MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Historically, Marvel Comics has represented diversity in its comic books better than DC. In fact, DC has been frequently criticized for its insensitive and stereotypical portrayals of race, gender, religion, and sexuality. Perhaps the best representation of DC’s struggle to incorporate diversity into its pages is Green Lantern. Since the title’s inception in 1940, the Green Lantern has been reinvented time and again. It has grown from one man who is indicative of cookie-cutter comic book heroes in the 1940s to an entire corps of space police who bring law and order to the universe. The comic itself has used constantly rotating central characters, aliens, and villains to represent diversity, but many of these characters tend to be insensitive to the marginalized individuals whom they are meant to appeal.

This presentation will focus on how Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and its subsidiary titles have portrayed race, gender, religion, and sexuality since the Silver Age. Specifically, it shows how enemies and aliens reflect American xenophobia, especially of Easterners, how African American characters volley between being blaxsploitative to fully developed, how characters’ religions are brought to the forefront of stories, and how women are treated negatively so much that the comic inspired Gail Simone’s “Woman in the Closet” theory. By analyzing Green Lantern from the Silver Age to present one can see clearly DC Comic’s general struggle with maintaining political correctness and staying relevant.