Title pretty much sums it up. Watched a video recently where someone was asked to name a black superhero that didn’t have lightning based powers and while I could name a few it made me realize just how prevalent the trope is.
But why?
Edit: Y’all I’m not asking for examples of black heroes that don’t have lightning powers. I’m asking why it’s a trope to begin with 😮💨
Ink contrast?
Probably not the worst explanation.
That’s high praise on Lenny
Frozone
Edit: There’s a 2-year-old thread on that other site that asked the same question and received lots of examples. I get that tropes and stereotypes exist, but I’m not sure black superheroes and lightning fits the bill.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/1gpxcn2/black_superheroes_without_electric_powers/
TV Tropes has an article on this that probably does a better job explaining than I could.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElectricBlackGuy
Holy shit. How can a dot org site enshittify itself so much?
uBlock Origin, my guy.
I don’t think the top level domain of the site has much to do with its platform decay, but yeah the ads are beyond obnoxious.
I personally think that it started with the fact that the contrast of the yellow lightning worked really well against black skin in the comics.
Then I’m assuming that it became a trope.
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.
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.
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.
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
This sounds like how Bill Maher would say it, immediately followed by like, the most blatant racism.
Big Black Contrast.
Started really with Storm in 1975, although, yeah, her powers are weather control, not specifically lightning, but lightning is definitely her power move.
Before Storm, you had Black Panther, Black Goliath, and Luke Cage, not electrical powers.
But AFTER that…
Black Lightning - 1977
Black Lightning is a great character, but Tony Isabella holds the rights to him so it gets complicated doing stuff with the character.
As a result, you get Black Lightning knock offs that can be used without the rights entanglement.
Black Vulcan - 1977 (Super Friends animation)
Static - 1993 (comics), 2000 (animation).
