So I know back when each Spider-Verse movie first came out, there were a lot of people asking how Spider Noir would feel about black people when he's from 1933. I think the general conclusion people came to is that he's not going to be rude because it's a kid's movie and they weren't going to touch that with a ten foot pole, and a character that you're supposed to root for probably wouldn't be racist anyway.
But I've been catching up on his comics, and to my surprise, they actually answer this question in Spider-Man Noir: Eyes Without a Face, a four issue comic that I truly believe is one of the best Spider-Man stories we've had in these many, many, many spinoffs of Earth-616. I highly recommend this comic in general because it's well written and has great art, but I also wanted to drop some panels of that in here for anyone who wants proof and to gush about how good this is.
This is Peter going back to Aunt May's home, where we find out the Parkers are family friends with the Robertsons. You probably know Robbie Robertson if you've read Spider-Man comics, he usually works at the Daily Bugle, but we're in segregation era so that's not happening here. But I really liked this as a starter because we knew that Aunt May was for the people (and gets accused of communism multiple times), but now we see that it's not just for white people. That's something that's usually inferred with Spider-Man, but when you set him back to this era, it does need to be explicitly placed in the narrative.
And it is in the narrative! This entire story is about Peter's and Robbie's different experiences in journalism and their quests to justice. I didn't want to grab every panel from this comic because I obviously want people to read it, but they go on to talk extensively about how black people were treated then (still not treated well now, mind you). Robbie wants to interview a scientist who we find out later is experimenting on people, namely black people, and Robbie makes it incredibly clear just how inhuman he is seen by someone whose intelligence is so well respected and how awful that feels. There's a lot of emphasis on intelligence in this story in general, and how it's often directly correlated to agency and whether we see someone as human or animal.
And because we're in 1933, we have to talk about the elephant in the room, AKA the rising Nazi regime. I really liked how they directly call out how the master race stuff is connected to white supremacy. I know this isn't common knowledge for some people, but there are three "eras" of the KKK, and times when they were going in and out of style, for lack of a better term. There's the one from the 1800s that was a social club and fizzled out without a lot of their "goals" reached, then the restart in the 1910s that faded in the thirties and forties after a lot of their leaders got arrested and didn't get replaced, and the group most people know in the fifties that was directly opposing the civil rights movement and is still around today. Directly tying this to the rise of Nazi power is smart and I appreciate how seriously they take this, both the writers and the white main character. This is also helpful if you're not me, a person from the American South, who isn't hyper aware of the connection between racism against black people in America and Nazi ideology, because these are important concepts to understand for the background of the story and the exposition dump for the historical significance of this is very well done for being an exposition dump.
And once we get this well-drawn explanation of why it's so bad that a black person is missing in a country that's politically charged against them, Peter is more than willing to help. He goes to a black and tan club (speakeasies that catered to POC) that he didn't bust despite its illegality because he's never cared about speakeasies, even used them to get vital information. Most of Peter's struggles in the Noir comics is figuring out where he's going to draw the line on innocent and guilty when so much of the world is crooked, and this is reaffirmed here. He puts all the cards on the table, lets the customers have a choice in whether they want to associate with traffickers, and they can decide for themselves. I also just like this because it annoys me when certain stuff pretends black and tan clubs didn't exist and it was nice to see one in a noir thing...
Big fan of how they handle the responses Peter gets to declaring this rescue as his mission, too. There's a nice early echo to our frenemy the Nuremberg Defense here, with the owner of the black and tan club who was keeping people in chains against their will acting like his hands are clean of the matter. We also have a cop that's trying to claim they don't live in a place where these sorts of things happen, and Peter has a shockingly informed clap back. If I can ramble about KKK history some more, I know a lot of people nowadays think it was just a crazed splinter group that the common American wouldn't have approved of back then, and that they were just meeting in isolation out in the country, but it was quite the opposite. They had significant power in urban areas, and like many extremist groups, they knew how to market themselves to almost make sense, to the point that you could parrot their ideas mindlessly. The cop's idea of them being in New York, so this can't be happening, is him falling for this propaganda that this can't be a case of mass lynching or trafficking, because only far away bad people he's never met would do that, not his neighbors who he sympathizes with. I love that Peter doesn't agree for a second. This tracks incredibly well with Peter's upbringing, since Aunt May and Uncle Ben are constantly accused of communist sympathies, he explicitly aligns with those sympathies, and around this time the KKK was gaining members by claiming to be anti-communism. There's an obvious modern need for the white person in a segregation era story to not be pro-lynching if you want to see them as a good person, but instead of it being this blurry "don't think about it too hard", it's explicitly in the text why he's anti-lynching. It's an extension of his character arc of hating how his world runs and how it systematically hurts people. With his caretakers being incredibly politically active and campaigning for people to take action against the government, it also makes sense for him to have the date of a political riot in his hometown memorized and ready to pull on someone who insists following the status quo is the best way to handle current problems.
And of course, the entire concept of black people being kidnapped to be used for experimentation is rooted in history. They have Nazism as an undercurrent for a lot of this story because the unethical human experimentation by the Nazis is written in our history books, but the unethical human experimentation by the American government is conveniently omitted. The specific incident that would be best to read about for this would be the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in 1932. While that wasn't technically kidnapping, it did attract volunteers with intentionally false information and forbade those involved from getting medical treatment, so their health was being held hostage. The comic has these people kidnapped to lobotomize into permanent servitude, which is an effort from the villain to stop black people from rebelling and "return" them to their state as slaves that white people can rely on. It's absolutely horrifying and I adore how obvious it is about it. I'm not an ethicist or a historian, but as someone who had background knowledge on this stuff before reading this but is also fully aware not everyone knows about these historical events, I think it does a relatively good job introducing this concept to the uninformed. The same goes for the information on the connection between Nazism and the KKK. Those groups had a much larger overlap in this time period than you'd think, and the way that overshadows the narrative in this story is what makes this story truly noir as a genre, approaching the topic with sober cynicism that you don't get in a lot of superhero stories.
Cynicism doesn't mean a fully unhappy ending, and Peter saves who he can since he's the hero and all that, but I don't want to spoil the end of the comic so I'll stay brief on that whole bit. It still does an excellent job of showing WHY this Peter Parker's path will diverge from ours outside of just being Spider-Man If He Was In a Noir Crime Drama. Peter Parker has always been a smart kid who wants to be a scientist. He usually works at the Daily Bugle in the meantime because he needs money before he can pursue that degree. However, Spider Noir will not become a scientist, because this story showed him what the most well respected scientists in his time do, and that's the best part of Eyes Without a Face to me. The way black people were treated in this time isn't some set dressing or garnish, it's a part of the narrative that will directly affect the main character's actions. It would've been so easy to handwave away the idea that the white person in 1933 probably wouldn't be nice to black people, but they show us, in vivid detail, that he is a Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man for everyone, especially the disenfranchised. It's not the thing that period pieces like to do where someone is unusually politically correct about race and gender because the writers don't want to deal with the implications of the era. The character they've set up before this fully informs this narrative, and I'm hoping, continues to act this way in the future. Really, really good comic, cannot recommend enough if you like Spider Noir.
