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Comment on What's with black superheroes and lightning powers?

impudentmortal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

This article does a pretty good job of explaining the history of black superheroes with electrical powers.

To summarize, the popularity of Black Lightning along with copyright issues lead to the creation of a few copycat heroes (ex: Black Vulcan in Super Friends, Juice from Justice League Unlimited). There’s also the possibility of electricity being a versatile power and the popularity of Storm from X-men and Static.

Someone in the comments section also noted that it could also be an artistic choice since the colors of electricity would contrast better with black characters than lighter skin characters. That seems like a stretch to me but that is another theory.

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zout@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
A pornstar from my country (decades ago) said that she preferred working with black men because of the contrast on screen. Totally unrelated tidbit, but it makes sense to me that the same goes here.

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- k0e3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Big Black Contrast.
  
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- ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  New bit idea: guy who insists he doesn’t have any internalized racism to confront, since he doesn’t have a sexual preference for interracial scenes, he simply believes they are better from a composition and cinematography perspective
  
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  - vinceman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    This sounds like how Bill Maher would say it, immediately followed by like, the most blatant racism.
    
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snooggums@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Great article!

I also think the contrast reason is very plausible for the early designs as colors and contrast are a massive part of design in comics.

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