Dear Internet,
I bought not one, but TWO superhero books this week. That’s right, two. One from DC and one from Marvel, all balanced-like. Streets of Gotham (which I really bought for the Manhunter backup) and the Gambit Origins book. I read ‘em, and I’m going to write about ‘em, but not right now. I’m too tired. Instead, I will give you linkage to pretty and interesting things. I promise to write about them soon, though.
In the meantime!
At Comics Worth Reading, the welcome news that Thom Zahler is giving away free comics to the first 75 women who visit his booth at Heroes Con this weekend.
Also there, Ed Sizemore reviews things he picked up at MoCCA, and they’re mostly books I didn’t already talk about. (I do think he’s crazy to not have liked The Unwritten, but I realize not everyone gets as geeked for metafiction as I do.)
Via The Hathor Legacy, a rant about “Strong Female Characters” that I can totally get behind. I also find this wording problematic because it implies that female characters are normally not strong, so strong must be pointed out when it does occur. But read her post. It’s better than what I said.
Shakesville has a good rundown of the sexism in the geek world lately. Seriously, people? It’s really not that hard to figure out that girls like all the same kinds of things that guys do.
This is just kind of a short, sublime post by, well, Neil Gaiman, who does short and sublime rather well.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:26 am
I don’t know, giving away free comics only to women strikes me as being exactly as sexist as, say, having a contest open only to males. yet one is praised and the other derided.
June 20th, 2009 at 5:54 am
It’s not “exactly as” sexist (though I won’t try to argue that it’s not sexist at all), because giving free comics to women serves to reach out to an audience that tend not to read as many comics. At a place like Heroes Con, it’s likely that there will be girlfriends and moms who have been dragged along by the males in their life, and so having someone willing to give them free comics would make them feel more welcome at a place where they probably feel completely out of their depth. In other words, it’s sexist in the way giving free comics to anyone under 13 is ageist.
The IGN/District 9 contest was sexist because it perpetuated the idea that sci-fi movies and comic book conventions are just for men. Not to mention, a trip to Comic-Con is worth about 500x more than a comic book, and part of the prize involves some soft journalism, thus excluding women was like discrimination in the hiring process (we discussed this before, that even though this probably wouldn’t directly lead to a real journalism job anywhere, it could still be put on a resume for someone applying for any number of media jobs)