ABSTRACT
The Critical Geography approach to reading comics emphasizes that the spatial relationships depicted in comics correspond to material, conceptual and experiential questions about how we define space. This chapter presents a Critical Geography reading of Brotherman Comics that historicizes the story, character, and setting of the comic in order to show the way that the urban imaginary is shaped by power relationships and how concerns about race and identity in the 1990s sparked a renaissance of diverse characters from companies such as Milestone Media (Brown 2000). These depictions offered unique opportunities for black creators to address questions of race, community, and power in comic book form. Similar to interdisciplinary analysis found works such as Comic Book Nation (2001), Super Black (2011), and Comics and the City (2010), this chapter examines Brotherman Comics as vehicle to understand how a graphic narrative rooted in black culture questioned and at times subverted the tropes of comic book superhero genre in order to highlight concerns of race, space, and community in the United States.
