- Pronouns
- he/him
Discuss this interview with comic book writer Arvid Nelson here.
This is true, though like other visual media it's a two-edged sword - the written word lets the reader fill in the background and can then shock them with an unexpected reveal (a character's ethnicity is different from what OTL-influenced cues would imply, there's some shocking background thing like slavery or segregation that was never mentioned as beneath notice, etc.)Now I think Comics have a lot of potential for alternate history due to the nature of it being visual allowing it to showcase more of the environment and world around the characters which literature just can't.
This is true, though like other visual media it's a two-edged sword - the written word lets the reader fill in the background and can then shock them with an unexpected reveal (a character's ethnicity is different from what OTL-influenced cues would imply, there's some shocking background thing like slavery or segregation that was never mentioned as beneath notice, etc.)
Indeed, but those are memorable precisely because someone managed to pull it off in a medium where it wouldn't usually be possible.Funnily enough I can think of a comic that uses both of those twists.
1953's 'Weird Fantasy #18' has a sci-fi short called 'Judgement Day' in which a human astronaut visits an alien planet torn by racism and gives them a speech about how it was only when earth united that they could become great and they needed to do the same thing and then in the last panel takes off his helmet to reveal himself black.
In the AH Comic 'Ministry of Space', about a british space programme coming off a more successful ww2, a minor character is a black woman who in the last panel is shown to be returning to segregated quarters, something previously not mentioned.
1953's 'Weird Fantasy #18' has a sci-fi short called 'Judgement Day' in which a human astronaut visits an alien planet torn by racism and gives them a speech about how it was only when earth united that they could become great and they needed to do the same thing and then in the last panel takes off his helmet to reveal himself black.
You could cast it as being "it's so racist that this little is seen as being progressive."I remember a guy I knew being annoyed by that segregation reveal in MiS, because if Britain's racist enough to have legally enforced segregation now, why are there black astronauts and a Sikh high up in the ministry? But they're not saying this is the law, this could be the informal norm, and it's not like racism kept black and Asian people out of all jobs forever, like there couldn't be one or two getting high up.
(To borrow another scifi, "if there's so much racism in this 1960s, how is the Nichelle character so prominent on the popular show?")
I remember a guy I knew being annoyed by that segregation reveal in MiS, because if Britain's racist enough to have legally enforced segregation now, why are there black astronauts and a Sikh high up in the ministry? But they're not saying this is the law, this could be the informal norm, and it's not like racism kept black and Asian people out of all jobs forever, like there couldn't be one or two getting high up.
(To borrow another scifi, "if there's so much racism in this 1960s, how is the Nichelle character so prominent on the popular show?")
On that topic - I was of the understanding that Britain never did segregation in the way that America did.It did feel to me like a quite heavy handed way to emphasise this uk's racism that didn't feel very close to how actual racism in the uk tends to display itself.
It did feel to me like a quite heavy handed way to emphasise this uk's racism that didn't feel very close to how actual racism in the uk tends to display itself.
On that topic - I was of the understanding that Britain never did segregation in the way that America did.
Had the class system already in place, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Equally famously a Victorian book on etiquette noted that the Aga Khan claimed direct descent from God and added "an English Duke takes precedence"There's a famous story when the king of hawaii is a guest in london and a duke refused to walk with him to which the king says 'Kamehameha is either a king or a n word, if he's a n word he has no business being here and if he's a king, a duke doesn't get to contradict him'.
Of course there was then a big public debate about whether he was a king or merely a chief.
I think in India new officers were given a list of the caste system and the princes vastly outranked any british soldiers just not british officers.