For the past month, one of the topics that has been getting attention has been Marvel Team-Up #24. Specifically the death of Freedom Ring.
The catch is that the character was one of Marvel’s very few gay characters and that fact, combined with the manner of his portrayal and death, has been leading to some very piercing questions.
Point:
Over at the Image Comics message board (I’m cheating a little to link this here), Robert Kirkman explains the motivation behind killing Freedom Ring.
The post:
Freedom Ring was always planned as an inexperienced hero who would get beaten up constantly and probably die. I wanted to comment on the fact that most superheroes get thier powers and are okay at it… and that’s not how life works.
During working on the book, I was also noticing that most gay characters… are all about being gay. Straight characters are well-rounded characters who like chicks. So I wanted to do a well-rounded character who just happened to like dudes.
Then I decided to combine the two ideas.
In hindsight, yeah, killing a gay character is no good when there are so few of them… but I really had only the best of intentions in mind.
Counterpoint:
Steven, at the Roar of Comics, adds his own perspective to Kirkman’s mistake in his blog post, Neutral:
Excerpt:
What I started thinking about was how Kirkman could have told the first idea without getting into trouble. (The idea of a superhero actually suffering and sacrificing to do his job, obviously, interests me.) And I realized the only way he could have done it is if Freedom Ring was a straight white male.
If Freedom Ring was black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or if he were a she, then Kirkman might have been accused (rightly accused) of implying that Freedom Ring was incompetent because he was black, because she was a woman.
But no one would reasonably say he would have died because he was male, or white, or straight. For storytelling purposes, a straight white male is neutral, contains no value that informs or overwhelms other, subtler personality traits.
Both Kirkman’s message board post and Steven’s blog entry add new facets to the entire overall discussion. It’s definitely good reading.
October 19th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Hmmmm.
Kirkman didn’t have to kill Freedom Ring off. He could have just had him quit.
October 19th, 2006 at 10:20 am
So gay people are quitters?
October 19th, 2006 at 11:21 am
Really this is so sad. Isn’t it just as close minded to say that you CAN’T kill off a character because they’re gay/female/a minority. Seriously this PC crap is just bringing down the culture of our country. How about looking at the fact that a gay character was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and commending the nobility it shows?
October 19th, 2006 at 11:27 am
In retrospect, what made everything worse was Joe Quesada pointing to Freedom Ring as an example of a gay Marvel superhero two weeks before the character’s death. It a) made a character who happened to be gay into a GAY character, and b) when his brutal, shocking death did occur, the message inferred was “and THIS is how Marvel treats GAY characters.”
And again, the solution, which Kirkman acknowledges, is just having MORE GAY CHARACTERS, and MORE DIVERSE CHARACTERS in general. You just get better stories that way.
Thanks for the link!
October 19th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Seriously this PC crap is just bringing down the culture of our country
>>>>>
Wowzers. That’s a huge claim.
Anyway, I’m thinking it’s not about the PC aspect AT ALL for most of the people complaining about Freedom Ring’s death. It’s most likely about a group of fans who haven’t seen any characters who reflected an important aspect of themselves for most of their time as fans. Then one pops up and BOOM is killed off in a heartbeat.
Until Marvel and DC get a fairly good roster of diverse characters it’s just going to seem suspicious when the few that are gay are offed almost before they got a chance to live. Like it or not comics have been pretty homophobic places for a long time so maybe they’ll just have to err on the side of caution for awhile and let the gay characters live a bit.
October 20th, 2006 at 9:01 am
wow, so first the 3 gay young avengers are locked up and ready to die “because they’re aliens” and then Freedom Ring gets killed brutally… hmm…