‘Black Defender: The Awakening’ Brings a New Hero to Center Stage

I’m always a fan of stories about heroes and villains: how they come to be, their lore, and the choices they make that define who they are. As a comic book consumer, it’s easy to get familiar with stories of Superman, Spider-Man, Static, Transformers, and so on. Finding new stories though, that’s what’s really exciting to me. There are many comics and graphic novels out there, not with the usual big publishers waiting to be discovered. Which brings us to Black Defender, created by writer Dr. David Washington with illustrations by Zhengis Tasbolatov. The Black Defender graphic novel gives us a look at the stage being set for a battle of good and evil taking place in Dale City. We meet Dr. Chris Withers, an orphan turned military man. We learn that by the age of 23, Chris had excelled in the special forces field. He is a decorated soldier that left the service in order to find knowledge, and that knowledge lay within the fields of social psychology and sociology. It’s not often we see a comic book character leave the military life for these types of fields. It’s not a flashy choice but one I found that separated Chris Withers from the usual hero story. It is stressed that Chris is a self-made man: earning his fortune through his consulting firm through good old fashioned hard work.

When we get insight into Chris’ work in sociology, there’s a great scene of him breaking down white privilege when questioned about it by a white man asking how can he benefit from it when he is …