Tag: Superheroes
How Comic Books Became Classics
In September, 2023, Penguin Classics, the venerable publisher of elegant Anglophile editions and portable canonical texts—Robert Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”—released three books that push the term “classic” into new, contested territory: “X-Men,” “The Avengers,” and “Fantastic Four.” These handsome hardcovers, whose gilded edges make them look like collector’s editions of Shakespeare, mostly feature early Marvel stories from the nineteen-sixties—what aficionados sometimes call the Silver Age of comics. They join Penguin volumes of “Black
We Need A Latino Superhero Revolution
Tenoch Huerta stands before a crowd full of eager onlookers. He wears a lavender undershirt with a navy suit and a headpiece made with duck and peacock feathers tucked behind his ear. A connector allows a singular black plume to dangle off his earlobe. It’s the first time anyone has seen such an open embrace of pre-Hispanic Latin culture on a stage as big as Comic-Con — and the actor hopes it won’t be the last.
“I want to say
Two Creators on Inventing (and Reinventing) Black Superheroes
‘You Are a Threat to Them’
By Eve L. Ewing | Author of the Marvel series Ironheart
My Twitter notifications were a garbage fire. They said I had no talent, that I was a harbinger of everything that was going wrong in the comics industry. Some of them used coded language like “forced diversity.” Other messages, like a simple image of a burning cross, were more direct.
It was December 2017 and everything was a culture war; the world of