Monday, January 20, 2014

Rob's Room: In Celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Supers by Ozi Magana
From Wikipedia:
Although this was not initially the case, Professor X has come to be compared to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and Magneto to the more militant Malcolm X. The X-Men’s purpose is sometimes referred to as achieving "Xavier’s dream," perhaps a reference to King’s historic "I Have a Dream" speech. (Magneto, in the first film, quotes Malcolm X with the line "By any means necessary.") X-Men comic books have often portrayed mutants as victims of mob violence, evoking images of the lynching of African Americans in the age before the American civil rights movement. Sentinels and anti-mutant hate groups such as Friends of Humanity, Humanity's Last Stand, the Church of Humanity and Stryker's Purifiers are thought to often represent oppressive forces like the Ku Klux Klan giving a form to denial of civil rights and amendments. In the 1980s, the comic featured a plot involving the fictional island nation of Genosha, where mutants are segregated and enslaved by an apartheid state. This is widely interpreted as a reference to the situation in South Africa at the time.

From The Boondocks Comic Strip (am trying to find a better res version of this):

No comments: