Fenris. I hate that I’m off-line these days. I can only participate in these threads days long after the conversation is dead and forgotten.
That said:
-
Freedom Beast wasn’t tied in to apartheid, he was anti-apartheid. It’s like objecting to Captain American because he was “tied” in with anti-Nazism.
-
True, he’s committed murder. So have scores of DC superheroes: Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Green Arrow… Even his predeccesor murdered an African despot in cold blood. Does that make him tainted, too? It was a realistic portrayal of what would happen if any man, regardless of creed or color, who wasn’t an typical American comic book superhero would do if they had half a brain. It was heaps better than that GREEN LANTERN ANNUAL written by Christopher Priest (back when he was James Owlsey) in which John Stewart had rescued the entire Pretoria government from a bomb threat in a green bubble and DIDN’T kill them all. I think a better ending would have been for Hal Jordan to do one of those self-congratulatory “You’re a better man” speeches and have John say something cold like, "I didn’t kill then because there were too many witnesses."You might find that tiresome but I’d be cheering.
-
Yeah, Donovan Mndawe was angry. But he wasn’t the stereotypical angry American black guy. He was an angry South African black, which is perfectly undestandable given the governmental policies of the time. By comparison, the differences between apartheid-era Nelson Mandela and post apartheid-Nelson Mandela are pretty stark, too. I’d expect any re-introduction of Freedom Beast to have someone say something like, “You don’t seem as angry as you used to,” and have him reply introspectively, “I had a lot to be angry about in those days.”
Obviously I have a loooOoooot of affection for that character’s one time appearance (I own the whole Morrison run on ANIMAL MAN and two copies of that issue, which for me ranks right behind “The Coyote Gospel”) and I hope to see what he’s been up to someday soon.
