What I've Been Thinking About Lately

Surfing the electronic break out past Blog@Newsarama this morning and came across this analysis of Frank Miller's work, which mentioned that Miller wrote about a girl Robin in The Dark Knight Returns to avoid any implication of a gay relationship between a now 55-year-old Batman and Robin. Unfortunately, I find that entirely plausible, particularly given the way I've seen Miller's diegesis evolve over the last 20 years but, man, I feel like someone's kicked my puppy while telling me that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist. I mean, I'll still take my chockie Easter eggs anyway I can get them but it's just not the same.

One more illusion bites the dust on the long, hard road towards wisdom.

Once again, this leads me to ponder whether the author's politics should be a factor, if not the deciding factor, in choosing to read her work? This question covers a vast grey area and implies (at least to my mind) that a qualitative judgement has already been made regarding the putative value of the work from a creative perspective (i.e. it's not crap). I suppose that the higher the critical and cultural value you place on something, the easier that decision is and generally with regards to "high culture" we accept that the cultural and historical significance of a work outweighs any ideas or characterizations that would considered regressive or biased to modern audiences, as with Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew for example. But what about "low culture" - movies and TV and pulp novels and comics and music and everything else that exists in the spectrum of contemporary entertainment? The question I'm asking is less a question of whether or not it's reasonable for someone to read or buy or view works by someone who's politics and worldview they may disagree with than a question of whether or not it's hypocritical believe one thing and read stories or watch TV shows that may or may not reflect different ideas? From a strictly personal position - withour regards to questions of censorship or imposed standards of political or moral correctness - what duty do I owe myself to pursue entertainment that reflects my beliefs?

More simply: can a feminist read Frank Miller and still look at herself in the mirror in the morning?

Comics and Me, part one

Once upon a time, I used to write about comics for reasons other than to criticize how female characters are treated by the medium's major publishers (the short version, btw, is badly and FWIW, consider that that list was "locked" in 1999. Things have not gotten better).

I have a hard time trying to remember when that was as well as how much I used to look forward to the new books hitting the shelves with that solid news-printy thwack each Wednesday. What you need to understand is that I've been reading comic books since I was 14 years old, which is when I started regularly following monthly titles like The X-Men, with issue #212. I actually bought it as a present for my brother, who was turning nine and had recently discovered Wolverine. But I read it before I wrapped it and 20 years later, he's got two kids who love Spider-Man and I'm still make my weekly pilgrimage to the specialty stores on Yonge Street for my fix.

But it's become more habit than hobby for me over the last couple of years. Every few months the number of books I bring home shrinks a little bit more until lately, finding three titles that I read out in a single week is something of a coup. Then again, ever since I started buying comics, I've been waiting (along with my mother - gah, gotta love mothers) to grow out of them again.

And then something weird happened because for a long time, not only did I not grow out of reading comics but comics seemed to be growing along with me. I went to university in the heady days of DC's Vertigo imprint: Gaiman's Sandman, Garth Ennis' iconic run on Hellblazer, Peter Milligan's monthly dose of weird and wonderful in Shade the Changing Man. Vertigo was meant to be an adult imprint and it was - sex, drugs, booze, girls kissing girls, boys becoming girls - people fucked up, made up, broke up, died and were occasionally reborn. And even in the G-rated environs of the X-Men, Chris Claremont could spend 70 issues telling a story above love, marriage, betrayal, adultery and demonic posesssion (Bub!) and keep me hanging on every word. So when Neil Gaiman talked about the medium of comics, I could nod my head sagely and agree without feeling like there was something juvenile about whiling away the hours with four-colour art and superheroes.

Then something changed and, unfortunately for mother, I don't think it was me. It felt like it happned overnight but it was certainly more gradual than that. Still, sometime between the beginning and end of the 1990s, comics seemed to get a whole lot dumber.

And I blame Todd McFarlane. tbc