Edition: U.S. / Global

WHOOSH! New Superheroes Liberate the Old-Boy Network

Published: August 4, 1993

LOOK! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's . . . Icon?

Although Icon, a red-and-green-clad comic-book superhero, bears similarities to the Man of Steel, there is one big difference: he's black. Finding heroes like Icon or his female partner, Rocket, would have been difficult five years ago. But today, superheroes who fly in the face of stereotypes -- whether they are black, gay or otherwise nontraditional -- are zapping and socking villains as lead characters in their own comic books.

Dr. Terence Moran, a professor of communications at New York University who studies the effects of popular images on American culture, said that younger people are becoming more receptive to the world's diversity and are more willing to accept comic-book heroes outside their own culture or sex.

"The more diversity you have in any mass-communication form, the better," Dr. Moran said. The more people see heroes of all kinds, he added, "the better they'll understand the diversity and complexity of the world around them."

Comic-book heroes who are women or from minority groups are no longer the exclusive domain of small publishers. In February, DC Comics, the oldest publisher of comic books, began distributing the comics of Milestone Media, a black-owned company in New York. Since then, Milestone has sold more than three million copies of its first four titles, "Hardware," "The Blood Syndicate," "Icon" and "Static," all of which feature African-American heroes. In November, Milestone will begin issuing "Xombie," featuring a Korean-American superhero, and heroes from other ethnic groups are expected to appear in comics produced by the company next year.

Gay characters are also appearing in nationally distributed comic books. Northstar, a character in Marvel Comics's "Alpha Flight," declared his homosexuality last year. DC Comics, the publisher of "Superman" and "Batman," also added a gay character, the Pied Piper, to its "Flash" series.

The number of superheroic women is also increasing. DC Comics, the publisher of "Wonder Woman," the longest-running comic book with a female hero, has begun several more comic books with female leads in the last few months, including "Black Canary," about a crime fighter in fishnet stockings; "Catwoman," Batman's feline adversary, and "Black Orchid," a mysterious character in DC's Vertigo series, which features graphic violence and strong language and is geared to mature readers.

Marvel's "She-Hulk," the cousin to "The Incredible Hulk," is still going strong after more than 50 issues, along with "Dark Angel" and "Wild Thing," the company's other comic books that feature a woman as the lead character. Several new projects with heroines are also being developed, including DC's "Supergirl" and Dark Horse Comics's "Ghost" and "Barb Wire."

However, there have been setbacks for some of the heroines in comic books. Marvel recently canceled "Silver Sable," which featured a female mercenary. Brent Frankenhoff, the associate editor of Comics Buyer's Guide magazine, said that historically female characters do not sell as well as their male counterparts because they are not seen as major heroes by men. Women, he said, make up only 16 percent of the comic-book-buying population.

Dr. Moran said that comic-book heroines have the same problems as television heroines. "Young boys have trouble accepting females as major heroes," he said. "The interesting thing is that girls have no problem watching television shows featuring male heroes, which explains why so many females will read comic books with male heroes instead of female."

Milestone's four owners, Derek Dingle, Denys Cowan, Dwayne McDuffie and Michael Davis, started their company to correct what they considered the misrepresentation of African-Americans in comic books.

"You only had two types of characters available for children," said Mr. McDuffie, the editor in chief. "You had the stupid angry brute and the he's-smart-but-he's-black characters. And they were all colored either this Hershey-bar shade of brown, a sickly looking gray or purple. I've never seen anyone that's gray or purple before in my life. There was no diversity and almost no accuracy among the characters of color at all."

Comic books with African-American heroes failed in the past because readers thought that the characters were not authentic, or they were repelled by the stereotypes presented, Mr. McDuffie said.

The comic-book world is enjoying a tremendous boom right now, partly because of the death of one of its own. More comic-book companies have been started and comic-book titles published in the first six months of 1993 than in any previous six-month period, in part because of the highly publicized death and rebirth of Superman, according to Dr. Samir Husni, who tracks new publications for his annual Samir Husni's Guide to New Magazines, based in Oxford, Miss.

"There is a huge interest in comic books from adults as well as children right now," Dr. Husni said.

There are an estimated 2.2 million comic-book readers in America, Mr. Frankenhoff, of the Comics Buyer's Guide, said. Once-struggling comic-book companies are now part of multimedia corporations, and the comics that children used to enjoy for 5 cents and 10 cents now average between $1 and $3 per issue.

The art is more lifelike, the stories more complex and the heroes more human.