The most electrifying thing about The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the new superhero blockbuster film, isn’t the dangerous voltage fired by Spidey’s latest nemesis Electro.

It’s the fact that Electro, played by Jamie Foxx, is black. That’s noteworthy casting in the mostly white world of comic book movies, all the more so given that the original Marvel Comics character was white.

Movies have always had trouble with race and diversity issues, although there are promising signs on the superhero front. The current hitCaptain America: The Winter Soldier features two important black characters: Samuel L. Jackson’s spy chief Nick Fury (who was originally written as white) and Anthony Mackie’s winged soldier Falcon, drawn from the first major African-American comic book superhero.

Still missing at the movies are the black supervillains, which is what makes Foxx’s Electro so special — and let’s pause for a moment to define “supervillain.” These are the top-tier baddies, usually the main nemesis of the superhero, who possess superpowers and/or a criminally genius IQ, as well as a megalomaniacal urge and ability to wreak havoc on a grand scale.

There are loads of black thugs and petty criminals on the big screen, but there’s never been an adversary quite like Electro. He’s a timid New York electrical engineer named Max Dillon who is transformed into a walking surge of lethal power and anger through a combination of industrial mishap and attack by electric eels.

Foxx has played heroes — he won an Oscar for his take on Ray Charles in Ray, and acclaim for his righteous title slave in Django Unchained — but he leapt at the chance to finally play a supervillain.

“The villain is the best because you get a chance to colour outside the lines,” Foxx told the Star from L.A.

“And what I wanted to do with this movie is be a legitimate adversary for Spider-Man because it’s like this: when you read the comic books or when you’re watching the movies, you only are excited as you can be for the superhero according to what his adversary is. The more he has to overcome, the more you root for your favourite hero.”

The main adversaries of superheroes are typically white: Lex Luthor and General Zod in Superman, Loki in The Avengers and Dr. Doom in The Fantastic Four. When they aren’t Caucasian, they’re often an indeterminate race, such as Red Skull in Captain America — and Cap’s new archenemy is the aptly named title paleface in the current hit film Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Before Foxx’s Electro, you had to search hard and stretch definitions to find a black character in a comic book movie who could be described as a supervillain. Michael Clarke Duncan played the fearsome Kingpin in Daredevil (2003), although that saga didn’t make a very successful jump from comic book to screen, failing both critically and at the box office.

And Kingpin, who is white in the comic book, is really just a very powerful crime lord, possessing no superhuman powers. He’s more on a par with Yaphet Kotto’s Mr. Big in the 007 movie Live and Let Die (1973), a film best known for Roger Moore’s debut as James Bond, but also notable for featuring the first black Bond villain and Bond girl (Rosie Carver).

(Bond films technically aren’t comic book movies, of course, but aren’t they really?)

It’s as if Hollywood is afraid to show an African-American doing something really evil, in case it leads to accusations of stereotyping and racism. No less a Hollywood figure than Morgan Freeman has long thought this.

“I think there’s a huge reluctance to cast blacks as super bad,” Freeman said from L.A., while promoting his own new movie, the sci-fi thriller Transcendence.

“I think that the way our society is set up now, thinking of how many black and Hispanic people are in prison, that (Hollywood) just doesn’t want to exacerbate that idea.”

Foxx takes a diplomatic view of the situation.

“Nah, I didn’t trip that (the race issue) and I’ll tell you why,” he said.

“There’s a certain thing that goes on in our business in Hollywood where the right person for the right job is sort of the right temperature. . . .

“We never even addressed it on the set. It was just like, ‘This is how we rock it,’ and then it just sort of felt good. Had it been a different way or something, then maybe (racial issues) might have come into play, but I just felt that this was right.”

Foxx’s “right temperature” argument finds resonance with Todd McFarlane, the Calgary-born cartoonist, toy designer and entertainment entrepreneur. McFarlane became famous in the 1980s and ’90s for reviving the Spider-Man franchise for Marvel Comics, and later became rich and famous by creating the phenomenally popular occult antihero Spawn, an African-American good guy enslaved by the devil.

“You go to a Denzel Washington (or Jamie Foxx) movie because you know it’s going to be a quality movie,” McFarlane says from the Arizona office of Todd McFarlane Entertainment, his film and animation studio.

“It’s not because it’s going to be a quality movie with black themes in it. You create a quality character and oh, by the way, they happen to be female, Asian, black; whatever you want to put on them that isn’t stereotypical.”

McFarlane takes issue with Freeman’s statement that the mostly white Hollywood establishment is reluctant to cast blacks as supervillains, fearing a “politically correct” backlash.

“I don’t think it’s true, but I think the nervousness of asking that question is there. There’s that potential of people wanting to be politically correct. Instead of just going, ‘Samuel Jackson would be cool as Nick Fury, Jamie Foxx, he’d be awesome as Electro,’ they count to three and maybe then start to analyze their decision instead of just going, ‘No, the gut was right. He’s the best man for the job.’

“I think there are times that we over-think stuff. Jamie Foxx is a legitimate, talented actor. That he is in a big-time movie and he’s playing one of the key roles shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

This issue may seem like no big deal, but it is if you’re a black actor trying to land roles that supposedly only a white person can play.

It’s also of major concern if you’re a black kid watching movies or reading comic books filled with mostly white characters, wondering where you fit into white-dominated worlds both real and imaginary.

Consider the personal situation of Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, the assistant professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, who has studied and written scholarly papers on the dearth of black supervillains.

As an African-American child growing up in the 1980s and watching the original Star Wars movies, he was excited when his mother told him that Darth Vader, one of the most sinister of all fantasy creations, was in fact a black man: she recognized the voice of legendary actor James Earl Jones from behind Vader’s black mask.

Imagine Cunningham’s surprise and “great disappointment” when the mask was removed at the end of Return of the Jedi, the final film in the original Star Wars trilogy, revealing Vader’s very white face, belonging to British actor Sebastian Shaw (while another white actor, David Prowse, played Vader under the mask).

“As the credits rolled, I had no other choice but to accept the greatest, most powerful villain of my generation was, like virtually all of his progenitors, a white man,” Cunningham wrote in a paper titled “The Absence of Black Supervillains in Mainstream Comics,” published in 2010 in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

In the same paper, he also addressed the issue of political correctness and Hollywood’s perceived reluctance to make black characters seem stereotypically bad by making them supervillains.

The fear is real, in part due to actions by black watchdog groups such as the NAACP, which aggressively speak out against prejudice of any kind: still an important job, as this week’s NBA racism scandal demonstrated.

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Yet going to the other extreme and dodging the issue by eschewing black supervillains is almost as bad, Cunningham asserts, as the tokenism of Hollywood’s early years, where blacks were habitually seen only as slaves, servants or unskilled labourers.

Hollywood’s see-no-evil approach to black supervillains, Cunningham wrote, may be intended as high-minded altruism, but it’s really “more akin to an inability (or refusal) to develop complex black characters.”

He concluded his paper by calling on the artistic community to work harder on “developing complex, contemplative and powerful black supervillains.”

Reached by the Star for elaboration, Cunningham said the problem is largely the same in movies as it is for comic books.

“Comics and film share a similar problem: their primary content creators are white men,” he said via email.

“In the past, these content creators could render race and ethnicity (and gender) in any manner they saw fit without any backlash necessarily influencing their coffers; in more contemporary times, they cannot. So rather than face the possibility of backlash (which, admittedly, could happen even if the ‘complex, contemplative and powerful’ black supervillain I’d like to see emerges), both comics and film have opted out of those types of portrayals for the most part.”

Cunningham also sees a problem in a “waning black star power in Hollywood” that could affect the casting of not just supervillains but also superheroes.

Black superstars such as Jamie Foxx, 46, Samuel L. Jackson, 65, Denzel Washington, 59, and Will Smith, 45, are reaching ages where they may be reluctant or unable to play action figures, although in Smith’s case he was certainly game as the troubled title superhero of Hancock, a worldwide hit in 2008.

Cunningham may be overstating the casting problem. There’s no lack of black talent available to play whatever superhero or supervillain Hollywood has going.

Just this week, Hollywood anointed a rising black star to the cast of Star Wars VII, the latest instalment of one of the most profitable franchises in movie history: British actor John Boyega, star of the sci-fi actioner Attack the Block, will reportedly have a major role in the still-undisclosed Star Wars VII story, but his character hasn’t yet been identified as hero or villain.

There’s also Lupita Nyong’o, Oscar winner for her searing performance in this year’s Best Picture champ, 12 Years a Slave. A super gig for her would also help reduce the longstanding gender imbalance of comic book films.

Don’t forget her 12 Years co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oscar-nominated in the title role. And here are a few more suggestions for potential supervillains (or superheroes): Tyrese Gibson, of the Fast & Furious and Transformers franchises; Terry Crews, the NFL player turned actor (The Expendables); and hip-hop star Kanye West, who would certainly bring a whole lot of watchable attitude to any blockbuster movie assignment.

For his part, Foxx is already hoping to play another supervillain, as well as continuing with badass Electro in future Spider-Man films (“You know electricity doesn’t die,” he teased).

Todd McFarlane said he’s definitely interested in Foxx for a reboot of Spawn, which McFarlane envisions as an R-rated supernatural thriller.

“You know what? I could do far worse than having Jamie Foxx in a movie. Jamie was out here at the office and he had some cool ideas,” McFarlane said.

Foxx said he hopes McFarlane gets the Spawn reboot going soon “and hopefully they don’t wait too late until I’m 90 years old.”

But maybe age isn’t such a big deal, after all.

Morgan Freeman is 76 and he’d love to play a real badass.

The Oscar-winning actor reckons he’s only done so once in his 50-year film career, for a movie called Street Smart in 1987. He played a gangland pimp called Fast Black who was threatening an investigative journalist played by the late Christopher Reeve, best known at that time for playing Superman in the movies.

When I tell Freeman I’d love to see him play a supervillain, he replies, “Me, too! I’ve always wanted to! I wanted to be one of 007’s nemeses. Oh, yeah!”

Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

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