Written by John Ridley
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli
Published by DC Comics
John Ridley continues to write The Other History of the DC Universe with a fiery punch of tell-it-like-it-was America that only those from its marginalized classes could convey.
That said, I was curious about choosing Anissa Pierce aka Thunder, a daughter of Black Lightning. He already was the story of the first issue.
Would this be too much of a retread?
No. This was its own thing and connected at the same time in a manner that speaks to the wider mission of this DC Black Label series.
That Black Lightning, Mal Duncan, Karen Beecher, Katana and Renee Montoya are people, and representatives of peoples, who have built their own identities and purposes because the one’s society confers on them are oppressive and rob them of dignity and life.
Yet Anissa Pierce’s story remains different, as the child of a superhero who then develops powers, and as a window into metahuman abilities as an identity in of itself. Something it took her a long time to figure out as related in this story covering the years 1981 to 2010.
That in 1981, Anissa’s mother took her and her sister, Jennifer, for a weekend at a motel outside Metropolis to tell them she and their father were divorcing, and that their father is Black Lightning.
From that moment, everything fractures for Anissa, and the next 30 years are spent piecing something else together from what once was whole.
It took a lifetime of hurt and regret, and a magical interdimensional void beyond time for Anissa Pierce to realize that her powers was an inextricable identity in the same way her sex, gender, sexual orientation and skin color were. She didn’t see being Black or gay as an intrinsic burden; it was society what did that, and she had strength to not let those stop her from asserting her place in the world.
Yet she had with the metagene. Because to her, the metagene was her father and Black Lightning and the reason her parents divorced and family fell apart, even though there was much evidence beyond that.
In that void, Anissa walks us through the Pierce family each owning a piece of the weight they’d dragged around for decades. The electrical manipulation abilities via metagene? They became a metaphor for the generational trauma passed down because people didn’t process it, work through it, resolve the terrible things that hurt them.
This is Anissa Pierce’s story.
However, it’s an interesting choice to pick Thunder after previous issues focused on Black Lightning and Katana, only for both of them to appear strongly here as well. Such is the life of Black Lightning’s daughter who then goes on to join a version of his old team, the Outsiders.
Black Lightning and Katana shift from lead roles in their stories to featured players here who remain just as ground-shapingly influential.
Black Lightning’s issue talked at length about the many ways Jeff Pierce felt he failed so many yet fought so hard for so long to achieve equality and safety of his neighborhood and Black Americans as a whole. And now, in Anissa’s story, we see more aspects of personal failure and struggle for Pierce the father: hard-charging, rigidly moralizing, hectoring and lecturing, overprotective and emotionally distant at the same time. Always the man behind the desk or at the blackboard.
But this time, also homophobic – even to an abusive degree.
Ridley places the Pierces in a contemporary 1990s and early 2000s regarding LGBTQ+ rights and attitudes about gay people. A queasiness came over me remembering Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, and so many more things from a time that was not that long ago and feels so far away from the very queer-colored life I live now.
It’s a time period that the Pierce family created for the recently ended Black Lightning TV show wouldn’t recognize. On that TV show, Anissa is out and her family treats her no differently. Under the stewardship of Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil, alongside The CW’s superhero boss Greg Berlanti (who is openly gay), Anissa even has a love interest and the show depicts them kissing and in bed together! That’s such a far cry from Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom cratering after she came out, or the salaciousness of early 2000s TV’s lipstick lesbian hookups.
Katana’s presence as a self-possessed woman whose sense of self is forged harder than the Soultaker blade provides a role model for the kind of resolve and personal peace Anissa envied.
John Ridley’s choice to feature Anissa and weave her story alongside those of her father and Katana becomes a smart one in that he has created his own riff on history’s ontology. In this series titled The Other History of the DC Universe, not only is he telling the “untold” stories of marginalized characters from marginalized social classes.
Ridley also proves the point that history goes beyond stories of who did what to whom, when it happened and why as the basic truth. While piecing together many histories, from many points of view, perhaps we can arrive at an emotional truth of these events based on what they felt like and what they left behind emotionally.
Then the past comes alive, just as it does in real life.
