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I didn’t plan to stop doing Douchebags of Comics, but I’ll admit I lost some enthusiasm for it right when it was starting to catch on, because as more people started seeing it, I started spending more time fielding people who were outraged and offended by things that I had said. I don’t regret anything that I said in the blogs attached to the drawings I did, but I started to feel like maybe people weren’t taking the whole thing in the spirit in which it was intended.
I liked using the word “Douchebag” because it has a variety of connotations and I could use it to write about people ranging from hardcore hateful nutjobs like Orson Scott Card to creators who have said or done some douchey things but who aren’t nearly as awful. Some of the responses I got outraged that I called so-and-so a “douchebag,” though, made me kind of wonder if people knew what I meant by the word. I had somebody tell me they thought I was verging on libel by calling people that. Really? Calling somebody a name isn’t libel. It’s not accusing them of a crime, and I don’t think I accused anybody of anything that they hadn’t said of their own volition and that wasn’t already a matter of public record. I’ve had a discussion numerous times about the odd way that people seem to think freedom of speech applies to somebody saying something awful, but does not apply to another person responding to that, and it still confuses me.
But I never planned to stop doing the cards, and then good ol’ Mark Millar came along and said something that made me think, “Well now, if that isn’t the very definition of douche.”
I think the word “douchebag” was invented for people who say things like: “The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy.”
Mark Millar said that recently.
I think anybody who is asked a serious question about rape and replies, “I don’t really think it matters,” is automatically a douchebag.
I had been kind of on the fence about whether or not I would make a Douchebags of Comics card of Mark Millar, because I really did like the Kick-Ass movie. I liked it, though, without actually having read the book.
The interesting thing that a lot of people I’ve talked to have gone through with Frank Miller is the long process of realizing that he’s not joking, there’s a lot of how he really sees the world in his comics. I defended Sin City for years because I honestly thought I was reading satire. I thought he was sending up the most adolescent tropes of crime comics and noir stories. And then you realize, he wasn’t really in on the joke.
The Kick-Ass movie is hyper violent, has a child saying “cunt,” and so on, but the premise was “real” people taking on superhero roles, so the idea seemed to me to have people who you actually care about- Which you do, thanks to really good performances by Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz- and who have real emotional lives, and then to put those people into the ridiculous cartoon tropes of some of the worst superhero comics. I thought that the movie was *commenting* on those tropes, not *celebrating* them.
I still think the movie actually might have been doing that. The comics it was based on, however, weren’t nearly smart enough to be operating on those multiple levels. When I finally read the comics, what had made me smile in the movie left me repulsed and rolling my eyes. I realized what I had enjoyed in the movie had been almost entirely due to texture that had been added after the fact to the puerile work that Millar had done.
Then I read the second series of comics. Ugh.
There are a thousand things obviously wrong and stupid about Millar’s comments on rape on any number of levels, but purely on a writing level, it’s just as repulsive. That’s Hack School 101: If you want to show a guy’s a bad guy and can’t be bothered with giving the reader any complicated portrait of him, have him rape somebody or kill a dog. You’re doing this because the villain in your hack writing is nothing more than a device, something for the “hero” to react to, so that you know he’s reacting to a bad thing. This way when you have your hero doing stupid over-the-top violent garbage because that’s all you know how to write, the audience knows they’re supposed to be cheering him because he’s doing these things as a reaction to the guy who did that bad thing.
Thus the rape scene isn’t actually there to discuss rape, it’s there to motivate the male hero to do stuff, in the case of hack Mark Millar, childish action movie violent stuff. So, in the second Kick-Ass series, we have a girl getting gang raped so that we can get to the ‘spolsions. If that’s not repulsive to you, there’s something very wrong with you.
Millar wasn’t just going for hack honorable mention, though, he was in a break-neck sprint to be Hack of the Year, so in Kick-Ass 2 there’s also a dog that gets killed. Because that’s what bad guys do. The dog gets decapitated while they’re at it. Because, you know, decapitation is just like rape.
Todd McFarlane also recently went on a little binge of stupid, sexist comics about how the portrayals of women and so on in comics are just part of the superhero genre, and that the genre is inherently for guys, so what’s the problem. He trotted out the usual logical fallacies and false equivalencies- The men are objectified too!- and generally made a fool of himself. There’s a good rundown of his comments and also Millar’s here. Let’s put aside for a moment that idea that comics are just for guys, since that’s obviously dumb and not true, and pretend that comics actually *were* just for guys- What kind of guys like this stuff? I’m assuming McFarlane considers himself a guy, so what he’s saying is that he likes stupid, narrow, sexist entertainment.
They’re not just saying that comics are for guys, they’re saying that comics are for particularly dim-witted guys in a perpetual arrested adolescence.
The fact that people saying things like this are, to some, the face of an entire art form is pretty infuriating to those of us who try to create comics on a higher level. Millar and McFarlane both got their start doing work for the big two superhero companies, and their “creator owned” work has mostly just been derivative versions of the same kinds of comics. You have an amazing art form, a medium that’s able to produce things like Fun Home and Maus, and yet when people look at it they mostly see endless variations on these same ideas, and to do something “new” with his 50th superhero deconstruction, the only think Millar can think of is to add more shock value.
So we have the same story that was used to sell kids cereal and action figures 50 years ago, only now with more rape!
Ask yourself if that’s progress.
The fans are part of the problem, as well. Many many people who refer to themselves as comic book fans are really only fans of a handful of decades-old licensed characters, and a few creators that pump out endless different versions of them. It’s like if somebody went around calling themselves a serious cineaste, and the only films they had ever seen in their life were Ninja Turtles movies. I use that as an example because I actually *like* Ninja Turtles, but I can recognize that there’s a difference between The Secret of the Ooze and Citizen Kane.
What I’m trying to say, people, is if you’re actually a comic book fan, you can do better. Stop reading sexist garbage churned out by ridiculous man children. There are actually superhero comics that have been done and that are being done today that are entertaining and worth reading, but there’s also a whole other world of art and culture out there. Read the stuff that’s worth your time, and quit rewarding the people who are producing abject junk.
(Source: rickworley.com, via )
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For the first time ever, this year’s Women Who Kick Ass panel at ComicCon was held in the convention’s largest venue, Hall H. Entertainment Weekly covers the panel here and it sounds incredible. A full transcript of the panel is here.
Unfortunately, the audience’s response to this panel was sexist and predictable.
A panel called “Women Who Kick Ass” follows Hunger Games. It’s in its fourth iteration, and the fact that it’s in Hall H on Saturday is a surprise. On the surface, it makes sense for this to follow Hunger Games, and it’s also likely the Con intended it to be something that would allow for the room to clear out a bit while shuffling in more people from the line that still snakes off across the street outside. But, all the same, there’s something gutsy about placing a frank discussion of Hollywood sexism, feminism, and the limited opportunities for women in the entertainment industry right before 20th Century Fox and Marvel come out to present superhero-heavy slates.
And “Women Who Kick Ass" is the most fascinating and enriching panel I attend at Comic-Con. In particular, its discussion of how sexism still rules far too often in Hollywood is terrific, with panelist Katee Sackhoff (of Battlestar Galactica fame) discussing a time an unnamed male actor pulled her arms out of their sockets while filming a fight sequence, in what she believes was recourse for her questioning him earlier in the shoot; and fellow panelist Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black discussing how a male crew member inappropriately hit on her when she was just 18 and bound to a bed for a shot. The moderator is good, in that she knows to get out of the way when the women on the panel — particularly Michelle Rodriguez — cut loose, and the content is engaging throughout.
For the most part, the dudes I’m sitting near either pay respectful attention or check Twitter, though there are some jokes from an older guy in front of me about how stupid he finds all of this. Then Rodriguez uses the phrase “destructive male culture” — as part of a larger answer about how women need to take more agency in telling their own stories — and something in the crowd flips. A certain subset of the audience begins to get more and more vocal, and when the panel runs slightly over, as all panels have done during the day, the vocalizations begin to get easier to hear, even to someone sitting clear across a giant room in a place that tends to eat sound from specific individuals in the audience; one really has to make a ruckus to be heard.
The final question — from a young woman about what aspects the perfect kick-ass woman would have — turns into a digression about the many roles that women play in real life and the few that they are asked to play onscreen. It’s all fascinating stuff, with Sackhoff talking about wanting to see someone as kind and strong as her mother onscreen, and Walking Dead’s Danai Gurira talking about the effectiveness of female political protestors in her native Zimbabwe, the sort of story that would almost never appear in a Hollywood film — but the longer it goes on, the more restless the crowd gets. When Rodriguez grabs the microphone again to follow up on a point made by another panelist, for the first time, the audience ripples with something close to jeering anger. When the panel finally ends and the five women on it proceed off to the side for photographs, something done at the end of most Hall H panels, someone shouts something from the audience, to a mixture of supportive laughs and horrified gasps, and the women quickly leave the stage. (I was not sitting close enough to hear what was said, but I confirmed with several people sitting in the immediate vicinity that it was a young man shouting “Women who talk too much!” after the loudspeaker asked attendees to voice their appreciation for the participants in the “Women Who Kick Ass” panel.)
It’s an ugly moment, an unfortunate capper to a great session, to be followed by many of the guys sitting around me offering up tired lines like “I hope they feel empowered now!” and several recitations of the Twilight mantra about ruining the Con. To be sure, most people in the room were respectful. But at a certain point, there needs to be an accounting for the fact that there is an ugliness that burbles beneath the surface of too many Comic-Con events, sometimes intentional and sometimes unintentional. That’s not a task for the Con itself. It’s a task for nerd culture, and one that will require an earnest attempt to understand why this sort of ugliness rises up so often around women, lest all the nerd culture stereotypes prove unfortunately true.
goldenspiderweb asked: Hello, I was wondering if you're still selling your comics/zines/art online? I remember there being a store on your website/journal at one point maybe? I've enjoyed your work for a long time and I would love that to buy something from you now that I'm at a point where I can do so. Thanks for your time.
Hi hi! That’s so very sweet of you to ask directly! I am still indeedy selling stuff. The shop is up at http://agentagnes.com/sale.html and I take Paypal. I believe everything is currently in stock except Disconnect; I need to order more of those so it would be back ordered for a while.
My goal for the next year is to make enough material to put out in satisfyingly sized print editions, so I’m focusing less on printing and more on creating, but there will be more soon!
Afternoon in Dolores Park (minus the garbage that never quite seems to go away entirely…) Just a fun piece for my own entertainment.
I was trying to describe recently this feeling I try to convey in a lot of my f/f art, this sense of innocence and wonderment in exploring romantic and erotic bonds, and the characters’ actions/state of undress implying that they live in a world where this is not a risky behavior that may result in unwanted attention from unwanted outside parties - that the behavior is for the entertainment of the women involved only. An attempt to show women being sexual for themselves and not just for a male audience, which just doesn’t happen that often. blah blah boobies~
BTW my website registration is not working right now; my host is working on it and should be back up shortly!
I finished this Batman/Robin comic for a show back in February. You may remember me talking about reading this in a Robin costume at Mission Comics in front of a huge crowd of people. If not, please imagine me reading it to you in this fashion. This is explicit and silly and not safe for work, so be warned!
ps, I realize my lettering is horrid… I always think it will be better than the finished product. Working on it!
Coloring takes a loooong time, whine whine
Welp in the meantime as I take a break, I’m gonna upload a little Batman/Robin comic I have lying around…
The SF Bay Guardian did a quickie profile of a few local queer cartoonists, and there’s my lovely self-portrait in the middle-left! Originally we wrote little bios and gave links but somehow that got lost. :( This is also in their print issue, out today, so I feel rather famous to be seen (in cartoon form, anyway) by so many Bay Area folk! Plus it’s cool to see my comic buddies Rick and Jon as well; their support and connection to the local community has been invaluable.
HAPPY PRIDE EVERYONE! Now US citizens can get married just in time for Gay Christmas.
I have two comics ideas I will be starting on shortly after I finish coloring a little picture I just drew. Not sure what the schedule on the upload of that will be, but if it’s longer than 5 pages, then I’ll put those up before the next 5, most likely. Have to show something!
On a more personal note, my cat was diagnosed with an aggressive cancerous tumor in his mouth 10 days ago and is dying. It’s been really awful but at the same time I have a new flame and things are going great so my brain is a little confused about what’s what. I’m curious how this will reflect in my work; I haven’t drawn while in love or in mourning in a looooong time.
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