HISTORY IN COMICS 287
Robert Morales and Kyle Baker ’s Truth: Red, White, and Black (2004) off ers
another take on Captain America. Th e story examines the racism that black
American soldiers faced during World War II. In a story inspired by the syphilis
experiments performed on Tuskegee Institute soldiers, doctors infect a battalion with
a super- soldier serum that either kills the men or transforms them into powerful but
grotesque beings. One man becomes the ideal super-soldier, but he is imprisoned and
hidden from public view after he participates in a failed mission against the Nazis.
Readers learn that he, a black man, was the original Captain America.
Kyle Baker ’s Nat Turner (2008) tells the story of the slave rebellion that Turner
led, relying on evocative pencil drawings and no text except for brief excerpts from
Turner’s own Th e Confessions of Nat Turner. Th ough many contemporary Americans
saw Turner as a murderer because he orchestrated the deaths of 60 whites, Baker’s
sympathetic treatment of Turner’s actions demonstrates how he became a civil rights
fi gure for modern America.
Milestone Media ’s Icon: A Hero’s Welcome (1997) revises the standard Superman
story by presenting its title character as an alien who arrives on Earth among slaves,
assumes their semblance, and, subsequently, lives through slavery to present times as
an African American. He becomes a wealthy, conservative businessman who does not
begin to make use of his superpowers until an inner-city youth, Raquel Ervin, attempts
to rob him, but then chastises him for not using his great abilities to fi ght for social
justice.
Alan Moore’s Supreme: Th e Story of the Year (2002) and Supreme: Th e Return
(2003) off er another revision to the Superman myth. Bearing a strong resemblance
to Superman, Supreme is a superhero fi rst created in 1992 by Rob Liefeld and Brian
Murray. With its variety of tongue-in-cheek references to comic book superhero con-
ventions, Supreme is a blatant parody of the superhero genre. He appears in a range
of costumes and forms that vary by time period, age, gender, and abilities. Th ese varia-
tions draw attention to the changeability of his character across time, rather than the
typically presumed timelessness of superhero characters. Supreme is a tribute espe-
cially to the Silver Age of comics and the techniques that comics artists commonly
used at that time. Supreme’s own in-character realizations that he is only one of the
many Supremes and that his memories are written by a group of authors, pay tribute
to the history of comics authorship.
Mythology
In contrast to other forms of history, mythology relies on the belief in the unchang-
ing nature of the world and its mythic fi gures. Mythic identity is especially important
to the meaning of comics superheroes, who are identifi ed with core values and abilities
based on their origin stories and their past storylines. In order to retain a range of
imaginative possibilities for characters—such as Superman, Batman , or the Flash —
while staying true to their mythic identities over time, writers use a process called
retcon , or retroactive continuity. Retcon involves some change in the nature of the
