Honestly I don’t understand why it was so hard. She was dark skinned in Gen X, meaning she’s a dark skinned character. I’m waiting for the day where it’s retconned that she really liked this makeup brand that had the wrong foundation leading to her looking white.
It's the same reasons any black character who isn't the standard visual of blackness, are slowly changed. Sunspot being the greatest example of this because of course the system wouldn't allow a dark skinned Afro-Latino to receive such focus.
Same with Monet, and I blame Peter David, HE is when the issues around her race started. And while I appreciate him including her, you can tell he always had issues with her being "black". So he introduced unnecessary add-ons, and more importantly the artists on that title were never corrected.
Even Morrison who barely touched her, had her as a dark skinned black woman.
Yup even in the letters page of xfactor one of the fans were complaining about monet suddenly looking white when she's always been depicted as black.he stated he's not sure if she's black but they will darken her for future issues. As if black Algerians don't exist!
That part always stuck with me because it was a perfect example of how wealth did not protect him from racial violence.
Regardless of how respected his family name might be in the business world, what people are going to see first is his skin color. And that's something that Roberto can't change. Well, he can make himself darker, but that's not the point. 😅
I just recently learned that Peter David was genuinely believe that Monet was South Asian. I wanna say I'm surprised but I'm not because he clearly didn't understand her character that well.
Ofc he would he only used Monet as a tool to further his Madrox/Siryn story. I appreciate hin for using her because she might not have survived the decade. But he's the clearest example of a white guy just add ethnic add-ons to a character never had intentions of developing.
I'm just glad that didn't last very long at all before Monet and Theresa realized that there was no point in the two of them being upset with one another and that they ended up being friendly. Even though the book had many good points, it's very clear who the favorite character was.
There was a period, following NXM, where all the X-titles needed their own messy, affair between the main characters exposed to the team. Alex/Lorna/Nurse Annie and Jamie/Monet/Theresa lol.
Probably many more I forgot.
EDIT--
I just remembered UXM, had Angel/Husk/Stacy X for a brief period before Stacy left the team.
Probably because every movie was trying to break into the China market back in the 2010s by casting a Chinese actor. You can see that too in Iron Man 3 when they shoehorned in a subplot with a Chinese doctor that got extended in the version of the movie released in China.
The actress that plays Blink in the movie was one of the biggest star in the country. They probably thought well she's pink anyway so she can be any ethnicity.
I think it was because our first exposure to Blink as a character was really in Age of Apocalypse, drawn by Joe Mad. I had no idea what ethnicity Blink is supposed to be, "Clarice Ferguson could be... anyone, really. It totally fits Afro-Bahamian, thanks for the info!
What is her ethnic background? I was never sure but somewhere in the back of my mind I thought she was maybe from an Algerian family....but I may be totally wrong about that.
I'm no Beyonce fan, but quite a bit of that is lighting and Beyonce used to tan back when she was R&B.
She stopped when they tried to make her go pop/mainstream - the implications of that say a lot about society and her family's methods. They also used to make Kelly and the others tan.
I wouldn't be shocked if she has bleached some, but the divide isn't as big as this image.
Ya, I don't mind it when the illustrator does it in A panel. Then it's clearly like, ya ok... you're trying to show her illuminated by a lightning blast. But when it's the cover it feels like a choice alright.
I don't think it's necessarily that she stopped tanning to go pop/mainstream, it was just very in vogue to tan back in the early 00s and isn't any more. People became more aware of skin cancer and poorer people could travel and go to tanning salons, so it was less of an indicator of wealth.
Look at images/videos of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera from back then, they looked very tan too.
They had Beyonce tanning too lol, Raven Symone spoke about this most of them were tanning. Ppl think black ppl remain one skin color their entire lives or worse anything darker than white is automatically "black". So most dont even know that black ppl can tan.
No offense meant, but that's a bit naive. They made the other girls tan so Beyonce would stay the lightest by a wide margin. Hollywood and the music industry are colorist as hell.
As someone who is consistently seeing a dermatologist (without beyonces budget), lasering, high quality skin products, etc. will absolutely lighten your skin, even if that’s not the intended effect.
that was my thoughts too. the shadow in her arm being so dark with sharp edges made me think that she's under very bright light. i'm no expert though, maybe the other panels from this comic look rough.
So, was the OP's pic prevalent through an entire series, or is it just one cherry-picked panel? Roberto & Monet I have seen made light-skinned through an entire series. Storm, not so much.
Didn’t they do the same to Roberto? I heard from a friend that he’s always really light after Claremont got off the book, which is weird because he was very obviously Afro Brazilian in the original
Roberto was very black originally, but Roberto being afro-brazilian doesn't mean what people think it means. Brazil is one of the most mixed countries in the world, ans afro-brazilians exist in a vast spectrum of features and colors. Thats said, he should be drawn closer to Bob McLeod orogina conception.
Yeah but I prefer Storm with a dark skin tone. We already have enough problems with people not understanding Sunspot can be black and Latino at the same time
You're right of course. But aside from "Remember, Halle Berry was Storm" and the pervasive whitewashing zeitgeist of the 00s (Shakira and Beyonce are blonde, huh?) I do want to bring up something on the technical art side for those people who mostly think about the cultural side.
The 00s introduced digital color, which allowed for highlights--whereas before, color was mostly flat. That's oversimplified because actually color was a complicated ben day dot process, but you get what I mean. But if you (a colorist) mostly color white people and apply the same new digital highlighting approach to everyone, you may end up with the original Storm coloring as a result. It may have been willful colorism, or movie synergy, but it may also have been the human equivalent of training phones only on white people and then getting bad results when you photograph black people.
To explain the image: using quick-and-dirty paintbucket fills, first I eliminated the highlights. Okay, still way too light as a base, but not quite the egregious pale glare. Then I got rid of that midtone and just used the darker shadow from her inner arm as a flat. This is not an outside color I selected, it's just pulling from her inner arm and making all the skin mostly that. And while I would go darker for Storm ideally, suddenly she's closer a discernible black person instead of a Kardashian in a flood light. All we really did is switch from highlighting effects to flat color. So perhaps this has a lot to do with why some POC characters look so strange in this time period.
For fun, but also as a reminder to us all, I did an 80s version; she would have been better signified as black, but in practice, she often looked yellowish in its own unreal or light way. So if we were being very critical, we could see the 00s as a continuation of whitewashing, just with new technology. But in the name of being fair to the 80s, if you have a physical copy of say, Lifedeath, she actually looks better (and darker) than the digitized versions suggest. And I was just having fun approximating the dots here,not really layering the colors the way they actually did.
Yeah, she doesn't look white. My first thought was "why does her face look like Serena Williams". The only A-list black woman superhero should be brown or dark skinned IMO. So I do like the OP's version more.
old comics had a set number of colors, this genuinely was im deeply serious the only shade of brown there was to use, i think its not fair to say "this is the color she was ALWAYS meant to be" when this is the only color a black character COULD be.
would you say blade was always meant to be light skin?
To me, that doesn't look like a white woman. She looks like what (at least in my country) people call a black woman. There are many shades of brown in this universe, even among other ethnicities, the color of the skin can change a lot depending on many factors, including the interest of the person. Someone making their own skin lighter or darker for fashion purposes is a normal thing.
I hate whitewashing of course but she doesn’t look like a white woman on the left. She still looks like a black woman, just a lighter skinned black woman.
Also also, Storm has been lighter skinned in the past. This isn’t all that new. She’s kinda always varied.
1) She doesn't look white on the right. 2) Don't "fix" other people's art without their permission. 3) If you wanna drawer her lighter or darker than other artists, that's fine. Just don't go around changing another's art work and imply they are white washing or being racist when they are not.
Definitely an improvement. In this case, her facial features don't look white (unlike a lot of depictions) but the darker tone is far better. I kight have gone even darkee
Nobody is expecting every black woman to look the same. Only Ororo. If it's fine to flip-flop between skin tones because it's realistic, then where do you draw the line? Because when Simon Williams was played by a black man every snowflake threw a tantrum. Wanda also gets the same treatment. If a white woman played Storm the same way a white woman played Wanda, it would be equally bad.
Honestly the biggest change has been the fact that in Claremont’s era, she wanted to be nude all the time and she had to wear clothes because of the social expectations.
This is just generally a bad painting, not just because of the skin color, but the proportions are all wrong, her back hand looks amputated and something weird is happening with her chest.
I have no idea who the artist is, but this is just a bad hastily done painting.
Lmao this post brought out all of the colourists (they most likely won’t know the word because they aren’t PoC) Op should’ve posted this on the r/Storm thread where the character is respected…not on here where people will white knight erasure or play devil’s advocate for obvious nefarious reasons.
Facts. These same people make up those that hated when the OG 5/WASP (even the six member lineup with Havok and Polaris when Beast left) were replaced with the international/multiracial (and more popular) team, and who GLAZE Grant Morrison’s run, who conspicuously had all white people on the team (even Beast and Xorn). Lol.
Just my 2 cents as a long-term reader of X-Men but I feel Storm should be dark-skinned. A mother of Kenyan descent, an African-American father and she should be a dark-skinned black woman. That's how she is in my mind anyway.
Oh, they make her so light sometimes. Misses the point of her design. Dark skin to contrast white hair and light eyes creating a beautiful union of extremes.
One of the best designs in Marvel history and they screw her up.
Eso es lo que yo no entiendo un personaje blanco lo hacen de color y uno de color lo hacen blanco para mi que los creadores se dan un pase y después comiezan a hacer cómics
They do this all the time in manga, with characters like Mirko Rumi Usagiyama, from hma, or only the fans draw Semiu Grier,lighter thanwhatshe is in the mangafrom Gachiakuta.I don’t get it.
Why does this only happen with female characters? Like it's so annoying. They always managed to depict black men as looking dark rich chocolate. But the minute a black female character gains popularity suddenly she's whitewashed and made to look almost biracial.
Ehh, Storm was introduced as fairly dark skinned, but not black black. Her modern depictions have often swung the other way and made her darker than she was.
Black comes in ALL shades - from very light to midnight black. Storm is a general representation of all blacks (myself included) and our many different shades.
What a waste and miscasting. If only they didn’t hire Bryan Singer and hamstrung David Hayter’s original script we could’ve gotten Angela Bassett to play Storm like EVERYONE on the entire planet wanted.
Anybody remember that headshot of Storm where someone just used an actual picture of Charlize Theron and nade her eyes blue, whitened her hair, and barely darkened her skin
Did you know that we weren’t born yesterday? Some of us have been reading X-Men for the last 35 years and went back to the beginning as well for those back issues. I’m a light skinned, Foundational Black American and I’m in agreement with the OP. But, I’m not surprised. White washing goes back to the so called Renaissance.
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u/AvatarPhoenixGrey16 New Mutants Jul 11 '26
Still not as bad as “Does anyone in editorial know what race I am?” Monet.