The current issue of Entertainment Weekly (8/7/09) promises to be “Your Ultimate Guide to Vampires!” There is a composite picture of Edward and Vampire Bill (from the Twilight movies and True Blood) on the cover. The main story (“Hungry for Vampires”) features Q&A interviews with Laurell K. Hamilton, Melissa de la Cruz, P.C. Cast and Anne Rice, short pieces by Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. It lists future books, movies, TV series and DVDs about vampires and even ranks the “20 Greatest Vampires—and their haircuts. But nowhere in this “Complete Guide” is there a single mention of L.A. Banks.True, EW did list Blade at Number 16 on the “Greatest” list and said Blacula had the second best coiffure (Maximillian, Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn, had the second worst). But there was nothing about the Vampire Huntress Legend.The story mentioned that most of the people writing about vampires today are women—but it totally missed mentioning that one of these writers is a woman of color.Now, how “complete” is that? (Okay, Ms. De la Cruz is from the Philippines, but you know I’m getting at.)To be fair, this same issue did prominently feature a tribute to E. Lynn Harris and in the past there have been articles about the lack of roles for actors of color, the paucity of minorities behind-the-camera and in executive suites, how “hard” it is to sell black-oriented projects to a “wider” audience. But an opportunity was missed here.
I was familiar with Rice, Hamilton, Harris and Meyer, but this was my first exposure to de la Cruz and Cast. For many of the 1.725 million readers of Entertainment Weekly, this could have been an introduction to L.A. Banks. With the growing number of “fangbangers” looking for more and new vampire stories… Think what this could have done for Ms. Banks’ sales.An opportunity was missed here.Every year, someone asks Why do “they” (never “we”) need a “Black History Month?” There’s no “White History Month,” and someone always fires back, “Because all the other months are White History Month! And they give us the shortest month of the year! You can’t expect even an organization as large as Time Warner (publishers of EW) to know everything; having never written for a national magazine, I have no idea about deadlines and lead times and research and editing. But there were nineteen names listed under “Written And Reported By” and apparently none of them were familiar with L.A. Banks. If you just Google “black vampires,” the third of the 6,450,000 results is link to an article titled “The Indisputably Black Vampires of Jewelle Gomez, L.A. Banks, and Octavia Butler.” Apparently, none of the contributors to this story did.And that is why we need Black History Month. Because black history is more than just Barack’s election and the MLK holiday.And black vampires are more than just Blacula and Maximillian.(PS: On the Feedback page EW says “WRITE TO US! We want to know what you think. Send e-mails to ew_letters@ew.com.” So I did.)
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