[SPEAKER_00]: What is up everybody?
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Comic Book Club.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Alex and we've got another bonus episode for you here talking about an awesome book called Spider-Man Miles Morales and Exploration.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's coming out June 25th from Bloomsbury.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is part of a bigger series that we've been talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: We recently talked to Jim Rugg about his weapon X book.
[SPEAKER_00]: We talked to other folks from this program and they're more academic looks at the characters you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: and we have a noted academic here to talk about this Biles Browse book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today is Tasha L. We'll Mac, Tasha, welcome to the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, how's it going?
[SPEAKER_00]: Really good, and very excited to talk about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really enjoyed this book.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a deep dive, particularly into the beginnings of Miles Morales, both what led to his beginnings, the first couple of arcs and the formation of the character.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just from Brian Michael Bendes and Sarah Pechelli, but talking about Donald Glover, a little bit, and the whole Blakey on the hashtag.
[SPEAKER_00]: Donald First Spider-Man was that one
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh, yeah, well, he was the Donald Glover of just got really excited about wanting to be Spider-Man.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, actually, he didn't get so excited initially.
[SPEAKER_02]: Someone suggested that if there was going to be a Spider-Man redo, then Donald Glover should play the person that became a whole fandom, a fandom battle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was a good choice, so not to which Donald Glover is like, I would love to play it, and then it just,
[SPEAKER_02]: when it's of the status.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, now we've, uh, I actually know Dottle from back the day from a sketch comedy days and NYU.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to do sketch comedy in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was a wild thing to see pop up.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've talked to Pride Michael Bendis a bunch about the genesis of miles as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to talk about you and where you were for a struck by miles.
[SPEAKER_00]: What made you interested in the character and ultimately let
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I was, I've been excited about the Miles Morales character ever since I started.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was just a character came out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was doing a writing a book called Afro Futurism, The World of Blackside Line, Fantasy Culture, and one of the,
[SPEAKER_02]: points of immersion that I really had to dive deep into when I decided to write about that subject was comics in the comic scene.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I like some, you know, fans of characters with someone who like comics as a kid, you know, drew comics, something happens and then you look up and there's a whole world of comics.
[SPEAKER_02]: that is grown beyond your wildest imagination.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when I decided to write about that for futurism, I was connected to the Black Asian comic scene that was in Chicago and looped in a lot of creators who were out of New York and Detroit and Atlanta who would come up for this con that turtleneck only put together.
[SPEAKER_02]: The con started in the late 90s and moved on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I was getting involved in that space,
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I just saw that, you know, I started getting excited about writing or creating characters, but I was around a lot of people were creating characters and really discussing the value of characters, how you shape characters, if you're doing one that's out of culture, what they should look like,
[SPEAKER_02]: and the tenants and, and so as I'm writing my offer, Futurism book and I'm writing about, you know, this comic scene, all of a sudden Miles Morales, the character is kind of launched into the Marvel universe.
[SPEAKER_02]: and I was almost finished with the book and that to go and make sure I wrote about my house in the book.
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of my evolution in writing about Africa tourism is really kind of paralleled with the rise of the Miles Morales character.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you, this is the dumbest possible question I do apologize, but can you talk about affer futurism in particular and how that connects to miles?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think probably a lot of listeners certainly think of afferutism as Wakanda, you know, just this city of the future that pushes technology forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing exactly what miles is necessarily, so how does that work together?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, for me, as a person, it was writing about Afra Futures.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I was really doing was looking at how people are thinking about futures and alternate realities.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I'm talking about everything from Barlem and Funkadelic and Janel Malne, and Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney and Teneridoo.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, these are all people who are in literature spaces, music spaces.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you had a lot of indie films.
[SPEAKER_02]: that sort of spoke to these relationships between imagination and liberation and technology and mysticism.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, but there wasn't really a term that people working under these works were really,
[SPEAKER_02]: working out there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You think about Ornette Coleman, if you're into jazz, we're all he wrote, that a whole jazz album called Science Fiction.
[SPEAKER_02]: You think about something like a sunrise who talks about being this Egyptian deity, but the idea he said he was from Saturn, and he's healing the world with music vibrations.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are jazz heads you just looked at that as jazz, and then there were people who love that table butler, and some of the languages looked at it,
[SPEAKER_02]: whether you're talking about some of their early comics like a a little bow or you're looking at a black Panther issues or other indie comic characters, Maddie's Rocket, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the comic people just knew the comics.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when I came across the turn of our future, I said, wait a second, this term applies to a lot of different
[SPEAKER_02]: genres and approaches, but everyone working on these things aren't necessarily familiar with all the ways that these ideas are expressing itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Miles Morales, to me, kind of falls more squarely in the conversation of just looking at, you know, comics.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, it's a character of color, you know, it's black and Latin they African American and Latin they African American and Puerto Rican coming out of Brooklyn and you know, taking the legacy character he has his cultural context.
[SPEAKER_02]: he's dealing with things that a lot of kids coming of age are dealing with.
[SPEAKER_02]: But because of that added cultural context, he's dealing with a character who isn't an alternate reality.
[SPEAKER_02]: He is dealing with his own personal relationship to how to express himself, which is a kind of liberation.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he's literally at some point going to hop from one universe to the next.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, talk about
[SPEAKER_02]: stretching paradigms.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then on top of that, he has particular technology, it's something that, you know, is tying into the the fables of old.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're looking at being bitten by a spider, you know, is it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is he a superhero?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is he a shamanistic?
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, not a shapeshifting figure?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's levels that you can take these comics, comics writing too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think more than anything because I was in a circle of people who were really creating comics and and pushing for
[SPEAKER_02]: stories that reflected these different vantage points and cultural vantage points.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I was very aware that the Miles Morales character had a great deal of meaning for people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... yet there's a couple of things that i wanted to ask you off of that that you certainly touch on in the book but like you were noting there are things they're very specific things right off that make a bit different from Peter Parker you know there's obviously the fact that like you were saying he is African-American Puerto Rican that makes him very different from Peter Parker there's Brooklyn versus Queens that makes him different as well um... what
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to think out of phrase up this question.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what does it mean that Miles is these other things than Peter or our Parker, that he is in another universe, that he does have slightly different powers, et cetera?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, well, you know, people.
[SPEAKER_02]: can just look at the ethnic difference and say okay well that's the primary difference between the two characters but that's more in some ways that's a surface thing you know there are other things that make miles very different from Peter Parker for one he's younger he's 13 years old so he has to literally deal with the the challenge of being a superhero who has to be in you know
[SPEAKER_02]: This treat lights go off or, you know, he asked parents who are attentive, but just something that's also different from Peter Parker, you know, Peter was, you know, I had a very attentive aunt and, you know, an uncle who was very attached to, but yeah way more wiggle room and independence in a way that Miles Morales does not, and he's younger.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's also in a private school.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like a boarding school.
[SPEAKER_02]: So,
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a different framework there, and then Miles has almost the opposite of an uncle bin.
[SPEAKER_02]: As an uncle Aaron, who he loves, who's amazing, but is very much a figure who's just, you know, problematic.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when, you know, Miles learns more about his uncle and his gangster affiliations, his villain affiliations, you know, he just starts sort of questioning is this.
[SPEAKER_02]: a path I'm supposed to go on, is this how I'm supposed to use my powers?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's, you know, it's a kind of a classic teen, the bottle, in one sense, but it's just different for Peter Parker because they do not have, you know, their, their their challenges are different, their frameworks are different, their relationships to family are different, and, and I think those are big deals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd 100% agree with you on all that, and I'll just throw out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, for me, the family, I think is almost the most crucial thing, just having both of his parents around interacting with him, and like you said, Uncle Aaron, I think the smartest decision they've made at a certain way was flipping the Uncle Ben Paradigm into something else and turning it into
[SPEAKER_00]: a riff on the with great power with great responsibility, but with essentially with power comes no responsibility or my guess is another way of looking at it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, with power comes more power, yeah, smash and destroy, yeah, so the fact that both characters wrestle with what that means, you know, and then the other thing that's different with Miles Morales and Peter Parker, Miles Morales as the benefit of being in the world, where he knows there are other superheroes,
[SPEAKER_02]: specifically, Peter Parker.
[SPEAKER_02]: Peter Parker is initially the only person he knows who has these arachnet abilities.
[SPEAKER_02]: He passes away.
[SPEAKER_02]: Milesville's culpable like he should have in some way say him, which, you know, was in no way his fault.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he has to evolve into his superhero
[SPEAKER_02]: And I which is it's it's sort of interesting maybe say that about Peter Parker as well, but the fact that he's older just makes it different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, one of the things that I really like that you point out in the book is you delve into his powers a little bit because another thing that makes Miles difference is he has different powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has the same spider powers, a spider man, but also you have a section where you talk about, it's not exactly invisibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's like Amelia and powers if I remember correctly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is a melody?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so what does that say about him?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know you touch on this to the book for the purposes of the podcast of us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have a character who wears a mask and has a full body suit.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't know his identity.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then on top of that, he can also go invisible.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which is an interesting trait to add to a character who's already in a costume and no one knows who they are.
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the ways I sort of write that down in the book, I talk about it as a form of like double protection.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of that, you know, is just the armor of youth that one puts on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of it is filling other for any number of reasons, you know, being a
[SPEAKER_02]: a kid or a kid of color in certain scenarios, it's the desire to be invisible.
[SPEAKER_02]: The desire to be invisible because so much is projected on someone.
[SPEAKER_02]: uh, and I, you know, and just sort of looking at this double power thought it was really fascinating because you have, uh, there's a whole lineage of books written by, you know, writers like a a Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison where they're talking about filling invisible in society.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, and then being in dynamics where they kind of don't want to stand out.
[SPEAKER_02]: because of their ethnicity or race, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the challenges that one has to deal with, because they stand out, or the challenges one has to deal with, because they aren't seen at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when someone says they're not feeling seen, it's not just like you literally don't see them standing there, which is also the case.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's, you know, feeling like your viewpoint
[SPEAKER_02]: The opinion you have aren't valued or what you're bringing to a scenario is just not important to the people who you're working with and you know I also just think about teenagers you know about a teens, people coming of age, they're like parents don't quite understand them they don't see the person they're becoming so this double invisibility is just a mask and you're invisible
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a question about another one of his powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also has his venom sting, which is sort of an electrical discharge that they've started playing with the current continuity by me who can be able to transform it into enormous sword among other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to take credit for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw somebody posting online wondering about why so many characters of color in particular have electrical powers, and you know, calling out black lightning and static and
[SPEAKER_00]: Miles Morales, do you have a take on that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why that is a trope?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I ran across those articles too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, he started naming them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I went in.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is quite a few.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then I talked to a friend of mine, John Jennings.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was like, this is not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then he starts naming them.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other kid does he don't have that power at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've seen other blog posts about people saying, there are other powers that Black characters have.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it almost depends on how deep in the comic scene you want to go, where you're looking at this range of characters and what their actual powers are.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, if I were to paraphrase at least one blog that I read.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I want to say, you know, the kind of static shock venom blasts
[SPEAKER_00]: get totally fair couple of questions for you this isn't necessarily touched out of the book but miles goes through a bunch of different costumes there's obviously he tries the original Spider-Man costume that doesn't work he gets his I would say classic black and red costume that he wears after that he's had baguier costumes tighter costumes different takes on it do you have a favorite
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so because my book focuses on the early iterations of Miles Morales, I would have to say it's, you know, it's very first official costume that I like the images of him with the Jordan's, I think that's a lot of those are the fun images where he's wearing the costumes he's rocking the Jordan's sometimes I like a baseball cap, I think that's a fun look.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, another one for you, a sort of like this or that you get in the book talking about a lot about little miles, the 13 year old miles, now that he's in the Marvel Universe proper, not in the ultimate universe, he's grown up a bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's an older teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a preference there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's an interesting one.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's a vulnerability that you have to deal with with younger miles.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think that younger miles connects to like our inner child, you know, areas kid with this weighted responsibility.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you just, you know, I have a lot of empathy even, you know, taking a look at these.
[SPEAKER_02]: comics again and writing about them.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, oh my gosh, it's the 13-year-old kid.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's going through this body or, and he has to fight these monsters.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, this is terrible.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then he, like, you can't see defeated them, but 13's pretty young.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, from a writing standpoint, if he's a little older, he can do more with him.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I'm not going to say I have a preference.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll say I have a preferred for the little biles just for a visual perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love just seeing the tiny skinny miles fighting against these big threats and overcoming them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something as a reader.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's very David and Goliath.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Always smaller than his opponent.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which it's kind of funny because in the book I talked about miles and the anazi,
[SPEAKER_02]: mythos, you know, the mythology and stories that came out of Ghana with the icon, and it's kind of spread all over the diaspora.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a not-tique character is always the character who's going to find the way.
[SPEAKER_02]: And his opponents are always bigger than him.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you're hearing about these stories where the spider is outsmarting, you know, the leopard or these larger animals, you
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: A frequent criticism that's thrown at Miles Morales that I see online a lot is that is the character that people love, like I love them, clearly you love him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he doesn't have a lot of standout stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't have those iconic story lines that necessarily you get with a lot of other characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that's true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or how do you feel about that?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't necessarily think that's true, and again, because I'm was really deep diving in those, say, you know, first dozen or so comics, I thought those were epic evolutions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so maybe something people need to take another look at or think about from a different vantage point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think that's a good way of putting it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, those comics, I, they were, my or it is the wrong word, but there was very much the shock of Peter Parker getting killed off the introduction of my house, Browles.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of big feelings going on there with everybody at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe with enough distance looking back, people would.
[SPEAKER_00]: people would appreciate it more.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think so.
[SPEAKER_02]: I made people worse.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was like the dynamism of the character existing and you know the possible symbolism and what does that mean that maybe
[SPEAKER_02]: They want to take another look at the character, but I know a lot of people, they're really excited about Miles and that those his arc.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is not something that you touch on too much of the book because it is very squarely focused on those 12 issues, but I would argue the big thing that really vaulted him.
[SPEAKER_00]: to the higher echelon is the spiderverse movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the things that really define him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a take and you don't have to but do you have a take on why specifically it was that that sort of like crisped miles in in terms of popular culture or do you disagree?
[SPEAKER_02]: uh, I agree.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, as you well know, comics people read comics and then there's people who love characters and then they after retroactively go and get into the comics.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a lot of people who can love characters, you know, they love Superman, you know, they love the X man and they haven't read comic the first.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're getting everything from the movies.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think for some people, the movies
[SPEAKER_02]: Deep dive into the character, which then got them excited about reading the comics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there anything while you're researching it that you were particularly surprised by that you came across in the book?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, obviously, it's going to be in the book and we want people to read the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: But was there a fact that you learned about these comics or something that you thought was, oh, I didn't know that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe, I guess there's a lot of it, you know, they're just sure I didn't quite know.
[SPEAKER_02]: As something that surprised me, I think, you know, thinking about the number,
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I would just say, you know, really thinking about how young Miles was, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, when the character's launched again, the fan fair of it and following the story, there's a tendency to think of him as older than he is because of what he's dealing with, but I just think is the fact he's 13 and the symbolism of that was really, really fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we wrap up here, obviously the focus is on this book and people should check that out, but anything else you want to plug, any other places people should check you out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I have a comic that I wrote called Black Moon Ritual, which is part of the Protopia collection.
[SPEAKER_02]: That anthology is now out and people can check that out.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want to learn more about Afrofeaturism, my book, The Afrofeaturist Evolution, is all as workbook questions and reflections to help you deep dive and hone in on your Afrofeaturist takes.
[SPEAKER_00]: awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once again for everybody out there, Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and Exploration is coming out June 25th from Bloomsbury.
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely check it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can pre-order it I believe now from your comic book store or book star.
[SPEAKER_00]: Natasha, thank you so much for coming on an absolute pleasure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, thanks so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this is Grant.
[SPEAKER_01]: They sit on crappy couches and they let us see what we can And he's just a monkey, they'll let us special guests think So grab your ring, hammer, don't be late for it, don't be fair