Since The Nerds of Color is not the only awesome thing on the internet, here are five links you should click on.
Seems that Jenn isn’t the only person who identifies with the Yellow Ranger. Over on The Toast, cartoonist Shing Yin Khor finds inspiration from everyone’s favorite Asian American Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger to deal with a lot of unfortunate questions and comments from a lot of unfortunate people.
“Smash the patriarchy,” indeed!
It’s no secret that we’ve been pretty excited for the new Ms. Marvel here at the N.O.C. Well, most of us, anyway. Though the debut issue is still a month away, Wired has a sneak peek at some of Adrian Alphona’s goregeus artwork, along with an interview with the series writer G. Willow Wilson.
Obviously, there’s been a lot of noise around what it means to have Kamala represent as a Pakistani-American, as a Muslim, as a teenager, and as a female superhero. In fact, our own Roundtable brought up many of those issues. Wilson addresses these points — and more — in the interview:
There’s a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren’t enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture. So the few ones that do exist come under increased scrutiny and pressure, because they’re expected to represent everybody. Obviously, you can’t do that with one character and you shouldn’t, because it would stifle the narrative and prevent them from becoming a fully-realized person. So I think in situations like that, you just have to tread lightly and trust your gut. Kamala is not a token anything in any way. She’s very much her own quirky, unique, wonderful person. She’s not a poster girl for her religion and she doesn’t fall into any neat little box.
Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel follows in a long line of traditionally white superhero characters who have been recast as people of color. To take it a step further, Gene Demby of NPR Code Switch uses an art project by Orion Martin — in which the artist re-imagines the X-Men as people of color — to interrogate how race and identity are used (or misused) in comics.
Martin’s art is the jumping off point for to a lengthy conversation between members of the Code Switch staff and others including Racialicious‘ Kendra Pettis and Arturo Garcia and blogger Kelly Kanayama.
In the new re-imagining, Wolverine, known for “his snarling, predatory aggression” becomes “a stereotype of angry black men.” My Code Switch teammate Matt Thompson, who didn’t have a much previous knowledge of the Emma Frost character, said the as black and as white underscored how hypersexualized her portrayal is.
You can read more from their unedited conversation here.
Last week, we told you about the upcoming nuptials of The Simpsons‘ famed “Comic Book Guy” to a manga artist named Yumiko. Though the ep aired last night, most folks are still buzzing about this Miyazaki tribute/hallucination.
Pretty cool, though I could’ve done without the chop socky font.
Finally, if you’re in New York City next weekend, swing by the Schomburg Center for their second annual Black Comics Festival. The festival will run January 17-18 with an opening reception Friday night and a full day of panels, workshops, screenings and more all day Saturday.
Our own David Walker will be on hand as well, so be sure to stop by and say hi!
