Gays In Refrigerators Too

[bellatrys]

So Perry Moore put his list up, and it comes with some pretty damning stats at the end, too.

Now, serious and longtime comics fans will know all this already, but for the casual and younger fan, it might come as a bit of a revelation that during the Silver Age it was actually prohibited by the comics industry rating system (much as with the Hays

Comments

[david_wisdom]

I just agreed with John Byrne. Goddamn you, P@L.

"Good Business Sense". Feh. I've been compiling the sales figures and I've got all your numbers, you bastards. You don't have new readers, you've just conned the same audience into buying more product and called it "growth".

You need GLBT readers, and female readers, and black readers and Muslim readers and as many readers as you can gather, you in-over-your-head man-children, for you know not how to sustain numbers and I have proof!

Moo hoo ha ha.

Even a stopped sexist can be right 2x a lifetime, what, what?

[bellatrys]

I just agreed with John Byrne. Goddamn you, P@L.

I have to say, I wasn't familiar with Byrne by name either, but that list of his personal fridgings being heavy on the torture-kill-mutilate pregnant women? One of my *longest* fandom squicks, from before I heard either word in fact, back when I first read Lawhead's Arthurian stories and he fridges Merlin's wife, the one who we first meet out hunting boar on horseback, but gets turned into a Faux Action Girl damn quickly and proves to be nothing but a Character Motivator By Her Gruesome Death (plus unborn son) for Our Hero.

I've been compiling the sales figures and I've got all your numbers, you bastards. You don't have new readers, you've just conned the same audience into buying more product and called it "growth".Also, it occurred to me that the dare "Go write/draw your own then, Nyah Nyah!" was a much stupider one than they realize, because there are *several* options now for self-publishing print comics, esp b/w short-run ones, there's Lulu and Cafe Press, but there are also some

Internet beats your weak business model, print-scum

[david_wisdom]

It's what John Rogers is calling 4th-Gen Media. Where comics are concerned, screw the direct market, screw the comic shops, hell, even screw Barnes & Noble's - take the content straight to the customer. The filthy pixel-stained technopeasants have already developed a few workable business models while Marvel scrambles over itself to figure out how this Internet thing works and fails repeatedly.

[hisnewreasons]

The director of 300 admits that he deliberately upped the (already-canon) swishiness of Movie!Xerxes because, quote, "What's more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?"

I enjoyed the Dawn of the Dead remake. I was also amused by the director's DVD commentary on which Snyder sounded like a teenage boy. ("Dude, you're such a rock star!") That's why I'm not totally surprised by his arrested mentality. He looks more idiot than savant nowadays.

These boys know nothing about girls, do they?

[deiseach]

"According to Snyder, Warner had given up on trying to appeal to a female audience. Then a pair of test screenings changed all that. ''We got, like, a 100 percent recommend from women under 25,'' says the director. ''They don't even get that kind of score on a romantic comedy.'' Why did women respond? In Miller's original graphic novel, Leonidas' wife, Queen Gorgo, appears only in passing. In the movie, Queen Gorgo (Brit Lena Headey) is a front-and-center partner to Leonidas, calming his nerves in bed (while both are very, very naked) and getting her own new subplot about political corruption as Leonidas marches off to war

Re: These boys know nothing about girls, do they?

[fledgist]

Hmmm. Is there a human-plane tree sexual orientation that I ken nothing of?

(I just finished teaching a unit on Pericles's Funeral Oration in which I pointed out that, contrary to the film, Spartan aristocrats wore armour -- which was not cheap.)

Personally, I think it was just Greek propaganda

[deiseach]

Someone expressing an appreciation of nature as nature, not as 'that's a useful hunk of timber' seems to have struck them as odd, not to say yet more evidence of Persian perversion.

Still, the notion of Xerxes as a tree-hugger (if you pardon the expression) wouldn't fit in with the blood-crazed megalomaniac with delusions of divinty who wants to crush the freedom-loving West, would it?

And on a related rant, why oh why did these idiots once again associate disability with evil? The Greek traitor is deformed, the Immortals are deformed - ack! It as much as validates the Spartan eugenics programme: see, if his parents had done the right thing and exposed him at birth, he wouldn't have grown up to sell us out to the Persian hordes.

Oh, phooey.

Re: Personally, I think it was just Greek propaganda

[fledgist]

It's a Christian thing (perhaps only a Protestant thing) to connect the outward appearance to the inner soul. The Greeks, after all, had a lame god.

Miller's knowledge of Sparta seems rather less than my knowledge of pre-Roman Gaul.

[smurasaki]

There is so much wrong with the "good business sense" excuse. Why artificially limit your potential readership to straight white guys? How is ignoring at least half the population good business sense?

Then, the assumption that white straight guys can only identify with white straight guys is pretty insulting to their imaginations, when you think about it. Heck, if the comics world really thinks their readership can only identify with improved copies of themselves, they should drop all their alien characters as well. Why would they think that someone who can't identify with women, gays, or people of color would be able to identify with someone who isn't even human? Even mutants are probably too other for these poor unamaginative fools.

Of course, the reality is that not only do women, gays, and people of color read comic books, but that people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations are perfectly capable of identifying with characters who don't check the same boxes on census forms. However, we all would like to see some

they project and contradict both

[bellatrys]

you'll catch the same folks saying on the one hand that straight white guys won't watch anything *but* straight white guys, and on the other hand saying "but isn't it reverse racism/sexism to say that female viewers/viewers of color can't identify with anyone different?" and yet if they believe the first, they obviously don't really believe the second, it's just legerdemain - and moreover they ignore the point you make, which is that people like us want to see ourselves onscreen too, even if we can (and in fact *must* having no other option) identify with protagonists not like ourselves, so why should we be completely excluded for the sake of the all-important, all-catered-to hypothetical SWG (18-25)? I mean, do they really think our money has cooties, like I joked? They sure seem to!

[fledgist]

I find the 'gay=swishy' meme particularly annoying. It's terrible stereotyping.

Oh, yeah

[deiseach]

And the lesbian = butch. If you're not falling out of the top of your costume whilst tottering around on stilettos in fishnets, you're a frigid castrating bitch who only wants to destroy men and seduce the pretty fluffy girlies.

How they deal with Wonder Woman being an Amazon, I don't know. Yes, I do. Make 'jokes' about doing a twenty-page rape spread.

Gosh, guys, how I laughed!

Re: Oh, yeah

[fledgist]

Yes, that's just as annoying.

The rape thing, though, is criminal.

Re: Oh, yeah

[the_leewit]

I've often wondered (pardon the term) why Wonder Woman is not gay--- stupid Black Canary fanfics aside, the idea of Paradise Island being a utopian colony of gay women appeals to me an awful lot. It's the sort of thing that my housemates and I used to sit around bullshitting about in college.

Maybe it's the stereotype thing--- what lesbian in her right mind would fight crime in a flashy not-much while wearing three-inch heels after getting implants the size of her head?

Of course, I know very few straight or bi women who would go for that, either, so, um.