Cover art by S. Clarke Hawbaker and Mark McKenna
Comic books traditionally take place within their own universe. Although they may contain elements of the real world, and can often even be seen as reflections of our world, that universe is also largely fictional. Yet every once in a while, the real world seeps in nonetheless. Thus was case in the eighth issue of the 1990s Nomad comic book series when title character Jack Monroe found himself in Los Angeles at the wrong moment in history.
“It began with a motorist caught speeding at 12:30 a.m. on Interstate 210,” Monroe explains in the opening pages. “He was beaten by four cops from the Foothill Division who claimed he had resisted arrest. Eleven other cops watched. Someone else watched too. The ‘arrest’ was videotaped. The tape was sold to KTLA in Los Angeles. A year later, the cops went to trial. On 3:15 p.m., Wednesday, April 29, 1992, the words ‘not guilty’ were spoken – ten times. That’s when the City of Angels finally opened the doors to Hell.”
The “motorist” referred to was Rodney King, while the “opened doors to Hell” was a series of riots and uprisings that besieged Los Angeles County following the acquittal of the four police officers who had repeatedly beaten King during his arrest. It was a volatile situation, and likewise fitting that of all the heroes and villains that make up the Marvel Universe, it was Jack Monroe – a volatile superhero if ever there was one – who was present.
According to the character’s mythology, Jack Monroe was recruited by the government to pose as Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes during the 1950s when both the original Captain America and Barnes were believed to have died during World War II. Monroe and the replacement Captain America eventually injected themselves with a super-soldier formula similar to the one given Steve Rogers but had the negative side effect of causing delusional paranoia and other psychosomatic reactions.
Monroe later recovered and took the name Nomad at the suggestion of the original Captain America during the 1980s, a moniker he continued to use when given his own comic book series in 1990. Jack Monroe’s mental stability was still erratic in Nomad nonetheless – he kidnaps an infant girl from her drug addicted mother, for instance, renames the child Bucky and brings her with him during a cross-country journey to find himself. On the night of April 29, 1992, that journey of self-discovery took him to Los Angeles.
“Their anger, their hatred – I can feel it washing over me,” Jack Monroe says of the rioters who have taken to the streets. “Just like I’ve felt it surge inside of me before. I understand it.”
In July 1992, the Los Angeles Times published “Los Angeles Before and After the Rodney King Case,” a group effort from the newspaper’s reporting staff that had the official title of Understanding the Riots. While Jack Monroe may have understood, a vast majority of white America was caught off guard, unaware of the rising tensions within African American communities not only from systematic abuse at the hands of the police but rampant poverty, drug addiction, and gang violence. And nowhere was that tension greater than in South Los Angeles.
The neighborhood had once been economically driven by factories owned by the likes of General Motors, Bethlehem Steel, and Goodyear. As those companies began closing their plants due to an economic downturn in the late 1970s, South Los Angeles was especially hard hit with no new businesses taking their place. Street gangs began to pop up instead, leading to drugs, addiction, and an exponential increase in violence.
When Los Angeles Public Schools adopted classroom integration during that same time period, it was the white population of the city that revolted, resulting in a state constitutional amendment forbidding involuntary busing and an underlying sense of racism behind the measure. Even before the Rodney King beating, meanwhile, Los Angeles police routinely used excessive force when dealing with African Americans, a fact underscored by the city having to pay $13 million dollars in 1991 alone to settle lawsuits stemming from police brutality.
While Understanding the Riots offers a detailed analysis of the preexisting conditions that led to the 1992 uprising, the Nomad comic book doesn’t offers any similar explanations regarding the riots other than the event that sparked them – the acquittal of the four police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King. Although Jack Monroe overhears the various opinions inside the bar where he sits and watches events unfold on television, he quickly reaches the point where he needs actions, not words, to make sense of the violence.
Using a hovering news helicopter as a beacon, Monroe soon finds himself at the corner of Florence and Normandie, where a mob of African Americans are throwing bricks and smashing windows. “I see so much as dusk turns to night,” he reflects. “And I wonder how much can one man do? In the middle of it all, I find my answer – it takes more than one man. A burning shop, people working together, trying to put the fire out. People of all skin colors. And what can I do to help? As much as I can do.”
On the actual night of April 29, 1992, two black men named T.J. Murphy and Tee Barnett were asking themselves that same question while watching the riots on their own television set. At the exact same intersection that Jack Monroe finds himself in the Nomad comic book, white truck driver Reginald Denny was dragged out of his cab and then beaten, kicked, and bashed with a fire extinguisher.
According to Understanding the Riots, Murphy and Barnett turned to each other and said, “Somebody’s got to get that guy out of there.” They immediately ran out the door and headed for the corner of Florence and Normandie, where an abandoned Denny had somehow found his way back into his cab. With no police car or ambulance in sight, Murphy and Barnett – accompanied by two other neighborhood Samaritans – guided the heavy rig to the nearest hospital on their own. A medic later told them that if they had been just one minute later, Reginald Denny would not have survived.
Although looting was a natural extension of the full-scale rioting that had erupted during the first night of violence, it evolved across racial lines the next day to include opportunistic white families scrambling to compete against African American gang member and single mothers in desperate need of items they couldn’t afford. The looting became so wide-spread that traffic jams even formed in shopping center parking lots.
Jack Monroe witnesses his fair share of looting in Nomad as well, including a white man in a business suit robbing a lingerie store on behalf of his girlfriend. “Groceries, appliances, I can see – but this?” he rhetorically asks himself. “If it weren’t so sick, it would be a joke.”
Then there were the fires, which would have overtaxed the Los Angeles Fire Department under normal circumstances. There was nothing normal, however, about the night of April 29, 1992. The sheer number of blazes severely reduced the availability of fire engines for any specific site, while the firemen themselves were met with flying rocks and broken bottles hurled at them by rioters. Without protection from the police department – which was virtually non-existent – there was little they could do in most cases, leaving the task of dousing the flames to neighborhood residents wielding garden hoses.
“How can the fire department keep up with it?” Jack Monroe wonders as the mayhem continues to surround him. “Easy – they can’t. So people watch as it gets worse. Or they do something about it, for good and bad. Does this bring out the worst or the best in people? Maybe it only brings out what they had in them either way?”
For Jack Monroe, the Los Angeles riots brought out the superhero within him as well as his own inner demons when he is forced to kill a sniper in self-defense. Others in the real world also wore dual hats, initially joining the violence but then helping the innocent as the situation worsened.
Nomad the comic book may be fictional and Understanding the Riots a factual account of the unrest that gripped Los Angeles on April 29, 1992, but the two narratives reflect the same twin capacities of human nature nonetheless – the ability to lash out when faced with injustice, and to offer compassion when the world itself burns around them.
Anthony Letizia