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.

As this trailer for a Wonder Woman movie, made by Jesse V. Johnson, a stuntman who is trying to transition to directing, has circulated over the past couple of days, much of the focus has been on how awesome it is to see Diana laying some serious smackdown on Nazis:

My reaction to it was somewhat different. What struck me as the most interesting part of the trailer was the way said Nazis treated their captive, and the things they assumed about her because she was a woman. There was the implication of sexual torture, the idea that one of her captors and Diana would have “fun.” There was the treatment of her ambitions to protect innocent people as if they were delusional or pathetic. And then there was the assumption that she was physically vulnerable, which is part of what makes watching her turn the tables so entertaining.

But it also suggested a direction that a Wonder Woman could take that might both allow her character to fit into the established superhero arc while also allowing her to be distinct. In Iron Man, Tony Stark’s narcissism and self-regard are his greatest weakness: he keeps having to acknowledge that he both needs and is attached to other people in order to defeat his enemies. In The Avengers, he has to face up to the possibility that destroying himself might be the best thing to do for everybody else. The Hulk has to learn that anger can’t be permanently contained, it can only be managed and channeled. So why not make Wonder Woman’s big struggle against the expectations that come along with being a female superhero? Just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s opponents kept coming at her even as her Big Bad count piled up, you could get some comedy and irritation out of the constant underestimation of Wonder Woman, especially in comparison to other members of the Justice League. Leavening villains’ threats with a tinge of sexual nastiness could be a creative way of commenting on the double standards for superheroes and superheroines—James Bond may be sexually threatened, but not so much Batman or Superman, and nipples on the Batsuit or a bulge on the Man of Steel’s suit aside, neither of DC’s other franchise players would ever end up in hotpants and a strapless top.

In other words, why not make the point that superwomen, just like high-achieving women in the real world, have to work through obstacles that their male counterparts couldn’t imagine. And just because Diana can do everything Batman can do backwards and in heeled boots doesn’t mean that it’s fun that she has to. This would be a lot less depressing than David E. Kelley’s attempt to recast Wonder Woman as a stressed-out single gal in the city, which thankfully never made it onto the air. And it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of the Nazi-punching, but it’s always nice when badassery actually conveys something other than the fact that the Amazons apparently offer rigorous machine-gun marksmanship training.

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.

Over at The Mary Sue, Jill Pantozzi passes along a cool rumor. Man of Steel director Zack Snyder, who already switched the race of Clark Kent’s Daily Planet editor Perry White from white to black with the casting of Laurence Fishburne, may have turned Jimmy Olsen into a woman:

Actress Rebecca Buller is listed as Jenny Olsen on the Man of Steel IMDB page. You can’t always trust the information there but when you add in this still from the trailer of Fishburne running with Buller, things get a bit firmer. She doesn’t have red hair but then, Lois does this time around so I guess a swap was in order there too. Perhaps Snyder is trying to make a point that we need to start breaking the mold when it comes to comic adaptations.

Jimmy Olsen has had a lot of interesting character morphs in old Superman comics and while he’s dressed up as a woman for undercover work several times, he’s never actually been a woman. Again, this whole thing could be totally off. Buller could be any Daily Planet employee, or just a friend of Perry’s, there’s no way to know for sure since neither Warner Bros. or Snyder have mentioned Jimmy Olsen but what do you think of the possibility?

I wouldn’t be surprised by this. Snyder, whose wife Deborah is his long-time producer, had always seemed more interested than a lot of his action-directing brethren in female characters. He managed to get the underrated Sucker-Punch made at a time when there was an unofficial Warner Brothers’ ban on movies with female main characters in place. The performance he got out of Lena Headey in 300 is the best thing in that arguably racist mess of a film, and he did a nice job with Malin Ackerman, an actress I’ve never found particularly compelling in other circumstances in Watchmen, too. And Man of Steel is also rumored to feature a Kryptonian supervillainess in addition to General Zod.

None of which is to say that I think Snyder has all of his ideas about women worked out in a particularly coherent way. And it doesn’t exactly help that some of his earlier projects were adaptations of sexually violent source material by authors—Frank Miller and Alan Moore—who have significant issues of their own to sort through. But I keep coming back to his work because at least he’s thinking about things like women and self-sacrifice, and friendship, and loyalty. He’s no Joss Whedon. But if Jimmy Olsen’s become Jenny, and Snyder’s become one of the only superhero directors willing to tweak a fandom with a decision that questions the invoilate nature of canon, it’ll be another reason to keep an eye on Snyder if only because I want to see what his female characters are eventually going to evolve into.

io9 passes along an intriguing rumor that, in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Superman gets defeated, but by a fellow Kryptonian, Faora, rather than by Michael Shannon’s General Zod:

At first they’re not as powerful but later on as she applies her fight training and adapts them to her powers, she gives Superman one of the worst beatings a hero has faced on camera… She “Doomsdays” him… literally pulverizing him with precision and lethal strength with hitting pressure-points, nerves and even just outclasses Supes in bare knuckle and gives Supes a severe beat down…he’s total agony this entire time, bloody and broken and barely gets away. My buddy doesn’t know at all how Superman defeats these guys eventually but he did say that Superman in this film gets hurt a lot more easily than Routh’s pre-crisis Superman…the military can hurt him too but Faora pretty much nearly kills him in hand to hand.

This wouldn’t particularly surprise me, given Snyder’s interest in fighting women. Who knows what the actual execution would be like (I should here cop to my standard weakness for Sucker-Punch, and acknowledge that everyone thinks I’m insane). And I do really hope that Snyder’s version of Faora isn’t the one from Action Comics, who survived the destruction of Krypton because she was serving an off-world sentence for setting up a concentration camp where she was murdering men. Because I’m not sure the nerd community could survive the conversations about misandry and misogyny that would be the result.

But I am so, so eager to see genuinely super-powered women who aren’t providing assistants and who don’t have to be someone’s girlfriend. It’s not that Joss Whedon didn’t revitalize Black Widow in The Avengers, or that I didn’t appreciate the tremendous sexual chemistry between Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield as Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man. I like romances. Watching The Thomas Crown Affair over the weekend, I realized how desperate I am for more love stories in which the participants and the obstacles to their union are both genuinely adult. Superhero movies, despite the criticism they get for playing to childish fantasies, are actually giving us some terrific portraits of women who get to be women, rather than girls, and their spiky romances with the men they love. But I would love to see a woman’s hyper-competence separated from her interest in the physical and mental health of the man she loved, to see a story where a woman like Selina Kyle save a man like Bruce Wayne’s armored ass because she can and she wants to, but for reasons other than that she’s fallen in love with him. I don’t want to cut down on the romances. I just want more, and more kinds of stories for women within this context. If the only way we can get to watch a woman grow into her power in a superhero movie right now is as a villain, I’ll take it. And hopefully Faora can knock out some of the pigeonholing of super-powered women while she’s at it. Not to mention that in between Faora and Selina Kyle, great female characters could be a dandy way for DC to put some real daylight in between their franchise and Marvel.

Over at IFC, Terri Schwartz reports that Ben Affleck’s been approached about directing DC’s Justice League movie, and has a smart assessment of his strengths and weaknesses in the position that also suggests a way DC, as it tries to build a viable movie franchise to match The Avengers, could distinguish itself from Marvel’s approach:

For now, we’re just intrigued by the possibility of Affleck. He has some experience with superhero films, but we’ll be the first to admit that “Daredevil” wasn’t great. Fortunately Affleck has greatly matured as an actor and a director since then, which is good for this project. However, Affleck doesn’t have any experience directing with CGI, which could be a boon or a curse. He filmed some great realistic action scenes in “The Town,” which could make a “Justice League” film more in line stylistically with Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy. To us, the more realistic this film is, the better, though we know there’s no way to make characters like the Green Lantern and the Flash work without some semblance of computer assistance. Hopefully Affleck is up to the task.

Mike Fleming at Deadline is more skeptical of the prospect that Affleck is going to happen:

This is a story I checked out days ago, and didn’t run when Affleck’s reps stated that it was not going to happen with him. Now, it makes sense that Warner Bros would offer Affleck the project. Chris Nolan is top man over there, but after three Batfilms and after producing the Superman reboot Man of Steel, he’s gotten spandex-clad protagonists out of his system. After Nolan, the studio then offers everything else to Harry Potter director David Yates (who is now keen on Tarzan) and Affleck, who has become a major director with Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and the upcoming Argo. Just because the studio wants Affleck doesn’t mean he will do the movie, and several sources tell me he might take a meeting, but that’s it.

After putting his acting career in the dumper with questionable choices like Gigli, Affleck admirably scripted a second act for himself with his writing and directing skills, and did it by taking on unexpected, thoughtful films. His reps clearly denied he would take this, and why would he want to direct a Justice League movie, unless he himself had figured out a way to make one that would compare favorably with Joss Whedon’s billion dollar Marvel smash The Avengers? I don’t see it.

Whether or not Affleck ends up being the man to do it, I think that DC would be strategically and creatively smart to create a franchise that’s less cosmic and more realistic than Marvel’s, and that maintains at least the gloss of ideas from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Given that Whedon’s locked in for Avengers 2, it probably doesn’t make sense to get into an witty arms race with him. Similarly, Marvel is, I think, potentially going to test audiences’ tolerance for cosmic characters and conflicts with Guardians of the Galaxy, and DC could distinguish itself by grounding its conflicts in the real world, and potentially even in real issues. Even if I think the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were ultimately flimsy and inconsistent , they got people talking without getting in the way of the movies’ blockbuster status, and that’s not a terrible brand if you can find directors and writers who can walk that line intelligently. It may not be possible to do emotional connection and dialogue better than Whedon, but given the way The Avengers has been set up so far, I think it’s possible for DC to come off build a more grounded world that gets audiences to connect to the characters and conflicts in a more serious way. We’ll see whether that’s Zack Snyder’s actual approach in Man of Steel, but DC’s certainly selling the initial hero’s journey as deeply rooted in the American experience and landscape rather than foregrounding the cosmic elements of it.

I also think that a more grounded, naturalistic (in so much as these things can be naturalistic) approach to the DC Comics universe might be a smart hedge against the day that mass audiences get a little tired of superhero movies. If you don’t need to to use Skrull spaceships and giant space lizard fish in the climax of your action sequences, you can make excellent action movies on smaller budgets. In boom times, that can mean bigger profits. If trends slow, it can mean preserving a margin. I don’t really expect DC to think that strategically, given the general death of the mid-budget action picture. But the company needs some smart insight to distinguish itself if it wants to do more than tag after Marvel’s coattails.

By Dennis Farr

“We both know this will be DC’s attempt to convince us that a second-string character is more major than he actually is, right?” When DC first announced it would be outing a major character in its universe, my straight roommate expressed his skepticism. It was one I didn’t wish to hold on to, and so I kept hope that we would have a big name. Fortunately (or not), my experience with DC tends toward their Vertigo line, picking up some of their books about Bats and Magic every so often, meaning my own litmus test for whether the character was major would be whether or not I’d even heard of him. Though in an age of HeroClix and Wikis clicked late at night, I’ve gleaned far more surface knowledge than the average non-comics fan.

When DC’s announcement came down, the name Alan Scott didn’t ring any bells, though Green Lantern certainly did. Having a fair amount of LGBT folk in my various social network feeds (most of them not really that interested in comics, but interested in having more representation in all forms of pop culture), they were excited until I informed them that no, this was not Hal Jordon. Which is to say, from the start, in choosing this particular icon, DC’s marketing has seemed a little off. Who were they targeting with this announcement? And how big was it really? Complicating those questions was the fact that the story was picked up and spread quite quickly to many mainstream sites, as well as the more niche queer-centered news blogs. Coupled with Marvel’s same-sex marriage storyline featuring Northstar, it seemed like there was major news in every corner. DC could not have believed it would only reach the fans who are more knowledgeable than I on DC’s main universe.

And upon reading the Earth 2 comics, I was left even more confused.
Read more

I had the enormous privilege to spend my Saturday talking about the employment of women in pop culture and the impacts it has on the representations we see in media with Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, Harmonix video game designer Alli Thresher (who you should know from her appearances around these parts), and Graphic Policy podcast co-host Elana Levin. We talked about a lot of things—Girls, Game of Thrones, DC Comics’ New 52, Naughty Dog’s video game designers, and the kinds of conversations that make guys realize what sorts of images they’re putting out into the world. Plus, the marvelous Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action, and the Media made a guest appearance to help us field questions from what turned out to be a conservative blogger who wanted to convince us that all dudes are just horrible sexist rapists, or something. It was pretty great:

It was a great conversation, and the questions from the audience (which we restated for the cameras when they were actual questions rather than “I actually have more of a comment” sorts of things) got my thought processes going. Netroots may be over for the year, but the posts inspired by it are just getting started.