Punk Mambo is a new series from Valiant Comics. My initial response was “heck yeah!” Then, I actually read it. People of color have got to be exhausted. As someone who is melanin challenged, I did not feel comfortable reviewing Punk Mambo #1 alone. Let’s be real; the last thing you need is another white person telling you their opinion. As such, I reviewed Punk Mambo #1 with our resident Prince of Unpopular Opinions and a person of color, Amanda Conley.
Voodoo is traditionally an African belief system that gets used fairly regularly and incorrectly in pop culture. In this comic, the protagonist is a white woman in punk attire named Punk who somehow manages to posses the Loa to use them to fight her battles for her. She’s got a shaved head, save for a purple mohawk, and multiple piercings. After a battle with a creature, her bond with the Loa is broken. We also find out that Punk is extremely old and doesn’t age because of her connection to the Loa.
Amanda, what’s your initial response to the premise?
Amanda: Initial response is this is nothing new. I’m not happy about it but it seems that white people do have a strong fascination with voodoo and always have. I’m not a gatekeeper in the sense that I am opposed to white people knowing about or being interested in voodoo but it does start to lean into an issue of cultural appropriation that I bet you if this comic centered around a black woman doing this it would be “stereotypical” or “too ethnic” but a Manic Pixie Dream Girl doing it is “edgy” and “new”.
Within a few pages, Punk meets Marie Laveau, the “queen of voodoo.” What are your feelings on Marie Laveau and her representation in media?
Amanda: Marie Laveau is the Mother of Modern Voodoo. She is an icon, a legend and is wonderful but she was complex for sure. She certainly had some rather colorful opinions about race that don’t age well but she is certainly very much more myth and woman. Her representation is very complex and I don’t think any media outside of an episode of Lore handles her well but that’s just my opinion.
Within a few pages, Punk goes from New Orleans to Haiti. She complains that she’s lost her magical portal and needs to find her missing Loa to get “first class transport” home. She does finally get told off in Haiti for using the Loa as tools. Thoughts?
Amanda: You know, white folk tend to imagine Haiti as a third world country and even the places that are sketchy are sketchy because of Haiti’s turbulent history. May I remind all of you that Haiti was a French territory that had three distinct classes and a ton of slaves and the slaves under the banner of one bomb-ass dude revolted and fought for their freedom. Haiti is turbulent because they had to build a government on their own and to continue to perpetuate it as crappy and terrible makes me angry.
It’s indicated that she’s about to have contact with the most powerful Loa in issue #2. Having read Zora Neale Hurston’s
Go Tell My Horse, which describes Jamaican and Haitian beliefs in detail, the belief structure described in Punk Mambo seems like a cursory reading of Wikipedia turned into a story. For example, Loa are not just spirits, but great powers that have multiple names and are much stronger than your run of the mill house ghost. Having seen the preview images for issue #2, it looks like the writers are making a similar mistake. Practitioners of voudon didn’t turn the images of Catholic saints into their gods, they used the pictures of the saints because they had no other available representation to use.
Issue #2 comes out May 29th.
