I saw some folks online wondering why, in NAMOR: KING IN BLACK, the Swift Riders are ethnically diverse when they’re all from the same city.

Aside from plenty of cities being diverse, the answer beyond that is simple:

They’re not all from the same city.

Atlantis is the name of the capital city of the Atlantean Empire. It’s also the name of the empire.

Two of the Swift Riders are from the city of Atlantis, Kharsa and Sycorax.

Garra the Breaker is one of the nomadic Chasm Folk.

The Mountain is from Deviant Lemuria.

And...

…Swift Mercy is from somewhere in the Atlantean Empire, but we haven’t established where.

Still, a subset of the question is “how come you have green and red and purple people when in the Sixties everyone was pale blue but sub-mariners?”

The answer is also “same reason almost all New Yorkers in comics in the 40s-60s were white, but we don’t do that any more."

New York was far more diverse than what we saw in comics, in Woody Allen movies and in FRIENDS. So nowadays we show it more accurately, and figure the old portryals were…limited.

The same can be true of Atlantis, even if it’s fictional.

The way I see it, the empire of Atlantis _and_ the city of Atlantis were always more diverse than what we saw in the Golden and Silver Age, but you got a limited portrayal because hey, those were the times.

Today, we don’t need to say “here’s why diversity is cropping up,” we...

…just say, “We’re showing more of it than you saw before, now. But the undersea civilizations were always varied — the oceans are bigger than the land areas, so there’s more room for variety, not less.”

Secrets behind the comics revealed.