When the new Muslim Ms. Marvel was first announced months back, I was almost immediately reminded of something Dwayne McDuffie said about minority characters in comics. Reminded again with that recent formspring question that thought the character was a generalizations, so seemed appropriate to post it below.
“If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren’t just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can’t be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn’t all white people and neither is Lex Luthor. We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn’t do just one book. We had to do a series of books and we had to present a view of the world that’s wider than the world we’ve seen before.”