This is an incredible shame:

ROBOT 6 has confirmed rumors circulating this weekend at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo that parent company AOL has shut down the comics news site ComicsAlliance. The move came Friday amid the abrupt closings of AOL Music and several music news and video sites.

Launched in its current form in August 2009 by Laura Hudson (AOL had briefly operated a lower-profile comics blog with that name), ComicsAlliance featured a mix of news, humor and commentary and a staff of contributors that most recently included the likes of Caleb Goellner, Chris Sims, Andy Khouri and David Brothers. Hudson left the site in June 2012, to be replaced as editor-in-chief by former Vertigo editor Joe Hughes.

It’s not just the loss of jobs for good writers that’s unfortunate. It’s that Comics Alliance, which I started reading under Hudson’s leadership, was a place where liking comics wasn’t incompatible with thinking about the race and gender of people who created them, or where you could enjoy something and still interrogate why you enjoyed it. So much of popular culture coverage is geared towards either trivia or towards feeding the beast of unalloyed enthusiasm that brooks no criticism or analysis. Comics Alliance was a place where the highest form of liking something was taking it seriously, giving it credit, and also assigning it responsibility. Pieces like Laura’s analysis of the presentation of Starfire in the New 52 made a valuable argument that sexism wasn’t just bad for its social impact on readers, it made for bad storytelling and bad art. If there’s any upside to this unfortunate news, I hope that Comics Alliance writers find new jobs quickly, and bring that ethos to a whole range of new publications that could benefit from it.

io9 has a wonderful gallery of fully-clothed superheroines, drawn by the artist Michael Lee Lunsford. I particularly dug this sketch of Power Girl:

What really struck me, looking at the images, is what they reveal about the state not just of sexism in the comic book industry, but of the laziness that sexism has bred in costume design. In artists’ eagerness to show off superheroines’ breasts, legs, and buttocks, they’ve become duplicitous and dull, utterly failing to think about what costumes might aid their characters in their jobs, much less reflect their personalities. Tony Stark’s tinkering with his costume is an essential element of his character, but the most creativity the people who draw her can bring to Power Girl is a cleavage window? I can imagine some very talented Hollywood costume designers working in film and television who would have a thing or two to say about the utter embarrassment to their profession represented by this dereliction of duty.

The meme that Superman, having arrived as a child from Krypton through the machinations of his parents, is in fact an undocumented immigrant has percolated a bit during this round of the immigration reform debate. But it took novelist Junot Diaz, who appeared on The Colbert Report earlier in the week, to take that idea and turn it into the perfect question for people who treat immigration reform as an abstraction:

What do you do with the isolated child in the fire engine red cape with nowhere else to go? What are in his best interests? Do you proceed under the most optimistic assumptions about what he might be able to bring to his new country? The worst? The point is not that Superman deserves an H-1B visa. It’s that immigrants deserve a chance to make contributions to the country they want to adopt, not simply to be treated as a drag on it.

Chris Sprouse, the comics artist who’s drawn everything from Batman for DC Comics to the Dark Horse adaptation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, has announced that he will withdraw from illustrating Orson Scott Card’s Superman story for DC, on the grounds that the furor around Card’s grotesquely anti-gay advocacy made it impossible for the story to stand on its own:

“It took a lot of thought to come to this conclusion, but I’ve decided to step back as the artist on this story,” Sprouse said in a statement released Tuesday. “The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that’s something I wasn’t comfortable with. My relationship with DC Comics remains as strong as ever and I look forward to my next project with them.”

Due to the creative change, the Card story will not appear in the first collected issue out May 29. Instead, it will feature a story by writer Jeff Parker and artist Chris Samnee, as well as a tale by Jeff Lemire and one by writer Justin Jordan and artist Riley Rossmo.

DC is also looking for a replacement illustrator for Card’s story.

“We fully support, understand and respect Chris’s decision to step back from his Adventures of Superman assignment,” the company said in a statement. “Chris is a hugely talented artist, and we’re excited to work with him on his next DC Comics project. In the meantime, we will re-solicit the story at a later date when a new artist is hired.”

This strikes me as one of the best possible outcomes we could have hoped for in this case. I know a lot of people would have liked to see Card summarily dismissed, but that seems like a decision that could have made him a martyr for people who don’t actually understand how First Amendment rights function, and might have limited the incident to a one-off, requiring more organizing the next time a comics company hired Card to write a title. What Sprouse’s decision does is illustrate something more useful: a shift in the market that suggests Card isn’t a good choice to work with because his active work to ban equal marriage rights and to recriminalize homosexuality make it impossible for his work to stand alone as fiction. I think it’s very, very risky to support political litmus tests for whether people are allowed to work or not—though I have no problem with political litmus tests for whether or not you want to give someone your money, or how you want to offset giving your money to someone who would use it for ill. But if someone’s political advocacy is making it more difficult for them to do the job they’re up for, then I think it’s perfectly reasonable not to hire them or work for them. We want the norms around Card to change, not to be fighting him title by title and watching the companies that employ him fail to learn the same lesson each time.

Whether DC still intends to stay in the Card business after this remains an open question. If I were them, I might not formally cancel his contract, but now that he’s no longer being used to launch the title, I might just…not rebid the art on it for a long time that could gradually turn in to forever. If they “fully suport, understand, and respect Chris’s decision,” not to be associated with a story that was going to attract nothing but disapprobation and boycotts, I wouldn’t be surprised if DC finds a way to follow in his footsteps, however quietly and slowly.

Over at io9, Rob Bricken asks whether Batwoman’s in-costume proposal to her girlfriend Maggie Sawyer will earn DC Comics good-will that it lost by hiring National Organization for Marriage board member and virulent homophobe Orson Scott Card, or “is this too little, too late for the company”?

I’m 99% sure the only reason DC hasn’t mentioned Batwoman’s marriage to the press is because it would call attention to the furor caused by the company’s recent decision to hire Orson Scott Card, scifi author and ardent detractor of gay rights, to write Adventures of Superman. Angry fans and retailers alike are planning to boycott the Superman comic in general, and some DC in particular unless Card is removed.

It’s too early to tell if Batwoman’s proposal will at all mitigate DC’s public relations problems with Card, or even if Card might have a problem collecting a check from a company whose works seemingly condone gay marraige. But at the moment, at least Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer are happy, even if nobody else is.

I’m always delighted to see more, and richer depictions of gay characters, especially in a medium where they were marginalized by the Comics Code and the disapprobation of Congress, a panic fed by cooked research. But this plot development won’t save DC Comics, and not just because a proposal on the page doesn’t really outweigh the harm Card’s speech and actions cause in the real world. Who gets hired to create content and what content ends up on the page are issues that are often related, but that function separately. People who care about where their money goes and the values of the content that they consume are going to care about both of those elements.

Something I wish I’d said more clearly the first itme I wrote about DC’s decision to hire Card to write Superman is that calls to fire him don’t appeal to me that strongly because it separates out his hiring from DC’s other hiring practices, which among other things, have produced a staff with very few women and no lead African-American writers on any comics titles. A decision by comics stores not to stock the title, demonstrating that Card’s values turn them off from a product that otherwise might have been profitable for them, makes more sense. And what would be most interesting to me is an explanation from DC about what process lead to Card’s selection. What made his pitches’ stronger than other writers? How did they weigh the likely publicity challenges from his employment against what appears to be a larger institutional imperative to modernize the brand by telling stories about committed gay couples? If DC Comics wants its image to be gay-friendly, then it should have been expected to be evaluated for consistency. More same-sex engagements doesn’t eliminate the appearance of a glaring contradiction in DC’s image.

If all DC wants is our money, rather than our social approval, that’s fine. But it needs to recognize that fishing for money on the grounds that it’s producing progressive and game-changing content is going to be a more difficult task if there’s a disconnect between what the content is, and who the money spent on it ends up going to.

In a fairly predictable cycle of events, DC Comics has hired Orson Scott Card to write Adventures of Superman, and large segments of the internet are displeased. As Comic Book Resources reports:

An online petition calling on the publisher to drop the “virulently anti-gay writer” has already drawn more than 4,800 signers. And while comic book fans and petitions seem to go hand in hand — it was just last month Marvel was being called upon to cancel Avengers Arena – this effort is being spearheaded by All Out, an initiative of the Purpose Foundation advocating for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. The drive has already attracted the attention of mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

Although Card is best known for his award-winning 1985 novel Ender’s Game, he has become notorious for outspoken views on homosexuality and his advocacy against gay rights. A board member of the National Organization for Marriage, a group dedicated to the opposition of same-sex marriage, the author has tried to link homosexuality to childhood molestation, advocated home-schooling to ensure children “are not propagandized with the ‘normality’ of ‘gay marriage’” (with Card, the phrase is always in quotation marks), and floated slippery-slope scenarios in which marriage-equality opponents one day will be classified as “mentally ill” and parents who encourage their children to pursue heterosexual marriage “will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.”

I’m of two minds about the petition. As much as I find Card’s views abhorrent, I do believe that he has a right to work, which of course is not the same thing as a requirement that anyone hire him. And I think it would be worrisome to set a precedent that political views which are unrelated to the content of a person’s job should be the grounds for firing them—obviously, Card’s views on homosexuality and gay rights would be a reason not to, say, put him in a position to make benefits determinations for gay families, or to decide whether or not to prosecute hate crimes. Now, obviously Card’s views have affected some of his creative output, and I’d be willing to listen to an argument that they affect even his works that aren’t primarily concerned with adult sexuality (though I think it would be a very heavy lift to convince me that Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead, as stand-alone books, are noxious works).

The really interesting question for me is who else other than Card DC considered to write Superman, and why Card’s pitch, whatever it was, stood out to the company. Card seems to me to be someone who has been coasting creatively on the reputation of Ender’s Game for an extremely long time, rather than a genuinely exciting active talent. But I wouldn’t be surprised if DC went with him because, if nothing else, he’s a recognizable brand name. That’s a kind of hiring laziness that is infuriating, particularly when, as Joseph Hughes wrote in a great piece at Comics Alliance earlier this month that inspired predictable-but-still-depressing hysteria, “There is currently not a single black writer working on a monthly series for either of the two biggest comic book publishers in the United States, and precious few working for any of the others.” Hiring a white, once-innovative writer whose attitudes both offend potential readers in general, and have the potential to seep into his work in a way that makes it deeply unappealing, is apparently still more attractive to DC Comics than seeking out a new and refreshing voice, no matter what body that voice is housed in.

Via The Mary Sue comes the news that Gail Simone, Freddie Williams II, Art Baltazar, Franco, and Ig Guara are working on a new project for DC comics, in which two superhero teamups, The Movement, done by Simone and Williams, and The Green Team, Baltazar, Franco, and Guara, represent the 99 percent and the 1 percent. I’m curious to see how that will actually shake out, because the early interviews don’t offer an enormous number of details. Jill Pantozzi writes:

“The Movement is an idea I’ve had for some time. It’s a book about power–who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse,” said Simone. “As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”

Simone didn’t name any characters in the interview but said The Movement would be an adventure story with some dark humor, and that it feels like a “very new kind of superhero book.”

“We’re not trying to preach platitudes at people. I happen to love superhero comics, especially the crazy glamor and thrills they contain,” she said. “But on the other, I think the backdrop is a slice of reality that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books. And I find that tremendously exciting.”

It’s amazing how many superhero stories involve said superheroes either having access to extreme wealth, or in the case of more working-class heroes like Peter Parker, ending up in proximity to it. It’s an assumption that goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the superpowers people manifest will be good for practical things, mostly fighting, and therefore monetizable, or at least worth controlling. And it also assumes that superpowers are relatively rare, and therefore a much more valuable commodity.

But it’s amazing how much interesting storytelling with superheroes comes when you get away from that wealth, or when artists start to explore the resentments that said wealth and power would inevitably engender. The central tension in The Incredibles is jealousy: Buddy Pine’s driven to try to democratize access to superpowers when he’s treated as ridiculous for aspiring to be as useful, and to get some of the social capital that Mr. Incredible is afforded. In Powers, superheroes have mixed status in society: some of them are public employees with the same somewhat-elevated status as cops, some remain tremendously famous and socially powerful, and others have adapted poorly to the restrictions based on them. Luke Cage, which I’ve been reading a lot of lately, derives much of its early power from the mismatch between how badly Luke Cage’s clients, some of them battling ordinary forces like housing discrimination and racial violence, need his services, and how little they’re able to compensate him for it. Luke is constantly short on rent and respect, and the business of superheroics is a rather grubby one.

If DC Comics wants to get at class politics, it seems like they should start by making superpowers much more common, and making some more highly valued than others, often in ways that don’t make immediate sense. It might also be fascinating to change the genesis of superpowers—rather than spontaneously manifesting themselves, or being the result of chemical exposure, a blood transfusion, or a wicked training regimen, maybe there’s a cost to getting powers that proves to be easier or harder to pay off, depending on which one you end up with. And maybe those inequalities have gotten suddenly and dramatically more intense. That’s a setup for a big event and new teamups that could be genuinely seismic.

In an absolutely amazing story, Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, went through the research notes that anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham took on his interviews with research subjects for Seduction of the Innocent, his book on the social and psychological impacts of comics—and discovered that he was faking the data. As a report on her work explains:

Wertham’s personal archives, however, show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History….

As she pored over his files, she began to recognize the case notes of children referred to in “Seduction,” and typing their quotes into her laptop computer. But when she returned to her hotel room and compared her notes to Wertham’s book, she found numerous inconsistencies. “I thought well maybe I’ve missed something, maybe I typed incorrectly,” Tilley said. So she began photocopying portions of Wertham’s files and comparing them closely to his book. “That’s when I realized the extent of the changes.”

For example, in “Seduction,” Wertham links “Batman” comic books to the case of a 13-year-old boy on probation and receiving counseling for sexual abuse of another boy: “Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: ‘Sometimes I read them over and over again. … It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy.’ ”

What Tilley found in Wertham’s notes, however, was that the boy preferred “Superman,” “Crime Does Not Pay” and “war comics” over “Batman,” and that he had previously been sexually assaulted by the other boy – all information that Wertham left out.

The whole thing is a wonderful reminder not to trust an argument just because it has an academic imprimatur—or because the people who advance it get an opportunity to present their ideas to Congress. And if our discussion of gun control continues to include calls to investigate a theoretical link between popular culture and gun violence—Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) is the latest legislator to get on that particular bandwagon—Tilley’s findings should be a cautionary tale for the researchers tasked with the study. I’d hope it’s harder to commit academic fraud today than it was in Wertham’s time.

But given that we live in a moment when 67 percent of Republicans think that violent video games present a “bigger safety threat” than guns according to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, the same kind of incentives to find video games guilty exist today that existed when Wertham went after comics. And even if a rigorous study does emerge from our current debate over guns policy, I’d be amazed if it was publicly accepted. The public doesn’t blame comics or video games for crime and violence because they have strong evidence and day-to-day demonstrations of the impact of that media. They blame comics and video games because they have relatively low levels of cultural capital relative to mediums like film and television, and because it’s easier to think about regulating culture than it is to go after other, more systematic elements of American life.

I’ll admit that when I heard that Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics were adding a gay male slayer to the lineup, I was skeptical. I’ve always been invested in Buffy as a story specifically about what it means to be a girl and then a woman, what it means to have your strength devalued and underestimated because you’re female, and what it means to create an identity of your own within a larger cultural context that imposes its own requirements and expectations. And I worry that, rather than creating new tools that can both explore those questions, franchises tend to sequester their efforts to represent women, gay people, and people of color in narrow tranches, like DC Comics has done with the Green Lantern corps.

But as soon as Jane Espenson and Drew Greenberg, the authors of the book, explained what they were doing in an interview with Out, I started to feel a lot better. Jane put the comic on the context of her work on Husbands, particularly her co-writer, Brad Bell:

I already knew Cheeks, and he has a line in Season 1 of Husbands, that Brad [Bell] wrote, that really struck me about how Cheeks has an “exotic femininity” that’s equated with weakness. I thought, Gee, all the work we’ve done with Buffy is about being female, and how that doesn’t mean that you are lesser. It suddenly struck me: If being feminine doesn’t mean that your’e lesser, then liking guys also doesn’t mean you’re lesser. For very good reason, we’ve focused on the female empowerment part of Buffy, but I wondered, Did we leave something out? What if someone in high school is looking up to Buffy as a role model, and we’re saying: You can’t be a Slayer.

And Drew puts the comics in the context of a larger conversation about misogyny and femininity that stretches across the gay and straight communities:

I have no problem telling a story about a boy who’s always felt more comfortable identifying with what society tells him is more of a feminine role. So much crap gets heaped upon us as gay men — crap from straight people and, frankly, crap from other gay people — about how it’s important to be masculine in this world, how your value is determined by your ability to fit into masculine norms prescribed by heterosexual society and, sadly, co-opted by gay society as a way to further disenfranchise and bully those who don’t meet those norms…And those attitudes are a reflection of not just our own internalized homophobia, but of our misogyny, too, and that’s something I’ve never understood. So if this is a story that causes people to examine traditional gender roles and think of them as something more fluid, I’m thrilled.

This is a critically important point, and not just for these conversations. Sexism and calcified gender roles hurt men as much as they hurt women. Having people believe you’re strong because of your gender presentation can be empowering, but it can also deny you the opportunity to express certain emotions or have certain reactions because that would make you weak, strip you of your social capital and authority. If your gender performance and your physical sex don’t match, people will try to reconcile them. Buffy‘s core mission, it seems, is still in place. This is just a reminder of how widely it’s needed.

The big comics news of the day is that DC Comics, having annulled Superman’s marriage to Lois Lane when it hit the reset button on the franchise with the New 52 have decided that the Man of Steel is going to start knocking aerial boots with Wonder Woman herself. I’ll have to wait and see how the story works out to decide how I feel about it, but the cover image released to promote the team-up is a reminder for all that comics can draw the female body in exaggeratedly sexual ways, they can be depressingly awful at making actual sexual contact between adult superheroes look remotely appealing. Take a look:

The fact that Superman is tied up in Wonder Woman’s lasso is a nice little nod to her fetish pin-up origins, and a way of playing with the power dynamic between them that lends the image a nice little frisson. Or it would if Superman and Wonder Woman’s actual bodies are posed so it looks like someone is smushing a Barbie and a Ken Doll together. These don’t look like humans who are attracted to each other and in the process of making actual sexual contact.

It’s not quite as bad as DC’s Batman-and-Catwoman-bang-on-a-roof panel, in which Batman’s abs look less like human’s than a stack of chicken cutlets and Catwoman’s expression is more slack-jawed than erotically intent. If you can leach the sex appeal out of Catwoman, you’re doing something wrong:

The same is true of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror. Everything about that comic is ugly, from its vicious Islamophobia to its illustrations, but its attempts at sexytimes are particularly inept:

This sort of rampant incompetence is part of what makes something like the current characterization of Namor as a stud who will hook up with anyone, irrespective of species, fun. Even if the panels themselves aren’t always alluring, the strips have an actual grown-up sense of humor about sex that doesn’t require me to risk headache via eye-roll:

The slam that comics are the provenance of slobbering teenaged boys is an irritating one, given the sophistication of the ideas superhero stories can explore when they’re at their best. But it would definitely help if comics artists started drawing superheroines like people instead of figurines, and superhero sexuality in a way that suggested some familiarity with intimacy and the functioning of the human body.