Imaginary Worlds - Truth, Justice and The American Way

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

Tracing the history of the superhero genre can reveal a lot about how we understand our own history, and how history gets whitewashed. Shawn Taylor, John Jennings and Art Burton look at how black superheroes evolved from a black Wild West lawman to HBO's Watchmen. And I talk with John Valadez about Mexican American masked vigilantes who may have inspired Zorro, and other masked heroes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. At first, I thought this was a terrible idea. Damon Lindelof, one of the showrunners from Lost, was going to reboot The Watchmen, which was a groundbreaking 1986 graphic novel about retired, semi-fascist superheroes. Now, there already was a Watchmen movie in 2009. It was a commercial and critical dud. But Damon Lindelof said that the HBO series would be a sequel, taking place 33 years after the events of the comic books. A lot of people besides me were pretty skeptical about this project.

But his Watchmen TV series turned out to be one of the best single seasons of serialized sci-fi fantasy TV that I have ever seen. I mean, the rumor is that HBO is not going to make a season two because season one was such a perfectly told story. And spoiler alert, I'm going to reveal a major plot twist on the show. Now, the Watchmen were a superhero team with a deep history. Most of them were masked vigilantes with normal human lifespans. So in the comics, we learn that the Watchmen had been cycling through generations of heroes going back to the 1940s. And in flashbacks in the comics, we learn that the first hero of the group was called Hooded Justice. He wore a hood over his head with a noose around his neck, along with gloves and a cape.

And he was the only member of the Watchmen whose secret identity we never learned. And the comics made it seem like Hooded Justice was white. And the comics made it seem like Hooded Justice was white. But in a flashback episode of the TV show, we learn that he was a black cop named Will Reeves in 1940s New York. He was almost lynched, and he used the noose and the hood around him as his superhero costume. And he wore makeup around his eyes under his hood to fool people into thinking he was white. You ain't gonna get justice with a badge, Will Reeves. You're gonna get it with that hood.

And if you're gonna stay a hero, townsfolk gonna need to think one of their own's under it. You sure you wanna do this? I'm sure. The Origin of Hooded Justice was probably one of the best episodes of television, forget genre, forget whatever, of ever, because it's like, that's how it would happen. Sean Taylor teaches pop culture at San Francisco State University. And he loved that episode because it tapped into something that he had often thought about, but had never seen explored in the superhero genre. Who else would be a masked vigilante aside from a marginalized person? I mean, if you want to think about the, I mean,

you are living under whatever conditions you're living in and you want to strike out, but you know, you can't go out as a woman, as a black person, as an Asian person, as a Latinx person. So wouldn't you put on a mask and go out and try to gain some type of redress from the oppression that you're under? And so for me, I always thought that having so many white masked vigilantes was always weird to me. John Jennings teaches about comics at UC Riverside. He's also a comic book writer, Jennings teaches about comics at UC Riverside. He's also a comic book writer. And he loved that storyline because he says it worked as a meta commentary about race and representation within the superhero genre.

He's already he's like a black cop. So he's a superhero passing as a cop. But he's also like closeted, you know, as far as like sexually closeted. But then also just the fact that you're black in America means you already have like a split consciousness to start with. So it was like, whoa, this is like a, it's like one of those Russian dolls, you know? What do you mean by that? When you're talking about how then on top of that being black in America, he's a double consciousness. How do you feel like that played out in an interesting way with him and with his character?

You know, as far as like double consciousness theory, that's, uh, that was put forth by W.B. Du Bois, uh, in his classic, you know, Souls of Black Folk, uh, book. We're talking about the idea that every African American has, like, there's a black component to our, to our being. And also there's this American side. And a lot of times those particular sides are, are at war with each other. So in some ways, like when you actually create a

Black superhero, you're creating this schism already because, you know, superheroes aren't American invention. They were created in America, you know, and they represent in some ways different aspects of belonging, you know, in our culture. So having a superhero that represents you is actually almost like a badge of being an American citizen in some ways. That's why it's such an interesting thing about representation. I don't know. I just think I thought it was really brilliant personally. Now, the aspect of Hooded Justice that really fascinated me was his lineage. The main character on the show is his granddaughter, who is a masked vigilante called Sister Knight. And we also learned that Will Reeves, or Hooded Justice,

was inspired by a legendary Wild West figure named Bass Reeves, who may have been his grandfather. There's actually a fake silent movie in the TV show that looks totally authentic. And as a kid, Will Reeves was obsessed with this movie. And they're in front of the church now. And the doors burst open, and all the townsfolk come running out to see what's what. The man in black tells them the sheriff's no good.

Cattle thief. He's stealing from the town. And now they ask the man who he is. He throws his hood back into the Bass Reefs, the black marshals of Oklahoma. He shows his badge. town's folk cheer. But Bass Reeves is not a fictional character. He was a real person.

And his story may have inspired the superhero genre itself. But the way that his legacy was whitewashed brings up a lot of issues around race, representation, and the question of who gets to tell your story. Art Burton wrote a book about Bass Reeves. He also grew up in Oklahoma, where the Watchmen TV show is set. And Art comes from a long line of black cowboys. In fact, he says about a fifth of all cowboys on the frontier were black,

although you wouldn't know it from watching Hollywood westerns. And he says Bass Reeves even has a perfect origin story. Yeah, he was a slave. His slave master was a cat. Officer in the Texas Regiment, 11th Texas Cavalry Regiment. And he was a body servant, and they were playing cards.

While they were playing cards, Bass got upset and thought he was being cheated. And so he knocked his master out. In Texas, for a slave to hit his master, that was punishable by death. He managed to escape. And the only place he could hide was living among Native Americans, where he acquired a unique set of skills. Well, he learned a lot about riding horses and different ways to make himself look small or large at a distance. He learned to master firearms, pistols, rifles.

He became ambidextrous with his weapons. He learned to work in disguise. That was his regular MO. When the Civil War broke out, he fought for the Union. And afterwards, he became a U.S. Marshal in what was called the Indian Territories, which are territories like Oklahoma that had not become official states yet. which are territories like Oklahoma that had not become official states yet. Now, being a U.S. marshal on the frontier was very dangerous. The job had a very high turnover rate. But he lasted over 30 years until he retired without a scratch.

Most deputies would bring back three or four people at a time. Bats would bring back 10, 11, 12 at a time. If he went after you, he was going to catch you. If you tried to hide from him, he would find you. And if you tried to shoot it out with him, he was going to kill you. And they say, you know, they said he killed 14 men. Well, at the time

he died, there was three or four newspapers that stated he killed over 20 men in the line of duty. But he wasn't proud of killing people. He was more proud of his detective skills. They were singing songs about him. He had that big of a legendary status in Indian territory. And if you're thinking, God, he almost sounds like the Lone Ranger,

that is not a coincidence. Art thinks that Bass Reeves was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger. And of course, the Lone Ranger inspired many other fictional masked heroes. He's the closest person in reality to be similar to the Lone Ranger. He rode a white horse at one time. He worked in disguise, such as the Lone Ranger. He was mandated by federal law to have a posseman, at least one, with him whenever he went into the field. He had an Indian with him. Many times he went into the field. The Long Ranger handed out silver bullets. Bass Reeves handed out silver dollars. People didn't remember his name. They just called him the Black Marshal. You know, who was that masked man?

They just called in a black marshal. You know, who was that masked man? The long ranger's name was Reeve, very close to Reeves. And Bass Reeves also had a very strong moral compass, to the point where he arrested his own son for murder. And they put a warrant out for his arrest. And Bass told the U.S. marshal that he didn't want any marshal to get hurt arresting his son and give him the warrant he would do it. And so he went out and arrested his own son for murder. Now, this story may seem too good to be true.

at the University of Wyoming who verified that the daughter of Fran Stryker, who was the main writer on the Lone Ranger radio series, said that her father did know about a legendary black marshal who often wore a disguise and rode with a Native American sidekick. And while Bass Reeves was a legend in his day, and honestly a more interesting character than the Lone Ranger, it is the Lone Ranger who ended up being an icon. And it's pretty obvious why. In fact, part of the reason why Bass Reeves thrived was because he oversaw territories like Oklahoma that were not officially states yet.

And when Oklahoma did become a state in the early 20th century, institutionalized segregation was established. And he was wiped off the history books until he was rediscovered by historians in the 1970s. Now, the 1970s was also the time when the superhero genre became more diverse, and suddenly there were all these new black superheroes. As a kid, Sean Taylor really enjoyed those comic books, but he could always tell the writers were white. I think the introduction of black superheroes was always more like, it was like blaxploitation, but in comics,. It's Black Panther and Black Goliath.

I was like, wow, do we really have to add that? Do we have to add the descriptor Black in front of everything? For me, what happened was when Storm came in in the X-Men, John Sykes X-Men, when they introduced Storm, it was just like a Black woman character who didn't have some type of racial signifier approach to her name. And it was just this amazing thing that was not attached to any other thing that came before it. Well, it's funny because DC had Black Lightning who is, you know, she could have been Black Storm. Yeah. And once again, it was just like it removed itself from having the descriptor of black and she just became this fully formed hero who's controlling the weather and has relationship to africa that wasn't like mythologized like black panther was a wakanda and that wasn't like this like this so far to the left that where it's like oh yeah we can accept this because it's so far out of the realm of possibility and so for me

it was for me the whole idea of black superheroes really hit home with Storm. That's interesting because, I mean, everyone's been praising Black Panther on so many levels. So it's interesting to hear that, you know, when you were younger and, you know, just a kid into comics, that Wakanda and Black Panther didn't really quite sit well as well with you. I mean, you know, he fought the Klan. That was amazing. But there was still something even like almost overly noble in how they wrote his dialogue. It was almost a caricature. I mean, not to say that take away what Kirby and Lee and the people who worked on Black Panther. But it was so like, it felt really like almost like a recipe.

Like, here's how you make a noble Black character. Add hyperdiction. Add Africa. Add Black. And it felt like it didn't feel authentic to me the way Storm did. John Jennings agrees. Some of the attempts by white writers to create Black superheroes actually weren't that bad. You know, honestly, a character like Black Panther, when Don McGregor was writing Black Panther, it was really well done because he was very serious about representing the character well. And same thing with Tony Isabella. I mean, I think Black Lightning is an aspirational character and I think it's well constructed. But I think Luke Cage to me, or like Black Goliath, some of the villains in Luke Cage were also like, whoa, what were you thinking with this?

Or the fact that his cuss word or his catchphrase was sweet Christmas. You know, like, I think they got it from like a Chester Himes novel, but I was like, that still doesn't sound like cool and it shouldn't be. You know what I'm saying? Or the first black green lantern, whose name was Jon Stewart. They give him like this kind of upper middle class gig. He's an architect, right? Jon Stewart is. But he's speaking like a revolutionary.

Like he's like, no, I'm not going to take this mess from these pigs. You know, he's kind of like that. You know what I'm saying? But he's also an architect. And when Black writers finally started taking over these characters in the 2000s, Jon says he could feel the change immediately. There's a sense of resonance with them. Like, for instance, you look at like, you know, Reginald Hudlin's run on Black Panther. John says he could feel the change immediately. for a long time. They understand the pitfalls of, they know the history of like how black characters have been kind of portrayed in various media. And you can definitely tell

they really are taking into effect that the culture is, you know, the cultural kind of affect is different. It's very different. And I think I can see that sometimes when you see, you know, black creators working with black characters. But he thinks that black writers have the most freedom with independent comics, like Brother Man or Black, which is a comic book series that imagines what if only black people had superpowers? There's a bit of a spectrum of what you can do when you're independent that you can't do when you're actually beholden to a giant company like Disney or Warner Brothers, right? Where it's like,

you're not on message, right? Working for those characters can be really exciting, like, but also extremely limiting because you have all of this continuity that you got to deal with. You have all these different shareholders you got to deal with. And a lot of times you're getting like totally rewritten by your editors, right?

Whereas like if you're, if I want to do another version of the whole, which is one of my characters, that I created with Damian Duffy, then I can go in on different issues with no oversight and just actually be more freely to express a spectrum of experiences. So I think that's probably one of the biggest things. Everybody wants to work for those big companies,

but then once you get there, you're like, whoa, I feel like I have handcuffs on now. You know what I'm saying? So yes, it's a trade-off. Now the showrunner of Watchmen was white, but he made sure that his staff was mostly people of color, including Cora Jefferson, who wrote the Hooded Justice flashback episode.

And Watchmen did get a lot of praise from Black fans, but Chun says there was also discussion as to whether it is okay to use real traumatic events from history as fodder for this sci-fi fantasy world. I am on the opposite side. I think that if you can introduce real Black history through spectacular popular culture, I think you're doing the memories of those two things a great service.

But I think it's really important that we start introducing or reintroducing true American history for all of our citizens so we can actually have a fuller picture of heroism and sacrifice that is the foundation of this very country. Now, there is one caveat to this story about Bass Reeves inspiring the Lone Ranger and eventually the superhero genre. There's another theory that the Lone Ranger was inspired by a masked vigilante from a different marginalized community. In fact, he may have been inspired by two different masked vigilantes from history. And that story also echoes many of the same issues around race and representation in the genre today. We'll go back in time again, just in a moment. So I mentioned that the Lone Ranger may have been inspired by a different historical figure. So I mentioned that the Lone Ranger may have been inspired by a different historical figure.

It's actually a little more complicated than that. The Lone Ranger may have actually been based off the character of Zorro, who was based off of real people from Mexican-American history. Now there's a lot to unpack here, so let's begin with the Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger was created by two people, the writer Fran Stryker and his boss at the radio station George Washington Trendle. Now, I have talked with cultural historians who disagree about whether Stryker or Trendle was the real creative force behind The Lone Ranger. And Stryker may have been inspired by Bass Reeves, but that's not the case with his boss, George Trendle. George Washington Trendle really looked to Zorro

as the inspiration for The Lone Ranger. John Valadez is a professor at Michigan State University. Growing up Mexican-American on the West Coast, he always loved Zorro as a character. And there's a strong case to make that Zorro was not just the inspiration for The Lone Ranger, but the inspiration for the entire superhero genre. I mean, Batman was based on Zorro. And Zorro appeared much earlier in pop culture, in a 1919 novel called The Curse of Capistrano by Johnson McCulley.

And McCulley was obsessed with California history. That's how he created Zorro, which was based on his reading of Mexican history and the history of the American West, which fascinated him. And who is Zorro based on? That's where things get really interesting. Okay, let's take one more leap backwards in time.

1848, the U.S. fought a war against Mexico. The U.S. won and took most of the West Coast. Also that same year, gold was discovered in California. So Americans from the East Coast and the Midwest slowly made their way to California to mine for gold. Meanwhile, Mexicans, now Mexican-Americans, were already there with plenty of time to dig up that gold. And other Mexicans started crossing the border, the brand new California border, to get that gold as well. And by the time the Anglo-Americans arrived...

These Americans looked at these Mexicans pulling out this gold and they were like, what the hell are you doing here? You lost the war. Go back to Mexico. You don't belong here. What they did is they first started, you know, pushing them out. And then when there was resistance, then it turned into open warfare. And there are two people from this time period that were probably the inspiration for Zorro. The first one was Joaquin Murrieta. He was part of that early wave of Mexicans who crossed the border looking for gold. But during the race war that followed, his family was wiped out. He was left for dead. But he survived and dedicated himself to seeking justice or revenge.

There were little newspapers all throughout the gold country. And there began appearing in these stories all over the place that says, you know, Joaquin and his band has done another raid and killed five people, you know, in French camp. And then it got so frantic with these, with Joaquin appearing in all of these newspapers that sometimes it even came up that he had murdered somebody in Los Angeles and somebody in San Francisco and somebody in Sacramento all on the same day. I mean, on one hand, it sounds like white settlers could not tell one Mexican from another. But Murrieta had also become a symbol, inspiring other Mexican-Americans. And the media built him up into a legend, making him larger than life.

Various elements were introduced. They would say that Joaquin wore this cape, you know, and a hat that hid his face. And they would say that Joaquin spoke perfect English, so you couldn't tell that he was Mexican or Anglo or what he was. And that sometimes he would wear disguises. He would appear as an old man, or he would appear as an old woman. So you never knew when he would strike or, you know, you always had to be on your guard.

And it was said that he had this extraordinary horsemanship and that he would, after killing somebody, he would disappear into the darkness as though he were a phantom. And no one was able to track him down. He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Eventually, the governor called on the California Rangers to capture him. And they did. So we assume. I mean, nobody really knew what he looked like. But they came back with a severed human head, claiming it was Marietta.

And they put the head on display, charging people five bucks to see it. Now that is a pretty grim story. Zorro is a fun, swashbuckling adventure. That's why historians point to another figure that Zorro may have been based on, a man named Tabersio Vasquez. And the story of Tabersio Vasquez also plays out like a typical superhero origin. Vasquez had come from this upper crust family. He was well educated. He wrote poetry. He was something of a dandy. He dressed in very fine clothes. Even though it was the frontier, they were very wealthy. They had, you know, vast, you know, lands and ranches and et cetera, et cetera. And as the Americans began

to come in during the gold rush, Vasquez kept having run-ins like many Mexicans or Mexican Americans now with the Anglos who discriminated against him. And he always saw himself as a very erudite, you know, sophisticated figure. And then the white sheriff was killed, and Vasquez was accused of murder. He swore he was innocent. He had to basically run for his life. And like Murrieta, he began to don and wear a cape. life. And like Murrieta, he began to don and wear a cape. And he became, again now, this elusive figure who would hijack Americans who were on the highway and steal from them, you know, as a kind of revenge. Although Vasquez claimed to never have killed anybody, he was famous for leaving Americans hogtied with their faces in the

dirt. That was kind of his trademark. And he did this for 20 years. Zorro also had a trademark to let people know that he was responsible. He would slice a Z into the flesh of his victims. But in the books and the movies, Zorro is not on the run. During the day, he's a wealthy playboy. But at night, he would then transform into this mythical figure who would wear a mask, and he would go and defeat the Spanish authorities who were abusing the poor, the Indians, the women, etc. That is the other big difference. The legend of Zorro takes place before the U.S. captured California. Now we have two possible origin stories here, one for the Lone Ranger and one

for Zorro. In the first one, the hero was changed from black to white. In the second one, the villains are changed from Anglo-American to Spanish. And even though Zorro is considered a Mexican-American folk hero, most of the actors who have played him have been white, including Clayton Moore, who also played the Lone Ranger. And this history of whitewashing in the superhero genre is so common, it even happened with the all-American Boy Scout, Superman. I mean, that character really started out as a refugee and an immigrant. John Jennings says, I mean, look at the two guys that created Superman in the 1930s, Siegel and Schuster. These two Jewish teenagers, one of which who loses his father in an act of burglary,

you know, who dies of a heart attack because of being robbed. You know, there's an aspirational aspect where I want to do something for my country and I can't, I want to fit in and I want to stop this stuff from happening around me. So you create a character that can do it. You know, the Kal-El is his, essentially like that's his home, that's the name that he was named on his home planet. Very Hebraic sounding too, to a certain degree. And, you know, little little by little it becomes an assimilationist narrative yeah and also uh in the beginning superman was more of a progressive character he was almost like a new deal type of hero you know like he went after a slumlord and he went after a war profiteer that's right yeah

he's more and he's less powerful he's not he's leaping from talliteer. That's right. Yeah, he's more, and he's less powerful. He's not, he's leaping from tall buildings. You know, he's leaping. You know, he's not flying. And he stands for truth and justice. And he doesn't stand for truth, justice in the American way

until after the Second World War and after the TV show. The phrase, absolute power corrupts absolutely, did not come up very much in superhero comics for most of the 20th century. The fantasy of the superhero is that you can have it both ways, absolute power and absolute goodness. That's why Watchmen was so groundbreaking in the 1980s. It was one of the first comics to ask, well, whose idea of truth and justice are they fighting for? And who defines

the American way? And what made the Watchmen TV series so interesting was that they layered the issues of race and representation on top of those questions. Again, Sean Taylor. Honestly, that's why so many black and brown Asian kids gravitate towards superheroes, because, wow, I could get justice and then be lauded for getting justice as opposed to being demonized for wanting justice. And John Valadez says the key to the superhero genre is the mask, the disguise. is the mask, the disguise. Their faces are covered. So it's not on any individual. It could be any of us.

Anybody could be the Lone Ranger. It could be you. It could be me. Anybody could be Zorro. We all have within us that we too could be somebody who stands up against injustice when we see it. And I think there's something fundamentally beautiful that echoes across race, across class, and across time that speaks to what it is to be fundamentally human. What makes the superhero genre so appealing to me is that when I'm reading a comic or watching superheroes on screen, there isn't much doubt

as to what is truth and what is justice. And it feels really satisfying. Although my favorite superhero stories find a way of incorporating the uglier aspects of our society with the hope that we can make things better. In knowing our history, tracing these types of characters back to the real people who inspired them can give us more clarity on the nature of truth, justice, and the American way. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Art Burton, Sean Taylor, John Jennings, and John Valadez. By the way, if you're curious to learn more about The Lone Ranger, I did an episode about Tonto as part of my mini-series on sidekicks last year. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine World's pod. And if you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media that helps people discover imaginary worlds. But the best way to support the show

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