

In Paul Fussell’s brutally perceptive BAD: The Dumbing of America, the late author cites the tastefully small print on a wedding invitation he had received:

We are aware of the plight of the less fortunate and homeless. Please bring a spare article of winter clothing.

The second part of this, Fussell allowed, was perfectly acceptable, even admirable. The first, with its self-congratulatory, attention-seeking, and naggingly proper tone, was bad. Fussell didn’t live long enough to see comics reach a high enough degree of corporate respectability that they have adopted the same mealy-mouthed back-patting that he found to be the common denominator in every big company’s marketing strategy, but he would have found the events of the last few weeks dismayingly familiar.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with Marvel’s hip-hop variant cover experiment. As blatant attempts at money-soaking go, it’s perfectly pleasant, and the material itself ranges from decent to wonderful. There’s not even anything intrinsically wrong with their attempt to capitalize on a cultural phenomenon with which their own engagement has been, to put it as mildly as possible, standoffish. And its admirable that they made an effort to include work by many artists of color in this project, even if they’ve failed to do so in their regular series. Where it all goes wrong is in how, like the well-meaning couple that just wants to translate their friends’ largesse into an attempt to keep a homeless person warm, Marvel can’t help but inserting themselves into the picture and turning what could have otherwise been a harmless exercise in mash-up culture into a gross display of self-adulation. Like so many corporate executives who can’t manage to do a bit of good without turning it into something bad, Marvel executives just couldn’t shut up.

“Marvel Comics and hip-hop culture have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue,” gassed editor-in-chief Axel Alonso when announcing the project. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, you know? All he had to do was pull the covers off the easel and show off what his people had done, and we might have been impressed enough to actually enjoy it. But with this fat-headed, entirely self-serving comment, he forced our hand. By making the patently absurd claim that Marvel Comics – a company that almost single-handedly invented the trope of giving black characters a name starting with ‘Black’, just in case we didn’t get the picture; a company whose record of hiring black creators is nothing short of dismal; a company whose biggest contribution to hip-hop, as far as I can tell, was creating a mutant character named Bling!, the daughter of two rappers named “Daddy Libido” and “Sexy Mutha” – has been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with hip-hop culture, the company forced us to examine that claim at face value, and it’s as worth as much as a pair of knockoff Air Jordans.

It’s not as if there’s no connection whatsoever between comics and hip-hop. Street culture has always been attracted to four-color crimefighters; I made that point the subject of my first presentation at the EMP Pop Conference almost a decade ago. It’s been reinforced articulately by this site’s founder here. The problem is one that David Brothers, a man who’s far more qualified than Noah or I to perceive, is that what’s happening between Marvel and hip-hop isn’t a dialogue; it’s a monologue. Worse still, it’s a monologue that began with a series of insults – what else are we make of a company that created black characters like the Hypno-Hustler, Charcoal, Night Thrasher, and Dreadlox? What are we to think of a company who reached out to black youth, in conjunction with Kyle Baker, so long ago that the comic came with a cassette tape? What are we to assume from the fact that Marvel’s biggest gesture towards the rap game this century was teaming up with a white rapper eight years past his prime? – and ended with a demand to be thanked?

Brothers’ response only showed how compounded Marvel’s folly had become. Alonso, at least, seems to have a genuine appreciation of hip-hop, but executive editor Tom Breevort, who is widely known as a short-tempered crank, fielded a question about the disparity between a company that employs almost no African-American writers, artists, or editors and a company that expects everyone to give them an atta-boy for cashing in on a cultural phenomenon that they previously ignored. Breevort’s response was so clueless, so tone-deaf and consequence blind, so borderline contemptuous, that it made it seem like no one behind the scenes at Marvel bothered to think the whole thing through before releasing the variant covers into the world accompanied by a press release making it clear that they expected to be praised for it.

Marvel’s management doesn’t quite have the perception gap that DC’s does, if for no other reason that they haven’t employed someone as horrible as Dan DiDio since they got rid of Bill Jemas. (Jemas did his own outreach to the hip-hop community, which went about as well as you might expect.) But they can’t coast on the goodwill generated by their successful film empire forever, and sooner or later, they’re going to have to answer – with a response a lot more thoughtful than “what does one have to do with the other?” – questions about their lack of diversity, their co-option of cultural trends, their treatment of their creators, and their ham-handed barreling through whatever social development they perceive as the trend of the moment. (Someday, our gay-married overlords will hold us all accountable for this.) When that day comes, they better have something to show other than a bunch more variant covers that are worth less than the lies they were printed on. Until then, they need to shut up and stop congratulating themselves. So far, the monologue has consisted of rappers talking to Marvel; if they don’t learn to respect their audience the way that audience has respected them, it’ll soon consist of Marvel talking to itself.