“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.
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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…)

Pam Noles was kind enough over the holidays to post a multi-part explanation of the Golliwogg character (the ragdoll character) seen in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier on And We Shall March. The post itself has five parts: a brief overview of minstrelsy in England and the United States, the history and implications of the Golliwogg, some thoughts on the storytelling potential in modern fiction, a recommended reading list and her actual reaction to the Black Dossier. If you don’t have time to digest the entire series, I’d suggest bookmarking it for when you have a chance to sit down because it’s really worth the read.

(Via Torchbearers)

Edited after the first comment to add: By the way, I’m not stupid. I’ve seen the things people will say to defend creators who aren’t Alan Moore, so I’m not about to leave this thread alone to become World War III. If you must comment to disagree, then do so politely and respectfully. If you cross the line, I’m deleting your comment.

Did anyone feel like punching something after reading the last Countdown special?

No? Just me?

I mean, I love the concept of a gender-reversed world. I picked up the Countdown Presents: Search for Ray Palmer: Superwoman/Batwoman special overjoyed at the thought of Earth-11. It’s just such a wonderful tool when analyzing gender in stories, to run through a familiar story with a woman instead of a man and consider how and why things could be different. Would they think differently about their actions? Each other? Why? And how does the reader react differently?

Granted, there was an option to screw up, but I figured we were beyond writing alternate universe female characters as less capable than their male counterparts. I wasn’t worried when I read it.

I was partially right. We are beyond writing alternate universe female characters as less capable than their male counterparts. All of the female characters were very well done. The dialogue and the way the story was set up suggested that the gender stereotypes were still the same, and that the people meant to be heroes just happened to more often be female than male this time around (probably due in no small part to the most inspiring hero on that planet being the Last Daughter of Krypton as opposed to the standard Last Son). I’d love to see a Kylie Rayner story (or find out what’s going on with Jordan’s counterpart) or a few World’s Finest adventures with Superwoman and Batwoman. The art was lovely, the designs were feminized but not sexualized (I especially liked the effect with the Flash’s long hair). The characterization in general was that the characters were themselves as men or as women.

There was one exception.

One big hairy exception.
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In the interest of peace and giving, I thought I’d just write a simple message wishing the readers of Blog@Newsarama a joyous holiday no matter what religious affiliation they may keep.

Then I started writing and changed my mind.

Instead I wanted to point out that something unusual in mainstream superhero comics. (Or too usual, I’m afraid.) While it’s not compulsory to take time off from the normal storyline in December, it’s not uncommon to see special Christmas issues in that month. Or a extra-long Holiday special spilled with short stories that includes a ten-page Chanukah story or a brief mention of Kwanzaa so the company can say “See, we’re diverse! Really, we are!”
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There’s been a bit of back and forth on the feminist fanblogs about whether or not its worth continuing to read superhero comics. This is nothing new. The subject gets bandied about regularly, usually when someone says “Why don’t you just make your own books?”

Sadly, this seemingly reasonable statement rarely produces a reasonable discussion.
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I’ve been watching the scrapping over gender issues in superhero comics closely for over two years now, and I’m no closer to being able to predict the sort of reaction a post will get now than I was then. I’d say I’m more baffled than ever by this point.
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Recently Chuck Dixon came under fire for a scene in Batman and the Outsiders where he portrayed the character Thunder as “oversensitive” because she was offended when Batman referred to her lesbian relationship with Grace as a “special relationship.” At the time, Batman was berating her as not worthy of being on the team.
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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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This week Lisa has some unavoidable day-job stuff keeping her from writing her column, so she recruited Karen Healey of the blog Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) to contribute a guest column. Enjoy! And thanks to Karen for pitch-hitting this week.

Where are the girls reading superhero comics?

Not the superhero-comics-reading women of the real world - anyone with an interest in the subject, an internet connection and a couple of sparking neurons can work out that they exist, whether the observer is happy about it or not. But where are the female comics characters who read comics?

You see, superhero comics being as fabulously meta-fictional as they often are, male superhero comics fans feature in abundant variety.

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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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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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