Oh sorry, it didn't even register as a spoiler!

Working backwards, he also referenced the "Tumblr crowd". Plenty of places to get lost here.

She has this idea at first that she needs to BE the Captain Marvel she worships. It's part of her character development/adolescent coming of age thing to get to where she can just be herself.

Fine, but when you're dealing with a legendary king who has a wizard for a counselor, it's a stretch to say that there's "no way" he'd take a black queen.

That's how I bought it, and I'm not a regular comics consumer. Interesting. I wonder how those numbers will shift in general, or if it will continue to mostly be critically-acclaimed crossover stuff that gets high digital numbers.

Yeah, how does online/digital distribution figure in to this?

I mean, I guess a black queen doesn't make sense if you take a literal view of the context of a fictional history with wizards? But it's not difficult to suspend disbelief there, and her ethnicity is not really relevant. So I guess I don't care and view people who do as suspiciously pedantic about the "realism" of a…

Except in this case, we already have a reason not to assume either is his biological child.

Because if a dad and his kid are both black, the kid is obviously not adopted? I don't understand your logic here. If he were played by a white actor, would it be unlikely Susan were adopted?

Yeah, I don't generally buy comics, but I'm buying Ms. Marvel.

I'm no huge comic book fan, but my understanding is that there are loads of original characters that just don't seem to get any traction for whatever reason. So lending existing brands to non-white-males is the only real way to get high visibility representation at this point.

That's assuming they just decided to make one of them black and figure out how to justify it later. It's possible the decision was more organic than that. (I don't know the back story at all, but I'm not ready to just assume that the justification is necessarily awkward.)

Buying Marvel and retconning all the staple characters.

It had direct relevance to one of the main points he was making, which is that race-bending "so often" doesn't make sense. Of his two examples, only one arguably doesn't make sense. Maybe that says something about the prevalence of this problem.

Seems like that's where things are starting to trend, starting with lesser-known characters, e.g. Green Arrow, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.

I would be sad to see the books wither as source material, though, and I'm not even much of a consumer of them. They are what make these mythological entities so iconic. If all we had of these characters was what we see on the screen, and not the primary-colored panel art, I feel like they'd be less transferable as a…

There's this thing called "adoption".

Even if the books are a small part of the comics universe, are they not still essential to feed the stories and characters?

Yeah, I would never argue that something should be changed just because (and I would never argue that that's not exactly what's happening in many cases) but if the change is compelling from a storytelling standpoint, storytellers shouldn't shy from deviations of continuity.

Dark Knight?