A Quick Analysis Of Diversity In DC Comics' 52-Title Reboot

[woodwardiocom]

Or, which titles are not about white guys?

For our purposes, aliens who look like white guys count as white guys (I'm looking at you, Supes), and aliens who don't look like white guys count for diversity. That last point could be debated, but it would require better diversi-chops than mine.

Solo Titles Not About White Guys

• Wonder Woman
  
• Mister Terrific
  
• Supergirl
  
• Batwoman (Female, Jewish, and gay! The champ!)
  
• Batwing (The African Batman.)
  
• Batgirl
  
• Catwoman
  
• Voodoo
  
• O.M.A.C. (He appears to be Asian.)
  
• Static Shock
  
• Blue Beetle
  
• Firestorm kinda slides in here, since he's a single superhero formed from two guys, one of whom is black.

Team Titles Where At Least Half The Team Are Not White Guys

• Justice League (A seven person team with five white guys? Even the animated series did better than that!)
  
• Justice League International (Seven members, with three women of varying ethnicities and a Chinese man.)
  
• Birds of Prey (An all-women team.)
  
• Green Lantern Corps (Over seven thousand members, mostly aliens, with only one white guy appearing regularly in this book.)
  
• Green Lantern: New Guardians (Seven members, only one human, and he identifies as half-Hispanic.)
  
• Red Lanterns (All aliens, none white.)
  
• Justice League Dark (Appears to be six members, half women, half white guys — in Deadman's case, extremely white, har har.)
  
• Stormwatch (Maybe, if Apollo and Midnighter join. They're white guys, but they're also a couple.)
  
• Suicide Squad (Maybe. As I recall, King Shark is Hawaiian.)
  
• Teen Titans (Appears to be half-women, half-white guys.)
  
• Hawk and Dove (Though so long as Liefeld is doing the art, no amount of diversity will get me to buy it regularly.)
  
• Legion of Super-Heroes (Maybe; unclear to me at this point.)
  
• Legion Lost (The core team appears to consist of one white guy, two very alien males, a black guy, a shapeshifting alien female, a Native American woman, and a sentient plasma field who takes male form and pronouns.)

I don't have enough data on Blackhawks and Men of War to assess them yet.

So, out of 52 titles, I have listed 24, with a couple of those being maybes. ...I'm going to say that they could do better, but they've clearly made a couple steps in the right direction.

(And hey, how did I ever miss commenting on the fact that the current Robin (Damian) is better than ¼ Arabic? His grandfather is Ra's, and his grandmother was allegedly Chinese/Euro/Arabic.)

Comments

[wombattery.livejournal.com]

Hawaiian or not, I have it on good authority that King Shark is a shark.

(I don't understand it, but Gail Simone seems to point it out at every opportunity.)

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Well, Selachimorhpo-Americans are sadly underrepresented in today's comics.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

How does those percentages compare with the general population? A comparison of percentages would be of interest . . . either percentage of solo characters, or percentage of all characters (counting, for example, Batman only once even though he's also in the Justice League of America); I don't think looking for teams as teams is as informative.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

How does those percentages compare with the general population?

Gender-wise, we've got teams which are actually half women, so that's nice. Ethnicity-wise, if Justice League International is supposed to represent the Earth's population, it needs a lot more Asians.

The Legion titles tend to be representative of the universe they inhabit because of the way they're written: The writers come up with a new member, then define his or her planet.

Judging the solo titles against American demographics, they need a lot more Hispanics. They're doing pretty good on African-Americans.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Ethnicity-wise, there's a biasing mechanism at work: The natural dumb mechanism is to have one character from each country involved. There are half a dozen East Asian countries, maybe eight Southeast Asian, half a dozen South Asian—and over forty European. Of course, that doesn't account for the shortage of black characters, because there are a lot of countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

Note on the Red Lanterns, one of them is from Earth, not human though.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Oh, good point! Go rage-kitty, go!

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Is it weird that I want to do a complementary list rating them by how awesome the roller coasters assorted with the various characters are?

Batwing wins a fuckton of points for the supine-backwards ascent and the twist into flying position, BTW. Poor Catwoman is stuck with a "family" coaster (although makes up for it a bit with the simple buzz-bar restraint that offers excellent airtime for its size and the overhanging tree branches that just barely don't whack you in the face).

I could go on.