Kevin Smith is launching Comic Book Men, a show based on Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank, New Jersey, on AMC on February 12. And of all the people I’ve seen in a week and a half at Television Critics Association press tour, he’s the biggest comic book nerd, the only person who would dream of saying something like comics are “one of the only pure american art forms. We invented the comic book. It’s one of the things that like jazz we can claim for our own. It didn’t come from any other place.” So of course I had to ask him what he thinks about the state of women in comics, and how to get more women into comic shops.

His answer was half flip: “I’ve seen Catwoman in her bra far too often. Now I just want to see her panties,” he joked, after I referenced the New 52. “All I hear single women talking about is how to find a good man. You will never find a better man than in a comic book store. Comic book dudes are all oral. My wife dropped her standards this much and she got me for life.”

But he was also very clear on the dynamics of the industry, and in thinking there should be more women represented both in the creative staffs making the books and in the stores selling them.

“It’s male-dominated media, and the readers are mostly dudes,” he acknowledged. “The growth of independent comics has been great for people who don’t want to tell stories about anyone in tights…more of that is what’s going to bring in more women.” And he praised Womanthology, the anthology collection of comics by women funded by Kickstarter and sold for charity. “It’s such a great idea…You could go page by page and say this person should be working in the industry. This is a show about these four dudes who work in this store. There are no women [in the store] yet…There should be a Comic Book Women, and good willing, there’ll be a spinoff Comic Book Women, and I’ll make shit ton of money.”

And really, that’s the way in. I wonder if Womanthology might be the key wedge here (I will admit to being impressed Smith had read it). I’d love to see spinoffs of the stories there, or by the artists who contributed. And whether those books are supported by sales or donations, they could be a means of demonstrating a market for something different. I doubt they’d reach the same scale as a mass-distributed book: it’s almost impossible to do that without marketing, distribution, and pure history and devotion. But if money is what matters, we need to find alternative ways to buying the same old stuff to demonstrate our market power. And we have to be very clear about communicating what makes us buy things (as well as what makes us not buy them).

I recently read David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which is a kind of depressing, if enlightening enterprise. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised than the man who created Charlie Brown was chronically depressed, but the story of his infidelities, and in particular, the way he pressured his oldest daughter to get an abortion in Japan and then barely acknowledged what he’d done when she got back, is less than gratifying.

But I think the counterfactual question that stood out at me most when reading the book is what it would have meant if Schulz or Peanuts had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Michaelis writes in particular about Snoopy. In one strip, “Snoopy, invited to make a distinguished-grad speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, finds himself caught up in a riot protesting the drafting of dogs to serve in Vietnam…Snoopy, at the podium, his hit with a dog dish, then teargassed.” He writes “One of the few ‘enemies’ that Americans could agree on in those years was the Red Baron…From 1966 to 1969, Snoopy could be found pursuing—or being pursued by—the Red Baron wherever American explained itself to itself.”

The answer as to why Schulz didn’t come out against the war lies in this observation: “His opinions on subjects ranging from the miniskirt to the sexualizations of Peanuts were surprisingly tolerant, indeed hospitable.” You don’t get to be a national sage without being largely agreeable. But that quality also denies you your ability to speak forcefully and decisively on divisive issues without alienating somebody. It’s the same thing as perpetual reelection to Congress: if staying the nation’s tolerant Grandpa, or staying a member of the House becomes more important than anything you actually do with the position, you’ve got to start wondering what the point is.

Last week, I suggested that if the superhero comics industry actually wants women readers, it should advertise to them, do promotional work to get characters and storylines in magazines oriented to women, and engage in other sensible forms of marketing outreach. A great example of what one such a campaign might look like turns out to be underway in Mozambique, where superheroines are illustrating breast cancer self-examination techniques in a sensible, non-prurient manner. The illustrations, which are quite attractive and have the heroines set up to be reasonably proportional (though I wish they’d shown their faces), have the tagline, “When we talk about breast cancer, there’s no women or superwomen. Everybody has to do the self-examination monthly. Fight with us against this enemy, and when in doubt, talk with your doctor.”

io9 suspects that the ads might not have official Marvel and DC approval, but the campaign is sponsored by Vodacom and Mozambique Fashion Week, both of which I’m assuming have some sense of copyright, so I’m hoping they actually got official signoffs. If that’s the case, maybe Susan G. Komen for the Cure or another women’s health organization should see if Marvel and DC would be willing to collaborate on similar campaign in the United States. It seems like there could be some real mutual messaging there: women as supeheroines, superheroines as accessible women.

I’m sorry I missed Occupy Broadway, which sounds like a joyful, entertaining evening of live street theater. And of course I agree with Benjamin Shepherd, who told Wired that “Social movements are about imaging a more just, democratic, joyous set of social relations and I think that begins with art. We’re using public space to create a more colorful image of what our streets could look like through open-access performance.” But I’ll admit I’m a bit more excited about the long-range planning going on in the Occupy Comics movement, which has a three-stage plan for 2012, starting with digital comics, moving to a limited-edition paper run, and culminating in a hardcover edition.

I’m all for temporary, innovative, moving art that transforms public spaces in the same way I’m all for temporary, galvanizing public protest. But if that’s all we get out of Occupy Wall Street or the various Occupy Art efforts, I’d be disappointed. The arc of culture is long and broad, and bending even some substantial portion of it towards justice is going to be a long project. The goal shouldn’t be just to crash Broadwalk theater sidewalks, but to see shows make it all the way through the process and on to the stages inside. A year-long publishing plan for some alternative comics is great — and getting those themes fully integrated into mainstream comics narratives should be the actual standard we’re setting. Occupying everywhere is one thing. Achieving enough change so that we don’t have to think of ourselves as occupiers is where we should actually want to end up.

Always-wise commenter Anthony Damiani asks a fair question about the challenges of building female comics readers:

But the counterpoint is that it’s not like they haven’t tried, a number of times. A book like She-Hulk (in its Superhuman Law incarnation) was a good book that should have attracted a female readership. Marvel Divas and Models Inc weren’t good books, but they were clear efforts. Ms. Mavel? Ghost Rider? Alias? Marvel’s solo books with female leads have had a hard time selling for some time now– and it’s not all because they’re vapid cheesecake male-oriented fantasies.

I think part of this is an equilibrium issue; the “comic-book-shop-as-smelly-boys’-club” effect makes it hostile terrain for books that would otherwise be appealing to a female audience. Which, in turn, leads to Brevoort’s attitude: a sort of despair that what they feel is socially responsible to produce is directly at odds with what they’re actually able to sell.

I agree that it’s true that the comics industry has produced some quite fine comics about female characters. Dan Slott’s Superhuman Law arc on She-Hulk is one of my all-time favorite comics and one of my all-time favorite procedural stories, and it’s tragic that She-Hulk has sort of slipped under the waters, that she’s not even on the list for a second-tier movie in Marvel’s slate.

But I don’t think that’s actually sufficient. It’s not as if women have some sort of mysterious homing pigeon hormones that allow us to swarm the best in lady culture when it’s published even if no one lets us know about it. I’d be genuinely curious to know if Marvel and DC have done substantial advertising campaigns in women’s magazines, or on female-oriented television shows when they’re rolling out new storylines or new artists on comics with female characters? Or if they’ve pitched their comics characters as cover girls or interview subjects a la Marge Simpson’s Playboy spread? Just for fun, I checked the Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire archives for references to She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, the Scarlet Witch, Catwoman, Wonder Woman. Only the last produced any results actually related to comics or related products: in a guide to famous breasts in Marie Claire that misstates Wonder Woman’s history. If any other industry was making a push to get a product to its core audience and was failing that miserably in reaching them, they would fire their PR people and their marketing department. Maybe someone can offer information I don’t have here, and if so, I’d be curious to hear it.

You can’t expect women to go into comic book stores if they have no idea that anything’s there for them. You can’t expect them to swing by comics and graphic novels sections in physical or online bookstores if they have no conception that there are characters they should get excited about. If you really want a female audience, go after it.

Tom Morello’s best known for his work as a guitarist in Rage Against the Machine, but this fall, he’s debuting in a new medium with the release of his comic book Orchid. Set in a dystopian future where the devastating effects of global warming have ravaged society and ushered in a brutally divided class system where the rich own the poor as slaves, and everyone’s at risk from newly-risen dinosaur-like monsters. The title character, Orchid, is a teenaged prostitute with “Property” tattooed across her chest and “Know Your Role” branded into her forearm. In the first issue, which was released on Oct. 12, Orchid is arrested for skimming profits from her pimp to support her family — and thrown into a paddy wagon with the leader of a small resistance movement. I spoke with Morello at New York Comic Con about the perils of drawing “empowered” female characters who exist for male gratification; his experiences with sex workers in Los Angeles; and the meaning of Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I was curious how you got the idea for the strip in the first place. Had you been wanting to do something about sex workers for a while?

Yeah. About 3 years ago I had a story in my head. I wanted to do something that combined the epic sweep of stories like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars but that combined class politics of movies like the Battle of Algiers, or my own worldview. That’s one thing I thought was missing from Dune or whatever. It’s always getting the king back on the throne, and the princess back into the castle, and I’m not into that.

There’s a lot of race and gender but not a lot of class in fantasy.

Yes, exactly. That’s one of the things about the world of Orchid, it’s absolutely race-neutral. So it was very important to me with this story for there to be epic battles, and cool monsters, and narrow escapes, but to have a class politics to it that is sorely missed in a lot of other work.

So how did you decide to have Orchid be someone be someone who was doing sex work?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was not accepted in the rock community. I wasn’t the right color, I didn’t have the right length of hair. This was like the mid-’80s. And the first LA community that accepted me was the East Hollywood underground rock community where there were a lot of drug addicts and prostitutes. And Orchid’s based on people that I knew who were very hard in some ways, but had huge hearts and were very generous people…They’re composites.

I’m curious. Did you do any research on sex work more generally?

The research I did was first-hand. I also, not that that I need to trumpet it, but I used to be an exotic dancer myself, but that’s not exactly the sex trade, but it borders on it. I would not say I drew on that experience writing Orchid, just to be perfectly clear, but full disclosure. It was a long time ago.
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It would be delightful to dismiss Frank Miller’s dreadful new graphic novel, Holy Terror, as a simple but significant misfire by a once-talented artist. But the viciously Islamophobic sentiments and sexualization of torture that permeate the book aren’t fringe beliefs that we can ignore because they have no chance of taking hold. Instead, variants of these sentiments have guided American foreign policy and domestic sentiments in disastrous directions and fuel a wide-ranging industry.

To be clear, even without its noxious politics, Holy Terror wouldn’t be a good book. Much of the story takes place on a rainy night, and the cross-hatching meant to indicate the storm adds a muddy quality to the images. The images of bodies may not reach Rob Liefeld levels of offensiveness, but only because they lack any of the specificity to be distinct, much less disgustingly sexist, though an early image of our purported heroine Natalie’s rear end is about as specific as things get. When she and the Fixer, ostensibly her enemy, her occasional lover, and in the course of the book, her soulmate, have sex on a roof, they’re an indistinct black mass. The story operates on a level of assertion rather than demonstration. For a story about a terrorist attack, it’s deeply dull.

When it’s not downright disgusting. Miller’s clearly working from a framework that assumes that on September 11, everything changes. Our Natalie, a sneak thief, finds the experience of getting a nail through the leg from a bomb packed with them clarifying:

They knew where to hit us. They knew exactly where to hit us. All my life, there’s been something wrong. Something missing. A sense that everything I’m seeing around me isn’t entirely true. That this seemingly orderly world of laws and logic and reason is nothing but a shroud, a chimera. A mask. But every once in a long while, the mask falls away. Every once in a long while, the whole world makes perfect sense. The world reveals itself. I am at peace. And at war.

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The bridge is yours.

-Figuring out the extent of the damage to the Washington Monument.

-A 7-year-old on Starfire.

-Really wish Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t going to punish Cristina for having an abortion.

-Five medical lessons from medical dramas.

-Not going to lie: I don’t care how bad this movie is. I will go see it.

So, I’ve been trying to reserve judgment on Tom Morello’s “part Suicide Girl and part Joan of Arc” comic, Orchid, until I actually got a look at it, because I have some doubts about the whole badass-sex-worker enterprise as executed by dudes, but Morello has generally good politics. That main character doesn’t show up yet in the preview Dark Horse has released, but that sample did kind of hit on one of my pet peeves: science fiction that’s immediately scientifically ridiculous.

The book starts with the line, repeated elsewhere, that “When the seas rose, genetic codes were smashed.” I realize this is nitpicky as hell, but you know what? Global warming is probably not going to create an alternative to DNA, or human beings wouldn’t be running around in their present form. It’s interesting enough to suggest that dramatic global warming and rising sea levels, say, made the return of giant marine reptiles possible, depending how far we’re supposed to be in the future. And the fight over high ground happening along class lines also makes sense as an interesting global warming-related conflict. I’m sure that not everyone, or even most of the folks reading Orchid will care that the book starts with something that patently silly. But it’s a distracting invention. The real consequences of climate change are terrifying enough. I wish they’d saved the wild inventions for changes in human society.