We want to see more diversity in the superhero genre. Here's why

AlfresonJr_ (Andy Osias), Strangefruit (Tarah Paul) and The Voice (Patrick Paul) co-host The New School of the Gifted, a podcast about comic books. Here, they discuss the lack of representation and diversity in the superhero genre.

Our love of comic books and the superhero genre goes back nearly 30 years. That's when we first started watching X-Men: The Animated series (1992).

The show was about a group of people with superhuman abilities due to gene mutation fighting against society's pressure to be accepted. It was one of the first animated television shows to teach us about different issues related to xenophobia, racism, and discrimination. There were a couple of Black characters, but we learned little about their origin stories and they rarely appeared.

Every time a superhero movie was released, we went as a group. Afterward, we had the most heated, geeky debates about what we liked and disliked. Somewhere along the line, our debates started leading to deeper discussions on topics like Black representation. 

As young Black Canadians, we accepted the lack of representation even though it negatively affected our self-esteem. We mainly saw ourselves represented in Black U.S. sitcoms, not in Canadian TV shows or movies, until we were in our late teens and early 20s, between 2005 and 2015, when that representation seems to have dried up.

The superhero genre specifically has never been known for its representation and diversity. Tim Hanley, a comic book historian, discovered that in 2014, 78.9 per cent of DC and Marvel comic book creators credited were white, compared to 11.5 per cent who were Hispanic, 6.8 per cent who were Asian and 1.2 per cent who were Black.

In 2015, the authors of "A Content-Analysis of Race, Gender, and Class in American Comic Books" randomly selected 28 popular comic books created between 1991 and 2005 and analyzed a total of 23,243 characters. They discovered that 86 per cent of the characters were white, and that aliens, demons and other types of non-human lifeforms were more represented than any other racial minority combined.

There is definitely more representation and diverse characters today compared to when we were children. The first Black superhero was introduced in 1966 by two Jewish-American creators named Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. He was named T'Challa, also known as the Black Panther. His first comic book appearance was in Fantastic Four #52. We all witnessed the phenomenon surrounding the character with the release of the film in 2018. We consider this to be a big step forward, since it has already paved the way for a lot of Black-centred films.

In 2011, Marvel Comics published Ultimate Fallout #4 (2011), where they first featured Miles Morales, a 13 year-old Afro-Puerto Rican teenager that gets bitten by a radioactive spider and becomes Spider-Man.

DC Comics also made some strides in television. The Flash, a superhero television show that debuted in 2014, cast Candice Patton, an African-American actress, as Iris West, a journalist and the love interest of Barry Allen, The Flash himself.

But then there's the case of Cecilia Reyes, an Afro-Puerto Rican X-Men superhero character created in 1997. Her character is featured in The New Mutants, an X-Men movie released in 2020, but she is whitewashed and played by Alice Braga, a Brazilian actress whose skin is lighter than Reyes'. We were both surprised and disappointed by that choice — whitewashing in the entertainment industry shows a disregard and lack of effort to represent characters of colour.

Even though progress has been made in the last decade, there needs to be more representation in the superhero genre. With the internet and social media, it is kind of hard to ignore art created by people of colour. They are addressing issues around presentation by creating stories that feature people who look like themselves, and who look like us.

We started our podcast, The New School of the Gifted, as a hobby, a way to share the conversations we'd been having about representation. As we recorded more episodes, we realized that it could be more than that. We use our platform to amplify the craft and work of art shared by creators of colour, particularly Black creators.

As Black millennials, we review movies and television shows in the superhero genre through that lens. We revisit classic comic books, but we also highlight comic books featuring people of colour.

• Diversity of Marvel comics not reflected in movies

Outside of being virtuous, investing in representation is good for business. Black Panther, the 2018 Marvel Studios movie with a predominantly Black cast, grossed a worldwide total of $1.3 billion. In 2016, the UCLA Bunche Center published a study on diversity in entertainment that found television shows and movies diverse in gender and race earn more and create more social media traffic.

More diversity and representation in the superhero genre would mean that Black creators and creators of colour, who think outside the box more often than not, can control the narrative and present well-rounded, compelling characters. It would help reduce stigmas and stereotypes about communities of colour.

And it would mean that young, nerdy Black boys and girls will not have to search far and wide to see themselves in the stories they enjoy.

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For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.