Today we’re going to do something a bit different for this feature. I attended Wiscon last weekend and sat in on the panels about comic books. Wiscon is a science fiction convention for feminists, so its panels were perfectly applicable to this column.

I have two panel writeups for you. One on Fun Home, which is in Part 2 of this week’s feature, and one on sexism and superhero comics, which is just beyond the jump.
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So it seems everyone and his brother wants to comment on how “overblown” and “out of proportion” the reaction to the Mary Jane Washerwoman statue is. I’ve been watching these blow-ups for a while now, and it stuck to the normal lifecycle of a major outrage. One or two people notice it at first, and are ignored until a well-known and widely-read person blogs about it and suddenly complaints are popping up all over the blogosphere. The outrage heats for a varying amount of time, depending not on the degree of the insult but on the popularity of the person who blogged about it combined with the popularity of the people who picked it up.

For the purposes of the Mary Jane as Washerwoman statue, Devil Doll has a few hundred people watching her blog. Apparently, a large number of them are interested in Mary Jane Watson-Parker (the Spiderman movie just opened, after all) and how she’s portrayed in a statue. Each of those friends have friends and are members of communities. Because of the friendslist that allows people to instantly read all of their friends’ livejournals in one place, word travels fast when it starts traveling on livejournal. When it has legs, it goes far.

This statue has legs.
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A Blog Carnival is an odd combination of e-zine and link collection. The blogosphere is large and expansive. A Carnival typically collects together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. Like a magazine it has submission deadlines, a publishing date and is posted in issues. And like a traveling carnival it moves and is hosted on individual journals and blogs.

The above is Willow‘s definition of a Blog Carnival. Its notable to this column because she offers it in reference to her new project, the People of Colour SF Carnival, which will (as the Feminist SF/F Carnival does) be accepting superhero comics-related submissions in the first edition. It should be posted in mid-June.

Interestingly enough the Erase Racism Carnival fell to Angry Black Woman this month, and she has chosen to request posts on race in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. That should be up on May 20th (May 18th submission deadline.)

With this in mind, I checked around the blogosphere for views on racial issues in comic books.
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This cover has been the “Outrage of the Week” for three nonconsecutive weeks in the Comics Fan Feminist Blogosphere, and its making its way towards a fourth with this post. Alpha Girl backs up the arguments laid out by Greg Burgas earlier this week, points out that the entire argument is pointless, states her appreciation for the character and makes a noble defense of large-breasted women at the hands of wicked extremist Feminists.

There’s one big problem with her post. The argument was a strawman. The complaints about the cover are not the wicked extremist Feminist arguments described. Neither Burgas nor Alpha seems to have read the actual complaints about the cover, and both bring up several arguments (Comics are a guy’s fantasy anyway. Its just as bad in TV and movies. Women have better self-esteem. Men are more realistic than you think. Why don’t we focus our energy towards something more important?) that are thoroughly, skillfully and convincingly refuted elsewhere.

We won’t be discussing those.

Instead, we’ll be addressing the expressed idea that artwork has less of a bearing on characterization than writing and of course, Power Girl’s breasts.

With pictures!
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As a community and an industry, we are desperately trying to prove that “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” Whenever the mainstream media starts talking about a comic book, its usually how they lead the story. We tout famous books like Sandman and Watchmen (rather than Maus and The Neighborhood) to our non-comics-reading friends as proof of the versatility and maturity of the medium.

Its not just us trying to prove ourselves to outsiders. We’re trying to prove ourselves to each other. The superhero books we read, leftovers from decades clutching the apron strings of the CCA-Nanny, are struggling to grow up and lose the trappings of childhood. With the Nanny gone (or at least too old and senile to babysit effectively), the writers and artists have tools that they are using as shorthand for “maturity.” Violence and sexual situations and sexualized violence and strong language have been increasing steadily for decades.

Of course, if you’re reading this website, you already knew that. Better writers than me have decried this, and better writers than me are actively using these “mature” tropes to good and bad effect in their stories. Chances are if you’re reading this site, you’ve already taken a side in the great “Maturity, Censorship, and Decency in Comics” debate.

As that debate is going on, both sides are killing the concurrent debate on social issues in comics.
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When I first started blogging, I started on a personal blog with some random thoughts and weekly reviews. There was no real direction, just a few ideas I’d never been able to get anyone to listen to and some ideas I picked up from my surrounding blogs. I managed to make my way onto a few blogrolls when I started posting regularly about women in comics. At the same time, quite a few other people started blogging about women as well. There was enough to start a separate blog just to keep the links on. This was nearly a year and a half ago, and I’ve been following posts about social issues of all kinds in comics very closely. I’ve been blogging them, particularly the gender ones, regularly on my personal blog.

I’ve recently noticed that I’ve been dropped from some of the first sites that linked me.
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