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First introduced in the pages of X-Men , Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. Hero Me Not offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially \"exotic,\" an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you.

In 2017, Fireside Magazine did a report on the absence of Black writers and creators within speculative fiction (science fiction, horror, fantasy, and so on), called the Black Spec Report, as they had done in previous years. The report showed that although Black representation had doubled (going from 2 percent to about 4 percent), Black writers were still greatly underrepresented considering Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, leaving the report to conclude that “[s]uch dramatic underrepresentation can’t be mathematically explained by random factors.” This means that there is a zero percent chance that the lack of

The year is “the not-so-distant-future.” The actual year is irrelevant as it could be any year in any time, and you could, in fact, be any person. In this time, it does not matter if you are Black or white, man or woman—there is no discrimination and racism has been eliminated. How, you ask, do you know this? Because they told you so. In fact, we all watch as you, Ethan Hawke, run around the screen scrubbing all evidence of your true self away, replacing it with DNA from another, more suitable white man. Gattaca (1997) is the future,

The genre field¹ has a long history of being not only racist, but also misogynist, relying on extreme rape and violence against women as plot devices. In this way, women are rarely allowed to be the heroes of their own stories outside of the fantasy of masculinity. Although the victims sometimes seek revenge in one-dimensional pursuits of retribution, more frequently violence and other forms of racism and misogyny serve to prove the masculinity of the male protagonist or to offer him a revenge motive, even becoming a vehicle for redemptive agency for male characters. Other times these motifs are simply

In grad school at Georgia State University while pursuing my degree in African American Studies, I had a professor who loved to call my research on comics “playing with the funnies.” We both laughed, as it was harmless, good-natured ribbing. She was an older Black woman who researched serious subjects like the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya and Kikuyu women, and she grew up in an era when the “funnies” were comic strips in newspapers which featured weird, white people who went on strange adventures. The funnies were for white people and about white people. But like everything else, the

The first panel of the comic depicts a Black woman. She carries a machete in each hand, and her skin and her afro are black, smooth, and perfect. She is adorned with jewels, and her face is completely covered with a veil of shining stones, obscuring her face so that you will never know what she looks like. And, really, this is the point. She wears a necklace of jewels that drapes over her breast but the only clothing on her body is a long, multicolored, flowing loincloth to honor the ancestors. Her favorite colors are red, purple, and copper.