Happy New Year everyone!
There is a line in Netflix’s Raising Dion that more or less sums up its raison d’être: “Moms aren’t any fun – that’s why they’re not in comics.” Certainly, if you look through the vast range of superhero comics, you’d be hard pressed to find many mums who aren’t dead and who are integral to the plots, other than (of course) in Wonder Woman.
Raising Dion is an attempt to counteract that – but simultaneously proof that there’s barely a genre on Earth that hasn’t now been cross-contaminated by the superhero genre. In this case, the genre is “heartwarming family tales about single black mums who try to raise their talented sons, and have to overcome all the obstacles that society – and men – can throw in their path”. It sounds niche, but there’s actually more stories like that then you might imagine.
Adapted by Carol Barbee from Dennis Liu’s comic book (and short movie) of the same name, Raising Dion sees Alisha Wainwright (Shadowhunters) playing the former dancer turned single mum in question. She’s recently lost her scientist husband, Michael B Jordan (Creed, Black Panther), who apparently died rescuing a drowning woman during a recent storm.
Moving back to her old neighbourhood but a new home and putting her son into a good but virtually whites-only local school, she’s soon struggling to make ends meet and juggling the demands of working life with those of her seven year old son Dion (Ja’Siah Young). She gets some help from her doctor sister (Jazmyn Simon), as well as her new neighbourhoods, but principally she starts to lean on her husband’s nerdy engineer best friend Jason Ritter (Joan of Arcadia, The Class, Parenthood, The Event, Kevin (Probably) Saves the World), who also happens to be Dion’s godfather.
Dion’s demands only seem to increase. Not only does he have a racist principal and new enemies in the form of the cliquey skateboarders in his class, he soon starts to exhibit strange powers, such as the ability to levitate things, to teleport and even to heal things. Can Wainwright protect her son, keep his powers secret while helping him to control them, keep him in school and decide whether to start dating again, all while trying to get a job that will give her medical coverage?
I guess it’s just the typical story of a single mum’s life. Apart from the man made from lightning.
© 2022 The Medium is Not Enough
