Paging Dwayne McDuffie

Evan Narcisse has some thoughts on Grant Morrison's Batman run and black superheroes:

Comics guru Grant Morrison is in the middle of a long Batman run and part of his treatment of the Bat-mythology is to accept everything. The goofy Batman-fights-space-aliens stories from the 1950s? Those happened. (Maybe only in Batman's head, but they happened.) Morrison also takes the approach that the cumulative effect would impact Bruce Wayne's psychology to the point of engendering a nervous breakdown. Morrison's concerned with a meta-narrative that alleges that these stories take on a life of their own and feed back into the story of the character.

I wonder what that approach would yield if you looked at the histories of more notable black comics characters like War Machine or Luke Cage or Black Panther in this way. It'd make you wanna holler. I know that dramatic structure requires embattled protagonists but, taking their fictional lives in the long view, these characters have had very few moments of well-adjusted happiness. In the comics, War Machine's a barely-human cyborg obsessed with righting the world's wrongs.In the real world, his comic's about to be cancelled. Chances are we'll have some kind of relaunch or re-imagining of James Rhodes and his War machine alter ego to tie in with the Iron Man 2 buzz next year. Here's hoping he can actually be a human being in it.

I think Don Cheadle is a good start.