Hey, didn't Nick Fury used to be white?

He sure did. The director of SHIELD didn’t always bear a striking resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson. For about 40 years, Col. Nick Fury was a white guy.

The story I got was that in the early ‘00s, the Ultimate Marvel line, set in an alternate universe, introduced Nick Fury depicted as looking very much like the actor. When the time came around to cast the Marvel movies, they figured, “What the hell. Let’s just cast Samuel L. Jackson.” So you see an African-American Fury in the movies and he’s been very good at the part, because he’s usually good in whatever he’s in.

This confused me because I hadn’t picked up a comic in awhile and once I did I thought, “Why is Nick Fury black?” It seemed odd that someone who had been around since the Silver Age would be a different race. I thought it was the same person but it turns out the new Fury is the long-lost son of the original.

I don’t know if there’s been any backlash but now that my confusion has been cleared up, I’m fine with this. If anything about the change bothers me, it’s the fact that father and son both have eye injuries that force them to wear an eyepatch. Come on.

I support any attempt at increasing diversity in comics. Kids read comics because they like to imagine themselves in costumes and capes, flying around and saving the day. It was easy for me to do that because most of the heroes looked like me. I wonder if it was harder for a kid of a different race to find a role model, especially in the early days of comics, when every hero was a white male. For years, even the African or African-American heroes had the word “black” in their code names. This made sense for someone like the Black Panther, with a black costume, but it was gratuitous and patronizing for people like Black Lightning or Black Goliath. What was it about that lightning that was black?

Marvel is also making its characters more diverse by introducing a new African-American Captain America. Sam Wilson, who appeared in The Winter Soldier as the Falcon, is taking over for Steve Rogers in the comics. I’m fine with this. The Falcon has a 40-year-plus history of heroism and if it’s anyone’s turn to take over for the Star-Spangled Avenger, it’s him.

Speaking of African-American characters, if the comics and movies really want to highlight them, they need to do more with Storm. Ororo Munroe is one of my very favorite characters. She’s been a fascinating, fully-drawn powerhouse for 40 years. It’s been a shame that she’s been sidelined in many of the X-Men movies as she was a leader and the heart and soul of the team for a lot of years. Storm is such a badass that she once temporarily lost her powers and was still able to beat Cyclops in Danger Room combat to retain leadership of the team. Yet in the movies, Halle Berry is lucky to have any lines.

Speaking of attempts at diversity, Marvel has announced that the new Thor is a woman. I’m fine with this but the semantics are misleading. This is not a transgender character. Thor is not becoming a woman; a woman is becoming Thor. A woman has been judged worthy to wield the Mjolnir. The male Thor is still a character but without the hammer. This confuses me because Thor is Thor’s real name and not a code name and even without the hammer, he’ll still have the considerable power of an Asgardian. So I guess there are two Thors. This actually happened once before in the great miniseries Earth X, which prophesied a future Marvel Universe in which Loki tricked Odin into turning Thor into a woman. Loki himself has also been a woman and reduced to a child, which I think highlights how fluid Asgardian identity can be and the fact that the gods are made in the image of their human worshippers and only have the aspects that their worshippers want them to have. The Norse people believed Loki to be evil so he became evil.

But I digress. Next week, we delve into the never-ending soap opera of Jean Grey. Wear something comfortable. This may take awhile.