One of the facts of life, so to speak, about comics these days is that it's pretty relentlessly Caucasian. Probably a holdover from the pre-Civil Rights days of the Silver Age...at any rate, it's still only been comparatively recently that cultural and ethnic diversity has become more commonplace.
Unfortunately, that typically means designating the guy in the full-face mask as "token minority."
I know the words "New Warriors" has become, among fans and fiction, something of a negative term, but it used to be the best superhero book on the stands...but, anyway, the reason I mention it was that it was the first comic to point out the tendency for comic creators to designate whatever team member was covered from head to toe in their uniform as the black member simply because they were the only ones not already explicitly white. Ever since, I've tried not to resort to such a cop-out...which is part of why I got into furry superheroes, since you don't have to worry about race then.
Yeah, I know...one cop-out for another.
SO, what does all this hot, sexy Affirmative Action wankery have to do with the kid in tights up there? Well, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been grooming these revamps as a possible hero team, and I noticed I had two things missing from the line-up as-is...namely a mystic-type and a jack-of-all-trades powerhouse.
What did you think I was going to say, huh?
While mentally flipping through my mental files, I realized that about 99% of my mystics and 80% of my jacks were female. Unfortunately, I'm kinda locked in with the female characters I have remaining female (Maisy is a girl-bot, Goo is flexible, literally, but I have no males to swap her with, and who heard of a guy named "Girlpower?"), so I retooled one concept, "Arkaine: The Sword of St. George," into a guy (since the previous version was a blatant Buffy wannabe). Well, since my mind was already in "political correct" mode, the niggling little voice in the back of my head pointed out that at least three of the characters were explicitly Caucasian (Girlpower, Magni, and, by dint of her red hair, Maisy), and the other two were in head-to-toe full costumes.
Crap.
Now, truthfully, I could make Goo something other than white and not feel too hypocritical since she IS a shapeshifter, but why beat around the bush? Besides, with all the black heroes we've seen popping up the past couple decades, there is one I have NEVER seen, a black Sorcerer Supreme.
While I'm still hammering out the details of his origin, what I DO know is that his real name is Anthony Sainte, and that he inherited the mantle and powers of the Arkaine, mystic defender against demonic and mystical threats, by default: the previous Arkaine is his greatXa-whole-lot uncle who had used his powers to prolong his life for centuries until being slain in battle, thus passing his title and abilities onto his oldest living kin, Tony.
As the Arkaine, Tony is a living mana battery, able to absorb and channel mystical energies at will. In the past, inheritors of the power had been trained to properly wield it; Tony, however, had no such training and has a personality firmly grounded in science and reality, so his applications of the power are, at first, a little heavy handed. He does possess a natural affinity for enchanting mundane objects and transmutation of matter, which allows him to equip himself (such as his spiffy uniform and the not-drawn magic carpet he's standing on) and use the battlefield itself as a weapon, and extrapolation of this is slowing increasing his abilities (such as enchanting air molecules to conduct energy blasts or dust particles to condense into shields and bindings). He's a sorcerer scientist, using logic to wield abstract forces and fighting the unimaginable with reason.
And, for the record, he DID enchant that tiny mask of his to befuddle the memories of how people see him. Like I said, he's nothing if not prepared.