"Becoming Fantastical" in Black Superhero Comics

arieck Scott’s Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics is, in the parlance of the genre he so lovingly assesses, “Amazing!” As rich in its attention to the content and form of comics as it is to the political and theoretical importance comics comprise as archive, Keeping It Unreal masterfully renders the how and why of blackness’ relationship to superheroism. Equal parts counterhistory of the depiction and narrativization of black and queer heroes, theory of reading of and identification with superheroes, and love letter to an undertheorized and (often) misunderstood genre and form, Scott’s book exemplifies the capacity of contemporary black queer studies to reconfigure relationships between reader, text, and the world at large. At its center, Scott’s theoretical and political project is invested in reclaiming fantasy from its marginal position in contemporary literary studies and using fantasy to theorize both the ontological and the epistemological horizons of blackness and queerness, showing its importance to the embodied experiences of black and queer people. The project begins with a compelling concatenation of speculations: “What if there were no racism or antiblackness or sexism or misogyny or homophobia or classism or ableism or transphobia or any of the horribly effective ways the modern world has found to create disposable people?” (7). Scott propounds these J U S T I N L. M A N N