Genius

Hosted by the energetic Miz Caramel Vixen, the founder of Vixenvarsity.com, the #BlackComicsMonth Diversity in Comics panel featured a wide variety of panelists from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and sexualities. They also work in vastly different comics genres from Mildred Louis writing and drawing a Magical Girl webcomic with women of color called Agents of the Realm to David F. Walker, who directed a documentary about the blaxploitation genre and currently writes Cyborg for DC Comics and much more. One of the panelists, Mikki Kendall, only recently broke into comics with the Swords of Sorrow: Lady Rawhide/Miss Fury one-shot and is more well-known for her pieces about intersectional feminism for XoJane, The Guardian, and others as well as prose fiction. Vixen let each panelist speak their mind about what diversity means to them, and they often tied in their thoughts with their comics from Genius (which I scored a free copy of) to Princeless and even Batman.

I like this comic book less and less the more that I read it. With each issue, Genius scales back in quality and entertainment. Part of that is due to the current political backdrop in the United States,and how the comic tries to comment on a current events, but fails. More importantly, this critic is just having trouble believing in the story since the motivations within feel thin.

War against the LAPD has begun. At this point in the series, there’s a bit of a credibility gap in the story, as we only poorly understand the motivations for the gangbangers as well as for Destiny. This could be fixed with a few issues explaining some context and backstory, but as it stands, the action thus far is pretty hard to buy into.

Genius is, at its core, a tale of revenge. A lot of kids grow up around a militarized, hostile police force and get lost in the system, and many of those kids grow up angry and potentially violent. This comic wants to show what would happen if one of those kids happened to be on an intellectual par with Hannibal or Alexander the Great.