I had a nice time at New York Comic Con this year, but Mandy Caruso, an illustrator and (clearly very talented) costume designer who was cosplaying as Black Cat at the convention….did not. She’s described some of the unattractive, but still, sadly routine gawking and requests to pose for photographs she experienced. But things apparently got really bad when she was asked by what appeared to be a legitimate media outlet for an interview. This is what happened:

Him: Damn, alright! Well let me ask you an important question then…what is your cup size?
Me: (big talk show smile) That is actually none of your fucking business.
Him: Oh! I think that means to say she’s a C.
Me: I actually have no breasts at all, what you see is just all of the fat from my midsection pulled up to my chest and carefully held in place with this corset. It’s really uncomfortable, I don’t know why I do it.
Him: (to the male crowd) Aw, come on what do you guys think? C cup?
—a few males start to shout out cup sizes as I stand there looking at this guy like this has to be a fucking joke, then look at the crowd and see that no amount of witty banter or fiestiness will stop making this whole thing fucking dumb. It was clearly a ploy to single out cosplaying women to get them to talk sexual innuendos and flirt with this asshole and let him talk down to them simply because they were in costume and were attractive. Whether I’m in a skintight catsuit or not, I’m a fucking professional in everything I do and I don’t need to play nice for this idiot.
Me: This is not an interview, this is degrading. I’m done. (I walk away)
Him: (clearly dumbfounded and surprised) ..Come on, it’s all in good fun!
Me: Being degraded is fun? That was unprofessional and I hope that isn’t your day job because you can’t interview for shit, my man.

Caruso has declined to name the news organization whose staffer did this. But I wish she would. It’s going to take a very long time to shift the culture of fan communities. But at minimum, no respectable conference or event should ever credential this staffer, and the organization that would have seen fit to publish an interview like this. The whole point of a credentials process is to weed out people who intend to provide serious coverage of an event and people who are just abusing a shot at getting free admission to a place where they can ogle women.

Spencer Ackerman is, of course, an ace defense reporter, but I really love it when he writes about culture. And I particularly appreciated this meditation on the New York punk club that was critically important to him growing up, because I think it reflects, to come back to a perpetual hobby-horse, the kind of norm-building it would be great to do in fan communities and at conventions:

Above my desk I keep a photograph that my wife bought for me of ABC No Rio. ABC No Rio is a punk club and (former?) squat on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where every Saturday afternoon a motley assortment of bands perform. I think of it as the punk rock version of the Boys & Girls Club, because that was the role it played for me as a teenager…it was supposed to be a place where you would be made to feel unwelcome if you groped someone in the pit; if you made a homophobic or racist remark; or if you engaged in otherwise destructive behavior.

You could be drunk or high and have sex — you weren’t supposed to be, but no one was really going to stop you — but if that translated into behavior that threatened others, your ass would be kicked out. It was filled with contradictions — a scene that supposedly glorified nihilism and free expression being so rigid? — but they were resolved, intellectually speaking, according to the baseline principle that those were the basic social responsibilities needed for the world in which we wanted to live to exist, a haven from the aggravating bullshit around us.

Again, these principles were never fully realized. I know women who were abused at ABC No Rio. I am thinking in particular of one individual who got away with it, probably because of his scene cred. I cringe at the idea that this piece will come across as treacly or sanitized. These are the reflections of a straight white boy who came up in the mid-90s and who went on to do all manner of bad things in his life. Your mileage may vary.

But it was important that these were the basic values that you were expected to adopt if you wanted to be part of what ABC No Rio was.

When I wrote about my experience at New York Comic Con, I noted how level the crowd seemed, how there were no particular signifiers of coolness. It also didn’t feel, for me, at least, like an unsafe space. The female cosplayers I saw getting their pictures taken mostly seemed to be objects of admiration because their costumes were completely and utterly awesome, less because they were intensely sexual or revealing. And almost no vendors were employing booth babes, perhaps in a sign that strategy is played out, though we’ll see when I hit San Diego Comic Con next year.

But despite that generally neutral atmosphere, it would still be great if there was a way to sell en masse the idea the dominant culture at cons was inclusive and oriented against harassment. Some changes, like panelists making a conscious effort to treat questioners who raise issues of representation and inclusiveness in art with respect, even if the questions are tough, would be relatively easy. Others, like adopting sexual harassment policies and training staff to enforce them, would take slightly more effort. But none of this is impossible. And even if enforcement’s inconsistent, the effort is important.

My friend Douglas Wolk was kind enough to show me around Comic Con during press and professionals day on Thursday, and after we’d wandered through Artist’s Alley and the Cultyard, and I’d spent entirely too much money on comics (seriously, I ended up with a 13-volume, foot-high stack of books home on the train Saturday), he asked me for my ethnography of the festival. His Kindle Single about the interaction of fan culture and marketing at San Diego Comic Con is a must-read and captured a lot of what I was thinking.

My experience of pop culture, other than buying movie tickets, or books, or music, is not particularly consumptive. I’ve never gotten into action figures, or costumes, and while I have some 1950s and 1960s Archie Comics in plastic at home, I don’t collect the vintage stuff either. So the level of consumption was, if not surprising, exactly, forcefully striking. There are people walking around with bags half the size of my body specially designed to hold everything they buy, and apps that show them all the free comics they can get. It’s really easy to get convinced that you genuinely want to buy, say, a wooden sparring sword or a beautiful pocket watch (I resisted. I didn’t get the drunken She-Hulk tattoo I warned I might fall for, either.) when you’re surrounded by stuff. And I can imagine that Cons might be kind of stressful experiences if you don’t have the luxury to, as I did, get a little financially carried away. And I appreciated that for every booth trying to get me to buy Buffy pint glasses and extremely expensive manga action figures, there were places selling off inventory, or vintage comics for a dollar or 50 cents.

The other thing that stuck with me was the experience I’ve never had before, of being in a place essentially without a visible social hierarchy. Some of that is because this is a temporary community, and some of it’s because everyone there is pulling a Clark Kent, taking off their workaday clothes and putting on what makes them comfortable and most them, whether it’s Chuck Taylors or some really fantastic ladies-fit purple Mandalorian armor. But despite the fact that the audience ranged from black teenaged hipsters, to parents with their kids, to the standard, stereotypical white-dude comic fans, as well as up and down the age spectrum, it was essentially impossible to tell who had power among the attendees. Cosplayers? They get looked at, and praised, and have their pictures taken, but getting what you want out of an experience isn’t necessarily the same as having power in it. Consumers? To a certain extent, yes: you might have to wait in a lot of lines, and pay money, but the entire experience exists for your stimulation. But by the temporary nature of the situation, there’s no way to tell who’s cool, maybe because for once, for a couple of days, it just doesn’t matter.

***

Oh, and if you want to see the panel I moderated with the fabulous Jane Espenson and the stars of Husbands, well, compliments of the lovely folks at Buffyfest, here you go:

The novelist Colson Whitehead isn’t new to science fiction and speculative fiction—his 1999 debut novel, The Intuitionist, was set in a world of competing schools of elevator inspectors and the dream of a elevator that could take riders to a perfect society. But his new book, Zone One, on bookshelves today, an elegaic tale of plague, zombie hunters in New York, and the limitations of efforts to build new societies is the result of Whitehead’s longstanding plans to write a monster novel. We spoke at New York Comic Con about choosing average narrators rather than heroic ones, making monsters sympathetic, and the persistence of corporate sponsorship in the apocalypse. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why a zombie novel?

People are wondering. It was reading comic books, and watching horror and science-fiction movies, reading them, H.P. Lovecraft that made me want to be a writer. I’ve never seen much of a division between so-called genre fiction and literary fiction. So when I went to college, I wanted to write werewolf novels. I remember applying to college and saying this to the interviewer, and he’s like ‘No, what do you really want to write?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, no.’ In retrospect, an elevator inspector novel obviously turned out not to be a bestseller. I knew that I would do a horror novel, book seven or book eight. It turned out to be book six. And zombies in particular, seeing Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead when I was nine or ten, too early to be that state-of-the-art makeup, the idea of zombie terror stayed with me.

I’m not prepared to talk about the larger social currents and why they’re big now among twenty-somethings and teenagers. For me, the terror of zombies and also covers Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the idea that your family and friends and neighbors and teachers could suddenly overnight become monsters, or reveal themselves as the monsters they’ve always been, that’s sort of my bad, Freudian interpretation. And it’s what brought my conception of the book to mind.

In a lot of these zombie stories, the hero is someone who’s really extraordinary, someone who’s going to find the cure, or lead the people to freedom. Mark Spitz, the nickname of the main character through whose eyes we’re seeing the world, is sort of relentless about his averageness. I was wondering how deliberate that choice was to make him representative rather than aspirational?

Yeah, there are the shambling dead, he’s like shambling mediocrity. I think when I was conceiving of the book, I figured, if you’re really high-functioning and really cognizant of what’s going on, you’d jump off a building. And if you’re a C or D person, you’d be killed off quickly. For me, the survivors are all mediocrities. He’s like a mediocrity among mediocrities. I’m not sure what kind of person ought to be in an apocalypse. I’m sure I’d be cut down pretty quickly. But it seems that someone who has always muddled through in organized society, his inefficiency to succeed becomes, actually, a successful adaptation.
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Tom Morello’s best known for his work as a guitarist in Rage Against the Machine, but this fall, he’s debuting in a new medium with the release of his comic book Orchid. Set in a dystopian future where the devastating effects of global warming have ravaged society and ushered in a brutally divided class system where the rich own the poor as slaves, and everyone’s at risk from newly-risen dinosaur-like monsters. The title character, Orchid, is a teenaged prostitute with “Property” tattooed across her chest and “Know Your Role” branded into her forearm. In the first issue, which was released on Oct. 12, Orchid is arrested for skimming profits from her pimp to support her family — and thrown into a paddy wagon with the leader of a small resistance movement. I spoke with Morello at New York Comic Con about the perils of drawing “empowered” female characters who exist for male gratification; his experiences with sex workers in Los Angeles; and the meaning of Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I was curious how you got the idea for the strip in the first place. Had you been wanting to do something about sex workers for a while?

Yeah. About 3 years ago I had a story in my head. I wanted to do something that combined the epic sweep of stories like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars but that combined class politics of movies like the Battle of Algiers, or my own worldview. That’s one thing I thought was missing from Dune or whatever. It’s always getting the king back on the throne, and the princess back into the castle, and I’m not into that.

There’s a lot of race and gender but not a lot of class in fantasy.

Yes, exactly. That’s one of the things about the world of Orchid, it’s absolutely race-neutral. So it was very important to me with this story for there to be epic battles, and cool monsters, and narrow escapes, but to have a class politics to it that is sorely missed in a lot of other work.

So how did you decide to have Orchid be someone be someone who was doing sex work?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was not accepted in the rock community. I wasn’t the right color, I didn’t have the right length of hair. This was like the mid-’80s. And the first LA community that accepted me was the East Hollywood underground rock community where there were a lot of drug addicts and prostitutes. And Orchid’s based on people that I knew who were very hard in some ways, but had huge hearts and were very generous people…They’re composites.

I’m curious. Did you do any research on sex work more generally?

The research I did was first-hand. I also, not that that I need to trumpet it, but I used to be an exotic dancer myself, but that’s not exactly the sex trade, but it borders on it. I would not say I drew on that experience writing Orchid, just to be perfectly clear, but full disclosure. It was a long time ago.
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New York Comic Con has apparently not cottoned to the idea that if you want journalists to file lots of frantic reports about how awesome your events are, it would be good to provide free wifi to journalists, and to make sure that it works in the press room. So I will have more extensive interviews and thoughts up on Monday.

But I just got out of a preview screening of an upcoming PBS documentary about superheroes, The Never-Ending Battle, which though it’s not done and won’t air until 2013 , looks like it’ll be just terrific. The first thing that struck me about it is that it’s very, very funny. As one member of the audience pointed out, movies about superheroes and superhero culture can be pretty self-righteous. So it’s pretty funny to see Joe Simon reading the dialogue describing Steve Rogers’ transformation from mouse to all-American hunk of man and cracking up at how ridiculous it is, or seeing his notes about how Steve needs a sidekick because otherwise he’ll end up talking to himself and sounding crazy.

And it’s also got some interesting demographic information about comics readership. During World War II, literally half the population, 70 million people, were reading comic books. I’d knew the numbers were high, but I didn’t know they had that kind of penetration, most of which I’d have to guess were due to the fact that superheroes were fighting the same war Americans were, and it was a war where people could feel unironically good about seeing mayhem perpetrated on the bad guys. Michael Chabon suggests in the documentary that G.I.s, in particular, wanted to read comics, but not superhero comics, because the superheroes didn’t seem relevant without a world war.

The other thing that surprised me, and which is directly relevant to a lot of the debates we have about comics today. In 1940, when Robin was created, 90 percent of American girls had read a comic book. Given that the dominant assumption of the mainstream comics industry today seems to be that women are not a viable major audience, this is an especially sad comedown. And it makes the tremendous vitriol that’s being spewed at women like Comics Alliance editor-in-chief Laura Hudson, a primary advocate for better representations of women in comics, even sadder. The violent reaction to the idea that the comics industry might want to produce comics women might actually want to read speaks to an infantile fear of women that represents the worst of comics fans, not the best.

Joe Simon reading the dialogue

He was our connection to that action

70 million americans read comics during world war II. Outsold the Saturday evening post.

If you like marriage equality, Jane Espenson, or me, and are at New York Comic Con today, you can have all three at once. I’m going to be moderating the panel on Husbands, Jane’s terrific new marriage equality web series, with Jane and the stars of the show at 12:15 p.m. in room 1A24. And some folks had asked if there was going to be a blog meetup at New York Comic Con, so I guess this can serve? Whether you come to the panel or not, if you meet me at the room after, we can grab a collective coffee.