Black Superheroes: Sunspot

Look, when I said "black heroes" I didn't mean literally

Name: Roberto "Bobby" da Costa 

First Appearance: Marvel Graphic Novel #4 (1982) 

History: Bobby da Costa was not the typical kid. Born to Afro-Brazilian millionaire Emmanuel da Costa, he lived a life of affluence but was also a high-level athlete, particularly skilled in football (that’s “soccer” for you uneducated swine). Despite this he was haunted by racism directed him for being the biracial son of a black man. This came to a head during one of his football matches, where racists from the opposing team brutally attacked him in a racially motivated hate crime. However, it was a that moment that Bobby’s mutant abilities emerged, allowing him to absorb solar energy and transferring them into superpowers (including super strength, flight, and able to create concussive blasts of solar energy, while also taking on pitch black skin while he’s powered up). 

Shortly after this, Bobby’s girlfriend Juliana, the only person who stood by his side when his powers manifested, was kidnapped by goons working for Donald Pierce of the Hellfire Club to lure him into a trap. During the struggle, Karma and Dani Moonstar, two recent recruits of Professor Charles Xavier, arrive to help rescue the two, but ultimately Juliana took a bullet for Bobby and died in his arms. 

Fueled by a need for revenge against Pierce, Bobby returned with Karma and Dani to Xaviers’ School for Gifted Youngsters and becomes of founding member of the New Mutants, the next generation of X-Men, taking on the codename “Sunspot.” 

Beta Says: To be completely transparent here, I’m not the most familiar with Sunspot. The reason for this is because even now after well over 30 years of being a comic book fan The New Mutants has always been and remains a weird blind spot for me. Because of this, I am ashamed to admit it was many years before I was aware that Bobby was black; I thought he was just Latino. However I was not alone in this false belief, as poor Roberto has had the “afro” part of his ethnic identity changed, forgotten, or otherwise ignored possibly more than any other black superhero in history. And that’s what we’re talking about today. Buckle up; I’m pretty pissed off.

More about the black erasure of Sunspot after the jump.

Sorry, this guy just looks f@#$ing cool!

As stated, Sunspot is a member of the X-Men spin-off team the New Mutants, and while that book was popular and critically acclaimed during the 1980s its notoriety really fell off by the 1990s. This is likely because of the effects of the ”Superstar Artist” era of the X-books that saw Rob Liefeld re-brand the book as the more militant and more EXTREME X-Force. Since then, the original members of the team have been considerably less prominent in the overall Marvel landscape than they had previously been, as often they individuals will disappear from books for years only to be brought in as a dark horse selection for a new team. Once a decade, maybe less, someone tries to bring back the New Mutants in a new ongoing, but inevitably it feels like pure nostalgia for the original book as opposed to doing something new. Honestly it's Magik (who wasn’t even a founder of the team) who has been the main ex-New Mutant to climb to A-list X-Men status with any consistency. 

That all said, Sunspot has actually done quite well for himself in the last ten years or so. He rose to fairly high prominence in 2015 when he used his deceased father’s vast wealth to purchase the villainous Advanced Idea Mechanic and reform it into an Avengers team (Avengers Idea Mechanics), while eventually having that group become agents of the US government in the pages of USAvengers. He died not too long after this but was one of the many, many X-Men to be resurrected during the Krakoa era, where he was active but I will say his spot in the overall Marvel scene did drop a bit. But aside from comics, he also was featured in the film X-Men: Days of Future Past, played by Mexican actor Adan Canto and, of course, appeared in the New Mutants movie played Brazilian actor Henry Zaga. The role that has given Bobby his most mainstream attention has probably been his unexpected inclusion in the cast of the sequel to X-Men: The Animated Series, X-Men ’97, where she is voiced by Brazilian actor Gui Agustini.

Have you noticed the problem yet? Even though some of them of Brazilian, none of these actors are black. At all. (Though it must be said, that hiring a Mexican actor for the role is just flat out wrong). Never has Sunspot been depicted as being the biracial son of the black man in any adaption he’s appeared in. This is nuts when you remember that a big part of his origin is that he was being ASSAULTED BY RACISTS FOR BEING BLACK!

Skin identical to his black father

Huh. What do you suppose he meant by that?

Aw dang, I think Roberto might be black, y'all!

In case you can’t read the above image, the white bigot pounding Bobby is saying "Your father's wealth can't change the color of your skin. You're still BLACK -- An animal masquerading as a human being!" How in the hell did all these casting directors make such a huge goddamn miss?!

To be fair, the answer probably lies in the comics themselves and I have a theory about it. Remember when I said the New Mutants fell out of prominence after X-Force took its place? I think that the further away we got from the their heyday of the 1980s, the characters from the New Mutants became less like the cast of the second most important X-book in history and became just more bodies in the increasingly insane number of X-Men characters who aren’t part of the core team (again, except for Magik, who has become part of that core). As this happens, less and less writers and artists have been familiar with the second-gen Xavier students. Maybe he’s pulled into a story because the creator see a “fire guy” (which he is not) and some easy diversity. I have noticed that his heritage isn’t brought up to much in subsequent comics and his skin tone had noticeably become lighter over the years. Simply put, I don’t think these all of these creator realized Bobby was black. This isn’t easily proven though, because it’s not like there’s much material that explicitly challenges that aspect of his character, but I’m willing to bet that unless the writer or the artist was a New Mutans fan, that element was forgotten.

One point I can put into this is how infrequently Sunspot appears in marketing material featuring a group shot of prominent black Marvel heroes, or any Black History Month promotion. Any time Black Panther is depicted in such material Sunspot should also appear. While I don’t want to say such images don’t exist, I can’t recall seeing Bobby standing alongside Storm, Luke Cage, and the Falcon anywhere. And frankly if the comics aren’t being careful about making it crystal clear that he’s Afro-Brazilian then is it any wonder that film and TV teams, most of whom likely weren’t buying every issue of Chris Claremont’s run on New Mutants, didn’t realize it?

I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention that in addition to Sunspot being whitewashed to not being black, I think he might also occasionally get the opposite of whitewashed to not being white.  Not surprisingly, Roberto’s mother Nina, a woman who is either an American who became Brazilian citizen or just always Brazilian but in both cases a white woman, doesn’t make it into many X-Men adaptations. The one time she did in X-Men ’97, well, let’s just say it doesn’t seem that the creators cared about being all that faithful to the source material and just wanted dot do their own thing. It would obviously be hypocritical to be upset about racial erasure with the character to not mention this being a problem as well.

According to X-Men '97, these are the same character

Things might be trending in the correct direction, however. When the creators of X-Men ’97 patted themselves on the back for hitting an authentic Brazilian actor to paly Sunspot, there was a lot of fan backlash for whitewashing the character and ignorant he was black. Enough noise was made that they actually had to respond. So obviously, there is a growing number of fans who understand the problem here. In the creator’s defense, they took a lot of liberties with Bobby characters, including him apparently not being an Olympic hopeful footballer, so the race change is just one of several issues. Still, it’s pretty egregious that they made a huge deal about replacing  Alyson Court as Jubilee with Holly Chou to be more racially sensitive and then completely screwed up with Roberto.

Anyway, how about we talk about Sunspot in general for a second? Right now, Sunspot is an pretty good situation. He’s probably more well known than ever at this point thanks to X-Men ’97 raising his profile, and he now has a lot of ties throughout the Marvel Universe and not just the X-Men, be that the Avengers or even the Hellfire Club. This would be an excellent time to put out a Sunspot miniseries with a high-profile creative team to take advantage of his notoriety before it cools down too much. Beyond that, it seems like a no-brainer to try to get him on a core X-Men team (has he actually ever been an X-Man, or just X-Men adjacent?). Marvel has kind of let down most of the New Mutant characters, but there’s no reason they can’t turn things around with Roberto. He has one of the most unique power sets in comic books, being much different than the typical “fire guy” that is always used, and can be versatile. You have the tools, Marvel; why not use them?

But hey, he was leader of an Avengers team
You can't take that away from him

Okay, I don’t want to write a book here, so we’re call that a day. For more on Sunspot check out World of Black Heroes. Next time we will look at a character I can only describe as being DC Comic’s equivalent of the Blue Marvel…despite that this guy was created first.