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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
HBO’s Watchmen (2019) and Disney+’s Falcon and Winter Soldier (2021) both offer television adaptations of comic book story worlds that reinvent superhero personas by centering race to deconstruct the country’s historical reliance on superhero narratives. The two productions took on these themes at a moment of reinvention across technology (streaming platforms), industry (Hollywood’s latest racial reckoning), and text (television depictions of comics properties). Both productions also filmed their stories in Atlanta, Georgia at a time when the country’s racist past had clearly caught up with it. As the “cradle of civil rights movement,” Atlanta provides a particularly charged backdrop for the television series. Many of the scenes in these shows were filmed in communities steeped in debates about the removal of confederate monuments.
Atlanta has reinvented itself as a home for comic book storytelling, thanks to its generous entertainment tax incentive. Yet where the success of “runaway production” locations of the past relied on a sense of place-less, Atlanta’s status as a center for civil rights, Black Hollywood, and the front-lines of America’s debates about race, gives these shows a sense of place. Reflecting on the work of Helen Morgan Parmett, Rebecca Wanzo and Francesca Sobande, I consider the ways location shoots in Atlanta, comic book racial legacies, and Hollywood’s latest racial reckoning, combine to imbue two comic book television series with unique significance as discursive texts the help creative industries and communities grapple with racist legacies.
Parallel Reckonings: Revisiting Racist Legacies in Comic Book Television Series and Atlanta Filming Locations
HBO’s Watchmen (2019) and Disney+’s Falcon and Winter Soldier (2021) both offer television adaptations of comic book story worlds that reinvent superhero personas by centering race to deconstruct the country’s historical reliance on superhero narratives. The two productions took on these themes at a moment of reinvention across technology (streaming platforms), industry (Hollywood’s latest racial reckoning), and text (television depictions of comics properties). Both productions also filmed their stories in Atlanta, Georgia at a time when the country’s racist past had clearly caught up with it. As the “cradle of civil rights movement,” Atlanta provides a particularly charged backdrop for the television series. Many of the scenes in these shows were filmed in communities steeped in debates about the removal of confederate monuments.
Atlanta has reinvented itself as a home for comic book storytelling, thanks to its generous entertainment tax incentive. Yet where the success of “runaway production” locations of the past relied on a sense of place-less, Atlanta’s status as a center for civil rights, Black Hollywood, and the front-lines of America’s debates about race, gives these shows a sense of place. Reflecting on the work of Helen Morgan Parmett, Rebecca Wanzo and Francesca Sobande, I consider the ways location shoots in Atlanta, comic book racial legacies, and Hollywood’s latest racial reckoning, combine to imbue two comic book television series with unique significance as discursive texts the help creative industries and communities grapple with racist legacies.
Bio
Ethan Tussey (Ph.D. University of California – Santa Barbara, 2012) is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Georgia State University. His work explores the relationship between the entertainment industry and the digitally empowered public. His book, The Procrastination Economy: The Big Business of Downtime (NYU Press, 2018) details the economic and social value of mobile device use in the context of the workplace, the commute, the waiting room, and the living room. He has contributed book chapters on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, DC’s SuperHero Girls action-dolls, creative labor, online sports viewing, connected viewing, sports and social media and crowdfunding to various anthologies. He is also the Graduate Director of the School of Film, Media & Theatre as well as the Coordinating Editor of In Media Res and the co-founder of the Atlanta Media Project. He teaches classes on media industries, media theory and history and digital media.