Worlds of Otherness

above: the Arkestra's uncredited Batman tie-in (seriously)

So I read this post by Douglas Wolk on Grant Morrison's lamentable use of a Magical Negro stereotype in the latest Batman right after I saw Carl Wilson mention Lil Wayne's use of an alien "Afronaut" persona, and now I think that lazy caricature Douglas rightly excoriates is extra-regrettable, because Morrison himself has recently drawn upon Afro-Futurism in a far more interesting way.

To paraphrase my comment from that Savage Critics post: "I think Morrison's use of black characters in Mister Miracle and Final Crisis is far more complex than the cliched trope in Batman. Their presence as the godly aliens' 'human shells' seems like a variation on the Afro-Futurism that Sun Ra and George Clinton invoked, flipping the exoticization of gifted minorities into a cosmology of black people as hyper-advanced beings." In the Mister Miracle miniseries heroes and villains are divided amongst various races (Metron, fittingly, appears in white and black incarnations). The earthly corruption that surrounds Shilo Norman does have a questionable hip-hop flavour to it (Missy Elliott Granny Goodness proffering the Apokolips equivalent of video models, a drug called "flat" that makes people plastic), but my hunch is that this was Morrison's somewhat glib, heavy-handed attempt at foregrounding a favourite theme: baddies who lurk behind every facet of society, whether pop or psychology. Using "the techniques of the healer" to inflict pain; transmuting hate into "pure beat." Of course, with Morrison the conspiracies rarely remain that simple. Although Sun Ra did demand cultlike asceticism from his Arkestra...

And there's other parallels. Like our Glaswegian magician, Herman "Sonny" Blount recounted a life-changing abduction, when aliens took him to Saturn and revealed the hidden truths of the universe (unlike Morrison, Sun Ra eventually claimed an origin there). It's hard not to hear an echo of the Arkestra's astral Egyptology when Shilo's friends complain that he's "living like some modern pharaoh...was it really the smartest idea to tell the newspapers you'd been contacted by aliens?" When he tells Desaad that "down in the dirt there was brotherhood and community and a vision...like human life, all human life, was so precious...and every individual human story was worthy of mythology," Morrison's utopianism sounds similarly spacey.

He also seems to be avoiding the mistake of many college kids and swing-loving hippies, who treat Sun Ra as "some sort of jazz Dr Seuss." Afro-Futurism means so much more than that. It's entwined with the chains that bound blacks in America: slave ships preceded rocket ships. And I think Morrison realizes this. He's channeled it before, for one thing, with The Invisibles' Jim Crow and "the empire never ended." It's a recurring theme in black SF: "There was a war in heaven, and evil won." Armageddon been in effect. Reviewing the first issue of this mega-crossover, Douglas wrote that "Morrison's described Final Crisis as a take on the eschatology of this cultural moment, which seems about right." I agree - and that take is seemingly adapting these afrofuturist ideas as an integral part of its address. Look at Darkseid's herald, Libra: the scales-tipping arbiter in a moral universe that always bends towards injustice. Or consider the reimagined Anti-Life Equation - a meme that "teaches" its victims to be "stunted slaves."

Not to mention the more obvious presence of Shilo Norman, who appears to be playing a central role in this conclusion to Morrison's long storyline. "Avatar of freedom" and civil rights, he triumphantly escaped death itself at the end of Seven Soldiers. That page could be the cover to a Sun Ra LP Jack Kirby never drew. In Reading Comics' chapter on the maxiseries mothership, Douglas wrote: "The implication of Seven Soldiers is that you become a superhero by evolving beyond your cultural context," and Carl links those alien personae with liberation from it - into the supercontext, perhaps. Maybe I'm engaged in an epic misreading here, or maybe Morrison will devolve towards more dodgy characterization of minorities, but what if Mister Miracle is the Afronaut who ends up freeing all of us, everywhere? Forget the Anti-Life Equation. Like the man from Saturn said: we came from nowhere here, why can't we go somewhere there?