Dallas, TX: Great Comics City
May 22I’m in Dallas for a business trip, and my buddy Bryan and I are making time to visit any and all comics emporiums here in the Lone Star State, within driving distance of our hotel.
May I just say that this city has some FINE shops? In addition to a full chain of Half-Price Books stores, which have (that’s right) half-price books, including current and older trade paperbacks.
This is a great city to be a comics fan. Not such a great place to be a Democrat, but whatever. I can’t have everything.
Braaaaaaaaaaain surgeons
May 22I love a good science debate and I love a good zombie discussion. Now, I can have both, with a side helping of Philosophy thrown in. Yay!
I can’t tell who’s serious, who’s being snarky, and who’s just having yuks. All I know is that there’s no need for a zombie test if you’re willing to shoot at anything that shambles.
Like, Bittorrent, eh?
May 18
So, like, this Sunday the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will be showing Strange Brew, ok? And, uh, Bob and Doug McKenzie will be on after, with a one-hour special. Beauty.
Those of you in the not-Great White North, you might wanna check out Bittorrent or something. Not that we promote crime, eh? I’m just sayin’.
Tabula Rasa
May 18I had one of those thoughts in the shower this morning. The deep kind. Not the other kind. But before I share, I need to give you a little background.
A few months back we had a gathering, something my extended circle of friends calls Slackademics. The idea is pretty simple – if Bob knows how to play ukelele and the rest don’t, Bob can teach us the basics. If someone knows how to draw or make web pages, they share their basics with the group. And at this particular gathering it was the history of comics. Very cool stuff, as the author and comics historian of the group covered the history of comics and what they were reflecting of society.
By the end, there was a main conclusion – this love of comics and sense of historical perspective wasn’t something easily transmittable. Those with kids were passing it along to their kids, maybe a few of their friends. But what about all the kids that don’t have that kind of nerd-mentorship?
Which is where my brain picked up this morning (as I was also pondering my post from the previous day and wondering if it would be a big shit storm or a little shit storm.)
They say we are not born racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or so on. We are not born with any preconceived ideas at all. They are not with us at the start, we learn them. And if you’ve ever watched a newborn brain power up, you’ll understand how scary it is to see how much they absorb through observation, let alone direct tutoring. So, generation after generation, we chip away at discrimination – it seems to be working, though it’s not like we’re ready to remove the word from the dictionary.
We’re even chipping away at sexism. But something is broke in comics. And I think that it’s related to a lack of comic mentorship. We are – right this very second as it happens – arguing with one another. One side sees the a problem and wants change. The other side are old dogs, who do not want to learn a new trick, and in fact don’t see a problem with the old trick. How is this going to help? It will help in the few younger minds that may happen to read and catch a thought. But will it be a good thought, or a bad thought? Kinda random.
So, here’s my question – why fight a 35 year-old with a disposable income who likes to collect statues? Shouldn’t the target be the brains that are still sorting things out?
If a living room full of people agree that maybe we should all try harder to educate kids that “I’m the God damned Batman!” is a stupid line, not in keeping with the spirit of the character, aren’t we agreed that those same opportunities, if we can produce them, are the logical place to ween an industry off of pointless booty, by prepping some new brains.
“This is a great Wonder Woman story. This one is stupid.”
“That’s a cute Supergirl statue. Oh, God, it’s that awful Superman/Batman Supergirl.”
So, how do we do this?
Brainstorm time!
1) Arrange with your local library to have regular comic-reading gatherings. Be prepared to bring the good shit, and that it may go missing or get damaged. You have five bucks to replace it, that kid doesn’t.
…
Actually, that’s all I’ve got. But I like it. I’m going to ponder it. What else can be done? Matt has something, but I will not comment – hopefully it something that can be talked about in the near future.
Mary Jane Watson-Parker, Burn Your Bra.
May 18Oh, sigh.
I’m trying to speak sense to the senseless, and frankly, it’s exhausting.
There is no context, nor situation or scenario, in which this statue of Mary Jane from the Spider-Man comics is anything but sexist and demeaning to women.
Don’t try to rationalize it. Sorry, doesn’t work. I don’t care what the target audience is; I don’t care that women “don’t have to buy it” or “don’t HAVE to look at it.” I don’t care that there are women who actually do laundry for their husbands, or women who look like that, or even women who look like that and pose like that when they do laundry.
It’s patently offensive to me that a major American entertainment corporation chooses to depict women in this way. It’s an archaic view of a woman’s place in the culture, it’s demeaning to the entire gender, and it’s just the latest example.
This example is particularly egregious, because it is so outlandish as to almost be a parody of sexism. Hell, maybe it is. I dunno.
I know that every time I see a Michael Turner cover with breasts bigger than basketballs, it pisses me off. Every time I open an issue of Superman and see Carlos Pacheco’s cheesecake obsession getting in the way of a darn good superhero yarn, it pisses me off. Every time I read an Ex Machina trade and a random main female character is depicted as sitting at home alone in a transparent negligee, like a character in a Friday After Dark movie on Skinemax, it pisses me off.
When I saw this statue, it REALLY PISSED ME OFF, and something snapped.
I just can’t resign myself to it anymore. The debasement of women in modern superhero comics, much like the graphic violence in the same, is something I have come to tolerate if I like a story well enough. There is no way I can justify it, and it consistently bothers me that I somehow support and silently issue my approval by spending money on it. Yet it doesn’t ruin things for me often.
This statue? It ruins things. It makes me want to torch my entire collection and disassociate myself completely with a fanbase and a hobby that I love. It makes me embarassed to even read comics. It’s pathetic.
I wish more people could try to understand how this is a problem, instead of working so hard to weakly rationalize it.
As I said in the Sisyphean comment thread on Newsarama (yeah, I’m gonna quote myself, fuck you):
If you think this statue is okay, I ask you to do me one simple favor.
Imagine any woman you care about in that same pose. Your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your wife, your daughter, your friend.
Just give it a second.
Then tell me how it’s okay for this industry to put these images consistently out into the public space, EVEN in limited editions, and EVEN for a targeted, tiny, sad market.
