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Thanks to J. A. Sheen for providing me some much-needed factual matter about this story.

"Getting Ugly": The Cream of Luke Cage Stories

The best Power Man/Iron Fist issue I can remember dates from the mid-eighties, late in the run, but sometime before the cancellation of the book. I can’t provide an issue number because I haven’t found a copy of it (and my original vanished, somewhere, with what was left of my youth). This story occurred in the doldrums of that title, during a period of dwindling reader interest and intermittent quality; so many readers, already having abandoned Power Man/Iron Fist for the trendier stuff of the early eighties, might have unfortunately overlooked this gem.

Said story resulted from the authorial efforts of Jim Owsley (who now writes under the name Christopher Priest) and the pencils of Mark Bagley and bears the title "Getting Ugly." In an altogether atypical way, this story managed to combine the classical Luke Cage elements (a surly Luke Cage barely managing to control his temper in the face of outrageous provocation, then, finally, when the reader and Luke both seem ready to melt down after too many torments, a cathartic release when Luke realizes he may now go to town on someone/something that really, really deserves it) with the hard-hitting sort of plot quirks that force the reader into self-criticism, something not really seen since the potent, though dated, Green Lantern / Green Arrow stories of Dennis O'Neil.

Chasing a Monster

In this story, Luke found himself chasing a monster around the city. The monster began life as a man, but took on dangerous, non-human traits as the result of some U.S. Army medical experiment that turned him into a violent, yellow, glowing beast that spent its time people up, bursting through walls, crawling through sewers, and slinging racial epithets at the helpless victims it found in a rampage through the inner city. Because of the beast’s language and its choice of victims (all African-American), said beast managed to get way under Luke’s invulnerable Black hide. Cage's personal history and ethnic roots notwithstanding, one can see gallantry here: The monster chose the most defenseless people it could find to terrorize, seemingly steering so that it might always target Black victims, whom it might beat, drive out into the streets, and curse with the dreaded N-epithet.

Therefore, in his direct way, Luke resolved to do an extra special job on this particular critter, and, bristling with righteous anger, followed the trail of destruction and took the creature down. Luke prepared, by this point, to unload entire truckloads of every can of whip known to mankind, and left the glowing baddie face down before delivering it back to the army whose imprudent experimentation had created it.

The Revelation

Luke's early pursuit had, in spite of malfunctioning computers used to access army personnel records, produced a name for the beast's original human form. Yet once the beast returned to his normal form in the hospital, all around discovered a Black man, not the troubled white veteran named by the cantankerous terminal; a computer glitch, it seems, had produced the records of a white soldier with the same name as the test subject who became the monster.

What began as a crusade, then, ended as just another rumble; the white supremacist on a personal pogrom against impoverished Black Americans vanished, leaving in his place a disturbed man who evidently suffered from a self-hatred he expressed by terrorizing his own kind. The recurrent racial slur represented less a racist's attack on the other than the inherited lexical baggage of someone who grew up somewhere that people just talked that way.

Dialogue did not reveal this last aspect of the story; the art carries it on the faces of the characters who appeared on the last page, as the last few panels showed a news broadcast, no longer discussing the monster (who, with one realization, miraculously became an object of pity rather than hatred). Luke Cage, the Falcon, and Detective King, three concerned Black men who had followed this rampage, sat glaring at the television until Cage, unhappily, turned it off.

Everything had become different, and everyone knew it; and it did little to make anyone involved look good.

Getting Away with Doing it Right

In general, comic book sermons on politics or culture or ethics tend to dumb down their messages and / or adhere to a self-congratulatory consensus that typically renders the stories unworthy and unreadable. Said stories mainly offer a quick doorway into dreamland, the land of Nod, with their shallow and self-righteous presentation of topical material. The inability to direct criticism inwards often makes such stories fail; for instance, consider that few human beings really like the Ku Klux Klan, but this would not make a miniseries with Black superheroes beating up Klansmen, issue after issue, interesting.

This story masqueraded as such a tale as a ruse to trick the reader into examining his own character, just as the Falcon, Luke, and Detective King had to do. Circumstances forced Luke to realize that the entire basis of his rage had rested upon illusions and the product of his preconceptions.

When he, and everyone else, saw the facts that undermined their prejudgments, their lack of self-criticism became achingly plain. Granted, the news could bury the story to keep the egg on their faces from showing; self-awareness, however, seemed likely to prevent Luke, Sam, and King from whitewashing their consciences so conveniently.

Consider this, in comparison to the "aren't bad people awful?" school of no-substance preaching. Owsley/Priest deserves some kind of award for this story, but until such recognition comes his way, all we can offer is a thumb's up.