Exactly 20 Years Ago “Blade” Hit Theaters

Blade was back in the nerd news last year after Wesley Snipes reported that he was in conversations with Marvel to bring the character back to the movie screen. It is widely said in my Black nerd circles that Blade (1998) was the first “modern superhero movie,” coming as it did at the end of the Batman in a Nipple Suit era and two years before the first X-Men movie. Yes, the first X-Men movie is now 15 years old. You know how old Blade is this week? 20 years old. Sit down for a while; I’ll go get your cane. Blade, and his brother anti-hero, Spawn, were wondrously Black in attitude, but were they really the beginning of the current comic book movie era? Is our nostalgia for Blade as Black folks rooted in the quality of the movie, or is it just that — nostalgia? Blade  and Spawn both featured conflicted protagonists attempting to stand equally in two worlds. Both contain freeze frames that look like the cinematographer took the shot straight from a graphic novel. Both took themselves seriously in a way that Batman and Superman of the 1980s and 90s didn’t. There was no more “wink wink, isn’t this silly?” in the dialog or the action sequences. These movies set you up to believe in the hero, even if he was an outcast with a bad attitude. As much as Blade  is the father of superhero movies, it is itself a child of the Shaft  movies. Blade centers on a Black male vigilante and his female love interest/sidekick initially beating up street-level thugs until they fight their way up to…