New In Theaters:

-The American Pie franchise wraps up this weekend with American Reunion: the humor’s as gross as ever, but there’s some real pathos there. And Alyson Hannigan in fetishwear.

-Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope: Morgan Spurlock’s latest is more sizzle reel than introspection, especially on issues of race and gender in the fan community. But there’s some fun to be had there, especially following aspiring artists and a costume designer for whom Comic-Con is a giant job fair.

On Television

-Starz debuts a new original series at 10 PM on Friday, Magic City, full of Jewish families, union busting subplots, Cuba’s fall to Castro, the arrival of casino-running gangsters in Florida, and gorgeous architecture—and people. The show’s uneven in the early going, but there’s potential there.

-Game of Thrones is back on HBO on Sunday with the second episode of its second season, and there are lots of fascinating gender politics on tap. Catch up, and we’ll discuss on Monday.

Morgan Spurlock, long known for socially conscious documentaries like Super Size Me, his look at the fast food industry, or war on terror exploration Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, is taking on a more personal passion in his latest movie. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope follows aspiring comic book artists taking their portfolios to publishers, costume-builders preparing for the masquerade, comic book vendors facing down an age of digital publishing and declining paper sales, and even a couple heading into an engagement at Kevin Smith’s Hall H panel. And Spurlock talked to geek icons ranging from Stan Lee to Joss Whedon about what it means to come to one of the largest geek gatherings on the planet—or as Whedon put “My tribe! I have found my tribe!”

I spoke to Spurlock about the cultural capital of geekdom, the rise of digital comics publishing, and whether the geek community needs to think harder about sexism and racism. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How long have you been going to Comic Con? How has it changed since you’ve been there?

The very first one I ever went to was in 2009…The comic book conventions when I was a kid, it would be some crusty old guys selling comics, and there would be some collectibles there, and a guy from Star Wars signing autographs in a corner…It’s 180 degress and ten miles away. There’s beocme mainstream success in all of these genres. Video games are now as big as movies. You have comic books that have become number one franchises…It’s become cool to like these things…before, you were the weirdos, the nerd, the freak. Now the weirdos and the freaks are running the franchises. What’s happened is there’s a tremendous cool factor that’s settled in around liking this stuff. It’s cool to wear that out loud.

One thing I noticed about the documentary, which I quite enjoyed, was while you’ve got some women in the mix, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of institutional sexism at Comic Con. You’ve got a guy wrangling slave Leias, but no look at how booth babes are treated or the fact that Comic Con doesn’t have a sexual harassment policy.

There’s tons of things that people would love for this film to talk about. And I’ve made a film that’s what I feel is about the heart and soul of Comic-Con. For me, I made a film that was about the fans. We made a film that has a very strong female character talking about what her passion is, breaking in to this design field. I just wanted to tell a story that got to the heart of fandom.

But given that fans have become so powerful and there’s so much cultural capital you get for being a geek, is it time to stop acting like we’re marginalized and start looking at ourselves as a community internally, particularly at how women and people of color are treated within it?

Sure. I mean, I think that anyone who goes to Comic-Con today will see that there’s a tremendous amount of women at Comic-Con today, as fans, as well as creator. This idea of it being a kind of geeky boy’s club isn’t relevant anymore. I feel like these are things that are kind of transitioning away automatically. I don’t think you need to kind of turn them into a story of their own. For me, as someone who goes there as a fan, I feel like it’s still a place for people with talent to find opportunities. The idea of Comic-Con as geek job fair, we met tons of young comic book artists who were going there to try to pitch their work…male or female, black white or otherwise.
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The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con:

The Mary Sue considers the question of whether anime conventions should do criminal background checks to prevent situations like one where a man in his 30s plead guilty to sexually coercing a 13-year-old girl he met at Katsucon. I think the post conflates attendance at cons with job applications that require you to disclose whether you’ve been arrested or convicted of a crime in a way that’s problematic, but I do, of course, agree that “men and women alike should be able to enjoy a molestation-free time at any anime convention they desire.”

One of the best ways to do this would be not criminal background checks, but strong anti-harassment policies and good training for convention staff and volunteers about how to enforce them and to balance the difficult task of supporting victims while showing respect for the principal that people are innocent until proven guilty. The database kept by the awesome folks at the Con Anti-Harassment Project doesn’t show a harassment policy for Katsucon or for the biggest Con of them all, San Diego Comic Con. And that’s just nuts. This is a basic thing you can do that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s privacy or civil liberties, that would help combat bad press-inducing incidents and would make everyone more comfortable coming. It’s a win-win scenario.

As things like the racialized reactions to the announcement of a mixed-race Spider-Man or a black man as a Norse God, or the treatment of people who ask about diversity in employment and characters at DC Comics demonstrate, being a self-described nerd or geek is no guarantee that you’ll be sympathetic to the concerns of minority groups who face actual systematic oppression. And in some cases, the norms of geekdom or nerddom can be employed in defense of the status quo as a way to avoid charges of racism or sexism. It would be nice if we could that we’d keep each other safe, but in any large group, that’s probably overly optimistic. Harassment policies at cons are a must. It’s an embarrassment that any convention wouldn’t have one.

DC Women Kicking Ass has an extended interview with a comics reader who goes by the handle Kyrax2, and who spent her time at Comic Con with her daughter, both of them dressed up as characters, going to panels and asking the top figures in the DC Comics universe about representation of women in character lineups, on covers, and among the creative staff of the label. It sounds like it was not a fun experience for her:

I started to mention the panels I’d previously attended. There was immediate hostility from the audience, with someone shouting, “We know!” as I began. Then I asked the question that had been bothering me since the night before, ever since I’d started thinking about the all-male composition of almost every panel I’d attended: “Are you committed to hiring more women?”

Didio responded, “I’m committed to hiring the absolute best writers and artists.”

I looked at the all-male panel and said, “Are you saying you can’t find any great women writers or artists?”

There was a furious reaction from the audience. People yelled at me to ‘sit down!’ and shouted out Gail Simone’s name over and over again. I said, “Yes, I met Gail Simone yesterday. I like her very much. But I’ve attended all these other panels, and with the exception of her and one female editor, they’ve all been male.”

I was again surprised by the audience’s reaction. If people liked Gail so much, didn’t they want to see more female writers and artists like her? It also felt very much like Gail was being used as a token female that everyone could point to and say, “Look! We have Gail! What’s wrong with you?” I didn’t hear any other name being called out.

I’m trying to decide if I think this sounds like it was a productive enterprise. I tend to prefer cajoling, jollying, and gentle shaming to confrontation, but then, the nice people at CAP have seen fit to give me this awesome platform from which to beat my favorite horses, dead or living. And I think media representation is one area where it can be productive to forcefully make people aware of their biases and blind spots even if it makes them uncomfortable. Watching or reading things with only white people, or only men, as stars may not be an active act of racism or sexism, but that doesn’t mean that passivity doesn’t have real impacts on the diversity of our stories and of our entertainment industry workforce, and it’s an act, intentional or no, of self-denial, locking yourself out of things that could illuminate your world.

So was this an effective way of waking people up? It certainly sounds like the most verbal people in the crowds were the ones who wanted to shut up Kyrax2, the panel attendance equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing nonsense, though I imagine that also served as a fairly indelible image for some of the more thoughtful people in the crowds who saw her. And given the venue, I’m not really shocked. I’m planning my first trip to Comic Con next year, so I don’t have first-hand experience of this, but it sounds like the event’s gotten so big that from a thematic and mission sense, it’s hard for it to maintain a coherent identity. I’m sure there are people for whom the presence of Twilight at Comic Con is a desecration, and people for whom anything that interrupts their opportunity to have contact with creators and actors in a really positive way is deeply upsetting. I respect that — though I don’t really think folks on panels should ever have a tough pass from difficult but fair questions. That said, next year it would be great to see this as a movement, a lot of women, and men who are their allies, and folks of color, and white folks, getting together to brainstorm questions in advance to elicit a lot of detailed information and reactions from artists, and to demonstrate widespread support for the idea that comics and geek culture get more interesting as they get more diverse. (And if someone is out there doing that, loop me in. I promise I’ll go as Jennifer Walters!) Lone heroes can accomplish a lot deploying the same power — or asking the same questions — over and over. But sometimes, it take the X-Men or the Avengers to win one of the bigger fights.