Reading about Miles Morales

[ysabetwordsmith]

My partner Doug found this wonderful interview with the creator of the Miles Morales Spiderman. It talks about why he made a mixed-race Spiderman and what superheroes mean to the audience. Some thoughts ...


"It's a story with a very strong theme: "With great power comes great responsibility." And that theme is so perfect in its simplicity that you could build a religion around it. As a fan, I carried it around with me, but when you start writing it, you realize, Oh, this is the most important lesson in the world. It's not a superpower lesson. It's a lesson about power, itself. If you have the power to sing, or to grab people's attention, or anything, then with that comes responsibility that you need to identify and raise yourself up to."

Agreed. This is part of my personal code of honor. Your responsibility always matches your power. If you don't have any power, you're not responsible for anything in that area. Wherever you do have power, you are responsible for using it well.

"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. So we made the choice to send Peter Parker off with a heroic death and have a new young man take the mantle in the form of Miles Morales, who’s half Hispanic and half African-American."

I think this is incredibly important. It makes me want to buy the comics, not just because I love the character concept, but because I want to encourage and support that kind of writing -- where someone actually looks at the world, asks what it needs, and also takes into consideration real facts such as demographics. I do this in my writing. It's not just about creating diversity. It's about matching the local color of a specific area if that's what you're writing about. Frex, my Walking the Beat is set in Jamaica Plain, and there are some characters from the Dominican Republic because that's a local trend there.

"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically. 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."

Actually, you CAN make a conscious decision to write more inclusive characters, or to change any other aspect of your writing. You can do whatever you want with it. If you're only writing to tick a representation box, it'll probably suck. But if you decide that you want to fill a gap, and make an honest effort to find out what's missing and fix that, then it'll probably be at least decent. Some people write intuitively, some logically. Some write things down, others make things up. It all works for somebody. Do what works for you -- and what is meaningful to you.

"Just yesterday, a woman wrote an article analyzing what she thought was a poor comic book cover, and she was met with just a bunch of shitty anonymous people being awful to her online. I think that a huge problem is people who read comics and don't understand the point of superheroes, which is to be the best version of yourself. You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and shit on a girl for having an opinion."

This is the whole point of cultural material in any medium: giving us a chance to imagine ourselves in other circumstances and how we would face the challenges that a character does. Stories can show us the best behavior or the worst behavior, and how that works out for a given character. I feel that we need superheroes in general, and the archetype of the Unsullied Hero in particular, to ring the gold bell at the top. And we also need terrifying villains to remind us of how awful people can be. A good story should make us think about the characters' choices, what they did and why, because that helps us make the right choices in our own lives.

Believe me, when you have very little time to make a very important decision, that mental practice matters. If you've done it before in your imagination, you're much better prepared to respond quickly and effectively when real life throws you a curve ball.

I feel that we need heroes for inspiration. They show us what the best behavior looks like. Maybe you can't lift a car like Captain America ... but you can open a door for someone with their hands full, and little things like that help make the world a better place too. Actions matter. Inspiration matters. Stories matter.

Comments

Archetypes

[dialecticdreamer]

Peter Parker is an archetype. So is Wolverine, or Phil Coulson, or Deathlock, or Felicity Smoak. (Oooh, DC reference, sorry! Ha!)

We've had the discussion about Nick Fury (white) being different than Nick Fury (black), and I think we're circling back to a key idea: do we need /separate/ archetypes for different races, the way the industry has been Ms.-ing superheroes for the last twenty years? (Only recently have they made any significant changes in storytelling, though.)

Are we talking about gaining ground against cultural inertia, at long last, or are we finally looking at our own /culture/ differently? Neither of us are more than armchair sociologists, but it's a good topic for a more formalized study. My hope is that we're finally seeing our own culture differently, and thus making the media mirror more accurate.

A good friend and I regularly argue whether dictionaries should be prescriptive of language, or descriptive. This is the same notion: should our entertainment tell us more about the world /as/ we see it, or as we /want/ it to be?

[samuraiter]

Brian Michael Bendis takes a lot of crap, but I think he hit the nail on the head here. Miles Morales caused a great deal of butthurt among Peter Parker fans, but he is unmistakably a Spider-Man for today (as opposed to 1963).

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I've so many thoughts on this, this may be a bit jumbled.

I know for myself I did this once I shook out after finding slash. That is to say, once I checked the shock I asked "is this the way this character would handle things?" and that took me to research and find the wide variety of historical and cultural constellations. I've changed how I think about things, and what I know about things, because of reading and writing.

I think of Star Trek and Man from U.N.C.L.E. here. I saw them first in syndication, things my mom had watched prime time and wanted to see again. Remember, this was a time when the world didn't look like what tv showed. TV was very white and very male. They also were hopeful, and the heroes won, not easily, sometimes they questioned. But they did it time after time.

And yes, practice is what makes it much faster to do the right thing when the time comes. There is a character in a Turtledove series, who becomes the first xenolinguistic expert, because he'd been reading the science-fiction magazines as he played minor league ball. (Like Steve, he was 4F. Lost all his teeth during the 1919 flu.) First step? Treat the lizards as people. Second and third are speak your language and listen to what they say.

It's not that race requires separate archetypes. But validating only X, that's going to alienate people. "I do what he does, slower." Sam didn't come out of a bottle. (Neither did Steve, not the part that is the hero.) Steve's MCU background, and the background he's accreted in the comics is radical. Think about it. He doesn't come from space, son of Important Scientist. He's not the heir to vast wealth. He's just a kid from Brooklyn, that wants to stop bullies even more than he wants to live through winter.

Characters aren't archetypes, but they are avatars, striding about showing how things work if Y is done. Well-done diversity gives more breadth of what is done and removes that 'doesn't look like me' bar.

[thnidu]

That name, Miles Morales, was a little itch in my mind, and it finally dawned on me: You want an Unsullied Hero? Here's a Moral Soldier ("miles", Latin for 'soldier').

[brushwolf]

Superhero comics started out with broken ethnic misrepresentation as part of the melting pot and the whitewashing afterwards. A couple of Jewish guys hopped up on Doc Savage novels come up with Superman; a Jewish guy creates The Spirit; Jacob Kurtzberg basically makes Marvel what it is. Names like Romita and Perez don't strike me as particularly whitebread either. And yet it's not till the 60s that we get our first openly Jewish superhero to go along with our first batch of Black supers.

I'm now wondering whether 40s/50s vintage readers just accepted that most of their heroes really were that WASPy or whether they were willing to assume politely whitewashed identities.

I get the impression that the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, happening at the same time as a big boom in comics, really opened up this idea that heroes didn't need to be white; I don't see why not open that possibility up to some of the established heroes, especially as an acknowledgement that the guys behind the pencils aren't necessarily white either. What's changing the guy in the suit going to do, make canon more of a mess? I have problems keeping it straight whether or why Charles Xavier can walk at any given time, I don't necessarily need Spidey to be recognizably Peter Parker from the 60s.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

This sounds solid. I haven't read the article, just your post. I don't write fiction, or hardly ever, and I didn't feel much connection *as creator* with the lessons for writers. One thing did ring with me, but in contradiction - in the particular context of what I do write: songs and lyrics.

"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically."

That sentence made me think immediately of a couple of times I've done just that, and it has worked *in its context*. E.g.: a humorous song about the calamities that can and do befall a smof - one of the (jokingly self-called) Secret Masters of Fandom, those who volunteer to run fannish conventions, as I did for filk music at Arisia for a number of years. Halfway into it I thought "Hey, wait! Why 'he'?" All I needed to do was change the pronouns, and my hapless Filkmeister became a hapless Filkmeisterin.

I did it because I wanted to be inclusive. I could do it that easily because the narrative was brief and had nothing in any way specific to one sex or gender, or to those aspects of person-ness or society.

That's all.