C2E2 - COMICS!

Heading downtown today to the Chicago Comic Con ... as a journalist. I'll be meeting with Mikki Kendall to talk to her about diversity and genre and power and twitter and more, heading to a panel, and seeing what I can see.

Follow along with me on twitter and instagram.

Captain America: Humanities Major

From The Mary Sue, Alysa Auriemma has a lovely essay about Captain America (in the context of the comic "Civil War") and a new masculinity. After opening paragraphs on toxic masculinity and patriarchy, she writes:

Captain America not only navigates masculinity, but he completely subverts and ultimately rejects our contemporary conceptions of what it means to be a man, thereby creating a new kind of masculinity that demands self-inquiry, emotional empathy, and innate goodness. It’s not enough to just say Cap is an example of non-toxic masculinity, because what Cap does is redefine the binary of maleness. He’s not just an emblem for what not to be; he’s a roadmap of masculine possibility. 

It's a good essay and you should read it. But here's my favorite part [My emphasis]:

Steve, The Art Student

Many of the male, human Avengers specialize in math and sciences: Tony Stark is a brilliant electric engineer, and Bruce Banner holds a doctorate in nuclear physics. But prior to getting transformed into Captain America, Steve Rogers was an art student who was really into comics and illustration and was planning on getting fine arts degree. This focus on the humanities correlates to Steve already subverting our expectations. We think of Captain America as this beefcake who represents the best of us. Perhaps the “best of us” doesn’t have to always focus on STEM (although the push for more women and girls to get involved and recognized for their work in math and science disciplines is welcome), but on the ways in which we can discuss, theorize, and imagine the world, as well, through arts education. This major literally illustrates Steve’s optimism and hope and points out a reason why Steve would volunteer for Operation Rebirth in the first place. He sees the world how it could be, which leads him to ultimately transform into Captain America.

That's right. Steve Rogers, whose path to heroism came from being good, is a humanities major.

Also he's my son's favorite (Image Descriptions: Three pictures of my son in various poses, wearing a Captain America shirt and Captain America swimsuit).

 

Daredevil is Blind

Foggy Nelson: "A blind old man taught you the ancient ways of martial arts. Isn't that the plot to Kung Fu?" (Marvel's Daredevil, Netflix, Episode 10)

I've got a review of "Scenes of ordinary disability" in Daredevil coming out later today from Vice. Edit - Link is here!!

In today's blog, I want to say a few more things about the nature of Matt Murdock/Daredevil's disability. Yes, thanks to his heightened senses, he can create a full map of his space in real time, helping him with Kung-Fu, knowing if people are nodding or flicking him off, and otherwise navigating the world just fine. He's a superhero. He can do things that real humans, blind or not, cannot do. In the show, it's his hearing that gets the most play - he tracks a car based on the music inside it while running over the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen. He hears Kingpin talking on a radio inside a truck from some distance away. These are cool superpowers!

But what he can't do is read a license plate.
He can't read a digital alarm clock.
He can't read a message printed on his cell phone.

I emphasize this because I think it's easy to miss the ways in which Murdock is in disabled. And if you miss that, you also miss the ways in which he's got little bits of assistive technology that help.

He uses a refreshable Braille display.

Image: Refreshable Braille display. From Wikimedia Commons

He uses a screen reader (a program that reads words on computer screens as well as provides other kinds of command information. It's why I put descriptions of images on my page, as I know I have some blind readers. And honestly, all websites should do it all the time).

His cell phone talks to him. "Karen calling. Karen calling." His alarm clock talks to him. "It's 7 o'clock."

These are just small little bits of assistive technology that make independent living more possible for blind people.

And so while Murdock is a superhero, he's still blind. He still has a disability.

And that's why how Marvel/Netflix represents his blindness matters so much to me and to so many people in the disability community, because however you count it, he's one of the two or three most prominent disabled characters in comics history (Professor X - his legs, not his mutant powers, Daredevil, and Oracle/Batgirl).

Previous item: Comics, Disability, and Race.

Edit: Updated to correct assistive tech terminology.

Super Rowan - Anatomy of a Viral Tweet

It started when Rowan's father posted her letter to Facebook and encouraged people to share it. I said, "how viral do you want to go? Like, I know an editor at The Mary Sue, and other places." He replied, "Do it." So I posted it to the blog and made this tweet below. Then I tagged various high-profile people using the "link to the tweet" feature, so that they would RT the original if possible, and let the awesome content of the letter do the work.

Please RT: An 11 year old girl writes to @DCComics - Girls read comics too, and they care. http://t.co/P6fhuHPDYa pic.twitter.com/gxqUDGlEBm
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 28, 2015

This tweet has received well over 1000 re-tweets (RTs are the vehicle by which tweets spread from user to user). Related tweets (especially from @chriswarcraft on Twitter) have gotten dozens. The piece, which of course people have to click through to find, is the third-most read in the history of my blog, with thousands of views. It's been covered on HeroicGirls.com, The Mary Sue, Slashfilm.com, Comic Book Resources, Nerdspan (with the fun title - how DC Comics can make Rowan happy), Cinema Blend, and surely others.

DC Comics responded with the following two tweets (to their over a million followers):

Thanks Rowan. We agree, we’re working hard to create more superhero fun for girls!
— DC Comics (@DCComics) January 30, 2015

Yes Rowan, girls read comics too! Wonder Woman movie & Supergirl TV both in the works, with more exciting girl power announcements soon!
— DC Comics (@DCComics) January 30, 2015

The best piece of journalism on Rowan's letter came from The Daily Dot's Lisa Granshaw. I put Lisa in touch with Rowan's family, and Granshaw did a great job putting the letter in context, as well as answering some of the questions about how Rowan wrote it. Granshaw writes:

The lack of women heroes in a collectible set of Justice League chibi action figures inspired Rowan to write her letter. She told her parents one day that she spent her bus ride home from school “thinking about a letter she wanted to write to DC about these chibis.”
“She sat down right away and started to write," Renée said. "She stopped from time to time to ask her dad if a particular sentence sounded ok, but apart from that it was entirely her own work. In fact, she was a little worried that people wouldn't believe it was written by a kid, so we made sure not to interfere. But we were extremely proud of her for taking the time to write about something that was important to her, instead of just being frustrated about it.”

So - Rowan wrote this herself.  That's important to note, as a number of people in tweets and comments have implied or outright stated otherwise.

Also - she wrote it about DC because she likes DC. Yes, she could have written about gender issues in Marvel or whatever, but she likes the DC female characters and wants more of them.

Next, from the same piece, there's this:

“The things is, it's not that there are no female superheroes," Renée said. "There are lots of them, as comics fans know. But in terms of what's available for kids when you walk into Target or Toys-R-Us, the superhero world looks pretty exclusively male. That's frustrating for girls who are fans; the boys can wear their favorite superhero all the time, but to this day we've never seen a Hawkgirl T-shirt for kids. It makes the girls feel like they're not important in the comics world, and that's hard when it's something that they love so much. Frankly, Rowan doesn't like not being taken seriously.”

That's such a key point. Plenty of people (though a small fraction of the hundreds of interactions I've now had about this tweet) criticized the letter by pointing out how many female characters there were in the DC Universe. This doesn't in fact contradict Rowan's letter, but is Rowan's point. She loves Hawkgirl. Where's the Hawkgirl merchandise?

So next we see whether DC lives up to their tweeted promise. The letter is still rolling around the internet, and it wouldn't surprise me for it to pick up more steam if the right folks notice. It's also, as the many links above note, just part of a much bigger conversation about gender and comics, or gender and geekdom more broadly. Here are my questions.

1. What, specifically, does DC have planned to address the gender issues in their product lines? That's the easy question to answer.

2. Has DC done any hard thinking about the systemic issues behind the lack of strong product lines and shows for girls?

Because you can roll out six or seven new shows, movies, and more t-shirts. You can hire some women to write, do art, and direct. You can invest in diversity. But if you don't de-stablize the corporate culture that led you astray in the first place, that consistently de-emphasized female characters, or sexualized them, or put them only in pink and purple settings ... the new products and shows will likewise fall prey to that culture.

Good luck, DC. We'll be watching.

Update: Covered in the Telegraph. Covered by BuzzFeed. Covered by Mic.com. Headline News. Huffington Post.  The Independent. And many more. If you see an interesting one, let me know!

Update 2: At Mommyish.com, there's a good piece which makes the following point.

Meanwhile, just a few tweets later, the company posted this thrilling news about new animated projects with accompanying toy line-ups:

Count ‘em up: that’s five dudes and exactly zero lady-people. The other project, not depicted in the Tweet, is a new version of the Justice League line-up, which has six guys and one token, albeit Wonder-ful, Woman. 8% women? Yeah, that ‘girl power’ is almost palpable.

I am as skeptical as this author.