Hero Complex has a long interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who is writing Marvel’s new Captain Marvel book which has a woman, Carol Danvers, taking on that mantle. In a particularly interesting section towards the beginning of the conversation, DeConnick goes back and forth on the question of whether, though Danvers was conceived of as an explicitly feminist character, she is writing a feminist book:

I don’t think this is new to my interpretation of Carol. I think that she’s an incredibly driven individual. The single line that I use for her off the top of my head is: Crackerjack pilot races to prove dead daddy wrong. I think Carol’s wound comes from …. well, she comes from a family of three kids, two younger brothers. Her dad was an old-fashioned construction foreman who loved her very much. This book was conceived as an unapologetically feminist book. It happened in the ’70s during the feminist movement and that was very much what the book was about. We’re much more skittish about that today, interestingly. Well, her dad opted not to pay for her to go to school and thought it’d be better spent on her brothers. That’s why she enlisted — to get her education paid for. I think that hurt her, and she’s always been trying to prove to her dad that she’s worthy. But her dad’s gone now, so it’s not a thing that she’s ever going to be able to get closure on…I’m not trying to write a feminist agenda. This is part of who the character is. And I’ve heard people question the Absorbing Man thing, like ‘Since when is the Absorbing Man a misogynist?’ That wasn’t my intent. My intent with him was that he was pushing her buttons. It wasn’t that it was a particular thing with him. Although he is a very old-fashioned character, and I think it’s hilarious. It was trash talk in a fight.

I’d argue that given that the first lines that are spoken in DeConnick’s take on the character are Carl Creel’s snarl “Lucky me! If it ain’t Captain America’s secretary, Mrs. Marvel,” and that he goes on to clock Carol, declaring “I’ll show you smarts, lady!” and to tell to Cap, “You lettin’ the little missus give the orders now? Wouldn’t catch me getting bossed around by no broad,” she’s probably writing a feminist comic. When someone brings gender (or race or sexual orientation or religion) into trash talk, they’re not just joshing someone, they’re setting up a hierarchy where whatever characteristic they’ve singled out is disqualifying, and that someone allied with their target will suffer a worse loss because they’ve inverted the gender heirarchy, etc.—they won’t just be defeated, they’ll be degendered.

Feminism isn’t just about getting women into positions traditionally occupied by men. The second half of the DeConnick response I’ve quoted there is in response to the question from Hero Complex, “We’ve already seen some dismissive behavior from Absorbing Man in the first issue. Will her proving herself as a hero in a male-dominated super-landscape be an ongoing theme?” Feminism is also about what happens when women get there, about the fact that earning the job is often the first step in dismantling sexism, and sexists don’t exactly roll over and die when women obtain positions of power. And fighting sexism isn’t solely women, or superheroines’ purview. Part of what’s thrilling about reading DeConnick’s version of Captain Marvel is watching Captain America joke with Carol about Absorbing Man’s sexism mid-fight and afterwards to encourage her to take up the Captain Marvel mantle, saying “Bottom line is this: you have led the Avengers. You have saved the world. Quit being an adjunct.” Their conversation is just the superheroic version of a mentor encouraging a female mentee to give herself credit instead of deferring it, pitch more ambitious stories, or to ask for that raise.

In other words, just because we’ve moved from one phase of feminism into the next isn’t a reason to abandon that as a framework as a character (or for an actress like Melissa Leo, whose work is clearly feminist, to declaim the label). Sexism isn’t over, in the superhero world, in the real world, or in the places that they intersect. And that sexism’s become more diffuse and complicated just means there are more ways to use gender dynamics to tell fascinating, complex stories about how people, male and female alike, construct their identities and understand their relative positions in the world.

When I was a girl, I once write a very serious entry in my journal explaining how I was finally starting to feel like a grown-up. The cause of my sense that I’d passed a milestone? I finally understood the jokes in a Doonesbury strip. Garry Trudeau’s sweeping chronicle of American life, perhaps more than any other cultural artifact, ties the generation of my family together. A print of Mike Doonesbury walking across Yale’s snow-covered Old Campus was one of the first big presents I could afford to give my father. The clipping Ellie’s little sister’s birth, announced as “It’s a baby woman!” is tucked into family photo albums along our own momentos. And now, Alex Doonesbury is grown up, married to Toggle, an Iraq war veteran, and as of this weekend, officially Doonesbury‘s new main character.

Daily cartoon strips may not get as much credit as they ought to for shaping the cultural zeitgeist, but throughout her life, and mine, Alex Doonesbury’s been one of the best female characters, of any age, in any medium. She’s a child of divorced parents with a complicated relationship with her mother that made her mature and self-protective rather than the victim of cliche trauma, and loving, collaborative tie to her stepmother, a Vietnamese refugee adopted by American Jews. In addition to both of these women, Alex has a father who spars with her on politics, works with her on business projects, and treats her like a mature person with worthy ideas. She’s been a full member of the cast almost from her birth because she was that important in Mike’s life, and she became so in ours. Alex is a computer genius without falling into sexy hacker tropes, and her skills brought her closer to her parents and all the way to MIT, a point of pride so fierce that MIT students rigged the voting to win her as a fictional fellow student. And her love story with Toggle, a disabled veteran with less education and a decidedly different family background from Alex’s own, has been part of Doonesbury’s transition into a more expansive portrait of American life.

In walking her down the aisle to Toggle at her June wedding, Mike ceded pride of place in her heart to a new man, and informally deeded the strip to a new generation of characters. The joyful rehearsal dinner at Walden College the night before the ceremony brought the strip’s core characters together again in the place where we first met them. “Is Alex’s tribe what you expected?” liberal radio host Mark asked Toggle, seeing it all for the first time, as might be the case for newer Doonesbury readers. But part of what was striking was both the characters who had left, which characters were at the margins—J.J. and Zeke snuck in as bartenders, while Kim is the radiant mother of the bride—and the new people sitting at the table. Ray Hightower, B.D.’s Gulf and Iraq War buddy, not one of the original characters, is at the main table now, representing a critically important tie from one generation to the next, linking B.D. to Toggle, and to the rest of the core cast. Reverend Sloan is regretting that he and Joanie never got together. Mike stands on the left side of the single large panel, preparing to give a toast in the single-frame panel, and the other characters’ conversations cut him off. On the right is his daughter, telling the guests “Everyone shut up! Go ahead, Daddy.” The composition emphasizes the extent to which this transition, if not Doonesbury as a whole, is about a father and a daughter. And in an emotionally wise piece of writing, Doonesbury skips over Mike’s toast, leaving that moment free for all the fathers and daughters reading to fill in with their own words, and Mike’s tribute to Alex a loving mystery.

The next day, as Mike prepares to lead his daughter down the aisle, he flashed back for a moment, seeing her not radiant in the wedding dress that brought him up short, but as a little girl with a fistful of wildflowers. “You okay?” Alex asked him. “You seem a little out of it.” “I’m fine,” her father told her. “You go play.”

Those days are gone, and so is Doonesbury‘s old order. It’s true that this has been an ongoing transition, and that Doonesbury has, unlike other strips that keep its characters preserved in amber, always allowed its characters to age and die, and achieved some of its finest artistic, emotional, and political moments in those departures. But there’s still something moving about seeing Mike formally announce that it’s Alex’s time, that she’s ready—and then to take it back as she, breaking the fourth wall, demands a cuter nose and that the aging hippies give pride of place to the kids they raised, who grew up to be programmers, and novelists, and world-class slackers. It’s bittersweet, and the transition won’t be a clean, complete break. But in between its talking cigarettes and dying AIDS patients, Red Rascals and journalists-turned-bloggers, Doonesbury has always been as weird, and biting, and tender—and now, as generous and far-sighted—as the best of life itself.

The news that makes me excited to start buying books issue by issue just keeps coming. First came the news that Jeff Parker, starting in October, will start writing Red She-Hulk as the main character of the Hulk books. Now comes word that Jonathan Hickman, known for writing long superhero arcs, is going to write The Avengers, and he tells Comic Book Resources that among his first concerns are making the team more diverse than the one we see on the big screen:

“The idea is that the Avengers have to get bigger,” Hickman told CBR. “That means bigger in every sense. That means the roster has to be bigger, and the missions have to be bigger, and the adversaries and scenarios they find themselves in have to be larger. I’ve played with this stuff a little bit over in the Ultimate Universe. Obviously, it’s a completely different weight class here, but in a lot of ways that’s the kind of velocity that the book should have. We (Tom Brevoort and I) also felt like that if the book was going to be about an Avengers world, it should look more like the world. Of course there are complications starting out when the necessary movie characters are five white dudes and a white lady, but, you know, bigger roster. Frankly, I’m really, really excited at how we address that. The lineup is killer.”

That’s not just good news for people who are dying to see some of their favorite superheroes get some more attention, or who feel frustrated by the whiteness of the big-screen Avengers lineup. It’s a way of mixing up Marvel’s franchise storytelling. It would have been supremely easy, given the vast success of the movies, for Marvel to concentrate the Avengers comic storytelling very tightly on the same set of characters. But Hickman said in the same interview that he intends to let the movie characters’ storylines play out in the books devoted to them and use The Avengers to tell individual stories about the heroes he’ll add to the team and about how those heroes interact in small groups. That means less homogenized storytelling. It means that if fans of the movies who come to the comics for the first time, they may have a chance to get invested in an entirely new set of characters. And Marvel may have a chance to build a constituency for an excitement for about characters they weren’t brave enough to make Avengers the first time around.

Because I wrote about She-Hulk and Judge Dredd yesterday, both comics that portray women particularly well, I wanted to pass along some credit to a project that’s become my new obsession: the Ladydrawers column at Truthout. Run by Anne Elizabeth Moore and MariNomi, the project, which launched a year ago, examines everything from how women break into the industry to how they’re portrayed in it. It’s beautifully illustrated intellectual ammunition. In the introduction, they replicate some of the work that Vida’s done for women’s bylines in literary journals, but with comics, and discover that indie Fantagraphics actually publishes a smaller percentage of work by women than Marvel. They come up with other ways to examine inequality in the industry, too, including a count that shows women author comics pages in a lower proportion than you’d expect given their employment at different companies: men, it seems, are getting more work per creator published. They’re clear about what it takes to develop methodology for these measurements, and that they’re still trying. And most recently they did a big survey about who’s submitting work and who’s getting published, and found that while 56 percent of their male respondents had submitted work and 75 percent of those creators said they’d had work published, 55 percent of female respondents had submitted work, but of those, only 57 percent had their work published. The series is ongoing, and I’m glad to see Truthout’s publishing it. Vida’s very specific measurements of women in magazines have made it so that industry can’t claim generalizations don’t apply to them. Ladydrawers could help do the same for comics.

“Every woman adores a fascist.” -Sylvia Plath

“We drove past the hatchery, / the hut that sells bait, / past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall’s Hill, / to the house that waits still, / on the top of the sea, / and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.” -Anne Sexton

I’m not going to Comic-Con this year, but I have been reading a lot of comics lately, plowing through 2000 AD’s editions of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files and Savage She-Hulk #1-25. They’re wildly different comics projects—Judge Joseph Dredd is the main character in a long-running futuristic comics saga that doesn’t reboot, letting a year pass in his life for every one of ours, while She-Hulk is a mid-level character in the complex Marvel Comics universe. And even more important, they explore wildly different values. And over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why, as a feminist and a civil libertarian, I like both a fascist cop who originated as a British satire of American authoritarian tendencies and a green feminist defense lawyer who was created to preempt a television rip-off of both the Hulk and the Bionic Woman so much.

In coming to terms with the cop, it help that Dredd is a satire of the yearning towards authoritarianism, and that the writing is often very funny. In a confrontation with the Dark Judges, undead villains dedicated to eradicating all life, Judge Fear attempts to drive Judge Dredd mad by telling him, “Gaze into the face of fear!” “For a moment the icy chill of terror courses down Dredd’s spine,” the comic tells us. “The shock of this gaze can kill an ordinary man. But Dredd is a judge—and Judges are not ordinary men!” His response? A solid punch, delivered with the retort: “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” In another story arc, called Block Mania, Mega-City One’s inhabitants, cramped into massive apartment buildings with strong internal identities, are drugged with a chemical that leads to city-wide riots. Dredd leads the response, but ultimately gets hit with a heavy dose of the substance himself. It’s hilarious watching this highly controlled man go as bonkers as his neighbors, hollering at the Judges under his command, “Now there’s just one thing I gotta know. I’m with Rowdy Yates Block! Who you fighting with?”

The comic also regularly punctures Dredd’s stoicism, particularly with regard to Walter, his lisping, worshipful robot butler who is an obvious stand in for stereotypically gay functionaries. Walter adores Dredd, and embraces subservience and slavery (something that causes him real psychological struggle down the line). But even though Dredd finds Walter irritating, Walter often inadvertently saves him. When Dredd is infiltrating the inner circle of a corrupt Chief Judge, the leader of the Department of Justice, which lead a coup and now rules Mega-City one in a dictatorship, Walter helps him sneak through a secret passageway in the Hall of Justice. During the Apocalypse War arc, Walter, who is trying to help Judge Dredd’s landlord Maria get cured of her Block Mania, finds out that invaders from East-Meg One, the nation that’s replaced the Soviet Union, are flanking Dredd’s forces and about to destroy them. Walter’s decency ends up being more crucial to Dredd’s survival in that moment than Dredd’s competence or authority.
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I’ve been reading a lot of Judge Dredd comics thanks to the nice people at 2000 A.D.—the new collection of the Complete Casefiles is gorgeous and well-curated—so I was particularly excited to see the trailer for Dredd, the second attempt to make a movie about the lawgivers who attempt to bring order to the post-apocalyptic dictatorship of Mega-City One:

From what I can tell, the moments we see in the trailer are extremely faithful to the script for the movie that’s been circulating for a couple of years, which to my mind is a good thing. The story looks to be simple: Jude Dredd, the best street patrolman in the Justice Department (which, for the unfamiliar, took over the remnants of the United States in a coup, and gave its Judges the power to act as judge, jury, and executioner to combat crime), is meant to spend a routine day assessing Judge Anderson, whose scores would mean she’d fail out of the program, but given her other abilities, the Chief Judge wants her to have a second chance to pass. But their day on the streets takes an unusual turn when Dredd and Anderson investigate a series of murders in a giant housing block called Peach Trees, the provenance of a ruthless drug lord named Ma-Ma (Lena Heady in a role that should make terrifying use of her experience as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones).

My only real reservation with the story is that I think Judge Dredd is most interesting when he’s questioning the system that’s empowered him, or pushing for a more expansive or humane vision of Mega-City One citizenship. Ma-Ma is an unambiguous villain, not someone to make Dredd question the hyper-violent exercise of his authority, though the script makes pretty clear how dehumanizing life in the blocks is, and how the violent war on crime takes its toll on civilians. The only real discretion he exercises is in his evaluation of Anderson. I’m hoping this will be a success and that we could see a franchise grow out of this, both because I think the character is excellent, and because I think with success would come confidence to tell some of the more ambiguous, and more cosmic, Judge Dredd stories. If The Avengers universe can get Thanos, surely the American public is ready for a Judge Death movie.

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.