes with electric powers. Morales’ academic trajectory has him applying for a charter school via lottery, a topic that has created a debate about race and equity for the better part of a decade. When we broaden the diversity, equity, and inclusion scope, we also see how anti-Blackness motivated other unexamined narrative decisions. His mother, to further his connection to Parker’s rogue’s gallery, was killed in a battle against the Venom symbiote — another example of the Women in Refrigerator trope in comics. After this death, Davis leaves Morales for some time, further fueling the narrative of Black children having absentee fathers.
There was nothing in these early narrative decisions that indicated we would claim Miles Morales. I feel claiming comic characters is tricky for Black folk as we are aware that comic book universes, shaped primarily by white men, serve as a release from the forces of white supremacy. Rather than deal with the lasting consequences of the social death of Black folk, creators reflexively paper over it with greater, physical threats. It is the ontological flaw within the television version of The Walking Dead. It is why Marvel has created mutants as the new subjected minorities — as a way for white people to forgive themselves for not undoing the sins of their ancestors. And it is why better stories will ultimately come from centering the Blackness of their Black heroes.
The Mantra and The Blackness
What caused Black people to embrace Miles Morales? How did we decide to overcome the transcendent, elemental force of anti-Blackness, and to claim Morales as belonging to the diaspora?
It certainly was not Bendis. In a July 2014 interview with Vulture, he reaffirmed the ancillary nature of Morales’ Blackness. “The most cosmetic change we made, obviously, is a couple of years ago when we made the determination that, if Spider-Man were created today, there’s a very large percentage chance that, based on where he’s living and who he is, that he would be a person of color,” he stated. He then goes back to his childhood and gives a racial Schrödinger’s costume to his conception of Spider-Man. “As a little kid, I didn’t even understand why he was my favorite, but it was because anybody could be Spider-Man under that costume, because it was head-to-toe.” Race continued to be ancillary to Bendis. Until you take off the mask, Spider-Man could be any man or woman, of any shade, so long as they lived the mantra.
At the same time, there are signs his understanding of his creation was evolving. “But subconsciously, if you look at the world around you and see your readers, you go, I wanna write something that I know is true. So you start writing women better and you write people outside of your experience better, because you look at pages of other people’s comics and you don’t recognize it as the world around you,” he reported. This dawning occurred with evidence that Black folk were making their claim toward Morales. “I took my kids to a comics convention recently,” he said, “and this little African-American boy came up to me in his homemade Miles Morales Spider-Man costume, which are not available to purchase. You have to make them yourself. It was just about the cutest thing I’d ever seen in my life.” Even if the stories and full realization were not there yet, Bendis was processing evidence that Black personhood was hungry for an honestly realized Morales. There was a demand- an expectation- that Morales would show a new generation that with great power comes great responsibility in the Blackest way possible.
Days after the Bendis interview, officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and left his body to bake in the Midwestern sun. Brown’s death summoned our current political moment. Marvel consequently learned many lessons on how to bring its catalog of Black characters to the big screen. Erik Killmonger, the nemesis of Black Panther, stopped being the Black man white men thought we wanted and instead, under the direction and writing of Ryan Coolger and Joe Robert Cole, became the African broken by the American experience. Luke Cage stopped being a horrible honoring of blaxploitation films and became the introspective, lonely avenger of Harlem due to showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker’s influence.
The visibility of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the shift Morales needed. The movie succeeded, due to its visual culture and soundtrack. Morales rocks Jordan retros. His hair, longer than it is in comics, is a contemporary Afro-based taper cut. Morales and his uncle Aaron engage in graffiti, one of the four classical elements of the hip-hop culture that emerged from the Bronx. The soundtrack is musically polyglot, but heavily influenced by Black voices such as Swae Lee and Blackway. The signaling toward Black personhood — that this is a product of Black people who genuinely respect Black culture — caused my wife and me to nerd out the entire time.
The release and promotion of the movie showed that the two truths of Morales, the mantra and the Blackness, were coming closer. Bendis, now working for rival DC Comics, claimed in a 2018 interview that the filmmakers “did what I wanted them to do. The filmmakers came in and bought their truth and put it on top of our truth…it’s a living, breathing, real Miles Morales.” Focusing again on the great power, great responsibility mantra, Bendis states “I know that Miles’ message, overall, is very important to people and myself and I would never do anything to bastardize that.” Miles is still a little boy given great power.
The emerging crop of Morales’ Black creators, however, are doing the work of making him a most truthful character. “It means a lot for young black and Latino kids to see themselves up on screen in these iconic, heroic, mythic stories,” director Peter Ramsey stated in an interview with NPR about the film. “There’s so many exciting black creators and creators of color and all genders, and the realization that this kind of diversity really does give rise to more interesting movies,” he says. “It just feels like it’s going to help unlock a key, creatively, for a lot of people in a lot of different ways that we don’t even realize yet.” I would argue that Ramsey’s involvement made sure there was enough signaling for Black personhood to make a claim. Great power now wears Jordan retros. The hero who believes in great responsibility loves hip-hop, but does not know all the words to “Sunflower.”
The signaling continues, with more Black creators such as Jason Reynolds making Morales more and more of a legit fictional character for the Black community. Evan Narcisse is also one of the writers for the Miles Morales video games. I feel that as Black creators put their imprint on Morales, his popularity will soar due to the increased possibility of his stories.
These stories will become more grounded in the realities that inspire Morales’ superheroics. In his 2011 interview, Bendis talked about wanting to write stories with Morales’ concerning “what’s going on in New York City right now.” In the hands of Black creators, that becomes possible. Imagine, as artist Marcus Williams has, Morales and his father clashing over #blacklivesmatter. How would Morales deal with the impact gentrification has had on his neighborhood and the increase of stop and frisk policing that follows it? Would the Kingpin take advantage of what is usually seen as an innocuous process of urban renewal? What writer will delve into the public school versus charter school debate and make it a focus of Morales using his great power to ensure great responsibility?
If Miles Morales is going to continue to move in the direction of becoming an authentic, truthful character, then creators are going to have to embrace the Blackness of the new Spider-Man fully. Luckily, there seems to be a crop of Black creators ready for the challenge.