DC Comics: Too dumb to live?

Pardon me, folks, I feel a rant coming on. This one is a grown-up-ish rant, so readers under 13, you might want to go find a happier blog to read today. Readers under 18, feel free to stay, but I don’t want to hear about it from your parents later.

Just us grown-up impersonators now? Good.

Lately there’s been yet another foofaw in the comic-book world about DC Comics’ treatment of female creators and characters. Things sort of exploded back in July, when a female fan in a Batgirl costume stood up at Comic-Con San Diego and asked a DC editor why, in the course of rebooting the company’s whole comic-book universe and launching 52 new #1 issues in September, the company’s creative staffed dropped from 12% female to 2% female. There was a lot of hemming and hawing, and the best explanation offered—that there simply weren’t enough female creators willing and able to work on DC’s relaunch—smelled a bit fishy.

Now the new comics are hitting the stands, and the fish-stink borders on hallucinogenic.

In the first issue of a comic-book series called Red Hood and the Outlaws, a superheroine named Starfire (you might remember her as the bubbly, naïve alien girl in the Teen Titans cartoons) had this conversation:

 

And the entire internet exploded.

A lot of female fans have complained about the way the reboot has treated female characters, pointing to Starfire as the tip of the iceberg. There’s the first issue of Catwoman, too, which ends with Catwoman having sex with Batman on a rooftop and seems to be pretty much all about shots of the main character in red lingerie, with her face conveniently cropped out:

 

Then there’s Voodoo, the first monthly DC title to have a black female as its lead character. Naturally, she’s a stripper, and this is the panel they chose to release as a sneak peek:

 

And I’m done posting panels for now, because this is beyond absurd and all the way out to disgusting.

I could talk about how these portrayals are demeaning to women, especially female fans, and how DC is sending wrong messages to impressionable teenage readers by telling the boys that this is how girls act and telling the girls that this is how heroes act. I could talk about the long, rich history of sexism and misogyny in mainstream comics, but honestly, I don’t think anybody who’s been reading comics for any length of time doubts that this stuff goes on, or that it goes mostly unchallenged. (If you'd like a cogent, well-written summary of the female fan response, however, the best one I've read is here.)

No, what I want to talk about is how incredibly stupid this kind of stuff is. Not because it’s unethical, or because it’s bad art. Let’s cut right to the bottom line here—by making this crap their primary product, DC Comics is leaving piles of money on the table.

DC Comics (and its parent corporation, Warner Bros.) is literally too stupid to take the money and run, too dumb to make hay while the sun shines, too brain-damaged to open its mouth when it’s raining soup. Marvel Comics does this, too, but DC’s the big offender at the moment. Both companies have an opportunity to double their customer base—at a minimum—and they’re chucking it for some soft-core porn.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it.

 

First, a few basic facts. Females make up approximately half of all human beings on planet Earth. Women buy and read many more books and magazines than men do, and are more likely to spend their leisure time reading, including (if not especially) in English-speaking countries. This is particularly true of fiction—women make up 80% of the market there. So of the people out there looking for an entertaining story, presented in the form of ink stains on paper, four-fifths are women and girls. Wouldn’t it be nice if they read comic books?

But wait, I hear you saying. Women and girls don’t read comic books. Comic books are for boys—always have been, always will be. Traditional superhero comics, in particular, don’t appeal to girls for some reason; girls who do read comics prefer manga, or cartoon-based comics, or edgy, independent, Vertigo-type stuff.  Why should we make superhero stories for people who don’t like stories about superheroes?

Well, the problem with that argument is that girls do like stories about superheroes. It’s just that most of them aren’t willing to wade through the cesspool to find the good ones. I know, and not just because I'm a female comic fan. I know because I created a female superhero with a life of her own—and both girls and boys read those stories like crazy.

I created Rae Masterson in 1998 after I read an article in the Los Angeles Times that said the comic-book industry was in freefall, and perhaps the best hope of saving it was to draw in female readers. I created a scrappy girl superhero mostly to see if I could, reasoning that if my middle-school classmates could afford to see Titanic four times every weekend, then surely a few of those dollars could easily be diverted to comics, as long as the comics were better than seeing Titanic again.

Inside of a few years, I had a small cult going around the stories, based entirely on word of mouth, and I was getting letters and emails from readers—both male and female—who were just as enthusiastic about Rae and Trevor as I was about Daredevil’s adventures. In high school, when I knew most of my readers at least by first name, I could say with confidence that my readership was solidly 50-50, an even split between male and female readers. Now that the much-improved stories are being serialized on Pocket Coyote, the reader base is closer to 60 to 65% female, according to Facebook stats and blog traffic. I still have all the elements of a good mainstream superhero story—lots of action and twisty plots and stuff blowing up, plus several metric tons of sarcasm—but I’ve also got relationship drama, and I go out of my way to make sure that my male and female characters are all fully developed and have their own unique character arcs. Everybody changes, everybody lives. (And everybody keeps their clothes on, though that wasn’t really a goal—it just sort of happened.)

 

Think about what those numbers could mean to DC Comics. If they stopped actively discouraging women from reading their books—stopped telling them over and over again that the only way to be accepted in this exciting fictional world was to fly around in lingerie and have sex on rooftops—they could more than double their fanbase. A particularly popular monthly comic book may sell 100,000 copies per issue; a writer who consistently wrote nuanced female characters with their clothes on could, with some intelligence and support from marketing, raise those numbers to something in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 250,000. That’s what it would look like if a mainstream comic could suddenly sprout Masks audience demographics. That’s 150,000 new fans—people who otherwise wouldn’t be reading your comics. New customers. That’s what DC Comics, and to a lesser extent Marvel, is leaving on the table.

Now, I hear you saying that Masks has a paltry circulation compared with, say, anything with Batman on the cover. My sample size is small enough that it might not scale up to something the size of the X-Men empire. My argument might be more valid if only there were an example of a mainstream comic-book property with fully developed (and fully clothed) female characters that made its producers a lot of money!

Oh, wait. There is.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of comic-book writers I know who go out of their way to write female characters with personalities and character arcs—but they’re all bestsellers, and most are winners of one or more Eisner awards (comicdom’s equivalent of the Oscar), usually for the work featuring those characters. Two of them saw their work represented in big-budget superhero movies this summer, and both of those movies blew out the doors of multiplexes worldwide. Thor drew heavily from J. Michael Straczynski’s run on the comic, which was notable in part for the complexity it brought to female characters like Jane Foster, Sif, and Loki (who was running around as a female for a while—long story). The movie, which prominently features Jane and gives Sif a chance to shine too, is closing in on $450 million in gross receipts worldwide, $181 million of that made in the United States.

Then there’s Captain America: The First Avenger, which is indebted to Ed Brubaker’s multi-Eisner-winning run on the character (in fact, Brubaker is credited in the film’s acknowledgments, along with creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby). The movie features Hayley Atwell as kickass British secret agent Peggy Carter, who combines elements of several female characters from Brubaker’s run and who holds her own quite effectively with the movie’s male leads. That flick is still in theaters, but it’s made around $175 million domestically as of this writing, and $360 million globally.

I saw both movies in theaters—Thor once and Captain America three times (long story). I saw Thor in a suburban multiplex, with an audience that was maybe 40% female. Captain America demographics varied a bit according to the time of day, but at least one showing was half-and-half. And while some of those girls and women were obviously there with the boys—accompanying their husbands, boyfriends, fathers and brothers—quite a few were alone, like I was, or were there with other women. They went to a superhero movie, voluntarily, and paid money to see it. All while mainstream comics are turning superheroines into blow-up dolls, in part because "chicks don't read comics anyway". And they're hemorrhaging money.

I’ve got news for you, comic-book industry: women are out there, and a bunch of them like stories about superheroes. You could be selling something they want to buy, and instead you’re selling Starfire’s breasts and Catwoman's butt. You’re hanging out a big “No Girls Allowed” sign on your clubhouse while the club is going bankrupt. I was smarter than this when I was fourteen years old. Don’t try to tell me a fourteen-year-old girl can crank out better stories than an entire industry full of people who’ve spent decades honing their storytelling skills. I know you guys can do better than this. You’re just choosing not to. 

Now, I’m perfectly happy to take your money and run. If you don’t want to go after this big, hungry market, I’ll merrily pursue it in your place, and reap the rewards. I expect to spend some time building up word of mouth on Masks, because I don’t have a big media conglomerate’s marketing department on my side, but it’s not rocket science. I know I can make money at this, and have fun doing it, even while giving away chapters for free and relying on the sales of trade collections to recoup my investment. I will gladly take advantage of the stupidity of the Big Two, and nip off with my little sliver of the pie. I can do wonderful things with even a sliver.

But wouldn’t it be better if someone in New York thought about making that pie twice as big?

Fist, meet face! Or, the beautiful nose-breaking

For Christmas, I received a copy of a comic book that got me thinking about one of the central tenets of superhero adventure: guys in tights whumping on each other.

The collection was Moon Knight: God and Country, written by Mike Benson and Charlie Huston. I loved Moon Knight as a kid—the shadowy world inhabited by a flawed hero in a silver-white costume (and the moody artwork that resulted); the fact that he had not one but three secret identities, and it made him kind of schizo; the serial encounters with his lycanthropic nemesis, Werewolf By Night, with their bizarre fusion of superheroics and horror. Moon Knight at his best was weird, and mysterious, and beautiful, and indefinably cool in a way that never really caught on (lucky for me—it meant I found a lot of good stories in the 25-cent bin).

Huston’s revamp of the character has been charitably described as hyperviolent. This version of Moon Knight is tormented by the Egyptian god who resurrected him in his origin story—except instead of demanding justice like he used to, Khonshu now wants blood and flying body parts, and usually appears wearing the form of a psychopathic mercenary Moon Knight killed (accidentally? During a psychotic episode? I’ve never been sure) in an earlier adventure. Moon Knight is now a government-sanctioned vigilante, and rapidly losing his grip on reality as he takes to carving his crescent-moon symbol into the foreheads of his bloodied and broken foes. I read Huston’s comics for a while, then finally quit in disgust because the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere interesting and pretty much everything I had liked about the character was now gone.

Reading God and Country, which picks up around the time I quit, reinforced my conviction that the comic had gone in an uninteresting direction. But it got me thinking about why I missed the old Moon Knight, and what it said that a take on the character that was (arguably) supported by the stories I loved was yet so repellent to me.

The answer struck me as I was typing those words up above—weird, mysterious, beautiful. There aren’t a lot of superheroes I consider beautiful, but as dark as Moon Knight’s adventures always were, I took a certain primal satisfaction in the fact that the character was trying to balance so many conflicting sides of his life, and more often than not managing to be a glimmer of light in his own darkness. That made the character beautiful. Huston lost that beautiful light in the spray of blood, and I lost interest in Moon Knight.

But let’s face it—guys in tights whumping on each other has always been a central feature of superhero comics. The first modern superhero comic featured on its cover a picture of Superman smashing a car full of gangsters into a boulder. Violence is part of the genre, and I don’t really have a problem with violence in my fiction. Heck, I do exhaustive research to get the violence in Masks right—to make sure Trevor’s fights, in particular, make sense in the context of the laws of physics, anatomy, and human behavior. I have described my book as “a love story and a coming-of-age narrative and a meditation on modern mythology—in which a lot of stuff blows up.”

And yet superhero violence, in my view, works best when it plays by rules, or at least when rules exist. In Masks, there’s an indelible line between masks who do their jobs with minimal violence—who never cripple or kill when they have a choice, who train to win fights without doing permanent harm—and those who believe in using the bad guys’ methods against them, who usually leave a trail of bodies in their wake. Rae and Trevor are in the first category; Cobalt is in the second, although he pretends otherwise. It’s what makes them enemies, really. The rest is window dressing.

Part of that conflict is rooted in the question of superhero morality—to have good guys and bad guys, you have to have at least a working definition of good and bad, right and wrong, and varying definitions lead to varying approaches. Most people who make the distinction at all agree, for example, that at least some forms of violence are bad—like murder. However, there are three major schools of thought on how to deal with the fact that violence exists whether we want it to or not. These ideas get dumbed down a lot for superhero fiction, but I’ll try to maintain at least a little of the necessary complexity.

The first school, which has become increasingly popular in the last 20 years, views violence (even in fiction) as a matter of proportionate response. If the bad guys are level-5 bad, then the good guys are allowed to be level-5 bad to beat them. If the bad guys are level-12 bad, you may need to keep a puke bag handy in order to root for the good guys. This is the same argument often advanced by people who advocate a “whatever it takes” approach to dealing with real-life violence—if the opposing force uses chemical weapons or suicide bombers, then we should be allowed to respond in kind. Anything less, this thought argues, ties the good guys’ hands. That’s where God and Country is coming from, and where Cobalt comes in.

The second school of thought is at the opposite end of the spectrum—if violence is bad, then the good guys shouldn’t use it, period. In the real world, this usually takes the form of pacifism—for example, Quakers who register as conscientious objectors in wartime because their religion prohibits war. You don’t see this portrayed much in Western entertainment anymore, partly because it really limits your fight-scene options. But you will occasionally see a pacifist superhero trying to make headway in a violent fictional world. Usually he doesn’t succeed; the best-known example of an attempt at a nonviolent hero in American culture is Shane, a novel and movie about a former gunfighter trying to give up the gun. It’s a deeply moving story, full of big ideas, but you can’t help noticing that Shane keeps beating people up in bar fights. Shane’s attempt at pacifism, noble as it may be, is a real problem for somebody writing a Western. There aren’t any heroes in Masks who take this view, although I’m experimenting with a pacifist hero in another novel just for the heck of it and it is as difficult as it is rewarding.

The third school of thought occupies the middle ground—the idea that violence is a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless, and should be limited as much as possible. In the real world, this basically boils down to the rules-of-war approach—things like the Geneva Conventions. This approach says that violence is sometimes the only solution to a bad situation (the Nazis are a classic example of a bad thing that needed stopping), and that violence should therefore be used only when absolutely necessary, and then only according to strictly defined rules, which are written out in advance so nobody is tempted to cheat. Soldiers wear uniforms; they don’t deliberately harm civilians; captured enemies are treated humanely and with respect. Most superheroes used to take this approach, although it’s less popular now as writers and editors have made villains ever more extreme—by the time the fifth school bus is blown to bits, it’s hard to understand why Batman hasn’t just strangled the Joker already.

Writers, of course, see problems and opportunities in all three approaches. It’s easy to give a pacifist hero the moral high ground, but stories need conflict, and it’s harder to create action and tension when your heroes avoid it. Competing with an already violent culture makes the proportionate approach tempting—when you’re trying to make your bones as a storyteller, nothing gets readers’ attention like the snap of bones breaking—but having to constantly make up new tortures is exhausting. And the middle path seems to be the best of both worlds, but it requires constant examination to balance the need for action in a superhero story with the need to avoid unnecessary violence.

Different writers have different attitudes toward this question. Part of it’s a question of temperament, naturally, and of how much you can get away with in a given story. But I’ve always found the most beauty in the balance—in the good guys who stay good guys, as much as they can, while the world goes to hell around them. They fight monsters without becoming them, or at least they try. Sometimes they’re outnumbered or outgunned as a result, but that just makes it more dramatic when they win. The balance itself is a good source of conflict. My favorite heroes abhor violence to one extent or another, but they won’t stand peacefully by while someone, for example, abuses a child. But neither will they beat the abuser into the ground just for the hell of it. The balance is difficult. It’s complicated. And when it’s done right, it’s beautiful.

(By the way, this is all completely separate from the question of whether violent art should be censored or restricted to certain audiences—although I do support things like clear and informative labeling so we don’t have six-year-olds bringing home God and Country by mistake. So if you want to know whether movies like Hostel should be in general release, you’ve come to the wrong window.)

At the climax of Masks, Rae and Trevor are forced to fight each other, with the fate of the world at stake. It’s arguably my favorite scene in the book because of the way their beliefs and their feelings for each other play out in their exchange of professional blows and personal words. It couldn’t happen if either one of them refused to fight at all, or simply pulled out a gun and blew the other away. What happens next is unexpected, and thrilling, and heartbreaking. And, to my mind, beautiful.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Of fans and fics

I have a confession to make. I’m allergic to fanfic.

I’m not kidding. I swore off reading fanfic a few years ago when I got physically ill from reading a supremely wrong story. I got nauseous, I broke out in a cold sweat, and I had a fever, stomach cramps and a migraine all night after reading it, until I finally got up at five in the morning and rewrote the ending the way it should have gone. Then, mysteriously, I fell immediately asleep and was fine when I woke up. I haven’t read fanfic since, except for what my students bring into class.

For the uninitiated, “fanfic” is short for “fan fiction”—unauthorized stories written in an established fictional universe, usually one established under someone else’s copyright. Fanfiction can be taken from books, movies, comics, television shows, even plays and popular songs. Sometimes they explore aspects of the story not covered in the canon materials—what did Character A do while the novel followed Character B on his quest for two chapters?—and sometimes they explore avenues of the source material the author deliberately chose not to explore—sure, Characters A and B are in love on the show, but what if it were Characters A and C? This last has given rise to what’s known as “slash” in fanfic—romantic relationships between characters of the same sex, especially male characters who are otherwise portrayed as heterosexual. (The earliest examples were Kirk/Spock stories … and there I’ll leave you.)

I don’t have much of an objection to fanfic personally. Many of my earliest short stories were basically fanfic, although I didn’t know the word when I wrote them, back in elementary school—and, unlike most current fanfic writers, I didn’t put the material online. I wrote it down in a notebook and passed it to a couple of fellow fans, and that was the end of it. It gave me a chance to hone my skills as a writer while I figured out how to establish my own characters and universe. That’s the major reason I support fanfic as a teaching tool, and let my students work on it in class if they’ve got all their other work done: it’s a ready-made story kit that can help you get started in writing. If you’re not yet confident enough in your own authorial voice, it’s sometimes a worthy exercise to use someone else’s to get the hang of things. Writing other people’s characters, mostly to amuse myself, taught me the basics of dialogue and plot and description. And whenever I brought out a new side of an established character, I honed the skills I would eventually bring to my own fully developed imaginary people. But I regarded my own efforts mostly as personal entertainment, and as educational exercises, much like an art student learning to paint by copying the works of the old masters. As long as you don’t hang your copy in a gallery and try to pass it off as the real thing, what’s the harm?

Well, it turns out there’s some very real harm, after all.

Today, of course, there is a large and vital fanfiction community online, and you can find thousands of fics on any subject you can imagine. People read and comment on them, argue about them, respond with writing of their own. Most active fanfic communities have produced more words about their chosen subject than the source of that material has published in the canon—the Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter communities, for example, have published the word-count equivalent of every Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter story a hundred times over (at least). Fanfic ranges from the innocuous to the obscene, from the touching to the twisted. And it’s creating a bit of a problem for the people who care about things like copyright infringement.

The basic problem with published fanfic—the stuff that’s out there on the interwebs for everyone to see—is that it’s out there without the permission of the copyright holder. J.K. Rowling has not authorized the million-and-one fics out there speculating on a romantic relationship between Harry and Hermione (or Harry and Draco). And to the extent that people are reading the fics rather than Rowling’s books, the fic writers are stealing Rowling’s business. That may not be much of a problem for J.K. Rowling, considering a) that she’s richer than some small countries and b) that in my experience the Harry Potter fanfic writers obsessively buy and read Rowling’s books to support their writing, but Harry and company are still Rowling’s creations, and she still has the right to decide what does and does not happen to them. That may not matter to the average blog troll, but if you care about a fictional universe enough to write about it, you might want to spare a thought for the author’s feelings.

There are some fairly complex legal arguments on both sides of the fanfiction question. Supporters claim that fanfiction is a “transformative” use of the canon property—a legalese word that means it’s different enough that it’s not infringing. Opponents call it outright theft. Some authors, including Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, have said publicly that they approve of fanfic set in their fictional worlds, and even linked to fics from their own sites. Others, including Anne Rice and Raymond E. Feist, have demanded that fics based on their works be taken down. A large number of copyright holders simply turn a blind eye as long as fanfic writers aren’t actually turning a profit on the work. (This may be because they don’t care, or because there’s only so much satisfaction you can get out of suing a fifteen-year-old English nerd for copyright infringement.) As often as not, it seems to come down to the individual preference of the author or artist who owns the copyright to the original work.

Recently I’ve been asked for my views on fanfic. A couple of Masks fanfic stories already exist—although, since most of them were written by my friends as a gag, they may qualify properly as friendfics. I honestly hadn’t given much thought to the fanfic question until one of my students began bringing anime fics into my class and asking my opinion of them—at which point I discovered that a) fanfic made a terrific teaching tool and b) I was acutely uncomfortable with its publication—the putting-it-on-the-internet part. Discovering the wide range of responses to fanfic didn’t really help me figure out how to guide my students. I finally decided I’d have to set some ground rules for my own fiction—because as far as Masks goes, I’m the copyright holder and it’ s my way or the highway, at least so far.

So, because Masks is an adventure story for teens set in a vivid fictional universe with a lot of side characters with a lot of bunnytrail and alternate-relationship potential (read: a prime candidate for fanfic), I’ve decided to lay down some ground rules here and now, before it becomes an issue. I am speaking only for myself and only for the characters and stories to which I hold copyright. But if anyone asks, ever, about fanfic set in the Masks universe, here are the three rules under which it’s completely fine by me (and only me).

Yeah, I know it’s silly to be laying down fanfic rules for a book that’s not even published yet. But what can I say? It’s been a slow blog week.

1. Don’t charge for Masks fanfic. This is an easy one, and a common restriction for fanfic writers. If you’re writing stories for your own amazement and amusement, you don’t need to charge money for them. Internet publishing is free. If you’re not charging for your work, you’re not poaching on my domain—because let’s face it, the only person who gets to charge for writing stories about my characters right now is me. If you want to be paid for your labor, write something original to you and charge as much as you like for it. (It’s what I did!)

2. Don’t pass Masks fanfic off as canon. This is more of a courtesy issue. I grant that some fanfic may be very, very good—certainly my students’ work is better than the average fics I remember. On the off chance that someone could mistake your work for mine, say somewhere that it’s not mine. I don’t want people getting mixed up on Captain Catastrophe’s secret origin. I wrote it the way I did for a reason. So if you’re going to change it, posting a disclaimer somewhere would be nice.

3. Don’t ask me to read your Masks fanfic. This is nothing personal to you as a writer. It’s partly a legal issue and partly a health issue. I do not read fanfic, except for what my students bring me, mostly so no one can accuse me of stealing an idea from it. If you have a really good sense of my characters, you might be able to predict which way a story will go. I’ve done it myself a couple of times with franchises I enjoyed. I don’t want you suing me for stealing your idea when we just happened to be thinking along the same lines, so I’m just not going to read your fic. Plus I really didn’t enjoy running a fever from that last fic I read, so I’m going to stay out of fanfiction for the sake of my health.

I wish you good writing, good learning, and someday a fictional universe of your very own to play with. Until then, be safe out there. The sanity you save may be your own.