← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 7899 | Posts: 17 | Started: 2003-07-06
2003-07-06 05:18 | User Profile
[color=purple]As far as I'm concerned, it's official. I wouldn't let a kid come within a mile of a comic book these days. (Which was - let's be honest - a fait accompli once Hollywood began embracing comics a decade ago.) They want your kids, they want them turned queer or - failing that - race-mixing. Ad no one is willing to risk the wrath and/or the derision of a hydra-headed media by saying so. Literally everything of charm and innocence and bedrock values is grist for SodAmerica's mill now. And seemingly the state of childhood itself is now the open target. They ought to be honest and change that slogan to "leave no child's behind".
Anybody who doesn't understand that these are all the initial steps to the eventual normalization of pedophilia is a fool. Almost as much a fool as those who refuse to acknowledge the interdependant link between pedophilia and homosexuality. They're so close now - closer than they could've ever dreamed a generation ago - than they can almost taste the spicy tang of Junior's twelve year old rectum.[/color]
[url=http://www.sfbg.com/37/39/cover_superqueer.html]http://www.sfbg.com/37/39/cover_superqueer.html[/url]
Sidekicks, mutants, and goddesses What makes superhero culture so queer.
By Annalee Newitz IT'S A WARM Friday afternoon, and people are drifting in and out of Comix Experience, a large, airy comic book store on Divisadero Street. A teenager is thumbing through back issues of Wolverine, and a woman is beaming into the pages of a Strangers in Paradise collection. Meanwhile, at the counter, there's the usual ongoing comic book geek banter. Some days you might overhear a penetrating analysis of the X-Men; others, you might find yourself drawn into a debate about which issue of Dork is the most psychotic. Today, Brian Hibbs, the irrepressible store owner, and Jeff Lester, his wisecracking sidekick, are deep in a serious discussion of queerness in comics.
"The shock value is gone," Hibbs says. "When Northstar [a mutant hero from Alpha Flight and now a member of the X-Men] came out almost a decade ago, it was kind of shocking. But now you see characters in comics who are gay all the time." **Today there are ongoing gay characters in mainstream titles like Superman (Maggie Sawyer, head of the Metropolis Police Department's Special Crimes Unit, is a lesbian), The Flash (communist ex-villain Pied Piper came out recently), and The Incredible Hulk (Hector, part of a superhero family called the Pantheon, is gay). Plus, Hibbs and Lester say, wildly successful series like The X-Men, with its several spin-offs, not only have gay characters but also "have a huge gay readership because the substance of the book is all about being alienated and trying to fit in, and you can read a very pro-gay message into it." **
Ever since a conservative doctor named Fredric Wertham started making noises in the 1940s about the homosexual subtexts in many comic books, comic book geeks have known ââ¬â or feared ââ¬â that there was something just a little queer about their textual preferences. It's hard to deny the sexual implications in books that follow the adventures of nerds with secret identities and social outcasts with superpowers. It wasn't until the 1970s that you began to see underground comic books with openly gay characters, and Northstar didn't punch his way out of the closet in Alpha Flight until the early 1990s. But the plots of perennial favorites like Batman nevertheless had what Xena: Warrior Princess devotees like to call "the subtext." Indeed, the queer subtexts of comics are what make these fantasies of heroism compelling. What we read as "queer" in the lives of superheroes are all those things that make them vulnerable, different, and ultimately human.
And now superheroic queerness is writ large all across U.S. popular culture. As critics never tire of remarking, Hollywood has been crazy about comic book characters for the past several years. We've seen movies, TV series, and video games that center on fantasy heroes like the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Daredevil, who are taken from actual comic books; we've also been introduced to characters like Neo (from The Matrix), Buffy, and the Terminator, who are cinematic originals but act as if they've been ripped from the pages of some Marvel title. Indeed, TV superhero Buffy has inspired at least three comic book series and a few graphic novels.
Not so innocent If we believe Wertham's assertion that there is something essentially queer about superheroes, it makes a strange kind of sense that queerness is becoming acceptable in mainstream culture at about the same time comic books are. Once the province of socially awkward boys in back rooms, comics are now the sort of thing regular people read on the subway. Queers, too, are more visible than ever in North America. Homosexual marriage has finally been legalized in Canada, and top-rated TV show Will and Grace has brought more queers into typical American living rooms than ACT-UP ever did. Perhaps the figure of the queer is alluring for the same reasons the superhero is. Both are misunderstood, secretive, and dashing; often they live just outside the law. Of course, there's one significant difference between real-life queers and comic book characters: in the fantasy world of comic books, the superhero always wins.
Wertham's 1954 book, The Seduction of the Innocent, explicitly blamed comic books for creating a generation of sexually perverse juvenile delinquents. He was particularly unhappy about the relationship between Batman and Robin, as well as the improper messages Wonder Woman was sending to young girls. Although comic book historians often blame Wertham for the abysmal sales of comic books in the 1950s, one could just as easily credit him with codifying the kinds of scenarios that ultimately make comics successful. It's telling that in the year after The Seduction of the Innocent scandalized the nation, one of the most popular movies of adolescent angst ever made, Rebel Without a Cause, drew its power from a surprisingly Batman-like plot: brooding hero with an excellent car and family trauma engages in heart-stopping acts of courage while his boyish, homoerotic sidekick looks on adoringly.
At least in the universe of Batman, the crushed-out sidekick doesn't have to be shot, and the hero's parents are no longer around to torment him. You can see why kids might turn to comic books for self-affirmation.
Trina Robbins, a feminist comic book historian and author of one of the first-ever comics about lesbians, says the single most influential comic book for her before the 1970s was Wonder Woman. Created in the '40s by William Moulton Marston ââ¬â who also, incidentally, invented the lie detector test ââ¬â **Wonder Woman was about "women working with women," Robbins says. "She's an amazon, she comes from a world of women, and certainly it's hinted that it might be a world where women love women too." Robbins is displeased by what she sees as the cluelessness of today's Wonder Woman comic: "I think straight men have been really intimidated by her, so DC has had to increase her breast size and shorten her skirts. None of the guys [since Marston] have really understood her. Now she worships Zeus, but why would she do that? Her mythic origin is woman-centric; she only worships goddesses."
Of course, as Robbins points out, men have been inspired by Wonder Woman too. "Strong women and gay men love her," she says. **"There are always so many Wonder Women at the Halloween party in the Castro every year. And why not be someone really interesting if you're going to do drag?"
At Comix Experience I ask Hibbs and Lester what they think about the Wonder Woman subtext. "Look at some of this old stuff ââ¬â it's really full of sexual imagery where the woman is in charge," Lester says, showing me images from a bound collection of the 1940s comic books. A woman buying a comic book from Hibbs overhears our conversation and grins conspiratorially at us. "Transformation Island," she says with a laugh, referring to the island off the coast of Wonder Woman's birthplace, Paradise Island, where Wonder Woman brings criminals to reform them. Often this rehabilitation takes the form of rather sexy-looking bondage and a lot of oddly enthusiastic groveling. Sometimes former arch-villains have to eat and drink out of dishes on the floor. The prettily tied-up figures look like they could have been borrowed from 1950s S-M magazine Exotica.
Marston's unconventional relationships with his wife and his lover ââ¬â who knew about each other and were quite content with the arrangement ââ¬â taught him that women benefited from autonomy and freedom. Wonder Woman was his self-conscious effort to teach women they could be as strong and heroic as men. Although there are a lot of homoerotic scenes in the early comic book, mostly featuring naughty villains and schoolgirls, what made Wonder Woman so damn queer was its heroine Diana's easy self-confidence in a pop cultural landscape littered with timid secretaries, femmes fatales, and domesticated mothers.
Superheroes and sodomy If contemporary Wonder Woman comic books haven't made good on their early feminist promise, the contemporary superhero-goddess from Promethea does. Written by comic book auteur Alan Moore (famous for titles like Watchmen, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Promethea is a mythic figure conjured generation after generation by artists who turn into her by depicting her in pictures or writing. Sophie discovers her Promethean powers one day when she writes a poem about the superhero and suddenly finds herself endowed with tremendous strength and a magical caduceus.
Juggling college homework with superpowers, though, begins to wear on Sophie so much that she takes a trip into the Immateria, the realm of the imagination where Promethea was originally conceived. She leaves her best friend Stacia in charge of being Promethea while she's gone, which leads to a rather bizarre lesbian plot twist wherein Stacia falls in love with an earlier incarnation of Promethea, Grace, who has been sent to watch over her in Sophie's absence. The whole mess is resolved ââ¬â weirdly ââ¬â in the court of King Solomon. Promethea remains one of the most compelling meditations on heroism and the imagination you would hope to find on the shelves of a comic book store.
Moore's comic books have never shied away from homosexual plot lines. In the latest issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ââ¬â which is a far cry from the sanitized version you'll see on-screen later this summer ââ¬â Mr. Hyde complains about Dr. Jekyll's repressed homosexuality and then proceeds to anally rape the Invisible Man in a scene that ends with a spectacularly graphic murder. color=blue[/color]
While Moore plays with the complexities of queerness, **the principal struggle in the X-Men books is simple enough for anyone even glancingly familiar with queer politics to recognize. As Erik Dussere notes in an article on Salon.com, the battle between Professor Xavier and arch-nemesis Magneto is a fantasy version of the clash between gay-marriage assimilationists and radical queer activists. Xavier wants the mutants to be decent, quiet people accepted by mainstream society, while Magneto thinks all mutants should flaunt their powers and use them to rule over humans. **
What readers can identify as queerness in their favorite characters from, say, X-Men, isn't necessarily a sexual orientation, although it can be. It's these characters' difference, their otherness ââ¬â the thing that makes them strong but also makes it impossible for them to ever find true companionship among ordinary people. Hibbs says he's had a lot of conversations about this issue when customers ask him which comic books are interesting for black people. "A lot of my customers are black," he explains, "and sometimes they want to know which authors are black, which illustrators, what have you. But the fact is that the most popular comic book among black readers by far is Thor, who is about as Aryan as you can get. I think it's because people buy characters that they like ââ¬â if they're black or gay or whatever, that's great. But people identify more with plot lines and situations, not characters per se."
Clearly there is something to this, although it rankles queer fans that so many openly gay comic book characters are either marginal or ridiculous. The Flash's nemesis-turned-buddy Pied Piper has appeared in the series on and off for decades but is hardly a main character. And the recently released Rawhide Kid, about a flamboyant, queeny western action hero, is at best drearily campy and at worst, according to Lester, "played for fanboy homophobia." There are no mainstream comic books devoted entirely to gay characters. Enigma, about a character whose superpowers make him gay, offers a fascinating portrait of super-queerdom but was only a limited series. Love and Rockets and Strangers in Paradise, series that feature a number of strong gay characters, are in the vein of graphic novels. Their real-life characters and situations are a far cry from the action-packed fantasies of superhero comic books. Open queerness doesn't seem to mesh with superhero-ness very well.
Comics are good for you And yet, according to former comic book writer Gerard Jones, queer kids turn to superheroes for a sense of identity. "Fantasy characters let kids try on different selves, and for kids going through sexual- and gender-identity questions, having openly queer characters in comic books gives them even more selves to try on," explains Jones, who recently published an anti-Wertham book on the psychological importance of superhero fantasies called Killing Monsters: Why Kids Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes and Make-Believe Violence. His main concern is that gay characters in comics are treated so "ham-handedly," their potential complexity reduced to the level of an after-school special.
"When Northstar came out, it could have been useful, but they reduced it to an easy political line about gay bashing versus tolerance," Jones says. "They deflated a complex character by just doing a story about queerness and its implications ââ¬â it's like doing a nonwhite character and everything is about that. But you need to get some of the messiness and complexity of the world in there. Being gay isn't just about 'being gay.' " Jones recalls his favorite queer plot line in some books he wrote for Justice League. In the story two of the characters were best friends who identified as heterosexual but whose friends all assumed they were gay. "I had fun with that. They didn't want to be uncool and say, 'We're straight,' but there was some anxiety. I like to see heterosexual characters being forced to relate to queerness in different ways."
As long as the queer heroes keep on coming ââ¬â whether their sexuality is part of a subtext or out in the open ââ¬â it's certain that heterosexuals will be dealing with them. **A nice, healthy dose of The X-Men or Promethea might be just what we need to make queerness as ubiquitous and extraordinary as comic books. **
Of course, the idea that comic books might be good for us is still as radical as it was back in the 1950s. Hollywood is pumping out superheroes, but meanwhile Congress continues to hold hearings about whether the comic-style bloodshed of video games is causing adolescent violence. Indeed, conservative critics have often intimated that part of what was so "sick" about the Columbine shooters ââ¬â aside from their obsession with becoming caped crusaders ââ¬â was their intense relationship with each other. Outside the politely homophobic meeting rooms of Washington, D.C., young comic book nerds are routinely called faggots by their less imaginative peers.
What remains certain is that there is still something profoundly affecting about the simple stories of power and vulnerability that animate the pages of even the silliest comic books. As long as these stories are inspiring bravery among the oppressed, and fear in the hearts of the authorities, our superheroes are doing something right.
2003-07-06 07:46 | User Profile
If we want to keep White kids from being violated & corrupted, we have to find a way to get back into the position from which we can force these filthy perverts to make this stark choice: into the closet, or into the grave.
2003-07-06 10:11 | User Profile
Yes this sick! I saw some queers on TV taking about how great it is they have gotten into mainstream comic books and how good this will be for kids. [img]http://forum.originaldissent.com/style_images/1/icon8.gif[/img]
2003-07-06 11:10 | User Profile
[color=purple][SIZE=3]"Anally rapes the Invisible Man before graphically murdering him"??!!??!![/color][/SIZE]
As Poe said..."For the love of God, Montresor!"
And don't presume for a minute that kids aren't reading this tripe. But even if they weren't, what possible readership could be entertained by this? "Adults"? Psychopaths is more like it.
So much for 'hip, edgy' Alan Moore.
Dear God..."Mr Hyde anally rapes the Invisible Man". We are a looong way from Kansas, Toto. We couldn't GET any further!
2003-07-06 18:19 | User Profile
Hmm...maybe I won't be seeing LXG after all. :(
[SIZE=1]Sanitized or not, I'm sure Moore is getting a cut of the profits.[/SIZE] :thd:
2003-07-06 18:26 | User Profile
Truly horrifying.
When I was a kid my parents would tear up any comics that made their way into our home. Instead we read the works of Tolkien, Homer, Twain. More kids should be so lucky.
2003-07-06 21:58 | User Profile
Hey -- are youse suggestin' that faggoty pillow-biting adventures are not as neat-o as the Jews claim them to be? That aimed-at-juveniles fudgepacking narrative is something less than wholesome? That the Yiddish custodians of our popular culture do not know what's best for us goyim?
D-oh!
[hmmmm, hmmmm -- humming the love theme from the new TV comedy series "Steve and Paul: Roommates...And So Much More"]
2003-07-06 23:12 | User Profile
The only comic I ever read when I was younger was Archie.
2003-07-07 05:43 | User Profile
Robbie,
The only comic I ever read when I was younger was Archie.
Well, for now you do not have not worry about Archie. Archie Comics has rules that no drug use or drinking can happen in the storys and that all characters must be virgins.
2003-07-07 06:07 | User Profile
Two of my favorites were Iron Fist & Sgt. Rock.
Hmm. In light of my subsequent understanding of the use of comics as a vehicle for fag agitprop, those titles acquire a whole new meaning....
2003-07-07 19:53 | User Profile
NB, when my friends and I were teenagers, we would drive by a local fag theater and see some of the most bizarret titles on the marquee, or so we thought. We realized that any title, andy name, any term, can sound faggy depending on the ... hehehe ... how/where it is used. Driving by the theater, we would fire off any term, title or word that came to mind; Parent Teacher Conference, Track Meet, can opener, fire sale... you name it. Everything sounded gay when put in the context of being on that theater's marquee. Unfortunately, it's now no longer a joke.
2003-07-08 10:19 | User Profile
Roy: Yeah, frootz befoul everything the come into contact with. "You had a GAY time? Hehehe...."
Last night I watched a history of comic books on the Hitler Channel. Mein Gott, it was one ugly zhid after another in an endless pickle snoot cavalcade. They laid it all out, boasting that "we fought Hitlah before America did!" with Superman & Captain America. They mentioned the S&M in Wonder Woman and the "unorthodox" home life of its creator. They also got into their advocacy of snivel rites, faggotry & gun control from the 60s onward. The whole industry in nothing but a seething hive of nation-destroying k-kes & leftist race-traitor scumbags.
2003-07-08 15:10 | User Profile
*As long as these stories are inspiring bravery among the oppressed, and fear in the hearts of the authorities, our superheroes are doing something right.*
Yeah, liberals/leftists just [u]hate[/u] authority--when it's doing what it's supposed to be doing, like keeping [url=http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_the_racial_profiling.html]criminal Negroes off the streets[/url]. But if someone--especially a White male--makes a "racist," "sexist", or "homophobic" remark, then all of a sudden it's "Officer, arrest that man! He just called me a [u]FAG[/u]!" :rolleyes:
2003-07-08 18:43 | User Profile
I too liked SGT ROCK. The character wasn't particularly superhuman the way Marvel's ripoff SGT FURY was and didn't relentlessly demonize the enemy; and the art (Joe Kubert covers, Russ Heath interiors) was uniformly terrific. This was around the time DC was running a sympathetic German character, ENEMY ACE, as well....and a strip sympathetic to the South in THE HAUNTED TANK, in which the tank commander was guided by the ghost of Jeb Stuart. Those DC war books weren't quite as gung-ho as they might have seemed.
But I continue to be aghast that John Severin would've been party to that homo Western title. I've read elsewhere that gays were horrified by the book and its 'homophobia', however....so perhaps it derided poofters (which would make me feel a lot better about Severin's participation).
2003-07-08 21:02 | User Profile
There was no way on Earth a 12-cent war comic published in America 30-40 years ago was ever going to take the side of the German Army. Remove the ideologies and it's still an opposing army regardless. You seem to think there was no reason kids couldn't buy THRILLING AXIS STORIES in the 50s & 60s, which is ridiculous. You can find more logical targets for your ire.
Additionally, the DC war books were almost uniformly created and written by Robert Kanigher, who wasn't Jewish.
2003-07-09 01:49 | User Profile
Yeah I know Moore's a good writer. I liked his BOJEFFRIES SAGA, WATCHMEN, 1963, etc.
He's also an Englishman who celebrates England's new 'diversity', a feminist, a gun-grabber (you're kidding yourself if you think Moore's 'racism' and 'sexism' is any more than a satirical put-on) and - most tellingly - a petulant whiner for 'creator's rights' in the comics field.
Please explain to me how radically 'revising' the creations of Verne, Wells, Stoker et al towards ends that would have those creators spinning in their graves...without kicking over a nickel to any of their estates, btw - doesn't make him a complete fu**ing hypocrite on an issue so beloved to him, he has publicly spewed his ire at every major who'd published his work when he was first making a name for himself.
Note also that not I but the article's author committed the 'spoiler' in question....and also note the sadistic delight and glee in which HE wrenched this salient plot point wholly out of context, to be held to the light and savored as 'one for our side'.
Yes, Moore's work is 'not for children'. Neither is Eminem's. But only a naif would pretend that kids have no access to either due to an all-powerful PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker.
2003-07-09 07:51 | User Profile
I must cede. I stopped reading war comics as a kid in the early 70s and can cite no extended credit listings. As I may have hinted, I paid more attention to artwork than story anyway. Kanigher was an Irishman, I believe. He's been dead for some time now. I'm frankly surprised they continued running into the 1980s; war comics, like Westerns, were fast petering out in the early 70s.
By the way - if these were all so offensive to you, even as a child....then why in the world do you still have your copies?