Super-Hero Eating Disorders

As you might have heard, a couple of months ago, Madrid's Fashion Week tried to combat super model eating disorders by banning participants who fell below a certain body mass index. While there has been a great deal of speculation about whether other nations will follow Madrid's lead in their treatment of super models, there has not been widespread speculation on how this might affect other industries, such as super-heroing.

The implications first came to my attention while reading Essential Luke Cage, Power Man, Volume 1, which contains the first 27 issues of the comic. Power Man, according to the back cover of the book, is "comics' first and foremost black superstar of the seventies." Imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Luke agreed to participate in dangerous scientific experiments which would reduce his sentence, but through an accident, he was endowed with superhuman strength and, more importantly, weight.

At first, I thought the weight detail was relatively insignificant in comparison to the huge biceps. The first reference to his weight seemed circumstantial enough in issue #3, p. 12: While Luke is tearing off a fire-escape ladder, he muses, "Keep learnin' more 'bout what doc's experiment did to me--like my weight. Still look 180...But hit 300 on the scales!" Seems like an innocent enough thought for a super-hero while he's tearing off a ladder.

But in the issues that follow, I soon discovered that Luke Cage is rather obsessed about his weight. In the first 26 issues, there are 18 explicit references to his weighing approximately 300 pounds. For the interests of posterity, they occur in: issue #3, p. 12; #5, p. 12; #6, p. 11; #8, p. 4; #8, p. 7; #9, p. 15; #11, p. 6; #12, cover; #12, p. 10; #14, p. 8; # 15, p. 5 (three different times on the same page!--I only count this as one reference); #17, p. 6; #17, p. 17; #18, p. 8; #18, p. 13; #23, p. 6; #24, p. 4; #26, p. 2.

Am I alone in thinking this is weird? Now, I know someone could say, "Perhaps it's not Luke Cage's obsession--he just happen to fall victim to a writer who happened to be dieting at the time, and transferred his own anxieties to his writing." However, during these 26 issues, Power Man had four different writers, each of whom made reference to his 300 pounds of weight! And apparently, it is not simply the case that Luke Cage was himself obsessed about his weight: so is the narrator/caption-writer, and so are his enemies! For instance, when Georgie escapes Power Man, he says to himself, "Oooo, mama! Ol' Georgie done won out again! That Cage boy can't even scramble with a 300-pound body!" I suppose it's understandable that Power Man would be self-conscious about his weight, if his enemies make fun of him for weighing 300 pounds and being slow.

Power Man brings up his weight upon rather odd occasions. For example, when he fights a space-alien who is trying to kill Dr. Doom, Power Man remarks, "Murder's a gig I don't take kindly to ... all 300 pounds o' me!" I guess I understand why he might say something like, "Murder's a gig I don't take kindly to ... nor do my powerpunching fists!" Somehow, I find the prospect of powerpunching fists far more threatening than 300 pounds. The sad thing is, perhaps to Power Man, 300 pounds is more threatening ... to himself. He often blames his failures on weighing three hundred pounds. For example, he thinks to himself, "those motherless jokers are splitin'--an' I don't know if I can move my three-hundred pound bod fast enough to nab 'em." Why not just say, "They're too fast?" No. If only his bod were less than three-hundred pounds, he could have caught up to them. The super-hero Quicksilver never would have had this problem.

The narrator constantly calls our attention to Power Man's weight, demanding we take it seriously as a formative aspect of his identity. For example, take this description of Power Man jumping from a roof-top: "Cage backs up, then races toward the edge of the Crayton building ... three hundred pounds of human power rockets across the deserted avenue ... three hundred pounds leaps from the sixteen-story structure to a twelve-story structure across the wide expanse ... three hundred pounds hits the roof of police headquarters and although that roof shudders and cracks--mama, it holds!" Given that narrators do not often use phrases like, "mama, it holds," it is quite probable that Marvel intends for us to think that the narrator is African-American (or at least employing slang that is supposed to be African-American). So, I ask, why is it that there are so many African-American characters--Power Man, his African-American enemies, his African-American narrator--all obsessed with weight? Are the writers trying to say that the African-American community wrestles with weight gain in the way that whites just cannot understand? Even the Marvel Comics characters who tend to struggle a lot with weight-related issues--say, Kingpin or the Blob (both white characters)--are not constantly informing us about how much they weigh.

I suppose the point is that, just as we need to encourage super-models not to be too skinny, we need to encourage super-heroes that it's okay to weigh 300 pounds, regardless of their race. In repartee with super-villains, it's okay to mention other things than their weight, like their mammoth fists or their bullet-bouncing chests. It is tragic when 300 pounds weighs heavier on a hero's mind than on his or her body.