The Specialists

It’s Thanksgiving in the US. Ideally, this is a time to reflect on your life and acknowledge the things you have to be grateful for. In practice, it’s an excuse to gather with family and overeat to an obscene degree.

This year, thanks to the COVID pandemic, many people are eschewing the gatherings. And, given the state of the world, it may seem difficult to think of things to be grateful for. But we hope that, whatever your circumstances, you’re having a safe and happy day. And we want you to know that we’re grateful for you, our readers.

We didn’t set out to create a comic with themes of social justice. It just kind of happened. We’d already decided that we were going to set our story during WWII. As we were creating the cast of characters, we wanted there to be some diversity, so we included two women, a Jewish kid, and a Black man. That left us with a decision to make about how to represent these characters’ lives in this setting.

We could have gone the purely anachronistic route, and never mentioned the challenges of being anything but a white man in the 1940s. That’s been done before (think of the Howling Commandos from Captain America: The First Avenger), but we went the other way, and have tried to portray the sexism, antisemitism, and racism of the time realistically. As white men, we may not be the best people to tell these stories, and undoubtedly, others could have done a better job. But it didn’t feel right to gloss over the uncomfortable realities of the time.

Of course, I’m talking like the 1940s were some distant era whose ways have been left far behind. But the truth is that racism and other ideologies of hate have never left, despite the hard-earned civil rights victories that have been won in the intervening years. Whether we admit it or not, we are still a deeply unequal nation.

All this is to say that Al and I are furious and heartbroken over the racial injustice that continues to plague our country. We stand with the Black community in demanding justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and every other Black life that has been needlessly, senselessly snuffed out.

The American promise of freedom and equality has never been kept. It’s time for us, as a nation, to live up to our own hype. And one step toward that goal — one of many — is to acknowledge that Black lives matter.

But the world doesn’t need another white man’s take on racism. Nothing I can say can express the pain and frustration that author Kimberly Jones conveys in this video. (NSFW language.)