What's Real Literature?

One thing I always find interesting about literature. The academic organizations like to talk about the need for diversity in literature. They laud the need for stories that contains characters who are women or gay or black or disabled, etc. The academic organizations also like to think they are the gatekeepers of great art. But they're not. They only praise what's safe.

Comic books did all that decades ago. Not only did they have powerful and heroic characters like the Black Falcon or Professor X or Jean Gray or even malcontents like Lobo and Hellboy: but, they didn't apologize for them. People need heroic characters to aspire to and look up to or they become dark and self-centered. We could learn a lot from comics, and fairytales and sci-fi and anime: all the art that academia calls "marginal" or "immature".

Schools seem to like stories about slaves or slavery. But humans need stories about people who are free. Maybe, just maybe, the schools got it all wrong. Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted to get it all wrong.