If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren’t just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can’t be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn’t all white people and neither is Lex Luthor.
Creating Black Comic Book Characters
*sigh*
It’s sort of a given that “good” Black characters in comic books are few and far between. Most tend to be lame, ethnic cliches or just filling the role of a White character in some weird ass Affirmative Action initiative to add a little color to some team lineup.
It’s really not that complicated though.
Choosing a character’s ethnicity can determine how they will behave in a story but it does not have to be the sum of their existence and shouldn’t take a lot of thought unless their race is an important part of the plot.
Skin color is not always a determiner of any sort of behavior, so it doesn’t really matter when you create a character what their ethnicity is. Again, you can add that to the story if you wish but honestly it is all fiction, so you can make up whatever you want. A good creator will just make their fiction believable.
The same can be applied to gender and sexuality; it doesn’t have to be pandering, forced or hyperbolic, just entertaining.
