Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 133

T h eX -M en ’s Storm:

Challenging Cultural Norms?
As Richard Reynolds notes in Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, “[F]or the
cultural student, superhero comics present a number of immediate paradoxes” (7).
Female superheroes present even more paradoxes than Reynolds outlines. If we
assume that we live in a culture which predominantly endorses white, middleclass male, values how do we, as a culture and as critics, read the creation of a
black, classless female superhero like Storm? Is she merely an embodiment of the
ultimate “Other” for the titillation of the largely male readership? Or is she an
indicator that comic books have grown up enough to tackle real cultural issues?
Neither of these views above is correct, although individual readers could create
either one of these readings, because both are too simple. Storm’s overt otherness
is inextricably en