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.
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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.

DC Comics has been teasing the reveal of a major gay character for some time, and they’ve finally revealed who it will be: Alan Scott, known as Green Lantern, a media mogul, will be revealed to be gay in a story that resets his character. When this news came out, I said it would be best if the supposedly-iconic character DC was going to have come out was someone for whom the revelation that he or she was gay helped tie together things we’d always known about the character and their personality, much as J.K. Rowling did with Albus Dumbledore. I’m not sure if a pure reset of an existing character quite does that. And over at Topless Robot, Rob Bricken explains that the move isn’t as bold as DC insisted it would be, in part because Scott is not even the most prominent Green Lantern in comics today, and in part because his arc as a gay man will be taking place in an alternate DC Comics universe, rather than altering our sense of the core universe, where a straight Alan Scott presumably is still going about his business.

DC Comics was never going to turn one of their genuinely iconic characters gay. An out and proud Batman would have been a great joke on moralists like Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who saw sexual perversion everywhere he looked in comic books. A gay Superman would have been a fascinating exploration of what it means to feel like an alien in human society. But it’s hard to imagine that DC would have done something so bold simply to demonstrate its commitment to diversity, or to compete in a market where Marvel Comics, and even Archie Comics, are directly selling themselves both to gay readers and to straight readers who live among and love the gay people in their lives.

Checking the box and including a gay character in your universe, whether you frame them as a stereotype or develop them well or not, isn’t really enough to earn a company points anymore. And I actually think the somewhat disappointed reaction to this revelation is a good thing because it suggests that our expectations are getting more ambitious. If companies want credit for doing something different and genuinely brave, rather than simply meeting their basic obligations to represent the world around them, they need to tell stories or highlight kinds of characters that no one else has the courage to represent. The L.A. Complex gets points for portraying gay characters who aren’t white and male, the standard television default. Happy Endings gets credit for showing us a gay man who’s chubby, romantic, semi-downwardly mobile. Maybe DC Comics will do something genuinely exciting with Alan Scott, but it’s fine not to shower the company with gratitude for simply nodding towards a diversity quota, and doing so with the same kind of gay person who’s been acceptable in pop culture for years: rich and white.

I wrote yesterday about the news that DC Comics is preparing to have a major male character in their stable, previously assumed to be straight, come out of the closet. Today the news comes that rival comics giant Marvel, already ahead of DC in the movie business is one-upping DC once again when it comes to depictions of gay characters: Canadian superhero Northstar will propose to his non-superpowered boyfriend in an arc that will lead to the first superhero comics wedding between two men. Archie Comics got there months ago with the wedding of Kevin Keller and his boyfriend (the two met during their military service), but it’s still a big deal to see a superhero, a masculine ideal if there ever was one, marry a man, to show the superhero community standing up and celebrating that couple. Whether you live within the story or experience it from outside, that’s some heavy hitters to have in your corner. And the way Marvel’s talking about the arc is great:

“The story of Northstar and Kyle is universal, and at the core of everything I write: a powerful love between two people who have to fight for it against all odds,” said comic writer Marjorie Liu in a statement. “This is the quintessential Marvel story, one that blends the modern world with the fantasy of superheroes in order to tell an exciting story that begins with a wedding and continues in ways you can’t imagine.”

Although Northstar’s story marks Marvel’s first gay wedding, the X-Men comics are known for tackling civil rights — including gay, lesbian and transgender issues — in their panels. Much has been made of the parallels between the mutant outsiders of the comics and gay youngsters grappling with identity and stigma. Other gay and bisexual Marvel characters include Mystique, Colossus (the Ultimate version), Destiny, Karma and Graymalkin.

“The Marvel Universe has always reflected the world outside your window, so we strive to make sure our characters, relationships and stories are grounded in that reality,” Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso, said in a statement.

I said this about Jay-Z and I think it’s true here, too. Presenting stories about gay people and gay couples as if they are the status quo, and as if they’re consistent with your stated values, and putting people who disagree in the position of shaking you off that ground is one of the most powerful ways to change the tenor of gay rights debate. And when it comes to narrative, doing more than simply announcing someone’s gay is critical: giving them a full, rich lived experience and insisting that ought to be the norm because it’s good storytelling is one of the best way art can fight for equality and reconfigure the terms of our conversations and assumptions.

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I’m still trying to decide how I feel about the announcement that DC Comics will, in a reversal of an existing policy, have an established character from their stable come out of the closet as gay.

In theory, I’m all for this kind of development. If you’re going to have multiple iterations of characters in multiple universes, one of the smartest ways to take advantage of that setup is to change the characters substantially so you see how people with different life experiences react to gaining great power and how they use it. Making Spider-Man a teenager of African-American and Latino origin is an opportunity to show us a different New York, one with public school entrance lotteries rather than gleaming research laboratories, an initial skepticism about his powers rather than a joyful enthusiasm, a set of family issues that make him vulnerable to S.H.I.E.L.D. bureacuracy rather than to his own inner demons. A gay superhero who comes out offers a new spin on covertness, secret identities, a new sense of what kind of people are vulnerable and need protection.

I just worry about how well this reveal will be done. A headline about Superman being gay would result in huge press for DC—Batman, by contrast, would retroactively make anti-comics crusader Frederic Wertham smile smugly in his grave—but that doesn’t guarantee that DC will be able to weave a coherent cloth between that old sense of a character and the new one. J.K. Rowling did a lovely job, I thought, when she revealed that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay: the information made all sorts of disparate elements of Dumbledore’s biography come together in a coherent whole. Comics characters have so much more history and backstory that it might be hard to find a character where a coming out story feels natural and clarifying rather than requiring a hard reset. And natural and clarifying, with a smart plan beyond the big reveal, should be the goal DC should set and the standard we should hold them to.

I do think that J. Michael Straczynski is basically correct that, given the nature of storytelling in comics, that “the perception that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan is both absolutely understandable and deeply flawed…Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But I don’t hear Alan or anyone else suggesting that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should have been allowed to write Superman.” And given the buzz about a Watchmen prequel movie, some prequel comics were probably inevitable. Given both of those things, and that I’m essentially reconciled to the idea that we’re going to have more of these stories that I see as essentially finished, I think the real problem with this project is that it’s focusing on the earlier lives of the characters we came to know in the initial story arc.

It’s not just that we know them fairly well already, and what the new books would be filling in is psychology and peripheral adventures rather than character details. It’s that I think it would be much more interesting to tell this backstory through structure rather than through characters, looking at a government that first institutionalized superheroes and then banished them to quiet retirements with the Kane Act. This is one of the reasons the Agent Colson moments and continuity in the Avengers movies and peripheral material have been so much fun. These are supposed to be projects that are reasonably thoughtful about what it would be like to have superheroed people in our midst, and folks like Colson, or regular liaisons to the Watchmen are so useful: they’re a way in to the idea not of having powers, but of reconciling yourself to people having powers around you that you don’t have access to and that you hope won’t be turned against you.

Watchmen told us something about ourselves or who we could have been: the forgiveness of Nixon, the decisive victory rather than the slow dissolution in the Cold War, the continuation of a high crime rate, the hypercorporatization of our country and our culture. Fleshing out the Comedian’s role as a sanctioned superhero, and the decisions that lead to his assassination of President Kennedy or his role in Vietnam, would be more interesting than explaining why Nite Owl is depressed because it’s about us, not about them.

The bridge is yours.

-Game of Thrones: ruining America’s youth!

-DC Comics’ sexist relaunch totally worked.

-Pretty sure I’m responsible for a ridiculous amount of the 2 billion hours of content streamed by Netflix users in the fourth quarter of 2011.

-This is not a hard call: Fox should cancel Terra Nova.

-A Portlandia guide to television hipsters.

In the course of an interview with Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, who are writing and drawing DC’s rebooted Wonder Woman, Geoff Boucher raises an interesting question. What does it mean to change Wonder Woman’s origin story, turning her from a statue brought to life by Aphrodite for Queen Hippolyta to Zeus’s daughter:

CC: If you went to the average person on the street and showed them a picture of Wonder Woman they would recognize her immediately. Ask those people her origin story and some of them might know the clay story but many, many others would not know that at all. That’s not a problem you have with Superman or Batman; everyone knows their origin. By making her the daughter of Zeus, we’ve gotten a big driving force behind our story. It gives her a motivation and it’s a key to character that we now feel is very important. She’s a child of the gods who defends us from them, in the same way that Superman is from another planet trying to save humanity and Batman is the orphan who is protecting us from the criminals who killed his parents.

BA: It’s going to be key to a lot of things. We can’t just make this change and leave it hanging. It’s going to inform the first year of stories. She’s got a whole family she’s got to meet. Some are looking forward to meeting her and others aren’t. We’re heading toward the family reunion. Ever been to one of those? At the same time she is protecting this young woman Zola, who happens to be carrying a baby — we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet — who is another one of the children of Zeus. So she’s protecting her half-brother or half-sister who is on the way.

That’s a sort of Buffy-ization of the Wonder Woman mythos that accords with a lot of recent stories that explore scenarios where there are a lot of people with varying degrees of power in the world. The idea that we’ve all got a little Wonder Woman in us has been part of the feminist mythos since the founding of Ms., which put her on the cover of its inaugural issue trying to halt the advance of the Vietnam War, striding past a billboard with the slogan “Peace and Justice in ’72.” A mythology that makes that possibility explicit raises the possibility of a pantheon of new superheroes. But it also risks reducing Wonder Woman to a permanent and perpetual mother-protector role, constantly rushing around defending her divinely-inspired relatives.

Similarly, in their quest for specificity, I wonder if Azzarello and Chiang are reducing Wonder Woman a bit. Her original story may not be plausible, or gritty, but it is about an expression of female will and independence. Not everything needs to be grounded in social realism. Some things can just be mysterious and strange. It’s yet another reason we’re far too consumed with origin stories. Trying to come up with a psychologically plausible explanation for the divine, or near-so, is a bit of a contradiction in terms.

They fill out this survey that DC Comics has asked Nielsen to do for them about whether or not the New 52 has fulfilled its mission. As one retailer the Mary Sue quotes says, “As they made clear from the beginning, their goal was to expand the market by appealing to new/lapsed readers. They believe this has happened, but now they’d like feedback from the fanbase and comic shop retailers about where to go next.” Our discussions here have been awesome, and enlightening for me. You should share them with DC, as a reminder of what they say about making assumptions.

The bridge is yours.

-Figuring out the extent of the damage to the Washington Monument.

-A 7-year-old on Starfire.

-Really wish Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t going to punish Cristina for having an abortion.

-Five medical lessons from medical dramas.

-Not going to lie: I don’t care how bad this movie is. I will go see it.