Every human being has a set of strategies in their social toolkit designed to protect themselves from the unpleasant rigors of empathy, self-examination, and the dreaded realization of their true place in the universe. There’s nothing wrong with this, provided you take inventory of these tendencies so that they don’t pop up unrecognized, use them only when appropriate and keep them properly calibrated to prevent them from harming another person in their use.
I’ve been carefully updating my own inventory by observing the online comics fan community, where one can see a variety of social strategies deployed in a full range of severity.
For example, just this week on this very blog I encountered a number of people employing a tactic known throughout the activist blogosphere as “Silencing.” Sometimes, when a person speaks an unpleasant truth that other people don’t wish to discuss the other people will gather round and do what they can from stopping the person from talking about it.
On April 29th, the mothership ran this interview with Captain Britain and MI: 13 writer Paul Cornell. Within a few hours of posting, it was edited to remove offensive content and the message board thread comments pertaining to the edited area were removed.
The infamous Dave Sim has dispatched a form letter outlining his new correspondence policy. According to a scan by Inkstuds, he now requires potential pen pals to affirm that he is not a misogynist.
Just Past the Horizon: It’s Not the Shovel That Smells.
Friday May 2, 2008, 12:26 pm
The event was simple. It began when the first previews of It’s a Jungle Out There! hit the mainstream feminist blogosphere.
No… It began when Amanda Marcotte, writer of It’s a Jungle Out There and well-known progressive political blogger wrote an essay without referencing the women of color who gave her the ideas.
No, that wasn’t the first. It began when the first cover of It’s A Jungle Out There was first released, and criticized for racist imagery.
No, that’s not early enough. It began when prominent feminists began siding with Clinton over Obama, claiming gender was bigger than race… Or was it a fallout in the ’70s at a feminist convention over racism? Or was it the ’40s when there was an advertising blitz to recruit women to the workforce, and all of the images featured white women?
No, let’s face it. It began in 1607 when the first African slaves were brought to the continent by English settlers.
Or was it earlier when the first white guy set foot in the Western Hemisphere? It wasn’t exactly the right foot to start out on. (more…)
You are all aware that there are different levels of context, aren’t you?
I’ll admit that its been a few years since school, and I don’t quite remember the curriculum but I know we did talk about context. I remember there were different kinds of context.
I remember context within a sentence, where you could deduce the definition of a word from the surrounding words. And I remember context for a sentence, where you needed the entire paragraph to understand that “It was SO big” did not necessarily mean something dirty.
There’s immediate context within a story that explains weird behaviors, such as why Sherlock Holmes never got evicted for regularly firing a gun inside a rented apartment or why Adora didn’t know she was on the bad guy’s side when they first introduced She-Ra. (more…)
So this week a panel from Mighty Avengers #11 has surfaced from the depths of the blogosphere, with a piece of Doom’s dialogue drawing harsh criticism:
My sincerest apologies for the late feature this week, I’m afraid life got in the way.
This is shame because in the feminist portion of the comics blogging community, we had quite an active week. So active, in fact, that a revelation from Robin #172 that would have been sure to cause a fuss a year or so ago was barely commented upon.
It’s not exactly a surprise revelation, but I’m going to cut this post and make a Spoiler Warning for anyone who’s avoiding internet blatherings about Gotham Underground #6 and Robin #172
This one slipped under the radar too quickly for my tastes, so I’m going to try and revive it a bit here.
About a month ago, Willow at Seeking Avalon discovered that Vixen’s skin tone had been lightened in Justice League. The post was picked up in a fewplaces, and the natural reaction of many superhero fans is to call the problem a “coloring error.”
Just Past the Horizon: A Message from the Mainstream Comics Industry
Friday March 7, 2008, 11:43 pm
Dear New Writer,
As most superhero comics are based in the United States, and most of the companies are American, it is possible to have a writer who has never left the United States. This works when the setting is always New York City, but often a plot logically reaches beyond the borders of that USA. The most powerful and popular characters tend to have a global reach, and may have to interact with non-American characters in order to keep the scale of the plot intact for the reader. Writing a character from a country you’ve never set foot in may seem like a daunting exercise that demands a lot of research, but observation of not only the superhero genre but the mainstream American media as a whole proves that this is not the case.
In order to help these writers, the Mainstream Comics Industry has collected some short guidelines based on the great American superhero tradition. (more…)
The appeal of classic hero stories is that they present us with a world we want to live in. A place where things work out in the end, people are basically good-natured, and nearly anything is possible if you adhere to a strong moral code and never give up. Human narratives encompass a wide variety of tones and types, and classic hero stories adhere to a sense of justice that is rarely fulfilled in our daily lives. They allow us to pretend for a short period of time that there’s a place where life is fair and just.
So much of modern entertainment tends towards false realism, tension, paranoia and cynicism that an optimistic story is unexpected. It comes off as nostalgic and a little naive. But it’s like a refreshing breath of fresh air. That’s why certain series are lauded endlessly. Not for skill or originality, but because the creators manage to capture the appeal of classic hero stories and present us with a world that despite all of the weirdness doesn’t seem like that bad a place to live.
I’ve been watching the reviews of Glamourpuss roll in, and the favorable ones talk about what a shame it is that there are people who won’t give the book a second glance because of Dave Sim’s reputation for misogyny. (more…)
This week I stumbled across two fantastic posts on one subject. Both are responding to the same blogger’s assertion that the black characters at DC are either editorially mandated diversity or token team members, and therefore bland and uninteresting.
The second one is being told by non-blacks that most “black” characters are bland and uninteresting. That the current crop of characters out there is only good when being written by black writers, even though sometimes even then it’s not good enough for others. My frustrations is that it places these characters inside a ghetto. Don’t touch these characters unless you are black enough. You have to be this black to use them or they might as well be palette-swapped versions of existing white characters. The current crop of existing black characters are just quota fillers and you have to pass the paper bag test to be able to interject some energy into them.
This one angers me so much. It insults the many good writers like Morrison, Bendis, and Ostrander who write fantastic black characters. Hell, one of the most realistic portrayals of a hispanic character is written by a white male. It also makes them sound more difficult to use than other characters, even though any character can be bland if the creators don’t understand them.
Edidin and Trippe saw the need in the community around them and responded to it. In 2007, they came up with the idea to somehow move comics from retailers, publishers, and fans in the comics community to these youth programs, who would then distribute them for free to the kids they helped. In December, Edidin and Trippe made a few test runs to see whether their plan was feasible, with the hopes of one day taking it national. It worked, and Sequential Heart was born.
“Sequential Heart was my baby,” Edidin said, “and it grew out of my frustration with the number of comics that end up wasted, destroyed, or hovering in warehouse limbo for decades. It seemed like someone MUST want these books, or have use for them. At the same time, I was reading about a huge number of families being displaced in the wake of natural disasters, which got me thinking about how rotten it is to be a displaced kid - that even if your basic physical needs are being met, it’s a tremendously tedious and dispiriting experience. Kids need fun as well as food - it’s developmentally essential, in fact. So, I was mulling over this stuff, and I ran across a thread on the message board, where someone was asking how the comics community could respond
to the SoCal wild fires, and something just clicked.
An update since the article was written: We’ve now donated over a hundred comics to organizations in and around Portland and have developed ongoing relationships with several of those. With luck, our website will be up and running within the next week or so, at which point we’re hoping to see an explosion of both requests and donations.
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention the last year and a half, Project Girl Wonder is a letter-writing campaign aimed at getting DC Comics to put a memorial for Stephanie Brown–the female Robin who was fired and killed shortly before Infinite Crisis–in the Batcave.
On Wednesday, Batman #673 featured the appearance of a memorial case.
Without getting into the details of the usefulness of Stephanie Brown as a feminist cause, the ability of DC Editorial to understand how a memorial case for the character relates to how female characters are portrayed, the amount of time it took to get them to notice there was a fanbase, or the permanence of the sequence in question — I’d just like to point out that we are seeing a major mainstream superhero publisher alter the direction of their biggest franchise (not just with a couple memorials, but with the Gotham Underground and Robin storylines) in order to court a primarily female fanbase.
That is a huge accomplishment. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
“What did you expect?” is one of those stock responses I get whenever I post anything more substantial than a picture of Green Lantern. There’s some variation in the wording (”Are you surprised?”, “LOTS of people do this”, “This has been done forever”, “This has been done worse before”), but the tone is pretty standard across the board. The tone is that something that is wrong is okay so long as it is wrong all the time. (more…)
Just Past the Horizon: The important thing to remember.
Saturday January 19, 2008, 12:26 am
I had a happy thought today.
Bear with me. This will take some explaining.
I’m watching another “women in comics controversy” in the community. This is what I do. I watch and I collect links and I react. I’m seeing people get offended, and people react to that offense, and people react to the reaction to that offense. I used to see these things in waves, but tonight I’m seeing it in levels. (more…)
In the past 16 hours I’ve gotten four links on the February 2008 Playboy cover, which features Tiffany Fallon as Wonder Woman (she is completely nude with body paint except actual high-heeled boots, which gives me tangential impressions about the need to alter the natural female body that I can’t quite articulate right now). I want to get some thoughts out there on this.
I know a lot of people have a Wonder Woman fetish. And that people will fetishize everything. And, of course, Playboy is a magazine specifically for that. What bothers me is the text on the inside cover (from Pink Raygun — that link is NSFW, scans from inside the magazine): (more…)
