Cultural Costume Conundrum

El Dorado (Super Friends) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I brushed against something in a previous commentary this week that I thought would make a great topic tonight. If you missed the article I was discussing the complaints about what color Power Ranger became which color Power Ranger, if that made any sense. I then said this:

There isn’t enough racial diversity in superhero comics or even movies without changing someone’s race between mediums. They shouldn’t do that and they also shouldn’t HAVE to do that, but that’s a commentary for another time. I fully support Saban and Disney’s choice, even if Power Rangers Samurai made a little less sense in the bargain. Samurai are native to Japanese culture because it’s native to Japanese history. It would be like having Arabs dress up as medieval knights. And I think I just came up with another commentary about cultural superpowers and character identities.

This is another common complaint, this time among comic superheroes. For example, if a superhero comes from Japan they’ll be draped in Japanese symbolism or their power has to come from a dragon or an oni (Japanese demon) or something like that. China is the same way. Greek heroes get their powers from the Greek gods. Things like this happen a lot and the cry of cultural insensitivity comes up. Are they right? Yes. And not necessarily. Don’t you love intros that contradict themselves to make a point?

Apache Chief (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The part I agree with is that, especially from Asian areas it seems, origins are based on local culture or legends. It happens with Native American heroes and villains, although there aren’t a lot of those. The only Native American hero I can think of right now is Apache Chief and the only villain is Black Bison. I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to Super Friends a lot because its four original characters are usually the biggest target of compliant. Namely that the Native American hero spoke not in broken English like many cowboy programs but certainly with a stereotype manner. Black Vulcan was black, Samurai was Japanese, and later a version of El Dorado had Mayan trappings and came from Mexico.

The main issue, and one I do agree with, is that when you have a character from a not-United States country they will be tied to their nation of origin while US heroes have more to draw from. This includes their superhero/villain identity but also the origin of their powers. China’s Great Ten has longer names and can’t fight without filling out the proper forms, which could be minor parody about Chinese bureaucracy. Marvel’s Sunfire had the Rising Sun of Japan on his outfit for years. Then again he thought he was avenging Japan against America, so that made sense. However, unlike US white and black superheroes, it is perceived that Asian or other national origin superheroes seem too tied to their national identity or national origin, with Ryan Choi, the second Atom, being an exception. They’re not completely wrong but there may be some reasoning behind it and cultural insensitivity may only be a part of it.

Certainly in the olden days that was the case. We didn’t have the internet, Godzilla movies, or anime to give us hints beyond tales by people who had been there for maybe a week, not counting post-World War Two occupation, as we broke down the militaristic government of the time. All we knew of these countries was a few hints of culture that we didn’t get right. Even as far as the 1980s all I knew about Japan was that it was an island with giant robots and monsters dominating its fiction. I didn’t see Dynaman until the late 80s, some time before Mighty Morphin Power Rangers brought live-action back to Saturday mornings, and even those were a parody dubbing and an Americanization respectively. Anime and Japanese-produced video games (thanks to the NES and later Genesis, although many of those games were translated for Western audiences) wouldn’t hit a new wave until sometime after that and with it we finally got further hints about how Japanese people actually live.

I think there’s another factor as well, this from a cultural versus imaginative standpoint. American history doesn’t have knights, dragons, or anything else, not counting Native Americans. Our ancestry comes from Europe, mainly England in the early days of what would become the United States Of America. And in those days we tried to distance ourselves from England as much as possible, having fought so hard to get away from King George and a country we no longer were directly born from.  So the fairy tales and myths of our ancestors’ homeland were not part of our new culture. At best we had the Bible, and it’s not like comics haven’t played games with that. (See Mephisto, Zauriel, and even Stanley and his Monster.) So while the trapping of the knights still sneak in to Iron Man and even Captain America, with his chain mail and shield–something Americans never really used in combat since the gun had long since been invented and made it obsolete, we went to other elements.

Phantom Detective, center

US superheroes costumes in the early days…actually, let’s go further back, to the pulp heroes that are the predecessor to the modern concept of the superhero. Look at their wardrobes. The Phantom Detective over there, as well as guys like the Shadow aren’t wearing a special costume. Phantom Detective has a normal dress suit on. Even the cape was part of fashion at the time and only became connected to superheroes exclusively as it fell out of fashion. (Although dress capes or winter capes are still made in one form or another.) He has a top hat and the kind of mask you’d wear at fancy dress parties that nowadays are usually used by movies for more questionable or just goofy events. The Shadow has a huge hat that might be a bit out-of-place, but the trench coat and scarf were probably easy to find, especially with all the money at his disposal. They weren’t specially designed theme cowls or full head masks and they didn’t have a huge symbol used as part of their identity. It’s was something you’d get at Brooks Brothers or out of the Sears catalog.

What we think of as a superhero costume owes more to athletics and the circus. Superman’s outfit was based on the circus strongman and showy capes and robes are still used by circus performers and boxers. Professional wrestlers from the time I grew up probably owe something to comic books but the traditional design had been used for a lot longer. Go watch an old black-and-white wrestling match with someone like Gorgeous George. These were the templates for the modern superhero costume in the US.

It makes some kind of sense that when it comes to costumes Japanese, Chinese, Arab, and European heroes would choose a different design. We didn’t know about Kamen Rider, Sentai, Metal Heroes, or Ultraman for the longest time but we knew Japanese were drawn to technology so having a lot of them with power armor or some tie to robotics isn’t too hard to believe.  We learned about samurai and ninjas and they were used in US design of Japanese characters, although we adopted the fictional ninja for some of our designs because they’re very effective. They can also have other origins. The Gatchaman was actually based on Western superheroes while Tiger & Bunny seems to be a mix of international superhero ideas, mostly Western and Japan. I haven’t seen a lot of Big Hero 6, either the upcoming movie or the original Marvel comics that they’re loosely based on but I have seen one guy with intelligent armor, like the US movie Star Kid. (Which is on the long list of BW Video Reviews, by the way.)

Sunfire (comics) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But getting back to the creativity, Eastern cultures, whether Arabian, Jewish, Indian, or Asian, as well as Native American, offer different ideas that Western ideas. Imagine a white guy draped in something related to dragons and not being tied to China? Hanna-Barbera’s Birdman names Ra, the Egyptian sun-god, as the source for his wings and solar energy blasts. The original Jaguar from Archie found his magic belt in a temple in Peru, and his recent replacement gets her power from a helmet from the same place. Then you have the aforementioned original Super Friends. HB didn’t seem interested in using metahumans (DC’s version of mutants) so they came up with other origins. Actually, we only get the origin of Apache Chief, as part of one of two episodes of Challenge Of The Super Friends that explored the backstories of heroes and villains featured on the show. Giganta’s new origin was connected to Apache Chief’s, as she stole the magic powder that gave the ability to change size. El Dorado, who was different in the comics, is draped in Aztec garb and has a heavy Mexican accent. Samurai is Japanese and uses Japanese incantations to call forth his powers, but at some point somebody decided his powers actually came from New Genesis, and not Japanese gods. He also has a strong accent but naming himself after a warrior from his homeland isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Like I said before, we don’t have that legacy of warriors in our history. At best we have the Revolutionary War, and if you’ve seen the Fighting Yank you know how well that actually works as a modern superhero costume. It’s not something you can go to more than once. And look how people make fun of the classic Superman costume, claiming he is wearing underwear on the outside because suddenly we have issue with spandex or nobody realizes his pants are one piece. Maybe Martha ran out of fabric for the pants and used part of the blanket she used to make the cape? At any rate it broke up the blue nicely, compared to the New 52 and Zack Snyder versions. There’s a reason they added that after the early Superman stories in Action Comics. Occasionally we go into knights or modern military (who are making their own Iron Man type technology) but that’s all we’ve got. So here is a character from another land, a new culture and a new source of costume design and power origin to play around with. As a creative person how do you not want to play with that?

Is there a problem? Yes, and it stems from the other part of the complaint. Why can’t a Japanese hero be born a mutant (Sunfire was) or get their powers from the same cosmic occurrence (Ryan Choi uses the same kind of dwarf star belt as Ray Palmer) or even radiation (if that exists I haven’t come across one memorable enough–heck, I only know Sunfire because he appeared on Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends)? I don’t think the problem is that other cultural sources of power or costume design were used but that even if you are an American your powers will come from Japanese folklore if you’re of Japanese decent, or Chinese folklore if you’re ancestry is Chinese. As usual it isn’t the use of A but the lack of B to balance things out. This is indeed something that should be addressed. The two characters I mentioned in this paragraph are exceptions rather than rules. Unless you’re portraying someone of a strong religious faith or that country’s answer to Captain America they should be allowed to form their own identity.

Although I’d be surprised to see a Japanese style superhero in a Western comic not based on a Japanese series or Westernized translation of same.

So yes, a little more variety with non-US heroes wouldn’t be a bad thing, but since all the good stuff was already uses with US heroes I’m not surprised that a creator wouldn’t want to play with the history of other cultures and who best than the people of those cultures? Again, the real problem isn’t that something exists, but that they aren’t balanced out properly. That’s something to look at.