The untimely remains of James Rhodes

Yes, I wanted to pull the whole quote so you can see why this sits so poorly with me. Like a body on a slab.

Comic fans want to think writers aren’t bastards and don’t look at the characters as disposable. But in this case, that is exactly what he did. In his own words: he considered Rhodes to be nothing more than a thing to be disposed of so two White Characters could have feelings?

#blackdeathsforwhitetears?

Are you fucking kidding me?

(Sorry kids, you might want to leave the room for this one. I will write something family-friendly again tomorrow, I promise.)

Brian Bendis felt the need to “white-man-splain” how it was necessary for James Rhodes, one of the longest running Black male protagonists of the Marvel Universe to die in order to make the stakes of Civil War II seem worthwhile.

What? We couldn’t imperil the Universe one more time?

You have so many Black characters you can just kill one ’cause you want folks to feel something?

Let me explain to you why this is a problem for me. It may take away from the initial article but it makes the personal affront just a bit more meaningful.

Like Rhodes, I am a military veteran, who has spent the last thirty years working with computer technology in a variety of industries and in a number of capacities.

As a Black man, it had always been my unfortunate lot, at least in Northern California to find I was invariably the only Black man working in a technical capacity in most companies that I worked for.

In some companies where I was a leading executive, I found I was only Black man to have EVER worked with that company, at that level, in its forty year history.

Why is that important?

Because James Rhodes as a character, was part of the iconic roster of characters who guided my choices growing up, a part of the ideals I aspired to being a child of the late 70s when his character first came into existence. I remember being excited to see him in the pages of Iron Man however infrequently he was allowed to grace the pages.

When James Rhodes became Iron Man, it was a momentous occasion to me, a confirmation that a Black man could have been doing that job quite well. The only failure of the character was that he did not invent the technology himself.

I came to grips with that when I remembered Green Lanterns didn’t create their rings, Captain Marvel didn’t create the Nega Bands which augmented his skills, and that Captain America didn’t create his amazing shield. I accepted that Rhodey would be forever linked to the annoyance that was often Tony Stark and I could be okay with it.

Using this as a personal cautionary tale, I would do better than Rhodey. I would master the technology I controlled. Even in my emulation of the character, I learned from him. But there was another aspect Marvel and the real world never addressed.

Where were all the other Black and Brown people in the company?

Stark had no other Black employees, and when I went to work, I never passed a Black man in the corridors, I never passed one on the street at lunchtime, I barely saw one at the technical conventions I attended where 50,000 to 100,000 people might attend.

When I did see one at a conference, I felt compelled to stop and chat, as if I were finding a long lost friend I hadn’t seen for years, an oasis in a desert of White, parched for Color of any kind. Parched for a sense of someone who knew my struggle, who didn’t overlook me as if I were nothing more than an impediment to their success.

And in their eyes, I saw they felt the same damn way. Where were all the people of color in the world?

Most Black men won’t ever say these things. They don’t want you to know how alone they feel. How out of place some of the things they hear in the office are and how hurtful some of the things that are said can be. They need that job.

Especially if it was a job of some significance, a job that was hard for anyone to get, let alone a Black man fighting against systemic racism, a mad cultural bias which says:

Black men are the worst thing to happen to America. Lazy, sexual predators, taking advantage of the system, using drugs and violence to control their urban hellholes held in check only with the valiant efforts of a hyper-vigilant police force.

Ask Bill O’Reilly, he will let you know that any day of the week.

When Marvel’s leadership decided James Rhodes had to die for the White characters of the Marvel Universe to give a damn and push the story along, I had to say, stop. Just stahp!

You see, Marvel writers and editors:



You don’t care about Black characters. You don’t care about Brown characters. You honestly don’t care about People of Color in any way shape or form. You know how I figured this out?



You hadn’t hired People of Color (for the longest time) and never in representational quantities.

Yes, I know about your recent hires. Nice, but a long way to go before you start looking like the population of the nation you draw your income from…

I am going to let my friend Hannibal Tabu take the floor for a second:

“Let’s run some numbers here. The last Black writer at Marvel was Reginald Hudlin, who left without fanfare in August 2009. The last Black writers at DC were Eric Wallace and Marc Bernardin, two television writers who were unceremoniously dropped in a slate of cancellations (Bernardin even commented on the struggles of Black writers in comics). Before Hudlin, screenwriter and actor Kevin Grevioux contributed The Blue Marvel to the canon, a character so ridiculously powerful that it’s hilarious to have him on the sidelines through most of Marvel history, and then … years of nothing.

DC briefly had screenwriters Felicia Henderson and Angela Robinson, but neither lasted very long. These numbers may seem spurious, but luckily there’s always hard data, thanks to this Google document showing that only twenty Black people have ever written more than one issue for, again, seventy percent of the marketplace.

Not “twenty Black people in the last ten years.” Not even “twenty Black people in the last twenty years.” That’s twenty Black people ever. Sure, you can bring up segregation for part of that period, but still. Even the ones who have gotten hired have not exactly had the best experience.”

You [Marvel] haven’t hired them as a significant part of your staff in over 40 years. You have hired no-talent Whites whose skills were barely nascent when there were highly skilled writers and artists of Color all over world.

And the recent hiring of talent of a diverse nature may be your way of making up for your failings but for at least 40 years, when you created Black characters they were never venerated, never esteemed, if they had powers at all, they were from the bottom of the basket in the superpower department.

For example:

Though I love the character to death, Luke Cage is an epic cultural train-wreck no Black writer would have let you get away with. His origin is straight out of the Tuskegee Experiments, couple with being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. After being imprisoned he is then forced to participate in criminal experimentation upon his person.

After all of these indignities was he gifted with amazing ability? Amazing reflexes, superhuman speed, strength, stamina, regeneration, wall-crawling and a preternatural sense of danger? Who would have started their career with all of those powers?

First appearance, Hero for Hire, 1972

No. Luke Cage gets steel-hard skin, to protect him from bullets and a smattering of barely defined super-strength. I’m surprised he didn’t end up being called ‘Black Power’ Man.

He would go on to have to be hired for his services, and without appreciable education, he would never be inducted into the likes of SHIELD or any other agency and would take at least thirty years before he would become an Avenger.

His most famous feat was showing up in Doom’s castle and demanding he get paid the $200 he was owed. (Seriously, I kid you not.) He gets Doom to pay up.

The Captain Britain Corps, an entire collection of White metaheroes protecting all of time and space. Of course they do.

Meanwhile Captain Britain would appear in 1976 with a similarly modest set of powers but would in time come to rival the heaviest hitters of the Marvel Universe.

He would travel through space and time, visit alternate realities and find White people controlling entire realities throughout the Multiverse. An entire legion of heroes just like him.

You are not slick, Marvel.

Your viewpoint is exactly the same as the world you reflect. White heroes reflect the best humanity has to offer, the best the species can be. Exploring, commanding, taking control of how things work everywhere.

Black heroes exist only to make White heroes look good. Luke Cage highlights his White super-rich partner who stumbles into a Chinese temple and walks away with one of the most formidable powers in the Marvel Universe, the Iron Fist.

War Machine, highlights Tony Stark, the creator of the War Machine suit which had gotten LONG in the tooth while Tony was upgrading his armor every time he got his hair coiffed.

In the real world, being a Person of Color often means holding your tongue when racist shit goes down. When a White man guns down an entire nightclub, he gets to be mentally ill, not a racist, white, bigot who shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms. Because no white man represents anything other than himself, unless he is a paragon of virtue, then any White man could be Superman.

But a Black or minority person has to represent their entire race.