The Comics Ramble: Diversity vs. Nostalgia vs. Marketing

“We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against.”

The quote comes from David Gabriel, Senior VP of Sales, Print & Marketing at Marvel, speaking to ICv2 about a downturn in sales Marvel suffered through the end of 2016. He then goes on to contrast the strong sales of Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, a nostalgia series about an alternate timeline where Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are still married and have a daughter.

Now, Gabriel admits there are a lot of factors in why between October and December last year people might have been making personal economies, about how Marvel may have just been putting too much product on the market, and several other factors. Still, the message seems clear, especailly as he goes on to tout the return of classic characters to prominence in coming months as a response to this downturn.

So, we need to discuss a few things.

For one, there is a specific breed of fan to whom this is good news. This is the sort of person who calls any title featuring a lead who is now white, male, cis and straight as “SJW comics”, as “pandering”. To this sort there is no additional, outside context to these falling sales, its just the natural consequence of not exclusively catering to them and their projected power fantasies at all times. Unfortunately, in many cases, they are also probably right.

How did we end up with this reality though? This reality that diversity doesn't sell in a world where Moonlight and Hidden Figures have been so successful? Diversity doesn't sell when YA novels can't throw out empowered female leads fast enough? Diversity doesn't sell when LGBTQ audiences will champion to high heaven any series that gives them even moderately respectful representation? Diversity doesn't sell in a world where one of Netflix's flagship series is set in a women's prison and from day one featured a parade of female characters representating all sorts of minorities? How does diversity not sell?

Because there's no one to sell it to.

You see, the sad reality of the comic industry right now is that if DC and Marvel weren't owned by larger companies that make megabucks licensing their IP they would probably have fallen apart years ago. The reason that so many events, even major jumping on point relaunches like DC Rebirth, are based around continuity wrangling is because the only major audience left for these things is the same core audience who have been reading comics their entire lives. Comics are sold in comic shops, not in supermarkets or bookshops or the local newsagent and that is just as true here in the UK as it is in the US. You want comics on a monthly basis you either find a comic shop in some back alley well away from the high rents of places with actual foot traffic or you order online.

And how do comic companies market a new series? Crossovers! Event tie-ins! A marketing strategy that literally requires you already read comics and have enough affection for Character A to want to spend extra money on their two-issue guest role in the series of Character B.

Outside of that? Nothing. Comics are advertised in comics, it is an insular feedback loop.

So, of course nostalgia sells better than diversity, of course Renew Your Vows sells better when it has one of the company's most popular characters in a spin-off of an era whose death fanboys bitch and moan to this day. Hell, I'm with them on that! I love Renew Your Vows, I got into comics during the Clone Saga, I miss the idea of a mature Peter and MJ as a young family.

But I got into those comics because they were in a rack at Nicholsons', an odd shop that was sort of a halfway house between corner newsagents and miniature supermarket. It was on one corner of what was, then, the main square of Basingstoke town centre right next to the bus station. I passed it every day of school through secondary school and on Wednesday I would pass through and pick up a couple of comics from the little section between the football magazines and the activity books for kids: Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, Generation X, Sensational Spider-Man, Fantastic Four. It wasn't much of a selection, in fact it was downright frustrating that of the four Spider-Man titles they only stocked three so I always missed a quarter of any major storyline.

It was accessible, though, to me and dozens and dozens of other kids coming to and from school.

It is a very simple truism of marketing that you can be amazing at something and you won't make a penny if no one sees you do it. If Marvel wants to reach audiences who are crying out for representation they can't trust that those audiences will just spontaneously decide to research comics on their own in the hopes of finding the lesser spotted Pakistani Muslim teenage girl superhero written by an actual practicing Muslim, they have to actually put some bloody money into telling the world that character exists.

And maybe, while we're at it, concentrate more on the experience of buying a single series than following the Marvel Universe? Events and crossovers are money sinks and we don't live in that economy anymore. You'll attract more casual fans if you aren't constantly teasing big events. We just got out of Civil War II then Monsters Unleashed, now you're building towards Secret Empire and Generations is going to run in the middle of Secret Empire.

We live in a world where the internet has basically destroyed any knowledge-based barrier to entry. The most convoluted character history is a Wikipedia article away and the only barriers left are the ones the comic industry seems happy to perpetuate: physical inaccessibility, lack of marketing and the financial burden of following a huge universe instead of a number of different series that share a setting.

Diversity doesn't sell... PAH! 

The Comics Ramble: Superman Reborn: WHAT JUST HAPPENED!?

SPOILER WARNING: This post goes into the events, conclusion and possible consequences of the Superman Reborn crossover (that's Superman #18 - #19, Action Comics #975 - #976 and Superwoman #7) so if you aren't caught up on the Super-books this is really, really not the post for you.

That having been said...

… “WHAT JUST HAPPENED!?” to quote Adam Blampied.

To break down the result: it turns out that when the New 52 was created Superman and Lois Lane were split in two. One half became the New 52 Superman and Lois who wasn't married to him, the other became the Superman we've been following since Rebirth who remembers the pre-Flashpoint continuity and Lois that he is married to and has a child with. Now the two versions have been fused together and history has changed around them so that there's only one version of Lois and Clark and they've have been married for years, raised their son whilst working at the Daily Planet and the events of both the New 52 and Rebirth era Super-books happened to them.

This is the perfect platonic example of the DC retcon: it fixes the big problem and leaves us with a lot of little questions.

Now, I can't deny that something like this needed to happen. Superman is Clark Kent, he works at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. People who have never picked up a comic in their lives know this as concrete fact so having to constantly explain that a Superman like that existed but died and now we're following his counterpart from another universe who is living under an assumed name on a farm in Hamilton County, Kansas for the benefit of confused new readers is more effort than its worth.

There's also the fact that this is a completely different attitude to the pre-Flashpoint/New 52 split than the rest of Rebirth has been exploring. Take the original Titans, who have recently discovered that their memories of being a team were taken from them and have now been reunited, memories restored. The same holds true for Barry Allen's memories of original flavour Wally West. Other series have either chosen to bring back pre-Flashpoint ideas as new events or just things that never rated a mention before and were totally always canon, honest guv. Either way, the message was that these comics were restoring something, be it restoring an erased past or re-introducing something fans remember fondly.

The Superman books, meanwhile, had this complicated (and, admittedly, pre-Rebirth) compromise of bringing back Superman's marriage but also jettisoning the Daily Planet status quo and there were alternate universes involved. It was complicated, it actively removed elements from the series readers expected to see, and it didn't work with the larger context of the company's line-wide relaunch. It had to go.

So it went and that is good. Superman should not be a series whose status quo is even close to hard to explain. It should be the most accessible, most straight forward series DC publishes: he's a superhero who has every power going and everyone knows who he's dating and where he works. Sometimes expectations are meant to be met.

And now they will be. What little we see of the new version of history, in a single splash page summarising Superman's new history, strongly suggests that the traditional status quo is back plus Superboy Jon. This is, on the larger scale, a good thing.

For those who believe in Rickard Stark's admonition that nothing that comes before “but” counts for anything that was around six hundred words of waste of time but here we go...

The problem DC has always had with these retcons is that whilst they usually do fix big picture problems they aren't that good on following through and figuring out how it affects the little things. Take, for example, Guy Gardner in the New 52. Guy Gardner, as with most of the Green Lantern characters, retained his pre-Flashpoint personality in the relaunch. This personality, however, was heavily based in the relationship he shared with Tora back in the Justice League International days, a relationship that was reduced in the new continuity to a couple of dates, no deep emotional connection and no bereavement because she never died.

Much as I love Guy Gardner, that is small potatoes compared to this.

The death of the New 52 Superman was used to launch Superwoman, New Super-Man and Lex Luthor's current status quo as seen in multiple titles. The fact that they're working with an unfamiliar Superman is central to almost every relationship Superman has with the Justice League, not to mention Nightwing, Batman and even Superwoman.

And that is what this is going to live or die on. Yes, there's a lot of foreshadowing about the big mystery of Rebirth and how the New 52 was created and how it all ties in to stopping Alan Moore getting his Watchmen rights back but, ultimately, what matters is the reader experience.

Are we going to be pissed off by whatever level of pointlessness becomes attached to the Hamilton County era? An era, let us remind ourselves, that covered almost forty issues of the core Super-books plus whatever else one of DC's most famous and widely used characters appeared in during that time. Will the new status quo make sense or will we just be asked to take on faith that all the elements of the characters that carry over from Hamilton County still make sense?

How does it affect Lana Lang and Kong Kenan, both characters whose series I am enjoying and whose origins just got scrambled? Superwoman, at least, had a tie-in that promises the next issue will answer those questions and I assume that with the current arc of New Super-Man is set in Metropolis we'll get some answers there.

So it at least looks like there's a solid plan to explore the consequences of this change up front, not let the questions fester as they did with the New 52.

I want to hope here. The Rebirth experiment, by and large, has been very well thought out. Unfortunately it has also largely ignored until now the Watchmen connection that Superman Reborn brings front and centre. With the Batman/Flash crossover The Button just around the corner, this might be the moment when the wheels start to come off and this very simple, very effective relaunch is about to fall down the same history-twisting rabbit hole DC relaunches all too often fall into. I admit I am cynical about the Watchmen thing for many reasons from its IP dispute origins to the questionable sanity of importing satirical characters into the continuity they were created to satirise.

I also worry about piling retcons on retcons. On that note, I do hope I'm right in thinking that Superman is a special case, a pre-Rebirth retcon that needed fixing to match Rebirth rather than the first in a series of such supplementary reboots.

For once, a DC line-wide reboot was simple, elegant and worked. It restored numerous beloved characters and relationships to the DCU whilst largely maintaining the simpler, more accessible continuity of the New 52. Half the characters and concepts that returned didn't even need extensive explanation. That simplicity was important.

What I am hoping is that DC, going against decades of instinct, keeps this simple. 

The Comics Ramble: In Non-Defense of The Killing Joke

This will not be pleasant. We're going to be going into detail today about Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke and the specifics of what did and did not happen to her. I'm doing this because there has been a kerfuffle recently concerning making TKJ into an animated movie, principally in response to Donna Dicken's article “It's Time To Kill The Killing Joke” which got her... let's face the sad facts, exactly the reaction one expects from the internet these days.

Lots of people want to defend The Killing Joke. Okay, well and good but, just to clear, the following are not defences:

“Barbara Gordon isn't sexually assaulted, you're reading things into it that aren't there!”

No, she isn't raped. At least, she isn't explicitly stated to have been. However, she is shot, stripped naked and then photographed nude and bleeding on the floor. This is assault with a clearly sexual component and whilst we can go back and forth on whether the Joker's goons rape her, that at least is explicit within the text. Whether it was seen that way by the writer, by the editor or even by the readership at the time (and the answer to all those is probably “no”) this is sexual assault.

“But Jim Gordon gets abused, too.”

Yes. Yes, he does BUT he is the subject of the story: he has an arc, he gets resolution and victory at the end. He gets, naked in the rain after everything he's been through, to cleave to his moral code and demand that the Joker be brought in alive and charged in full accordance with the law. Barbara, meanwhile, is treated as a passive object in the story and gets none of those things. She gets shot and after that she is barely addressed by the story at all. We don't even see her reaction to the news she's lost the use of her legs, the only person told on panel that it's happened is Batman. So, yeah, Barbara's injury and disability is very much treated as something for Batman and Jim Gordon to react to, not for Barbara to engage with in any visible way.

“Alan Moore is a genius and this is his fantastic creative vision!”

Erm... so, Alan Moore has been pretty clear that he doesn't really care for the whole Barbara scene anymore. He himself acknowledges that this is something he should have been held back from writing by his editor. There is definitely good stuff in TKJ but none of it needs naked, bleeding Barbara to function. The meat of the story is the stuff with Jim, Batman and the Joker in the abandoned funfair.

“But this comic created Oracle, the great disability pride superhero, you can't want to undo that!”

Actually, this is one I was sort of caught up in until I read Dickens' article and re-read TKJ. It's been a few years since I last picked it up and I genuinely thought there was more set-up for Oracle (re: any) than there actually is.

However, let's be very, very clear: this is flat out untrue. Oracle is not Alan Moore's creation, she is Kim Yale and John Ostrander's creation and first appeared in Suicide Squad. Folding this story into continuity was a late-day decision, disabled Barbara was not considered an ongoing prospect going forward when this was written. No version of Barbara was, there were no plans for her future use at that time. And again, as with appreciating what Moore does with the central concept here, Oracle does not need naked Barbara to function, she just needs a gunshot wound.

“But... but... Jason Todd!!!!!”

See my point about Jim Gordon's treatment in TKJ: Jason's death was the high point of a four-part story arc in which he had probably more agency than any sidekick had had prior to that point. Also, his death, unlike Barbara's assault here, was not sexualised.

“If you object to this film then you want to ban the book and arghle-blargle free speech! Censorship! Oppression! Chips in gravy!”

Okay, this one is complicated and will actually take multiple paragraphs to tell you why you're wrong. Point one: I do not want to ban The Killing Joke. In a similar vein, I do not want to “ban” The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Celestial Toymaker, The Goon Show or any number of Disney movies because of their problematic treatment of race. All those things, The Killing Joke included, exist and I firmly believe they must continue to exist. That their content was acceptable in their days is regrettable but we learn nothing from erasing them.

We only learn from discussing them. Huck Finn is part of the American Canon but it has issues of race in spite of the author's recorded (for his time) liberal views. The Celestial Toymaker is flat-out racist and a pretty crap story with it but it is a fantastic text for seeing what could be broadcast unquestioned in 1966 on BBC One (answer: sinophobic surrealism). Spike Milligan was a comic genius whose upbringing in colonial India led him to skewer Imperial ignorance but that didn't stop him demonstrating it with his Asian characters. Acknowledging these flaws doesn't stop us enjoying the parts that have aged well (not that there are many of those in Toymaker...) but just denying the problems with these things makes us look just plain ignorant.

This is all equally true of the TKJ's content. The Killing Joke is a historical document and it has a right to exist. The film, however, is yet unmade. In making it with the sexual assault scene intact, given there's a better than decent chance it'll be adapted scene-for-scene from the comic, validates the original content as PRESENTLY acceptable. I can look at a 1988 graphic novel, an 1884 novel, a 1960s TV serial or a 1950s radio comedy and accept that that was how people thought back then, however regrettably, because that's the march of history for you. Having to make those allowances for a 2015 animated feature is just too much to ask.

And gravy on chips is a heresy against all common decency.

“But there are other pieces of media with sexual assault in them!”

Yes and I am not totally opposed to its portrayal as it can be both sensitively and usefully addressed in fiction. However, I do not believe that a DC animated feature is going to go into a deep, well-constructed narrative of assault survival when it can sell itself on Joker antics instead.

“Well, no one said you have to watch it!”

No. No, they didn't, glad we agree. However, if anyone expects this to carry them the argument I shall bring in some medieval law: those who remain silence shall be presumed to agree. People used to vote like that: only the dissenting had to speak and anyone silent was assumed to be voting yay. These days we have abstention, which is a form of silent protest for those who don't feel strongly enough to actually have an opinion.

If I believe something is wrong, I will speak. It is a moral duty. I will not be seen to agree with something if I do not actually agree with it. It doesn't matter if it personally affects me or not, whether it be the content of a film, the passing of a law or the downright bizarre notion some people have that pineapple is in some way edible.

“But this is what the Joker would do and any other decision betrays the character!”

No. I'm sorry, no. Fictional characters do not have volition of their own. The Joker does whatever his writer tells him to do and even if we did accept the idea that there is some essential core to the Joker that “makes” him act a certain way, I present you...

"Just once I wish Ledger or Hamill would draw the short straw!"

Do we think this guy would shoot a woman, strip her nude and take photos? When people talk about the Joker as if he were a coherent entity they tend to be speaking just for a preferred version of the character. I'm not saying The Killing Joke would be any better for having Cesar Romero and his painted-out moustache in it (though, honestly, what wouldn't be?) but when people talk about the Joker being a cruel sadist at heart it ignores the fact that Romero's version has as much right to be seen as “the” Joker as Alan Moore's or Frank Miller's or Heath Ledger's.

“But this is the definitive origin of the Joker!”

Two points. Point one: look up the word “definitive” quickly because this is really not what it means. The Killing Joke itself acknowledges that the flashbacks might all be fiction, in fact that acknowledgement is one of the best lines in the whole damn thing. Point two: the origin, again, is not impacted by Barbara having more clothes on as she bleeds out or getting some moment of catharsis or victory later in the story.

Is that the answer, perhaps? Can the story be saved by intelligently addressing Barbara's plight in the story, by toning down the sexualised nature of her assault? Is it not just as shocking for a father to see his daughter bleeding on the floor however she's dressed? Is there no victory Barbara can be given to make this genuinely the origin of Oracle, not just the story other authors rebelled against to create Oracle?

After all, if the Joker must have a definitive story, wouldn't we all rather it be multiple choice?

I think it can be saved. I believe in my heart of hearts that there's a good story here, perhaps not the great story other people see but certainly a good one that has problems that could be ironed out. At the end of the day, though, I don't think that's what's going to happen. The Killing Joke movie will, like as not, be a straight warts-and-all adaptation because that is what the most vocal sections of fandom will demand: the full story with not a change made to their precious classic.

Could it be changed up a bit? I don't see why not, the comic is only about fifty pages so there's going to be some padding at least so why not some padding that serves a purpose? 

The Comics Ramble: Harley, is that you?

Left to right: likely Bronze Tiger; Captain Boomerang who isn't called Captain Boomerang;
apparently Enchantress; definitely Katana; almost certainly Rick Flagg; claims to be
Harley Quinn; heavily marketed as Deadshot; take your pick of Blockbuster, King Shark
or Killer Croc, cos I dunno; and what I am assured is El Diablo and not a zombie. 

Oh, I could rant about this image for hours. It'd be an easy post, a post you've likely already seen elsewhere because I am slow as hell with these things and we all know how it goes. I could point out how this image started a forty-comment long Facebook conversation between myself, three other comicbook geeks and an ICT teacher whose Google Fu is worryingly good yet there were still two character we couldn't identify. I could draw all the standard comparisons between the DC-Warner and Marvel-Disney approaches. I could make all manner of hyperbolic, nay histrionic, statements about how DC's obsession with looking like adults does nothing of the sort.

But I'm not gonna. I'm tired of being angry, about this and so many other things, so I'm going to try and unpick something interesting (if still highly critical) out of this image. You might remember when the photo of the Leto Joker hit I said that when they released a publicity shot of a halfway decent Harley Quinn then I would permit myself to hope.

Well...

Now, I don't want to use the phrase “slutty schoolgirl fantasy” out of politeness... but I suspect the phrase probably came up in a design meeting or two at Warner, is all I'm saying.

Harley's been a lot of things over the years: a gangster's moll; an abuse survivor carving out a life for herself; an arch-manipulator capable of using everything from her education to her own mental condition to twist others around her finger; an anarchic free spirit running an apartment building for some very odd tenants... that's a lot of different interpretations. I've seen her “be” a lot of different characters in a lot of different media, so what is it about this version that screams “Not Harley!” to me?

Hell, I don't even mind the whole “Property of the Joker” line on the back of her jacket. I mean, it does combine with the Joker's “damaged” tattoo to make me wonder exactly how many show don't tell violations this film will have (does Will Smith have “sniper” written somewhere on his rifle, I wonder?) but when introducing Harley to a whole new audience its probably important to start with her in classic The Joker's Girlfriend mode and work up to the later interpretations we comic fans all know and love.

(I'm giving you credit here, Warner Bros., so please make her more than a beaten woman and prove me right, okay? That shit's okay as a starting point in the story, not as a whole character. Please don't make me cringe through continuous scenes of abuse with no pay-off. Please don't make me explain those scenes to the many co-workers who come to me after every comicbook movie with trivia questions. Don't do that to me. Thank you.)

No, my essential problem with this costume is it looking nothing like a harlequin. It actually seems to have escaped everyone's notice when designing this thing that Harley's name is a pun. Even this monstrosity...

… makes reference to that fact in its use of colour. Even though its the least Harlequin-esque of her costumes it conveys a few important visual cues about her personality: the red and black are a bold contrast, noticeable, its a performative costume that she wants to be noticed; its more blatantly sexualised than her more usual look but that still draws attention to her physicality and Harley is a very physical character; the white skin (bleached in this version, usually make-up in others) references her link to the Joker and serves to make her stand out even further.

Movie Harley has a bit of slap on her face, almost invisible given the lighting of the picture, and we return to one of my initial problems with the image as a whole: who are these guys? There's not much visual information conveyed about these characters: some are clearly soldiers, some are in civvies; there's a mummy hiding in the rear to be as indistinct as possible; a relatively on-model version of a very minor hero; there's Will Smith being all marketable; and our subject for today: what appears to be a bad modernisation of Sandy from the final act of Grease.

Yet I can see what they're going for here once I scrape away my confusion about who's who and look at this as marketing. Let's just take the bull by the horns and compare this cast to the Avengers: there are more women on this team and its more ethnically diverse even than the post-Age Of Ultron Avengers. That message just gets drowned out because so few of the characters have good visual identifiers and its the geek media who are meant to share this around and go “Look! Look which characters they're doing!”.

And yet here I am confident the woman in the middle is Harley Quinn only because she's the blonde. There should be more to work with than that.