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By Jason Bourgeois
Love. Exciting and new. Or completely made up out of nowhere, and being shoved down our throats.
Yes, I'm giving you a little more love this month, but tinging it with dislike.
For those not into what I'm talking about, Marvel has decided to throw a wedding. They will have their premiere African American characters, Black Panther, the king of Wakanda, and Storm, mutant weather mistress of the X-men, get married later this year.
As is evident, I'm not entirely pleased with this decision. I like Storm, and the Black Panther, but the whole thing with getting them married seems so very forced, and almost insulting.
I don't have anything against marriages in comics, or other forms of media. I have a bit of a romantic side, but don't tell anyone. Yes, very often it can kill a lot of the relationship tension, but there is still plenty of things you can do with happy couples, or married couples. Some of those are flirting with the idea of breaking them up, but that is hardly the end of ideas. And also, in comics, relationships and romance aren't the main thrust of the stories, but one of many factors. If your characters are only defined bu their relationship with their significant other, then they likely need more work. Reed and Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four have been happily married, with the expected speedbumps, for many years, as well as Spider-Man and Mary Jane, to a lesser extent.
Unfortunately for Storm and T'Challa, they don't even have that. They have no relationship tension building up to an eventual hooking up, or even marriage. The only hints of any kind of relationship between these two characters was over twenty years ago in an issue of Marvel Team Up, even I didn't know existed until a few years ago.
Christopher Priest, while writing Black Panther in the late nineties, did some work to bring the characters a little more together, with some hints of backstory, but nothing ever really came from that either.
All attempts to put them together have come off as little more than Marvel realizing they have two prominent African American characters, so they should get hooked up. I'm a white guy, and even I find this somewhat insulting. I would like to think that isn't Marvel's goal back then, or now, but there's a lot of that feel to it, regardless. Even the ads are hyping two black characters getting together. And with already knowing they're getting married, any story trying to establish them getting a backstoried relationship is completely undercut. Which Marvel is actually trying to do with a new Storm miniseries, giving them a more fleshed out, forced relationship now that Marvel has realized that Storm and the Black Panther actually need a history together before they walk down the aisle.
Now, I will say, that this could actually be pulled off. Marvel could manage to give them a credible backstory that manages to make them work, and not seem too forced, and/or they could also go the route of a forced or arranged marriage for royalty reasons, or just because T'Challa needs a queen, and actually knowing Storm, and knowing she's seperated from the politics of his nation as well as a woman he can trust, could easily make things work in such a way. If I can make it work in a little ranty column, Marvel certainly could manage to get it to work as well.
The other downside of this is that it's being given a huge media push, to get interest, and is being pushed as such a huge deal, as it being two black people getting married, even getting coverage on BET. The less said about the writer of Black Panther running BET, the better, probably.
While this is a big deal, probably the bigger deal would be another wedding, happening in just a few weeks, and getting almost zero coverage anywhere, and that wedding would be between Luke Cage, and the Brian Bendis character, Jessica Jones. Why do I say this is a big deal? For several reasons. It's a black man getting married, yes, but he's getting married to a white woman. This would surely be seen as more important, as crossing racial barriers is still a big thing, rather than a black man marrying another black woman, like is pretty common place, although not so much in comics, for either case. And no one is talking about this anywhere. Shouldn't this be a big deal? At least as big as Storm and Black Panther? The story is also being told in New Avengers Annual #1, heralding the return of the annuals to Marvel's publishing plans.
It's a shame that such a forced idea is being given so much attention, while something that has been building over the last five years, and is breaking down actual boundaries, has been completely ignored by everyone.
Favoritism will get you everywhere, I guess.
Jason M. Bourgeois
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