I read comics. I also tend to draw certain comparisons between the comics industry and the video game industry, whether it’s their history of being accused of corrupting their consumers through violent content, or the general stigma of being “kids’ stuff” despite all evidence to the contrary.
And like video game players, comic readers – certainly those that consider themselves fans – tend to be very passionate about the medium and the characters and creators they follow. It’s easy still to discount comics as all capes and costumes, if you’re on the outside, because that’s still where the money (relatively speaking) is, and that’s what gets made into movies. But as a medium, comics host many nuanced and personal stories across all genres, things that speak to readers in ways that stuff with a higher budget – television or movies, say – often cannot afford in their quest to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
But hey, there’s nothing wrong with superheroes, either; Marvel, in their new Ms. Marvel ongoing, has recently premiered a title character who is an American Muslim teenager, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants. How many places in American culture, even now, can you find that very real part of the American population represented, much less in a positive, leading role?
Regrettably, though, I’m not compelled to write this because of my favorite media moving forward. I’m compelled to write this because of my favorite media being held back.
I should provide a few disclaimers here.
First, though I won’t be going into anything terribly explicit myself, I feel I should provide a trigger warning to be on the safe side. Some of the anecdotes I’ll link to will have their own, and need it much more than this article.
Second, I need to be very upfront. I am a white, middle class male, and I fully acknowledge how much that equates to winning the genetic lottery. I get the privilege that comes with that. The most discriminated against I’ve ever been has been by people who think that atheists (or liberals) are evil, and being told I’m going to hell or that I’m a wholly immoral individual by someone who does not know me (and who I’ll likely never see again) is tame compared to what a lot of people experience.
We’ve all seen one controversy or another. This is, unfortunately, nothing new. The latest in the all-too-long line of incidents came after Janelle Asselin, a comic journalist and former DC Comics editor, amongst other things, picked apart the cover of the upcoming Teen Titans #1 on Comic Book Resources. One of the fixtures of the cover is Wonder Girl, front and center. She’s sixteen, by the way.
Agree or not with Asselin’s assessment – and a skim through some of the post’s nearly six hundred comments shows that more did not than did, even if their main complaint was that it was “nitpicky” – a person can only be so incensed by someone on the internet saying something they disagree with. At least, you would think. Now, to be clear, the whole article was not about Wonder Girl’s breasts; Asselin brings up many points about composition, about how it doesn’t showcase the team, about the weird perspective on Robin and the odd placement of the jumping-out-at-you signature by Beast Boy’s knee. But the thing most people fixate on was that she didn’t like that a sixteen year old girl was being presented as having implausibly huge breasts with physics that only implants could achieve. I don’t always agree with these kinds of criticisms, but in this case she has a definite point, and her point extends beyond just the depiction of women; it’s also a point about how DC is approaching their audience (and, indeed, what audience DC is trying to grab), especially in a world where a much larger part of the public knows the Teen Titans from the Cartoon Network show of a decade ago.
She goes into some of the backlash here, but I’m guessing that, if you’re reading Tap, this isn’t your first internet rodeo. You know the drill: namecalling, shaming, men calling her out for not really knowing much about comics (reminder: she was an editor at DC), and – because this is the internet – rape threats. And plenty of those came through via a survey she’s currently running (also in that link above) about sexual harassment in comics, because internet trolls don’t seem to understand irony, I guess.
Needless to say, this is a terrible thing for a person to be put through, but it happens all the time. It’s clearly far from the first time Asselin herself has experienced this sort of behavior. And that’s ridiculous. It’s also really hard to fix or even mitigate. The conversation about internet trolls has been ongoing for ages, now, and the video game community is a common battleground, of course. It’s fairly clear to me these days that the conventional wisdom doesn’t work. “Don’t feed the trolls” might discourage the sort that pops into a forum and drop a straw man in the middle of a discussion, but it’s hardly sufficient for the more dedicated and vitriolic. But neither is blocking accounts, and when worse comes to worst, getting the law involved can be daunting, even hazardous. And that is a humbling and discouraging fact if I ever heard one.
And that makes a bit of sense, because trolls are sadists, psychopaths, and narcissists, according to research from the University of Manitoba. Considering that such disorders are notoriously difficult to treat, this never-ending battle might be what it is partially because there’s literally very little way to fight back. Ignoring that sort just provokes them to push harder, or assume you are unable to face them. Fighting them – whether through argument, blocking, or other action – means they’ve gotten a response out of you. So I wish the solution were as simple as outrage, but no outrage ever seems to make a dent. These are people who are, often in a very literal way, shameless.
But we still have to admit to letting this environment in our hobbies (or professions) fester, that this sort of strategy becomes obvious and effective. In video games and comics alike, there’s enough implied misogyny that women find them very unwelcoming places. Sure, yes, there is a big difference between someone doubting a woman’s “geek cred” and someone threatening to sexually assault her for daring to look at something he likes. But the fact that some part of these fandoms is marginalized – by people from within (“You aren’t a real gamer!”) and without (“Aren’t comic books only for boys?”) makes them targets to anyone who wants to strike a nerve with minimal resistance.
Of men (and I know this includes myself) who seem to only surface during a major controversy such as this one, it is not unfair to ask, “Where have you been?” The answer, at least for me, is that honestly I’ve always felt unwelcome in the conversation. I’ve addressed this a little before in my Tap vs. Tap conversations with AJ. Sometimes, when men put in their two cents against misogynist behavior, whether against the guy on the forum who just really hates “feminazis” or the deluge of rape threats, women (some women – by no means all) respond with frustration. I saw it this morning on Twitter.
Is that supposed to mean its REALLY a problem? That when women discuss it it doesn’t somehow resonate? That a man must address it?
— DC Women Kicking Ass (@dcwomenkicknass) April 18, 2014
This was one in a series of tweets in which she also calls for people to “play a role” in solving the problem. Over the last hour or so I’ve struggled to figure out if it’s wrong of me to feel somewhat offended by the implication, because I am constantly coiled in self-doubt over my own understanding of these issues. But I’ve heard this kind of response. I’ve heard it in conversation; I heard it in class in college. I acknowledge that there’s a certain facet of gender culture that encourages men to protect women, and so sometimes these responses can come off as patronizing – as a “Have no fear, a MAN is here!” But I’ve seen this sort of response directed at guys whose input, at least as I read it, was not that.
Some of the frustration clearly comes from how many people look at something like this rape threat epidemic and are surprised it’s really a thing. And that’s completely fair. But we’re trying to help, and we’re trying to understand. There is no question that, especially for men who do not experience this firsthand, there is a lot of room for education. We aren’t going to completely understand the nuances of the problem the first time we hear about it. We probably never will fully since we can only see it as a third party. But to shut that down as being patriarchal is problematic, too. It’s difficult to know how we can contribute when the response, especially out of context, and especially on the internet where we lose the nuances of things like tone and inflection, can be so easily read as “We don’t want your help.” It can make it really hard to figure out where we fit in the conversation.
There’s also a problem in the industries themselves, of course – not just when it comes to this or that character being oversexualized or strong or weak or stereotyped, but in the audience to which the publishers decide to cater. On Kevin Smith’s frequently excellent (if you don’t mind the language) podcast Fatman on Batman, Paul Dini, a major writer in kids’ television (especially things like Batman: The Animated Series), explained: “‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’ — this is the network talking — ‘one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys, but right there.'” It’s a business decision – arguably a bad one – but it has repercussions for how kids learn to view themselves and others through the heroes they see and play and read about. But at least that one I can comprehend as one of those, “Someone has numbers somewhere that lead them to believe this is true, even if they are stupid numbers with stupid heads.” I mean, someone driven by profit wouldn’t exclude a whole segment of the population, their potential customers, for no apparent reason. Probably.
But then, you might have even heard about Funcom’s backfiring April Fool’s joke. This one I truly do not understand. Well, I do, but I wish I didn’t. In a nutshell, for April Fool’s, Funcom released some special costumes into their dark fantasy MMO The Secret World: a full-body wetsuit for female characters and a flamboyant and revealing “mankini” for male characters. They were poking a bit of fun at themselves, since they are not immune to having more sexualized outfits for female characters than male ones. Befuddlingly, though, Funcom eventually backpedaled, removing the latter from the game – but not the former – after a number of people had bought it, and despite many saying they wanted it. Because it didn’t fit with the message they wanted to send with The Secret World. The mind boggles at how this happened, especially since the item was not a commercial flop. The official argument goes that the item didn’t fit with the IP, and I suppose that’s true to an extent; still, it’s a peculiar double standard that skimpy outfits fit with the seriousness of the setting (to be sure, that might be because of movies in the genre) as long as women are wearing them. And this not from an American company, but a Norwegian one – a country ahead of the US in both gender equality and LGBT rights.
These are profound problems that plague video games as much as comics.
I’d like to think that this is one of those issues that will sort of work itself out as my generation – which seems undeniably geekier across the board than our predecessors – gradually take over the world. But that hardly justifies resting on our laurels. If we like something – if we are fans of it and love it – let’s make an effort to make it better. We’ve seen, in recent years, that considerable public backlash can provoke action even from major companies. These media can be vehicles for unprecedented levels of inclusiveness: a comic can be very personal, and very nuanced; a video game can allow an interactive exploration of being someone Other; instead the focus is on epitomizing a singular slice of the audience. That’s just archaic.
I know that no amount of equality on the comics page or in a virtual world will make the truly terrible human beings who make this kind of discussion even necessary go away; I am not under some illusion that I’m proposing some kind of magical fix. But maybe, if we can affect this change for the better, through our feedback, through our dollars, they might feel less implicitly welcome.
And it is through our dollars and our feedback (like this excellent article) that we can manifest change, one hopes.
As undoubtedly geekier as the current generation is, and I actually think that’s a really good thing, I also can’t help but consider that most of the troll horror stories probably spawn from that generation as well. Maybe that’s an unfair generalization, but it seems reasonable, and it saddens me a bit because I fear that it will mean that no one takes enough advantage of the opportunity to improve the things we love, as Dix recommends here. I’m not sure I buy the University of Manitoba’s research. It seems too pat, frankly, and it seems unlikely that there are so many far-spectrum lunatics and sociopaths out there. Without any research to back me up I speculate that people are assholes in this medium because this medium makes it easy for people to be assholes, that anonymity and a deep (and deeply wrongheaded) colonialism about things like gender combine to make this horrid rape culture something that happens. I’m not sure there’s much to be done about it, though that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Quite the opposite.
As for Asselin’s article, I think her comments on gender presentation speak for themselves. Personally I was also struck by how much I learned from her. I’d never have noticed Robin’s positioning or Beast Boy’s knee-signaturasaurus, things that (I assume) would be standouts to a really experienced person. I see them now, thanks to her analysis, I hope she gets a little credit for having taught people to see things they might not otherwise see across the board.
Speaking as someone who won the same genetic and social lottery as Dix (white financially stable male American), I’d add that he’s not wrong at all to be coiled in self-doubt about his understanding of these issues. Try as I might, or he might, there may be a limit to how directly we CAN understand them, because no matter what we’re going to be on the outside of the experience. But that people try is important, and as he says, many guys do not mean “I am here to protect you” when they speak up against the kind of shit Asselin is suffering in that comments section.
Finally, Dix: you are not going to hell for being atheist or liberal. You are going to hell because you said I’d make a poor Batman.
Well, as long as I’m going to hell for a GOOD REASON.
I am dubious of self-reported research, to be fair, and I don’t think the takeaway is supposed to be “all trolls are psychopaths,” so much as “this correlates somewhat with psychopathic behavior.” A lot of people – especially kids and teenagers – go through such phases but grow out of them. I think some people who engage in trollish behavior are just sometimes jerks, or get caught up in what they’re doing: especially in gaming, I think sometimes griefing and flaming is more heat of the moment. I don’t want to come off like I’m discounting the idea that sane people exist who also have repulsive opinions and engage in repulsive behaviors.
That said, some of the major horror stories – the types that come with stalking and dozens and dozens of alternate e-mails and things – that seems to me like such fixation, such commitment, that you’ve have to be a little crazy. Narcissistic, at least. And that’s also not meant to be an excuse, but rather an observation that we can’t always assume that the sort of behaviors we won’t to get rid of are being perpetrated by people who react in ways we’d expect or to things we’d expect.
Unfortunately, allow me to throw some cold water on your hope in the next to final paragraph. Disclosure: I’m a non-white male, so I have been discriminated against from bartenders pretending I’m not there (I sent my white girlfriend to get me a drink) to cops asking to see my idea because while walking along the sidewalk they thought I “looked like a guy who was hiding from them” or while when I was a passenger in a different girlfriend’s car she was stopped for speeding and asked if she was in the car with me against her will.
The problem with thinking things will work out as geekier generations take over the world is that…. the very same group dynamics and biases exist. Except because geeks were also marginalized they don’t realize they’re doing the same to other groups and feel like of course they’re not because they were picked on or a minority or whatever.
Illustrative of this is Nate Silver and Ezra Klein’s recent attempts to establish themselves at their homes online. They hired a bunch of smart capable people, but at the beginning at least, few people who might bring a different cultural perspective like women or non-whites. The thing is, they either didn’t realize it when it happened or flat out said they didn’t KNOW people that fit their criteria who were not white/Jewish males.
This is a far cry from issuing rape threats obviously, but my point is that the tech sector has it’s own male-dominated culture AND assumptions in terms of bias that go along with it. It’s like asking a woman at a game conference if she’s PR or actually plays games for instance. So in fact even if incidents like this do go down in frequency I think it will be harder to get across what is happening to the men involved because they will think “I couldn’t possibly be discriminatory because I know what it’s like!” But they are. We are.
Thanks very much for your input, MNP. That’s good food for thought. You are completely correct. I will admit to having limited ability to offer much input on racial discrimination, and that’s a whole other issue, likely.
I don’t want to seem like I believe this is a simple fix, or even a waiting game. You are completely correct that these biases still exist, and will continue to exist for generations to come. I work in the tech sector in my day job, and I have female coworkers who I know encounter discrimination of various kinds in the workplace despite being as competent (or more) than their male counterparts. But at least in that regard, by far the worst of it comes from the “old guard”, the people who are at management level and are in their fifties or sixties.
I also don’t immediately equate geekiness with acceptance. Not at all. I’d be naive to, considering the evidence to the contrary. But geekiness IS much more the norm for my generation, and fandom is generally more diverse than it once was (at least from a gender perspective). For the majority of gamers and comic readers, I think, it is not strange or threatening to have women involved in the hobby, and that fact will mean that newcomers will increasingly see that as normal, not the exception. So that comment is generally more directed at traditionally geek territory, NOT everything across the board.
That somewhat comes with the general shift, nationally, culturally, toward greater acceptance of all genders. It tends to be the older, more conservative generations that resist things like equal pay and LGBT rights most staunchly.
I think there’s an urge, like Steerpike does above, to think it’s “our” generation — the geeks who now seem to control more of the business end of geek culture — who still troll to protect the prominence of the male gaze, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the vast majority of trolls aren’t the 30- and 40-somethings, but are instead, teenagers. In a survey of subReddit forum subscribers who participate in forums geared towards Men’s Rights Activism, men aged 17-20 made up 87% of participants, far overshadowing any other age grouping (citation: http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2014/04/13/but-how-do-you-know-the-mras-are-atheists/). The goal of the survey at the link was to see whether the same MRA trolls who practice online misogyny are fundamentalist Christians (turns out they’re overwhelmingly not), but by asking the age group question, it also points to something I think is hopeful: a lot of trolls are teenagers who eventually grow out of it.
I hope that demographic applies to geek culture, as well. The very fact that Tap and other geek culture discussion sites brings up topics like these at all is a sign that, as we grow older and more mature, we are critical of the content we consume without the old arguments about such media being “just good fun” and not worthy of thoughtful critique.
And this kerfluffle over the Teen Titans cover reminds me of the Tomb Raider reboot discussions (b00bs not big enough) or the Gal Gadot Wonder Woman casting (b00bs not big enough). Does all of this seriously boil down to “I like b00bs and if comics/games/movies have smaller b00bs I’ll never see another one”? We demand realism in so many areas, why not in women’s bodies drawn or animated or portrayed? Why is it not just as jarring to see distorted female bodies as it is, to me at least, to see ridiculously muscled male bodies (I blame Todd MacFarlane for all of this)? As the owner of good-sized breasts, I’ve been known to stare dumbfounded at some comic depictions of b00bs and their gravity-defying properties, and I would imagine that as men reach the age when they’ve seen some themselves (in whatever context) and witnessed their behavior, they’d get a little tired of being artistically lied to.
The anonymity of Internet commenting, I think, precludes us from often keeping in mind that we are, in large part, arguing with children and teenagers. Not that no worthwhile commentary can come from that age group, but that age and experience do lend perspective (and self-filtering) that not many develop that early. That’s why I think the subReddit forum poll is sort of heartening, and I hope that while we continue to discuss issues of online harassment, we do so in the hopes that the harassers’ numbers are dwindling as they grow the heck up.
Oh, and sorry to double-post, but I want to make a personal pet peeve related to the subject: why define a single body type as appropriate for male and female characters in comics (and then argue ad nauseam over whether it’s unrealistic or insulting) when it would be soooo much more creatively fulfilling to put some thought into what type of body a character with certain powers might have, y’know? Take Superman, for instance: if his strength comes from Earth’s yellow sun, why is he always drawn as being huge and over-muscled, the kind of physique that would make him pretty strong even in the shade? A character with scientific or supernatural origins for their powers (or mental… would’ve been pretty cool to see psychic-only Psylocke being more rounded and feminine before transitioning to athletic super-ninja Psylocke, but I digress) could have any body type, whereas those whose powers result more from training would have the physique of Soldiers or MMA fighters.
Anyway, it really irks me in mainstream superhero comics that there doesn’t seem to be more thought put into what type of body someone with those powers would have.
And on a lighter note, this: http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/
That trend in a lot of cases was a very ’90s thing. The 1990s were during one of the periods of artist fame (we’re in a period of writer fame), and a couple of those artists, most notably Rob Liefeld, who were fairly young and became superstars practically overnight, favored the hypermuscular design for nearly all characters (females included, sometimes). And that trend cemented the idea somewhat in public consciousness.
These days it tends to be down to the artist, but a lot of artists try to think of how things should actually look. Today’s Superman tends to look lean and athletic (much like he usually does in the movies), fit but not out to win any Mr. Universe competitions or anything. Characters like the Flash are slighter and more streamlined, to evoke speed. The Robins, even the older ones, have gymnast-like builds. Batman actually tends to be a little more overtly muscular-looking than Superman, since he presumably actually has to have built all that muscle the old-fashioned way. You even periodically get the scrawny teenagers like Jaime Reyes (the Blue Beetle) and Peter Parker or Miles Morales in certain incarnations of Spider-Man, especially the Ultimate line.
But it’s true that the not-in-very-good-shape body types that account for so much of the population aren’t really represented as even supporting characters, often, much less heroes. There’s often some partial justification for this (not to deal with this issue, though, usually) by having most heroes actually worry about staying in shape, because even if their powers aren’t very physical, they don’t want to find themselves in a life-threatening situation because they put off going to the gym. (And I have to say, if I were regularly in life-threatening situations, motivating myself to go to the gym would probably be easier!)
I’d actually say that I think video games demonstrate a bit less body-type diversity for male characters, right now, since every male lead has a soldier’s build.
It is 100% true, however, that female body types have a much narrower representation, and they are all basically “slim and well-endowed”. And this comes up just about every five minutes in comics. This understandably alienates some female readers, while a certain section of male readers are very defensive of this eye candy. It’s enough of an acknowledged problem now that some artists – especially indie artists, but here and there in the mainstream – very specifically work against it in their art, but we’re currently still pretty locked in that trend.
I agree with everything you said, and I think, too, that the surging popularity of live action comicbook movies and TV is helping push back against the mannerist animated trends. Real human actors simply can’t look like their animated counterparts, and the more we as an audience start picturing the characters based on actual human beings, the more I feel those attitudes will have to flow back to animation, as you describe. You’re right that there are some body types that will always be underrepresented in comics and games v. the real world (three cheers for The Blob, though), but that’s as it should be. These are in many ways fantasies for all involved, and I certainly don’t want to see anyone with my thighs up on screen.
As for the ability to discuss the issue with civility on the internet, though (I just finished reading Will Pfeifer’s response to Asselin’s cover critique, his response amounting to, “I don’t agree with her but man you people are jerks”), I’m hopeful that will get easier with time, but as your original article says, what’s the proper response in the meantime? What will get the threats and rhetoric to stop flooding out in response to critique? What should we do while waiting for trolls to grow out of it, or is there going to be an endlessly revolving cast of trolls growing into it?
I think it’s important to talk about the subject, like you and other venues are, but at a certain point, I find myself flocking to sites that have no comment section, or simply never, ever reading the comments. Many of the women-oriented blogs I read, some focused on geek culture, some on politics, others on religion, I just NEVER look at the comments unless they’re strictly moderated. Not sure what to do at this point except shake my head and not feed the trolls.
With that said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the animation in season two of the Walking Dead videogame, with character body types including not just a small child, but a pregnant woman of color and men and women of all ages. Since the animation is decidedly comic-like, it dovetails really well with the graphic novels, which always did include somewhat more realistic body types. Perhaps it’s the superhero genre in comics and the shooter/actioner videogames that will forever linger in the realm of thigh muscles and sideb00b.
Both independent video games and independent comics do a much better job of being broadly representative. It’s the major publishers in both fields that have the biggest problems.
I think part of why there’s limited awareness of the harassment issues now is that so many people – myself included – have sworn off comment sections for the most part. I don’t read comment sections on sites besides Tap and one or two others that have a good community and don’t experience much trolling of any kind. And because of how vitriolic comment sections tend to get, sites increasingly make it easy to ignore them, putting them well below the content, past ads and so forth. Just because I sometimes read, say, CBR articles, doesn’t mean I participate in or even look at the comment sections. It’s easy to get the perception that this kind of abuse only happens when there’s a big outcry about it when that’s how you interact with the internet.
This is in reply to Dix’s reply to me, I couldn’t figure out how to respond to it directly.
I generally think you’re right, in that simply having more diversity opens the door wider for the future. We’ve seen it in various areas like gay marriage. But I don’t think something like the change of opinion on gay marriage would have happened so rapidly had people not been pushing the issue. As you said, it’s not simply a waiting game. I think you have to keep confronting instances of discrimination/misogyny every time. It’s exhausting but I think the change will be very slow otherwise.
LGBT rights changing rapidly due to the efforts put forth on their behalf is definitely fact, per MNP’s remarks. Had it not been brought up – I remember it was discussed before but really came to a sort of prominence during the 2004 presidential race, Kerry vs W. That was the year that many states including my own passed amendments to their state constitutions banning gay marriage, then here we are only ten years later and it’s made fantastic progress, and those amendments are tumbling down. It bothers me a lot that society can make great, relatively high speed progress on some issues but remains medieval on others. Gender equality has been an ongoing battle since the 1920s, but there’s still fighting over equal pay. Racial equality still lags behind. Did LGBT rights move faster because a new generation is fighting for it, or is something else happening? I don’t know, to be honest, but it strikes me that we still see this kind of misogyny on a comic cover, when a cover showing gay characters would probably not evoke the same response.
Dix suggests that a beefier generation, perhaps feeling disincluded itself at times, may be more likely to be inclusive. I hope so, but only time will tell. It’s equally possible that a geeky generation, feeling disincluded, will be more likely to lash out and show greater cruelty when it thinks it can get away with it.
Out of curiosity, has the cover artist responded anywhere to Asselin’s critique?
LBGT rights ran ahead of racial equality because being gay doesn’t break along class lines. That is the reason, period. The lack of progress on women’s equality has no such excuse – domestic violence rates are worse among the poor, but there’s no shortage of pay discrimination in the highest paying professions, et cetera. Strip away the obvious elements of discrimination and you’re still left with more subtle and almost as harmful variants of misogyny hiding in plain sight, in all social classes. That’s a disease you can’t simplify with Marxist analysis.
Dix, fantastic article. As my nom de guerre would suggest, I am a huge comic book fan, but if I may, I would put an alternative spin on this. I work in an industry still heavily male dominated, despite attempts to change the ethos, but that industry still regards “the geek”, male or female, as some kind of bizarre, immature, “you-watch-the-Big-Bang-Theory-don’t-you?” outcast.
Step outside of the tech/culture/movie/literary industry, and any type of indulgence in fantasy worlds that isn’t mainstream (and by that I mean movies like Twilight and The Hunger Games), and you will see a remarkable amount of ignorance not only towards the comic book medium, but also the prejudices therein. I sometimes come back in from my lunch break clutching a comic book I’ve bought form a nearby store, and have above once had people laugh as I’ve leafed through it to show them what it’s all about. I used to say to people “it’s a book with pictures”, but stopped when people reacted by saying it seemed I needed illustrative help to understand a novel.
My point here is that when you do show someone a comic book, and you see, as a friend of mine did when looking at my hardback of Justice League of America, Catwoman with her outfit unzipped to the point she looks like a porn actress, you appear to that person as a leering fantasist, even if you’re not (and I stress, I’m not).
When covers such as this promote that view, however inadvertently, then all it does is reinforce the stereotype of comic book readers as slightly one step up from dirty old men in plastic coats clutching grimy paper bags with dirty books inside.
I also agree with your later point, the argument never seems to take flight until a man seems to step in. I am more than willing to defend another comic book fan, male or female, when they are criticised unfairly or made fun of. On one occasion at a comic con, I was chatting away to a girl at a stall when the owner began to laugh at her for the gap in her knowledge (she happened to be unaware that Wolverine had once had the Adamantium stripped from his bones), and I stuck up for her. This prompted two things – the owner of the stall then tried to trip me up and failed, at which point I’d felt I’d achieved a moral victory, only for the said girl to then tear a strip off me for daring to defend her. I may well have fallen victim to a misogynist urge here, but I still felt what I was doing was right.
My point here is, as a white, middle class male, I like comics, but sometimes feel ashamed that I do, particularly in their portrayal of women. Can I change any of those things? No, but I can try and believe that the people writing and drawing the material I love will one day understand that women are people, not objects of desire or incapable of defending themselves.
This is a good article.
But, like, man, I can’t believe this comic cover is the hill some people picked to die on. Like to me it’s not a great cover nor is it especially bad either? It’s just like a typical comic book store thing. I guess in the sea of other things like this it would not have even registered to me. Yet rants and death threats.
@Steerpike, I’m not aware of Kenneth Rocafort (the artist) responding to this article or the resulting controversy. This is not the first time in recent history that Rocafort’s renderings of one of the Teen Titans. When DC rebooted in September 2011, probably the biggest representation-of-women outcry centered around his depiction of Starfire – along with writer Scott Lobdell, who wrote her kind of slutty – partially it seemed her role in the team was to sleep with all of the male characters because her culture doesn’t really have a concept of monogamous love and sex is just kind of a fun thing you do. Though I think it was an (perhaps ill-executed) attempt to explore those ideas through the lens of a character who didn’t grow up with human social norms in that regard, the fact that her costume covered perhaps 10% of her body and her breasts were probably about 45% of her mass kind of made it seem just pornographic. Much the same argument was made then, that Starfire is probably best and most widely known as the shy, awkward-because-she’s-an-alien-and-doesn’t-understand-human-culture sort of love interest for Robin in the Teen Titans cartoons.
Rocafort, as near as I gather, is acting like most professionals would here, and not getting into some kind of argument with every journalist who criticizes his work. Some professional artists who have nothing to do with the book – okay, one that I know of, Brett Booth, whose vitriolic response is arguably what rocketed this controversy into the stratosphere – jumped on Asselin about it, though. Booth has done work for Wildstorm and was the penciler on Teen Titans when it relaunched for the New 52 in 2011 (also with writer Lobdell). He seemed to take the criticism pretty personally, actually.
@AJ, it is a little odd that this bit of what was probably, for Asselin, in many ways just another part of her job as a comics critic has been the latest spark to the proverbial powder keg, though I think Booth’s involvement had something to do with popularizing the article at first (“DC Artist Disagrees Soundly with Lady Comics Journalist! Why is She Reading Comic Books, Anyway?!” might have been a headline somewhere). Obviously the negative responses she’s gotten have snowballed since it really blew up, though the problem didn’t exactly START then.
Good stuff!
I don’t disagree with anything Janelle Asselin said in her critique of the cover. It’s all spot and completely accurate. But, I also agree with AJ, it looks like a very standard comic book cover. Granted it’s Asselin’s job to critique it and it is a cover to a #1 issue of “Teen Titans”, hitting the “it’s about teenagers for a younger audience” angle nicely, so I do see it having a little more relevance than your standard cover.
There has been a lot of controversy swirling around D.C. of late. Some of it similar in nature – its depiction of women – and some a little different (the refusal to have two lesbian characters get married situation).
I also agree with Bane. The depiction of “Wonder Girl” is embarrassing. I still read comic books (only trade paperbacks) and would be embarrassed reading a comic with a character that looks like that. I distinctly recall the depiction of the women in Straczynski’s “Midnight Nation” to be so distracting that it took away from what was a kinda-sorta interesting story. The women were all skinny, massive breasts and wore ridiculously skimpy outfits. It didn’t fit and was completely unnecessary.
@Ajax19 “….would be embarrassed reading a comic with a character that looks like that.”
Really? I mean, yeah, the boobs are kind of anti-grav, but, sheesh, I’ve just seen so much worse. I just fear that we’re going to be entering a world where a woman won’t be depicted on a cover at all for fear of the backlash.
AJ, I have seen a ton worse too. (“Midnight Nation” being an example). But, yeah, I would be a bit embarrassed reading it. If I was sitting in bed next to my wife reading this (where I read most of my comics) or sitting next to her or a stranger on a flight somewhere (the next most common locale for comic book reading), I would be a bit embarrassed by the cover of this comic.
I will fully admit that, as time has gone on, my tastes in comic books has changed quite a bit. I grew up reading Marvel, D.C., Image and others, almost all of which were super hero books. Over the last 10-15 years, however, my tastes shifted pretty dramatically away from super hero books to other stories. Most of those books tend to have plenty of female characters that are depicted pretty reasonably and not in any way embarrassing.
I don’t really read anything from Marvel or D.C. universes anymore. I pick up the occasional Wolverine story for Marvel and I used to read Gail Simone’s “Secret Six” until its run ended, and then gave the New 52 “Suicide Squad” a chance, all due to my love for Deadshot (my favorite character in the D.C. universe).
If you want a “grown up” view of comic books, with something that actually tackles head on the sexualisation and graphic violence within comics, both in a comical and a serious way, then take a look at Garth Ennis’ “The Boys”. One girl is “upgraded” from their version of the Teen Titans to their version of The Justice League, and is given a costume that is hugely revealing. She asks why, and she’s told by the team’s PR men – “because you appeal to the demographic”. Can’t help think Ennis was ahead of the curve on this one…
Bane: “…and is given a costume that is hugely revealing. She asks why, and she’s told by the team’s PR men – ‘because you appeal to the demographic.'”
I can get behind that kind of self-awareness. Stretching all the way back to Sally Jupiter from Watchmen (and probably before that) you can see a bit of it. Comics have had this misogyny-of-presentation issue for so long, I appreciate that some writers are turning it on itself.
Ajax19 is my Comics Counselor (he is also Tap-Repeatedly’s Legal Advisor and the World’s Greatest Borderlands 2 Phaselock Sniper); thanks to him I get Res’d pretty reliably and my knowledge of and love for the comics medium has dramatically increased. By not reading anything that Ajax doesn’t loan me, I’m pretty much guaranteed the best stuff. Unfortunately I read it faster than it is produced and I hate waiting, so I think we’re running low on complete trade paperback runs I can borrow.
AJ makes an interesting point about THIS being the hill some people picked to die on. It is, really, pretty standard fare for presentation of women (which doesn’t make it okay, just… standard fare). Since I read Asselin’s piece I can’t unsee the weird perspective on Robin’s building, but Wonder Girl is just depressingly standard. Maybe that’s why people picked the hill to die on: you look at it and think, “that’s pretty standard boobage for superheroines.” and then you realize that just isn’t a good place for comics to be, so you head off to the hill.
Isn’t that lavish style sort of falling out of favor? David Aja’s art in Hawkeye is practically line drawings but I find it miles more evocative (and Kate Bishop miles sexier, though maybe just because she’s not sixteen) than the cover we’re talking about here. Gabriel Ba’s Umbrella Academy art took a little longer for me to get used to, but it too seems more… fizzy.
Bane, I’ve read a few trades of “The Boys.” I find Ennis… Hrmm. Let’s see, I really enjoyed “Preacher” (it tends to meander quite a bit in the middle and lose its sense of direction, but it picks up. There’s a lot of over-the-top vulgarity throughout. Most of it is completely unnecessary, but that’s Garth Ennis for you) and I like a lot of his “Hellblazer” work, but after a while I get a bit tired with Ennis. He’s just relentlessly vicious and nasty. It’s like eating a desert that’s too sweet. The first few bites are damn tasty, but as you get closer and closer to finishing it just gets to be too much and the joy is gone. I think that’s why his “Hellblazer” work is my favorite. They tend to be short, a few issue-long stories. Just enough to be tasty, but not enough to be overwhelming.
As for “The Boys”, there is some interesting characters and ideas, but it suffers from this same thing. It also gets a bit repetitive: I get it, super heroes are horrible people, drug addicts, rapists, pedophiles, abusers-of-powers and all of that.
I really feel that Brian Michael Bendis’ “Powers” deals with the ‘secret lives’ of superheroes, those that have to “clean up” after them, and the various over-used super hero tropes much more deftly and in a much more complex and interesting way. It’s pretty spot on in many ways and a fun read.
Steerpike, I feel the same way about Robin on the building. It’s insanely distracting now. I am going with “he’s standing on a planter” and that tiny door isn’t a door, but a light of some sort that illuminates the planter at night.
I feel that this style of comic book art became popular in the late 80’s/early 90’s. Right around the time Jim Lee hit the scene – his stuff was amazing at the time to me. That said, it’s not a style that I am particularly fond of anymore.
I have one room in my house that’s dedicated to me. We call it “The Duchy.” It’s official title is “The Duchy of Dork.” It houses my various comic books, collectibles (see, action figures) and my “art.” Most of my art is comic book drawings and comic book covers. I don’t think I have anything later than the early-to-mid 80’s. That’s the style I enjoy as “art” I suppose.
Yes, modern comics are definitely still riding the Jim Lee legacy of art, though I find that more palatable than the Rob Liefeld branch of it that came a little later and was really popular for a few years. Jim Lee is currently a co-publisher at DC, and was responsible for the lion’s share of the costume redesigns and things for various DC characters that came with the New 52 reboot.
We’re still waiting for the next artist-worship stage of the industry. It seems a little overdue, almost. Not that I mind, terribly; I tend to buy for the writer, and almost always will, although there are some artists out there who blow my mind enough that I’ll follow them to books I might not otherwise pick up.
I second the suggestion that Powers is really good. I haven’t read The Boys, and though I really liked Preacher I don’t think I could go back to Ennis that often in general. Writers like he and Mark Millar who seem intent on relentless depravity are just very hit and miss for me. Meanwhile, Bendis is pretty sincere and clever, and though I think he’s also too prolific for his own good and often find his core superhero work sort of disposable (and arguably, one of the reasons I don’t read a lot of Marvel these days is probably my general boredom with how prevalent his influence is), his indie work is a bit more focused. I’d also point at Wildstorm’s The Authority as a pretty good series that takes the idea of superheroes and plays up their vices and imperfections. Warren Ellis got it going, and Millar wrote a run as well, both of which were pretty good for something a little different, though not exactly the same sort of commentary as Powers.
I feel the same way about Mark Millar. I had a very bad taste in my mouth after finishing “Wanted.”
I think “Powers” may be the only thing from Bendis I’ve read. He does seem insanely prolific. I have read a lot of criticism of his style, but sticking to just “Powers” has seemed to insulate me from most of it.
I have a trade or two of “Authority”. I enjoyed it, but felt a bit lost at times.
At some point I need to spend an afternoon and take stock of where I stand with all of this. I feel like I own a bunch of comics that I’ve never read or only read some of. This must be rectified.
I think Bendis’s Marvel stuff tends to be weaker in general for whatever reason and is where he gets the bulk of the criticism, really. I mean, he’s like the epitome of the decompressed storytelling style. He writes well, but seriously, I spent a summer reading through Ultimate Spider-Man trades and enjoyed them greatly, but after a lot of arcs I sat back a moment and was like…”Wait, that was like six issues of comic reading I just did, but I’m pretty sure I could cover the important plot/character points in maybe two issues, tops!” (One issue, even, in some cases.)
Anyway, this thread has drifted a bit, which is fine. Things seem to have quieted down again on this topic over the weekend until the next firestorm, whatever it might be. The takeaway, as usual, has largely been “don’t ignore it; it’s not okay.”
I do wonder sometimes how much we may just need to impose greater regulation on the internet, though. I don’t have a lot of perception of where the trend is headed, generally speaking, but I know there are more communities than I can recall that I’ve chosen to specifically avoid because of how vitriolic they can be. It’s why I don’t play online games almost at all unless I’m doing it privately with friends, and I’ve never had major run-ins with griefers or anything. I just don’t like the culture.
I was playing HAWKEN last night a little – only just started dabbling – and one guy who was on the other team for a few rounds (he was ranked pretty low, so he must’ve been new, I guess) got really mad at losing badly. Started calling me an asshole and a faggot, for some reason. I know I fragged him a few times, but no more than any other player, I don’t think; I KNOW I got kill streaks on two of his teammates, not him. I wasn’t chatting in the channel at all except for post-game “gg”s. I think it was just that I was in first place on my team? I don’t know. It was pretty tame by comparison (text only) and was more amusing than anything, really, since he felt the need in the middle of the match to try about four different insults because of the game censoring them (he settled on FACK, which I guess is “fuck” + “fag”, maybe). That he felt the need to go to that trouble in the midst of a firefight might explain why he was doing so badly.
Of course, if this had happened to me in real life – some guy I’d never met just spitting mad and calling me names and slurs – it would be a complete outlier. But this comes up so often in games, of course, and online in general, that some sites just don’t allow comments anymore, and some games (I read about Hearthstone doing this, for instance) make a specific decision NOT to allow chat at all unless you’re friends, relying instead on predefined emotes. That’s been a method used for children’s online games like Disney’s ToonTown for ages so that content could be a bit more controlled, but now we’re talking about games imposing censorship just because they see it as the only way to preserve the community and their game.
And it’s always the question of whether people act this way because the anonymity insulates them from the consequences of some horribleness that they just always have but don’t express in the real world, or whether there is something else setting off otherwise “normal” individuals. This seems to be an area we’ve been kind of happy to just take on face value – there are jerks in the world and they can just shout louder online without someone shutting them up – but is it so simple? Maybe. Maybe not.
There’s something about the psychology of communication online that informs this behavior, but I’d say it’s not just anonymity. The whole medium of communication is more complex than that, and it doesn’t explain the variance you’ll see in certain games or online neighborhoods.
Population size is a factor too, especially on discussion boards, because the larger the group, the more varied the personalities. The Internet Movie Database forum is an example of a cesspool of human behavior in part because many people are present. We’ve always been exceedingly lucky with our community at Tap; it’s small, which helps, but it hasn’t always been small and even small-ness isn’t a guarantee. Something self-selecting about the community itself filters out most unwelcome types before they even get in, which is strange since we never had any mechanism to control that, not even back to the FFC days.
What you experienced is one of those head-scratchers, Dix. Why THAT guy, why take it out on you, when you clearly weren’t targeting him? Why go to the trouble of inventing words (fack, though? What’s wrong with fug and fackot? I mean come on) and typing them in? Where’s the satisfaction for that player? Wouldn’t it just serve to make him angrier?
I was summoned the other day in Dark Souls II and the guy followed all the usual courtesies – bowing and such. He didn’t seem to know where he was going. Typically this means they just want backup to help scout the area, and I’d already been through so I walked him around for about ten minutes. During this time he summoned another guy who helped out before falling to a monster. We reached a point on a narrow cliff ledge where an NPC Black Phantom invades, so I gestured the guy back and took the lead with my shield up, which in Dark Souls-speak means “danger, stay behind me.” He clearly understood this because he summoned another phantom.
We’re edging forward and all of a sudden it says my summoner died. WTF? I turn around and he’s gone – he’d been behind me and in front of the other summon, who was doing a “noooooooooooooooo” pose (communication in Dark Souls is hilarious), then back to my world.
Five minutes later I get a PSN message: Asshole.
I’m like… did I accidentally knock him off the cliff or something? Seems like I’d have noticed that. Far as I can tell he just dropped dead. Plus I’d been with the guy for like fifteen minutes, even if I did kill him inadvertently it clearly wasn’t grieferdom. Yet I’m an asshole. Given the amount of effort involved in sending someone a PSN message with thumbsticks, he was clearly pretty mad. Why? What did it accomplish?
I digress.
That the firestorm has gone away is good; that it’s just gone to the usual background radiation of “don’t ignore it, it’s not okay” isn’t good. As you said, Dix, it needs follow up with feedback and with dollars.
@Steerpike, I think he was trying to say “fag” because it always appeared as *** and I assume the characters are censored one to one, but I don’t know why it became FACK (always in all caps). Maybe it was a happy middle ground between fag and fuck? Certainly is efficient, which is good, considering he was standing in the middle of a facking battlefield trying to insult people.
There’s still a little fire burning here, as it turns out. Greg Rucka, one of my personal favorite comic writers right now, has a Tumblr post circulating a bit today that sort of responds to this latest hubbub. And he isn’t happy.
What seems to have set him off was an image that was doing the rounds on Twitter yesterday of a t-shirt that said, “I like my fangirls like I like my coffee. I HATE coffee.”
http://ruckawriter.tumblr.com/post/83527917580/contents-under-pressure
Rucka’s not the only comic creator to respond in some way to the controversy, of course, although he’s one of the only ones doing a blog on it, I think. I know Bendis and Gail Simone were talking about it a bit last week on Twitter, amongst others. You’ve got to wonder if that changes anyone’s mind, though. Rucka seems realistic about the fact that the people at whom his rant is directed probably will never read it, because why would they, but I do really wonder if some of these “girls don’t belong in comics/games/whatever” guys think that they are preserving the culture the people who make this stuff they hold sacred intended.