Diskussion: Superhelden-Comics und Diversity

Willkommen zu einem neuen Blogbeitrag aus den Rubriken "Superhelden" sowie "Themen, die vermutlich drei Promille der Genderama-Leser" interessieren – eine ausführliche Debatte darüber, wie die US-Comicszene gerade mit der Herausforderung größerer "Diversity" umgeht (mehr Minderheiten verschiedenster Art als Hauptfiguren und Produzenten). Und das auch noch auf Englisch! Ich finde es aber spannend, weil es einige meiner Ansichten in einem früheren Genderama-Beitrag zu diesem Thema stark in Frage stellt. Ein Auszug:

I have frankly been blown away by the amount of fan support the new Ms. Marvel has gotten. When Sana Amanat and Steve Wacker of Marvel called me up and said, "We want to create a new teenage Muslim superheroine from scratch and put her on her own book," my first thought was, "Are they nuts? Did I hear correctly?" I would never in a million years have pitched that book myself, because I value my sanity. There was a time when I couldn’t put pen to paper without being accused of stealth jihad or perpetuating the Muslim socialist Illuminati attack on America or whatever. This just seemed like the trifecta of death: new character (doesn’t sell!), female (doesn’t sell!) and Muslim (hire an intern to open all the hate mail!).

(...) And it worked. Fans fell in love with Kamala, and I fell in love with her fans. We never had to justify her existence the way I was afraid we would have to. All of a sudden, she was on The Colbert Report and I was getting calls from CNN. Issue #1 of Ms. Marvel has just gone into its sixth printing. Sixth. This is math-changing. Some of it is generational. when I do speaking gigs and chat with young adult readers, their outlook is far more globalist and pragmatic than that of my peers when we were that age. They are willing to see themselves in unexpected characters, unexpected scenarios. They have that innate flexibility.

Hier findet man den vollständigen Beitrag.