I wrote yesterday about the news that DC Comics is preparing to have a major male character in their stable, previously assumed to be straight, come out of the closet. Today the news comes that rival comics giant Marvel, already ahead of DC in the movie business is one-upping DC once again when it comes to depictions of gay characters: Canadian superhero Northstar will propose to his non-superpowered boyfriend in an arc that will lead to the first superhero comics wedding between two men. Archie Comics got there months ago with the wedding of Kevin Keller and his boyfriend (the two met during their military service), but it’s still a big deal to see a superhero, a masculine ideal if there ever was one, marry a man, to show the superhero community standing up and celebrating that couple. Whether you live within the story or experience it from outside, that’s some heavy hitters to have in your corner. And the way Marvel’s talking about the arc is great:

“The story of Northstar and Kyle is universal, and at the core of everything I write: a powerful love between two people who have to fight for it against all odds,” said comic writer Marjorie Liu in a statement. “This is the quintessential Marvel story, one that blends the modern world with the fantasy of superheroes in order to tell an exciting story that begins with a wedding and continues in ways you can’t imagine.”

Although Northstar’s story marks Marvel’s first gay wedding, the X-Men comics are known for tackling civil rights — including gay, lesbian and transgender issues — in their panels. Much has been made of the parallels between the mutant outsiders of the comics and gay youngsters grappling with identity and stigma. Other gay and bisexual Marvel characters include Mystique, Colossus (the Ultimate version), Destiny, Karma and Graymalkin.

“The Marvel Universe has always reflected the world outside your window, so we strive to make sure our characters, relationships and stories are grounded in that reality,” Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso, said in a statement.

I said this about Jay-Z and I think it’s true here, too. Presenting stories about gay people and gay couples as if they are the status quo, and as if they’re consistent with your stated values, and putting people who disagree in the position of shaking you off that ground is one of the most powerful ways to change the tenor of gay rights debate. And when it comes to narrative, doing more than simply announcing someone’s gay is critical: giving them a full, rich lived experience and insisting that ought to be the norm because it’s good storytelling is one of the best way art can fight for equality and reconfigure the terms of our conversations and assumptions.

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In a bit of genius framing and smart re-appropriation of what’s already proven to be one of their most commercially-viable properties, the folks at Archie Comics have announced that they’re going to make a live-action Sabrina the Teenage Witch movie. And rather than the close-to-the-comics format of the cartoon show which debuted in 1970 and ran for four seasons, or the sweetly comic movie and seven-season live action series that starred Melissa Joan Hart, they’re doing something just as smart as their Archie Gets Married series or the introduction of gay character Kevin Keller. They’re turning Sabrina into a superhero, and giving her an origin story that’s meant to function like a Spider-Man Story. Even if you’re not into Archie Comics, you should be excited about this development.

The thing that’s fascinating about Sabrina is that, like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, or to a lesser extent, HBO’s Girls, which premieres this weekend, it’s a world in which women are central and men, to a certain extent, just don’t matter very much. Sure, there’s Sabrina’s non-magical boyfriend, and she has male and female friends in the form of the Archie gang, but the absolute core of the franchise and the thing that’s most fun about is Sabrina hanging around with her wacky aunts and figure out what it means to be a witch. It’s almost a total inversion from superhero movies in which talented young men are mentored by skillful older men, where women serve as consciences before hanging from things or get burned to death by villains. Even when we see extremely powerful women in pop culture, they get mentored by men: Buffy has Giles, Katniss has Haymitch, The Bride has Pai Mei. The idea of a superheroine who gets to be mentored by other women is essentially unprecedented in the last decade of cinema, and it lends an entirely new dynamic to the trope, one that’s less about the transfer of power possessed by men to a lone women and more about the idea that there are specifically feminine means of power.

This is particularly important given that becoming a teenager, and discovering you have power, do tend to mean different things for boys and girls. It’s easy, for example, to make jokes about Peter Parker and his uncontrollable webs in his early days as Spider-Man. But ultimately, the narrative for dorky dudes who acquire super-powers is pretty simple: the weakling acquires a compensatory strength or skill, whether it’s web-slinging or a U.S. Government-issue physique, takes up a man’s work, and is rewarded with the girl. If you’re a woman, things are more complicated: getting power means not just using it but managing it, and the way people respond to your possession of it. And if you get that power as a teenage girl, you get it at a time when you have to manage a whole host of other things that are not unique to boys but are intensified for girls—your looks, your clothes, your brain, and the way people treat whatever combination of them you’re manifesting. That’s complicated, but that complexity is precisely what makes it unfortunate that Marvel or DC hasn’t tried to tell these stories. No matter what you may think of their core content, the folks at Archie are fast proving themselves hugely nimble, creative, and forward-looking.

The good people at Archie Comics were kind enough to let me give y’all a first look at the cover for Archie 635, in which the Occupy movement comes to Riverdale. The issue’s being written by Alex Segura and drawn by Gisele Lagace. And it looks pretty great:

Archie’s done a pretty flawless job of updating their brand in recent years, whether through the introduction of gay character Kevin Keller, something they’ve done while never getting baited by the response from homophobes, or the Archie Gets Married storyline, which finally let the characters grow up. Segura came to Archie from DC Comics, a move that gave the brand a greater connection to where the rest of the comics industry was at. And this Occupy issue is, I think, a smart, news-relevant move that also works well with the core Archie mythology. Archie’s struggle to choose between Betty and Veronica has always been a conversation about being happy in the middle class or deciding to make the bid for the big time, even if the people you know there are irritable and self-absorbed.

If you need any more proof that conservatives don’t just want to protect their own kids from material they find objectionable, they don’t want anyone to have any access to it, ever, check out the One Million Moms freakout over Archie Comics at Toys ‘R’ Us. They’re writing to the chain:

As a mother and a member of OneMillionMoms.com, I am extremely disappointed to learn that select Toys ‘R’ Us stores are now selling ‘Archie’ comic books with a same-sex wedding displayed on the front cover. I am referring to the ones where the front cover reads “Just Married” with two men marrying, one wearing a service uniform. I am aware that Toys ‘R’ Us employees do not actually set up the displays; they leave this up to the vendor. Your company should be aware of the merchandise being sold in your stores nonetheless. These comic books are displayed at the front checkout counters so they are highly visible to employees, managers, customers and children.

Unfortunately, children are now being exposed to same-sex marriage in your toy store. This is the last place a parent would expect to be confronted with questions from their children on topics that are too complicated for them to understand. Issues of this nature are being introduced too early and too soon, which is becoming extremely common and unnecessary. A trip to the toy store turns into a premature discussion on sexual orientation and is completely uncalled for. Toys ‘R’ Us should be more responsible in the products they carry.

If your children are too young for a discussion about the fact that sometimes two men or two women love each other the way Mommy and Daddy do, they are also probably far too young to see any other comic books or tabloids that are displayed routinely at checkouts, or to any of the violent or sexual toys or games that are regularly peddled at large toy chains. There’s always the option of shopping for toys while your children are at school or with another parent. And if your children are old enough to read, but you don’t want them reading the cover of this one comic book, hand them a new or favorite book while they’re at the checkout line.

I do sympathize with parents who want to expose their children to age-appropriate content, but I draw the line at those who think they have a right to a world where they don’t have to be exposed to anything that contradicts their worldview, and who are prepared to demand that, rather than to try to find reasonable workarounds. And if you want your kids to share your views even in a world that doesn’t, you’re probably going to have to raise them to believe strongly enough even when they’re exposed to new things. Keeping Archie comics out of Toys ‘R’ Us won’t keep gay couples invisible in the world the One Million Moms’ kids will grow up in.

One of the best things about writing about multiple media is that you’re not subject to the tyranny of Best Of lists. I could no more decide between Shame and Hugo for a numbered slot than I could pick between Revenge and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (though can we please get Kanye writing rhymes for and about Emily Thorne? I need an update on Snoop Dogg and his Sookie Stackhouse obsession). However, there were a lot of things that made me happy this year, and because Oprah’s not rockin’ it anymore, here is a semi-chronological-but-unranked list of my 26-odd favorite things to consume or discuss in 2011. A similar list of my least favorite things will follow tomorrow.

1. Frank Ocean makes us all hurt so good: I’m more irritated than anything else by the antics of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. But it’s worth it for Frank Ocean, who rocks specific melancholia like nobody’s business. “Novacane” was one of my favorite songs of 2011.

2. Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch: Before y’all accuse me of getting all Armond White up in the business, let me be clear. I don’t think Sucker Punch is an affirmatively good movie or that Snyder is a visionary director (though I appreciate that he actually has a distinctive visual style). But as aestheticized meditation on the horrors of lobotomy, a frightening and overlooked part of American mental health history, I found it unexpectedly moving. Plus, Snyder circumvented a ban on female leads with the movie.

3. Cedar Rapids sets Ed Helms loose: Up In the Air, but for people who actually live in flyover country, and Parks and Recreation with a deeper undercurrent of bitter darkness and isolation. There should be more popular culture about the struggle to be fundamentally decent.

4. War photographers movie The Bang-Bang Club and HBO’s biopic of the Louds, Cinema Verite: After the death of Tim Heatherington and as Joao Silva recovered from his injuries, The Bang-Bang Club offered a look at what it takes not just to put yourself in danger as a war photographer, but at what it means to be an observer rather than someone who intervenes. Conversely, Cinema Verite went back to the invention of reality television to explore what it means to be watched — and dissected — by a mass audience.

5. Game of Thrones is brilliant, and even the frustrating A Dance With Dragons is grist for the mill: I worry that George R.R. Martin’s universe is spiraling completely out of control, too big for any series to contain. But the first season of the HBO adaptation featured great performances, particularly by a host of very young actors and a smart sense for cuts and world-building. I don’t know if we’ll reach the end of this fascinating, maddening saga any time soon. But the ride looks like it’s going to be delightful.
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The bridge is yours.

-A wonderfully nerdtastic interview with Paul Kupperberg of Life With Archie.

-TV networks’ fear of drama.

-The 10 geekiest moments on Community.

-From Desperate Housewives to the women who work for them.

-We get more raunch comedy and education reform from the stars of Bad Teacher!

Comics Alliance has a big story up about the latest twist in Archie Comics’ storyline about Kevin Keller. Not only is his character going to be in the military in the future, not only is he getting married to a character who appears, at least in these sample pages, to be of a different race, but the twist is going to be that he met his future hubby during his term of service. But what actually struck me about the story is not that it’s about a post-Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell world, not that it’s about an interracial gay wedding, but that Archie is following Doonesbury and telling a story about injured veterans.

I don’t know how many of y’all have followed B.D.’s arc over the past couple of years, but Doonesbury’s done more than any other pop culture artifact that I can think of to explore what happens to soldiers who bear the cost of our current involvement in two disastrous wars. Whether it’s B.D. losing his leg and struggling through physical and mental therapy; Toggle’s battle against traumatic brain injury; Ray Hightower’s panic attacks; and Melissa’s struggle to overcome the lasting impact of surviving command rape, the strip’s effortlessly, compassionately, and often hilariously integrated B.D.’s military family into the strip.

Archie’s decision to do something similar may be derivative, and it may not be as sustained — the stories about the characters as adults are, after, part of a one-off storyline. But I’m glad to see another American institution in comics integrate the diverse experiences of servicemembers and their families into key storylines, and to emphasize that war is not cost-free, and it’s not temporary. Not everyone’s going to be lucky enough to get rehabbed by a hunky gay nurse in a military hospital. But a lot of folks are going to have to deal with lost limbs and the lasting effects of injuries that might have killed them in earlier conflicts.

I’ve long wanted to check out To Riverdale and Back Again, the live-action Archie movie NBC made in 1990, and thanks to some work by trusty reader David Crockett, I finally got to watch it.

The movie is every bit as bad as I expected it would be. Veronica has her father re-route the Concorde to Riverdale. Lauren Holly has a delightfully awful blonde wig to play Betty, who is apparently teaching school and writing cheesy fiction. Reggie runs a delightfully awful ’80s aerobics gym. Jughead is a quivery shrink who redeems himself by public acts of deeply white hip-hop. It’s weird, rather than endearing, that the characters are mired in the same old fights and rivalries that consumed them 15 years later, and it would have been more interesting to have the movie be a thought experiment in how they’d change as they grew up. It does, however, involve a pretty heartwarming scene of civil disobedience and a terroristic white chauffer!

But it’s also just a funny little refugee from an earlier era of comic book movies that seems to assume what readers-turned-audiences wanted in their adaptations was artificiality. There’s no real attempt to make these characters seem realistic or to have proportional reactions to events. Josie and the Pussycats, which had a much better cast than this, but a scenario that was as goof-tastic and over the top as possible (and also really terrible-looking costuming). I wonder if the intervening 20 years have made folks realize that you could just treat Archie comics as a realistic, straight-forward, if sweet, story and make a really great teen movie based on them. Certainly the Sabrina television show worked because it took that approach and added just enough magic to make it clear that the rules and stakes of the world were different, but not the human anxieties.