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ABSTRACT: In Victor LaValle’s 2018 collected comic book Destroyer , the limits of respectability politics and the goals of representation for Black characters are both tested. Destroyer focuses on the death and rebirth of a young Black boy named Akai, who is murdered by police while walking home; his mother, a descendant of Victor Frankenstein and a researcher working on nanotechnology and reanimated life, brings him back in a “super” powered form. In the graphic narrative’s depiction of Black heroism and struggle, its radical politics and its visual work deny the peacemaking impulse of respectability politics that have been linked to the representation of Black characters in comics and other sequential art. This essay traces how Destroyer rejects respectability politics, explores the often-disregarded righteous rage of Black women, and conveys its protest of the premature death Black people are vulnerable to on a regular basis through a highly referential and often intertextual graphic narrative. LaValle’s comic ultimately embraces the rage, heroism, and humanity of its Black characters in its speculative approach to the issues of life and death that it is in conversation with throughout its panels and pages.
Nicole Dib (Sat,) studied this question.