I hadn’t seen the covers for the Game of Thrones comics adaptation until Latoya Peterson tweeted this one out in horror:

It’s amazing how even an original, powerful franchise with its own following can get squished into comic book conventions even when they don’t fit very well. Here, Dany’s a standard comic-book babe with an impossibly tiny waist and significant-sized breasts, even though her character has just hit puberty in the scene from the novel depicted here. Even if she’s been aged up, as she was in the show to make the depiction of her marriage to a Ghengis Khan-like barbarian less problematic, the way she’s portrayed here is about serving her up as a delectable object, not to explain how frightening what’s about to happen to her is.

Even worse may be this cover:

The scene that’s depicted here? The one where Dany looks like she’s having an orgasm? It’s the moment after she, in extreme grief at the loss of her husband and the fact she’s been abandoned by her people, does something that everyone around her thinks is suicidal, but that turns out to be an act of vision that makes her a critically important and sought-after leader. Also, all her hair burns off. But no, that couldn’t possibly be what’s important here. What’s important is that she look devourable, whether by dragons or by men.

“Why The Avengers was so exciting to watch,” Ben Kuchera wrote in his review of the movie at Penny Arcade, “was that once you have every character set up and properly introduced by their previous films you can do anything. The script doesn’t have to spend time and dialog explaining who everyone is and where they came from…They each arrive on the screen fully formed, without the dullness of a well-worn origin story weighing them down.”

I think he’s right, and he’s nailed something important about where we are in the development of comic book movies. Some, if not all, movie franchise are finally fully behaving like comic books, giving us extended explorations of individual characters that intersect with and then diverge from other characters we’re spending time with in parallel, and examining new iterations of characters before the memory of the last version of the same figure has faded. To some critics, that means we’ve succumbed to an efficient, corporatized entertainment system that hits the same beats over and over again. Certainly, one of the reasons Spider-Man is rebooting is so Sony keeps its rights to the character and doesn’t let them revert back to Marvel. And if the lesson Marvel takes from the massive success of The Avengers is that pure repetition is a gold mine, that would be too bad. But I also think that the willingness by Marvel to give us more than six-odd hours over three movies with a set of characters presents an opportunity to demand richer, more unusual, deeper explorations of characters, to turn action movies into the kind of meditations we’re more accustomed to getting from television.

Previously, we’ve been used to superhero movies that come in three parts: a rise, a challenge, and a fall or a redemption. That’s a fine, sturdy structure for storytelling, and I fully expect The Dark Knight Rises to be a powerful deployment of that very reliable format. Previously, when a franchise has been kept alive past three installments, as with the Alien movies, it’s often less because the people involved have an overarching story to tell or set of ideas to explore than because a character is popular and profitable.

Marvel, on the other hand, has planned from the beginning to use these characters for a long time. Samuel L. Jackson’s contract with the company ties him to nine films so they can use Nick Fury as a through line in The Avengers franchise even if only in cameos. Even though at the time he came on board as The Hulk, Marvel didn’t plan to make more stand-alone movies based on the character, Mark Ruffalo was locked up for six movies, and now that his version of the character has become so definitive, the studio has him to work with.
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If only Marvel would oblige:

“Oh I’d be happy if they add the Black Panther and maybe Dr. Strange,” Lee told I Am Rogue during a recent interview. As for which characters he’d like to see get their very own franchise entries, a la “Iron Man”, “Thor” and “The Hulk”: “Those two [Dr. Strange and the Black Panther] and probably Ant-Man, which I think they are working on [Edgar Wright has been indeed been developing a solo Ant-Man flick for several years now]. Maybe I’ll play a little role in that.”

As much as I would love to see this happen, I only would want it to happen if it could be done right. And I’m not sure how Marvel’s formula would handle a black man who’s king of an African empire that’s more technologically advanced than the West, who’s done battle against the Ku Klux Klan and the apartheid regime in South Africa. I got back and forth on this, because I think there’s real value in positive portrayals of powerful black men in our media, but I wonder if a Black Panther movie that’s barred from talking about race would be worse than no Black Panther at all.

By Alli Thrasher

Yesterday The Oatmeal ran a comic about the differences between online gameplay experiences between the genders. In it, Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, depicts his own experience playing a few rounds of Left 4 Dead online. In the panel below, he showcases the ease with which a clueless girl gamer accidentally trashes her teammates and receives pleasantries and accolades for her faults:

Naturally the comic sparked outrage across the interwebs. The piece drew ire from gamers across the board, largely for its totally flawed portrayal of the realities of online gaming. At first, Inman seemed to miss the point, responding with a pseudo apology post in which he wrote, “a terrible female gamer gets away with more than a terrible male gamer.”

Cuppycake, Lead editor of The Borderhouse Blog, summed up, perfectly, why the above statements are not only erroneous, but also evidence of the privileged perspectives that make gaming often unwelcome for women: “You know what actually sucks about being a woman who games? Being harassed because of my gender…When I make a mistake in games, it’s because I’m a woman trying to play games. When you make a mistake, you just suck at the game and made a mistake.”

After receiving, and obviously digesting, further messages and tweets about the comic and the follow up post, Inman made a huge step in rectifying the situation by not only making a large donation to The Women Against Abuse Foundation, but also noting that he really and truly effed up: “I’m a guy and I barely talk into my mic, so I’ll concede that my view of things is probably very skewed.”

I commend Inman for skewing away from the typical mansplaining of “stop being so sensitive” that often accompanies the response to pieces like his comic. That he recognized his position as privileged and went even further to show that he came around to understanding what the problem with the post was is HUGE. The entire situation, however, brings to light, again, the true realities of online harrassment in the video games community.

As part of his apology post, Inman asks readers, “Outside of steam, it sounds like it’s still pretty horrible for women to play games. Is this true?” Yes, Mr. Inman, it is.

Need proof? Check out http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ or http://www.notinthekitchenanymore.com/ And guess what? The above include posts from all over the sphere of gaming – Steam, XBLA, and beyond. While I’m very aware that trashtalking is the nature of friendly competition, for women gamers (or gay or lesbian gamers, or gay gamers, or well basically anyone who doesn’t immediately present as a white straight male), our mere presence online opens us up to language that goes well beyond trashtalking. I’ve gotten cursed out playing Uno. And it’s not just “idiotic 13 year olds” doing the harassing. Research proves that the average gamer is 37 years old and that eighty-two percent of gamers are 18 years of age or older. Speaking from personal experience, the worst harassment I ever received as a gamer or community manager came from a man in his early 30s who had a job, a long time girlfriend, and most definitely did not live in his basement.

Truth be told, I’m thankful that the whole debacle occurred for a number of reasons. First, and foremost, it’s HUGE that a very public, internet celebrity, like the Oatmeal creator, can have his eyes opened to the experiences and realities of other gamers. Second, the reaction, to Inman’s original post, highlights again, that a sizeable portion of the gamer community is very aware of, and not cool with, the unfriendly nature of online gameplay. Finally, it provides an opportunity for all gamers to proactively look at how they address harassment when they witness it.

I think all gamers are invested in their play experiences being fun, productive, and straight up awesome. Moreover I think we all want the spheres we play in and the communities we participate in to be welcome places. So what do we do about all of this? Simple, report, call people out, and refuse to accept that violent sexist language is part of our culture or experience. If you’re a guy playing online and you hear someone trash talking, call them out. Feel free to say, “hey, that’s not cool.” Better yet, feel free to report and block them. Refuse to play with them. If you’re a moderator for an online community, enforce guidelines regarding hate speech. Educate members of your community about how their language can alienate other players. Don’t be afraid to use the banhammer.

And finally, if you’re a woman playing online, don’t stay silent on your end of the headset. I know this is tougher—who likes opening themselves up for abuse? But it’s high time that we stop hiding. Women make up over 40% of the gaming population – we’re a huge part of this community and we should not let ourselves be made invisible. So turn on your voice chat, ladies, and let the folks on the other end know that you’re there, you’re playing, and you’re not going away.

BlackBook has a fantastic look at gay stand-up comedians that gets at a point that I think is a challenge both for gay comics and Muslim comedy in general: how do you make the vernacular that’s part of your community conversation legible to a wider audience so they can participate in the jokes with you? And how do you create jokes that are a base that you can build your comedy on, rather than define you on terms that may not precisely be your own? As one of the comedians BlackBook talked to put it:

Part of this is because of the constraints of gay comedy. “There’s a condescending attitude that gay entertainment has to involve drag shows or men being effeminate,” says Brent Sullivan, a New York-based comedian. “I did a show in Chelsea the other day where there was this screaming queen who did a lot better than I did. Even homophobes could enjoy that because you are putting yourself into this box that they’ve created for you. But I think we haven’t challenged the gay-friendly straight men of this world to actually enjoy a gay character or enjoy gay entertainment because we haven’t given them anything to enjoy.”

Watching Marc Maron interview Jeffrey Tambor at SXSW, one of the things that fun about watching them riff off each other was the total lack of need to clarify any of the Jewish humor. Even a moment when they may have crossed the line with a Holocaust joke was immediately apparent to everyone in the room, even though it’s hardly a setting that guarantees a majority-Jewish audience. Jewish humor’s just so deeply-integrated into the American humor tradition—Christopher Hitchens believed the only kind of women who could be funny were Jewish ones and lesbians—that while it registers as particular, it doesn’t register as foreign. Everyone can participate in it, and Jews own it, it’s a tool we get to turn on anti-Semites.

That’s true for a small portion of gay humor, and for essentially no Muslim humor whatsoever. Things like the Allah Made Me Funny tour, The Infidel, Four Lions, and Max on Happy Endings will help. But we have so much work to do to make that language feel automatic and accessible to broad audiences.

The bridge is yours.

-M.I.A. apparently wrote the theme song for a talk show Julian Assange is doing. Our world is silly.

-These comics sound great.

-Really sorry HBO isn’t doing this.

-The origins of Ron Swanson.

-This looks like a lot of fun:

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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As you may have read, about 50 of the 1,400 newspapers that carry Doonesbury have asked to run alternative strips this week while the comic takes on the spate of laws that would require women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds before obtaining abortions. It’s too bad they’re being timid, because the arc as a whole is terrific: ferocious and funny all at once. “Will it hurt?” asks the patient about to undergo the ultrasound. “Well, it’s not comfortable, honey,” the nurse tells her. “But Texas feels you should have thought of that.”

It’s a worthwhile reminder of the standards male creators should set for themselves when trying to write about women’s issues—and frankly, women in general. The fact that Gary Trudeau’s done amazing work over the years with characters like Joanie Caucus, Lacey Davenport, Alex Doonesbury, Kim Rosenthal, and Melissa Wheeler is the reason he can speak with authority on the subject now. The strip has consistently expanded its scope on women’s issues, and I thought it was particularly brave to explore the consequences of Melissa’s command rape, when it could have been interpreted as a pivot away from B.D.’s loss of his leg. Trudeau treated what both Melissa and B.D. were suffering as equally legitimate pain, and he made treating Melissa with respect a major part of B.D.’s recovery, expanding his world in the process. Trudeau isn’t just parachuting in to abortion because the topic is trendy, he’s not the equivalent of an all-dude panel discussing women’s health. He’s a genuine ally, and a powerful one.

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.