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The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Chris Gavaler Explores the Multiverse of Comics, Pop Culture, and Politics”

January 15, 2024 Daredevil & Black Lives Matter

George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012 and, after a one-month trial, was acquitted of second-degree murder in July 2013, six months into Obama’s second term. In response, activist Alicia Garza posted “a love letter to black people” on Facebook and coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which then appeared on Twitter about thirty times daily over the next six months. Seven years later, the hashtag would appear 3.7 million times per day during the month following George Floyd’s death in 2020.

Daredevil #28 (September 2013) was published the same week as Zimmerman’s acquittal and Garza’s post. Though writer Mark Waid, penciler and colorist Javier Rodriguez, and editor-in-chief Axel Alonso were not influenced by the verdict or any of the specifics of the trial, they conceived the two-issue court-focused story while Zimmerman was awaiting trial. Issue #28 introduces Nate Hackett, a short, overweight, round-faced defendant with a scraggly mustache and chin hair—characteristics similar to Zimmerman’s, though Rodriguez’s design does not suggest an exact counterpart.

Hackett, who bullied Daredevil alter ego Matt Murdock as a child, is dislikeable, someone Murdock describes as a “professional victim” who should wear an “It wasn’t my fault!” t-shirt. Murdock grudgingly agrees to help him in court, suggesting a similar dislike but reluctant acceptance of Zimmerman’s real-world plea too.

With the racial tensions of the Zimmerman trial as his national context, Waid reprises Marvel’s KKK counterpart, Sons of the Serpent. The organization had not made a major appearance in a Marvel story in five years. As some readers of this blog are aware, I’ve been studying the white supremacist stories off and on for over a year now; the group also appeared in 1966, 1970, 1975, 1991, 1994, and 2008. Waid must have had an interest in them because they make a very brief appearance the same month in The Indestructible Hulk #11 (September 2013), which he also scripted. More significantly, Waid scripted a two-issue Sons of the Serpent 1971 retcon story in Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #8-9 (April-May 1999) — which I haven’t blogged about yet, but will soonish (it is shockingly bad in ways that I didn’t know a comic could be bad). But rather than referencing it, Waid alludes only to the 1975 Defenders story. Charged for being a former Sons of the Serpent member, Hackett sues for false arrest, arguing that his affiliation was protected as free speech and that he left before his “branch” became “political” and “terrorists.” Waid makes the KKK link explicit when Hackett explains: “I joined to light farts, y’know? Not crosses.”

Issue #28 concludes with the judge shooting Hackett — evidence that “racist fanatics have infiltrated the whole justice system,” since the bailiff, prosecutor, and court reporter collude in the attempted murder. Though all four appear white, Rodriquez’s skin color designs are not reductively Color-driven. Rodriquez assigns at least two shades for each face, creating naturalistic lighting effects that undermine earlier industry norms for designating race. Individual characters’ skin colors can change panel to panel, with members of multiple races and ethnicities sharing overlapping color ranges.

Rodriguez also establishes a multi-ethnic setting in the first scene, placing a dark-skinned janitor, two dark-skinned doctors, a blonde nurse, and an ethically indeterminate brown-haired woman in the background of a hospital scene on the second page. Two pages later, a Black food vendor and two possibly Asian pedestrians look up as Daredevil leaps across rooftops.

Since naturalistically rendered white skin is not necessarily distinguishable from Asian, Hispanic, or Black skin, white supremacists are more difficult to identify. Rodriquez exploits the ambiguity by introducing a female police officer wearing sunglasses below Daredevil’s narration: “and I don’t know who’s who.”

The officer appears Asian only after Rodriquez draws her in a close-up after she has removed her sunglasses five panels later. Rodriquez similarly undermines the race-denoting role of hair color. While some but not all of the White supremacist officers have blonde hair, a dark-skinned paramedic has presumably dyed his hair blonde. Noting their high heart rates, Daredevil’s go-to method for evaluating guilt, Daredevil accuses both the Asian officer and the Black paramedic of being Sons of the Serpent. The paramedic responds: “Do I look like a white supremacist?”

Though Daredevil is literally blind, his radar-like senses provide superior spatial awareness, lacking only in color. Rodriquez depicts his radar sense as maps consisting of parallel and evenly spaced pink contour lines giving shape to all objects which are uniformly dark blue with undifferentiated black backgrounds. Since Daredevil apparently cannot distinguish race-designating physiognomy, he is also Colorblind.

Light skin and blonde hair, however, are the most consistent markers of white supremacy. Aside from the judge, who is bald, the blonde bailiff and a later blonde officer, who attempts to murder the paramedic after the judge forces a gun into his hand, are the clearest villains. The officer also wears a blonde goatee, which, though inherently ambiguous, when combined with a baseball-style cap, short sleeves, and open collar may suggest a redneck stereotype—a kind of othered outsider in the urban context.

Ultimately, Waid’s Daredevil perceives the justice system as blameless, since the officers shooting at him were “justifiably paranoid,” the judge “was jailed” afterwards, and, he tells Hackett in his hospital bed, “we know it wasn’t the NYPD behind the false arrest, but rather the Serpents.”

According to MarvelFandom.com, October cover-dated issue #29 was released at the very end of July — two and a half weeks after a jury acquitted Zimmerman. I doubt readers shared Daredevil’s optimism about the legal system.

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