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[Ted Belmont]

Yeah, my point got kind of muddled there. What I was trying to say was, in order to be equivalent in terms of making members of a certain gender/sexual orientation uncomfortable; ie, in order to be as alienating to the average comic book fan(ie straight, white, male) as comics are to women, comics artists would have to start using gay porn as reference for male superheroes.

But yeah I think if we've gotten to the point where we have to explain WHY comics artists referencing porn at all is a bad thing, we've lost the plot.

[Brentoid]

Stop telling me what my point is.

My point is that article starts right off with "men are athletes, women are porn stars" which doesn't seem quite right.  Even most football players don't quite resemble the perfectly toned stud beefcakes we see on those sample pages.  The argument as to whether or not THAT'S a problem is not something I'm terribly concerned about.

See, the thing is that most people concerned about this sort of thing seem to think that the solution is to convince the Big Two to cut it the fuck out, which isn't going to work.  You can tell Marvel that Psylocke looks fucking ridiculous until you're blue in the face and they won't listen, for two reasons:

1. Most of the people who make the decisions there probably really like it this way.
2. There's no real current indicator that changing things would yield any sort of positive result.

"Hm, so you want me to enforce an across-the-board change of creative direction that would potentially alienate our current reader base (of shameless mouthbreathers) in order to attract a demographic that has not expressed an interest in our industry in any sort of meaningful numbers?  Yeah, we've tried that before.  A lot of times.  And it's always ended up with us tanking, a lot of artists getting fired, and our fans writing in en masse to call us fucking idiots.  So unless you can give us some reason to believe that putting pants on Wonder Woman isn't going to cause  petty uproar, then we're going to keep making our money in the pin-up industry.  Fuck your feminism."

You want to change things?  Stop finding bad examples and start producing good ones, then find a way to make them popular somehow.  Capitalists always migrate towards the most obvious source of financial water, so if you can break new and exciting ground in the field of Covered Up and Chiropractically Sound Superheroism, they'll be scrambling to find Dana a nice pair of denims with an unbroken fly.

Good luck though.  You're dealing with a national demographic that is gradually regressing to the idea that people with both a vagina and an inseam are somehow insulting God.

[Thad]

"Hm, so you want me to enforce an across-the-board change of creative direction that would potentially alienate our current reader base (of shameless mouthbreathers) in order to attract a demographic that has not expressed an interest in our industry in any sort of meaningful numbers?  Yeah, we've tried that before.  A lot of times.  And it's always ended up with us tanking, a lot of artists getting fired, and our fans writing in en masse to call us fucking idiots.  So unless you can give us some reason to believe that putting pants on Wonder Woman isn't going to cause  petty uproar, then we're going to keep making our money in the pin-up industry.  Fuck your feminism."

Except comic book nerds vocally complain about absolutely everything.  DC and Marvel do not use the things comic book nerds complain about on the Internet as actual indicators of how they should run their business.

What do comics fans complain about most loudly?  Company-wide event stories.  You know, the exact thing that makes the publishers more money than anything else.

So no, it's not that at all.  It's not that DC is gun-shy because they tried putting pants on Wonder Woman and people on the Internet whined about it.  If DC were really that damn concerned that people would stop buying books because they hate stupid-looking Jim Lee costume designs, they would not have subsequently put him in charge of redesigning EVERY MAJOR CHARACTER'S COSTUME.

And if you think comic book nerds are complaining any less about the new uniforms with their piping and V-necks and Superman-armor than they did about Wonder Woman's pants, well, I'll grant they've gotten less MSM coverage, but I don't think they've gotten any less comment-thread vitriol.  (Actually, from a marketing perspective, MSM controversy is probably a good thing -- with the possible exception of Fox News scare stories, and sometimes even then.)

I can't think of any actual example where DC or Marvel depicted a female superhero (or, hell, supervillain) in a less sexist fashion and sales suffered as a result of it.  Wonder Woman's sales actually INCREASED when JMS took over, albeit briefly.  I certainly can't think of a case where a publisher has tanked and a lot of artists gotten fired.  Fans writing en masse to call them fucking idiots, on the other hand, is what is referred to in the business as "Wednesday".

You want to change things?  Stop finding bad examples and start producing good ones, then find a way to make them popular somehow.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

As far as books that don't display this particular brand of sexism and have attained some popularity, I can think of a few -- Love and Rockets, Bone, Strangers in Paradise, Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim -- but no major superhero books leap to mind.

Superhero cartoons are an altogether different matter, though.

Do we even need to discuss how monumentally fucking better DC's animation division is than its comics division, or can we just take that as read after the past 20 years?

The disconnect between the animation people and the comics people continues to baffle me.

[Ted Belmont]

You want to change things?  Stop finding bad examples and start producing good ones, then find a way to make them popular somehow. 

Why should the people who aren't in the wrong be responsible for fixing the problem?

[Joxam]

Theoretically you make a good point ted, but in actual practice the people that are wrong have no idea they're wrong or don't give a fuck and will need some type of motivation to actually make them change. It has pretty much always been the job of the masses to show that the world needs to change in some base way.

[Ted Belmont]

True, but that kind of stance just reminds me of DC's saying they didn't hire any women writers because none had submitted any proposals, when DC specifically doesn't accept unsolicited proposals. The people in control of enacting actual change have no interest in changing things, and until they do, it won't matter what anyone else does, at least as far as mainstream superhero comics are concerned.

[Thad]

Hence the need for people to TELL them "This is wrong."  Pointing to negative examples may cause a shitstorm, but it can also have a long-term positive impact.  The WIR list was a watershed moment, and yes we still see women get fridged, but people have become more aware of it and gotten better about it.

Which is not to say we shouldn't strive for positive examples, too -- of course we should!  The books I've listed are all quite good.  In the superhero genre, I'd point to people like Mike Allred, Amanda Conner, and Darwyn Cooke as artists who draw lovely women who don't have impossible physiology.  Their work has been critically acclaimed, and sold pretty well -- they haven't done Jim Lee numbers but they're pretty well-respected.

So yes, by all means go out and buy iZombie, Rachel Rising, and Rasl.  And if you're going to pick up Watchmen prequels, definitely grab Minutemen and Silk Spectre.  (And if you're not, I can't say I blame you.)

[Ted Belmont]

Yeah, what Thad said. I'm not saying we should just throw our hands up and go OH WELL, but expecting the people who are calling attention to the problem to be the ones to come up with a solution absolves the people in the wrong(editorial staff, artists and writers who perpetuate/profit off of sexist crap) of responsibility. In order to bring about real change, both sides have to work together to come up with a solution that's tenable for everyone.

Unfortunately, Marvel and DC have shown time and again that they have no interest in real change, but like Thad said, we just have to keep calling attention to the problem until they get the idea that hey, maybe they should make comics that EVERYONE can enjoy, not just an ever-shrinking audience that will be displeased no matter what they do.

That, or superhero comics will just continue producing infantile dreck and waste away in a endles cycle of self-consumption.

Either way, we'll always have Batman: TAS. They can't take that away from us!

[Mongrel]

That, or superhero comics will just continue producing infantile dreck and waste away in a endles cycle of self-consumption.

I think I'm probably the only one who actually wants this to happen. Then again, the movie resurgence will probably keep marvel/DC afloat for at least another decade, so never mind.

[Brentoid]

I'm not absolving anybody of anything; I'm saying you've got to pick your battles.  Responsibility in this country is treated with all the gravity and dedication as a pet rock, so calling people on it is unfortunately going to be one of the most ineffective tools in your arsenal.  I see far too many people dedicated to this tactic though and it's just kind of sad.

[Bongo Bill]

Exploitative pandering is just the tip of the iceberg. As far as I can tell, the only reason DC and Marvel are still in business is because they basically inherited the exclusive right to popular and iconic characters deeply embedded in the public consciousness. It takes some spectacular kind of anti-competence to take the likes of Superman and Spider-Man and barely break five digits in sales on a given title. Their situation has so warped the business of American comics that it has somehow created an environment where they manage not only to survive, but to be considered the big fish in their pond! Their practices set the standards for the whole industry, spreading a risk-aversion that makes it difficult even for those newcomers who are offering a different and superior product.

The problem isn't that superhero comics are full of embarrassingly crass sexism; the problem is that superhero comics full of embarrassingly crass sexism, which should be a harmless niche in the comics ecosystem, have instead come to represent the entire medium, and fail to live up to the responsibilities of that prominence.

[Thad]

I'm not absolving anybody of anything; I'm saying you've got to pick your battles.  Responsibility in this country is treated with all the gravity and dedication as a pet rock, so calling people on it is unfortunately going to be one of the most ineffective tools in your arsenal.  I see far too many people dedicated to this tactic though and it's just kind of sad.

But it HAS worked.  I've already made the WIR point, and there's also the fact that one woman dressed like Batgirl managed to rattle the hell out of Dan Didio at last year's Con and leave DC furiously backpedaling.

Hell, a handful of creators getting together in the 1970's managed to shame DC into making permanent changes to how it handled royalties and attribution, and forced Marvel to (mostly) follow suit.

The important thing is to separate out the impotent wailing of fanboys who will buy your shit anyway from actual industrywide issues that are affecting your bottom line.  Rampant sexism falls squarely into the latter category, and the fact that the two biggest comics news sites on the Internet are beating this drum DOES mean something.

(Er, CA and CBR are the biggest, right?  And then probably Newsarama, though I haven't read it in years.)

[Ted Belmont]

I'm not absolving anybody of anything; I'm saying you've got to pick your battles.  Responsibility in this country is treated with all the gravity and dedication as a pet rock, so calling people on it is unfortunately going to be one of the most ineffective tools in your arsenal.  I see far too many people dedicated to this tactic though and it's just kind of sad.

But it HAS worked.  I've already made the WIR point, and there's also the fact that one woman dressed like Batgirl managed to rattle the hell out of Dan Didio at last year's Con and leave DC furiously backpedaling.

How many female writers has DC hired since then, anyway? Not trying to make a point here, I am legitimately curious if it had any lasting impact, or if they just paid lip service to the issue and continued on doing what they were doing.

[Mongrel]

I think that by far the best example I've ever heard about how it has a real impact on the bottom line was the parable about the little girl who starts watching animated DCU stuff and then moves on to the regular comics only to drop them in instant disgust, never to return to comics.

[Thad]

How many female writers has DC hired since then, anyway? Not trying to make a point here, I am legitimately curious if it had any lasting impact, or if they just paid lip service to the issue and continued on doing what they were doing.

Well, they've announced new stuff from Ann Nocenti and Amanda Conner, off the top of my head.  Not sure if there's more -- and God knows two women aren't enough -- but at least it's double what they initially announced.

EDIT: Nicola Scott on Earth-2, too.  That's still only up to 3 I can think of, but again, it's a start.

[Büge]

My point is that article starts right off with "men are athletes, women are porn stars" which doesn't seem quite right.  Even most football players don't quite resemble the perfectly toned stud beefcakes we see on those sample pages.

If I may pick at some nits for a moment: There are many different types of athletes. Male superheroes typically resemble MMA fighters more than anything else, with the occasional wrestler and bodybuilder.

[Rico]

That's only sort of true. Most MMA fighters who are ripped tend to have endurance problems in longer bouts or on the ground. Superhero musculature is grossly impractical and really the human ones ought to have artist thought put into which muscles would actually be developed by a character's skillset, but, well....

(The real life example, of course, being the millions of accusations of Lance Armstrong roiding out because of the benefits he got from being able to start over from scratch and specifically develop the muscles he needed for his particular sport)

[Brentoid]

Totally unrelated: Levi's gets in trouble for sticking its messages in a blender and setting it to frappé.

[Classic]

Maybe it's an irrelevant question, but... Why can't we see any of the model's faces in either ad?

[Shinra]

Maybe it's an irrelevant question, but... Why can't we see any of the model's faces in either ad?

Their faces are too fat for photography