Comix – Page 19 – Wis[s]e Words

Chelsea Cain shows you how to not handle criticism

Published on June 10, 2019Leave a comment

Eagle Eyed viewers noticed something strange in the latest issue of Chelsea Cain’s Man-Eaters, a dystopian satire about how menstruation turns pubescent women into werepanthers:

First panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

In case you can’t read that, those are two mildly critical tweets about Man-Eaters hung on the walls of a rehabilitation centre for menstruators. Chelsea Cain breaking the fourth wall there to really own the person who wrote those tweets. (I won’t link to these tweets directly; they are googable if you really want to see them). Note that both of them are from the same person, a reader who didn’t tweet at Chelsea Cain directly, has fewer followers than even I have and only expressed mild disappointment that Man-Eaters wasn’t better than it was. Why feel the need to blow it all up by including them in the issue without approval and hence expose both them and your own inability to handle criticism to a much wider, much more hostile audience? Why do this to yourself?

Second panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

It’s not as if Cain herself doesn’t know what it feels like to be a target of harassment. On Metafilter last year I posted an interview in which she talked about her own experiences being harassed for being outspoken feminist in her work for Marvel. Sure, she left the poster’s identity off the tweets she put in the comic, but as said, a simple search on that first sentence in the first tweet will find the originals. Fortunately for the original poster, the comix community so far has responded with horror at Cain and they seem to have suffered little consequences so far other than the stress of knowing a big name comic creator tried to sick their fans at you.

Whether the criticism is warranted doesn’t enter into it. The problem is that Chelsea Cain took the same right wing harassment tactics used against her and attempted to silence a critic, one with a much smaller following than she has. Once the backlash against that started this weekend she was quick to apologise and throw a pity party for herself for being so dumb, but she never once contacted the person she actually wronged before she deleted her twitter account. It’s not a good look, but you also have to wonder why her editor, publisher, or even whoever had to cut and paste those tweets into the panels in the first place didn’t drew Cain aside to ask her if she really thought this through? American comics are a cesspit of unprofessionalism but this is low even by their standards.

UPDATE: for those wanting to read a good analysis of what’s wrong with Man-Eaters as a comic and story, including its gender essentialism, may I recommend Véronique Emma Houxbois’ review of the series, written before #9 came out.

The dumbest take

Published on December 28, 2018Leave a comment

This is silly:

complaining about Peni Parker being too anime when that is the whole point

My only Spider Verse regret was watching the woman of color Spider (Peni Parker) become an “anime amiright?!” gag instead of a… normal person like in her comic? (Sorry y’all, I worship Spider Verse, but nothing’s perfect out here.)

First, as the Pedantic Romantic points out, she isn’t a “normal person” in her original comic either and the picture used to illustrate this tweet is actually … an Evangelion reference. Second, the idea that a character based in an anime/manga rather than a comics background is immediately a gag character. Third, the idea that the more grim and gritty image is better than the more cutesy re-imagining as shown in the movie. It’s not far removed from the similar complaints about the SJWs ruining She-Ra with its new art style. Mainly this seems a well intentioned but misguided criticism, rooted perhaps in a slight disdain for modern anime: too cutesy, too moe, too feminine perhaps.

Peni Parker

Some people also criticised having the movie Peni Parker’s first dialogue being in Japanese, but a) she is Japanese-american, b) it’s a decent enough meta joke since everybody in anime always speaks Japanese the same way everybody in comics speaks English and c) Peni Parker being a massive weeb fits in thematically very well with Peter Parker having always been a massive nerd.

Steve Ditko

Published on July 7, 2018Leave a comment

Steve Ditko had died as he lived, alone.

Dormammu takes on Eternity, courtesy of Steve Ditko

As I perhaps made not quite clear enough in my review of The Essential Doctor Strange, Ditko’s Doctor Strange is a stone cold classic, as good as his run on Spider-Man, or anything anybody else has ever done on a superhero series. He’d never quite reach those heights ever again; I blame his conversion to Objectivism. He was creative enough afterwards for Charlton, with Captain Atom, the revamped Blue Beetle, Nightshade and of course the Question, but like with the Creeper or The Hawk and the Dove at DC, they never quite caught fire. (Incidently, I never understood how Ditko could work for a mobbed up publisher like Charlton while preaching Objectivism and A=A.)

Squirrel Girl

Instead it seems that post-Spider-Man, post-Doctor Strange, Ditko’s creations were at their best in other people’s hands. The Question went from staunch objectivist crime fighter to long haired liberal snowflake when Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan got their hands on him –and worse, got him wearing eighties power suits– but he was a hell of a lot more interesting. The same with a late creation like Speedball, a failure in his own title, but as written by Fabian Nicezia, an excellent team player in New Warriors. And then there’s Squirrel Girl, surely the most unlikely of his creations to catch fire as she did.

Not a bad legacy to leave behind.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow

Published on February 19, 2018Leave a comment

I’ve got such mixed feelings about that story. Rereading it just now, having been triggered by Tegan’s tweet, it still choked me up, as it does every time. But I’m also fully aware of how schmalzy it is, how dependent on having feelings for Silver Age Superman with all its silliness already.

27 Action Comics #583

I wonder what it must have been like for Swan to draw such a profoundly odd but also indelibly sad last story.

Still contains the saddest scene Alan Moore ever wrote, and he wrote From Hell. pic.twitter.com/phvys6gm6F

— It's TEGAN! (@tegan_oneil5000) February 5, 2018

To start with, the creative staff for what was to be the very last story to be ever told about the classic, Silver Age Superman and his world, was pretty much stunt casting. There’s Curt Swan, the classic Silver Age Superman artist, brought back to team up with two of the hottest flavours of eighties DC: Alan Moore and George Perez. It makes sense to have Swan there, but not have him being inked by e.g. Murphy Anderson, not having Cary Bates or Elliot S! Maggin or any of the other long term Superman writers write the last ever Superman story feels a bit sad.

The real problem is the context in which Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow was published. DC had decided that it didn’t want to be saddled with its fifty year history anymore, that all that old stuff was dumb and embarrassing, that they needed somebody modern like John Byrne to come around and give Superman a make-over. Even with Alan Moore being quite fond of Silver Age Superman, he was still in his make superheroes edgy phase and that same mood pervades Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. Imaginary stories (“aren’t they all”) were always much more bloodthirsty than mainstream Superman, but Moore turns it up to eleven. Just because Lois and Clark survive and get a superbaby doesn’t make this a happy ending.

Everybody dies: friends, villains, lovers, superdogs. Bizarro destroys his own planet before attacking Metropolis. The Toyman and the Prankster murder Pete Ross and reveal Clark Kent is Superman. Metallo attacks the Daily Planet to murder Superman’s friends. The Legion of Supervillains murder Lana Lang and Jimmy Olsen when they’re defending the Fortress of Solitude. The Kryptonite Man takes out Krypto but not before he’s bitten to death by him. Brainiac usurp’s Lex Luthor’s body. And the one responsible for the carnage turns out to be a bored Mister Mxyzptlk, because “a funny little man in a derby hat” doesn’t work in the eighties anymore. Next issue Byrne would come and reboot Superman as Superyuppie.

Thirtyplus years on it’s all just as silly as the Silver Age Supes it was saying farewell too and a darn sight more offensive. The combination of nostalgia and carnage would be a prelude of some of DC’s worst instincts during the next three decades, constantly killing off, rebooting and killing off again. In hindsight, I like the imaginary stories of Mr and Mrs Superman much better.

Why Peter Parker is the better nerd

Published on January 5, 2018Leave a comment

I. Coleman has a point, comparing the hero of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One with Peter Parker:

If you want a geek hero, look at Peter Parker. He likes Star Wars and obsesses over superheroes. He’s a nerd. He gets bullied for being a nerd. But his fondness for LEGOs isn’t what makes him a hero – that would be his heroism. His goodness. The fact that he’ll go out of his way to help an old lady cross the street. He knows what it’s like to get picked on, and instead of picking on others in turn, he chooses to stand up for the little guy no matter how hard it is. Peter Parker is what geek culture needs to strive to be every day. When we write an article or a videogame or a book, we should think “Would Peter Parker write this? Would he agree with what we’re saying?”

And conversely, I propose we should also ask “would Wade Watts like this?” And if the answer is yes, you should delete your draft, burn your script, drown the thing in white-out and start over. And it’s this test, more than anything else, that Ready Player One so catastrophically fails. Yes, it’s boring, poorly-written, and literally contains a ten-page list of titles of things the author likes. But it also fails the basic test of humanity, creating a character and a world so repugnant that I feel more than justified in saying it represents the absolute worst of nerd culture.

Peter Parker: science nerd

But there’s another way in which Peter Parker and Wade Watts differ, one that’s just as important as the one Coleman points out: what kind of nerd they are. It’s this difference that at least partially explains their moral differences as well. As we all know, Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider that turned him into Spider-Man, but the reason he was bitten by that spider was because he went to a scientific exhibition, because Peter Parker was the kind of nerd who was really into science, who was studying to become a scientist. That’s why he was bullied, at a time when being a brainiac was not a good thing. There’s more than a hint of classism in the bullying, what with his principal tormentor being the popular, rich jock who could afford to tool around in a sports car, while Parker wore handme down clothes and thick nerd glasses. And that’s why he was bullied: he looked poor, he was a brainiac, he didn’t share the interests of the cool people nor felt the need to imitate them.

Wade Watts on the other hand is the worst possible sort of nerd, the one that thinks his (excessive) love of Star Wars and knowledge of eighties nerd trivia makes him special, gets him persecuted. He doesn’t create, he just consumes, never does anything original. He has a persecution complex but nobody’s persecuting him. His type is widespread among fandom, usually white men who’ve never had much hardship in their lives, but who’ve convinced themselves that a light spot of bullying during high school means the entire world is against them because of their brilliance. These are usually the same people who want to exclude anybody not like them — LGBT, women, PoC — from fandom, that only they are true fans though they never contribute anything. That’s the kind of fan who eat up flattering trash like Ready Player One.