The Uncomfortable Truth About Race Swaps

I want to be upfront — this one is nuanced and I’m going to navigate it carefully because I’m not interested in being inflammatory for the sake of it. I’m interested in being honest.
For a while, I made videos breaking down two specific errors the mainstream kept making with black characters. The first was tokenization — race swapping classically fair-skinned characters, sometimes directly from comic to screen, sometimes through offshoot copies with barely altered names and costumes. The second was creating semi-original characters but hyper-fixating on their race to the point where the character becomes uninteresting. The marketing leads with identity instead of story. The press tour is about representation instead of what makes the character compelling. And by the time someone encounters the actual product, the pitch was never “here’s a great character.” It was “here’s a black character, and you should support it because of that.”
I eventually toned that commentary down because I decided to go build my own comic books. Put my energy into the Rippaverse rather than talking about what everyone else was doing wrong. And the Rippaverse has seen a lot of success — over fifteen million in sales, original characters, original universe, no race swaps, no tokenization. Characters who happen to be black but whose stories aren’t defined by their race. Isom is our most popular character. He’s black. But people connect with him because of the story, the world, the action — not because we marketed him as a diversity milestone.
And despite that, there’s a segment of people who try to ignore or diminish what we’ve built. Partly for political reasons. But there’s a deeper, more uncomfortable answer. A lot of people who say they want black characters don’t actually want original black characters. What they want is for established, historically prominent white characters to be reimagined as black — because in their minds, legitimacy is tied to those existing properties. An original black character starting from scratch doesn’t carry the same cultural weight to them as taking an established icon and making them black.
The path forward has never been race swaps. It’s never been leading with identity. It’s creating characters so well-written and so undeniable that people connect with them on their own merits. That’s harder. It takes more effort and more time. But it’s the only approach that actually builds something lasting.