Marvel’s Black Panther is a cultural phenomenon, a historic box office success that’s brought in rave reviews and sparked conversation all over social media and traditional media alike. There are no signs of the excitement abating, either, as the conversation about the film has evolved from discussions about the importance of representation into something grander: a rather groundbreaking celebration of black culture.

With an all-star collection of majority black talent both in front of and behind the camera, Black Panther, under the direction of Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed), is about more than the latest superhero’s journey; it’s also about black culture’s journey, and it points toward a future where it could be the culture. It acknowledges and celebrates everything from traditional African society to African-American political debates, from the power and beauty of black women to the preservation of identity, all within the lush confines of the fictional African nation of Wakanda.

All told, Black Panther’s greatest legacy may not be what it’s done for Marvel, Hollywood, or box office records, but what it’s done for the culture. In Wakanda, which offers much to marvel at for audiences of all backgrounds, black viewers in particular have found a cultural oasis that feels like nothing we’ve seen before.

Black Panther celebrates black culture on several fronts

Black Panther is in many ways a love letter to black culture. Africa has traditionally been an unsophisticated bit player in American media, often portrayed as backward, savage, and chaotic in everything from news coverage to films. It’s a portrayal that has left little room for other interpretations, which is why Black Panther’s vision of Wakanda as a bustling metropolis of vibranium-powered futuristic skyscrapers, racing trains, and soaring spaceships feels so refreshing.

Marvel movies often take place in grand, imaginative locales, like Thor’s Asgard or Guardians of the Galaxy’s far-flung planets. But nothing has been quite as audacious and poignant as Wakanda, a vision of Africa that feels indebted to both Jack Kirby and Octavia Butler, home to a thriving black population that represents our collective ingenuity and beauty. As a testament to black empowerment, Black Panther is an important artifact, but it’s also, quite simply, a big draw for black moviegoers starved for this sort of vision.

It’s not just Wakanda’s skyline that makes an impact, though; the film drew on a team of designers and stylists to showcase a very specific, beautiful black aesthetic. In an interview with the New York Times, Camille Friend, who oversaw the various hair designs of what she calls “a totally Afrocentric, natural hair movie,” said the entire production was considered against a backdrop of a bigger black cultural moment: “We’re in a moment when people are feeling empowered about being black,” she says. “The hair helps communicate that.”

Like the film’s hair, Black Panther’s costuming was an opportunity to infuse meaning and pride into the movie. As the film’s head costume designer, Ruth Carter, shared with NPR, the costumes, like Wakanda itself, needed to evoke a place and people that had “never been colonized, one that looked toward the future but was based on a real past.”

Carter and her team drew on Kenyan, Namibian, and South African reference points to complete the film’s array of looks, reflecting not only the tribal diversity that exists within Wakanda but the diversity of black culture and identity as well. The film is a crucial stamp of validation for black people hungry for the opportunity to celebrate everything from Afrofuturism to the natural hair movement that’s often been derided in mainstream spaces. 

The care and intricacy of the film’s styling carried a heavy price tag, with Marvel committing more money to Black Panther than its previous few films in order to achieve a visual splendor that’s as exciting to the culture as it is to the eye. The result is the sort of spectacle black moviegoers rarely get to see in popular mainstream culture. That isn’t lost on Marvel’s Kevin Feige, who explained his reasoning behind the film’s budget to Vulture: “It’s a big story that deserves to be told in a big way, for all of the cultural and political reasons that people talk about.”

These vague “cultural and political reasons” are at the heart of a movie phenomenon that’s inspired everything from Black Panther-themed watch parties to a voter registration initiative to a curriculum that encourages educators to leverage the film to teach deeper histories about African culture, politics, and history. It’s also opened up dialogues and personal reflections about black identity in America and abroad via #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe, a powerful cross section of editorial and real-time reflections on the film’s resonance with black moviegoers.

The film has also jumped into the current of black political thought and action, prompting challenging think pieces about how T’Challa and Killmonger’s rift is representative of familiar ideological debates in the black community, and what the film’s politics represent about the state of black America. In addition to escapism and inspiration, Black Panther offers African Americans the opportunity to reexamine and reimagine their place in the world, both literally and figuratively. Wakanda has emerged as a vision of what’s possible, representing what true liberation could look like, but the power of that fantasy is directly linked to the harsh realities of Erik Killmonger’s experience growing up in Oakland, California, far away from that utopic vision.

Black Panther is part of a wave of entertainment that’s expanding the scope of black narratives

The excitement around Black Panther doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the film is the latest in a string of high-water-mark moments for a black pop culture landscape that’s experiencing a renaissance. Recent years have seen a new level of black art that’s intertwined sociopolitical commentary with high-caliber artistry: from Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN to Atlanta and Queen Sugar, there’s been a renewed focus on telling stories that broaden and sharpen the range of black narratives.

This expansion is significant given black audiences’ complex relationship with Hollywood, which has typically presented a narrow slice of the African-American narrative. It’s an industry that has often seemed invested in black Americans primarily as slaves (12 Years a Slave), victims of inner-city strife (Detroit), or symbols of comfort (The Help) and is fixated on stories about the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras and biopics of famous black people that only glimpse at race.

For a long time, it’s felt like the only stories about the African-American experience Hollywood was interested in telling were stories that were intertwined in some way with the white experience, making this shift toward stories that center black narratives as black narratives feel both welcome and long overdue.

A similar shift has been afoot in Hollywood offscreen in recent years. As #OscarsSoWhite launched a debate about the industry’s fidelity to representation and valuing nonwhite contributions, filmmakers like Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, A Wrinkle in Time’s Ava DuVernay, and Get Out’s Jordan Peele have taken crucial pole positions as visionaries who are pushing the boundaries of black representation on film. Coogler’s Black Panther joins these projects as a missing piece: a popcorn movie that uses the most mainstream of film genres — the superhero movie — to project the complexity of black identity, politics, and creativity.

Black Panther is in many ways an antidote to the black American experience in 2018

The renewed conversation around race that Black Panther enters into extends beyond the entertainment industry. As the first black superhero film in a cinematic universe that’s spent the past decade focused primarily on white superheroes, it underlines the chasm that exists between society’s treatment of black Americans and white Americans.

In many ways, black bodies have experienced a renewed series of attacks in recent years. Black NFL players can’t kneel in protest without recrimination from the president, team owners, or a conservative-leaning fan base. Everyday black citizens have been increasingly displaced in gentrifying cities, locked up in prisons at alarming rates, and shot and beaten by law enforcement at equally high ones.

This makes Black Panther a palate cleanser of sorts, a healthy injection of powerful, beautiful images of the black body. It’s what’s behind the lure of Wakanda, a land of black vibrancy, freedom, diversity, and discourse not blighted by outside forces or forced to negotiate with anyone but themselves. It’s why the Killmonger/T’Challa chasm rings so true, as they both offer their own type of wish fulfillment for black viewers: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a world where we aren’t encumbered by systemic racism and oppression and are masters of our own destiny? And yet wouldn’t it also be nice to galvanize a community with resources and political might to address and maybe even reverse the effects of that systemic oppression?

Told from a posture of power and pride, Black Panther is in many ways a most necessary antidote for the black American experience in 2018, an elixir that provides escape into a world where black Americans can imagine these conversations outside of the white gaze. As black America feels under assault everywhere from Charlottesville to the White House, it’s invaluable to be reminded that we still have the ability to soar and take action like T’Challa or Nakia or Okoye, to be strong black bodies of justice. The value of that reminder is not just timely — it’s timeless.

For more on Black Panther, listen to our episode of Today Explained featuring Rise of the Black Panther author Evan Narcisse.

In recent weeks, two films have endeavored to spark similar conversations about racial injustice, police brutality, and rioting, despite recounting events separated by 50 years.

Detroit, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by her collaborator Mark Boal, is set during the titular city’s infamous 12th Street Riots, which claimed 43 lives, almost 1,200 injuries, and more than 7,000 arrests in the final week of July 1967. Using a journalistic approach, it reconstructs and dramatizes the events that led to the killing of three black teenage boys — 17-year-old Carl Cooper, 18-year-old Aubrey Pollard, and 19-year-old Fred Temple — depicting in grim detail a group of young black men and women being terrorized at the Algiers Motel over a nightlong torture and brutality session at the hands of Detroit police.

A week after Detroit’s national expansion to 3,000 theaters, the street-level documentary Whose Streets?, directed by filmmaker and activist Sabaah Folayan, debuted at a much smaller scale. Premiering in January at Sundance, and now playing in 15 select cities, the five-act documentary has images and scenes that eerily mirror Detroit’s portrayal of racial tensions between black citizens and authority systems bent against them, here in service of a narrative following the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown Jr. at the hands of officer Darren Wilson.

On their own, these films are pieces of a larger conversation that might have once felt compartmentalized to the past, whether far (Detroit) or recent (Whose Streets?). Yet now, as the country reels from the sight of white supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, it places greater weight on a question that goes far beyond whether these movies are good: the question of whether these films can inspire productive conversations on race. As one film stumbles and another succeeds, the answer lies in some key differences between them.

Detroit: an exercise in black trauma and narrative injustice

Detroit’s core story about that brutal, murderous night at the Algiers Motel that ended the lives of three young black men (also detailed in John Hersey’s 1968 book The Algiers Motel Incident) is certainly a story worth telling, and the outcome will feel chillingly familiar for many people, especially for black moviegoers. The conflicting, dubious accounts by authorities; the insistent, dismissed accounts by eyewitnesses; collusion by a wider legal system; and a trail of broken black bodies will feel wearingly familiar to many viewers today.

They also feel all the more egregious in light of Detroit’s faults. While it comes from a well-intentioned place, the movie suffers from being both too inhuman and too abstract. Detroit’s approach to storytelling suffers from rounded representations and political context, which not only undercuts the humanity of Detroit’s black citizens, it threatens to stifle a worthwhile conversation about how far American race relations haven’t come since 1967.

In a Variety profile about Detroit, Bigelow says that her hope is “that a dialogue comes out of this film that can begin to humanize a situation that often feels very abstract.” But unfortunately, that humanity never makes its way out of Detroit’s muck of dreary, traumatizing imagery, nonexistent characterization, and lack of broader political and historical context. In Bigelow’s film, conversation is driven by suffering, supplanting nuance with abhorrent images that feel cobbled together from newspaper headlines: There’s “African-American Child Accidentally Shot By Authorities” for when a child peering through her living room window is shot because she’s mistaken for a sniper; there’s “Local Robber Stopped By Officer Bullets While Looting” as another scene.

These scenes are treated chillingly, but Detroit seems disinterested in lingering on the people inhabiting the bodies involved, saying nothing of significance about what impact those deaths have on the community. The movie’s undisciplined desire to “rip from the headlines” cheapens the inherent drama of its central conflict in deference to sensationalism.

Intentionally or not, under the pen of screenwriter Mark Boal, Detroit reproduces situations that have sparked outcries from the black community in recent years. The girl in the window isn’t just an incident; it’s Tamir Rice. The running looter shot in the back by officers and the subsequent cover-up isn’t just plot — it’s the 2015 South Carolina killing of Walter Scott, or, as the looter scales the fence, injured and bleeding, it’s the 2016 Chicago killing of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal. 

Underlying all of this is what HuffPost Black Voices points out: Detroit overlooks the fact that years before the events it depicts, in 1963, nearly 200,000 black Detroiters marched to protest the structural inequalities they were already fighting against in housing, schooling, and policing. That omission matters as the movie shortcuts to an outbreak of black anger that arguably feels outsized to the “blind pig” after-hours raid that opens the film.

The only real black mobility and agency ever evidenced in Detroit is athletic and superhuman. In Detroit, black rioters run nonstop, break windows, and steal goods in one motion, upend cars, run after being beaten and shot. And they sing: One of the film’s central figures is Larry Reed, a member of the Detroit group the Dramatics, and Detroit has a significant number of scenes with Reed singing his way into sex, out of trouble, and into work.

When Detroit examines the black community beyond its suffering, the representations are unflattering. Black men are repeatedly shown as lustful, violent, and beaten; black women are virtually nonexistent, aside from a brief, empty appearance by Samira Wiley, suggesting they were only around to answer phone calls, greet motel guests, and console the bereaved.

While Detroit’s premise would suggest it’s broaching another segment of our generations-long conversation about race, its scenes of black people suffering detached from scenes of black people also working, laughing, loving, and living — as they still managed to do over decades of systemic oppression — makes it feel like a one-dimensional conversation that prioritizes pain over humanity.

Ultimately, Detroit doesn’t feel like a productive film entry about our racial past, like 12 Years A Slave, because it can’t connect with anything other than itself. Instead, it ends up feeling contrived by filmmakers driven more by provocative imagery than inspiring a reflective conversation.

The reaction of all this has at times been damning. While the film has high critical approval (review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes has it at 84 percent fresh), there has been justifiable consternation about Bigelow’s approach to the city of Detroit, the events at the Algiers, and blackness. Critic Angelica Jade Bastien called the film’s depiction of race, violence, and brutality “soulless” in her review, while outlets like the popular black culture/politics/entertainment site Very Smart Brothers essentially called the film unwatchable on a second viewing. Other outlets have referred to it as “numbing” and “unbearable.”

In a July interview with the Detroit News, Bigelow asserts that the film “speaks to the necessity for a dialogue” that’s not about “isolated events” but rather that’s “about this country” and says the film’s purpose is to serve as “an indictment against the lack of conversation about race in this country.” Those are laudatory sentiments that mirror the movie’s flaws, because Detroit doesn’t seem clear or consistent about what conversations about race it’s seeking to instigate. Is it about racialized police states? Police brutality? Interracial dating? Poverty? Citing Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote that riots are the “language of the unheard,” she says that the rioters in Detroit “were heard,” but if so, Detroit seems confused about both what they were saying and how it was received.

In the context of Bigelow’s statements, Detroit’s pastiche of racial imagery in service of shedding light on our culture’s contradictory conscience ends up coming off as a painfully performative attempt to be “down.” That impression is especially strong in the wake of another successful 2017 film that helped form a vocabulary around well-intentioned white liberal attempts at race conversations with a fixation on tortured black bodies: Jordan Peele’s Get Out.  

Taken at her word, Bigelow has noble intentions for wanting to tackle this film. Acknowledging that she had a “long conversation with myself” as a white woman directing the film, she ultimately decided to tell the story, particularly after a grand jury declined to pursue prosecuting Darren Wilson. It’s an ironic inspiration for a film that fails to make a convincing connection between the events of 1967 and those happening in 2017. It operates under the assumption that graphic retelling of a historical moment is sufficient inspiration for thinking about the injustices that are happening today.

The movie’s closing credits showcase Bigelow and Boal’s research, sharing the current whereabouts of many of the core officers and civilians involved, but doesn’t take a moment to highlight the dark irony of the Detroit police department’s ongoing issues with race and police accountability. If Detroit were truly interested in indictments, it might have also used the closing credits to footnote that after the Algiers trial, in 1971, the city created STRESS, an undercover police task force that only further escalated the tensions between police and black citizens.

Fortunately, audiences have the option of a more responsible, nuanced, and human story set against a similar backdrop of police brutality and racial violence in Whose Streets? The film’s street-level observations told via camera-phone recordings and documentary video footage offers a more convincing and telling portrait of the intersections of police brutality, state-sanctioned law and order, and activism — and maintains its subjects’ humanity while indicting a system that routinely dehumanizes them.

Whose Streets?: an exercise in empowerment and humanity

Where Detroit conflates truth and power with “unflinching” looks at the riots that rived the city for days, Whose Streets? understands the power in looking away.

Filmed during the height of the Ferguson unrest in the wake of Michael Brown being shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson, the documentary is a close, intimate look at everyone involved, from protestors to everyday citizens to Ferguson authorities to President Barack Obama. It examines moments of peaceful, strategized resistance by local activist leaders like Brittany Ferrell, a single mother with designs to be a nurse who is activated by the injustice around Brown’s death, or David Whitt, another local Ferguson resident-turned-activist who dedicates his time to vigilant surveillance of police activity after Brown (who was Whitt’s neighbor) is killed.

Though it’s over an hour shorter, Whose Streets? takes the time Detroit doesn’t to flesh out its subjects and the ongoing reality of their daily lives, from the mundanity of dropping kids off at school to restoring, again and again, the memorial where Brown’s slain body lay for hours to attending town-hall meetings and convening with other protesters and friends. The documentary also gives voice to other residents who are involved in the locally led grassroots movement, taking care to show how active, concerned, and resourceful these citizens are. 

This attentiveness to the three-dimensional nature of its subjects and central conflict means that when Whose Streets? makes use of the type of imagery Detroit employs — heavily armored legions of state and federal law enforcement roaming the streets to enforce curfews and decorum, using an array of “suppression tactics” — it manages to evoke the tragedy, terror, and controversy of these images, where Bigelow and Boal make them feel wooden and exploitative. 

In the hands of director Sabaah Folayan (with co-director Damon Davis), an activist and a black woman, Whose Streets? exhibits respect for nuance in both telling a fuller story and evoking a fuller range of emotions. Whose Streets? cares about the aftermath of its conflict, highlighting the physical and emotional cost that accompanies resistance and activism by detailing not only the effects of tear gas and rubber bullets, but also the mental, emotional, and financial wear and tear on activists buried under bureaucratic attacks in the form of court summons and eviction notices.

It also includes a brief but powerful scene where protestors directly engage a black female officer, asking her if she’s tired of upholding the “blue code of silence” in the wake of another injustice at the hands of law enforcement. As her steely, dutiful gaze breaks and tears roll down her eyes, Whose Streets? evokes far more efficiently the inherent conflict of a black person serving in a law and order capacity during black unrest than Bigelow ever manages to do with John Boyega’s character in Detroit. 

This is why Whose Streets is better positioned to provoke a productive conversation about race in the country: It’s interested in indicting the country for what’s been done to the black community for generations, not just a handful of officers. In comparison, most of Detroit’s big-picture scenes are fixated on property and appearances, as the movie repeatedly shows black-owned businesses in the rioted areas spray-painted with “Soul Brother/Sister,” pleading for protection. It uses archival footage of black people talking about restoring buildings and homes, and countless scenes of community wreckage. It never once makes the connection to actual suffering so much as savagery.

A question of whose story and whose perspective

In tandem, Detroit and Whose Streets? should theoretically propel deeper, more meaningful conversations about America’s racial stain, but the chasm between the two films’ points of view is too vast. Whose Streets? exhibits a conviction that not only takes seriously social justice challenges and strides, but also takes them past the point of exhaustion, providing a blueprint for not only how to heal post-trauma, but how to battle something bigger than yourself. Detroit never reaches these depths or heights, because its story is too mired in despair, presenting history as inherently episodic, hopelessly stuck in bloody amber.

We need stories that carry the torch of how humanity moves forward in the face of racism and the systems it festers in, but Hollywood still seems ill-equipped for telling these stories. The stories are there, but the white mainstream imagination isn’t. Charitably speaking, that could be because of ignorance, but skeptically, it could be a reflection of something more sinister.

This past weekend, as white supremacists marched down the streets of Charlottesville with torches in hand, they presented a story that felt like a shock to many, but was despairingly familiar to those who have been following, involved in, and impacted by this country’s racial dialogue and trauma over the generations. White nationalist Richard Spencer called Donald Trump’s denouncement of the hate groups that converged in Charlottesville “not serious,” and Trump later seemed to validate that by hosting a press conference where he claimed “both sides” are accountable for what happened in Charlottesville. That sort of creative retelling, which likely satisfied Spencer and similar ideologues while increasing the skepticism in people who feel that Trump is beholden to those groups, is a dizzying reminder that we have to always be vigilant about who is telling our history, and how.

That vigilance is at the root of the recent outcry surrounding HBO’s upcoming series Confederate, which dances on the fine line of fascination with alt-histories and slavery in a story that no one seems to be asking for. Before it’s even begun production, Confederate has been torched by audiences and critics who not only wonder if the Game of Thrones showrunners can tell such a story as two white men, but also whether they should. The strong backlash to Confederate had HBO and the creators scrambling to the show’s defense, essentially asking their critics to give it a chance before casting too many aspersions on it.

But those rebuttals illuminate the chasm that opens when we try to grapple with racism, history, and representation in entertainment. They underscore what studies have shown about our country’s attitudes about racial justice then and now, what many have argued, and perhaps what is the true conversation to be had regarding Detroit and Whose Streets: that progress is not a matter of time and policy, but rather of understanding. That chasm persists because we still need honest, authentic stories to give us what policies and time can’t always provide: empathy and perspective.

The Great Flood of 1927, a biblical-scale event spanning more than 27,000 square miles, displaced nearly 700,000 people and killed 500. Occurring in the middle of America’s Jim Crow era, a period marked by deep segregation, rearticulated forms of slavery, and the height of white law and order — including but not limited to the Ku Klux Klan and local authorities (with members occasionally sitting in both seats) and the persistent culture of lynching — it was a horrific time to be an African American. Their fate wouldn’t prove any better after the Great Flood either, with nearly 200,000 black people relegated to relief camps, eventually forcing many Delta residents to move north as part of the Great Migration.

Against that backdrop, a graphic novel miniseries was created by longtime industry scribe Mark Waid (Kingdom Come, Impulse) and artist J.G. Jones (Final Crisis). Their miniseries, originally released in 2015 via Boom Studios and released this month as a collected volume, is set during the height of the Great Flood, as the small town of Chatterlee, Mississippi, is frantically preparing to battle the incoming tidal wave from the bloated Mississippi River threatening to consume the town. As the flood looms closer by the day, Chatterlee’s white residents cajole the town’s black residents into securing a bulwark against the incoming waters.

In the midst of this imminent catastrophe, though, something else gets added to the mix. At the end of the first issue of the four-issue series, an alien crash-lands in the town. When it emerges from the rubble, it’s revealed that the alien is a black man: large, silent, powerfully built, and naked.

And so begins the rest of the story; a Kryptonian-type origin story of a black superman with unclear motives but very clear strength — in a series called Strange Fruit.

Where to begin?

Strange Fruit attracted controversy with its first issue back in 2015

For starters, why this story and by these two men? Interviews that Waid and Jones did promoting and framing their project suggest some of it is rooted in personal history. In an Entertainment Weekly interview from 2015, the two creators talk about navigating the weight of history, race, and pain through their work. Waid states that as “Southern natives who grew up during the Civil Rights wars … we both feel like we’ve got something personal to say about the racial clashes we saw and experienced first-hand as boys,” and Jones talks about coming to the idea “when my mother passed along a book she read about the 1927 flood in the Mississippi Delta” — earnest, albeit problematic justifications for doing this project.

Aware of the potential pushback in taking this on, Waid also offered in a Newsarama interview that he’s “hyper-aware of my privilege as a white guy” and says, “I’ve no doubt our readers will let us know if we err.”

Plenty of readers did just that. In a scathing 2015 Comics Bulletin review of the first issue titled “Strange Fruit #1 Is an Embarrassment,” author Chase Magnett poses some provocative statements about the creators, offering that “Waid and Jones have nothing to add. Their narrative is filled with heroes and villains constructed from the conscience of two white Americans eager to prove their irreproachability,” adding that ultimately, ”Strange Fruit #1 is simply a continuation of a white narrative in a predominantly white medium by white creators that purports itself to be about the black experience.”

Noted comics critic J.A. Micheline, a black writer who focuses on race and gender, shared her perspective on the project on the blog Women Write About Comics. Micheline unpacks the issues around the on- and off-panel politics of Strange Fruit, offering that the last scene of the first issue alone shows that the creators have labored under a white gaze where they “spent a lot of time considering what white folks are or aren’t going to like without once stopping to think about what black folks really ain’t gonna like.”

It’s in her ComicsAlliance article on Strange Fruit, though, that Micheline zooms out a bit more, unpacking how the creation process and the industry itself allows for a project like this to come to fruition. As she puts it, it’s insufficient to suggest that Waid and Jones have erred simply because they’re white creators; instead, she implores creatives who are seeking to tell stories across lines of identity to “create responsibly,” because “[w]hen you choose not to create responsibly and get behind the wheel anyway, it’s marginalized people you inevitably mow down — even if you didn’t mean to.”

Many reviews and interviews have cited this dynamic; Waid and Jones’s project seems to operate under the assumption it gets a pass for the creators’ bravery to “go there” on (white) American racism, and there’s plenty of precedent in the industry of largely white creators tackling the nation’s racist history through comics. In 2003, the Marvel miniseries Truth: Red, White and Black used a Tuskegee-type backdrop to explore the “real” history and cost of creating a super-soldier vaccine that would eventually produce Captain America, and even a 1985 issue of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing (coincidentally called “Strange Fruit”) sought to explore the Jim Crow South, lynching, and racism.

Similar to those earlier works, the conversations about Strange Fruit are typically underscored with caveats that the story is well-intentioned and beautifully constructed, providing a soft landing of sorts for two respected creators. And it’s true that Strange Fruit is a heady, sometimes noble effort, beautifully drawn and colored, with plenty of immersive cinematic moments ranging from the bulging levees in the constant downpour to the constantly laboring black residents in the background of many panels to the wide-ranging facial expressions. Yet Strange Fruit tries to have its cake and eat it too, and ultimately falls under the weight of both artistic sanctimony and execution.

In its haste to make a statement about America’s racist past, Strange Fruit overlooks the nuance of that past

The litany of reasons that Strange Fruit is a deeply problematic story begins with its title, which is owed to a phrase popularized by Nina Simone and Billie Holiday in a song of the same name. The phrase refers to lynching (“strange fruit hanging in poplar trees”), one of the bloodiest aspects of the Jim Crow era, a murderous act that is connected to nearly 3,500 recorded deaths of black people for believed and contrived offenses.

The threat of lynching was a tool used to intimidate and corral black behavior and mobility in social and political situations. Waid and Jones, though, seek to re-appropriate the term here, thinking that a clever intersection of this phrase is to use it as the title of a Jim Crow-era story where an alien black man drops out of the sky, tumbling from on high.

There’s much to be unpacked with this character, too. In interviews with the creators, he’s often referred to as “the colossus,” yet his “given” name after he emerges from the rubble completely naked is “Johnson,” a name too on the nose to be considered an oversight by anyone involved in the creative process.

Perhaps equally astounding is that Sonny, a local black farmhand who spends the series being chased, beaten, and shot in literally every issue, gives Johnson a Confederate flag to drape himself in, and little of Johnson’s attire changes over the course of the series — meaning he spends the story half-naked and voiceless, a characterization that’s laden with the type of fetishizing covered by Wesley Morris in last year’s piece on the taboos around black male sexuality.

Strange Fruit’s desire to make big, albeit familiar, statements about America’s sinful past and do justice to both the subject matter and history often comes at the expense of considerate or even dimensional characterization. There’s no denying that Waid and Jones did their research on the era; the clothing, appearances, and language all reflect the story’s early 20th century setting. Yet that also means the series is steeped in the language and behavior of the time, and so the endless stream of racial epithets hurled at or uttered in reference to the black characters in nearly every panel can feel especially grating in a series called Strange Fruit that’s centered on a half-naked black super-being called “Johnson.”

Besides a flood, racial tension, and a government employee dispatched to help with the flood and the Klan, the series also adds to the plot a missing white child, and the burden of trying to do it all forces some uneasy characterizations and plot choices. The attempts at humor also confound; there’s a clear nod to the KKK scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, where Waid and Jones spend a couple of panels with some Klansmen fussing about their costuming. Too many details like the above pull an attuned reader out of the story too often, and the resultant story, as put by Publisher’s Weekly in its review, “ends up feeling too self-congratulatory to make a strong statement.”

In a great summation of this story’s direction, Waid positioned Strange Fruit in an “all lives matter” sort of context, noting “the common enemy: a raging river which threatens to claim the entire town.” It’s an odd assertion that feels tone-deaf to both history and its own story, one that quite accurately showcases that in times of national distress, minorities like African Americans must hold the water of the national concerns of the time while still fervently fighting for their own equal citizenry.

Sure, the town may be flooded, but that may hold less urgency for black characters who spend the series being threatened with lynching, being beaten by the cops and citizenry, being jailed without merit and shot on sight. Troubleshooting the flood may be further down the list when you’re fighting and fearing for your life on the daily, and that the story overlooks this frank reality feels essentially like ironic whitewashing.

Strange Fruit reflects the comics industry’s difficulty reconciling traditionalism with a push for diversity

Strange Fruit arrives at a time when the comics industry is in turmoil over issues of diversity and representation, with comics behemoths Marvel and DC exploring how to diversify their respective output. At a recent press panel about their upcoming event “Dark Matter,” the publisher’s heads, Dan DiDio and Jim Lee, discussed the importance of diversity in the company’s line of titles, stressing that their approach to diversity can’t be “[worrying] about servicing the same existing audience.”

This “existing audiences” conversation has been at the core a series of blunders around Marvel’s diversity moves. Marvel’s strategy to date has centered on updating the ethnic and gender identities of existing characters — like Thor (now a woman named Jane Foster), Spider-Man (biracial Miles Morales), the Hulk (Asian-American super kid Amadeus Cho), Iron Man (African-American teenage girl RiRi Williams), and Captain America (African-American Sam Wilson, formerly the Falcon) — some of which has been met with furor from a longstanding fan base most comfortable with the established white identities of these heroes.

This consumer reaction has led to a rather predictable conclusion for Marvel, which has announced two upcoming events — “Generations,” which sees classic versions of the aforementioned heroes meeting their new-generation counterparts for single-issue stories, and “Legacy,” which promises to “honor and restore” the company’s iconic names — that read as a not-so-subtle placation to that traditionalist griping.

In an industry where no one stays dead, what truly won’t die is comics’ adamantium-clad sense of tradition. In order to reengage the diehard fan base that drives their sales numbers, both publishers have used winking language about getting “back to basics” and distinguishing between “comic book readers” and “casual readers” in a way that positions diverse characters and titles (and their readers) as the “other” within the industry.

All of which brings us back to Strange Fruit’s problematic placement in this landscape. Strange Fruit’s publisher, Boom Studios, is a smaller imprint than Marvel and DC, with a mission of publishing a wider array of non-superhero stories since setting up shop in 2005. But while it’s smaller in imprint, Waid and Jones’s project fits into the wider narrative of creating and maintaining stories and voices that are speaking to a predominantly white mainstream audience — which isn’t inherently a bad thing so much as a limited one.

The result of this limited view of a work’s potential audience can mean that sometimes stories, even ones striving for racial diversity, end up being created with a white gaze in mind. This is where Strange Fruit’s execution ultimately suffers; not just on the page, but also in the process of an industry still struggling to understand how to hit nuanced, inclusive notes for a changing audience.

Creators and publishers often maintain that it’s ultimately the story that matters, and that these thornier issues of representation and diversity will whisk themselves away as long as a good story is told. The problem is that without maintaining the high ground on pushing for more diversity in both stories and storytellers, the industry risks regressing back to its more whitewashed days. Pivoting the diversity discussion to being about telling a good story feels like the equivalent of Waid’s own Strange Fruit defense: focus on the flood, not the racism.