Black Nerds Need a Producer Credit. Who Can Set That Up?
After a decade that saw comic-book movies and fantasy shows take over pop culture, we’re the ones calling the shots
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Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I was lucky to grow up a comic book fan.
My parents saw my early love of comic books — the way I’d hide out at the Waldenbooks in the first floor of West Jackson’s Metrocenter Mall while they shopped, the way I talked endlessly about storylines I’d written myself — and indulged it. Maybe one day they thought I’d eventually write comics for a living, or write about them, or something. Every Wednesday when new issues dropped, they would drive me to the comic book store in a neighboring town, and sit patiently in the car while I went inside and thumbed through the newest issues of X-Men and Batman. I went to that comic book store hundreds of times as a kid.
And I rarely, if ever, saw any Black people there.
This isn’t a unique story. Most Black nerds could tell you about how they felt like the only kids who had comic book collections — but not a lot of friends their age to talk about the books with. But this also isn’t one of those things about how I’m a Talented Tenth Black unicorn because I read comic books and watched anime and was chastised by my simple-minded peers or whatever. To the contrary: This decade has produced quite the cottage industry of Black creatives who wear their nerd enthusiasm as badges of Black superiority. We’ve had enough of that.
Instead, this is about those comic-book spaces that were never really made for us, and how we as Black folks had to create our own. How we not only propelled nerd culture to the forefront of American culture, but broke through barriers, prejudices, and creative laziness to carve our own lanes whether anyone wanted us there or not.
Let’s bust one myth real quick: Black folks were never uninterested in science fiction or comic books. We always took to stories that encouraged escape, transported our imaginations, allowed us to transcend the environments that we’ve often been burdened with. Whenever we’ve been exposed to superheroes…
