Luke Cage, or Power Man, is a hero for hire. Which means you have to pay him. So when you hire him for a job and you don't pay up, here's what you do next: buy a shovel and start digging that foot out yo' jive turkey ass. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right.
The Luke Cage comic had some problems. He had all the rage of a revolutionary 70s black man, but angry black men in the 70s didn't write no jive funny books. And from the looks of his jibba jabba, I don't think they even had one around to do part-time consulting. So at any given time, Luke Cage may or may not have been saying things that mean anything. Then this nonsense moon language was sent to people even more square where they put it through a filter to make sure it was rated G.
This may be why every panel of every issue, Luke Cage punctuates his sentences by putting his fist through all nearby objects. Because it's hard to express your anger at the establishment when your mouth only forms kindergarten Madlibs. In one issue, he gets stiffed on a heroing invoice by Dr. Doom and lets out a string of expletives so confusing to me that I had to call in outside assistance. As I often do in African-American matters, I asked my black girlfriend for help. Was Power Man speaking a forgotten dialect of her people's tongue? Or was it meaningless gibberish from a mental breakdown that transcended racial differences? This is a word-for-word transcript of our meeting.
Seanbaby: "Sweetie, could you read a page of this Luke Cage comic? I want to verify that he's talking nonsense, or jive." Girlfriend: "What's Luke Cage's power?" Seanbaby: "He's just tough. He lifts like 40 tons and is kind of bulletproof." Girlfriend: "Just tough? They can't give a ***** a freeze ray?"
She never answered my question. I think she may have been covering; embarrassed that she didn't know what the fuck he was talking about either. I didn't press the issue because I immediately knew I was going to quote her, and was trying to figure out a polite way to ask her where the apostrophe goes in the n-word.