I think it was appropriate for Brandon Soderberg at ComicsForSerious to call out Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man: Fever #1 for a scene that he finds to be “insanely racist.” I’ll be honest, I didn’t think anything of it at first, and even as I started to post this I was disagreeing with Brandon. I mean, “thass” is a stereotypical pronunciation of “that’s” because that’s how some black people pronounce it. Not all, not most, but enough that it’s become part of the stereotype for the urban black guy. I think there are probably enough guys in NYC who talk like this that it’s not racist to choose one as a small character in a scene set in an NYC apartment building. An old couple on the street below might speak with some Yiddish inflection, the hot dog vendor might sound Italian with his extra a’s at the end of words. You want characters to have a bit of zest to their dialogue, and as long as that ethnic shorthand isn’t used to enforce stereotypes, no problem. My black California friend Steve speaks differently than my white New Jersey friend Jay, but not a lot, and in a scene you may exaggerate differences a bit for dramatic effect, so each character sounds different. A twenty-two page adventure comic doesn’t lend itself to developing supporting characters or even having them speak much like real people. You try to make it as quick and punchy as you can.

It also threw me off that in writing about stereotypical dialogue, Brandon kind of undermined himself with this ramped-up patois that he has no problem avoiding later in the piece:

See, back when those shits were sorta hard to find and I had like my Comics Journal issues and maybe one or two dusty-ass collections from my local, suburban library and that’s it, the idea of Ditko (or Kirby or Moebius or even, Frank Miller) bubbled-up into something no artist could never live up to.

It’s also not that big a deal that the black character is dressed somewhat anachronistically. You could leave it at McCarthy not doing his homework and being out of touch. But that leads me to ultimately agree with Brandon in wondering just what McCarthy’s point was in using this character. The joke in the scene is that after Spider-Man defeats the Vulture in the guy’s apartment, he dials 911 from the guy’s phone, and when Spidey tells him this, the guy looks all worried because he’s going to now have to deal with cops. Brandon surmises that McCarthy is implying the black guy must be a criminal to be worried. I think one could also interpret his reaction as concern that, guilty or not, having police in his apartment, taking a statement, could just be a huge hassle, and certainly the stereotype exists of the police who needlessly hassle black people because they can. But however McCarthy intended his punchline to be interpreted, there’s undoubtedly a racial component that isn’t very funny and should have been changed to be less potentially offensive. Maybe make it a white, hippie-looking guy, so the impression is that the police might find drugs in his apartment or something. Sometimes a black guy is just a black guy, but in the context this one is used in the book, it’s hard to defend.

P.S. I’m a new fan of Brandon’s blog. Read it.

—Christopher Allen