Politically Correct History / Comic Books

• One of DC Comics's many Elseworlds storylines has the Justice League of America back in Wild West times. Wonder Woman was a sheriff and shows a heck of a lot of chest, as in her modern day outfit (though she wears pants). Sure, the town she was sheriff of was indicated to be progressive, but she spent a lot of time wandering through other towns and didn't get hassled for being a woman with guns with half her boobs hanging out.
• Deliberately averted in Superman Smashes the Klan. Racism is prevalent everywhere in the comic, between the blatant examples (i.e. the Klan of the Fiery Kross) to the more subtle microaggressions (i.e. a girl being thankful that Roberta is Chinese and not a "Jap"). Roberta's father also tries to shoo away three African-American men who stopped to help him put out the fires around the Lees' house, only to realize his error when one of them pulls out a police badge. Even Superman is afraid of his alien heritage and hides his origins from the world.
• In The Sandman (1989): Discussed when Hob Gadling criticizes everything while accompanying his current girlfriend to a Renaissance Fair. However, he also points out one aspect that isn't an example, telling his black girlfriend that ideas about racial supremacy and racial purity are a lot more recent that most people assume. Hob also still regrets, two centuries on, that he made his fortune in the slave trade.
• Goldie Vance is set in 1960s Florida, but the subjects of racism and homophobia almost never come up. This is particularly notable in the way that Goldie, an African-American girl, openly pursues a relationship with a Japanese-American girl named Diane, and nobody bats an eye.
• Both Nick Fury's Howling Commandos and Sgt. Rock's Easy Company included one African-American soldier. In Real Life the US armed forces weren't racially integrated until 1948. Eventually justified, at least in the Howling Commandos; they're a special unit hand-picked by Fury himself. If he thinks an African-American soldier is a good addition to his line-up, the military isn't going to tell him no. Per Word of God, one of the intentions when creating the Howling Commandos was to include as many minorities as possible, so readers could confront any prejudices they might have against any of those ethnicities. Stan Lee even threw in a Camp Straight. Partly an example of Reality Is Unrealistic. Black soldiers actually served in integrated rifle companies as early as 1945. Still the entire US military was not integrated until 1948. Heck, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower selectively integrated some black soldiers into his forces in 1944 in real life (he was running low on men, but even then, his aides advised strongly against it), so a small force with a leader as respected as Rock or Fury should have been able to do the same.
• Captain America is often subject to this in recent history among fans.
  • People often express amazement that in his World War II years, Cap is depicted as a man with none of the prejudices that a typical American at that time would consider perfectly reasonable unspoken assumptions like racism, sexism or homophobia. The alternate universe series The Ultimates attempts to address this, and Cap here is significantly more reactionary and prejudiced than most any other incarnation, including the Captain America actually published in the 1940s. This led some fans to claim that this version of Captain America is an aversion of politically-correct history showing that such a man would be out of place in 21st Century post-Civil Rights America. Others argue that the Cap is more a projection of Eagleland type II in the wake of The War on Terror, (eg. the infamous "Do you think this A stands for France?") than anything else.
  • In any case this rests on a fundamental misreading of The '30s and The '40s, the era of the New Deal and anti-fascism, that Jack Kirby and Joe Simon had generally progressive views, and that Captain America wanting to fight Nazis before America's entry into the war was a powerful anti-fascist statement. Steve Rogers was an educated artist from liberal New York before he enlisted, so he probably wouldn't be that mainstream in his views. The vision of America as Eagleland-II comes from the Eisenhower fifties which was in many ways a conservative cultural backlash to The '30s.
• The members of the actual Golden Age JSA were all white and mostly male, with Wonder Woman acting as the token female secretary. Modern depictions of that period in DC history have more women involved in groups like the All-Star Squadron, and even a few minority characters like Amazing-Man and Tiger.
• Explicitly invoked by Marguerite Bennett in DC Comics Bombshells. The series takes place in an Alternate History version of World War 2, where according to Word of God, segregation has already been done away with and parts of the women's lib movement have already occurred. While some attitudes that might be more expected of the time are still around, women in that universe are able to do things like attend West Point, hold high military positions, compete in sports like boxing and Olympic track and field events, and run major companies without such things being thought of as that odd. Racism and homophobia are also far less prevalent. Bennett has pointed out that thanks to Hollywood History, the contributions of black and Asian-American soldiers in WW2 have already been thoroughly ignored, which is part of the reason she wanted to work with a diverse cast in the first place.
  Bennett: Another issue [we have] as Americans, especially, is we have this tendency to accept the media that's discussed the war more than the [actual] history. We have these White actors in these movies, and we have this idea that it was a White war. That completely glosses over the contributions of people of color except in these very specific and again, often brutalized and downtrodden circumstances, so I wanted to get rid of that. It's just so funny because folk have this reaction because, "Well that's not historically accurate" because they're getting other media that is in itself not historically accurate.
• One of supporting characters from the 2018 volume of Exiles is a Gender Flipped, lesbian version of Bucky Barnes, who openly flirts with women. Despite living in the 1940s, none of the soldiers she fights alongside comment on her sexuality or behavior.
• Asterix is not very politically correct at all, but lapses into this occasionally (possibly to indicate how weird the Gauls are compared to the Gallo-Romans and Romans, but also possibly as part of Purely Aesthetic Era). For instance, How Obelix Fell Into The Magic Potion When He Was A Little Boy (which shows the education in the Gaul village) and The Big Fight (which shows the Roman-style education in a village run by a chief with a huge Foreign Culture Fetish for all things Roman) show little girls being educated alongside little boys, being taught things like language and Maths - and young adult Panacea is said to have returned from studying in the city with the implication it was at something like a university. We don't know very much about how the Brittanic tribes educated their children, but we do know that the Romans very rarely educated girls.
  • The Gauls mostly fit the popular description from Cicero - that the only two things they care about are getting drunk and fighting - but the more unsavory descriptions of their culture from the same accounts are omitted, since some of it includes cannibalism and human sacrifice that would make them much less likeable heroes, not to mention hard-to-draw behaviour like wearing complicated tattoos.
• Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky touches on this:
  • Since the comics are written in a decade where the Vietnam War is generally seen as a mistake, Zdarsky's reinterpretation of scenes that cover the conflict in the Lee-Romita decade are different. Peter is shown having doubts about signing up and joining the war effort and serving the draft, and gets into a tussle with Flash's decision to enlist (though he admits to Gwen that this is him venting at his high school bully and using a political issue as an excuse). In the actual comics, Lee showed the Vietnam War as non-controversial, with Peter and others willingly supporting and encouraging Flash joining in. This is because the Vietnam War during the '60s was quite popular and the protest movement in 1966 was very much a fringe movement, only growing in the years after that.
  • Having Captain America openly fight and defend Vietnamese against American soldiers at the end, or have him voice doubts about the rightness of the Vietnam War, would have been unthinkable to do in the actual '60s and even when Marvel re-tooled Cap as someone "loyal only to the dream", it took Watergate and even then a disguised version of it, to have Cap take a political stance like that. But when one considers that Steve probably saw numerous war crimes during his time in Vietnam, his change in political stance makes sense.
• The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): The Holiday Girls seem to be a perfectly accepted and universally loved group despite consisting of three white women, one black woman and one brown woman in a period when the United States was highly segregated and hate crimes against African Americans were common. As a matter of fact, while Lawrence is obviously serving with an all black unit (the Tuskegee Airmen), segregation and racial inequality and violence is treated as non-existent despite the time period and setting.
• Averted in Code Name: Gravedigger. This was of the few mainstream comics set in World War II to acknowledge that the American military of the time was segregated, and that blacks were not allowed to serve in combat units. Hazard faces plenty of prejudice on both sides of the conflict. Word of God from creator David Michelinie was that he wanted to do a book that could touch on these issues while still telling an entertaining war story.
• Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel: Averted. The moment it was revealed that the Blue Marvel was Dr. Adam Brashear, a black man, President John F. Kennedy summoned him, gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his many actions that saved the world, and then asked (with reluctance) if he could please stop doing superheroics. Brashear accepted, which is why very few people had ever heard of him until the time he took up the cape again.