[El Pais cover h/t gawker]

My man Siddhartha, like many people, refers to Obama as "The Hope" but every now and then a wire gets crossed and he calls him (or maybe I just hear?) "The Truth."

Lots of people think "Paul Pierce" when they hear "The Truth," but me I think of Isaiah Bradly, the hero of Robert Morales and Kyle Baker's comic series Truth: Red, White & Black. That Truth re-imagines the super-soldier formula that produced Captain America as having a secret-secret origin in Tuskeegee-like tests on black soldiers. (Luke Cage ran a similar riff through the prison-industrial complex.)

They're a great set of books, and reflect the way that the road to being a bona-fide (black) American hero isn't always clear cut. Not everyone wants to hear about possible twists in that road, though. Geek-insider arguments about plot and art aside, the deep outrage inspired in some Amazon reviewers of Truth by what they describe as the book's "America hating" follows a depressingly familiar pattern where people want to protect their inspiring, but thoroughly uncomplicated and fictional fantasies - in this case Captain America - from contamination with thoroughly documented historical realities. (I.e., the use of African Americans and other marginalized people in ethically challenged medical experiments.) Basically those angry folks on Amazon are saying that maintaining the pristine contours of their fantasy is more important than what happened to flesh and blood Negroes.

Anyway, the hope/truth misfire - for me - just goes to show how thoroughly the ugliness of the Democratic primary has kept me from properly reveling in the completely afrofuturistic and mind-blowing fact that A FRICKING BLACK MAN HAS BEEN NOMINATED PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OF A MAJOR AMERICAN PARTY. Previously this occurrence was completely the stuff of fantasy, black presidents either showing up in social commentaries like James Earl Jones' The Man -

- or in "Oh Shit! A black man for prez! The world must be ending" sci-fi -

or on the Chappelle show -

- or in crypto-esoteric historiography like J.A. Rogers' The Five Negro Presidents. (Hint: Bill Clinton didn't make the cut.)

I think there's a kind of internal, generational dissonance in how people imagine a black president, where one side sees Obama embodying what one NPR interviewee called the realization of "Dr. King's dream," while other people view him as some completely out, quasi-futuristic shit. Pandagon's Jessie Taylor got to the essence of the latter notion when in an astute post he wrote where he speculated that some folks are afraid Obama will turn out to be Blackazoid, "the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963." Taylor illustrated the post with this image of aborted Captain Marvel clone Captain Thunder:

We're going to see more and more images of images of Barack that evoke both the civil rights legacy and images of Barack the Superhero as we move on. Which will predominate? In my (admittedly bent) mind, at least, SuperBarack has the lead. Which gets us back to the cover of Spanish newspaper El Pais that opens this post and that appeared on on the day Obama clinched the nomination. If that isn't an echo of Kyle Baker's Truth, I don't know what is.