How Comic Book Companies Are Erasing Culture in Comics

Comic books and movies are an excellent opportunity for representation, but POC in comics are constantly rewritten as white or having their culture ignored.

Comic books and comic book movies are two very lucrative entertainment genres, with the two prominent companies being Marvel and DC comics. Through the years, characters are added, and old ones are changed, but not all of these changes are good. 

Both Marvel and DC comics tend to erase the culture of their characters as they gain popularity by changing their race, ignoring their ethnicity, and casting white actors to play POC. This erasure is constant across comic books and movies.

Comic Books

One such instance of erasure is in the characters fans have dubbed the “batfamily,” which includes Batman and the other heroes in the city, Gotham. This includes Batman himself and his first son Dick Grayson. 

Batman was established as being ethnically Jewish in 2006. This happened during the introduction of Batwomen, Bruce Wayne’s cousin on his mother’s side. Batwoman’s father, Batman’s uncle, is Jewish, as was his mother, thus making Bruce Wayne ethnically Jewish. However, the writers of the Batman comics never touch on this in their comics.

The other instances of this are much more founded in cannon but often left untouched. This is seen in Batman’s son Dick Grayson. Dick Grayson was established as part Romani in the Gotham Knights comic run in the late 90s and early 2000s. While his identity is cannon in the comics, it is often never mentioned in more well-known media and comic runs.

Marvel Comics has issues with blatant antisemitism in addition to erasure. This is seen in the Maximoff twins in the MCU and their father, Magneto, in the comics. The most obvious is when Marvel comics had Magneto, a Jewish holocaust survivor, work with the Red Skull, a nazi. This happened in the Acts of Vengence comic run. Marvel comic rectified this in Captain America #367 by having Magneto betray the Red Skull and leave him to die due to backlash from fans.

Movies and Shows

Comic book movies and TV shows, both Marvel and DC, have issues not just with whitewashing characters like Silver fox and Jubilee but actively erasing the cultural identities of their characters. Examples are the Maximoff twins, both in the MCU and Sony X-Men, and Roy Harper in the DC show Arrow.

In the comics, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff are Jewish Romani and the children of two holocaust survivors, who got their powers through mutation, like the X-men. However, since mutants do not exist in the MCU, Marvel tried to work around it and, in doing so, had two Jewish Romani characters work with nazis to get their powers. 

In the MCU, the Maximoff twins gain their abilities by volunteering and briefly working with Hydra, a nazi faction. This is blatant erasure of the culture they are part of in the comics. This erasure also exists in the X-Men movies, although to a less antisemitic degree. In the X-Men film Days of Future Past, Pietros Romani heritage is wholly ignored. The film even changed his name from Pietro to Peter, making him and his mother completely American, and not even mentioning Wanda. 

This erasure isn’t unique to Marvel Comics either, as DC comics did something similar to Roy Harper, Arsenal, in their show Arrow. In the many reboots of Roy Harper’s origin, one aspect remained consistent. In More Fun Comics, Adventure Comics, and Secret Origins, Roy Harper is adopted by the Navajo tribe after his parent’s deaths.

Roy Harper’s origin has been altered over the years to remove racist stereotypes, but his childhood on the Navajo reservation was a constant. It went even further when in Adventure Comics #209, it was established that the Navajo tribe were the ones that taught Roy Harper how to use a bow and arrow, his iconic weapon that he uses in his run as a hero and a vigilante. Roy Harper’s childhood upbringing on the reservation helped shape him as a character. Still, in the show Arrow, this was erased, and they gave him an entirely different backstory, having been raised in the glades and learning to use a bow from the Green Arrow.

Comic books and movies are popular media and have an opportunity to have a thorough representation of many groups. Still, it is often erased or changed once this representation is established. Erasing this representation can harm the communities that comic book companies take these characters away from.