Marvel Comics & Civil Rights

When I presented my panel paper “Teaching White Supremacy in Marvel Comics” at the Comics Studies Society conference in June, I said this fall I would be changing my first-year writing seminar from “Superhero Comics” (a version of which I’ve been teaching since since I think 2008?) to a much more specific “Marvel Comics & Civil Rights.” Last year I test-ran a unit focused on iterations of Marvel’s version of the KKK, the Sons of the Serpent. It went so well I thought, why not, let’s convert the whole course. As I told the panel audience (which was surprisingly well attended for the first panel on the first morning before a lot of folks had flown in), the trick is to abandon trade paperback anthologies and use the vast resources of online comics to curate your own highly specialized syllabus selection. I’ve now (nearly) finalized my fall syllabus. It turned out weirder than I was expecting. Some version of Sons of the Serpent appears seven times, Hate-Monger (another KKK–inspired…