“Why Couldn’t You Let Me Die?”: Cyborg, Social Death, and Narratives of Black Disability

Abstract

In 1980 writer Marv Wolfman and illustrator George Pérez launched the New Teen Titans for DC Comics. DC sought to tap into the soaring popularity of Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men with their own team of late-adolescent outcasts, and succeeded with New Teen Titans emerging as one of DC’s top-selling books for most of the 1980s. Wolfman and Pérez created several new characters for the series: the alien warrior princess Starfire, the mystical and tragic Raven, and Victor Stone (also known as Cyborg). As the only African American hero in the group, and in fact one of the few leading Black characters in mainstream superhero comics, Stone is an exceptional figure in a genre replete with wonders. Cyborg’s origin establishes his difference: he is the only member of the Teen Titans who is neither the protégé of a more established hero nor associated with a royal family whose heredity grants unique abilities.¹ Further, Stone is the only hero in the group who is disabled. Indeed, Cyborg’s status as superhero literally derives from the process of rehabilitation: he must successfully complete physical and occupational therapy in order to (re)master the gross and fine motor skills needed to use the metal limbs and techno-organs grafted into his body after a catastrophic accident nearly kills him.

In the posthuman there are no essential differences […] between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.

—N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman