[...] reading this, I was seriously tempted to drop everything DC publishes, but that’s the baby with the [...]

[...] My friend David Oakes sent along these thoughts, taking off from an infamous comment I made previously. I found them thought-provoking, so he granted permission to share them with [...]

[...] My little rant on corporate comic sexism was the Quote of the Month in the letter column in Powers #22. I was disappointed that it’s presented without attribution or link, just my name, and also that Bendis didn’t comment or respond. It’s just plopped in there between a near-incoherent letter and an excerpt from Tina Fey talking to Howard Stern about how nasty Paris Hilton is. (Rather like the worst impressions of Usenet, that column is.) [...]

For what it’s worth, I think absent fathers/childhood illness explains the love of superheroes, as I said above. I don’t think it’s necessarily related to their abhorrent treatment of women.

The entire thing is impossible to sum up easily. I grew up a comic geek with an abesnt father myself. I’ve self-published comics and have a new one coming out (not that I would consider myself a “professional” comic writer), but I do not consider myself with the wrong attitude or feelings towards woman in any way. I’m sure my wife would agree. It’s pretty difficult to point at the upbringing of people to determine why they are the way they are… Johanna could be right, and I’m sure in some cases particular people’s childhood is a cause for their current behavior and mindset… and keep in mind she did say “many” not all. I think it’s a streatch for ANY of us to determine we know why anyone does ANYTHING, but we all have the ability to speculate. In the absence of any real insider knowledge myself, I have to defer to others who have had a medicon of actual experiance with comic professionals such as Johanna or Valerie.

There is no question in my mind that there is something wrong with the mindset of the people in charge of the big two. I honestly feel that the industry as a whole would benefit from the absence of Dan Didio and Joe Quesada from their positions of power. What I’m wondering is, does anyone feel that either (or both) of these gentlemen have an adverse effect towards woman in the industry?

I can only imagine the toll that being a woman in the comics industry takes. I can’t begin to compare any experiances in my life, so I won’t try. I myself, tend to not care at all the gender (or race or sexually orintation) of any writer or artist in the business and only really care about what I think of their work (case in point, I LOVE Gail Simone’s writing but LOTHE Devin Graysons’)

Ok, enough rambling. Thanks.

- Rocket

[...] At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna — who also worked in the corporate comics industry — comments: You put a bunch of immature men, many of whom were very sick as children or had absent fathers or both,1 and all of whom escaped into over-muscled power fantasies as a result, in charge of a publishing subgroup with no prestige and little money. Several of them have never worked anywhere else, or if they have, it was at one of the few similar companies in the same industry that behave the same way. They’re still geeks, mentally, with low self-esteem and no success with women, few of whom they actually know in person, but they’re power brokers within their little world, and there are thousands like them who desperately want to be them… and you wonder why it all ends up so twisted? [...]

I have to say, I’m not comfortable with blaming this on the fact that so many comics creators are geeks or haven’t had loads of success with women.

To some extent, Johanna’s comment matches my own experience. I’m not (and she’s not) saying that 100% of geeky guys grow up to bitterly resent women. But it’s a common enough type so I’ve run into it many times. (Someone has to be buying all those Gor novels).

It’s like comic book shops. Not all of them have the “boy’s clubhouse” thing in which any woman who walks in is treated like The Female Thing (there either for suspicious glares or for hitting on). But it’s a common enough problem so that most of my female comic-reading friends have run into it at one time or another. We shouldn’t let our (quite admirable) desire to avoid stereotyping geeky men prevent us from seeing patterns that actually exist.

I have to agree with Steve that the whole “sick and/or missing father” thing is painting with too broad a brush. I’m sure Johanna wouldn’t have written that it if she hadn’t run into such men a bunch of times, but I’ve known some bitterly misogynistic male geeks who grew up healthy (if wimpy) and with fathers in the house. And I can think of at least a couple of lovely, not at all woman-hating geeky men I know whose fathers were absent in their childhoods.

Of course, Johanna did say “many,” not “all.” And I hesitate to agree with Steve at all, because I don’t want to seem like I’m endorsing what a jerk he’s acting like in this discussion, both here and at newsarama. (Nothing personal, Steve, but regardless of what you actually feel, you write as if you’ve got a ginourmous chip on your shoulder. Criticism isn’t bad, but belligerence is.)

It’s not like we want comics to be written only by normal people, do we?

I do vote with my wallet.

To me (I was eight at the time, and there wasn’t as much sexually charged stuff on TV back then, oh yes, it was the late 70s) it all was perfectly normal and I most certainly did not see them as sex objects.

But the stuff that is out right now, it is somehow… unsavory. Am I the only one to think that Frank Miller’s depiction of Black Canary on that ASBR was the worst kind of porn image? And don’t get me wrong, I am all for porn (if it’s good…which it never is), but I somehow feel the stuff today is geared towards someone who’s a bit creepy, but not me.

If you don’t like your opinions challenged, then perhaps you shouldn’t publicize them.

Frankly, given your pseudo-psychological method of analysis, it doesn’t suprise me that when I challenged your opinion, rather than address the content of my argument, or provide facts and evidence to back up your own, you again resorted to baseless assumptions about my personal motivations — in this case, assuming that I’m jealous of you.

Why would I be jealous of you when your intellectual and reasoning skills leave so much to be desired. The Internet is a very mixed bag indeed as it apparently gives any blowhard with a blog a soapbox upon which to spew their ill-informed opinions.

(Getting linked from the Newsarama blog is SUCH a mixed bag. Some very nice people pull their content together, but some of the readers…)

[...] I first found the blog through Johanna Draper Carlson’s blog last weekend, where she initially posted about the section about the editorial thinking behind the creation of Identity Crisis: You put a bunch of immature men, many of whom were very sick as children or had absent fathers or both, and all of whom escaped into over-muscled power fantasies as a result, in charge of a publishing subgroup with no prestige and little money. Several of them have never worked anywhere else, or if they have, it was at one of the few similar companies in the same industry that behave the same way. They’re still geeks, mentally, with low self-esteem and no success with women, few of whom they actually know in person, but they’re power brokers within their little world, and there are thousands like them who desperately want to be them… and you wonder why it all ends up so twisted? [...]

[...] I don’t want to beat the subject into the ground — either you accept the sexism in superhero comics, in which case you don’t need further convincing, or you don’t, and I’ve found from experience that those folks can rationalize away most anything — but I did have a further thought spun off from some of the many thoughtful comments left at that previous post. [...]

If you’re close to my age (35) then you came upon comics somewhere around 1975-1985, when the effects of the Comics Code were still being felt. I think it’s hard for some of us to see that those kind of comics, the standard by which we measure the comics of today, were themselves an aberration. Dr. Light raping Sue Dibny on that satellite, in all its pathetic anti-glory, is a straight shot from those 1920s pulps with their naked white girls being ravished by rabid scientists and jungle cannibals; from Crime Does Not pay; from the “injury to eye” covers. “Mainstream” comics has always been a seedy industry with a seedy product (with the aforementioned exception of the Comics Code era, which corresponded with the collapse of sales and loss of widespread distribution) and a seedy heart beats beneath those corporate clothes.

Right now many DC comics are, arguably, brighter and relatively less exploitative than the books of just a couple of years ago–DC has talked about deliberately lightening the tone post-Infinite Crisis. But as Michael calls it a pendulum, that metaphor is a reminder that these less gruesome, more “respectable” comics happily coexist with the Identity Crises in a single marketing strategy. The women in refrigerators on one side of the pendulum, and a cheery Busiek Superman story on the other, are all part of one big grandfather clock.

Then again, DC and Marvel do publish corporate-property comics which do feel – to me, at least – like they’re truly the voice of their creators, and although they may be edited somewhat they’re not really the voice of the corporation. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, James Robinson’s Starman, Busiek and Perez’ Avengers, Morrison’s JLA, all books of varying merit where a good creator was hired for a property and he produced good work in his own voice.

The nice thing about such comics is that love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can pretty much hold the creator accountable for the merits or flaws of the title. And that’s a good thing, because an individual creator’s voice is almost always a far more interesting thing than a corporation’s voice.

The pendulum right now is very far on the side of the corporation among the Big Two. I figure it will swing back around someday, but I think we’re going to have to find this generation’s James Robinsons and Kurt Busieks to do it.

I didn’t know if I should read the new material as real life or fiction, but after reading your comments, I guess it’s real life. As fiction, it would be powerful writing; as real life, it is a sad commentary, both on the comics industry and the insufferable p***k who accidentally injured her. This makes me sick to my stomach.