History of Illustration by Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove and Whitney Sherman (review)

Abstract

367 sion of stories and characters that the authors do find promising. Nevertheless, in praising an example of Luke Cage coming into a leadership role in 2005’s the New Avengers, the authors ignore that the policies he used this leadership to enact are an echo of the kind of “broken windows” approach equated with Rudolph Guiliani’s draconian mayorship of New York City—policies that disproportionately targeted communities of color (280–81). This kind of context seems crucial in considering how Cage is written by Brian Michael Bendis in these comics and is a context that scholars like Jonathan W. Gray (and I myself) have already pointed out when writing about them. Truly, it would be too much to ask of any survey like All New, All Different to adequately explore all these interconnected perspectives on race and American superheroes, but nevertheless the book would have been better served to clearly frame its claims that comics “promulgat[e] unique conceptions of race and ethnicity” and “produce attitudes” by spending more time considering who creates those messages, who receives them, and how (14). Ultimately, this incompleteness gives the impression that Austin and Hamilton perceive a very narrow and unsophisticated audience for the comics to which they ascribe so much power.