“Africa Batman: certainly sounds like one of the worst ideas of all time, right?
I mean, pair the idea of making a second Batman, taking a beloved character and saying Let’s do that again! Pretty much destined to fail.
Then add in the African angle.
I guess this would be a good time to point out that I don’t consider myself to be a racist.
Here’s the thing: I think most of us are fairly clueless about Africa. We hear the news, we see all the bad stuff, and I’m not angling for a “everyone is a wonderful human rainbow deep down” kind of thing here. But what I mean is that very few of us can read about Africa and say, Yes, I think I can imagine what it’s like to walk around there. You can do it with other places using the power of your imagination.
London? Just imagine a shittier New York.
Paris? Just imagine a shittier New York.
Chicago? Just imagine a shittier New York that uses food as an emotional crutch.
But Africa? I don’t really know where to begin, and I’ve actually BEEN there. Granted, it was a trip to the Middle East, which is quite different from the rest of the continent I’m sure. But that’s exactly the point. Even having set foot, it’s still outside anything I know.
We had a German foreign exchange student in high school, and one of the highlights of that year was going to a track team breakfast and watch him be grilled by a girl sitting across from him.
Do they have credit cards in Germany?
Do they have computers in Germany?
He was a little insulted, but he took it well other than making a big show of being amazed when the food came out hot (he claimed that Germany was still working on the invention of fire. I would say this was the point when I decided that befriending a German would be a life-enriching thing to do).
I’m afraid, however, that when it comes to Africa I might find myself on the embarrassing end of some very very stupid questions.
That can’t be it, though. There has to be a reason that after pulling up a list of black DC characters I recognized almost none. Catspaw? Computo II? Shango the Thunderer?
You know what I think it is? I think it’s honestly because we have a hard time with the line. What I mean is, we have a superhero and he is black. On the one side, we could write this exactly like a white character, ignore the racial side of things, and just say this character “happens” to be black. On the other side, we could start off strong by naming her Nu’Bia.
I don’t mean to say that white is a default race. What I mean to say is that most times with a white character, their race is not the most remarkable thing about them, which makes a lot of sense. The most interesting thing about Spider-Man is not his race. That’s pretty far down the list. Take Cyborg. Part-machine, part black man. Which part of that is more interesting? Well, I’ve seen many a black person, but I have not met ANY machine men yet, so far as I know anyway, so it’s an easy call.
The point is that there is a line to be walked here. Because these are fictional characters, and because they are very often written by white men, making a character non-white is a significant choice that’s being made. So in order for the story to make sense, they have to balance things. The character can’t be blind to the fact that he/she is a member of a minority. But on the other hand, a comic book that features a guy kicking ass in a Batman suit is going to suffer if it spends too much time on race because the ass kicking is the far more interesting part.
Batwing works better for me than I thought it would. The character isn’t just Black Batman. He has his own entire backstory that’s quite different from the Batman we know. And the nature of the story arc sees him fighting different bad guys. Again, they didn’t make a Joker Africa Edition. They didn’t just take the things that work about Batman and graft them onto Africa.
What I like about this is they didn’t take Batman and make him black. They made up a new character with his own motivations and setting. He’s just outfitted by Batman. In fact, almost the entirety of the action takes place during the day, which is a huge thematic departure from the Batman we all know from Gotham.
I guess that this idea made me nervous. Then after reading it I thought, This is actually pretty decent. Why wouldn’t they just make this guy his own character? Why go with the Bat theme? In fact, it almost feels like this was written out with no real plan to include Batman at all.
The answer, I suspect, is that it was necessary because otherwise no one would have read it. We’ve been conditioned to understand that comics with black main characters are second-tier books, and that they are going to teach us a moral lesson or be used as a vehicle to make us aware of what’s happening in another part of the world.
The book touches on these issues, but in the right way. The way a comic book should. We see some boy soldiers, but we don’t get a long soliloquy about how wrong that is. We get an actual, Batman-y story with some ass-kicking and some detective work to boot, while at the same time not ignoring the importance of the difference in setting and character origin.
Give it a shot. Especially if you read Bat-Family stuff. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than some of the other titles in that dysfunctional, uneven family. That’s for damn sure.
“