Friends of Lulu is, in their own words, "a national nonprofit organization whose purpose is to promote and encourage female readership and participation in the comic book industry." Valerie D'Orazio is the group's current president.
In the comments thread to D'Orazio's second post in three days about how terrible something she heard happened in a DC comic book she didn't read was, a commenter asked her why D'Orazio is only complainig about DC all of a sudden (a fact underscored by her contrasting that DC comic book she hadn't read unfavorably with a Marvel comic book she hadn't read yet either (the Obama/Spidey team-up), and trumpeting the fact that Marvel's Wonderful Wizard of Oz apparently "sold out" out the distributor level, which is something that should happen pretty much with every single Marvel book (since they print to meet pre-orders, and don't reveal the the numbers of books they print anyway.
Occasionalsuperheroine poster code-named "Najika":
Hello Val. First time poster, long time reader. I just want to say a couple things and then I'll stop bothering you.
When I first discovered your blog I absolutely loved it. I was just discovering the online comic book feminism community. Your blog was definitely the best. I really liked your insider views too. But the real appeal was how you never failed to call out the big name companies on their crap.
Flash forward a few months and it seemed like something had changed. Instead of calling everyone out on their errors, it seemed like you only called DC out on stuff. This confused me a little. I looked through your blog archives and saw that you used to work for DC and it wasn't pleasant for you.
I can see why an unpleasant experiance with a company would make you be hard on them. After all, you have an insight into them we don't. But I'm still disappointed with the new direction you've taken. It seems to me like you've started to ignore the rest of the industry and focus on DC's mess-ups exclusively. I'm bummed that the take no prisoner feminist views seem to be gone. When Ultimate Wasp met her gory end the rest of the blogosphere called Marvel out on it. Even though people have directly asked you about it in Comments sections you haven't addressed it once. I also have to agree with other commentors when they say you aren't really being fair to DC. They have a great all-ages line and publish lots of great titles that I, as a feminist, love to read.
Of course, this is your blog. If you want to talk about DC instead of feminism that is your complete right. But I'm not sure if I want to read about it. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks for your time.
Valerie D'Orazio, President of Friends of Lulu:
Najika, if you support DC Comics, then personally, I really can't consider you a feminist. Sorry. It's like "yeah, I read about your bad experiences with them. that stuff about sexism. that's too bad. but can you cool it on them? I want to read about feminism, but I don't want to ruin my comic book reading experience."
It's like if you had a horrible sexist thing happen to you at a certain coffee shop. And I stop by, and read the stuff you say about the coffee shop. Now, I consider myself a serious feminist. Ad I DO want to hear your opinions on sexism. But I tire of hearing about that coffee shop. Because I want to buy a fucking cappuccino there. They make good cappuccino, and I don't want to feel guilty about buying it. Now, you might feel offended that I have heard your story, yet not only have patronized the sexist coffee shop -- but had the temerity to tell YOU that YOU should stop talking about how you were hurt there. Because I want to enjoy my cappuccino.
For you to tell me to stop posting about this stuff and post about "feminism" instead -- it's like you didn't read a damn thing I wrote.
Go enjoy your comic books, and enjoy your "feminist" blogs. Hope you find one that hates Dave Sim -- he's such a good, soft target.
Once again:
[I]f you support DC Comics, then personally, I really can't consider you a feminist.
Okay obviously, that’s nonsense, D’Orazio knows it’s nonsense, and anyone who’s ever read her blog knows she knows it's nonsense, and if she stopped to think about what she wrote before she sat in front of her keyboard and started banging on the keys, she wouldn’t have written it.
I don't honestly think she honesty thinks that Gail Simone, Nicola Scott, G. Willow Wilson or Amy Reader-Hadley (just to name the women working on ongoings for DC), Jann Jones, Karen Berger and Shelly Bond (to name some editors whose names I happen to know how to spell) are all anti-woman, to say nothing of the scores of others—men and women—who work for DC Comics in some capacity. I don't honestly think she thinks that anyone who buys and reads DC comics is somehow anti-woman.
But that’s what she said.
Showing posts with label a great disturbance in the blogosphere. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a great disturbance in the blogosphere. Show all posts
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Society doesn’t know, care about Namor The Sub-Mariner (and a few other subjects undeserving of their own posts)
Aquaman first appeared in 1941, but didn’t become a real fixture of comics and American pop culture until years later, during the so-called Silver Age. He was, at the time, essentially just a weaker, blonder, more pleasant version of Namor The Sub-Mariner, with a more direct and marketable name.
Namor first appeared in 1939, and he was essentially just Superman from underwater…if Superman was an enormous prick who would occasionally just walk around wrecking the joint for no good reason. Namor fought Nazis with Captain America in the Golden Age, kidnapped Sue “Invisible Woman” Richards of the Fantastic Four in the Silver Age, and has swam around the Marvel Universe being an enormous prick, telling superheroes to touch him not, spouting catchphrases and occasionally wrecking joints ever since.
And yet, when the mainstream, non-comics media reach for an underwater superhero to compare Olympic athlete Michael Phelps to, it is inevitably Aquaman, never Namor.
What’s up with that, mainstream media?
Here’s Sports Illustrated magazine online, comparing “two guys who live their lives in the water.” The guys are Phelps and Aquaman.
Here’s cartoonist J.D. Crowe’s horrifying caricature of monster-man Phelps, calling him Aquaman.
Here’s Jon Stewart showing “stunning footage” of “Phelps racing his French rival Black Manta.”
Here’s Wonkette.com’s Ken Layne on Political Machine, talking about America’s inability to respond militarily to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, or do much of anything militarily a the moment: “Or that famous swimmer Michael Phelps can save the country by, uh, swimming very fast to various problem zones, like Aquaman.” (And at Wonkette proper, they ask, “WTF was Aquaman’s secret power anyway, just basically swimming?” Yeah. And a little thing we like to call telepathy! And the ability to totally breathe underwater! And super-speed, -strength and –endurance!)
Google News-ing “Michael Phelps” and “Aquaman” Thursday evening got me 74 hits; doing the same for “Michael Phelps” and “Namor” got me only three, and one of those mentioned both Namor and Aquaman.
Not that there weren’t any comparisons of Phelps to Namor, of course, but there are significantly fewer, and certainly none in as high-profile a place as The Daily Show or any of the one million newspapers that have called Phelps Aquaman.
In conclusion, while Aquaman may still be something of a pop culture punchline thanks to Super Friends, at least pop culture is aware of his existence.
—I don’t think all this Olympic-related name-dropping of Aquaman would at all translate into an increase of in-store comics sales, but it hardly matters, as DC isn’t publishing an Aquaman comic, the last volume of which was cancelled at the end of last year after an ill-considered 18-issue run in which the title character was ditched in favor of a brand-new legacy character.
In a similar vein, I found it rather ironic that DC published a monthly comic book series with the phrase “Dark Knight” right there in the title (Legends of the Dark Knight) for 215 issues over the course of 19 years, and the ended up canceling it the year before a gigantic movie called The Dark Knight was released, replacing it with a similar book entitled Batman Confidential (which no one will ever use for a movie title ever).
I don’t know that that necessarily cost DC any sales either (or, more accurately, cost them potential new sales)—particularly since I heard the film referred to as Batman and Dark Knight interchangeably in conversation—but it’s an unfortunate failure to capitalize on the free publicity of having everyone on earth saying the words “Dark Knight” over the course of a few months.
It’s not like they didn’t know what the name of the next Batman movie was going to be back when they decided to cancel LDK and replace it with a book that sounded like it was about Batman’s love life, right?
—Back to Namor for a minute: I stumbled through a (more) half-assed (than usual) review of the Last Defenders #6 last week, and I freely admit that I just didn’t get it.
Tim O’Neil did, and I’d encourage you to read his review of the series (and thoughts on the franchise in general). He has an interesting take on what exactly Joe Casey was up to with this weird little miniseries, and, after reading O’Neil’s case, I think that not only is he right, but Casey’s mini might actually have been kind of brilliant. I kind of want to sit down and reread it again sometime soon, now that O’Neil’s offered another way to look at it.
—Okay, one last thing pertaining to Namor and then I swear to move on: Did you see James Kochalka’s cover of a page of Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four? Kochalka, who is responsible for Superfuckers, a comic book that is all about a bunch of super-powered jerks and dicks, draws a superb Namor.
In a perfect world, Joe Quesada would already be knocking on Kochalka’s front door, with a big sack of cash money (complete with a dollar sign drawn on the front) in one hand, and a contract to do a Namor Max miniseries in the other. (Link from many places, but I think I saw it at Comicsreporter.com first).
—I haven’t mentioned that Robert Kirkman video manifesto thing, in large part because I a) don’t have a dog in that fight, and b) don’t want to be a dick to Robert Kirkman, in case I ever have the opportunity to pitch something to Image Comics, but of the various reactions I’ve read—from Dirk Deppey’s it’s "just insane” to Steven Grant’s measured response—I thought Abhay Khosla’s was the most amusing.
He used it to frame a review the latest issue of Kirkman’s Astonishing Wolf-Man comic:
I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?
Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics
Good stuff, as always.
—Oh, and speaking of Abhay and good stuff, click here to watch him make Scott Kurtz look like the dumbest fucking guy to ever touch a keyboard.
In the comments section, Kurtz goes round and round with posters, several of them prominent and/or pretty great online comics critics, about, I don’t know, how he doesn’t believe in the existence of quality prose about creative works, or that criticism on the Internet doesn’t count because those are just bloggers and not critics (an odd statement for a guy who does webcomics to make; wouldn’t a webcomic creator be offended to be told their comic isn’t a real comic because it’s not on paper?), or that writing isn’t an art form unless it’s a screenplay, a novel or the words in the bubbles of his strip. (Hell, he says that not only is non-fiction writing not only not an art, it’s not even a craft. The construction of the previous sentence, by the way, isn’t very good, I know).
This is another excellent example of why creators should pretty much never post anything online ever, particularly if they happen to be idiots (like Kurtz) and/or have thoroughly unlikable online personas (like Mark Millar) and/or hold wacky-ass personal beliefs (like Dave Sim and a few dozen others).
See, I’ve never read Kurtz’s PVP. Not because I didn’t like it (I just searched for it online, and I see Kurtz has a pretty nice line and highly animated character designs), not because I wasn’t aware of its existence and not because of any aesthetic prejudice against online comics. I’m just a slow adapter. I’ve never had a cell phone, or one of those little white boxes that pump music into your ears…whattayacallit, an I-Pad? It took me years of hearing how genius Achewood was before I dedicated the time necessary to get into it, and, likewise, I had to try Dinosaur Comics over and over until I found the proper dosage of which I need to take it in to enjoy it (one strip a day; the opposite of Achewood, really).
But after reading Kurtz spend time publicly making an ass of himself, I’m never going to be able to come to PVP cold and try to experience it with fresh eyes. I’m going to think, “PVP? Oh, the strip by that dumb fucking guy who’s never read anything in his life? No thanks.”
The moral of this story? If you are a comics creator and can’t help making an ass of yourself in public, don’t go out in public.
—After completing this year’s Justice League Ice Cream Social, I went back and reviewed my master list and realized I completely forgot to do one of the superheroes on the League. Can you guess which one? Here’s a hint: She’s a she, and she was on the team sometime between Legends and JLA #1. I guess I’ll do a mini-one next summer, to include her and any Leaguers added by then, like Icon or Hardware (if McDuffie does end up adding some of the Milestone characters to the team).
The next sketch blog event is tentatively scheduled for October.
UPDATE #1: I altered the wording of the first sentence, since, as commenter Tegan pointed out, it wasn't technically accurate.
UPDATE #2: Kurtz struck a more concillatory note later in that Blog@ post which makes him seem like less of an ignorant douche. I still have no desire to ever read PVP though.
Namor first appeared in 1939, and he was essentially just Superman from underwater…if Superman was an enormous prick who would occasionally just walk around wrecking the joint for no good reason. Namor fought Nazis with Captain America in the Golden Age, kidnapped Sue “Invisible Woman” Richards of the Fantastic Four in the Silver Age, and has swam around the Marvel Universe being an enormous prick, telling superheroes to touch him not, spouting catchphrases and occasionally wrecking joints ever since.
And yet, when the mainstream, non-comics media reach for an underwater superhero to compare Olympic athlete Michael Phelps to, it is inevitably Aquaman, never Namor.
What’s up with that, mainstream media?
Here’s Sports Illustrated magazine online, comparing “two guys who live their lives in the water.” The guys are Phelps and Aquaman.
Here’s cartoonist J.D. Crowe’s horrifying caricature of monster-man Phelps, calling him Aquaman.
Here’s Jon Stewart showing “stunning footage” of “Phelps racing his French rival Black Manta.”
Here’s Wonkette.com’s Ken Layne on Political Machine, talking about America’s inability to respond militarily to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, or do much of anything militarily a the moment: “Or that famous swimmer Michael Phelps can save the country by, uh, swimming very fast to various problem zones, like Aquaman.” (And at Wonkette proper, they ask, “WTF was Aquaman’s secret power anyway, just basically swimming?” Yeah. And a little thing we like to call telepathy! And the ability to totally breathe underwater! And super-speed, -strength and –endurance!)
Google News-ing “Michael Phelps” and “Aquaman” Thursday evening got me 74 hits; doing the same for “Michael Phelps” and “Namor” got me only three, and one of those mentioned both Namor and Aquaman.
Not that there weren’t any comparisons of Phelps to Namor, of course, but there are significantly fewer, and certainly none in as high-profile a place as The Daily Show or any of the one million newspapers that have called Phelps Aquaman.
In conclusion, while Aquaman may still be something of a pop culture punchline thanks to Super Friends, at least pop culture is aware of his existence.
—I don’t think all this Olympic-related name-dropping of Aquaman would at all translate into an increase of in-store comics sales, but it hardly matters, as DC isn’t publishing an Aquaman comic, the last volume of which was cancelled at the end of last year after an ill-considered 18-issue run in which the title character was ditched in favor of a brand-new legacy character.
In a similar vein, I found it rather ironic that DC published a monthly comic book series with the phrase “Dark Knight” right there in the title (Legends of the Dark Knight) for 215 issues over the course of 19 years, and the ended up canceling it the year before a gigantic movie called The Dark Knight was released, replacing it with a similar book entitled Batman Confidential (which no one will ever use for a movie title ever).
I don’t know that that necessarily cost DC any sales either (or, more accurately, cost them potential new sales)—particularly since I heard the film referred to as Batman and Dark Knight interchangeably in conversation—but it’s an unfortunate failure to capitalize on the free publicity of having everyone on earth saying the words “Dark Knight” over the course of a few months.
It’s not like they didn’t know what the name of the next Batman movie was going to be back when they decided to cancel LDK and replace it with a book that sounded like it was about Batman’s love life, right?
—Back to Namor for a minute: I stumbled through a (more) half-assed (than usual) review of the Last Defenders #6 last week, and I freely admit that I just didn’t get it.
Tim O’Neil did, and I’d encourage you to read his review of the series (and thoughts on the franchise in general). He has an interesting take on what exactly Joe Casey was up to with this weird little miniseries, and, after reading O’Neil’s case, I think that not only is he right, but Casey’s mini might actually have been kind of brilliant. I kind of want to sit down and reread it again sometime soon, now that O’Neil’s offered another way to look at it.
—Okay, one last thing pertaining to Namor and then I swear to move on: Did you see James Kochalka’s cover of a page of Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four? Kochalka, who is responsible for Superfuckers, a comic book that is all about a bunch of super-powered jerks and dicks, draws a superb Namor.
In a perfect world, Joe Quesada would already be knocking on Kochalka’s front door, with a big sack of cash money (complete with a dollar sign drawn on the front) in one hand, and a contract to do a Namor Max miniseries in the other. (Link from many places, but I think I saw it at Comicsreporter.com first).
—I haven’t mentioned that Robert Kirkman video manifesto thing, in large part because I a) don’t have a dog in that fight, and b) don’t want to be a dick to Robert Kirkman, in case I ever have the opportunity to pitch something to Image Comics, but of the various reactions I’ve read—from Dirk Deppey’s it’s "just insane” to Steven Grant’s measured response—I thought Abhay Khosla’s was the most amusing.
He used it to frame a review the latest issue of Kirkman’s Astonishing Wolf-Man comic:
I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?
Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics
Good stuff, as always.
—Oh, and speaking of Abhay and good stuff, click here to watch him make Scott Kurtz look like the dumbest fucking guy to ever touch a keyboard.
In the comments section, Kurtz goes round and round with posters, several of them prominent and/or pretty great online comics critics, about, I don’t know, how he doesn’t believe in the existence of quality prose about creative works, or that criticism on the Internet doesn’t count because those are just bloggers and not critics (an odd statement for a guy who does webcomics to make; wouldn’t a webcomic creator be offended to be told their comic isn’t a real comic because it’s not on paper?), or that writing isn’t an art form unless it’s a screenplay, a novel or the words in the bubbles of his strip. (Hell, he says that not only is non-fiction writing not only not an art, it’s not even a craft. The construction of the previous sentence, by the way, isn’t very good, I know).
This is another excellent example of why creators should pretty much never post anything online ever, particularly if they happen to be idiots (like Kurtz) and/or have thoroughly unlikable online personas (like Mark Millar) and/or hold wacky-ass personal beliefs (like Dave Sim and a few dozen others).
See, I’ve never read Kurtz’s PVP. Not because I didn’t like it (I just searched for it online, and I see Kurtz has a pretty nice line and highly animated character designs), not because I wasn’t aware of its existence and not because of any aesthetic prejudice against online comics. I’m just a slow adapter. I’ve never had a cell phone, or one of those little white boxes that pump music into your ears…whattayacallit, an I-Pad? It took me years of hearing how genius Achewood was before I dedicated the time necessary to get into it, and, likewise, I had to try Dinosaur Comics over and over until I found the proper dosage of which I need to take it in to enjoy it (one strip a day; the opposite of Achewood, really).
But after reading Kurtz spend time publicly making an ass of himself, I’m never going to be able to come to PVP cold and try to experience it with fresh eyes. I’m going to think, “PVP? Oh, the strip by that dumb fucking guy who’s never read anything in his life? No thanks.”
The moral of this story? If you are a comics creator and can’t help making an ass of yourself in public, don’t go out in public.
—After completing this year’s Justice League Ice Cream Social, I went back and reviewed my master list and realized I completely forgot to do one of the superheroes on the League. Can you guess which one? Here’s a hint: She’s a she, and she was on the team sometime between Legends and JLA #1. I guess I’ll do a mini-one next summer, to include her and any Leaguers added by then, like Icon or Hardware (if McDuffie does end up adding some of the Milestone characters to the team).
The next sketch blog event is tentatively scheduled for October.
UPDATE #1: I altered the wording of the first sentence, since, as commenter Tegan pointed out, it wasn't technically accurate.
UPDATE #2: Kurtz struck a more concillatory note later in that Blog@ post which makes him seem like less of an ignorant douche. I still have no desire to ever read PVP though.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Captain America, lesbian superheroines, Spoiler, X-Men and hobos (but no kitchen sink)
—Waste not, want not. Here’s a piece on the latest issue of Captain America that got bumped out of the paper for space, and won’t be relevant any more before the next issue. So I figured I might as well post it here, rather than let it go to waste. It’s written for a general audience, rather than the regular EDILW readers, who tend to consist of Newsarama readers and contributors and women with crushes on The Winter Soldier...
Marvel's Captain America comic got another jolt of mainstream media attention—Good Morning America! NPR! The Colbert Report!—with last week's release of #34, the issue in which a new character inherits the still-dead Steve Roger's shield and superhero identity.
It's often amusing (and sometimes cringe-inducing) to watch the “civilian” media react to the goings-on within the wonderful world of comics in the occasional instances that they notice.
In the case of last April's "death" of the original Captain America, it lead to tons of media coverage and a rush of people to comic shops snapping up what they were sure would be a collector's item, the last issue of the 67-year-old superhero Captain America's comic book.
Of course, superheroes die pretty regularly, and they tend to come back to life. Death has relatively little meaning in stories in which superpowers, clones, time travel and magic are so heavily involved.
When a big-time superhero does die, he of she is often replaced by another hero using his or her name, and often times the new character is a darker version of the original. Rather than a noteworthy event, then, the intro of the new Cap is really just Marvel following the well-established formula in the superhero cycle of death and rebirth.
What is fairly unique about this case, however, is how well writer Ed Brubaker has been able to maintain the quality of the monthly book after the title character was removed from it.
Almost a year has passed and, if anything, the book's gotten stronger and stronger, as Brubaker focused on Cap's traditional second bananas and antagonists, making it more of an ensemble drama. Brubaker’s completely mastered potboiler thriller and espionage, to the point where even when things happen exactly as one expects them to, they’re still exciting anyway.
Captain America #34 sees Cap’s former sidekick Bucky finally becoming the new Captain America, something that seemed a foregone conclusion the second the original was declared dead. The new Captain has a new costume, and a gun, which he uses to kneecap his terrorist enemies.
While the symbolism of a guy named “America” switching from a defense-only shield to a shield and gun combo may be groaningly obvious, this same issue sees Brubaker proving himself eerily prescient.
It opens with CNN talking heads decrying the price of oil, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the sudden sharp downturn in the economy. In the Marvel Universe, this has all lead to street demonstrations and rioting outside the White House.
What's behind this economic chaos? Captain America’s archenemy, the incredibly well preserved Nazi villain known as The Red Skull. Considering the lead time in comics—generally six months—Brubaker is either damn good at trend-spotting, or the real world is more and more following the gloomy imaginations of fiction writers purposely trying to think of melodramatically negative scenarios. Either way, it’s disturbingly in tune with today’s headlines.
In the ‘40s, Captain America used to punch out Hitler on the covers of his comics. I look forward to a cover in which the new Captain punches out the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
—Okay, anyone who wants to give Matt Brady and crew shit for laying into creators during profiles and interviews at Newsarama, please turn your attention to this Advocate article on all the lesbian superheroines in the DCU (Link totally stolen from Dirk Deppey’s Journalista).
It starts out on the wrong foot, mentioning Judd Winick’s gay-bashing issue of Green Lantern as the start of gay characters in super-comics in the DCU (I probably would have mentioned Vertigo easing super-comics readers into it, but whatever).
Most of it consists of talk about Renee “The Question” Montoya and Kathy “Batwoman” Kane, who appear in little-read miniseries Crime Bible: The Five Lessons of Blood, and some questions with Dan DiDio.
The writer does seem passably familiar with the DCU, saying this:
Batwoman and the Question aren’t the only sapphic superfolks stalking the streets of the DC Universe, either. Lovers Knockout and Scandal are both members of the Secret Six, while Amazonian powerhouse Grace and the density-altering heroine Thunder have a sexual relationship in the pages of The Outsiders. And when Catwoman, now more of an antihero than a villainess, retired to raise her newborn child, her lesbian friend Holly took on the guise of the ferocious feline.
Are these queer avengers here to stay—and stay gay? Knockout was recently murdered and, in a recent issue, it looked like Thunder was evicted from the Outsiders. But DiDio promises both Question and Batwoman will have "prominent roles" in 2008, after the current Crime Bible series wraps in February.
Hmm. I don’t know that Batwoman and the Question are exactly terribly prominent. Batwoman in particular seems to have disappeared. Cameos in Countdown and a guest-appearance in Crime Bible aside, she has a very low-profile for a hero who was set to appear in her own monthly, one that two different writers worked on at some point and a logo was already designed for. It’s odd that a character with a bat on her chest is less-seen in the modern DCU than, say, Booster Gold or the Metal Men or Geo-Force or Mogo the Green Lantern who is also a planet, you know?
Knockout and Scandal appeared in two miniseries; the former is at least temporarily dead (Although, unlike some of the Fourth Worlders, she’s a minor and modern addition, and not exactly guaranteed to return in the same way that, say, Orion and Mr. Miracle are). There are no plans for another Secret Six series announced at this point, and the team’s writer seems too focused on Wonder Woman for other books at this point, having dropped the rest of her workload.
Grace and Thunder are pretty awful examples of lesbian heroes, as both were just suddenly announced as gay; the former having had several sexual relationships with men prior, and a rather icky sexual history that I don’t imagine many gay advocates would be happy to hear about (“What are you trying to say, DC? That being repeatedly raped as a child turns you gay?”). They’re also both being written by one of the few mainstream super-comics writers who has actually came out and announced he foun gay content in super-comics to be completely inappropriate.
And Catwoman II was only temporarily carrying the Catwoman monthly; she’s been stripped of her cat-suit and sent to co-star in Countdown, a rather severe punishment for any DC superhero.
So, I don’t know…hooray for Sapphic superheroes?
As Deppey also snidely points out, they’re all buxom, Barbie doll-figured women in skintight costumes, with the exception of Montoya, who is a buxom, Barbie doll-figured woman in a trenchcoat. I was pretty disappointed to see how poor Holly swelled up into a cookie-cutter smexy super-girl in the pages of Countdown and in Adam Hughes’ Catwoman covers, as she used to be short, thin and rather gamine.
—Speaking of Dirk, everybody already read this essay of his, right? The one about the comics blogosphere’s sometimes misplaced feminist causes and superhero decadence and the super-comics markets? I’m afraid that a lot of the good points he makes are going to go unread or undiscussed simply because it is a long piece which a few pundits who should know better seem to have either not read or not understood and/or because some of the people who get name-dropped are going to take some personal offense to it, and respond to that stuff instead.
I think, for the most part, Deppey’s analysis is right…or at least seems right to me. However, Lisa Forturner, who provided the quote that got Deppey’s rhetorical ball rolling, is right about something too—DC is definitely paying attention.
Between Dan DiDio’s Christmas list, Chuck Dixon’s current Robin story arc, complete with memorial case gripe, and Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel’s one-panel case appearance in a dream sequence, it’s pretty obvious that DC hears this group of fans and is making attempts to respond.
Does it matter? I suppose that depends on who’s answering the question. (I said my piece on it here). Certainly it’s a drop in a bucket, and perhaps not a very important one, but, again, it depends on the person. Personally, I’d be happier to see less of Ed Benes drawing Wonder Woman and Black Canary, and a gradual shift towards returning more of the DCU line to books that are truly all-ages, with perhaps a couple reserved for more grown-up stories (Like, remember when New Titans, Green Arrow, Legends of the Dark Knight and a few others were kind of more for grown-up fans, but most of the line would be fine for a ten-year-old to read?)
See, I don’t mind people being torn in half in the comics I read, or rape being a plot point, but I really don’t think Superman, Robin or Mary Marvel need to be in those comics. I think it’s rather telling that probably the two best comics that DC published featuring superheroes last year were Grant Morrison and Frank Quiteley’s All-Star Superman and Jeff Smith’s Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, both of which were all-ages in the truest sense of the word.
—If I were the person at DC responsible for deciding what old comics get released at what point in time, I would have made damn sure 1988 miniseries Millennium was in comics shops just before Marvel’s big Secret Invasion storyline kicked off.
I don’t remember Millennium being a terribly good story, and like Armageddon 2001, it’s really weird to read it this deep into the 21st century, but despite its disastrous ending (Has any new initiative ever fallen as flat as fast as The New Guardians?), it’s still head and shoulders above the worst of the DCU crossovers (Genesis and Countdown, by my reckoning). Plus, Ian Gibson does the finished art, and man, you haven’t seen the Martian Manhunter until you’ve seen Ian Gibson draw him.
The plot involves a centuries old scheme by the Manhunter robots, the Guardians’ first attempt at a universal police force before they decided on the Green Lanterns, infiltrating the DCU with sleeper agents, all timed to strike at once, so that the supporting characters that our heroes had come to trust over the years suddenly revealed themselves to be alien menaces.
In addition to the eight issues of the main miniseries, I believe just about every single DC comic at the time tied into it, even All-Star Squadron, which was set 40 years in the past. So a trade would have a lot to choose from, but I’m sure there’s a lot of unimportant chaff that wouldn’t be needed (Maybe a trade would look like the one for DC One Million, with the main series and then the more important tie-ins included).
Now, I don’t think Brian Michael Bendis found these in a dollar bin and was suddenly, “Hey, a great idea! Yoink!” or anything, but the surface similarities are such that DC could give their rival a good nose-tweaking by getting it out there and letting the partisan crowd draw their own conclusions. (And, besides, DC’s hardcore fans are all atwitter about things involving the Guardians, GL Corps and suchlike at the moment, aren’t they?)
Of course, if I were in charge of those things, I would have rushed to make sure Legends, in which the U.S. government outlaws superheroes, was available in trade ASAP as soon as I heard the first rumors about Civil War, and that The Flash: Hell To Pay was in trade as soon as I heard the first rumors that Peter Parker was contemplating selling his marriage to the devil in “One More Day.”
—This new X-Men cartoon looks pretty cool. My introduction to the characters was in an episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and then that pretty awful ‘90s one, which I loved in the way that one loves horrible cartoons. Like, every single character’s voice in that show was absolutely hilarious to me…it was a guranteed twenty-minute giggle-fest.
I thought X-Men: Evolution was pretty great. It took me a while to get used to it—or else it got more awesome towards the end.
This looks like a neat mixture of the two.
The ‘90s version had much better music, though:
In fact, the only way to improve upon that theme song would be, I don’t know, to sing something in Japanese, and set a bunch of images of speed-lines and gravity-free battles to it:
—Wonkette column “Cartoon Violence” is always worth a read, but this hobo-centric column is triply so. I may not know much about comedy (as the attempts at humor on this page should readily attest), but I do know that there is nothing funnier than hobos. Hell, just the word is hilarious.
Speaking of which, I believe this is a very strong contender for my occasional attempts to isolate the greatest Captain Marvel cover of all time:
Marvel's Captain America comic got another jolt of mainstream media attention—Good Morning America! NPR! The Colbert Report!—with last week's release of #34, the issue in which a new character inherits the still-dead Steve Roger's shield and superhero identity.
It's often amusing (and sometimes cringe-inducing) to watch the “civilian” media react to the goings-on within the wonderful world of comics in the occasional instances that they notice.
In the case of last April's "death" of the original Captain America, it lead to tons of media coverage and a rush of people to comic shops snapping up what they were sure would be a collector's item, the last issue of the 67-year-old superhero Captain America's comic book.
Of course, superheroes die pretty regularly, and they tend to come back to life. Death has relatively little meaning in stories in which superpowers, clones, time travel and magic are so heavily involved.
When a big-time superhero does die, he of she is often replaced by another hero using his or her name, and often times the new character is a darker version of the original. Rather than a noteworthy event, then, the intro of the new Cap is really just Marvel following the well-established formula in the superhero cycle of death and rebirth.
What is fairly unique about this case, however, is how well writer Ed Brubaker has been able to maintain the quality of the monthly book after the title character was removed from it.
Almost a year has passed and, if anything, the book's gotten stronger and stronger, as Brubaker focused on Cap's traditional second bananas and antagonists, making it more of an ensemble drama. Brubaker’s completely mastered potboiler thriller and espionage, to the point where even when things happen exactly as one expects them to, they’re still exciting anyway.
Captain America #34 sees Cap’s former sidekick Bucky finally becoming the new Captain America, something that seemed a foregone conclusion the second the original was declared dead. The new Captain has a new costume, and a gun, which he uses to kneecap his terrorist enemies.
While the symbolism of a guy named “America” switching from a defense-only shield to a shield and gun combo may be groaningly obvious, this same issue sees Brubaker proving himself eerily prescient.
It opens with CNN talking heads decrying the price of oil, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the sudden sharp downturn in the economy. In the Marvel Universe, this has all lead to street demonstrations and rioting outside the White House.
What's behind this economic chaos? Captain America’s archenemy, the incredibly well preserved Nazi villain known as The Red Skull. Considering the lead time in comics—generally six months—Brubaker is either damn good at trend-spotting, or the real world is more and more following the gloomy imaginations of fiction writers purposely trying to think of melodramatically negative scenarios. Either way, it’s disturbingly in tune with today’s headlines.
In the ‘40s, Captain America used to punch out Hitler on the covers of his comics. I look forward to a cover in which the new Captain punches out the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
—Okay, anyone who wants to give Matt Brady and crew shit for laying into creators during profiles and interviews at Newsarama, please turn your attention to this Advocate article on all the lesbian superheroines in the DCU (Link totally stolen from Dirk Deppey’s Journalista).
It starts out on the wrong foot, mentioning Judd Winick’s gay-bashing issue of Green Lantern as the start of gay characters in super-comics in the DCU (I probably would have mentioned Vertigo easing super-comics readers into it, but whatever).
Most of it consists of talk about Renee “The Question” Montoya and Kathy “Batwoman” Kane, who appear in little-read miniseries Crime Bible: The Five Lessons of Blood, and some questions with Dan DiDio.
The writer does seem passably familiar with the DCU, saying this:
Batwoman and the Question aren’t the only sapphic superfolks stalking the streets of the DC Universe, either. Lovers Knockout and Scandal are both members of the Secret Six, while Amazonian powerhouse Grace and the density-altering heroine Thunder have a sexual relationship in the pages of The Outsiders. And when Catwoman, now more of an antihero than a villainess, retired to raise her newborn child, her lesbian friend Holly took on the guise of the ferocious feline.
Are these queer avengers here to stay—and stay gay? Knockout was recently murdered and, in a recent issue, it looked like Thunder was evicted from the Outsiders. But DiDio promises both Question and Batwoman will have "prominent roles" in 2008, after the current Crime Bible series wraps in February.
Hmm. I don’t know that Batwoman and the Question are exactly terribly prominent. Batwoman in particular seems to have disappeared. Cameos in Countdown and a guest-appearance in Crime Bible aside, she has a very low-profile for a hero who was set to appear in her own monthly, one that two different writers worked on at some point and a logo was already designed for. It’s odd that a character with a bat on her chest is less-seen in the modern DCU than, say, Booster Gold or the Metal Men or Geo-Force or Mogo the Green Lantern who is also a planet, you know?
Knockout and Scandal appeared in two miniseries; the former is at least temporarily dead (Although, unlike some of the Fourth Worlders, she’s a minor and modern addition, and not exactly guaranteed to return in the same way that, say, Orion and Mr. Miracle are). There are no plans for another Secret Six series announced at this point, and the team’s writer seems too focused on Wonder Woman for other books at this point, having dropped the rest of her workload.
Grace and Thunder are pretty awful examples of lesbian heroes, as both were just suddenly announced as gay; the former having had several sexual relationships with men prior, and a rather icky sexual history that I don’t imagine many gay advocates would be happy to hear about (“What are you trying to say, DC? That being repeatedly raped as a child turns you gay?”). They’re also both being written by one of the few mainstream super-comics writers who has actually came out and announced he foun gay content in super-comics to be completely inappropriate.
And Catwoman II was only temporarily carrying the Catwoman monthly; she’s been stripped of her cat-suit and sent to co-star in Countdown, a rather severe punishment for any DC superhero.
So, I don’t know…hooray for Sapphic superheroes?
As Deppey also snidely points out, they’re all buxom, Barbie doll-figured women in skintight costumes, with the exception of Montoya, who is a buxom, Barbie doll-figured woman in a trenchcoat. I was pretty disappointed to see how poor Holly swelled up into a cookie-cutter smexy super-girl in the pages of Countdown and in Adam Hughes’ Catwoman covers, as she used to be short, thin and rather gamine.
—Speaking of Dirk, everybody already read this essay of his, right? The one about the comics blogosphere’s sometimes misplaced feminist causes and superhero decadence and the super-comics markets? I’m afraid that a lot of the good points he makes are going to go unread or undiscussed simply because it is a long piece which a few pundits who should know better seem to have either not read or not understood and/or because some of the people who get name-dropped are going to take some personal offense to it, and respond to that stuff instead.
I think, for the most part, Deppey’s analysis is right…or at least seems right to me. However, Lisa Forturner, who provided the quote that got Deppey’s rhetorical ball rolling, is right about something too—DC is definitely paying attention.
Between Dan DiDio’s Christmas list, Chuck Dixon’s current Robin story arc, complete with memorial case gripe, and Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel’s one-panel case appearance in a dream sequence, it’s pretty obvious that DC hears this group of fans and is making attempts to respond.
Does it matter? I suppose that depends on who’s answering the question. (I said my piece on it here). Certainly it’s a drop in a bucket, and perhaps not a very important one, but, again, it depends on the person. Personally, I’d be happier to see less of Ed Benes drawing Wonder Woman and Black Canary, and a gradual shift towards returning more of the DCU line to books that are truly all-ages, with perhaps a couple reserved for more grown-up stories (Like, remember when New Titans, Green Arrow, Legends of the Dark Knight and a few others were kind of more for grown-up fans, but most of the line would be fine for a ten-year-old to read?)
See, I don’t mind people being torn in half in the comics I read, or rape being a plot point, but I really don’t think Superman, Robin or Mary Marvel need to be in those comics. I think it’s rather telling that probably the two best comics that DC published featuring superheroes last year were Grant Morrison and Frank Quiteley’s All-Star Superman and Jeff Smith’s Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, both of which were all-ages in the truest sense of the word.
—If I were the person at DC responsible for deciding what old comics get released at what point in time, I would have made damn sure 1988 miniseries Millennium was in comics shops just before Marvel’s big Secret Invasion storyline kicked off.
I don’t remember Millennium being a terribly good story, and like Armageddon 2001, it’s really weird to read it this deep into the 21st century, but despite its disastrous ending (Has any new initiative ever fallen as flat as fast as The New Guardians?), it’s still head and shoulders above the worst of the DCU crossovers (Genesis and Countdown, by my reckoning). Plus, Ian Gibson does the finished art, and man, you haven’t seen the Martian Manhunter until you’ve seen Ian Gibson draw him.
The plot involves a centuries old scheme by the Manhunter robots, the Guardians’ first attempt at a universal police force before they decided on the Green Lanterns, infiltrating the DCU with sleeper agents, all timed to strike at once, so that the supporting characters that our heroes had come to trust over the years suddenly revealed themselves to be alien menaces.
In addition to the eight issues of the main miniseries, I believe just about every single DC comic at the time tied into it, even All-Star Squadron, which was set 40 years in the past. So a trade would have a lot to choose from, but I’m sure there’s a lot of unimportant chaff that wouldn’t be needed (Maybe a trade would look like the one for DC One Million, with the main series and then the more important tie-ins included).
Now, I don’t think Brian Michael Bendis found these in a dollar bin and was suddenly, “Hey, a great idea! Yoink!” or anything, but the surface similarities are such that DC could give their rival a good nose-tweaking by getting it out there and letting the partisan crowd draw their own conclusions. (And, besides, DC’s hardcore fans are all atwitter about things involving the Guardians, GL Corps and suchlike at the moment, aren’t they?)
Of course, if I were in charge of those things, I would have rushed to make sure Legends, in which the U.S. government outlaws superheroes, was available in trade ASAP as soon as I heard the first rumors about Civil War, and that The Flash: Hell To Pay was in trade as soon as I heard the first rumors that Peter Parker was contemplating selling his marriage to the devil in “One More Day.”
—This new X-Men cartoon looks pretty cool. My introduction to the characters was in an episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and then that pretty awful ‘90s one, which I loved in the way that one loves horrible cartoons. Like, every single character’s voice in that show was absolutely hilarious to me…it was a guranteed twenty-minute giggle-fest.
I thought X-Men: Evolution was pretty great. It took me a while to get used to it—or else it got more awesome towards the end.
This looks like a neat mixture of the two.
The ‘90s version had much better music, though:
In fact, the only way to improve upon that theme song would be, I don’t know, to sing something in Japanese, and set a bunch of images of speed-lines and gravity-free battles to it:
—Wonkette column “Cartoon Violence” is always worth a read, but this hobo-centric column is triply so. I may not know much about comedy (as the attempts at humor on this page should readily attest), but I do know that there is nothing funnier than hobos. Hell, just the word is hilarious.
Speaking of which, I believe this is a very strong contender for my occasional attempts to isolate the greatest Captain Marvel cover of all time:
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Six Things
1.) Meanwhile in Las Vegas…: This week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics review is of the better late than never Teen Titans Lost Annual, which I totally loved.
It wasn’t just the sight of a Dick Sprang-y looking Robin hanging out with a Jay Stephens-y looking JFK, in brilliant all-Allred ink and color (above), although, let’s face it, that is awesome.
It was the happy ending Haney and company gave our most tragic president:
(And, after a week of thinking on it, I wonder if that had anything to do with DC’s decision to release this…the thought that saying Kennedy survived his assassination and it was an alien doppelganger that died in his stead—complete with a drawing of the iconic image of his mourning son at the funeral—crossed some kind of line of good taste?)
The Stepens/Allred/Allred team is seriously great. Their Wonder Girl is probably the best damn Wonder Girl I’ve ever seen. Here she is in flight:
And here she is receiving foot-worship from an alien hippie:
Good stuff!
I know it’s kind of a tired, unimaginative cliché to say things like, “Wow this Bob Haney/Gardner Fox/Grant Morrison comic is so crazy…they must have totally been on drugs while writing it, for how else could the human imagination ever conceive of such wild ideas?", but, well, surely it must have occurred to Stephens that the alien race of hippies he was drawing were totally flying around on giant pipes, right?
And not giant Dr. Will Magnus pipes, but giant hide ‘em when you get pulled over pipes.
I know future Haney “Year One” Titans stories are out of the question, but I do hope to see some more from the Allreds at some point. If only because I think a lot of folks won’t read this story simply because it’s not in a trade. And where could you collect it in a trade?
Maybe a trade full of Allred Teen Titans stories? So far we’ve got the Lost Annual, and this gem
“Doom Patrol Vs. Teen Titans” from Solo #7.
But that’s still not enough to fill a whole trade. So People In Charge of Assigning Awesome Projects at DC, please see that Mike Allred gets at least one more project featuring the Year One Titans at some point soon, okay?
2.) Careful! Comics blogging can make you so used to bitter nitpicking you’ll find yourself dissecting and criticizing the most innocent and innocuous stuff: While at my local library the other day, I saw a rowdy group of little boys leaving the children’s area with their moms. I would guess they were around four years old or so.
They were all excitedly shouting, “I spin the web! I spin a web!” and I soon realized they were playing Spider-Man.
The boy closest to me made a fist and held his arm out straight in front of him, making a spittle-fueld “Foosh!” sound and saying, “I spin a web!” again.
And I thought to myself how he was holding his hand wrong. Spider-Man only shoots webs from his fist while wearing his black costume. Otherwise using his web-shooter requires him to tap the palm of his hand with his middle two fingers and make that Ditko sign.
And the sounnd of his web-shooters is clearly “Thwip!” and not “Foosh!”
And then I realized I was nitpicking a four-year-old’s imaginary play in the back of my head, and hated myself.
I heard the mother telling the boys to calm down as I passed them, and the one who went foosh protested, “But we were just spinning the web to save the day.”
3.) On second thought, let’s stick with complaining about “One More Day” for a while longer: Sorry gang, but I just can’t muster even an iota of outrage over the fact that there’s a quasi-famous naked lady painted as Wonder Woman on the cover of some issue of Playboy. I honestly don’t see anything wrong with it at all.
As a standalone image, there isn’t really much difference between that cover image and your average Adam Hughes Wonder Woman cover, beyond the difference in media.
In fact, I think DC hyper-sexualizing their flagship superheroine in their comics is a lot more offensive than Playboy doing it in a shrink-rapped softcore porn and men’s interest magazine.
The little kids who see Wonder Woman on the Justice League Unlimited cartoons and in their toy aisles can go into a comic shop and pick up an issue of Justice League of America and see Ed Benes drawings of Wonder Woman’s body straining to escape her tiny costume—including that one issue where Lex Luthor seems to be alluding to sexually torturing her, or that one where her pants completely disappear. These hypothetical little kids hypothetically reading JLoA would see the “real” Wonder Woman in a constant state of undress being treated as a sex object by the villain (if they’re not sophisticated enough to realize it’s actually the artist responsible).
The same little kids won’t be able to buy an issue of Playboy and see what’s inside it because, well, they don’t sell issues of Playboy to little kids. And if kids were to somehow get their hands on a copy—maybe finding it under their dad’s bed or in his closet—it should be clear to them that it’s not the “real” Wonder Woman they’re looking at. First clue? She’s clearly wearing paint, not a costume. And she’s in a magazine, not a comic book or cartoon.
So, what we have here is what I gather is a professional celebrity (she’s from reality TV, right?) getting paid a good deal of money to take her clothes off in a magazine for adults who want to look at pictures of ladies not wearing any clothes, one who happens to be painted up like Wonder Woman—a sort of naughty superheroine look instead of, oh, a naughty nurse or naughty school girl or naughty librarian or whatever.
(Do nurses associations get upset every time they see a scantily clad lady in a tiny white dress with the zipper halfway down clenching a stethoscope in her teeth?)
For other examples of characters dressed as naughty superheroes and superheroines, please see Justice League of America Wedding Special #1, in which Green Lantern hires a bunch of strippers dressed like Marvel heroines for Green Arrow’s bachelor party, and the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special #1, in which Black Canary’s bachelorette party is at a male strip club called “The Meat Locker” wherein the strippers are all wearing scanty versions of DC’s male superhero costumes.
4.) Which of my favorite Justice Leaguers will die next?: I do hope this item from this week’s Lying in the Gutters column is misinformation Rich Johnston was purposely fed by DC (it’s marked with a “caution” light in Johnston’s system of accuracy): “If Warner won’t let DC Comics kill off Batman in “Final Crisis," who can DC get away with introducing to the Grim Reaper? I mean it has to be decent names, but it also has to be someone that a major franchise license isn’t totally resting on… the two names marked for karking I’ve been given by a DC source are Martian Manhunter and Aquaman.”
I thought both of them were supposed to be involved in some capacity in the upcoming Justice League movie (which I kinda hope never actually gets made…oh hey, good news on that front!), so I would assume Warner Brothers wouldn’t be enthusiastic about either of them dying either.
But regardless, Aquaman is already dead. He’s been dead for months now. When his last series ended, it was revealed that part of his spirit went into Arthur “Aquaman II” Curry and the rest of it mutated into The Dweller of the Deep, who then died and turned to water. So he’s, like, dead, but it’s a death so stupid that he should be pretty easy to bring back. But if they’re going to re-kill him in Final Crisis, they better hurry up and bring him back to life soon.
It’s worth noting that a lot of DC creators and editors don’t seem to even know this. There was Brad Meltzer writing Aquaman II as if he was Aquaman I in his last issue of JLoA, and I saw this panel from Green Arrow/Black Canary in Rachelle Goguen’s reviews of last week’s comics:
So I don’t know, unless they, um, kark Aquaman II in Final Crisis, that just leaves Martian Manhunter. He’s not currently appearing regularly in JLoA or any other title, and DC seems to have a hard time figuring out what to do with him when he’s not in a Justice League comic.
On the other hand, his whole “last of his race” angle makes killing him seem kind of drastic, and the peculiar nature of his shape-changing physiology pretty much makes him impossible to kill-kill anyway.
On the other other hand, unlike Superman, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's mom, Hawkman, Aquaman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Lantern Guy Gardener, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Green Arrow Oliver Queen, Donna Troy and Ice, he hasn’t died for longer than a few minutes and come back to life yet*, so I guess that killing him off temporarily might seem like a fresh idea.
5.) Elsewhere on CBR this week, there’s an interview with both writer Tom Peyer and pencil artist Rags Morales about one of my favorite DC comics of all time, Hourman. If you missed the not-in-trade book, you might want to give the interview a read and see if you can find it for cheap somewhere.
It’s interesting to consider the creative success (if not the financial success) of this particular brilliant but cancelled series today, in part because it was the result of a creative team taking a character recreated by Grant Morrison and running with it, and it resulted in some pretty great comics.
More recently, we’ve seen Gail Simone and a small army of artists try to run with Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Atom and Ivy Town in The All-New Atom, “Graymiotti” and a couple of artists try to turn Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Freedom Fighters into a couple of miniseries, and Duncan Rouleau try to turn Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Metal Men into a miniseries.
Of the three, none of them seem to come anywhere near the quality of Hourman (It may have helped that Peyer seemed to genuinely be on Morrison’s wavelength—having edited his work and having been part of the foursome who were notoriously forbidden from taking over the Superman titles—while having a writing style that was quite different).
I like Rouleau’s Metal Men okay, although it can be so narratively jam-packed it can get awfully confusing at times (particularly in the earlier issues), and I tried both ANA and Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, and both failed to click for me.
Apparently turning Morrison’s ideas into comics gold is a very difficult challenge. Maybe they should give Peyer a call next time they decide to release a new series “based on concepts and ideas by Grant Morrison.”
6.) Trade-waiting this series was probably a terrible idea: I am worried that I won’t be able to avoid hearing about the end of Y: The Last Man online before I get around to actually reading it.
*Unless you count “Obsidian Age,” during which he and the rest of the League all died only to be reanimated as unkillable zombies and then brought all the way back to life via magic.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Comics Controversy Calvaclade Update: Quesada on that statuette and that cover
Props to Newsarma.com's Matt Brady asking Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada about the two biggest Marvel stories of the past two weeks. You'll have to slog through some goofy Marvel hypsterism to get there, but after their weird-o online video show (I'm just glad they didn't call it In Da House), Brady asks Quesada about Comiquette-gate and Heroes For Hentai-gate.
Regarding Comiquette-gate, Quesada quite diplomatically responds,
When fans saw the statue was exactly the same time I was made aware of it, I have no involvement in that stuff and haven't kept up with the brouhaha. It kind of floors me in a way because Adam Hughes is brilliant and is known for his amazingly sexy portrayal of strong women, so I'm not quite sure what people are up in arms about? Seriously, fill me in because I've literally been out of town and out of the loop.
He's right on the fact that Hughes is generally one of the last artist one would expect to cause this sort of reaction. Sure, he draws sexy super-women exploding out of their costumes pretty much exclusively these days, but he draws them the way real women actually look. He's a great artist, who knows anatomy, lighting, design and drapery. He certainly doesn't belong in the same category as Michael Turner and Greg Land, who I'm frankly shocked that both Marvel and DC continue to give money.
Hughes didn't do himself any favors in his Newsarama interview about the statue, but anyway you look at it, this is a nice piece of art:
And it's not really Hughes’ fault that the sculptors drained all of the humanity, sexiness and spirit out of his design. But then, that's what happens when you're making a plastic statuette based on a drawing.
I was incredibly disappointed (and, frankly, extremely shocked) to hear Quesada's response to the Heroes For Hire cover, however:
First, I think people are reading way too much into that cover than was ever intended. I heard terms such as "tentacle rape" being thrown around when that in no way is what's happening, nor does it happen in the book. Those tentacles are the arms of the Brood who appears in the issue and is a major story point, the Brood have tentacles, sorry about that.
Secondly, the concept for that cover, soup to nuts came from a female artist. Thirdly, not being a deep follower of manga, I have no idea what recurring theme people are referring to or concerned with. While I appreciate the sentiment and the feelings that some may have about this, I honestly feel that there is way too much being read into this cover.
Also, HFH is a book that features two strong, lead female protagonist who kick major ass; somehow folks have forgotten to focus on that.
I've actually already heard all of these arguments torn apart in the same posts in which people originally began reacting to the cover image. No, it's not technically a picture of women being raped by tentacles, and yes, we're not all retarded, we can see that's not what's actually happening on the cover...it's what's about to happen.
Whether that scene as depicted occurs within the book or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the cover itself is reprehensible, particularly on a Marvel superhero comic book. Although, if nothing like it occurs in the book, why on Earth is it on the cover at all?
Exactly.
Quesada points out that the image came from a female artist. Um, so what? That doesn't make it any less repulsive an image, nor does it exempt Marvel from getting to share in the criticism of it. Are we to believe they were just like, "Hey, give us an image of the Heroes For Hire team fighting the Brood," got this
back, and were like, "Awesome! Let’s just slap this on the cover now, okay?”
They didn't see any sketches first, or talk to the artist in detail about what they wanted? And they have no power to reject an image, or ask for alterations to it? How hard would it be, with the powers of computers, to at least clean that up a bit? (They were certainly able to alter the image of Peter Parkers genitals that slipped into Reign or the nip slip in Iron Man once they were discovered/noticed, without having to have someone redraw an entire page).
Quesada acts like Marvel is completely powerless over what their cover artists do, and have no choice but to run what a freelancer turns in. Why do I get the feeling that if Misty Knight was smoking a cigarette in that image, it would have gotten rejected? (It may be worth noting that Marvel voluntarily rates it’s comic books, betraying a belief, as the smoking ban and the confused comments about gay title heroes did previously, that Marvel believes there are kids who might be reading their books. HFH is rated “T+,” which I assume meant is for older teens, but their site says actually means is for “9+ years old [readers]… Appropriate for most readers, parents are advised they may want to read before or with younger children.” So, that cover is cool for a ten-year-old to look at? Because I wouldn’t even look at it at work).
Quesada’s comment on the fact that HFH has " two strong, lead female protagonist [sic] who kick major ass" is also weird. That's part of the problem, as has been pointed out by Tamora Pierce, who has written for Marvel:
It's not right that we have these powerful women. Let's humiliate them publicly, on the cover. Let's strip them of their power, wit, and rage, and show them off to everyone who walks by, to show what powerful women can expect, even when we've showed them being powerful. This is what happens when women strut along, kicking butt. This is what they can expect. Savor and learn!
Beyond the fact that Quesada doesn't see a problem with the cover (A state of affairs I had imagined and found perhaps just as bad if not worse than an intentional use of the imagery to stoke it's most negative and perversely sexual connotations), I was surprised to hear him say publicly that he's not a "deep follower" of manga.
Um, should you really be the Editor-in-Chief of one of the biggest American comic book publishers and not be "deep into" the most rapid-growing and widely-read type of sequential art storytelling? Admittedly, it does explain why Marvel's dozen or so attempts to attract the manga audience have all fallen flat (with a few vestiges of such initiatives seemingly succeeding despite Marvel's efforts, like Runaways surviving the doomed "Tsunami" line or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane lasting as long as it has and racking up rave reviews), but, Jesus, if I was Quesada I'd have copies of Fruits Basket and Naruto under microscopes in a big Marvel lab somewhere, with Marvel staff scientists studying the things around the clock and I'd be calling once a day to ask if they've managed to identify and reverse engineer whatever it is that makes kids love those things so much.
I hate to sound all doom-y and gloom-y here, but I'm 30; I'm going to be dead in 50-60 years (if I'm lucky), along with just about everyone else who reads Marvel Comics. The comic book consumers who are going to replace me are currently a bunch of little kids and teenagers who read manga.
I thought that was common knowledge, but I guess not.
As depressing as Quesada's response to the HFH controversy, it's nowhere near as depressing as reading the comments Newsarama.com posters left in response. Read them at your own peril.
Regarding Comiquette-gate, Quesada quite diplomatically responds,
When fans saw the statue was exactly the same time I was made aware of it, I have no involvement in that stuff and haven't kept up with the brouhaha. It kind of floors me in a way because Adam Hughes is brilliant and is known for his amazingly sexy portrayal of strong women, so I'm not quite sure what people are up in arms about? Seriously, fill me in because I've literally been out of town and out of the loop.
He's right on the fact that Hughes is generally one of the last artist one would expect to cause this sort of reaction. Sure, he draws sexy super-women exploding out of their costumes pretty much exclusively these days, but he draws them the way real women actually look. He's a great artist, who knows anatomy, lighting, design and drapery. He certainly doesn't belong in the same category as Michael Turner and Greg Land, who I'm frankly shocked that both Marvel and DC continue to give money.
Hughes didn't do himself any favors in his Newsarama interview about the statue, but anyway you look at it, this is a nice piece of art:
And it's not really Hughes’ fault that the sculptors drained all of the humanity, sexiness and spirit out of his design. But then, that's what happens when you're making a plastic statuette based on a drawing.
I was incredibly disappointed (and, frankly, extremely shocked) to hear Quesada's response to the Heroes For Hire cover, however:
First, I think people are reading way too much into that cover than was ever intended. I heard terms such as "tentacle rape" being thrown around when that in no way is what's happening, nor does it happen in the book. Those tentacles are the arms of the Brood who appears in the issue and is a major story point, the Brood have tentacles, sorry about that.
Secondly, the concept for that cover, soup to nuts came from a female artist. Thirdly, not being a deep follower of manga, I have no idea what recurring theme people are referring to or concerned with. While I appreciate the sentiment and the feelings that some may have about this, I honestly feel that there is way too much being read into this cover.
Also, HFH is a book that features two strong, lead female protagonist who kick major ass; somehow folks have forgotten to focus on that.
I've actually already heard all of these arguments torn apart in the same posts in which people originally began reacting to the cover image. No, it's not technically a picture of women being raped by tentacles, and yes, we're not all retarded, we can see that's not what's actually happening on the cover...it's what's about to happen.
Whether that scene as depicted occurs within the book or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the cover itself is reprehensible, particularly on a Marvel superhero comic book. Although, if nothing like it occurs in the book, why on Earth is it on the cover at all?
Exactly.
Quesada points out that the image came from a female artist. Um, so what? That doesn't make it any less repulsive an image, nor does it exempt Marvel from getting to share in the criticism of it. Are we to believe they were just like, "Hey, give us an image of the Heroes For Hire team fighting the Brood," got this
back, and were like, "Awesome! Let’s just slap this on the cover now, okay?”
They didn't see any sketches first, or talk to the artist in detail about what they wanted? And they have no power to reject an image, or ask for alterations to it? How hard would it be, with the powers of computers, to at least clean that up a bit? (They were certainly able to alter the image of Peter Parkers genitals that slipped into Reign or the nip slip in Iron Man once they were discovered/noticed, without having to have someone redraw an entire page).
Quesada acts like Marvel is completely powerless over what their cover artists do, and have no choice but to run what a freelancer turns in. Why do I get the feeling that if Misty Knight was smoking a cigarette in that image, it would have gotten rejected? (It may be worth noting that Marvel voluntarily rates it’s comic books, betraying a belief, as the smoking ban and the confused comments about gay title heroes did previously, that Marvel believes there are kids who might be reading their books. HFH is rated “T+,” which I assume meant is for older teens, but their site says actually means is for “9+ years old [readers]… Appropriate for most readers, parents are advised they may want to read before or with younger children.” So, that cover is cool for a ten-year-old to look at? Because I wouldn’t even look at it at work).
Quesada’s comment on the fact that HFH has " two strong, lead female protagonist [sic] who kick major ass" is also weird. That's part of the problem, as has been pointed out by Tamora Pierce, who has written for Marvel:
It's not right that we have these powerful women. Let's humiliate them publicly, on the cover. Let's strip them of their power, wit, and rage, and show them off to everyone who walks by, to show what powerful women can expect, even when we've showed them being powerful. This is what happens when women strut along, kicking butt. This is what they can expect. Savor and learn!
Beyond the fact that Quesada doesn't see a problem with the cover (A state of affairs I had imagined and found perhaps just as bad if not worse than an intentional use of the imagery to stoke it's most negative and perversely sexual connotations), I was surprised to hear him say publicly that he's not a "deep follower" of manga.
Um, should you really be the Editor-in-Chief of one of the biggest American comic book publishers and not be "deep into" the most rapid-growing and widely-read type of sequential art storytelling? Admittedly, it does explain why Marvel's dozen or so attempts to attract the manga audience have all fallen flat (with a few vestiges of such initiatives seemingly succeeding despite Marvel's efforts, like Runaways surviving the doomed "Tsunami" line or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane lasting as long as it has and racking up rave reviews), but, Jesus, if I was Quesada I'd have copies of Fruits Basket and Naruto under microscopes in a big Marvel lab somewhere, with Marvel staff scientists studying the things around the clock and I'd be calling once a day to ask if they've managed to identify and reverse engineer whatever it is that makes kids love those things so much.
I hate to sound all doom-y and gloom-y here, but I'm 30; I'm going to be dead in 50-60 years (if I'm lucky), along with just about everyone else who reads Marvel Comics. The comic book consumers who are going to replace me are currently a bunch of little kids and teenagers who read manga.
I thought that was common knowledge, but I guess not.
As depressing as Quesada's response to the HFH controversy, it's nowhere near as depressing as reading the comments Newsarama.com posters left in response. Read them at your own peril.
Monday, May 14, 2007
EDILW gets existential over the concept of entitlement among superhero fans/comics bloggers
Not quite as outrageous as Package-gate nor as linked-to as Johannagate comes Comiquette-gate, the latest disturbance in the blogosphere.
Eisner-nominated Comics Journal curmudgeon, superhero-bashing blogger and all-around EDILW favorite Dirk Deppey weighed in with today’s Journalista entry, in one of the occasional thought-provoking essays couched in his linkage.
In addition to repeating a point Kevin Church hit on a few months regarding energy spent getting Batman to put a Robin IV or Spoiler case in the Batcave, Deppey says this:
“So why the big freakout over a harmless statuette? I’d say it had to do with the earlier point raised: the fangirl’s inflated sense of entitlement, and the unwillingness of the rest of the world to feed it. It’s no different than the complaints that fanboys lodge over the perceived injustices of the funnybook world, of course, though they usually don’t waste time trying to wrap their enormous self-involvement in pseudo-ethical trappings…
“Women don’t buy superhero comics in sufficient numbers to make DC Comics pay attention to their demands. Like Marvel, they have an audience that buys their wares: adult male fanboys. Lacking financial motivation, there’s no reason to pay heed to Project Girl Wonder’s demand for fan fiction written to their specifications.”
Which got me thinking. Not necessarily about the fact that those who find the Mary Jane “comiquette” offensive are getting upset over nothing (It’s certainly not hard to see how it could irritate some; I don’t find it morally repellant personally, but at the same time I’d be mortified to have it on my mantle). But rather that last phrase above, which I’ve emboldened: “Fan fiction written to their specifications.”
It got me thinking because I wonder how much of the stuff I expend so much energy on here could be dismissed by saying that what I really want is just fan fiction written to my own personal specifications?
And then there’s Deppey’s solution—“they’re going to have to make the fucking comics first.”
Now that makes sense. If what female super-comics fans want is to see female superheroes and supporting characters treated with an equal amount of respect to male superheroes and supporting characters, then, yeah, they may have to make those comics themselves.
If what they want is Batman to erect a Stephanie Brown shrine or Power Girl to get a new costume, well, they’re not going to be able affect those particular changes…not without getting jobs working as writers, artists and editors for DC comics, and thus gaining access to the DCU (The first step of which is probably also to make their own fucking comics, too).
Anyway, after reading Deppey’s piece earlier in the day, I spent some time this afternoon wondering if EDILW is nothing but a waste of energy, spent on a misguided quest for fan fiction written to my specifications, wherein Cassandra Cain isn’t made a villain for no reason and Martian Manhunter gets to kick a little ass once in a while.
Shouldn’t I spend more time inking Caleb's Incomplete Self-Published Comicbook #1? Does online kvetching about the way the DC and Marvel universes are run really ever accomplish anything?
And then I saw this announcement on Newsarama.com.
According to the brief story, DC has announced a new miniseries in the Tales of the Unexpected/Mystery in Space featuring Animal Man, Adam Strange and Starfire, which will be entitled Countdown to Adventure (Yeah, that’s a stupid title), to be written by Adam Beechen.
The spin of the announcement/story goes like this: “Beechen’s move to the new miniseries does come with a cost – he had to give up Teen Titans, where he was recently named as the series’ new writer, stepping in for the departing Geoff Johns. Moving over to that series will be another member of the Countdown team, Sean McKeever.”Which sounds like a more positive way of saying that DC belated realized that Beechen is actually a pretty awful comics writer whom too few fans are willing to put up with, and they snatched Titans away from him, giving him Countdown to Adventure as a sort of consolation prize. (Certainly the trio of C-Listers in Countdown to Adventure aren’t as high profile as a title starring Robin, and the latter is less likely to earn more money for Beechen than the former.)
What’s interesting about the announcement, and its timing, is that Beechen literally just started working on Titans. He co-plotted and co-wrote much of the last arc of the series, and the very last issue, #46, was his first issue of this run solo. It was also the worst goddam DC comic I’ve read in a good, long time. I’m hard-pressed to even think of a worse written DC comic. Maybe something from Erik Larsen’s Aquaman? Or Extreme Justice?
I’m not the only one who noticed, and loudly complained that this fan fiction was not living up to my specifications. I can’t recall hearing a single person issuing any sort of praise for Beechen's solo issue of Titans; the most positive reaction among Newsarama.com posters following a “Best Shots” thread that week seemed to be, “Yeah, it was bad, but I’ve read worse, so I’ll give it another four issues to improve before I drop it.” Now obviously DC editorial didn’t see a problem with it. The script came across someone’s desk, they read it, approved it and handed it over to the artists (who also did a shitty job) to draw, and then they printed and shipped the damn thing. So it wasn’t until after the blogosphere panned it that they decided maybe it wasn’t so good and that someone else should write the title from now on.
The lesson? Well, maybe online bitching does accomplish change in those superhero universes once in a while after all (For another example, see World War III which, while badly bungled, seemed plotted entirely in response to Newsarama.com posters’ questions about “One Year Later” changes).
So maybe EDILW isn't a complete waste of time. But I probably should get some inking done tonight too.
A final note on Deppey’s piece: Johanna Draper Carlson linked to it as, I don’t know, Round Three of her “superheroes aren’t for girls” coverage of the last week. I honestly didn’t think of Deppey covering the same ground as Carlson until she pointed it out herself, but she says, “It’ll be interesting to see if he receives the same level of outrage I did. I suspect not, for several reasons: the first blush of venom has already been expended; he’s known for being outrageous (working for Fantagraphics gets you that rep); and he’s not female, which I suspect played into the kind of attacks I received. (I think both men and women see females as easier targets online, and I could be considered more of a betrayer to my gender, thus raising more of an emotional response.)”
So if you think Deppey’s full of shit, be sure to tell him so in the comments section at Journalista.
Otherwise, you hate women.
Jerk.
Did things get a little too heavy this post? Yeah, maybe. So let's take a deep breath, and cleanse our souls by contemplating this image, which, like the MJ comiquette, combines elements guaranteed to stimulate male interest—a pretty young woman, sports and a gorilla.
Is it demeaning to women because Wonder Woman is portrayed as prone and forced to play sports against a sub-human opponent, as if she isn't even worthy of playing against men?
Or is it a pro-feminist image because she seems to have outrun the throw and be sliding into home safe, winning at a man's game?
Discuss.
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