Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Is switching STAR BOY's race stupid?

I'll miss the boyish and endearingly goofy Star Boy of the past, regardless of skin color. There's nothing boyish about the reimagined character and it remains to be seen if he's endearing. I'm not as concerned about his altered skin color/race as I am about his prospects for the future. He looked rather downcast on the cover of LSH #1, and Waid's reference to Star Boy as a "hard luck guy" brings to mind the unlucky fate of the last black male Xanthuan who joined the LSH. Then there's >*gulp*< Nura's vision of Star Boy's grave -- the only one of Dreamer's pre-cog flashes that went unfulfilled. Maybe she was jacking into a different reality ...

Did that flash of vision show 'Star Boy' above his grave or 'Thom Kallor'?

The only masked member of the team as the Black guy? Nah, I don't that would work, as the only way we'd know he was Black would be if his costume re-design exposed his neck or arms. I know the current Ferro costume exposes some skin, but I preferred the Chris Sprouse design, which didn't expose any, IIRC.

I loved that outfit

Dreamer actually Dreamed up two seperate headstones - one (in English) said "To the memory of Thom Kallor, Starboy", and the second (in Interlac) said "Thom Kallor, Legionnaire. His star guides our way."

I've hesitated adding my 2 cents, but here goes...

presumably, all the characters are being three-booted to one degree or another. Thus, even Garth will be a slightly different Garth, Gim will be a different Gim, etc, just as Reboot Vi was quite different than preboot Vi, for instance.

Therefore, whether white or black, odds are Threeboot Thom would be different than Reboot Thom or preboot Thom. EVEN if he's called Thom and he is white, he's still a different Thom.

Therefore, so what if he's of a different ethnicity?

I fail to see the big deal here.

Other than an unneccessary continuity revision, that is.

And ignoring charcters that should/could have been used instead.

I'm wondering if it won't turn out that Xanthu is a colony that's almost exclusively black. That could explain the change.

Initially, I didn't like the change, but his costume is so fantastic that the race doesn't bother me.

We should consider the possibility that the Legion's seeming lack of racial and species diversity will factor into WaK's examination of 31st century society. The U.P. may have actually regressed insofar as racial/species mixing is concerned -- perhaps separate but equal is the order of the day and reproduction is as scientifically controlled as dog and horse breeding is in the 21st century.

The preview is replete with references to genetic engineering, and Waid has already shown an interest in the topic of racial and species "purity" in the White Triangle story. Star Boy's dark skin and African features might be integral to THAT particular character's backstory and not just an example of racial tokenism. For example, maybe S.B. is a 31st century Ubermensch who represents the very apex of genetic engineering, i.e., an attempt to maintain the human type in its unadulterated ancestral form. His love life might be affected by eugenic concerns, insofar as it's forbidden for Xanthuans to dilute their bloodline by intermixing with other species or races, like Naltorians, and doing so is perceived as sexual depravity. Something else else like that would certainly put a twist on the classic Star Boy/Dream Girl romance.

I don't think Karate Kid is of another race...I always thought he was asian. Sure he has a tan but still seems asian.

Jorge

not to get too far off the subject but how do or did everyone feel about Pete Ross being black in Smallville?

I didn't like it at first but warmed up to it later and I don't watch the show anymore anyway. Still wish Lana had been a redhead though.

Have had limited time to read the 6 pages here, so apology if i miss a point but...

HELL yes i have a problem with this.

i sort of hope that the character is meant to be Kid Quantum, the star symbol can be ambiguous, and i have no problem with that character appearing in the book.

But if it's Thom it sucks. If it's him it will epitomize pointless rehashed retconning for me in a way even more creatively bankrupt than that !@#$%#%$%^@#$! snake.

I liked Jaques as the second Invisible Kid aand the difference there was that 1) he was never meant to be Lyle and 2) his race was not an issue.

I liked that with Jaques the character was just black. That where he came from didn't really matter. Durlan's were looked at funny and Imskiians were militantly 'ethnic', but he was just another human.

If that is Thom then either were going to get some 'issue' origin of the type that dated Tyroc more than his flares, or it's pointless.

If more black members were needed on the team then they need to get over re-rewriting the original stories and start adding new characters.

And as for Val, wasn't his mother russian? i thought that he was half japanese and his features really depended on the artist at the time

I didn't care.

A possible problem with this...


So, race-switched Star Boy has been pretty kewl in the 3boot series as well as the 'toon, but the 'toon is over and the 3boot is possibly about to be wiped in favor of Johns' ACTION LSH.

Possible scenarios:

Brotha Star Boy is gone forever, which will be a blow to his fans... [sarcasm] something Legion fans know NOTHING about [/sarcasm]

OR

There will be a possible LSH with combined members from all 3 Legions... y'know, the members that survive the Superboy-Prime slaughterfest... [sarcasm] which I just can't WAIT to read about [/sarcasm]. With original Star Boy presumably now a permanent member of the JSA, the door is open for 3boot Star Boy in whatever LSH is coming.


Something else else to wonder about.

i saw it as a very good move. as a person of color, it's sad for me to see a futuristic society still dominated by caucasian faces. according to the one drop rule, "white" people will conceivably be the extreme minority in the future.

there's the argument presented by many people that "oh but, there's a dude with green skin, that's diverse". not when that character has caucausian features. as much as i love brainiac 5 (which is psychotic, i tell you), he is not a representation of diversity to me.

what i like about the current art on the series is that lyle and a couple others have more ambiguous complexions. i would argue that triplicate girl looks appropriately ambiguous. I always thought it was a loss not to cash in on Imra's name and make her more Indian looking.

tyroc as he was last seen is not a character i could relate to, he does not look appealing, he looks like one of those "trying too hard" characters. if he was redesigned and actually written well, i'd be all over him and his cute afro. jacques was too ridiculous for me. his outfit and hair were silly, as was his constant french (really, shouldn't they ALL have accents? why is he speaking an ancient language...).

cute danielle computo, i would be so for her cute interactions with b5 (which was what i wanted from that character since the beginning). catspaw was... gross and creepy to me. she's a sexual harassment law suit waiting to happen.

kid quantum was amazing to me and i miss her dearly. stylish and cute and a good leader!

on an artistic, purely aesthetic level, the current star boy is much more attractive and cool looking to me, and his characterization, at least in waid's run, was also very appealing. i was always very turned off by ugly bearded giant man thom as well as his very first appearance as a guy with a crew cut. i was neutral on the gates/xs era thom, he was just confusing background noise to me. whenever i got to a story with him it was like "oh god, whatever star boy, this is going too long"

to me, to make a character that is ethnic it is important to FIRST make the character, to give them a personality, and then at the end you go "and he's black". to me, that removes the problem that plagues more diversity attempts. because this seems the case with the current star boy, i find him appealing and a good move. i never think of him as a "token black character", i think "star boy is cos' right hand man, he's a little clumsy, he's allergic to sugar, and he's getting better at fighting!" and after all that, I think "oh yeah, he's one of the few black people apparently left on earth :/"

that panel that was cut out of the lightning saga that showed all three little star boys hanging out was very touching to me. i think any thom would go "hey there's a different race version of me? whoa!" and that's the extent of it.

Thank you for an insightful post, veryvery. I find it interesting and enlightening to read how a person of color views these characters, who are often well-meaning but misguided depictions by white creators.

As a Caucasian, I also thinks it’s noteworthy to point out where my opinions of these characters coincide with and differ from yours:

Agreed. Brainy's claim to diversity makes sense only if green-skinned people actually exist (the same holds true for Shady and Cham).

Tyroc was considered an embarrassment even when he debuted . . . a discofied angry black man? What bothers me, though, is how creators did not even attempt to salvage or develop his character. Almost all characters start out as stereotypes (consider Brainy, for example: the aloof intellectual who spouts ten-dollar words and can build just the right invention in a few seconds) but can evolve into something more (consider Brainy: the lovesick psychotic, etc.). Tyroc, instead, was shunted off to the side and ignored for years, only to be written out altogether. (Though he did appear in a more dignified role in 5YL.) "Tries to hard?" In some ways, yes. "Tries not hard enough" in other ways.

As for Jacques . . . I always liked him. As a previous poster noted, being black was incidental to his character. He was the new kid on the block who discovered the Legion as many fans at the time might have. They could see the Legion through his eyes and his attempts to fit in. Too, Jacques represented the next generation of Legionnaires better than his contemporaries, Blok and the White Witch, who seemed to have no trouble fitting in.

As for the French accent . . . you do have a point. I saw it as an affectation that was meant to distinguish his character from the others—which, in a way, also made his race incidental, as if being black wasn’t enough to distinguish him. (Which could be another way of saying that race doesn’t matter in the 30th century.) But I re-read some of those issues not long ago and the French accent does feel contrived and unnecessary.

I didn’t read most of LEGIONNAIRES, so I’m largely unfamiliar with these two characters, but I love your last line.

Agreed. KQ is a good example of what Tyroc might have been. She started out as an angry black woman (although her anger had to do with her brother’s death and not with her race) and evolved into a mature and forceful character whose growth was depicted extremely well.

I wonder if that crewcut somehow defined Thom in a more negative fashion that it should have. I say this because I had a similar reaction to the character, at first. It was only after “The Legionnaire Who Killed” cast Thom in a sympathetic light that I began to care about him as a character.

I liked the beard and longer hair, if only because they were among the first obvious signs that Levitz’s Legion was growing up. I can’t say that they changed Thom’s character much.

What aspects of the postboot Thom did you feel went on too long? The klutziness? Gim riding him hard? Or anything associated with the character? I thought most of these traits made Thom easier to identify with than the preboot version, though the klutziness was too often played for comic effect and diminished his crediblity as a Legionnaire.

An interesting view. One might suppose, however, that a person’s race has some influence on their personality and is not incidental (Jacques notwithstanding). A black person is said to have very different experiences in America than a white person, for example, and these experiences influence how each person develops (in addition to cultural and other factors unique to a particular group of people). I would think that writers should consider these factors before creating a character of any race, not tack them on after.

I haven’t read much of the threeboot, but you make a good case for the present Star Boy.

Agreed. It might be interesting, though, if Geoff Johns decides to keep both versions of Star Boy—then they would have to decide who keeps the name.

Ten centuries from now, blonde hair and blue eyes and 'white' skin should be rarer than hen's teeth, having gone the way of the blue-eyed blondes that used to live in India and Greece and Rome.

But these characters were invented back in a day when 'the future' was portrayed by the Jetsons. A bunch of clean-cut cacausians in a city full of flying cars and robots doing the menial work.

I'd rather have new characters introduced to flesh the team out, then older characters with their own devoted followings retconned into something visibly different. Kid Quantum 2 was a neat character, for instance.

Quite a few Legionnaires have 'wiggle room' in their ethnicity. I've seen some pretty dark-complected takes on Lu, Brin, Rokk, Val and especially Tinya (who looked East Indian at one point!). But others, such as Garth, Imra and, yes, Thom, have always been pretty darn caucasian, and I don't really think there's anything wrong with caucasians either.

If someone came along and redefined Rokk as partly of earth-Asian descent, and even went so far as to say that most Braalians are a similar mix, I could see that, he's often been seen as dark, and Kitson's take on Cos even had him look a tiny bit Asian. But Thom really wasn't 'on the cusp' there, and the character has been dragged over to places like Kingdom Come, making him one of the last characters they should be tweaking, IMO.

Being an ugly bearded giant man, I'm always delighted to see a dude with facial hair in the comics.

Although I have to say, my favorite thing about threeboot Star Boy, other than his awesome costume, is that he doesn't shave his head. I am beyond sick of every single black male in comic book having to be bald. There are still black men in the world with hair!

Total agreement here.

If Tyroc had been some cool sonic-powered character who happened to be black, I would have liked him a lot more than the disco caricature we got.

As for Jacques, I'm French enough to be annoyed when someone speaks in a 'French accent' in comic books. They can say 'the quantum distortion is tearing the ship apart!' in English, but they can't freaking remember to say 'yes' instead of 'oui?' Gimme a break.

I don't mind that Star Boy is now a black character.

I do mind that Thom Kallor is now black. I don't think it's ever valid to change a well-known character's race in order to meet some kind of quota.

This is one of the things I really don't like about Waid's Legion. Star Boy should either have been a new character -- or better yet, a new Legionnaire could have been invented.

But consider that most Legionnaires aren't from Earth. Their race wouldn't carry the same connotations it does on Earth. You can say Star Boy is black, but you can't say he's of African descent. He is certainly not an African-American. He's a Xanthune on Earth. What cultural connotations does that bring?

Well… actually I said that I wasn’t too hot on the very first version of Thom but… his very first appearance is adorable, I forgot that I read that recently (for the podcast). And him being bullied by horrible lana lang was amazing, he seems so sad and put upon! And he had a cute little girlfriend.

As for what annoyed me in postboot, it was that none of the interactions he had with characters seemed to make sense to me, it just seemed like they were trying to make him very pitiable, but it was at the expense of the other characters around him, if that makes sense. For example, when Gim was being mean to him, I wasn’t going “poor Thom” I was going “Gim has gone nuts, what’s going on here?!”. And the complications with Thom’s powers, I felt very impatient with that, like it went on forever! And then there was something where Dream Girl saw him die but then he didn’t… or SOMETHING. It was all a weird confusing blur so any time he showed up he just signaled “confusing time that won’t be wrapped up”. Haha, actually even in that preboot story where he killed Kenz? All I got out of that was “Superboy is not a good lawyer”

You see, I think race doesn’t really have that much to do with personality. Whether I am an industrious person, or an honest person, or a leader and or a follower, that is something that is not race based, that is based on how you were raised and your own personal momentum. Personality is how you DEAL with the issue of race, it might mean your life is a little more easy or difficult in certain situations, but race itself has really nothing to do with it. Yes a black person will, usually, come from different circumstances, but how they engage those circumstances, I believe, comes from within. I would not say that I work hard, or like to draw because of my race! I think it gives me more inclination to be sensitive about issues of race and try not to be horrible to people? But I’m pretty sure white people have those same inclinations on their own, right?

You see to me, it makes more sense that in a futuristic and I’ll say utopian view of the future such as the world of the legion, race isn’t associated with derogatory stereotypes, right? So it should make sense even more that a character should grow up not much differently than the majority. The problem with the legion is two fold, 1) that there are so few other races depicted other than white when, I think in a thousand years it’s safe to say that most of us will be multi racial. And 2) their first racially diverse member, tyroc, is very obviously a soap box character.

I think the best way to address race is a more subtle approach, to make a good strong character that HAPPENS to be of another race. This is especially true with writers for comic books, let’s face it, a comic book given it’s page and word count, is not really that effective a medium to provide a really GOOD representation of a person of color that deals with issues in a meaningful way unless that bok is really devoted to those subjects. It takes a very good author to make an ethnic character without crossing the line into offensive. (storm from the X-men is a good example of a character that gives me a headache most of the time). When you turn a character into a soap box, they immediately lose depth, and a depthless character is the worst thing of all! How will anyone relate to them then?!

Case in point? There’s a pampers commercial where the let you know that when you buy pampers, you give money to children in need all over the world. Nice eh? But the commercial has women in very ethnic dress (ex: a Chinese lady with one of those hats who looked like she just stepped out of a rice paddy) handing the white lady their children. Now obviously, pampers has good intentions, who doesn’t like humanitarian aid, but seriously?! My step mom is Chinese and she does not wear clothes from the turn of the century. Me and my coworker work with a team designing avatar fashions in China, and those people are so much better dressed than I am. Africa has modern cities, people! So does India!

Hahah really long reply, I’m sorry!! ;__;!!

Ah, yes, I wouldn’t mind Cham and Querl, et all being vehicles for thoughts on racial discrimination (that’s why I enjoyed the recent action comics run!). That takes care of the CHARACTERS thoughts on race. BUT, creators need to be sensitive to their READERS! Sometimes when I see a group of people that are all the same race hanging out together, I get the impression like “ah they only hang out with people of their own race, I’m not really welcome”. This is the same with comics for me, when I see a group of heroes that shouldn’t, by sheer probability, be of the same race, I think “I’m not really welcome here”. If a team is a Japanese specific team, for example, I would think “okay they’re all Japanese, that makes sense, there are like, two black guys that live there”. But if it’s an American team? Or a futuristic team? That just seems ludicrous!

And it’s not like White-Thom isn’t around, guys?! He’s not replaced! In fact, he’s super prominent, way more prominent than Black-Thom! He’s… right there as Star Man! I don’t understand what the complaint is! Actually… you know, I always saw it as “well of course White-Thom-StarMan isn’t in the current legion series, he’s chilling in the JSA. So there’s a different one there as a place holder”

being unfamiliar with white-Thom from back in the day, is his PERSONALITY very different from black-Thom? How does it compare? Personally, I think he’s a very nice guy, who cares that he’s black?! If he was going around punching kittens and babies in the face then I think people would have a reason to complain! But he’s MADE of kittens!

Man, I'm so with you there. When she was introduced, she was my favorite, just a bit naive and terribly kind-hearted (except when potato salad was flung into her face, then things got a bit testy...). But she's become harder and 'edgier' and grouchier over time, and the character I liked, a completely original take, turned into an 'angry black chick.'

It's like the opposite of character growth. Storm became *less.*

One problem with 'black Thom' is that he's not exactly African, as already noted in this thread. He's a Xanthu'an. Are Xanthu'ans from Earth, originally? Is an 'African' complexion normal for Xanthu'ans? Rare? Dominant? By making an alien *look* 'black,' the decision is meaningless. He's not even a token black, because he's not even human. If Sun Boy, or Colossal Boy, earth-natives (or at least of earth descent, in the event of a Mars-born Colossal Boy), were rebooted as African in coloration, perhaps even natives of a modern day African city or pan-African union of nations, then it would be at least relevant.

As written, 'black Thom' has no meta reason to be darker skinned (which could be a plus, since he's at least not being used to pound home any poorly thought out lessons on race...). He *looks* African, but he's from another planet, and we don't know if his people came from Earth originally, so he's not really any more a 'black man' than Brainiac 5.

He's worse than a token, IMO. Thom is 'black, but not really.' Kind of a 'safe black.'

And it wasn't until this moment, thinking of Legionnaires from Earth (Lyle, Gim, Dirk), that I realized that Earth needs wimmin! Are there are female Legionnaires from Earth?

"Race" IMO is best depicted as a cultural thing. IMO, the best depiction of race would be to define some cultural norms for that character and those of similar race, much like they did very well with Winyth. Some may certainly have adopted a certain look, a darwinian adoption, but "race" wouldn't be defined by that.


Artists can draw them a little bigger, a little smaller, barely without a word. Use a different color of ink though and boom go the threads.

Way I see it, they were just short on brown ink for the first 40 years. After all, what "race" WAS he? "White" isn't a race. Earthman apparently isn't a race even 1000 years into the future.


Point is, I guess I admit it is annoying, "randomly" changing a depiction. I had, have, and will have difficulty with Snecky so I'm not on a soapbox, just wishing "race" had a different (more prgressive?) definition then the one typically given.

What I was saying is, changing Star Boy's skin color shouldn't change his character, thus I don't mind the change. And that the Legion needs more non-white characters, however we get them... as long as they aren't offensive stereotypes.

I realize that if you take every black Legionnaire from every version, plus Ferro Lad who was meant to be black, you actually have a large number. It's easy to make a Legion with enough black characters that tokenism is the farthest thing from your mind. The more obvious problem is with Asians. The only East Asian Legionnaires, unless I'm being really slow here, are Karate Kid and (SW6) Dragonmage. Both with stereotypical Asian associations.