GWOG

So this yakuza queenpin walks into a casino to meet this hitmen, right? And she’s the ex-wife of one and she’s called in because of this gang war between this bald guy called Appelido and a fat dude that hasn’t got a name, and apparently the war’s a big deal. And these criminals who are known to be dead are all walking around and – oh, no, we’re not going to explain why, just roll with it.

What? No, we’ll tell you the fat guy’s name later. Oh, and yeah, that singer in the background and hitman Finnigan’s comment is significant, you’re right, but we don’t have time to explain what it refers to and – look, yes, I know you don’t know why that Indian guy called Kal with a bionic hand is so grumpy but – okay, look, SHOOTING. That’s cool, eh? Lookit the yellow speed lines!

That’s me trying to explain the plot of 2000 AD’s current Sinister Dexter story. That story is tied into other stories going back eight years, none of which are in trade. There is little to explain what’s going on to anyone new (That Reminds Me Of This has ended up completely bored of the strip as a result of not knowing who the drokk anyone is). I’ve been reading 2000 AD since 2003 and even I get lost at times.

This is the curse of the serial comic: trying to tell the story and not get bogged down in exposition, while also trying to fill in anyone new what’s going on. Or rather, it should be trying to fill in anyone new. And there’s the problem: Sinister Dexter doesn’t seem to be assuming anyone new will be picking up 2000 AD.

And it’s not alone in this. I read the Norman Osborn-era Thunderbolts comic, Ellis thru Parker, and during the Dark Reign issues it could get very confusing. The Siege tie-in was especially bizarre: what the hell is going on here? Why is it happening? Why is there a war against Asgard? If it wasn’t for the Internet, I’d have been lost: the Thunderbolts tie-in to Secret Invasion was guilty of assuming I knew about the crossover too, but “shape-shifting aliens are attacking!” is a lot easier to grasp on the go.

You can all think of your own examples. But the alternative is often… well, Comics Alliance did a very funny comic strip summing up the backstory of X-Man Rachel Summers. It’s confusing, messy, and if a comic tried to explain it to you in a story you’d recoil from the damn thing. I read Spider-Man during the Clone Saga and remember issues that opened with millions of captions explaining every damn facet of the past umpteen issues, and that never stopped being far too confusing.

And then there’s that infamous Batgirl two-page spread of the whole Bat Family talking through Cassandra Cain’s last two years of stories in intricate detail. Who doesn’t get a headache just looking at it? Why would it make someone want to read more about Cass?

Too often, comics either assume nobody new will be reading or bombards new readers with too much. Both options are harmful, they turn off new readers (and the latter pisses off the existing ones). We need better options here.

Luckily, we’ve got some. How does Grant Morrison deal with Cyclops being possessed by Apocalypse for a whole story? “He was taken over by one of them ‘evil forces’ we run into from time to time,” sums up Logan, and it’s made Scott a mess: that’s all you have to know, and it tells you what life is like in the X-Men and (later in the scene) what Logan thinks of Scott. How does Garth Ennis get out of the Punisher being turned into a hitman for Heaven and get him back to killing normal criminals? “Tried it. Didn’t like it.”

We need these things to be kept simple, to the point, and tied into the story. Otherwise, we’ll get very, very, very, very confused and/or bored – and why read something that makes you confused or bored?

The bad taste left in our mouths by the terrible Avatar: The Last Airbender film has been wiped out by the promise of a delicious new series!

The immediate reaction, if you’re me (and I see no reason to assume you’re not), is to seek out every possible piece of information, rumour and speculation about this. And basically every aspect of this fills me with joy.

The Legend of Korra starts 70 years after the defeat of Fire Lord Ozai. We have a new Avatar, Korra, the next after Aang – a Southern Water Tribe woman. She’s older than Aang was, a teenage, and has already mastered Water, Earth and Fire. She’s come to Republic City to learn Airbending from Aang’s son Tenzin (Aang is presumed dead, unless they’ve pulled a Buffy*). There’s people of all nations** in Republic City, it’s crime-ridden, and there’s an anti-bender revolt which Korra has to work against while learning to airbend. This will apparently be a slightly more grown-up series.

If you didn’t see Avatar: The Last Airbender and want to know what was so great about it, Shaker Seraph’s series of critical posts does a great job of exploring the show’s highlights and problems from a feminist point of view. For those of us who loved the series, a lot of the good feelings we had – from a series with capable women everywhere, entirely populated by Asian*** characters, with a level of drama and storytelling not neared by your average childrens’ cartoon, that actually used the word “sexist” – were soured by a live-action film with none of these virtues. The good people at Racebending did more than anyone to push back against everything that was wrong with the film. I’d like to think that it’s partly because of them that Nickelodeon commissioned a new series with all the things we loved about the old one. It’s probably just because the movie made some money, but still.

And the lead character’s a woman! But then, why wouldn’t she be?

The new “Avatar” is a woman. What inspired you to change the sex of the protagonist of the series?

Michael DiMartino: It’s not so much about changing because we had Avatar Kyoshi before Aang. We’d established that the Avatar can be male or female and we just thought let’s explore one of those more in depth, because Kyoshi was a popular character with a lot of fans and it seemed like a great opportunity to not retread what we’d done with Aang, who was a great hero, we all loved him, but we really wanted to try something different. And we have so many great female fans out there, who really responded to Katara in the first series, we thought we have the fan base who are really going to enjoy seeing the Avatar be a female.

Konietzko: Mike and I, we love those characters too, and we’ve encountered countless fans who are male who really like those characters too. We just don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can’t have an action series led by a female character. It’s kinda nonsense to us.

More of this, please.

*In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when the current Slayer dies a new young woman becomes the Slayer. In the finale of Season One, Buffy’s heart stops in a fight with the Master. Xander revives her, but her “death” was enough to trigger the awakening of a new Slayer, Kendra. You’re welcome!

** “All nations” is what this press release says. Does that mean the Air Nomads are back somehow? Perhaps some escaped the genocide!

*** At least, they’re as Asian as the characters of Lord of the Rings are white.

Endnote: we thought we’d pass on this announcement from Threadless, as some of our readers might be interested. We at GW are unaffiliated with Threadless and have no involvement with this promotion:

Threadless has recently launched their newest “loves” competition entitled “Threadless Loves Comics”. Threadless is SUPER excited for this one, because the chosen design will actually be worn by a character in an upcoming issue of New York Times Bestseller, Chew! (which is now becoming a TV series)! And that’s not even the half of it! $2,000 in cash, a $500 Threadless Gift Certificate, Original art, an iPad, and a collection of graphic novels are up for grabs, too! All you need to do to enter is create a design that is inspired by comics. Entries are being accepted until August 12th.

So what’s all the fuss about then? Why all the complaints about lack of female characters (and non-white characters, and gay characters and yadda yadda)? Why is it such a big deal, why all this PC stuff? No one’s going to be affected that much by a comic.

It’s just comics. They’re not real.

You’ve probably seen or heard that particular argument before, and also about film, cartoons, RPGs, whatever medium you’re into. Issues of representation just don’t matter and that fiction we pay money to experience, why that just has no effect on us. The way we think about women and what they can do, or about racial minorities, the stories we tell about them (or about the lack of them) will never really effect how we think about them in real life.

Except.

Except in Volume VI of Titan’s Charley’s War trades, writer Pat Mills recounts meeting an ex-squaddie who joined the army because he grew up reading war comics. He also recounts meeting two men from “traditional military families – [who] didn’t enlist” because they grew up reading Charley’s War and its brutal depictions of warfare. Grown men picked their careers because those silly comics made it look cool or made it look horrific.

Except that Dr Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, has cited Uhura on Star Trek as a reason she wanted to become an astronaut. And NASA hired Uhura actress Nichelle Nichols to recruit women and ethnic minorities, capitalising on her influence from Trek.

Except that Weird Fantasy #18’s Judgement Day!, taking on contemporary segregation through metaphor and then ending with a clear symbol of real-life segregation ending, was universally praised by readers as something that hit them hard. A school principal asked for copies for his school. Only one critical letter arrived, decrying EC Comics because “the North and South are like they are, so why not leave well enough alone!”… while other southerners praised it for what it had done.

Except that the group Racebending has done surveys to see what drew fans to Avatar: The Last Airbender, a cartoon where everyone is Asian or Inuit, and comments from non-white fans cite things like “It was fantastic being able to spot things from my own ethnic background on the show, which is something that I hardly ever get to see”. In response to the film, which cast Caucasian actors to play the three leads, one fan notes “I lost that self esteem”. One states that growing up, “I thought there was something wrong with me and wished to be Caucasian myself” because that was all she saw on telly.

Except when reviewing MTV’s old cartoon Daria, Jezebel’s Margaret Hartmann recalls growing up with Daria as the only TV character she could truly relate to, a smart female character that was having experiences that she could recognise from her own life. And that the show “provided me with the sort of social guidance that allowed me to stay true to myself”, leading to her sticking with her best friend in the face of “social suicide”.

This is a list that could go on and on and on. What we see, read, listen to, and generally absorb from the media around us has an impact on how we think. At a young age, that’s even more important. Kids and teenagers come out thinking “I can do that”, “this is the right thing to do and it can be done”, “this stuff is possible“. Or, in the case of young white boys, come out looking at things in a way they hadn’t before, or even just thinking “hey, that character’s badass!” when looking at a character who isn’t a white male.

But of course, fiction isn’t real so none of it matters.

Except when the blog Crimitism took issue with Warhammer 40,000 retconning a black Space Marine platoon into white people who had been mutated into “daemonic” looking dark skinned mutants, another blog went out of its way to decry Crimitism as talking “crackpot conspiracy theory kind of bullshit”. It went out of its way to bring up half-understand pseudo-facts about skin colour mutations and England’s racial demographics to try and prove the blog wrong. And then it ended with saying it’s just a game, “don’t take it too seriously”.

Except fans on the Internet have crawled out to complain about a prominent Muslim woman character in Captain Britain and MI:13, or there being too many black characters in Dwayne McDuffie’s JLA run (two of them).

Except Bill Willingham allegedly wanted to “gun down those girls” who asked for a dead superheroine to get a memorial case like a male hero had received.

This is another list that goes on and on and on. Why is all this “PC stuff” such a big deal to you, guys?

After Heroes Con, fan Nevermore999 reported that, in response to an audience member saying that Stephanie Brown should have been left dead, writer Bill Willingham replied that he had actually fought for Stephanie to live.

Then he apparently said:

I wanted to gun down those girls who kept asking about the memorial case.

Which was a direct response to the campaign encouraged by Girl-Wonder.org’s Project Girl Wonder.

(You can read a full account of the panel in Nevermore999’s post on her general Heroes Con experience, or more succinctly in this summary of that particular section, with some discussion, in this Scans_Daily post.)

Let’s look at that again.

I wanted to gun down those girls who kept asking about the memorial case.

Feminist comic book fans are often accused of disproportionate response to things they find offensive. The reasoning goes that they’re making a huge fuss over something completely insignificant. Sure, okay, the art is boobtacular, female characters get killed off to further male characters’ story arcs, and the easiest shorthand for a traumatic character backstory is rape, but come on. It’s only comic books, right? In the grand scheme of things, how much do they matter?

Apparently, they matter enough to create violent fantasies towards feminists who want change.

Talk about disproportionate response.

While I was writing Girls Read Comics, I occasionally received threats to my physical person. Not a great many, but any number more than zero is unacceptable. Because I was, apparently, writing about unimportant things in comics that didn’t really matter, some people told me they wanted to cause me physical harm.

I thought it very unlikely that any of those people could and would actually hurt me, but the fact that they expressed a desire to was in and of itself harmful. Threats of violence support a culture of violence that negatively affects less privileged people – in this case, women.

I am likewise reasonably sure that Willingham is not really going to systemically slaughter every girl who stood up and asked about a memorial case for Stephanie Brown.

But I do think that in voicing a desire to shoot “those girls”, however insincere it actually was, he contributed to a culture that regularly uses the threat of violence against women to keep them in line. He enabled anti-feminists who don’t have his creative clout to make public their own creepy thoughts regarding righteous violence against feminist voices. He certainly engendered fear, because I read what he’d said, and was afraid, and sick, and angry.

The phrasing, “I wanted to gun down those girls” is not neutral dismissal of irritating fan persistence over something a creator considers insignificant. However innocuously it was meant, it is a statement of gendered violent fantasy.

Unfortunately, outside of comics, women are not mind-readers. We can’t use our psychic abilities to tell who’s just exaggerating out of pique, and who really wants to hurt us. And the world tells us over and over again, via the media, via rape culture, via our actual experience, that people, that men with guns, sometimes really do act upon a desire to hurt women.

As they did in the Ecole Polytechnic massacre of 1989, the Amish school shooting of 2006, and the Winnenden school and Collier Township shootings of 2009.

But of course when someone says they did want to gun us down, we ought to use our non-existent psychic powers to know they were only kidding. Check out the comments on that Scans_Daily post. While a number of commentators are appalled, some are dismissive. After all, though he probably shouldn’t have said it, Willingham didn’t really mean it. Hyperbole is a common tool of frustration, and those silly girls really riled him up.

A verbal contribution to a culture of violence against women doesn’t really matter.

This post contains the opinions and viewpoints of Karen Healey, and is not an official Girl-Wonder.org statement.

In line with Girl-Wonder.org’s aims of fostering discussion in a safer space, comments on this post can be made at this thread in our forums.

SAN DIEGO — A $125,000 donation in support of an anti-gay marriage initiative by a San Diego hotelier has drawn the ire of gay and lesbian activists and local labor unions who are now calling for a boycott.

Organizers held a news conference in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, near Seaport Village, on Thursday. A coalition of LGBT community leaders and the labor movement spoke out against Doug Manchester, who contributed a donation in support of Proposition 8, which would allow only men and women to marry in the state of California. The group opposes the ballot measure because it threatens the recent state Supreme Court decision that allows marriage between men and women.

Another day, another bigot – but one where comics fans definitely have a chance to make their feelings known. If you’re going to San Diego Comic Con, you may want to consider the homophobia of the Hyatt’s owner and his active opposition to the establishment of legal marriage between same-sex couples* before drinking at the Hyatt (or the Mariott, also owned by Manchester).

Chris Butcher makes his opinion clear.

Tom Spurgeon points out some of the ways people try to justify continued patronage.

And Lisa Jonte asks you to collect receipts from the other bars you patronise.

* I don’t GET these people. “We want to protect marriage: by delegalising a whole bunch of them!”

(Cross-posted to GRC)

Maddy and I are off to Brazil in a few minutes. Well, we’re off to New York where we change planes. But basically, we’re off to Brazil together. She has the disarming smile. I have the unlikely facial hair. We’re like Green Arrow and Speedy, only without the boxing glove arrows, the costumes, the similarity of gender and… okay, not really a good analogy, but what the hell, we’re hitting the road. Or we will if the car turns up.

It’s a better analogy than he thinks!

This is in all ways a totally fantastic image, but Roy Harper hasn’t been Speedy since the 70s. Mia Dearden deserves her due!