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.

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.