Tagged: Wonder Woman

Joe Corallo: Comic Con Narrowly Misses The Point

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This week’s column marks my one-year anniversary of doing this at ComicMix. Though I’m tempted to do a year in review, this past weekend was New York Comic Con so that idea is going to have to be put on hold for at least a week.

I started Thursday morning by getting to the Javits Center around 9:00 am. After going through a few different lines, getting my bag checked, getting my badge scanned, and waiting on another couple of lines, I was in by about 10:15 am. I hit the show floor and did the rounds. At 11:00 am I went to my first panel.

joegeeksoutBody of Evidence: How We See Ourselves in Comics had panelists ranging from librarians, comic creators, a performer and my friend David Baxter, as well as a physician discussing healthy body image in comics as well as touching on disabled representation. Most of the disabled representation revolved around the character of Oracle and a point that fellow ComicMix columnist Martha Thomases has made with me before: while it’s great to have disabled representation, why is it that a woman isn’t able to heal from her exploitive attack in a world where Batman breaks his back and recovers?

While the panel had passionate panelists making interesting points, the panelists were noticeably cis, able bodied, and white or white-passing (David is half Native American). That doesn’t take away from the points they were making, but seeing people of color, trans, and disabled people share their experiences would have been helpful and enlightening. Especially at a convention that ejected Jay Justice, a queer disabled person of color, from a panel because they couldn’t accommodate the scooter she needs to get around.

That panel was far from the only one that suffered from some lack of diversity. Along with fellow ComicMix columnist Molly Jackson, I attended the Wonder Woman 75 panel on Friday. The panel was majority male, and almost exclusively white with the exception of the legendary Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, who frustratingly talked the least during the panel. And despite Greg Rucka being on the panel, Wonder Woman being confirmed as queer was never mentioned. Perhaps it would have been during a Q&A, but the panel ended early without one. As one of I’m sure many queer people in attendance, saying that was disappointing would be an understatement. You’d think with Wonder Woman being on the cover of this year’s NYCC program for NYCC would have provided some motivation.

That night while waiting in line for another event, I was discussing the Wonder Woman 75 panel with a friend when two people on the line in front of me interjected. They told me how they attended the Queer Culture: LGBT Presence in Pop Culture panel and to their surprise the panel was exclusively cis white men, or at very least white-passing. Beyond that they discussed how that was a similar experience they had at other panels.

young-animalFriday was also the day of the DC’s Young Animal panel, and if you’ve been reading my column over the past year you could probably guess that was on the top of my list of panels to attend. The panelists included creators Gerard Way (Doom Patrol, Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye), Nick Derington (Doom Patrol), Jody Houser (Mother Panic), and Marley Zarcone (Shade, the Changing Girl). This particular panel was packed and had a very enthusiastic crowd. Fans of Gerard Way hung onto his every word as he talked about how the Young Animal imprint came to be and gave previews of the books to come. They even handed out a cassette (you read that right) with a new song of his. The highlight for me was during the Q&A when someone asked about queer representation and Gerard discussed how he has been talking with Rachel Pollack about her run and Coagula in particular and bringing her back. When he had mentioned how Coagula was a trans superhero the packed panel room cheered. This goes to show how starved people are for trans representation and further pushes the point I and others have been making for some time now; reprint Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol.

While I did enjoy the DC’s Young Animal panel quite a bit, it was again an all cis white panel. For this particular panel, similar to the Wonder Woman panel, it was because of the creators that were available or asked. The only way to have more diverse panels is to have more diverse creators.

And they shouldn’t be limited to diversity specific panels. The goal of those panels is to raise awareness. The idea is for panels on diversity to be a starting point of a conversation, not the ending point. We can see that with panels like Marvel: 50 Years of Black Panther featuring different creative minds behind the character, as well as the panel on Luke Cage. When you have people of color working on comics, they get to be on the panels to discuss them. We desperately need more of that not just because it’s right, but to ensure a future for comics.

The future of comics does not encompass the same demographics as before. Women, people of color, queer people, disabled people, and people that cover more than one or all of the above are reading comics. They want representation, and they want a seat at the table. That’s not to say they never read comics before, but many didn’t because they didn’t see people that looked like them or they didn’t tell stories that were in any way relatable. Straight cis white guy with superpowers trying to get the girl doesn’t really speak directly to the experiences of many of the groups I mentioned even in metaphor. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to in recent years who finally got into comics through small publishers and webcomics finally representing people like them because they honestly didn’t believe comics as a medium represented them.

new-york-comic-con-nycc-2016-featured-imageBefore I left NYCC on Saturday I got to be a guest at the Geeks OUT! Booth selling copies of my new comic as well as signing copies of their anthology I had been in last year. In the couple of hours I was at the booth, people of all different backgrounds came over and gushed over the items they were selling, like a t-shirt saying “Strong Female Character.” Many also stopped to take a preferred pronoun sticker from the table. They’d ask if they were free, and many asked if it would be okay to take an extra one for a friend. People were thrilled that a group like Geeks OUT! Was considerate enough to create stickers like these for everyone.

As comics fandom is becoming more mainstream and more diverse, comics need to keep up with these changes. NYCC 2016 is a good example of some efforts to keep up with those changes… but not getting there quite yet.

Joe Corallo: Wonder Woman Queer; Restrictions Apply

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wonder-woman-templetonLast week Greg Rucka, current writer on Wonder Woman Rebirth, confirmed in an interview that Wonder Woman is queer. Whether you agree with Greg Rucka’s approach on the character, it’s a good interview and worth your time. Basically, the ideas delved into are that since Wonder Woman’s home Themyscira is an all woman’s paradise that whereas they may not exactly consider it being queer since same sex relationships are all they could have, we would consider it queer by our standards. And certainly any women that come to our world from there would almost certainly be queer by our standards.

This is certainly important for queer representation in comics. However, there are some factors here that limit this milestone that are worth discussing.

First, Wonder Woman has not always been queer. Some sites like this one make the claim that she always was, and that was always creator William Moulton Marston’s intentions. We have absolutely no evidence that was his end goal. Yes, he was in a polyamorous relationship with two women and enjoyed BDSM. While he clearly drew on some of his bondage experience for the comic, that does not mean he wished the character to be openly queer and to ultimately acknowledge that in the comics. Seeing as William Moulton Marston passed away in 1947, there are little to know formal interviews his creating Wonder Woman. Believe it or not, people didn’t care a lot about comic creators back then.

When it comes to Wonder Woman in comics as well let’s keep in mind that Comics Code Authority. The code as it stood in 1954 banned any reference to sexual deviations as they saw it, so any form of queerness, straight through 1989. While both Marvel and DC had printed a few comics that could not get the Comics Code Authority seal, it was almost always for something related to drug use. Rarely if ever was the seal denied to Marvel or DC for queerness.

gal-gadot-wonder-womanThe companies followed those guidelines so closely that Chris Claremont was forced to drop the idea of a queer relationship between Mystique and Destiny from his X-Men run. As a result, multiple generations of Wonder Woman writers had no intention of writing her as queer as it would not be published. Furthermore, straight cis white men (with the arguable exception of William Moulton Marston being polyamorous) exclusively wrote Wonder Woman for over four decades until ComicMix’s own Mindy Newell got to write three issues in 1985 before George Pérez took the reigns after Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Since 1942, various incarnations of Wonder Woman appeared in comics, on TV, and now Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman in the DC Cinematic Universe. From cartoons spanning Super Friends, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited to the live-action Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter, Wonder Woman has presented straight or at most warm and welcoming to other women. Her love interests didn’t stray far from Steve Trevor or Superman. With Steve Trevor cast in the Wonder Woman film debuting next summer in addition to the movie having mostly been filmed already, it is highly likely if not entirely impossible she will be presenting as queer in the film. Though I do fear there’s a chance she may appear queer briefly in the film in a cringe-worthy-for-the-male-gaze fashion. I’m hoping that won’t be the case.

wonder-woman-60sIt’s also worth noting that DC has retconned quite a few characters as being bisexual/queer. These characters include Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, John Constantine and now Wonder Woman. All of them are cis and white with only one of them being male. Many of the characters named have appeared in other media recently; when the Constantine show premiered on NBC, the showrunners stated they would not portray him as bisexual. Harley Quinn was just in the film Suicide Squad with no reference to her bisexuality. It’s hard to say you’re pushing for diversity when you’re pushing for it in the medium with the least amount of people engaging in it, while not demanding it with those characters’ counterparts on TV and in the movies.

The characters being cis and white are part of the limitations DC has when they retcon characters. The overwhelming majority of the characters created decades ago were straight cis and white. When you aren’t creating new characters and are retconning queerness into them, the result is a lot of white queer characters and few to no queer POC. This sort of backdoor diversity approach to queerness isn’t the best approach. As I’ve been advocating on this column for a while, we need more new queer characters and to use some of the queer characters who were made with the intention to be queer like Coagula, who granted is white, but would still bring DC’s trans superhero count from 0 to 1. DC needs new characters, not more backdoor diversity.

wonder-woman-race-colorWe have decades of a straight-coded Wonder Woman in our culture. Yes, she has often been a symbol of feminism, but we cannot conflate feminism with queerness. Whether people want to admit it or not, Wonder Woman being queer is a retcon and we need to treat it as such.

We can embrace this news as positive and push for more overt queerness in Wonder Woman, which is what I plan on doing. We can praise Greg Rucka for taking positive steps in this direction and for his handling of Wonder Woman. What we can’t do is go around acting like DC Comics has been progressive on this front for decades and we just didn’t realize it. And we can’t praise Wonder Woman being queer in the comics and not acknowledge how she’s presenting as straight in other media. That’s not how this works.

Marc Alan Fishman’s Ten Easy Steps To Make Justice League Great

 

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Welcome to LinkBait 2016, kiddos! After last week, I was left wandering the streets thinking “How can Warner Brothers make Justice League not just good but completely balls-out awesomesauce?” Well, here I am stuck in New York City (day job, baybae!) with nothing better to do than listicle my way towards freedom. Let’s break it down:

  1. Be Funny.
    If the teaser trailer thing they tossed at us via SDCC was any indication, this one may be in the bag. Between Batfleck’s quips to the angry Aquaman and the Flash’s quips to Bats… I laughed more in two minutes of footage than I did after watching all of the DC films combined.
  2. Stop Brooding.
    Can we just state the obvious? Batman v. Superman and Man of Steel were chores to survive through. With rain and darkness and death and crying and smoke and ashes and pain and lasers, we’ve now sat through about five hours of tragedy shaded by angst. Simply put, we don’t need any more of it.
  3. Open up After Effects and turn off all filters.
    Forgive my insincerity to any of the directors of photography, art directors, and cinematographers who worked on the previous films. They were ugly brown-blue nightmare-scapes. For the love of Rao, please just up that saturation. Want a guide? Open up a comic book. I realize the brands need some consistency. But when your competition can level a city in broad daylight, and still have bright blue skies, it proves you don’t need to muck up the screen just because there’s a fight going on.
  4. Remember: Nothing is truly ever solved by punching.
    Listen, I don’t want to keep beating the “Marvel’s doing it better” tree too often, but I need to call a spade a spade. The Avengers? The day was saved by sacrifice. Civil War? A stalemate and respect for common sense. Heck! Guardians of the Galaxy? Friggen friendship, love, and having Kurt Russel alien-DNA. Consider it your blueprint: the Justice League needs to beat whatever villainy that arises with their wit, their courage, and their unwavering compassion for humanity. Simply put, only martial arts movies get away with winning by using better punching.
  5. In Media Res… Love It.
    We don’t need anyone’s secret origin. Not anymore. The movie-going public has been well-versed now by a decade’s worth of them. Start us ready to assemble… err… gather the League and save the day.
  6. Aquaman will be cool if you play it cool.
    We all know Aquaman is a pop-culture icon for morty hero-dom. But what makes him awesome isn’t the tattoos, Samoan looks, angry grit, or massive pecs. It’s his confidence. It’s his heroism. It’s his humanity. It’s clear that Momoa’s Arthur Curry is an intense individual. That’s fine. But he need not be a snarling snarky shark-man to garner favor with the lowest common denominator.
  7. No one believes Superman is dead.
    Well, you sorta’ let that cat outta the bag quickly, didn’t you? So be clear, and to the point. Bring him back. Spare us the mullet and/or black costume and give us the big blue boy scout America has been begging for.
  8. Wonder Woman must be the force to be reckoned with.
    Up until now, Black Widow has been the super hero little girls are looking up to. But she’s a complicated character who’s been buried behind the bigger toys in the toybox over at Club Mickey. DC has the opportunity to steal the title of best female hero and bury Marvel in that respect. Wonder Woman stole every scene she was in back in Sadman v. Badman. While we know she’ll soon get her own solo flick to flood the cinemas with aspiration. But in the team setting, she’s set to break out and be the biggest, baddest bitch of the bunch.
  9. The villain needs to matter.
    To date, Marvel’s malevolent mad men have been shallow at best, save only – perhaps – for the lukewarm Loki. DC’s rogues frankly spank Marvel’s ne’er-do-wells on paper. It’s about time they proved it. It looks like Darkseid may be the big baddie. And all it takes is boning up on how he was portrayed in Justice League: Unlimited and Superman: The Animated Series. Simply put? Darkseid is the better Thanos. DC has the opportunity to spare us seventeen ten-second teasers to get to a true villain. Roll out the parademons and a few Apokolyptian lieutenants for larger fight scenes, and you’re golden as a Kirby panel.
  10. Go ahead and tell us this is a multi-verse.
    There’s no better way to make all the fanboys lose their minds then to say Arrow, Flash, Supergirl and (to a much lesser degree) Gotham could exist and travel into the movies, and vice versa. With all the goodwill being built on the CW thus far… those whoops, hollers, and rounds of applause will come if people got the notion Grant Gustin and Ezra Miller would ever run across one another.

So, ComicMixers… what would you tell DC and WB to do to make Justice League a movie you’ll crave seeing?

Tweeks: DC Super Hero Girls SDCC Cast Interview

Maddy has been pretty vocal this year about how she is with DC, though even more than Rebirth, Batgirl and Birds of Prey, we are both obsessed with DC Super Hero Girls. Yes, it is aimed for girls 6 -12, but we dare anyone to not love this. Start with the video shorts and eventually move onto the books and toy. And now there’s a new movie.

DC Super Hero Girls: Hero of the Year premiered at Comc-Con, but just this week it’s been released on DVD and we already know it will be running non-stop on every little kid’s minivan TV. Apparently there’s so much action boys like it too. Why oh why was this not a thing when we were kids?

At SDCC, we were able to chat with Tara Strong (Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn), Grey Griffin (Wonder Woman), Anais Fairweather (Supergirl), Teala Dunn (Bumblebee), Stephanie Sheh (Katana), Jennifer Coyle (producer), and Cecilia Aranovich (director) about what they bring to the movie and to the characters. We also find out why a movie about a group of teenage girl superheroes is so important to them and in what ways they identify with their characters.

 

Tweeks Reactions to SDCC Trailerpalooza Quick Pick Reactions

Tweeks Reactions to SDCC Trailerpalooza Quick Pick Reactions

Here’s our take on the movie trailers released at San Diego Comic Con last month.

Justice League

Anya: Eh. It doesn’t look that good and there’s nothing that sets it apart from other superhero movies. I’ve noticed lately when watching the trailer that it’s the same thing for every movie. Some dramatic music plays and then one of the main characters gives an inspirational speech. Then, while he’s still talking, the trailer cuts to clips of people fighting, training, and making out. Then, the music cuts out for the comic relief to make one or two jokes. Finally, the music intensifies and a bunch of clips are cut together an play really fast. Then, the character finishes his face and the movie info appears on the screen.

Maddy: It looks okay but I’m probably not gonna go see it. Also, when Bruce Wayne is Batman he grows more stubble and his voice gets deeper? What’s up with that? Also, I like how Wonder Woman was in it twice. Just twice.

Wonder Woman

Anya: This one looks better, but I’m not super excited for it. I might go see it but it’s not getting me hyped as a 13 year old girl. Really the only thing intriguing to me about it is that it’s Wonder Woman because honestly it looks like the other 20 superhero movies that have come out in the past ten years.

Maddy: I am super excited for this actually. This is I think the first major movie starring a female superhero and it’s really groundbreaking. The costumes look fantastic and Gal Gadot looks like she will be phenomenal.

Suicide Squad

 

Anya: First of all, TWENTY ONE PILOTS!!!!!!! I think theSuicide Squad soundtrack is probably one of the best summer albums. Second, this is the movie I’m looking forward too the most. It just looks better than the other movies we’ve seen so far because it just seems so different.

Maddy:  ASDJEFHUWHUIHJYEGW!  I’M SO EXCITED!!!!!!!! I’ve been hyped about this movie since it was first announced and I’ve pre-ordered the soundtrack and I know all the words to everything except “Purple Lamborghini” because that just came out. I’m genuinely OBSESSED. I’ll be wearing a Daddy’s Little Monster shirt when I see it opening day!

The Lego Batman Movie

Anya: So, this movie just looks like it’s the story of Robin told by Legos, I guess? It looks good and it looks like something I’ll probably see while babysitting but not something I’d rush to the theater to see.

Maddy: I agree, it looks pretty good, maybe not for your teenage girl demographic.  Also, these type of movies are super impressive because they’re so hard to make. Good job, technical team!

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Anya: It looks so good! I cannot wait to see this one. I think that the costumes are really good. I like the 1920’s. They had great clothes back then.

Maddy: I’m gonna be walking into the theatre chanting NEWT SCAMANDER! NEWT SCAMANDER! NEWT SCAMANDER! and some people will be like “Oh yeah, me too!” but others will be like, “Who is she and what is her damage?”  I’m so excited to see a J.K. Rowling movie in theaters! 

Doctor Strange

Anya: I might be more hyped for this than Suicide Squad, but I don’t know. The whole thing is so trippy, it looks so cool!  Also, Benedict Cumberbatch is amazing and I’m so excited for everything except the beard. It makes him look so scraggly.

Maddy: WHOOOOOHOOO! IT’S BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!!!! This movie looks trip, like Anya said. I’m really excited. I love optical illusions and stuff so this’ll be cool. AND THE CAPE THING WAS SO COOL. It just snapped on like “whoa.”

Mindy Newell’s Coming Attractions

hillary wonder womanIn the spring of 1971, I met a girl. The first time I saw her, we were, appropriately enough, in a class on political and civil rights. She had thick blond hair, big glasses. Wore no makeup. And she exuded this strength of self-possession I found magnetic. –President Bill Clinton, 2016 Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Lock Her Up!!! – Rallying Cry at 2016 Republican National Convention

In my not so humble opinion, the Wonder Woman trailer definitely shows a lot of promise.

But I’m not talking about Princess Diana of Themiscrya. I mean that other Wonder Woman – Hillary Rodham Clinton.

You may be thinking “What trailer? I mean the one starring Mrs. Clinton for the last 50 or so years of her life, during much of which she has been in the public eye – or bull’s-eye – and not just as FLOTUS, New York Senator, and Secretary of State. Hillary’s extensive involvement in politics goes back to 1960, when, as a 13-year old, she helped canvass for Richard Nixon, and then, four years later, she worked for the Goldwater campaign.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Hillary Rodham started her political life as a Republican.

Wonder Woman InaugerationI have never understood the incredibly vicious vitriol directed towards Hillary, or her husband, for that matter. And so much of it is not political; it’s personal. The other day a woman at work said to me that she hated her. I asked her why. She said it was (and I’m paraphrasing) “because she stayed with her husband despite his many adulteries. What woman would do that? I wouldn’t. Would you?” For the record, well, no, I wouldn’t, but, I said, “It’s her marriage, not mine, and not yours.” (And also for the record, this woman did not say anything about Hillary staying with her husband for her own personal political ambitions.) I’ve heard variations of this theme for just about forever.

Sometimes I think television itself, as a media form, just doesn’t like her, the way it didn’t like Richard Nixon when he debated John F. Kennedy back in 1960. It’s just one of the mysteries of the modern media age that some people just don’t come across well on the screen. Hillary, despite being a baby boomer – so that you would think that she would be very comfortable with the television camera – always looks, well, not nervous, but tense; and yet I have never seen a better display of pure aplomb than that 13-hour grueling Benghazi kangaroo court trial that Mrs. Clinton was forced to endure. And even then, Hillary haters, including Fox News and other right-wing media, boldly declared that the reason she was so relaxed was because she was on Valium. This claim was quickly ignored by the next news cycle.

Before I sat down to write this column, I did a bit of research and found a great article over at the webzine Slate. In “The Hillary Haters” (July 24 2016), writer Michelle Goldberg went out and actually asked some “common” folk just exactly what they have against her. Here are some of their answers:

“She strikes me as programmed and robotic.”

“She is disingenuous and lies blatantly.”

“If I could make her a profit she’d be my best friend.”

“She’s a sociopath.”

There were lies upon lies upon lies, and misquotes piled on misquotes piled on misquotes and misconceptions following misconception. But when Ms. Goldberg answered with facts, the subjects just didn’t want to listen, discounting them and/or shrugging their shoulders.

Look, I feel it too. There is “Something About Hillary” that annoys me. I know she capable, I know she’s brilliant, and I know she’s been demonized. But she lacks that something that stops me from being crazy about her. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never met her, not even to shake her hand, but there is a but there….well, let me tell you a story.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, in an enclave out on Eastern Long Island called the Hamptons, my mother’s friend noticed a big brouhaha across the street from her. She looked, and she saw Bill Clinton surrounded by people and press and, of course, secret service agents. Mom’s friend said that she never felt such a wave of pure charisma in her life, it could have knocked her over with a feather, and not only was he in a crush, a mob, but he was also at least 100 feet away from her.

She was telling this to my mother over a cup of coffee in our kitchen. I was there as well.

“Was he with Hillary?” asked my mother, who was (and is) a big fan of the lady.

“Yeah, I think so. Who cares?” said her friend.

So is it a lack of charisma or her gender that is hurting “Hill?” Many a feminist writer has argued that the two are related, that a woman cannot have that charisma-bias because of her sex, but I don’t agree. There are plenty of women with it, from Sophia Loren to Senator Elizabeth Warner, so it’s not about looks. But here’s a thought…

Sophia Loren, Senator Warren, Rachel Maddow, Princess Diana, Melissa McCarthy… all these women and many more just have that natural élan, that certain something, that charisma which draws people in, makes us like them without knowing them, makes people pay attention –

Hillary doesn’t have that inborn gift. But the woman makes us pay attention, demands us to see her, to hear her, to listen to her…

Hmm…

Maybe it’s that which so many people resent.

 

Molly Jackson Is Preparing For The Future

Wonder Woman & Elmo

This past weekend was the arguably biggest event on the geek calendar, San Diego Comic Con. It is an explosion of headlines, news clips, and video spots that most geeks salivate over. However, I was not one of them. That’s right, I spent the biggest geek weekend of the year creating Sesame Street characters out of fruit. It was awesome.

My niece, Baby Destructo (as I call her), turned three last week and wanted a Sesame Street birthday party. Elmo is kiddie crack, I swear. As she is my very favorite person to spend time with, my family and I spent the weekend trying to make it the best day of her year.

Hanging out with a three-year old is a reminder of how active an imagination can be. She was always pointing to nothing and seeing trains or butterflies coming through the house. She makes force lighting and names everyone after My Little Pony characters. We sat together and she read books to me, and even has her favorite book memorized.  My personal highlight though was when she pointed to Spock on my t-shirt and said “I like him.”

Towards the end of the weekend, when she was all passed out from playing her favorite game of me chasing her through a museum, I finally got to check out some of the highlights from SDCC. I was particularly disappointed to see some news pieces. A male con staffer decided to hijack a Women in Film Production panel to teach the panelists about the film industry. I can’t quite understand why, but he thought that he needed to help the female panelists explain their careers and run their panel for them. Then I checked out the reviews of The Killing Joke. I admit, I haven’t seen the film yet but the descriptions I have read are not promising. They took Batgirl, whose part in this comic is small in itself, and added a storyline that made her a lovesick child who only seems motivated by a man.

I was excited to see the Wonder Woman trailer; it was a surprising breath of fresh air after reading some of the others. It was a strong woman standing up and being an equal partner with a man while fighting for the equality of others. I would love to see more of strong female characters in all media, but what really hurt was seeing that a strong female character was dragged down. Mostly though, I think about the world that my tiny, imaginative, smart niece is growing up in.

Media will shape her more than any generation before her. She will grow up in a world where equality is an active topic, where in her formative years a woman is the first presidential nominee for a major American political party. But in the same breath, entertainment has dragged its feet in making changes. Every time we get a Ghostbusters or Buffy, another demeaning instance seems to rear its ugly head.

We have a responsibility to the future to make sure that our entertainment is diverse and equal. And in some ways it seems silly. After everything that has happened, this fight should be over but the current climate of this country has proven otherwise.

I want my niece to grow up in a world where she is treated equally along with everyone else. So the next time you read something that is not quite right or hear a joke that uses a minority group as the punchline, think about the future you want for the next generation.

Mindy Newell: Denver, Stormtroopers, and Farts

X-Wing @ DCC, 2016

So as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by fellow columnist Emily S. Whitten calls “Convention Crud” and I called, last week, “Airplane Adenovirus”…

Me & R2I had an ABFAB time at the Denver Comic Con 2016!

That’s “Absolutely Fabulous” for those of you too young to remember the BBC show.

Overseen by the Denver-based Pop Culture Classroom, a non-profit organization whose aim is to use comics and other pop culture media to educate kids and inform the public, the con is held annually at the Colorado Convention Center, an edifice that puts the Jacob Javits Center here in New York to total shame, in downtown Denver. Incredibly yuuuge – it stretches over four city blocks – with many atriums letting in the sunlight of the Mile High City, the con never felt crowded, despite its 100,000+ attendance.

I was invited because of my connection to Wonder Woman, who was created by William Moulton Marston 75 years ago this year. I must admit to having some trepidation, because, to be completely honest, I didn’t think that my work on the Amazon Princess was remembered, and I had images of sitting alone and ignored for three days. To make it worse, I hadn’t thought to bring any samples of my work to put out on display, so my table was white and bare in comparison to my nearest neighbors, authors and artists whose work was exhibited in beautiful and multi-colored presentations.

(To be fair to myself, I actually have very little of my work here at home. Over the years I have given out 99% of my work to my daughter’s friends, to cousins and the children of friends for birthday, communion, and bar-or-bas mitzvah presents, and for Halloween treats.)

Getting Timey-Winy, DCC, 2016But those little fears disappeared immediately as I became entranced by everything at the convention. The first thing I saw when I entered the Exhibitors Hall was a “life-size” beat-up and dented X-Wing fighter, looking as if it had just returned from a rendezvous with the Imperial fleet. (I immediately took the above picture.) The next thing I saw were two Stormtroopers, and I handed my phone to the volunteer who was leading me to my table as I stepped between them; she obligingly snapped a photo.

I was, as my daughter had put it as she drove me to the airport, “with my people.”

I was on many panels, not all of them to do with “Women and Comics.” Pop Culture also features educational classes for kids and adults at the convention, and I was slated to lead “Creating a Four-Panel Comic,” which was for kids [I would say] from eight-years old and down. That experience is one of my most treasured memories!

When Alix was in elementary school I gave some “lectures” on creating a story for her English class, so I wasn’t at all nervous. I immediately involved the kids in the audience, not staying on the stage, but going into the audience and letting them talk into the microphone. The kids proved to be incredibly imaginative and involved. A young girl volunteered the superhero, named FlashDash for her super-speed. The villain was Lunchbox. This bad guy carries a lunchbox, and inside it are burritos. “Burritos?” I laughed along with audience, who were obviously enjoying themselves. “And what do the burritos do?”

“They explode,” said the young boy, who was about seven, and whose name I can’t remember, damn my menopausal memory!

“And when they explode, it smells like the worst fart ever! The smell will kill you!”

Well, I don’t know about you, but fart jokes crack me up. Just the mention of the word fart makes me go silly. So imagine the reaction of the audience and those within hearing distance – remember, me and the kids were using a microphone – when the young man said this. A gigantic Bwa-bwa-hah-hah! went up and echoed in Exhibitors Hall.

I didn’t want to embarrass the boy. “That is absolutely fantastic,” I said, still smiling and laughing a little. “Lunchbox uses the exploding burritos the way Hobgoblin uses his pumpkin bombs. That is so great.”

“So how does FlashDash defeat Lunchbos?” I asked. The creator of Lunchbox shot up his hand, and even though I really wanted to involve some other kids, everyone was looking at him, so I went with the flow.

Me & 2 Buddies, DCC, 2016“FlashDash waves her cape super-fast and blows away the fart,” he said.

I’m tellin’ y’all, this kid is going to be a comics superstar in about 20 or 25 years, or even sooner!

Meanwhile, up on the podium, my artist, a really talented young guy named Colton, was drawing all of this out on an easel in four panels. We had three, so far.

“Okay,” I said, “So FlashDash, in the first panel, meets Lunchbox. The second panel shows Lunchbox throwing the burrito and it exploding.” Colton used wiggly lines to show the farts’s uh, “waves of stink.”

“The third panel has FlashDash waving her cape at super-speed, dispersing the fart cloud. So we have one more panel. What happens?”

A little girl, a very little girl, she must have been four years old, bashfully waved her hand, and I walked up to her. “FlashDash’s dragon uses his fire breath and burns up Lunchbox’s lunchbox,” she said softly. I’m telling y’all, this child was absolutely adorable.

“Oh, FlashDash has a pet dragon?” I asked her. She smiled shyly and nodded. I turned to Colton, who was already adding a little dragon hovering over FlashDash’s shoulder to the preceding panels. I said to the audience that this was an example of a writer and an artist “editing” their work, meaning changing it to make it better.

Then Colton drew the final panel, with the dragon’s fire breath melting the burrito-containing lunchbox.

DCC, 2016“And that’s the end of Lunchbox and his exploding fart burritos,” I said. “FlashDash and her pet dragon have saved the day.”

We weren’t able to photocopy the story, but many parents and kids came up to the podium and snapped photos of the “Four-Panel Comic.”

Yep, I had an AbFab time in Denver. I caught up with old friends – Andy Mangels, Barbara Randall Kesel, Timothy Truman, Trina Robbins, Peter David – and made new ones – Cat Staggs, Yannick Paquette, LJ Hachmeister, Joe Staton, Hannah Means Shannon (a.k.a. Hannah Menzies), Marguerite Sauvage, and Jeff Hendon and his wife.

I met so many terrific people, I could fill this whole column with their names alone. I met that at the convention, I met them at the hotel. I met Jae Lee on the ride back to the airport.

I sat on panels and signed autographs and took pictures with fans. Oh, yeah, remember how I talked about my white, bare table? I found Mile High Comics, and bought a bunch of my comics, including issues of Wonder Woman (including what I consider mine and George Pérez’s best work on the title, #46, “Chalk Drawings”), “Lois Lane: When It Rains, God Is Crying,” and “Legionnaires Three.” (I then gave them as a gift to my Exhibitors Hall neighbor, the aforementioned Jeff Herndon, an amazing illustrator in the Denver area, and his wife in exchange for a beautiful painting of Gail Godot as Wonder Woman. I wanted to pay for it, but he and his wife wouldn’t hear of it, so instead we did the “barter.”)

Comics. Celebrities. An X-Wing, Stormtroopers, and R2-D2. The TARDIS.

And farts.

It was a helluva’ weekend.

Mike Gold: Do NOT Look Up In The Sky!

TV Invisible AirplaneQuestion 1: What’s the coolest part of the Wonder Woman myth?

That’s easy. It’s her invisible airplane. Hands down.

Question 2: What really cool looking merchandising item is coming to help celebrate (or milk) WW’s 75th anniversary?

Ummm… It’s her invisible airplane. Among everything else you can imagine.

Question 3: What crucial element of her saga is not in the upcoming Wonder Woman movie?

Oy. Please don’t tell me it’s her invisible airplane.

Hot Wheels Invisible AirplaneJust as I’ve grown comfortable recommending the otherwise dreadful Batman v Superman movie solely for the Wonder Woman scenes, DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson somewhat apologetically told People Magazine “There is no invisible jet. Not in this iteration.”

Feh.

I wasn’t thrilled about the movie being set during World War I, even though it is being released in time to, ahh, celebrate the 100th anniversary of The War To End All Wars. Yes, kids, that’s what WWI was called. And, in that context, WWI was a failure. But I digress.

Then an old-timey 15-watt incandescent light bulb when off over my head. “Wait!!!” I said to me. “An invisible biplane!!! How cool is that???”

Evidently, cool enough for me to use six exclamation points and three question marks.

But such will not come to pass. No invisible plane, bi- or otherwise.

The invisible airplane is as cool as it is completely gratuitous. No, we do not need it. Just as Superman doesn’t need his red trunks, either, but you wouldn’t eliminate that world renown icon, would you?

O.K. That’s a bad example. I’m completely right, but it’s still a bad example.

This isn’t the end of the world, and sure as hell I’m not calling for a boycott of the movie or anything like that. For one thing, Gal Gadot was so … wonderful … in BvS that she deserves our attention, even if Warner Bros. does not.

And who knows? President Nelson talked about iterations. Maybe the invisible plane – invisible jet? – will get polished up for the Justice League movie.

Ha! Just kidding. When it comes to Warner Bros. big-screen adaptation of the sundry DC heroes, we can always count on the Demons of Burbank to screw the pooch.

But, still, it would have been cool.Will Elder Woman Wonder

Molly Jackson: It’s About Time

About time

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been chugging along for the past eight years. For the most part, almost all of their films are considered hits with the fans. Their most recent offering is up to par for Marvel, pleasing comic and non-comic fans. In fact, there is only one big glaring mark against Marvel – for me at least. Where are my female-led movies?

We are talking eight years of a major blockbuster franchise. In the MCU, there is only one central female character, Black Widow, that has been in it from almost the beginning, and a handful of female supporting characters, like Pepper Potts, Sif and Jane Foster. You can make the argument that Scarlet Witch is now a central figure but she is still very new to the universe.

Before you start yelling at me, yes I know there is a female-led movie on the Marvel schedule. Captain Marvel is set for March 8th, 2019. So almost three years from now. So, eleven years into the MCU, we finally get a female-led movie that fans were asking for four years ago. But even before that, since the moment Scarlett Johannson appeared in Iron Man 2, fans have been asking for her to get a solo film. Or toys (or as I liked to put it, any recognition at all), as in the Black Widow flash mobs in 2015.

Kevin Feige, head of Marvel Studios, has finally gotten the hint. He told Deadline that they are committed to doing a Black Widow movie, after the current slate of films is done. So, maybe early 2020s, if we are lucky.

Traditionally, movie studios like to point to underperforming female-led movies and blame the gender of the character for a bad box office rather than any other issues, like script, direction, plot, editing, set design, general stupidity of the film. Really, who is to blame for Catwoman: Halle Berry or the writers/director/producers? Meanwhile, any high-grossing female-led film is ignored as a happy accident.

What it looks like to me is that Marvel is waiting to see how Wonder Woman does first. BvS might have been horrible, but Gal Gadot’s few minutes on screen really did the character justice. If Wonder Woman can strike gold with a lesser known actress for a troubled DC Cinematic Universe, then things will look brighter for Black Widow. Then on to Ant-Man and Wasp in 2018, to see how fans react to a female character in the title of the film. Finally, if Captain Marvel does well in 2019, I think Black Widow will be greenlit.

I don’t doubt Feige’s sincerity in wanting to do a Black Widow solo film. He has helped mold the character into a rock for the Avengers to lean on. To take her to the next level would be a dream. However, Marvel is traditionally stingy with pay and Scarlett Johannsson has proved her box office worth time and again. She can ask for a larger sum and it is totally justified. With Captain Marvel, they can pick a lesser-known actress and pay her less money for the honor career boost of being in a Marvel film.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has given us a lot – most of it we didn’t even know we wanted until we had it! (Guardians of the Galaxy, am I right?) Still, fans have been asking from the second movie in for a Black Widow film. We have stuck with you this far Marvel, don’t let us down.

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