In the Pink, by Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs is the creator of the popular blog Pen-Elayne on the Web. She was a founding member of Friends of Lulu, an organization dedicated to increasing the involvement of girls and women in comics, as readers and creators. She is married to inker Robin Riggs, with whom she shares two cats, and has odd love/hate relationship with Hillary Clinton.

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8 Responses

  1. Rick Marshall says:

    Years ago, my family's dalmation had a run-in with a skunk. After reading on the 'Net that tomato and lemon juice were both good for removing the skunk scent from skin, we proceeded to open a big can of tomato juice and douse the dog's coat in it. While it did a good job of removing the smell, the dog was pink with black spots for the next two months.

    • Mike Gold says:

      That's really cool. Since dog are color-blind, he probably wasn't even embarrassed.

  2. Russ Rogers says:

    This column made me see (RED)! http://www.joinred.com/Personally, I see nothing wrong with trying to harness our insatiable consumerism to try to attack some of the world's problems. http://ww3.komen.org/PromiseShop/My favorite (RED) product might be the Apple iPod. http://www.apple.com/ipod/red/Check it out! It's the SAME MSRP as all the other iPods. It comes in a super cool color. You get free engraving and free shipping when you order through apple.com. AND a portion of the money goes to fight the global AIDS crisis. It's a win-win-win situation. You get a cooler product for the same price. You get to feel even better about your purchase and yourself as a human being. Apple gets a direct sale. And a fine charity gets a bit of cha-CHING!There are folks on Amazon.com trying to resell the Garth Brooks, Ulitmate Hits CD Exclussive "Pink Edition" as a RARE collectors item for $25 to $40. I say pick yours up for $15 here: http://ww3.komen.org/promiseshop/ProductInfo.aspx…You can be happy that $10 of the purchase price will be going to Komen for the Cure. Hey, if you buy it through Amazon, $10 will still have gone to Komen for the Cure, but you will just be wasting 10 to 25 extra bucks on resellers. You might as well make that 10 to 25 buck donation straight to the Komen Foundation. The standard edition of the Ultimate Hits (now THERE'S an oxymoron) costs $12 on Amazon. So you are paying a $3 premium to get the RARE "Pink Edition." Think of it as paying just $5 for the RARE CD while also making a $10 contribution to a worthy cause!Here's a "Think Before You Pink" moment. Linens and Things also sells a Susan G. Komen Kitchen Aid Teakettle for $60. $5 of the purchase price goes the to Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Foundation. This sounds good, right? Wrong. For $50 you can buy the same KitchenAid Teakettle in another color. That means you are spending $10 dollars more to give $5 to charity. That's a rip off. Like buying the Ultimate Hits "Pink Edition" from a reseller. You might as well buy the Red Teakettle and send a check for $7 to the Komen Foundation. You've saved $3 and made a bigger contribution to the cause.http://www.lnt.com/product/index.jsp?productId=22…Paying $10 more to make a $5 contribution isn't a win-win-win situation. The company and the cause do all right by the deal. But the bottom line is the consumer gets LESS for the money. In my opinion, that's not how charity consumerism is supposed to work. At the very least, you should be able to leverage the small amount more you are paying for the product into a larger donation for the charity; like the Garth Brooks CD, where you leverage paying $3 more for the CD into a $10 donation for the cause!The concept of harnessing consumerism for charity isn't new. Aisles of Smiles for Jerry's Kids has been raising millions of dollars each year for MDA for more than two decades! http://www.mda.org/help/AOS/default.htmTarget stores has been giving 5% of it's income back to the community since 1946! They have a bunch of different programs that both benefit worthy causes AND promote themselves. Nothing wrong with that. http://sites.target.com/site/en/corporate/page.js…Finally, if we are looking for cool products that help support a worthy cause, let's look no farther than the HERO Initiative! The HERO Initiative is a charity that helps comic creators in need. It used to be called ACTOR and you can still find it here: http://www.actorcomicfund.org/HERO Initiative has partnered up with a bunch of cool companies. And there are a ton of cool products and comic book tie-in merchandise that helps raise money for their cause. http://www.atomiccomicsstore.com/heroinitiative.hhttp://www.dynamicforces.com/htmlfiles/c-HERO.htm…I'm sorry, this comment is too long and contains WAY too many links to stuff outside of ComicMix. Oh well. Thanks for the column, Elayne. As usual, it made me think.

  3. Rick Taylor says:

    To me, pink is another color choice an not gender specific.I always enjoyed working with then-editor Michael Golden who was never afraid to wield solid color.His use of pink, purple and orange gave me a boost when dealing with some of the 'don't use purple' boyz club at DC.Mike would say things like 'go ahead and use a solid magenta (pink in funny book lingo) background (or logo) on that cover'. Inside I'd smile, it insured the stuff would bounce right off the newsstand.As a kid I like the fact that Cosmic Boy and Magnus had pink costumes (hell, Magnus had a man-skirt and white boots). In the future they must be less hung up about gender, too. But the Magnus thing was probably 'cuz in the dayz of hand seps they wanted things done the simplest and fastest they could.Like I say, another color choice/option.