Not Enough Time?

The website Comic Book Resource, now known as CBR, generates a lot of content as it explores science fiction and superhero media in book, television and movie form -- it's basically a one-stop newsfeed for geek culture items. Sometimes the items are straight news releases, about a casting change, series renewal or movie development. Sometimes they're analyses of this or that character or series in light of a particular idea or cultural phenomenon. The wide range of geek culture and the hyper-speed need for new content mean that there's often a lot of scrolling to be done to avoid the 13th take on yet another anime series that I've never heard of before.

Among the standard entries are historical digs into the media to answer questions that younger readers may have about the long, long story of comic books. Superman, for one, has got more than 80 years of history that a lot of today's readers may not know. 

An entry a couple of days ago, for example, took a look at the versions Big Blue Boy Scout as he appears in other universes in the long string of DC Comics continuity to see when the first black Superman appeared. Some other universes offer more diverse groups of the heroes first developed when the concerns of minority audiences were not often considered. Kal-El is still the same baby rocketed from Krypton just before it exploded, but his appearance in these worlds matches what we would call African-American instead of Caucasian. Writer Brian Cronin describes two currently operating black Supermen from other universes and then digs back about 20 years to a one-shot title Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths. It gives us the story of one of the many universes imperiled by the Anti-Monitor during that story, originally published in the 1980s, called Earth-D. In this story, both Superman and his cousin, Supergirl, are black although their histories are the same and they are members of the Justice Alliance with counterparts to the mainstream heroes who reflect a wide range of ethnicities. This, Cronin says, is the first time we see "Black Superman."

Cronin's been writing about pop culture for a long time, so we'll just have to ascribe this lapse to a neuron misfire rather than the usual millennial cluelessness; the first Black Superman was, as Johnny Wakelin told us in 1975, Muhammed Ali.