Comics should be better. We should be better.
Laura Hudson, editor-in-chief of Comics Alliance, is brilliant, correct, and heartbreaking:
Female characters are only insatiable, barely-dressed aliens and strippers because someone decided to make them that way.
Even a casual scroll down my Twitter feed or the front page of this blog should make it pretty clear how much I love comics in general and superheroes in particular. More than that, I believe in superheroes. I think they play an important role in our culture—after all, they’re morality tales, in which the strongest among us do the right thing just because it’s the right thing. What better purpose is there for art, even if it’s commercial?
And yet.
DC’s highly-publicized relaunch of their entire line was supposed to be about breaking down the walls around superhero comics. It was supposed to be about inviting the rest of the world in. It was supposed to be about putting aside that hard-won 21st-century cynicism and showing people something better, even if it was “unrealistic.”
As Laura so eloquently points out, DC has failed in this endeavor. Instead of aspirational stories that try and highlight our better selves, we’re given bad pornography. We’re shown a 14-year-old boy’s perception of maturity. It’s motion without thought, action without meaning or consequence or consideration.
I don’t want to admit that I read these comics. I’m glad they’re available via iPad, so no one can see the covers. This is a kind of shame I’ve never felt before. It’s not the bright colors. It’s not the silly costumes (which, I swear, are even sillier now). It’s not the ham-handed themes, or the cartoon morality.
It’s that feeling that only comes from losing faith in something that you so badly want to believe in. Think about the first day you realized that your parents were actual, fallible human beings who might one day die. Think about the morning when you finally understood just how badly you broke someone’s heart. When you realized that you were the villain in someone else’s story, rather than the hero of your own.
That’s what this is, for me, and I can only imagine how much worse it must be for Laura. I’m privileged as hell (white, male, American, etc.), and I feel this like a cardiac arrhythmia. How much worse must this be for Laura, and for everyone else?
These are fictional characters. They’re made of intention, just as we’re made of atoms. They are nothing that someone has not told them to be.
And when given the chance to try and show the best of us, this is what we turn them into.
Source: comicsalliance.com
