Will Shetterly's Blog, page 4
January 17, 2023
Pity the Fans of Capitalism
It’s hard to pity the fans of capitalism who love watching the rich enjoy the wealth that belongs to us all.
January 15, 2023
Three Groups that Lie about Martin Luther King: Conservatives, Liberals, and Fans of Reparations
Who lies most about Martin Luther King? There are three competing groups.
Before the Black Panther: The First Black Comics Heroes—plus Two Early White Heroes with Black…
While there were many Middle-Eastern heroes in the early days of comics (perhaps because Middle-Easterners had been legally white since…
January 12, 2023
Medium, Please Change to a One-Click “Like” System—or at least to a Five
If I could change one thing about Medium, it would be the insane fifty-click system for “liking” articles. I understand a writer’s pay was…
January 11, 2023
Comics had many Muslim Heroes in the 1940s—including two (or three?) Superheroes
The first Muslim superhero appeared in 1944, over three decades before the first unambiguously Jewish superhero. In the first half of the…
January 10, 2023
January 7, 2023
From Mystery Men to Superheroes—How Siegel and Shuster Subverted the…
The people who argue that superheroes existed before Superman usually point at rich white men from Christian backgrounds who used masks…
December 30, 2022
Who Invented Superheroes—A Woman, Two Jews, or a “Saucy” Pulp Writer?
There’s a popular argument that the Scarlet Pimpernel was the first superhero, and since his creator, Baroness Emma Orczy, was a woman…
December 29, 2022
Ten Native American Superheroes Every Comics Fan Should Know
An odd fact: there were more Native superheroes in comics in the 1940s than the 1960s.
December 28, 2022
The Mysteries of the Red Mask, the First Black Masked Comics Hero
Call him Schrödinger’s Black Superhero. The Red Mask, the star of a nationally syndicated newspaper strip published in 1936, two years…
