Tag Archives: comics

Cyborg Re-humanized

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Cyborg_(2015)_DC_logoLet’s start this one with a full disclosure. By the time I was old enough to read comics and understand them as more than just really cool pictures, there weren’t a lot of POC characters floating around. The first one I saw in print was Cyborg, and honestly, I think it affected me a lot more than I probably thought. Cybernetics and robotics remain some of my favourite things in comics, games, and in my own artistic dabbles. And as with so many things, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve looked back to examine things I liked in the past. Now, recently, partly in response to the DCAU’s Justice League animated features, Robert Jones Jr. wrote an interesting piece on the emasculation of Cyborg as part of a larger trope of neutering male POC characters. [1] I agree in parts, and disagree in others (for example, in the movie he cited, Batman, the Flash, and Cyborg do not call “dibs” on Wonder Woman), but things have changed since the original pre-Crisis Cyborg and the stumbling start of the New 52 Cyborg.
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Diversity Fail by Marvel (Again)

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marvel logoIn comics, when something needs to be changed in a character who has already been established for whatever reason, it’s called a retcon. This is short for “retroactive continuity”, and it comes in two broad flavours, hard and soft. DC favours hard reset retcons that rebooted the entire universe, and until recently, Marvel preferred soft ones that occurred in book. Until recently, I preferred the soft ones too, since when I saw them previously, they were used to gently “bump” things to help keep the system on track. For example, Professor X was turned into a Vietnam veteran from a Korean War veteran to bump the X-Men forward in time because the Marvel Universe doesn’t deal well with the passage of time (the original X-Men should all be in their sixties, and Iron Man should be well into his seventies or early eighties). I’m writing about this because comic books are an easily accessed medium for people interested in SFF.
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