Reviews and a Few Thoughts on Race and Gender

I read this article on ThinkProgress about how four legendary white male comics creators were dismissive of race and sex of characters. Michael Kantor, Todd McFarlane, Len Wein and Gerry Conway were at the Television Critics Association press tour and seemed to be making a case for race neutral, sex neutral characters in comics. McFarlane said:

"So we actually stereotype and do it to both sexes. We just happen to show a little more skin when we get to the ladies.”

He also said, according to the article:

“There hasn’t really been historically a comic book that has worked that is trying to get across a kind of message, if you will," ... "So the female characters that work are the ones that are just strong women that actually it’s good storytelling, and the odd character that is a minority that works is the one that is just a good strong character. They’ve tried to do minority characters and bring that label and that surrounding [debate] into it. You’re aware that you’re reading a minority comic book. I think it’s wrong.”

Now, on the face of it, this is incendiary, especially for the people being marginalized: Women and People of Color. But the thing is, he has a point. They all do. When you write about a woman or a character with an ethnicity other than white and you make that the point of the story, then, odds are, it won't be very good on a story level because there won't be much foundation and a fair amount of writers will either revert to stereotypes or run out of ideas without an actual story. And that's largely because, at DC and Marvel, the majority of the writers are white males.

Which brings me to the point these men don't get. Characters differ. They need more than strength. They need their differences, which is why we have so many characters starring in so many books, and not just because their strengths and weaknesses vary. Sure, Aquaman lives in water; Superman inhabits the dry, surface world. But Aquaman is informed by his background, growing up in Atlantis. Superman is a Krptonian, separated in infancy from his family and his world. Bruce Wayne, despite being Batman, is a privileged white male and while losing his parents brutally in front of him when he was young and impressionable, how he reacted to that might've been much different had he not had the advantages his race and wealth afforded him.

Len Wein argued for racial neutrality:

“I think every time you take a female character, a black character, a Hispanic character, a gay character, and make that the point of the character, you are minimalizing the character.” ... “I have written anything you can possibly think of. I have created Storm who was the first black female superhero. I created a number of other characters, and it never matters to me what the color of their skin was. I was writing about who they were as human beings, and it wasn’t Black Storm. She was Storm.”

Again, a good point made. She was a character, an individual. And yet, he denies the background that made her the individual she was. How can you write about who someone was as a human being without infusing them with a racial identity, or include how their sex influenced how they were raised, how they view themselves, how they approach life?

Not all people of an ethnic group are the same. Not all women are the same, nor all men. But comic books don't tell neutral stories. No one is walking around wearing the same neutral body suit as everyone else. The characters aren't all the same shade of green or purple. There are aliens (and that's often been pointed at as an example of non-white characters!) and humans, and males and females. If a comic is set in a real-world setting, for instance, Earth, then it should reflect that reality, as should the creative teams.

These male writers were dismissive of female superheroes as a genre girls will read. Well, let me tell you guys something. I was reading superhero comics when I was seven, over 50 years ago. By the time I was twelve, girl comics (Archie, Millie the Model, romance comics) bored me.

Conway said:

"And I think it’s a mistake to sort of, like, pigeonhole superheroes, or to add so much to superheroes that you’re missing the fact it’s a genre within itself. It’s like saying, ‘Why are there no medieval stories about female knights?’ Because there was only one, you know, Joan of Arc. It’s not it’s an inherent limitation of that particular genre, superheroes.” 

And McFarlane added:

“It might not be the right platform,” he said. “I’ve got two daughters, and if I wanted to do something that I thought was emboldened to a female, I probably wouldn’t choose superhero comic books to get that message across. I would do it in either a TV show, a movie, a novel, or a book. It wouldn’t be superheroes because I know that’s heavily testosterone — driven, and it’s a certain kind of group of people. That’s not where I would go get this kind of message, so it might not be the right platform for some of this.”

A lot of women, myself, included would disagree. Vehemently. First, it's fiction. Second, women have fought in wars while disguised as men. Women have been part of mythology from the beginning, and mythology has been part of comics for a long time, with Wonder Woman the most obvious example. You want to empower your daughters? Let them see role models in all media, comics, included. Let them see females are respected and powerful even in the comics field you work in, Mr. McFarlane. Don't tell them, sorry, but these aren't really for you. They're for boys who need to look at pictures of women with their boobs and butt sticking out.

Not that I mind much of the sexy art. It's the gratuitous art that bothers me. It's how the males are all muscular while the women look like they can be broken in half like a wishbone. Power Girl might have big breasts and shows off her cleavage, but she's no pushover. When written well, she's an excellent role model. We need more like her. And we need more like the Vixen mini-series, that showed how good a story you can have when you work in a black female superhero's ethnicity.

“'I think the bigger question is why are readers not interested in those?' Conway asked."

Good question, Mr. Conway. Maybe the answer has to do with what's actually available. Some people, like me, will read about white male superheroes, but not everyone will be satisfied with just that. It's a different world now. And there are some more good points made in the article, so go read it, if you haven't, already.

And this attitude that comics follow or reflect society and don't or shouldn't lead, is part of the larger argument of: Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? I think it's both, a mix, same as nature/nurture has proven to be. You simply can't separate the two. And as society is diverse, so should be comics, re: sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, on both the character and creator sides.

Gail Simone is writing The Movement for DC. It's political, dealing with societal and economic inequities. It has a lot of ethnic characters. Issue 4 shows us the background of many of these new superheroes. This comic reflects the social unrest of recent years, with the Occupy movement, etc. Yet it also is a move into new territory for a superhero comic, with many characters on both sides who can't easily be labeled all good or all bad. My only problem with this comic is the mice. I really hate mice and rats.

Gail's first issue of Red Sonja came out a couple of weeks ago and it's good. I've never read Red Sonja, so I can't compare what Gail is doing with her vs the past, but this is a woman who was beaten down yet not defeated. I won't say she's been empowered, because once freed from captivity, she claimed her own power. As if should be.

I also read the Hawkeye Annual, which focused on Kate Bishop. Kate, on the road with Lucky the Pizza Dog, bumbles her way into a big mess, then gets herself out of it. Kate is young and brash and capable, and she's written by a man, Matt Fraction, who gets it.

The Nature of Geekdom

I've written about this before, but I just read this post on Male Privilege in Geek-dom, makes a lot of good, enlightened points, and thought it was worth revisiting this topic. My experiences aren't really reflected in the article because I'm the wrong generation. I turn 60 next year -- a fact I'm trying to not think about much -- and back in the '50s and '60s, being a geek (I can't recall what word we used, other than being weird) was frowned upon for both girls and boys. We girls, of course, could read Archie comics and romance comics, and maybe Classics Illustrated, but that was it. But with parents -- yes, both of them -- who appreciated superheroes, I started reading Superman and Batman titles when I was seven, along with all the other kinds of comics I was reading by then.

By the time I was 12, my friends -- all girls -- didn't want to be seen with me if I had comics visible. I was a shy kid and didn't even talk to boys much because they always teased me, or better, ignored me. In college, I'd read comics in the stairwells -- a popular place to hang out if you wanted to be alone -- or in the cafeteria, the comic hidden behind a textbook. I got my comics at the local candy store/drugstore, and didn't discover comic shops until I was living on my own after graduation. Soon after, I went to my first comicon, a local NY annual event, the Phil Seuling New York Comic Arts Convention held in the old, long gone Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Station, a con I read about in a comic lettercol.

I don't recall cosplaying at the con, though it might've gone on. I do recall being overwhelmed by all the things being sold that tempted me. Creation cons came a bit later, adding toys and collectibles to the mix. I was mostly ignored at the cons, going by myself because none of my friends were genre fans or geeks. When I went to pay for things, the vendors readily accepted my money. Some even talked to me as if I were just another customer.

My experiences at comic shops were similar. So many things to buy! So few other women customers. It was a bit uncomfortable being one of the few women in the stores, but no one at Forbidden Planet, Action Comics (they'd licensed the name from DC and were located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan), and Jim Hanley's Universe ever made me feel uncomfortable or unwanted when I shopped there in the '80s and '90s. The staff was usually friendly and welcoming, but by then, I was clearly no sexy young woman to be hit on. I've been shopping in Forbidden Planet since.

I found geeky friends, mostly through writing fanfic, including a few attempts at comics fanfic for the Teen Titans APA which I learned about from a fan friend. Most of my fanfic was for TV shows and it's through media fandom that I found fellow geeks across the globe to be friends with.

I've been attending NYCC since its inception a few years ago, and I feel accepted. I'm middle-aged, no sex symbol, and I buy stuff. Maybe it's from being in New York, where women work at Forbidden Planet these days, or maybe it's because I'm still mostly a loner fan, but there's this whole experience girls and women have that I've never experienced. I always felt I missed out because fandom was an unknown for me back when I was of an age when I was likely to get interested in an organized fan network of activity.

I started reading comics before there was the feminist movement. The females in comics were just reflecting the norm for me. As I grew more feminist in the '70s, I started noticing things, but it didn't make me like the objectified female characters less. They were already ingrained in my mind the way they were, and maybe, it wasn't as flagrant then as now. But one reason I loved the powerless Wonder Woman was because she got to prove herself a worthy heroine without needing superpowers, the same reason I loved Lois Lane.

I know I'm a woman of my times. For all my feminist leanings -- kept my maiden name when I married, haven't worn makeup since a few attempts in high school, not much for the domestic arts of cleaning and cooking, hate lace and frills, want equal pay for equal work and want legislators to stop trying to legislate reproductive rights, and so on -- I still have an acceptance for the portrayal of female characters others don't. I can bemoan a costume while still loving the character, same as I can wish the males were as sexualized as the women. That should be equal, after all. That Catwoman's zipper used to be up and now is down bugs me but isn't something I'd bitch about. I don't read the book for other reasons that have more to do with the whole new DC than with the sexualizing of the character. But I do get the anger.

The writer of the article that inspired this post gets it. He gets that no matter what one thinks or feels, a man will never understand how it feels to worry everyday that violence will befall you, that someone might challenge you simply because of your sex. Men can be victims, and way too many are -- I just read that more men are raped in the military than women, though the percentage of women is higher, the difference being no doubt that more men are in the military than women -- but a man doesn't sit on a near empty subway car or walk down a street and wonder if one of the people there wants to harm him. As a women, coming home late from work or college classes, those were among my thoughts. I remember one night thinking I was being followed and walked past my building and around the corner in case I needed to run into the 24-hour restaurant for safety. A false alarm, but how many men deal with that feeling?

I was fortunate to work in a profession where women were often management and probably outnumbered the men, but there were men in charge mostly and they did have a way of patronizing the women when we had ideas. I was lucky with my male supervisors, except for one who felt threatened by me, and had more female supervisors who were dismissive, but I know it can be brutal out there for women. Women get treated as everything but just a person all the time, something that rarely happens to men (well, to straight non-minority men, that is), so it's always encouraging when a man gets it.

Boobs on Boobs

Paperghost is my new hero. You've got to read the comments to Meltzer's post. Most folks on Brad Meltzer's MySpace don't have a problem with the cover from hell, aka PG's Breasts Attack! After all, most don't want to upset the man they go there to worship. One or two even wondered why all the protests were from men. Well, this woman is doing her protesting here and on other blogs because I'll be damned if I join MySpace just to comment in that thread or on any other of Brad's posts, even when I want to give him kudos. Which I did once and discovered I needed an account to do so. feh. I don't want a MySpace account.

Of course, the comments, mainly from one Randy, remind me of why I stopped visiting the DC Comics message boards. Randy's too dark user pic has a man, presumably him, holding a baby, which I hope isn't a girl or his, because he won't likely instill a proper sense of independence and empowerment in her judging by his comments in response to Paperghost.

Randy had this to say:

"See, whereas you're looking at Wonder Woman's ass, Power Girl's boobs and Supergirl's mid-section, there are some readers like myself who prefer to ignore that sort of stuff to watch Wonder Woman rescue abused women (Wonder Woman #5) or Power Girl recruit new members of a team she believes in (JSofA #1) or Supergirl try to figure out her place in the world (Supergirl #12)"

Wow. Someone who reads comics just for the words, is that what we're to believe? Sheesh. As Paperghost asks:

"Would you see Superman drawn with his Supernuts hanging out?"

When the discussion ends up in a laughable debate as to whether or not the art is good (the fact that it's anatomically awful is viewed as a subjective opinion by some of these people) among the other issues under discussion, then I'm doubly glad I'm not on MySpace.

And it's sad that people don't get the real issue. They defend PG's large breasts, not understanding that it's fine for PG to have those giant melons. The problem is that they do not appear to be attached to her body except possibly by glue and in the wrong place. There are plenty of women endowed with enormous breasts who have generously shared nude photos of themselves online. Of course, that won't help artists like Turner who would then need to figure out how high the lift when the breasts are stuffed into spandex which presumably has a built-in bra, probably with an underwire, or else they would likely hang to her waist or lower.

I've said many times here that I don't mind cheesecake provided I get to see my share of beefcake. But same as I wouldn't like seeing a male character's package protruding from his abdomen, I'd prefer to see the females portrayed realistically. Male characters look silly in short pants, even when they are young like the original Robin, unlike females who have legs showing up to their ass. And that's fine. But when Wonder Woman, who is currently a dignified character (all silliness from the past is forgiven if not forgotten), has her ass sticking out of her bathing suit style outfit when normally, the pantyline comes down a bit lower, I call that gratuitous. There is no comparable display of male anatomy to make this fair or reasonable.

I don't want to be rabid here. I like sexy art, and normally, I don't mind a little extra flash of skin. But it's getting to be ridiculous and yes, demeaning, when it's so poorly executed, is unfairly and unevenly distributed between the sexes, and comes when DC, especially Don DiDio, is wondering how to reach more female readers. Covers like that JLA 10 isn't the way.

Oh, and Paperghost provided a link to this wonderful analysis of the anatomical impossibility that is PG on that cover.