5 Shockingly Racist Scenes in Famous Superhero Comics

Going all the way back to the '30s, I scoured hundreds upon hundreds of comics to find the most jaw-dropping examples of racial intolerance by Earth's mightiest heroes. This won't be like the day you first noticed they made the black Power Ranger black and the Asian one yellow -- these comics are legitimately fucked up.

One more thing, Internet. You've proven many times that when you see something vaguely ethnic, you can't tell if it's racist or if the racism was inside you all along. It's such a complex and subjective issue that only a truly brilliant mind could create rules to define it. So it really is quite something that I've done exactly that. Here are the three ways to tell if a character is racist:

Now we know the rules, so let's get started:

#5. The Justice League

1. A Native American named Apache Chief who wasn't either of those things.

2. A Japanese guy named Samurai who wasn't that.

3. Black Vulcan, who actually was one of those.

4. A Mexican named El Dorado, which wasn't where he lived.

Apache, Samurai, Black, and El were conceived with the best of intentions-- making money off ethnic children, but they ended up being half-naked idiots acting out half-remembered cultural stereotypes. So I guess I'm only making the case that they are as bad as a Dane Cook set. Let's see if I can find instances of Justice League members being more objectively offensive.

Batman as a character gets redefined several times a generation. He's a tortured loner, a campy joke, a barking sadist, and you'll love him as a cranky 9-year-old this fall on Fox! However, the one trait he always has across all media and reboots is his refusal to take a human life. Well, that Batlaw does not apply to Chinamen. If you come from the Orient, Batman doesn't care about you until he needs a crash mat or a place to put a massive falling statue.

Bruce Wayne became a bat to strike fear into the hearts of Gotham criminals, but in China, bats are often considered good luck. So Batman may have decided to murder a few hundred of their people to clear up any confusion. And speaking of confusion, here's the kind of interaction Batman has with Native Americans:

Race throws a monkey wrench into all of Batman's defining characteristics. He won't take a human life, but never mind that if you're Chinese. He's a master of disguise, but if you're an Indian, he'll settle for covering his face in lipstick and borrowing your hat. And most notably, he's the world's greatest detective... unless you're black.

Aquaman wasn't as subtle as Batman was with his racism. If Aquaman saw someone from Japan, he screamed racial slurs at them in every dialect of fish.

Aquaman sometimes screamed racist shit for no real reason. He might have spent too much time speaking with animals on the far left of an evolutionary scale because here he is, by himself, shouting ethnically intolerant slurs at a lake:

So yes, members of the Justice League were sort of awful, but Batman is supposed to be a loose cannon and if Aquaman didn't suck, he'd have nothing left to do. How about one of their most beloved and respected members? What about the very woman who came from Paradise Island as an ambassador of peace to all mankind? Surely Wonder Woman doesn't have a history of cultural insensitivity! Surely she was a bastion of purity her entire career! Surely no reader could possibly anticipate the next image being the complete opposite of this buildup!

Wonder Woman fought in the Pacific theater against America's sneak-attacking, Rape-of-Nan-Kinging enemy, so her racism was pretty understandable. However, she always took it to a weird place. Wonder Woman didn't dismiss her Japanese enemies as inhuman trash-- she zeroed in on specific parts of their culture so she could better mock them while they died. For example, when she discovered the Japanese had a term called "save face," it opened a whole new arena of trash talk.

There were people on the Justice League with racism that didn't even make sense. Green Lantern is a space policeman. Most of his coworkers and friends are jellyfish or cosmic squirrels, and yet he had no idea what to do when he met a real-life Earth Eskimo.

Yes, Hal Jordan had an Eskimo sidekick he called "PIEFACE." And that nickname fucking stuck. Thomas Kalmaku walked around for decades answering to PIEFACE. It was such a bizarrely offensive character that when Filmation created a Green Lantern cartoon in the '60s, they replaced him with a blue (probably) alien boy named Kai Ro. Hal wasn't as aggressively racist towards him, but their relationship was far from appropriate.

Aside from some poorly handled run-ins with white guilt (above), the other members of the Justice League managed to get by without major racial incidents. Usually it involved writers trying for cute and missing wildly, like the time The Flash ran into a Japanese colleague...

So I've covered all the big ones, right? Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash... the whole Justice League! I'm not forgetting anyone?

You've probably seen that before. "SUPERMAN SAYS: YOU CAN SLAP A JAP" might be the most famous racist comic panel of all time. It's included in nearly every discussion of WWII propaganda and is found on Mel Gibson's computer in the folder "Tattoo Ideas." But to Superman's credit, he was probably trying to stop that printing press. Superman never talked like that. I mean, you don't call someone racist when he owns a coffin that can make his girlfriend black.

Superman handled most racial situations perfectly. He made it through WWII and Korea without calling anyone names and he didn't even ask to touch Black Lois' hair. If he had one cultural kryptonite, it was that he wasn't great with Indians.

In a story called "Superman, Indian Chief!", Superman was called in to settle a property dispute in Metropolis. An evil mogul discovered, through distant Native American ancestry, that he owned all the city's land. He instantly began extorting the citizens of Metropolis and proudly bragged about it right to Superman's face. It was almost suicidally evil, and here's how Superman handled it:

Superman had any number of option-- everything from diplomacy to super hypnosis to super ventriloquism to punching the evil dick into the sun. He went with: running back in time to screw the Indians out of their land 300 years ago. He didn't even have to think about it. He was already jogging through the 1800s before the guy was done with his threat. Say what you want about Aquaman and Wonder Woman shrieking "Jap!" for the better part of a decade; Superman wove his racism into the very fabric of his universe's chronosphere.

#4. The X-Men

It's probably strange to accuse the X-Men of racism since mutants are sort of an allegory for civil rights. But should they be? They exist in a world with actual races, gays, and bigotry-- it's possible laser eyes and adamantium are an extra layer of abstraction the reader doesn't need. You know, what? It doesn't matter. Whether their intentions were good or not, the X-Men writers declared themselves the voice of minority rights, and they didn't handle it well.

There's a special time in each white person's life when they make their first black friend. This white person always suspected they were one of the good ones, but now they have confirmation-- a real relationship. They feel like they are special enough to be trusted with the n-word by the n's themselves. It's liberating! There's a real social change happening and they're leading it! Then, armed with their new n-word pass, they sit down to write a comic book where Kitty Pryde delivers a speech at a funeral:

Like the Justice League, most of the X-Men's cultural diversity came in one explosion of poorly thought out ethnic characters. For example, James Proudstar. He's a Native American with the power of being pretty tough and tracking. Almost as if a racist thought, "What super powers would be handy if you had to, like, be an Indian all day?" And sure enough, when we meet him, he's having a wrestling match with a buffalo. A wrestling match with a buffalo.

So James Proudstar is an Indian who does Indian stuff, only super hard. Describing that character without mentioning his Native American heritage is like trying to maintain a student-teacher relationship with Helen Keller while you teach her the word for lapdance. It's a weird combination of impossible and inappropriate.

I'd say Warpath's lack of depth indicates dullness more than racism, but he's not an isolated incident. Let's talk about Jubilee.

Not only did they make the Chinese mutant the worst one, when they sat down to think up her abilities, they came up with "make fireworks." That's not a super power. That's more like the actual occupation of millions of Chinese kids. It's not as bad as giving her laundry powers or the ability to squirt oyster sauce, but it's still one of answers on a racist Family Feud board, "Things Chinese People Do."

Knowing what you now know, take a moment to guess how they dealt with the Irish X-Man. Why, you're exactly right: Banshee grew up in a castle filled with leprechauns and has trouble with alcohol. That's real. And so is this: the greatest 12 seconds of cartoon ever:

"YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!"

Ethnic mutants all seem to have been created by someone thinking about a race of people then giving them a power based on the first thing that pops into their head. Did Stan Lee institute some kind of five second time limit on creating each X-Man? I mean, what if someone decided to make a Japanese mutant after too many WWII documentaries and created a superhero just covered in atomic fi-- oh. Oh, no.

#3. The Justice Society of America

The Justice Society was the very first superhero team, and they have the antiquated views on race to prove it. Their gargantuan roster was made up of Dr. Fate, The Spectre, Starman, Sandman, Hawkman, Johnny Thunderbolt, and The Atom! With all those heroic crime fighters on one team, wouldn't it be something if one brave comedy writer could find a panel of every single one of them screaming offensive things?

If you've been keeping track with your Justice Society Unfortunate Quotes Checklist, there's only one member left to go-- The Atom. In the '40s, his only powers were shortness and punching, yet his tiny body held enough pressurized intolerance to capsize a hundred gay cruises. He wasn't clumsy with it, though. Like Wonder Woman, he studied Japanese culture in order to refine and enhance his racism:

#2. The Young Allies

It's important to judge Young Allies as a work of comedy. For example, sometimes Tubby's fatness and Whitewash's buffoonery would come together to create outrageous comical situations:

And wait until you see the antics of Toro and Knuckles!

Young Allies had the comic sensibilities of Gallagher finding a colon tumor. Racist and stupidly wacky, but haunted by the tragic frailty of human life. That's because the Young Allies were constantly surrounded by death, and they themselves killed almost indiscriminately. They were unimaginable assholes who seemed to always have access to flame throwers, high explosives, and some squealing Japanese caricature to use them on.

The book quickly became a dumping grounds for bad propaganda. If a writer at Timely Comics wanted to channel his impotent Pearl Harbor rage into a story, they pointed him at Young Allies and gave him a pencil. Some of them are such pathetic wish-fulfillment nonsense you'll start rooting for Hirohito.

It's hard for a comic to get more racist than having the spiritual ruler of Japan turning to the reader and announcing, "ALL MY PEOPLE ARE A LOT OF YELLOW, UNDERHANDED RATS!" Well, it does. Black Talon was the Young Allies' deadliest foe, and his super power makes Whitewash Jones look like an NAACP Spirit Award winner... Black Talon was a white guy who had a black man's hand.

So a black murderer donated his hand, complete with traditional African claws, to science. Then, once it was attached to the recipient, its African corpuscles infected the entire body with evil while leaving it with the strength and cunning of nearly one white man. That's not how you write a super villain origin. That's how a writer comes out to his Ku Klux Klan family as retarded.

#1. The Marvel Family

Most people call Captain Marvel "Shazam" because that's the magic word he screams to transform from young Billy Batson to a superhero. Aside from having a little boy inside him, he was basically Superman, or at least close enough that Superman sued him and won. Oh, yeah, there was one other trait that set him apart from Superman: Captain Marvel owned a slave.

Steamboat was Billy Batson's "valet," a combination secretary, cook, janitor, pilot, and slave. He was drawn so racistly that if you were unfamiliar with '40s stereotypes, you'd have no idea he was supposed to be human. He looked like a baboon crawling backwards out of a pile of laundry. If the world's greatest artist a card that said "MAKE THE ROOM UNCOMFORTABLE" in Pictionary, Steamboat is what he or she would draw.

So a little boy owned a slave in 1940 and he was some kind of unfrozen Peking Man. Here's the bizarre part: Steamboat didn't know Billy Batson was Captain Marvel. The two were together 24 hours a day and Billy's transformation process involved screaming, lightning, and exploding. Wouldn't Steamboat start to figure things out by the second time a thunderstorm hit the office and replaced his boss with a superhero? The fact that he didn't put it together might be the most insulting thing about the Steamboat character.

Billy didn't even bother hiding it most times-- he turned into Captain Marvel right next to Steamboat all god damn day.

There's probably a part of you still thinking this could be some kind of misunderstanding... maybe Steamboat was some kind of magical talking muppet or a uniquely disabled child bound to Captain Marvel by a 5th dimensional imp? I thought the same thing... until I finally found an issue where Steamboat encountered other black people. Fuuuuuuck:

This was obviously a comic for ignorant, terrible children, but there were enough of those to make it a hit. Captain Marvel was so popular they made spinoffs faster than the writers could think up good spinoffs. For instance, they created a Captain Marvel Jr, a slightly younger version with such an exceptional racism he could spot the Japanese on you through a hazmat suit.

Soon there was a cartoon bunny Captain Marvel, hillbilly Captain Marvels, and my personal favorite: Uncle Marvel. Uncle Marvel didn't have magical powers like the others; he was just a fat man who decided he was Mary Marvel's uncle. When I discovered he wasn't related to her in any way, I may have lost my mind because my notes say "NOT REAL FUCKING UNCLE!? The combined IQ of the Marvel Family is measured in jam." I genuinely have no idea what it means.

Mary Marvel is the saint of the family. She may officially be the 2nd dumbest superhero of all time, but I never managed to find a single panel of her shouting a racial slur. Let's congratulate her:

Looking back on these comics can help us all learn the humiliating consequences of ignorance. Mocking another race for having hemorrhoid pillows for mouths or canary yellow skin is wrong. We need to find ways to relate to our fellow man-- to try to understand them. Why, here's young Billy Batson doing so now!