Fans cannot
emote?
Plus: John Byrne's treatment of
women and the “fanboy” stereotype
May 9, 2005
By Avi Green
On Comics Worth Reading’s blog
section last year, and also on Precocious
Curmudgeon, there was an interesting entry about how the
defenders of Identity Crisis were trying to imply that the critics
of that abominable miniseries were emotionally upset:
‘As I posted on
Usenet, I find it interesting that the defenders of Identity
Crisis always assume that the critics are responding
emotionally. Many of them write off the logical and textual
analyses demonstrating how IC is bad writing in favor of calling
those who point out the problems "fanboys" or "emotionally
upset".’ – Johanna Draper Carlson
This was quite an interesting thing to learn about, mainly because,
for people who supposedly want more character depth in comics,
personality, stuff like that – it’s ironic that the defenders of
such a book should be so against people in real life showing any
such thing, which is precisely what the offended fans were doing.
However, if there’s anything – or anyone – this most certainly does
bring to mind, it’s when Hero
Realm’s webmaster Alex Hamby, who comes as almost the perfect
example of such hypocrisy for a subject like this, pretty much used
the very same approach when he went and, in a most awkward manner,
attacked/tore down on Gail Simone’s Women in Refridgerators
website, as
I discussed last February. (For the record, I also found the
rest of his two columns recently, and have spoken about them here
too.) If you read Mr. Hamby's ghastly little diatribe there, you saw
that he said, “I can easily see how seeing a woman or
a child hurt in fiction would evoke horror and a reader's desire
to help end any such suffering.” Two points to make in
response to that: first, what’s wrong with wanting/wishing to do so?
In a world so full of violence, do we truly need more? Second, one
of the leading reasons why readers were offended, of course, besides
the fact that the rape scene in Identity Crisis was in poor taste
and was also tremendously
one-sided to boot in its depiction, complete with an almost
exclusively masculine viewpoint, was because, as fans of Sue Dibny,
seeing her being subjected to such atrocities, the rape being even
more than once, and even a scene of her bleeding from the head to
accompany it included as a third act of horror, was just simply
unacceptable.
Let’s be clear. As characters who were
created for the genre of lighthearted adventure, Ralph and Sue Dibny
are just simply ill-suited to the whole story. In fact, when you see
that the mindwiping doesn’t seem to work so well on either Dr. Light
or even Batman, but does seem to work quite well on Sue, so that
only adds insult to injury.
Thus, Mr. Hamby’s silly and meaningless little argument is even more
a classic exercise in futility and delegitimizing the democratic
right of comics fans to argue against what they find offensive than
it seems.
Even more ironic (and hilarious) however, was that, for someone who
implied that fans were responding simply out of being emotionally
upset, Mr. Hamby himself tended to act stung/upset and to bash what
he considered an attack on anything Marvel did that was okay by him
during the Jemas regime at the House of Ideas (which even included,
sadly enough, the Trouble
miniseries by Mark Millar, and may even include the Sins Past story
arc in Amazing Spider-Man
by Straczynski), it didn’t take a genius to tell that he was very
upset whenever his favorite comics company took flak for something
the readership didn’t find pleasing, but that he, in all of his
selective positions, did. In fact, as I recall, when he once
interviewed Mark Alessi, former chairman of CrossGen, which is
currently in the midst of a court hearing to deal with the ownership
of their properties over at Cal Publishing, he seemed pretty upset
that anyone could have the gall to criticize Marvel, even if it was
justified. (And the really weird thing about it was that, his
misgivings about what Alessi had to say seemed to be on just
business-related matters!)
In fact, to make his argument about tragedy, drama and emotional
depth even less credible: from personal experience, when I tried to
ask him on a topic he started on a board section meant for those
so-called columns of his, "why not keep Sue
Dibny alive and let any rape serve as character development, or
introduce a new ongoing character for whom it can serve as such?"
he simply said in response to my posting, "okay, who
wants to see a new, unknown character being killed off?"
So in other words, what happened was that he ignored what I was
trying to say in the first place, which was – why not let this kind
of brutality, at the very least, serve as something to fulfill what
he ostensibly advocated, which was character development, or even
to introduce a brand new character in the DCU who fell victim to the
experience, whose own development could stem from that as the years
go by. And then he says that wants the characters to have some
emotional depth! Well actually…he didn’t. He only said, quite
simply, that, “tragedy makes good drama.” In
other words, it would seem as if all he was interested in was that
the characters be grieving,
and little else. Right, go figure.
That could also explain why he said almost virtually nothing about
Elongated Man himself in his column, and indicate what he really
thinks of him following this mess, which is, in one, single word:
nothing. Nor from what I recall did he even try making any genuine
discussion of him when talking about IC on his site’s board. Hence,
IMO, his argument was not genuine, and most certainly wasn’t
altruistic. So to say the least, it would appear that truly
speaking, Mr. Hamby was not interested in the characters themselves
or what developments could be made for them, but rather, all the
grief they were going through.
As for his arguing that there are some male characters who’ve
experienced the same kind of degradation that female characters
have, well, to be fair, yes of course there are some. Mister Miracle
may have been victimized in such a way in a story that Alan Moore
wrote in the late 1980’s at DC, and the second Starman, Jack Knight,
was more or less a victim of rape, when the female villianess, the
Mist, drugged him and pretty much bore his child in 1996, when James
Robinson wrote the 1994-2000 series. The idea behind that story was
that she was looking for something that could serve as the perfect
weapon against Jack Knight, that being that she mothered his own
son. Less successful on an artistic level however, was when, just
last year, Devin Grayson wrote an absurdly fanfiction-ish scene in
which the female villainess Tarantula apparently does that to
Nightwing on a rooftop, following her supposedly slaying Blockbuster
in Dick Grayson’s solo book, a storyline that was apparently meant
to make it look as if he had something to be sorry over, that being
his failure to prevent a villain, in this case, from being slain.
(And then, to make matters all the more ridiculous, Roland Desmond
turns up alive and well over in Robin’s own book just shortly
afterwards. So what was the whole point?)
So are there some examples in comics history? Sure. And while the
examples I gave took place over at DC, I’m sure there’s some over at
Marvel too, both good and bad. But the fact that Mr. Hamby didn’t
actually use any of these examples directly within his own column/editorial on the main
site pretty much shot down any credible argument he could’ve at
least tried to make, and only compounded the perception that he was
aiming for the lowbrow on purpose. So much for creativity in writing
an editorial.
Of course, the main problem with his attempt to use the
victimization of male characters as a means to justify the notion of
female characters being victimized as well in comics is that he's
also implying that it's okay to do it to male characters as well.
This begs an interesting question: is violence against even male
heroes justified? Of course not. So Mr. Hamby's resorting to an
approach like that is insulting not just to women, but to men as
well, because, while male heroes taking blows is nothing new, what's
he says there is very much legitimizing assaults on male characters
as well as female ones.
It may be in bad form to hit a lady, but that does not mean that
it's okay for villains to subject male characters to violence as
well. In fact, any violence against innocents is simply
unacceptable. And that's why Mr. Hamby's attempt at moral
equivalency fails miserably.
Reading these excellent weblog essays, I understood and realized
much more than I had before, what Mr. Hamby was doing back then. For
this, I wish to offer many thanks to my blog brethren, for being the
real heroes when it comes to comic books, and for helping me to
understand all the better why in the end, Hero Realm was simply and
sadly not worth my time.
For the record, from what I can recall of Mr. Hamby, his being a fan
of DC Comics was questionable at best. He almost never tended to
post on the DCU boards on his website, and whenever he did have
something to say, it was usually just on some “fanboyish” item, such
as the Hush story arc in Batman
by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, and also on Identity Crisis, of course.
There were some things not in connection with “fanboy” talk that he
did tend to discuss at times, including Superman books, but other
than that, very few things seemed to interest him in the ways of DC.
For someone who seemed to consider IC a book worth upholding, it’s
apparent that it was otherwise out of knee-jerk motivations and
loyalty to the establishment only.
Stuck in the Byrne-Hold
One of the most absurd things about Mr. Hamby that I can remember
him doing, was how he tended to have misgivings about John Byrne's
later work, post-early-90s, yet when it came to his de-facto defense
of Identity Crisis, as seen in the editorial he wrote that I
dissected earlier, he argued at almost the same time that Byrne was
to be praised for making us as readers feel something when featuring
a violent assault on women and children. The fatal flaw to this
argument however, was that Hamby wrote (very ambiguously at that)
about what Byrne (and Brad Meltzer) supposedly accomplished in his
past works as if this were a known fact.
I recently happened upon this
old
article from Hero Play on the internet, in which the writer
talks about how, while Byrne did write some impressive stories
involving female protagonists, he still had a very questionable, and
even at times, very disturbing approach, to his depiction of women
in comics, that could more or less refute what Mr. Hamby was trying
to imply in his silly diatribe of yore.
As the writer of the article on Hero Play points out:
"Superhero
comics
have always been violent to some degree, and that is to be
expected, so I paid more attention to how the characters dealt
with violence against them, and whether they were portrayed as
struggling or helpless, defiant or frightened. When I divided the
results by gender, I was surprised at the severity of the bias.
I
undertook the same methods on the other Byrne books I had: Alpha
Flight, Superman, the Fantastic Four and others, and found the
same recurring themes: routine kidnapping, abuse, torture, and
killing of women in order to further the story and give the male
characters something to think about."
In my own experience in reading any of Byrne's books, I too have
noticed that at various times, such as in the case of a story in the
Fantastic Four from 1981
that involved a young girl coping with an abusive drunk of a father
in a small town in Arizona (one of the most puzzling things about it
was that one of the characters featured in the medical clinic said
that he was a native of that state, yet his accent was written so
that it looked a lot more like something from out of the southern
states). To Byrne's credit there, I will say that he at least showed
that Frankie Raye, who later became, Nova, the new herald for
Galactus, was mad as hell about that, yet at the same time, I was
annoyed that she was the only one who seemed genuinely furious about
it, Reed's stern reply to a question later submitted by the father
notwithstanding. And then, there was a scene in a later issue from
1986, towards the end of his run at the time, where She-Hulk is
about to use a piece of metal she's ripped off from a dashboard in a
spaceship the FF are fighting in during a battle with Blastaar in
the Negative Zone to do some damage with, but the aforementioned
villain stunned her with an energy ray before she could even do
anything.
Another more definate example I can think of though: I remember
reading the first issue of the third ongoing Superman series of today, which
replaced Adventures of Superman
as the sans-adjective title, in which Byrne reintroduced Metallo.
He'd broken into a city bank as a way to draw Superman's attention,
and then, when Clark and Lois came in to see what happened, John
Corben briefly held her hostage in order to force Clark into action
as the Man of Steel. And the part where Corben yanked her arm(s),
from what I can recall, was alarming. And if that's not enough, the
infamous "Byrne-Hold" in which a woman is held at arms length by the
neck, comes into play here too. Not that Lois was scared of him, but
what's really annoying about it is the way it's presented: she's not
exactly shown to be in genuine pain, not even after being put down,
when in real life, anyone who'd been held like that would surely
have been gasping for breath at least a short period afterwards.
This has the effect of making it 
seem stilted and exaggerated at best, and
it's certainly another clue as to Byrne's mistreatment of women,
whenever it serves not the story, but apparently, he himself.
And yet, it's probably nothing compared to that Fantastic Four cover shown in
the article, where She-Hulk was being kicked in the head by a
supervillain! OUCH!
In the issue of Action Comics
where Superman meets the Teen Titans, Donna Troy, then still Wonder
Girl, talks about being one of the "liberated ladies" while
fighting, and then finds herself in this very same grip, this time
by the Man of Steel himself, who's been possessed by/had his mind
switched with that of a crazy crippled man, who then makes rather
ludicrous implications in dialect towards her. Is that supposed to
be Byrne's way of making a jab at feminists, or independent women,
whom Donna has sometimes symbolized? I don't know, but I will say
that it almost seems to have "Murphy Stu" (the male fanfic term for
a writer who inserts himself into the story proceedings) written all
over it.
(And that's not all: thinking back on that story now, I can't help
but wonder if Byrne was jabbing at fanboys, enforcing the stereotype
of their being aimless nerds by implying that they were also brutes
and nihilistic underneath. It kinda reminds me of the movie Unbreakable, which, now that I
realize it, built upon some comics fan stereotypes, by implying that
they're insane. And almost makes me feel embarrassed to have seen
it, certainly the ending.)
Then, in another of Action
Comics, Hawkman and Hawkgirl guest star, and as the writer
points out for starters:
"Later
on, when Hawkman and Hawkgirl appear (actually, the cover bills it
as "Superman & Hawkman"), guess which one gets beat up on?
While Hawkman and Superman handle an armada of alien ships,
Hawkgirl gets beat up on by a supporting cast villain."
Not just by a villain, tragically
enough. Even Hawkman himself beats up on her, as shown in this
picture right here.
Now it may not involve any bleeding. But even so, what's shocking
about it is how it depicts the Winged Warrior smacking - no, slugging - the woman he's
usually known to be very loving and fiercely protective of across
the head. Some way to depict Hawkman as a loving husband, that's for
sure.
And then, there's this part, which points out that Byrne may have
preceded what Meltzer did, in dealing with pregnant women in one of
his own creator-owned books, The
Next Men:
'The
basic premise of this book is that teenage mothers were kidnapped
and experimented on to create a race of superhumans: the Next Men.
Byrne's fascination with abusing and killing pregnant women (in
especially gruesome ways) comes back again and again in the books
he works on. I suppose it could be called a "motif."'
From this, we see that the attacks on pregnant women in comics is
nothing new, and that Byrne certainly had some kind of a facination
with the whole distasteful idea.
Then, there's the time when he turned Scarlet Witch evil in West Coast Avengers in 1990:
"The
Scarlet Witch is almost always cringing from whatever threat
they're facing, while the others prepare themselves to fight. (Of
course, that doesn't happen when she's the featured
villain.)"
If there's something else this part of the article made me think of,
it's some kind of stereotype that seems to have appeared here and
there in entertainment, wherein a female with combat skills is only
shown as being truly effective if she's evil! I've noticed that form
of stereotype here and there, in a few movies and such, in example,
and the part about Scarlet Witch's having gone nuts and turning
crook again for a time reminded me of that bizarre stereotype.
And what's really awful about all this is that Byrne's story from
around that time was where Brian Michael Bendis got the idea from
for how to write up the premise for Avengers Disassembled last year.
And then someone reviewing the Avengers Disassembled arc over at
Hero Realm (see below for more) had the sheer ignorance to say that
Bendis did his homework!
For someone who sometimes tended to say that Byrne's past his prime,
Mr. Hamby certainly seemed quite impressed, even today, with how
Byrne had a fetish for mishandling the female characters in a lot of
the comics he wrote.
The following quote from the Hero Play article should pretty much
sum up what seems to be quite a trend in comic books, and may even
suggest who really ended up popularizing it:
'One of
the things about Byrne (and most comics writers) is that whenever
he wants to give his male characters more "depth," he kills off or
tortures the women around them. When he wants to give the women
more depth, he just tortures them directly.'
And what's really scary when thinking about that, is that, while it
didn't start with Byrne, and won't end with him either, he may very
easily have popularized the trend of discrimination against women in
comics. The possible difference though, is that in some cases, he
may have tended to be more subtle in his approach, whereas Meltzer,
and even Chuck Austen, who did something like that with Polaris in Uncanny X-Men, was more out in
the open when doing it.
Now, let us turn to what the definitions of fanboys are, to say the
least…
What is the meaning of the term
“fanboyish”?
For many years now, that’s something I’ve never been quite sure of,
as to what being a fanboy (or fangirl) really is or means. But I
guess in fairness, there could be two-to-three different meanings to
one word.
One, is simply being a comic book fan, ditto of the characters who
populate them. The second is those who enjoy the traditional themes
of comics, such as action, adventure and romance. The third,
however, is being an addict in a most weird sense, that being one
who buys the mega-hyped, so-called “events” regardless of whether
they’re good or bad, simply because they were hyped, and that is
presumably who these kind of books are aimed at too. The aimless
addicts care nothing for history or consistency, how the characters
acted before, or even the lessons of life that great writers like
Stan Lee and Denny O’Neil tried to offer. Nor, in fact, do these
mindless, unthinking addicts, who also do not seem to have a single
second thought as to morality, ever seem to care if the stories at
hand are discriminatory against race and religion, or even women.
They seem to be doing little more than to respond to a beacon signal
emitted by the company, calling upon them to buy, buy, and buy, just
because it’s some kind of a celebration, like being invited to a
birthday party.
That, to say the least, is what these so-called events seem to be
thought of as being in many cases: big gala celebrations where the
idea is to have a great time at the carnival fair, even if they’re
serving up phony milkshakes to go with it. And nobody even tries to
check if they’re really getting their money’s worth, or if it fits
in well with any of the positive messages that Marvel and DC were
trying to promote years before, including that famous line by Stan
Lee, “With great power, must come great
responsibility!” In fact, and as mentioned earlier above, a
reviewer on Hero Realm back in late 2004 reviewed Avengers
Disassembled’s last parts (look here
for the review, and here
for what I have to say about it on my own blog) and most dismayingly
enough, the reviewer completely failed to understand why the
outcome, with Scarlet Witch being depicted as gone insane from
having failed to raise real children, and unable to cope with power,
was resorting to misogynistic stereotyping. He just gave a
collosally favorable rating without a second thought, because he
enjoyed the story simply out of being a comics fan, and did not have
any considerations, moral or otherwise, on whether or not Marvel or
DC were resorting to cheap elements, nor if they were really taking
any genuine steps in setting any of these “bold new directions” they
speak of in cases like these.
It just goes to show why something is going to have to be done in
order to start educating people on why discrimination against racial
minority groups and women does not make for good entertainment, and
it also shows why Women in Refridgerators is as relevant as ever an
argument on discrimination in the comic book industry.
Recommended links:
Comics
should
be
Good
weblog entry
Howling
Curmudgeons
entry
from
December 16, 2004
Everything2.Com:
The
treatment
of
female characters in Superhero comic books
Everything2.Com:
Countdown
to
Infinite
Crisis article
Sequential
Tart
Roundtable:
Dissection
of 2004
Comics
Should
be
Good
entry from April 2005
Comics
Worth
Reading
entry
from May 2005
ComixExperience's
Savage
Critic:
reviews
from May 8, 2005
Copyright 2005 Avi Green. All rights reserved.
Home FAQ Columns
Reviews
Links
Favorite
Characters Special
Features Politics
Blog Comics
Blog Food Blog