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The recent announcement by Marvel Comics of the upcoming release of Girl Comics was one apparently
met by a bit of controversy, if one stretches the definition of controversy to include what people say in comment sections of internet blog postings. Although I've got no problem providing a
link to a sampling of some of the comments, I refuse to actually read all of them and attempt some form of a summary.
(After a quick skim, I will say I was disappointed to find out how loose some people's definition of a "crazy free-for-all of sexist insanity" has become--no matter how nasty some people might have gotten about this particular item, there are people on youtube who have spent over three months leaving hateful comments about how awesome they think it is that a ten year old girl, born with a litany of painful birth defects, had suffered an inconceivable amount of pain prior to her death. People might have said sexist, repugnant things about the Girl Comics idea, I wouldn't doubt that they spat them with vigor, but 15 seconds on google shows that they were still playing by Queensbury's delightful rules.)
It's not difficult to see why the rhetoric can so often go in a negative direction, as so much of it had gone
a mere week prior following DC's announcement of the Earth One graphic novel initiative. When the Big Two companies make a fuss about something, and that fuss can in any way be perceived as a movement towards correcting a problem, the initial responses are certain to contain a healthy slice of contempt.
But why? After all, it isn't as if DC had said "we're going to do a bunch of new Batman and Superman stories" and then added "and we're going to print them on the skin of your lover", and it wasn't as if Marvel said "we're doing a comic with a bunch of female creators, and after that, we're going to stop publishing comics where Wolverine gets to have a bewildering amount of sex with women who are completely out of his league." All that happened was that two companies--both of which are in the business of making money and are somewhat responsible to their shareholders--announced that they were going to add more items to their product line. There's more drama to be found in NBC's decision to replace all of their 10:00PM programming with the mental toilet that is the Jay Leno Show, because that meant an actual reduction in scheduled programming. There's no evidence that the Girl Comics mini-series or the Earth One graphic novels are replacing
anything, and common sense indicates that both items are being designed to appeal to people who aren't currently purchasing other products, as well as their regular customers.
DC's and Marvel's business strategies for the last twenty years (and this decade especially) have been focused on maximizing the amount of money that they can make off their most committed audience members. That's not a theory. And when those companies decide to make a move towards rectifying that, or when there's a perception that that feeling might be the motivating force behind a new product or a product change, a portion of the loyal audience seems to take it as a personal attack, albeit a veiled one. It isn't that the audience actively wishes women shouldn't make Marvel comics, or that the audience doesn't want to see Geoff Johns and Gary Frank do a new Batman graphic novel. It almost reads as if the audience is upset that their loyalty has been thrown under the bus.
The easy response to that negativity is to immediately blame those who feel "betrayed" as acting like children, and part of that ease comes from accuracy, because, well, it is childish to want things to never change. But while some of those feelings of betrayal may be deserving of ridicule, it's worth recalling that much of the source for that feeling stems from the fashion in which both DC & Marvel constructed their fan-dependent publishing model. Both of the Big Two expect, need and crave company-focused consumers, an audience that gets all of their comics needs met by the products they have to offer. (Hence the reason for the existence of Vertigo, hence the reason for the existence of Icon & Soleil.) They want you to come to their house, and only their house, and they want you to stay there forever, preferably in a sleeping bag featuring one of their characters while wearing the matching underwear.
It's the super-hero comics, you see. (Does this kind of rancor meet anything else?) It's about the fact that any and every time that Marvel or DC attempt to get out of the fan-catered bucket they created all on their own, part of those decisions come with the implicit statement that the people who keep low-selling super-hero comics alive, the people who pay too much money for a product that suffers constant fluctuation in quality, that those people ain't good enough. Not enough of them are girls, for one. There's all those people who bought that Arkham Asylum video game but didn't pick up Battle for the Cowl, for the other. It's almost like the people spending all that money every week aren't also making sure to spend a couple of weekends a month convincing other people to take a chance on The Great Ten.
Whenever DC or Marvel slaps their fanbase with the old "we gotta get something new happening", it's the equivalent of a guy coming home to a wife that he treats like crap and saying, after all these years of her handling all that cooking/cleaning/humping stuff, he thinks he wants a bit of variety. And then he shows her the apartment he's going to be staying at on the weekend, and would she like to meet the crazy hot Brazilian model he met at the Major Lazer show? Should regular Big Two fans take it as a personal insult when a new super-hero product is designed for an audience that's not them? Of course not. But that's logical, and being a fan isn't about logic. It's about emotion, and that's not unique to comics.
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Look, nobody's going to see me walking the picket line with a guy who spends 100 bucks on Blackest Night: More Crap Featuring Zombie Terra. But for what it's worth, I'm not about to get in line to shake hands with whoever came up with the bright idea to publish something that showcases the fact that Marvel hires female cartoonists. Hey, I would've loved to be there and applaud when they tore those "Whites Only" signs off the water fountains in Atlanta, but that doesn't mean I'll be dancing in the streets of Crown Heights just because Black Lightning got a Year One series. Nobody throws me a party just because I made it to work on time, and you don't deserve one for only being 15 minutes late. Making a decision to publish a Batman graphic novel that won't include Ragman or any of those other thirty superheroes who fight crime in Gotham City isn't exactly a paradigm shift either. These are business decisions, and while one of them might have a lateral sociological benefit, it's not like either company had to wait until 2009 for the world to be ready. They should've done them both a long time ago, and they don't deserve any esteem for figuring it out now.Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
