Dan Didio still thinks he's a writer, does he?
Okay. So now about this Infinity Man and his Forever People. From the cover, it looks like Infinity Man is the god that lost his time travel map and the Forever People are the bandits. Judging by the name and the fact that Keith Giffen was tagged to do the art, I'm going to go out on a great big very safe looking limb and say these characters were created by Jack Kirby. Looking up the characters in my 1985 Who's Who, I see both entries were drawn by Jack Kirby. Like I said, it was a really safe limb to go out on. Plus I'm pretty sure the information that Kirby wrote these characters was rattling around in my brain somewhere but wasn't exactly a fact I could have spit out while trying to score with some hot piece of hotness at a cocktail party. Attractive people love discussing comic book facts at parties, right? That's a rhetorical question because I'm an attractive person and I like discussing comic books at parties! So I already knew the answer. Which is kind of the definition of rhetorical question so I probably didn't need to say that. I sure wish I had some self-consciousness!
I think Dan Didio likes to write about characters that have mysterious origins and/or were created by Jack Kirby. So he's done OMAC and The Phantom Stranger and Challengers of the Unknown and now Infinity Man. The first line in Infinity Man's bio in the 1985 Who's Who is this: "Nothing is known about the origin of the mysterious being called Infinity Man." What is known about him is that he pals around with five kids who touch his box and shout, "Taaruu!" I think this guy might need to be investigated.
Looking up The Forever People, I see I recognize Beautiful Dreamer and Big Bear. It looks like Serifan the Cowboy has been replaced by another female in the new team. And Vykin the Black probably dropped the "the Black" from his name because most people nowadays don't go around saying things like "Barack Obama the Black" and "Samuel L. Jackson the Black." Unless he's known as "the Black" because of some other reason that isn't racist like I've made it out to be! Perhaps it's simply rare to have a dark skin tone on the planet of New Genesis. It's just that so many comic book creators of the past simply added "black" to the name of any character that was a black man. I'm not sure black women got the same treatment though. I could be wrong though since I'm a scholar of Ancient Egypt and not a scholar of comic books!
Looking at the covers of the Who's Who (the front and back portrayed every character listed in the issue) to see if the whole adding "black" to a black character's name has much truth to it, I see the first issue, which is obviously a control issue, has one black character: Amazing-Man. So right off we see how small representation was for African-Americans even in 1985. One out of thirty entries is a black hero. There are more locations listed in this issue than that.
Issue #2 begins the run of characters with "black" in their name yet features not a single black character on the front and back cover! We've got Black Bison, Blackbriar Thorn, Black Canary (I and II!), Black Condor, Blackfire, Black Hand, and three Blackhawk entries (incidentally, the Blackhawks were an apparently all-white division when they were created). So the word "black" gets used no matter what the skin tone of the character. Well, as long as that skin tone is white or orange so far.
Out of 31 entries on Issue #3, we have three black characters (all male) and they all have "black" in their name: Black Manta, Black Lightning, and Black Racer. So that's three times as many characters as issue #1 and, um, I don't know how many times more than Issue #2 because I keep coming up with the answer "zero" for that equation. Let's look at a few more control issues.
I know Captain Atom is white but his pose made me laugh and this commentary really needed a picture in it.
Issue #5 has Cyborg. Issue #6 has none. Issue #7 has none. Even Easy Company didn't have any black members. Issue #8 has none. And finally Issue #9 has three black men (still no black women. It can't take until "V" to get an appearance of a black female hero (or villain), can it?): John Stewart, Gravedigger (whose real name is "Ulysses Hazard" which makes him completely awesome), and Impala of the Global Guardians (Dr. Mist and several others were left off the cover. Probably to make room for all of the Green Lanterns).
To finish, a very quick and cursory glance of the covers reveals the first black female to make an appearance is Onyx. And there isn't another until Vixen. So forget about how this began looking for black characters with or without "black" in their character name. It was hard enough just finding any! It's insane that in that white a pool of characters, people complain when any diversity is added to the mix. These covers were from 1985 detailing characters created many years ago. Has the diversity gotten better? I don't know! I'm not a comic book scientist! Although just look at the cover to Infinity Man and the Forever People #1! New Genesis has gotten a bit more diverse!
I should probably get to reading this fucking comic book already.
There's a big trip to Earth planned for the newest graduating class on New Genesis but Mark Moonrider can't get the Mother Box to work correctly. Probably because everybody needs to be touching it and yelling, "Taaruu!"
Everybody but Big Bear has gathered together and most of them are arguing. Unless the female that arrived with Vykin is Big Bear and she'll have some transformation into the Big Bear on the cover later. That's probably not the case though since this comic just started. I should just finish reading the pages where they finally become a group since those are the pages of group stories that I find the most monotonous.
That's the way I feel all of the time, Beautiful Dreamer.
Big Bear is waiting for the kids on the other end. He's got an apartment in Venice Beach set up for them and some kind of artificial intelligence named Kirby that does
Meanwhile, a facility in the Sudan turning desert into fertile ground to grow crops is having a bit of an Apokolyptian bug problem.
It's Preying Mantis! With an "e"!
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