Designated Sidekick

I know, I shut up for over a fortnight then two posts in one night. No consistency what so ever. Next up, I'll be liking Batman:Artists Against Decent Female Characters

During today's venture into the DC universe, I was chatting to my 'local' comic store guy (local as in 2000km from where I live, but hey, I know the guy who runs the shop, so it counts).

As it happens, I was trying to demonstrate the hideous hideousness of early to mid 90s Image comics (W.I.L.D.Cats, Adventures of DistortedBoobGirl and AwkwardBackTwistWoman and a few other titles that indicated the horror. Liefield. The horror, the pouchencrustedhorror).

BTW, Message to Gail Simone. I'm really really sorry he's drawing your work. Really. That said, when did Tim Drake get to start wearing Stephanie Brown's costume? Robin the Gender Interchange Wonder is kind of a cool concept, but I digress.

I really do digress don't I?

Anyway, after spending time in Ace Comics without actually buying anything (So I'll plug them instead), and in discussion with Jen (who what responds here and somewhat knows me in real life :), we came to the conclusion that what makes the Ace Comics work for us is that the crew in there really genuinely love comics. So when someone comes in, they're all about trying to share the sheer pleasure and fun they get from comics.

I can constrast this to my previous regular store, where it wasn't about the sheer love of the game, as much as it was a "Geekier than thou" mindset. Sure, in the 1990s, comics was a bit of a wasteland (Damn you Image), and frankly, much of my distaste for sexist comics came from that time (Incidentally, there was a very very cool woman who worked at the store who I really liked, even if she did call me Cerebus most of the time). The atmosphere of the old store was very much boys club, elitism, pecking orders and you needed to curry favour of the store upper echelon.

Given that I was part of the boys club, a white male middle class geek in a competitive field of comics geeks, and I found the place unpleasantly uncomfortable, any woman who came to the store would have had a bad time of it.

The thing is that the comics of DCU still represent that old store, and a lot of the independent and smaller franchises are about the new store. Pol could point me to good art, good stories, comics with women who were proportional to real people. (None wore primary coloured spandex, as he aptly put it)

The problem infesting the DCU is that they seem to have lost the joy that comes from comics, comicbook geekery, and the rest of the geek life. The celebration of the massively cool stuff that we get all a quiver and fanpeople drooling over because we're geeks.

Somewhere, somehow, they've equated "JOY" and "OMGSQUEE" with "Angsty" and "Character X, (usually Batman) is an iconic character so let's make him hateworthy and an asshole", and replaced good art with porn stills.

So really, you have to ask the question - why do the people apparently charged with making comics hate comics that much? Why do they want to have the clique elite, the power games and the small club house mentality?

I felt the big difference between the store of today and the old store was confidence. The store I was in today exuded confidence in itself, in being happy and proud of comics and the associated geekery, and wanting to share the joy of the experience. In contrast, I wonder if Dan DiDio's constant need to ruin the lives of fictional characters is derived from a lack of confidence that would let him leave happy characters having happiness for a while. Mebbe it's a confidence thing, or maybe DCU/Marvel are still stuck back in the early 1990s, where it was more important to be the cool kid in the store, up on the pecking order of nerds, geeks and outcasts (when, frankly, we were all outcasts).

Maybe a new generation of staff who feel confidence in the work they do, the medium they represent, and the stories they write are needed to lift comics from a shy, introspective outcast club into a vibrant, self confident medium.

I read *that* supergirl tradepaperback today. I'm not proud of it, but it happened*

Two things.

A. Supergirl's ever shrinking costume led me to a series of conclusions. These are
1) Supergirl is a shapeshifter, a la Clayface or Odo. Her skirt is actual shapechanging skin.
2) Supergirl wears no underwear, unless the waistband of said underwear is that gold belt.
3) Her real secret power is the ability to put old men into jail for child porn
4) There's a talentless hack drawing the character. This was made really obvious be SuperGirl, PowerGirl, Batgirl…and gods almighty, Robin, being so hideously drawn.
5) Same talentless hack has a fetish for men, as evidenced by the loving detail on the Batman as Conan crotch shot

B) There's a series need for a couple of well placed retirements (by age, serious wounding or death) amongst the DCU editorial. The Supergirl story line wasn't bad per se, and has one near perfect line from Beastboy summing up the Teen Titans. That said, I hated reading the comic because there's this horrific gulf between the story (Here's Supergirl coming into her own as a character, out of the shadow of Batman and Superman, and gaining her own reputation), and this disturbing oversexualised child parading around going "Look at me! I'm 14 and not wearing underwear…Don't YOU WANT ME?".

I worry about anyone who signed off the art on that series.

In other news, Tim Drake or Dick Grayson dies or goes insane this year**. Why do I know this? Every other character I've cared about in the DCU has died, and they're the last two left not to have a dirtnap vacation or turn heel.

The problem I'm finding in the DCU comicverse is that I breathe a sigh of relief when characters I like die, so they're temporarily safe from the clutches of the editorial mandate. There are one or two more characters who's deaths will come as a relief, simply because then the female characters (who periodically accidentally get good stories and well drawn portrayals, but most not) will be free from the risk of being redrawn as pornstars and blow up dolls.

It's a sad industry where you rejoice the death of a character as the salvation from the editorial mandate of crappy stories and worse costumes

*(That's the waffle house moment adapted from Bill Hicks)
** (Or gets transfered to an ensemble cast where only the worst aspect of their personality is used for the entire time they're in the book, thus making them a pathetic shadow of their real self)