While fantasy is often thought of as an escape from reality, primarily of value if it offers a blueprint for some utopian future, Nubia taught me that fantasy can be an active engagement with reality and a basis for questioning the present. 2021 brought us the miniseries “Nubia and the Amazons,” as well as a young adult graphic novel, “Nubia: Real One,” starring a teenage Nubia. After nearly 50 years of rare appearances in comics, Nubia - or new versions of the original (she’s no longer Wonder Woman’s twin) - has been revived. Her commercial failure didn’t stop me from taking Nubia to heart and making her a star in my own imagination. But unlike other contemporaneous DC Comics assays in racial diversity, such as now-mainstay character John Stewart (the Black Green Lantern), Nubia didn’t become a consistently recurring character in DC’s fantasy world. Nubia was created as part of DC Comics’ attempt during the 1970s to integrate its all-white roster of superheroes and broaden its consumer audience, following the splash made by rival Marvel Comics, which had introduced the Black Panther in 1966. And because I saw it, I started reading superhero comics. Nubia and her shared parentage with Wonder Woman were blotted from two-dimensional existence by DC Comics’ successive rounds of reboots starting in the 1980s.īut I happened to see one of those first issues when I was in third grade in 1973, living on an Army base in West Germany where my father was stationed. She became a footnote known mostly to superhero comics cognoscenti, however.
Endowed with all the gods-given superhuman gifts and martial prowess of her iconic sister, Diana, Nubia’s story was revealed over the course of three issues of Wonder Woman comics in 1973. Strange, had as powerful an impact on my childhood imagination as the little-known Nubia, Wonder Woman’s Black twin sister. None of my favorite superheroes, such as Thor and Dr. At least some of today’s youth will find what they need to learn and thrive elsewhere, despite the unnecessary damage these attacks on academic freedom inflict on them. My experience suggests that even if some of the recent harmful curricula and book bans succeed in restricting kids’ education, there’s hope that they will fail in their ultimate aim.
Those frequently dismissed, unrealistic, action-adventure stories about mostly white male heroes that were written and drawn almost entirely by white male creators fostered and honed my powers of imagination. Reading superhero comics was a powerful and unexpected source for my willingness to question the status quo. I resisted and challenged white supremacist ideas when I could identify them, and I had a strong aversion to injustice. Yet even in my elementary school years I knew that anti-Black racism was powerful. As a young Black boy in the 1970s, one who was queer but didn’t exactly know it, I was taught next to nothing in school about slavery (other than Lincoln’s heroics in ending it) and absolutely nothing about the cornucopia of possibilities for one’s gender or sexuality.
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