Bealz, Prince Of The SouthSide

Marvel has a billion dollar knack for mining the rich storytelling potential latent within a good ol' messy family legacy, particularly of the patriarchal sort: Iron Man with his dead Daddy issues. Thor and Loki with their dead Daddy issues. Spiderman with his dead Daddy/Uncle/Mentor issues. Black Panther with his dead Daddy issues. The over-riding, most enduring characteristic connecting them all has been this particularly repetitive dynamic. It's no wonder that Carol Danvers seemed to have a shitty flashback Dad, too. Either way, as far as an easily and successfully repeated formula is concerned, Marvel's corporate nature demands that they stick to what works. This gives the viewer the benefit of an ever-increasing scope and scale, but it also lends to a diminished interest or investment in the overall point of it all. Because, in the end, who really cares? We know how this plays out. Daddy's good lessons stick and the more troublesome aspects of h

                                                         MASTER SARGENT ELSWORTH DANSBY                                                         http://omeka.decaturlibrary.org/items/show/128                                                                                                    OBAMA That shit was inspirational. Like a 14-year old kid seeing a partially dismantled airplane in a black man's garage. We didn't all stomp roaches in the morning on the way to a cereal box cinched up tight to keep out the critters? No. Factory heat baked in the grease that settled into the creases of beat up, steel-toed boots and khakis or brooms left calluses as big as dimes on the leathery hands of those who drove the big Buicks on my block and still they struggled to keep up appearances, show up on Sunday and strut in Stetsons and Stacy Adams after sipping shine on Saturday night at the after hours spot. That's it. That's what was done when there were a fe

This Country, indeed, the World at large, as ruled by The Ways of Men, specializes in the art of minimizing and marginalization. That being said, I'm on my way to see Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings , and I am excited for what is supposedly an epic superhero adventure, lush with a relevance of purpose and a cuturally appropriate presentation. It makes me think of my excitement to see Black Panther , another MCU epic, released in 2018, and told from a keenly, self-aware, African-American's global point of view, and just how impactful that story was to me at the time. Here, then, I'll revisit that initial experience and the subsequent article that I wrote as a sort of before and after experience. That was then, how I felt as a Black Man who had grown up on comics, limited to the very narrow slice of representation offered up, first, on the printed page, and later in cinematic form. I wonder, now, though, going into this experience with Shang-Chi , a com