The comic panels above—which are from a webcomic called Let’s Be Friends Again—are clever and poignant. They work to associate young black/Latino Miles Morales, one of our contemporary heroes (at least in the insulated comic book fan world) with Trayvon Martin, and in doing so make use of the anonymity of the superhero figure to remind us that Trayvon could be any young black or brown man. Shit, the crazy irony to me about this whole thing is that in another time and place George Zimmerman himself could be the “suspicious” brown man in a neighborhood in which “he does not belong.”

But I think the panels also work to point out that Miles himself “does not belong” in the superhero tradition. He, like most black and brown superhero characters in mainstream comics, is an outlier. In other words, people like Miles or Trayvon are unfortunately more likely to be victim of a “heroic” vigilante than to be one.

This is all to say that the association made in the comic above reminded me of a paper I never got to write on the lack of black superheroes in the seminal work of superhero comic book as commentary on superhero comic books, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. It was to be called “Invisible (Watch) Men: The Impossibility of the Black Superhero.”

While frequently lauded as the first and best serious treatment of superhero comics, the absence of black superheroes in Watchmen is a glaring omission that has rarely (if ever) been noted by readers and critics. It is my contention, however, that such an absence can be read as an example of what Judith Butler would call a “performative contradiction.” That is, the fact that the critique of the superhero genre’s limitations and problematic representations along political and gender lines made explicit in much of Watchmen still fails to address (or even mention!) the troubling representations of blackness common to superhero comics brings to light the lack of any unproblematic space for blackness in the superhero tradition. In other words, transferred to the quasi-real (or at least “gritty”) setting of Watchmen black “superheroes” cannot exist.

There are two elements to Watchmen that appear to interrogate this absence. First, details in the backgrounds of panels (see inset panel) and supplemental material appended to each chapter (including an apologia for the Klan from the pages of the reactionary New Frontiersman) provides clues to this problem, implying an awareness of this absence on the part of Moore and thus an intentional exclusion. As such, the normitivity of such invisibility is appropriated “to oppose [its] historically sedimented effect, [which] constitutes the insurrectionary moment of that history, the moment that founds a future through a break with the past” (Butler 159). As Watchmen breaks with the superhero comic tradition, it suggests that the tradition it critiques (however well-intentioned) has more in common with the masked and hooded figures responsible for reinforcing racial invisibility through intimidation and violence (i.e. the Klan and serial lynching) than with the liberatory values with which superheroes are popularly associated.

Second, Dr. Malcolm Long as one of two African-American characters in the graphic novel (neither of which are “heroes”), plays an important role as a prison psychologist interviewing the white working-class Rorschach, characterized as the most anti-social and reactionary of the Watchmen characters. The middle-class and self-admittedly “fat and complacent” Dr. Long is increasingly disturbed by his sessions with the “hero,” coming to grips with the impossibility of curing the man as a result of the deep social dysfunction from which the superhero tradition arises, and frightened of the violent projection of a moral framework on a nihilistic landscape (punching state power into being)—a framework that too often is invisibly constructed around racial notions. In a world where black, brown (and queer and poor) unrest due to lack of access to power and agency threatens the status quo, anonymous and systematic violence is necessary to maintain white supremacy. To whatever degree Dr. Long prospers depends on his participation in that systemic violence as an agent of state power in his role as an employee of the state correctional institution.

This is just a little treatment or abstract for something I had hoped to develop (and may still develop in the future), but the LBFA comic above I think resounds with a profound contradiction, transforming the idealized vigilante hero into the victim of racially-informed vigilantism. The comic panels highlights a paradox that opens up a space where we can hope for a different kind of superhero tradition that makes room for people of color and not be based on violent reinforcement of the status quo and its narratives of criminality which uphold a culture of tacit white supremacy. I want black and brown superheroes that don’t need to be invisible or silent, that don’t need to prove they are “one of the good ones,” but that address the racial underpinnings of the tradition they are a part of. I want social justice superheroes.