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Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero
African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Jeffrey A. Brown
What Milestone comic books do is put the mind back in the body, the Clark Kent back in the Superman. That Milestone does this so often with black superheroes also allows them to develop the image of powerful black men as much more than mere hypermasculine brutes - "tough, but not too tough." When the conclusion to Milestone's third cross-over event, "The Long Hot Summer," was published, many of the readers I spoke with were eager to point out that the surprisingly peaceful resolution to an amusement park riot was indicative of the company's approach to brains-over-brawn. "Man, just when you thought everything was going to get really, really bloody," two fans in their early twenties explained, "Wise Son [leader of The Blood Syndicate, Milestone's multicultural super-gang] gets to the park's communication systems and simply talks people out of hurting each other . . . basically shames them into being responsible for their actions." Likewise, a senior university student was able to recall, almost word for word, his favorite bit of dialogue from Hardware #9, a series featuring a black scientific genius who dons his self-constructed super armor to fight crime: "Hardware is fighting this Alva Technologies-created female version of himself called Technique," the student recalled, "when he loses his jet pack and is falling from thousands of feet up. He grabs his pack and tries to fix it while he's falling, thinking, 'So here's where I find out if I'm the genius that my I.Q. tells me I am.' When the pack works again, moments before becoming street pizza, he says, and this is a great line, 'Worked like a charm! Who says those tests are culturally biased?'"
As one especially enthusiastic and thoughtful black fan in his late teens remarked, "It's nice to see cool brothers in the comics who can think their way out of a rough spot. You know, Icon's a lawyer; Hardware's an all-purpose science super-genius; and Static, well, he's just a high school kid, but he's the coolest and, I think, the smartest of all them. Yeah, I'd stack Static up against any other superhero any day. He's the man." Other readers seemed to agree: "Oh yeah Static, he's got the best sense of humor, and the thing is everybody thinks he's just this kid with wimpy lightning powers, but he's the smart one, always putting down guys bigger than him by being smarter."
As an example of the preferred Milestone brains-over-brawn style, several fans chose one of Static's earliest adventures as among their favorites. The story entitled "Pounding the Pavement," written by Robert L. Washington and Dwayne McDuffie, appeared in the August 1993 issue Static #3. The tale features the first appearance of a powerful new villain, Tarmack, in Milestone's fictional setting of Dakota City. As the characters in the book point out, Tarmack looks and acts like a black version of the evil, liquid-metal T2000 from the popular movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1992). Essentially he is a shape-shifting mass of, well, tarmac. Usually configured in the shape of a large and muscular black male body, Tarmack can transform himself into liquified states or change his appendages into whatever weapons he desires, including knives, hammers, and anvils. One of Virgil (Static) Hawkins's friends describes Tarmack as "a six-foot blob of silly putty that turns into Riddock Bowe whenever it wants to." The problem is that Tarmack has his sights set on making a name for himself as the guy who takes down Static. He first tries to challenge Static to a fight by destroying a local high school hangout; unfortunately Static, who was tied up washing dishes at his part-time job in a nearby burger franchise, arrives too late to fight but in time to rescue bystanders trapped in the building's rubble.
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