Race + Comics: When is Diversity ‘Contrived’?

• Black Panther: One could use current Panther Shuri under the “surrogate” clause, or T’Challa, who has a long-standing association with the team.
• Monica Rambeau: The former Captain Marvel was the leader of the Avengers at one point.
• The Falcon: Long-time team member and partner to Captain America.
• Patriot: The grandson of the original Captain America, as well as a member of the Young Avengers. If anybody was born for this kind of story, it’s him.
• Storm: Before she married T’Challa, she was leader of the X-Men, and in canon, she’s one of the more respected members of Marvel’s superhero community.
• Misty Knight & Colleen Wing: These NYC-based characters got some more attention in the Daredevil-centric Shadowland story, as well as the recently-revived Heroes For Hire series.
• Living Lightning: A former member of the Avengers’ West Coast affiliate. The most underutilized gay character Marvel has right now.
• Echo: Already featured in New Avengers under the guise of Ronin.
• 3-D Man: Another ex-Avenger, the hero formerly known as Triathlon was given some shine during the Secret Invasion storyline, and will be part of the Agents of Atlas starting next month.

Easy-peasy, right? By Brevoort’s own vaguely-worded standards, there seems to be little reason a proper pitch featuring a PoC team couldn’t fly, right? Or, as blogger Son of Baldwin asked Brevoort on Twitter:

Here’s Brevoort’s response:

And where did this “law” come from?

What Brevoort doesn’t mention is that a comic-book company is perfectly suited to run a course-correction on whatever attitudes came from those “less-enlightened times,” because it deals with universes and characters of its’ own creation. For characters like Luke Cage, who was inducted into the franchise in New Avengers, that “something specific” Brevoort alluded to can be boiled down to the support of Brian Michael Bendis, who has been the primary Avengers storyteller since the Avengers Disassembled saga of 2005. Cage had been featured as a a supporting player in Alias, a mature-readers title about Cage’s eventual wife and teammate, Jessica Jones. But, because Bendis saw something worth exploring with the character, he wrote him to be recruited by Captain America and Iron Man, and developed into the leader of both his own team of Avengers and another team, the Thunderbolts.

So, Brevoort’s claiming history as a handicap, when his industry has been clinging to code words like “iconic” and characters who in some cases pre-date the Civil Rights movement, fails to inspire much sympathy – especially when one compares his saying that Marvel’s “mandate” is telling, as he put it:

With this response, posted less than a month ago, to a reader question about “people so concerned about lack of diversity in a comic”:

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