“Becoming Fantastical” in Black Superhero Comics

Darieck Scott’s Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics is, in the parlance of the genre he so lovingly assesses, “Amazing!” As rich in its attention to the content and form of comics as it is to the political and theoretical importance comics comprise as archive, Keeping It Unreal masterfully renders the how and why of blackness’ relationship to superheroism. Equal parts counter-history of the depiction and narrativization of black and queer heroes, theory of reading of and identification with superheroes, and love letter to an undertheorized and (often) misunderstood genre and form, Scott’s book exemplifies the capacity of contemporary black queer studies to reconfigure relationships between reader, text, and the world at large.

At its center, Scott’s theoretical and political project is invested in reclaiming fantasy from its marginal position in contemporary literary studies and using fantasy to theorize both the ontological and the epistemological horizons of blackness and queerness, showing its importance to the embodied experiences of black and queer people. The project begins with a compelling concatenation of speculations: “What if there were no racism or antiblackness or sexism or misogyny or homophobia or classism or ableism or transphobia or any of the horribly effective ways the modern world has found to create disposable people?” (7). Scott propounds these prospects to show, through a nuanced conception of the political and cultural import of black people reading superhero comics—an act he describes through the compelling formation “fantasy-acts” (30)—that readers are always negotiating and imagining such a world, especially in the “parlous times” that seem ripped from the pages of superhero fantasy themselves (1). The power and magic of fantasy-acts, in their relationship to the ongoing work of making a livable and just world for black and queer thriving, lies in their capacity to transform readerly perspectives on both the world at large and themselves. Scott pins this specific capacity on the open form of comics production: their “incompletion” is an opportunity for readers to fully participate in the meaning making project and prospect of comics in general and superhero comics in particular. Instead of “models or finished products representing or imagining new worlds and fully finished habitable imaginaries” (43), fantasy-acts offer a fragmentary code, in which “useful information” is transmitted for a “justice that would arise.”1 As propositions about our world, not apart from the real but rather exposing the productive tension between the real and the unreal, fantasy-acts offer an exciting revision of how scholars might approach the question of worldmaking and reality vis-à-vis fantasy. “Reality,” Scott argues, “is unfinished and ever will be. In fantasy, we may detect reality’s future shapes as well as its present habitability” (24). Over the course of the three long chapters that make up the body of Keeping It Unreal, Scott reveals fantasy to be “a mode of living and … the transformation of living and being” (39).

Keeping It Unreal represents an important rejoinder to current trends in literary studies, black studies, and queer studies. Addressing ideas including the worthiness of fantasy and pulp fiction to scholarly literary audiences, the relationship between black/queer comics characters’ and readers’ identities and notions of racialized sexual difference and its representation in graphic fiction, among others, Scott shows the import of working with popular texts to underscore both the value of reading and its relationship to the construction of personhood. In addition to looking to important literary theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Lauren Berlant, Scott turns to unlikely and underappreciated theorists of comics reading: Fredric Wertham and Frantz Fanon. Engaging their complicated derision of comics reading, Scott underscores that their misplaced paranoia about the psychic processes involved in reading comics nevertheless explain that “identification is the source and the end product of superhero-comics fandom or of reading superhero comics” (97). Scott argues that “reading/viewing comics … does not only or simply provide models for behavior or educations in how to see yourself in relation to the world … but that reading/viewing comics and fantasy-acts … is a mode of being you, whether child or adult or, as we almost all are, an amalgam of the two” (86). Reflecting critically on his own imagination of Nubia (a character whose spotty publication history he describes to great effect), Scott explains, “My Nubia … reshaped my world into one where a black woman was a goddess, a destroyer by means of her great powers of hand and body, and by means of her very ‘existence,’ a challenger of racial-gender injustice” (88). Scott’s identification brings me to an important and perhaps undertheorized readerly process. Rather than situate identity exclusively in a field of injury, Scott routes it through (racial) fantasies of power and pleasure. Throughout Keeping It Unreal, but especially in this first chapter, he shows how and why black superheroic figures like Nubia undermine invidious racial fantasies such as antiblackness while engendering imaginaries of power and capacity at the same time. This is not simply an argument about representation (throughout the book, he is careful to mark the countability of black figures in superhero comics) but rather shows how black and queer readers realize themselves in a fantastic reading economy. In an intellectual milieu for which race (and especially blackness) is understood primarily as indexical categories of relative privilege or injury, Scott’s recourse to identification is not only appreciated but vital.

Of course, this theory of identification could not exist without desire, and these arguments feel like familiar ground. In Extravagant Abjection,2 Scott undertook the work of explaining the relationship between black power and vulnerability using the metaphor of the bottom and locating in abjection the possibilities of pleasure for subjected black people. In Keeping It Unreal, Scott turns his attention to the capacities of superhero comics to captivate readers through their attachment to fantasies of power as pleasure. Of special interest is his third chapter on erotic and pornographic comics that draw on the tropes of superheroes in their fantasy of masculinity. In the subsection “Black Dick Power,” Scott describes how queer black phallic power exists in a circumscribed and dialectic relationship to white heteromasculine power, explaining, “the content of power is not absolute but malleable” (195). This shifting terrain of power circuits through an unlikely medium considering that the objects of inquiry are pornographic: interracial queer love, a love not without its shortcomings and potential pitfalls (which he details again to great effect) but one that nevertheless positions blackness—and here, black superheroic masculinity, which is always already queer—as “powerful and desirable” (216). Scott again arrives at the conclusion that, while the process of desiring blackness is not without a variety of complicated and often contradictory factors, the tropology of black superhero aesthetics in pornographic comics conjoins supposedly paradoxical terms: “power and blackness, beauty and blackness, superhero and blackness” (218).

All of this amounts to Scott’s own investment in taking the queerness and blackness of superhero seriously (235). Rather than simply deploy this concept, Scott tells us precisely what is at stake in what he describes as a “possibly laughable” exercise: instead of comparing comics to something as serious as nuclear war or antiblackness, Scott proposes that they guide readers through their encounters with these and other dangerous social and political realities. Comics are thus relational devices, enlightening the reader on their own orientation to power, pleasure, and desire. But more than that, they proffer a transformative invitation, promising a simultaneous refashioning of both the world and the reader. This is especially clear in the second chapter, “Can the Black Superhero Be?,” which undertakes a prolonged engagement with various figures of black male superheroism, including the Powerman Luke Cage, Blade the Daywalker, Black Panther and his sister Shuri as well as lesser-known figures like Killraven and Carmilla. Here, Scott’s attention to the creative process (especially to the investments of comics authors and artists, including figures like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Nnedi Okorafor, and Don McGregor) underscores the very serious epistemological and ontological propositions black superheroes embody. Enfolding nationalism, criminality, respectability, and a host of other ways the black (masc) body is framed as a social and political problem and potentate, Scott argues that the form of the comic, its mapping of time as sequence, “produces the effect of history” (170). Not merely reproductive, comics’ specific form—the frame, the gutter, the splash page—reconfigures the relationship between reader and text such that they empower a different set of imaginaries. Comics thus “demand and enable” a reading praxis that “def[ies] or ignore[s] or challenge[s] white-supremacist projects, if the creator of the comic … and/or the reader is motived to mount that challenge.”

I suppose I was always going to like this book; I am a fan of comics and an avid reader of Scott’s Extravagant Abjection. But there is something stunningly beautiful about Scott’s mind at work here and something incredibly compelling about this kind of scholarship, which avers the power of the imagination to refashion the self and the world. What is perhaps most compelling is his capacity to do so despite and in explicit contradistinction to the social and intellectual premise that fantasy is at best a distraction and at worst a contributing factor to black death and erasure. Keeping It Unreal shows that it is not only possible to work in fantastic idioms but imperative. “Amazing!” indeed.