This may be extremely unusual (or perhaps extremely common), but I’ve never really liked characters my own age. Growing up, I always liked the character who was older than me. That was who I wanted to read about. When I was a pre-teen I loved stories with teenagers but it seemed the moment I reached High School I got sick of reading about High School students and moved on to twenty-somethings. I’m in my mid-twenties now. I still like some characters in my generation (I suppose Kyle Rayner and Wally West are my generation at the moment), but they were technically made for my sister’s generation and were older than me when first grew to like them. I want them to mature a little to be older than me now. I like some younger characters (again, the ones who — like Jubilee and Monet St. Croix — were actually older than me when I first encountered them) but I can’t seem to get as interested in their story range. More and more I find myself latching on to Silver and Golden Age characters and wishing to see them retain their seniority, not be kept forever young.

This is frustrating, because most of the heroes (particularly the female heroes but this is pretty widespread among male heroes too) are kept young perpetually, despite being aimed at adults who grew up with them and might possibly appreciate growing along with them. There’s an attitude that nobody would want to read a gray-haired Wonder Woman or see crow’s feet around Storm’s eyes.
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Attention in the NYC area!

This coming Monday (November 12th) at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art there will be a panel on Women of Color in Comics and Manga moderated by Cheryl Lynn Eaton:

The panel will take place on November 12 at 7:00pm at the renowned Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which is located at 594 Broadway (Suite 401). Admission? Pay what you wish! Hope to see NYC/NJ come out and represent!

The panel will feature Alitha E. Martinez (Thor, Iron Man), Jenny Gonzalez (Too Negative, House of 12), and Rashida Lewis (Sand Storm).

In the past week we’ve seen a cross-blog debate explode about the nature of a scene with Tigra in New Avengers #35 and some discussion about a spread of three female Justice Leaguers in Justice League of America #14. I was unwilling to comment directly on either because I’ve only seen online scans, but I just can’t ignore these things. I was reading a debate on an email list where one my co-bloggers (it was Tom) pointed out there is a trend of heroes getting in trouble recently and brought up that Kyle Rayner was recently stripped completely nude in the current Green Lantern storyline as an example. Well, a Green Lantern mention can usually get me to speak up, and a quick look at the Sinestro Corps confirmed that a very important factor was in play (two, actually, but I only have time for the one today), a factor that influences the reaction no matter where the story was going or what the artist and the writer intended. A factor that the artists, editors, and writers in superhero comics should keep in mind when crafting their stories, because it interferes severely with the communication between the creator and the reader.
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The topic of the month in the online comics community seems to be comics journalism, and before everyone loses interest I wanted to take this opportunity to ask a favor of anyone who has the opportunity to interview a comic book industry professional for a news source.

Please, please, if you bring up the topic of women in comics, do it right.

It is getting to the point that I wince whenever I see the subject of feminism broached in a mainstream interview. With very few exceptions, the interviewer vaguely mentions recent issues (”There’s an ongoing trend of feminist comic book criticism” or “the fan outrage directed at the treatment of women in comics” or “the tendency of certain fans to go after anything that even remotely resembles misogyny” or some other generalization) to show that they are in touch with fandom. The interviewee then repeats the strawman of their choice (”Well, anyone who’s actually seen my art knows I draw strong women,” or “some of these fans are just looking for something to be angry about” or “..fat ugly girls…” or “I did ask the artist for a breast reduction” or “I was actually trying to draw attention to the issue…” or “I have daughters, how can I be a misogynist” or whatever else they can come up with) and more often than not the actual complaint never gets addressed. We, the readers, have no way of knowing if the industry professional is even aware of the complaint, or if they are just making assumptions based on a quick glance at the reports or if someone is telling them vague generalizations about how excitable women are over little things. We don’t know!
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I imagine most people who bother to read this feature know that I am one of the link-collectors for When Fangirls Attack (the other is Blog@Newsarama’s own Melissa Krause). That’s a project we started before we were invited to join the team here, and it has brought my great enjoyment and great stress over the past 20 months or so.

See, we have a “Link ‘em all and let the readers sort ‘em out” policy at When Fangirls Attack that occasionally gets an annoyed response. People don’t understand the point of linking patently anti-feminist rants and letting those arguments spread. We have a number of reasons for pushing the neutral policy (my own standards for a “feminist opinion” don’t necessarily match even those of my closest friends, becoming too one-sided chases some of the traffic away to the point where the only people who visit the site are already in the choir anyway, I have a bizarre compulsion to be as neutral as possible, Melissa and I have a collectively twisted sense of humor, I enjoy being angry), but really the best one is that conflict breeds eloquence. Most of what feminists do is spread awareness, based on the logic that if someone is aware of a problem they will take steps to minimize the problem. Analyzing social trends in media is a way of bringing awareness to harmful attitudes in our culture, and convincing people that things need to change. Arguing for social change in a culture where much of the population has been trained since birth to feel that things are the way they are as a result of human nature gets tricky. You need a good angle for your argument.
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October has come, ladies and gentlemen, and that means its time to talk about scary things! Terrifying things such as witches, ghosts, bosses, serial killers, space elevators, mummies, global thermonuclear war, vampires, missionaries or the most horrifying thing of all: women yelling!
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From Digital Femme:

Since its debut in February 2007, UVC: The Urban Voice in Comics has provided news, information and opinions about black comics and creators for all readers. This fall, UVC takes a closer look at a small but significant segment of the comics industry - black women.

Among the features in the November/December 2007 issue include the following:

feature articles on black women creators and industry figures, including Barbara Brandon-Croft, Spike, and The Ormes Society founder Cheryl Lynn Eaton

a listing and analysis of the major black women characters at both Marvel and DC Comics

selective listings of significant black women characters in other comics, past and present, real and fictitious

In addition, this special issue will also include articles about black women in science-fiction film and television, in animation, and as science-fiction/fantasy novelists.

For another project, Cheryl Lynn is requesting that minority (by race, orientation, and religion) women who work in the comics industry and live in the NYC area contact her.

As with many of these posts, this one stems from a time I went to the comic bookstore and saw something that annoyed me. This particular time I wasn’t even looking for comic books. Instead I’d been scouring used bookstores for the sequel to a trashy novel (that I hadn’t known was so trashy when the first book was loaned to me, but now I was hooked). I hadn’t even intended to look at the rack, except the clerk who helped me navigate the unfamiliar paranormal romance territory turned out to be the biggest Teen Titans fan I had ever met. She steered me into the comic book section to point something out when my eyes fell upon the reason I just can’t get back into Marvel comics.
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“If you tell a kid he’s worthless once, you won’t really cause much damage. You tell a kid he’s worthless every day for six months you’re going to mess with his head.”

The person who said that to me wasn’t discussing anything to do with comic books, mass media, pop culture, or politics. It was just a simple statement about children. I wouldn’t have connected that quote to this subject if not for an email conversation which was nitpicking a previous debate about race in pop culture. I’d failed in convincing my debate opponent that the comedic sidekick who talks a good game but falls to pieces at the first sign of trouble was a racist stereotype. She did not believe me, and likely still doesn’t even after I pointed out that the cowardly black guy has been around since before the Civil War because there are white comedic sidekicks and black competent sidekicks.
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Melissa and I were laughing and talking in chat as we tend to do when sorely offended by the outside world when she pointed out the comment made on her blog. She’d responded to a blog post, and now the original poster responded back. Hoping for a chuckle or a good fight I checked out the comment to find a reasonable question at the end:

But I really am curious how you see your fandom for DC intersecting with the portrayal of women in their comics. I agree that Jann Jones is not guaranteed to improve the situation–I think I made that point in my original post–but her hiring would, hypothetically, be a major turning point in the history of the North American comics industry. Do you ever feel like you’re being pulled in two directions at once? I don’t mean this as an insult; I’m always struck at how you and Lisa retain your enthusiasm for superhero comics in the face of the WFA project. It’s kind of a unique situation, and I was mostly interested in hearing your thoughts on that (apparently false) dichotomy. Again, sorry if my intentions were unclear.

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Leslie Caribou blogged last week about how she reacted when she learned that in the not-too-distant past superhero comics not only welcomed women, but were actually marketed to them:

And when I think about those fangirls during WWII, I think about what we have in common. Did they run through fields imagining that they were flying, just like I did when I was little? Did they tie blankets around their shoulders as a makeshift cape, and insist upon wearing them in public despite their parent’s efforts to get them to leave said cape at home? When they missed their loved ones who were away at war, did reading comics help ease the pain, just like the death of a comic book character helped me cope with the loss of my grandmother? And when their fathers came home in a casket, did they wish that Miss America or Miss Victory had been there to help them? Did they wish that a superheroine had been fighting alongside their father, to protect him from the enemy soldier who had killed him, as I have wished for a superhero to be real so many times?

We shouldn’t be asking if comics are for women. That’s stupid. There is nothing about having a pair of X chromosomes that makes you dislike comics. What we should be asking is: What happened since then? Where did the cartoonists, the fans, the characters go? Did women suddenly become uninterested, or did the developing comics subculture exclude women?

Amazons Attack ended Wednesday, and I got a look at the last few pages even though I dropped the miniseries long ago. A number of readers have proclaimed that “Will Pfiefer killed Wonder Woman” and I’ve taken it upon myself in my personal blog to tell them (in a few admittedly not very polite posts) that they are overreacting a bit. The usual fighting has commenced, and it leaves me thinking about exactly why I dropped the miniseries. Strangely enough, it wasn’t for any of the more prominent criticisms.

(Yes, I am about to nitpick this miniseries after I just spent two days telling people they were overreacting to it.)
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One of the things that people who only know me through this feature here might not realize is that I am crazy for 1960s Green Lantern stories. I love them, I seek them out, I will shell out a reasonable amount of money for the pleasure of reading them.

As everyone knows, there’s a lot of sexism (and racism — though I don’t see why we can’t bring the Hal’s mechanic back and call him “Tom” now. They’ve retconned out far less significant details than a racist nickname) in 1960s comics. There’s a lot of women fainting, preening and scheming to get married that is simply silly and embarrassing now. I know time and time again I see a panel from the 1960s posted with “It could be worse, girls!” or I see someone at a convention talking about how far we’ve come with female superhero portrayal since the Silver Age. And we have come a long way in some ways, but to be honest I can think of a few instances were things were done right early on, where the portrayal of a female character was revolutionary and the writers since have made it worse while updating the stories.
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The blogging community seems to have been quiet about this little bit from WWC, so I’m going to do something unusual and quote an item from the mothersite in case it was missed in the flurry of convention news.

From Vaneta Rogers’ New Worlds Order panel report:

A blind member of the audience said he enjoyed the audiobook version of Infinite Crisis. Would there be more audio books of the Crisis aftermath, joking that, “I’m completely in the dark about it.” There may be 52 in audio. “Usually when we do a novelization, there’s an audio version of it,” Didio said, adding that 52 is due to be a novelization.

Paul Levitz then said he remembered reading into a reel-to-reel for a blind friend. “It would be a great thing in this world of internet posted stuff that may or may not be legal to just have homemade read-alouds of your favorite stories for people who cannot read them,” he said.

(Also thought I’d point out that it was the Publisher putting this idea out there.)

Because I can be talked into anything I’ve written a two part post detailing my experiences at WizardWorld: Chicago last weekend. Melissa has added commentary in italics rather than sit down and write her own.

Part I is here.

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Because I can be talked into anything I’ve written a two part post detailing my experiences at WizardWorld: Chicago last weekend. Melissa has added commentary in italics rather than sit down and write her own.

Hey, we did the SAME THING. It’s not like having two separate reports would be anything but redundant.
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Tony Bedard commented on the Beat yesterday about the Supergirl creative team change, and some of the reaction to the Guedes art.

Yeah, I was only ever on for 3 issues. Did an interview or two, which might’ve made it seem like a bigger deal than that, but it was always just 3 issues to keep the seat warm for the new team.

That sounds a little worse than intended, though. Frankly 3 issues of Supergirl was a welcome opportunity and I’m having great fun with it. And Renato Guedes has been a revelation to me. I’m dying to work with this guy again, and when I read some people complaining that he makes Supergirl look “fat” (i.e. human) it’s really cracks me up.

After a hell of a day at work, I booted up my ancient desktop computer to write this column and was almost immediately greeted with an instant message from Chris asking if I read Supergirl that week. He was punished for abruptly interrupting my train of thought with being told about my day. Chris’s good mood was not diminished by this, and he was ready with a preview of his Supergirl #20 review:

But the real draw here–no pun intended–is artist Renato Guedes, who does some truly wonderful work. Ever since her return at the hands of Mike Turner and the launch of the series with Ian Churchill, the latest version of Supergirl’s been criticized (rightly, if you asked me) for her rail-thin, oversexualized appearance, but here, Guedes’ work blows them all away, and he does it without offering exploitation and calling it beauty. Here’s hoping these guys stick around for a while, and that this book finally gets the readability it deserves.

He then told me to put it in my WFA and smoke it, so I thought I’d do him one better by putting it in this post as an example of why positive blogging is pretty much impossible when you’re worried about how women are portrayed in comics.
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I want you all to read this, and then read it again and imagine my voice (I’m an Alto with a slow Pennsylvania/Oklahoma accent). Then read it aloud to yourself, because you need to get this burned into your heads whether you are a fan or a creator.

When people criticize a sample of writing as sexist, they are not criticizing the writer personally. They are criticizing writing sample. More specifically, they are criticizing the idea espoused in that writing sample, and idea which is quite likely such an ingrained trope that the writer never thought twice about.
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Full programming schedule starts here, but I have some highlights for DC fans specifically:

1. Get the latest rumors and news from the horse’s mouth. DC has at least promotional panels for dropping hints about the mainstream books for each day of the con. If you’re there on Thursday, you can catch the rumors about the company-wide plot in (DC Countdown…to the End? 12:15-1:15 PM Thur), or news on its team books (DC Group Therapy: Leagues, Legions, Societies, and Teens 6:00-7:00 PM Thur). On Friday, there’s the always popular DC Nation panel (6:00-7:00 PM Fri) for the entire DCU line; the DCU: New Worlds Order (1:30-2:45 PM Sat) and Wildstorm: Storm Front (5:00-6:00 PM) is on Saturday. Finally, on Sunday you can go to the DC: Big Guns (10:30-11:30 PM Sun) panel to find out what’s being planned for the five major franchises, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and the Flash.
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