Agent Agnes
My table at Bookish Beasts at the Center for Sex and Culture. I’ll be here until 6 pm if you want to check it out!

My table at Bookish Beasts at the Center for Sex and Culture. I’ll be here until 6 pm if you want to check it out!

I’ll be at another queer comics panel this Saturday, this time for GaymerX2 in San Francisco, once again organized by the wonderful Zan of Northwest Press.  Panel is on Saturday at 11 am. :)

Queer Comics Expo this Sunday

The Cartoon Art Museum in downtown Sam Francisco is hosting the first ever Queer Comics Expo this Sunday 11am - 5 pm. I will be a part of the panel Queer Comics… In All Directions! Not yet sure of the time so will post it later. Drop by if you can!

http://cartoonart.org/2014/05/first-annual-queer-comics-expo-sunday-june-8-2014/

Oooh, look what just arrived in the post! My contributor copies of Pupa! I can’t wait to read it, everything looks so amazing…
I will be selling the extra five copies, signed. Only five?? Only five. Not even worth it to make the paypal button… PM me...

Oooh, look what just arrived in the post! My contributor copies of Pupa! I can’t wait to read it, everything looks so amazing…

I will be selling the extra five copies, signed. Only five?? Only five. Not even worth it to make the paypal button… PM me if you are interested! They got slightly dinged up in the post so I’ll be wrapping them and shipping priority in the US. First class international. CORRECTION: $15 + $5 shipping.

More info about the project at pupazine.bigcartel.com!

I will have a comic page in this!  Jon has been a wonderfully supportive friend and he is an insanely prolific artist.  Check out the individual books or support the project and get the collected anthology!

skincube:

I drew a 9 page comic for an upcoming anthology - jetplastic.net

I can’t post the whole comic yet, but I can show you these 2 splash pages.

I’ll let you all know when you can read the whole thing!

bisexual-books:

image

This has been a great summer for bisexual books. Like Shiri Eisner’s Bi Notes for a Bisexual Revolution which also came out this summer, Anything That Loves is one of the most impressive bisexual books I have read it a very long time.

The sheer diversity is staggering. In this…

Review of the anthology where one of my personal stories appears.

saicoink:

PUPA PREORDERS START TODAY!

PUPA is an anthology with comics and illustrations about insects from 26 artists from around the world.

$23US (includes international shipping from Taiwan)
Book information:
- A6 size
- 100 pages B&W
- 8 pages colour
- 1 colour pullout

Now available for preorder from September 21st - October 12th! The print run will be limited to preorders, but a small number of books will be offered for sale after the preorder from contributing artists. If you want a copy please order one today! Books ship October.

Proceeds from book sales will be going towards The Foundation for Preservation of Honey Bees.  The book cost includes international shipping and helps us cover Paypal fees and conversion fees (from USD to TWD).

Contributors include:
Agent Agnes
Andrea Manica
Christine Vu
Coey Kuhn
Cosmosmith
Cynthia L.
DG
Deadums
Gisu
Huli
Hwei Lim
Inés Estrada
Jane Mai
Kinkan
Laura Knetzger
Lawn
Marcus
Maré Odomo
Mopinks
Muura
P-RO
Saicoink
Saprophilous
Vera L.
Vivian Rosas
Wrat

We will only print books based on the number of preorders and books requested by contributors. Once they are gone they will be gone! I helped Lawn edit and design the book. We would really appreciate your support. Thanks for looking!!

I’m late to the party but I am in this anthology!  My comic is short but I still giggle thinking about it.  Preorder here.

awasteoftimecomic:
“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...

awasteoftimecomic:

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.

racebending:
“ 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...

racebending:

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.

-Todd VanDerWerff “A Day Inside ComicCon’s Hall H"