This comment amused me more than the webcomic that started the thread:

okay… And here I’m going to probably be ripped apart from all sides… but…
I’ve noticed that a large number of female Comic Book Store Staff tend to veer towards these comics… … And Grant Morrison for some reason (don’t know what the connection is there!)
Perhaps because they tend to avoid the latex brigade since the old “her breasts are bigger than her head” thing…
Guys (again, in general) tend to veer TOWARDS the latex brigade for the same reason…

This is JUST A GENERALISATION! I know I’ve just kicked over the tin of worms that will lead to countless messages of “I’m a guy and I love Mouse Guard”/”I’m a girl and I love Power Girl”… “…and I’m not gay!” (Those would be thier words, I’m not implying anything…)

So carefully worded, and he goes out of his way to frame it with “Please don’t rip me apart.”

I’m going to be gentle and not rip him apart, but he did get me thinking about perceptions of female comic book store staff, and female comic book readers.
(more…)

I think I’ve said it before on this website, but nothing bothers me more than people who see things purely in extremes. Human society is so complex that any commentary on it needs to be approached with thought, perspective and sympathy.

It’s the lack of thought that really gets me. Most of what I write about–dustups over social issues–can be not only cleared up but avoided with a little thought. With a little sympathy. And certainly with a little perspective, because what it usually come down to is someone who is unable to think from the perspective of another person.
(more…)

First, I must apologize for the long hiatus that this column has taken. A few sudden brushfires in my day to day life called for an abrupt withdrawal from the web and I’m just now making my way back.

As a result, I’m a slight bit behind in my blogreading, but I am fortunate enough to have friends who email me particularly good pieces like this analysis of politics and race in a 1960s war comic from bitterandrew at Armagideon Time:

In a sane world, this facsimile of logic where “falling short of ultimate evil” somehow equals “good” would be greeted with universal shock, horror, and/or rage, but in this world, it is seen as a valid argument by a large segment of the populace.
(more…)

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.

There are a number of ways to do this.
(more…)

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.

This screencapture of the offensive content has been passed around the blogosphere:

A number of people are understandably upset by the second question and the circumstances under which it disappeared. Rather than do an editorial this week, I contacted Matt Brady for a short question and answer session about the subject.

Due to a severe scheduling and location conflict, this took considerably longer than we meant for it to. I apologize for the delay.

(more…)

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…)

“It’s just a comic book.”
(more…)

I happened upon some interesting ideas in my weekly reading.
(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:

Naughty language below the cut
(more…)

Sometimes, it’s about predictability
(more…)

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

(more…)

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 few places, and the natural reaction of many superhero fans is to call the problem a “coloring error.”

Except… (more…)

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.

And it’s not the plot that does this. (more…)

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.

Pedro Tejeda at Funnybook Babylon:

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.

(more…)

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.

The reactions from the people behind Project Girl Wonder were mixed. There was praise, cynicism, and dismissal because it was just a dream sequence.

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…)

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…)