Lighten Up

March 18, 2015 10:06 AM

Lighten Up (NSFW), a short comic about coloring and race in comics by Ronald Wimberly.
posted by dinty_moore (14 comments total)

Oooh Ronald Wimberly! He did one issue of Lucifer ages ago and I was really impressed by it. This is a clever and incisive comic but it doesn't have the crazy energy of that issue's penciling.

Oh and looking at comic vine he apparently did work in an issue of Prophet I haven't gotten to yet. Excited now!
posted by selfnoise at 10:13 AM on March 18, 2015

That's a great essay/comic.
posted by suelac at 10:14 AM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

It is a good essay, and an aspect of racism in comics I've never really considered, which is kind of ridiculous in hindsight.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:16 AM on March 18, 2015

One of the things I've most enjoyed about webcomics as a medium (not a serial genre) is that the lack of restriction of form--not having the constraints of a printed page--seems to free up a lot of creativity in the writers and artists. The essay was great, but the visual form of it, with the HTML color codes, really helped drive the message home for me. I'm not sure how well it would have worked on paper.
posted by immlass at 10:28 AM on March 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

That was pretty awesome.
posted by echocollate at 10:31 AM on March 18, 2015

I only know the Marvel comic universe from films and TVs so I have no idea about the history of this character in the comics. It's interesting to look at her gallery on the Marvel database, though. She has every skin color from "tan white person" to, say, "Gina Torres." It's hard to know what the editor in question could have been thinking.

Also, the database says her mother was "African American" and her father was Latino.

Could that name be any more painfully on the nose, though? The most famous homonym, surely, is "Melitta" the German coffee-machine and coffee-products company.
posted by yoink at 10:39 AM on March 18, 2015

Outstanding.

MetaFilter: SLOW DOWN, WHITE GUILT AHEAD.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:00 AM on March 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

Such a great comic. Reminds me of Wyatt Cenac's friend, who got told her skin was too brown to be a hobbit in a film.
posted by cashman at 11:56 AM on March 18, 2015

Fantastic. I look forward to discovering more of his work.
posted by Svejk at 12:31 PM on March 18, 2015

I've said this in other places, but it belongs here, too. GIVE RON WIMBERLY ALL THE COMICS! Check out his Blade pitch and Cloak & Dagger pitch on his Tumblr link. The young pantheon of comics artists for me is : Becky Cloonan, Sophie Campbell, Ron Wimberly, James Stokoe and Corey Lewis.
posted by Slothrop at 6:03 PM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

i was just coming to post this! it is so, so good.
posted by nadawi at 8:17 PM on March 18, 2015

It was indeed a good essay/comic, and I appreciate having the chance to read it.

But can someone please add a "NSFW" tag? There is a panel of nudity in the form of a comic version of a painting, and I was unsettled when it appeared unexpectedly on my (workplace) screen.
posted by Scattercat at 9:40 PM on March 18, 2015

I don't think the issue was with the character being Latina and White (he makes the point that Latina can cover a lot of different skin tones), it was that she'd been formerly assumed to be Latina and Black, and the Black part had just been erased.
posted by dinty_moore at 5:27 AM on March 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Added "NSFW" to post text.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 5:34 AM on March 19, 2015