wanna make a bet/we'll be neck and neck/takin' off the gloves

[parsimonia]

There's a blog post entitled "A Rant About Women" that's been circulating online recently, and together with this response to it, I've been wondering about how it all may apply to the comics industry.

Comments

[parsimonia]

You cannot find meaningful female or minority characters prior to the Bronze Age. So the obsession with nostalgia over the Silver and Golden Ages, by its nature, is exclusionary to women and minorities.

You have just summed up in two sentences what I have been trying to think of a way to say for a while now. GAH! Thank you. XD

That's exactly it. (And personally I'm baffled by the idea that Geoforce has fans, but hey.)

because of the nostalgia issue always prioritizing straight white males - it's going to limit your influence and slow your advancement.

Yes. And the problem is, all those old, white and mostly male characters always have the edge over the new ones when it comes being "iconic", by virtue of being older, and these newer, more diverse characters can never "catch up" to being the same as the old guys.

It's pretty much parallel to difficulties of women and minorities advancing or gaining anything anywhere, because the dominant group already had their system set up to their advantage from the get-go.

[parsimonia]

The later group being the one before the ... uhg Outsiders history confuses me. I only read it when Cass was on the team, okay? lol

I'm guessing you mean the one when Dick and Roy were leading it? Do I have that right?

[parsimonia]

Ah, I see.

Then 5oaK hit

5 of a thousand? Do not recognize this acronym!

[schmevil]

Pfft. The one Dick and Roy were leading were clearly the Real Outsiders.

[elspethdixon]

You cannot find meaningful female or minority characters prior to the Bronze Age.That's not necessarily true when it comes to female characters -- some of the meaningful female characters from the Bronze Age are Silver Age heroines who finally got treated seriously instead of like the Token Girl Love Interest. A lot of the cast of Birds of Prey, like Black Canary, Babs, and Lady Blackhawk, have been around since the Silver Age. Definately true about minority characters, though. The only two pre-1970s minority superheroes I can think of off the top of my head are the Falcon and Black Panther, both of them just squeaking under the 1970 cut-off date, and a couple probably-fail-laden Native American heroes from the Golden Age (unless horrible racist sidekick character charicatures from the 1930s & 40s count, and I suspect they don't), whereas I could go through a roll call of Golden Age and Silver Age heroines. Particularly the Golden Age, where superheroines depressingly often got to wear far more clothing than they do now and

[elspethdixon]

it's funny how much better the Golden Age was for female portrayals than the Silver Age.

It's similar in some ways to the depictions of women in pre-code and post-code Hollywood. Women got to have much more assertive sexualities in some ways in 20s silent films and early 1930s films then they did in many films in the 50s, both due to the Hayes Code cracking down in the 30s and due to attempts to nudge women back into familiar, non-threatening gender roles after WWII.

Or, depressingly, to the roles women got to have in movies in the 80s vs. the films that are coming out now, where things actually seem to have backslide slightly in terms of depictions of women.