This is something I’ve wanted to express for a while, and this particular controversy that erupted last week has graciously refocused me.
This is a stand-alone comic week, but there’s still gonna be strips every weekday for this week instead of the usual stand-alone MWF schedule. I had too many stand-alone gag ideas and loose ends that needed to be tied up that needed to be done all at once.
Jim Lee has a problem. He can only masturbate to women in comics if he designed the costumes.
On my planet this is hilarious.
Really, everything I’ve seen about the reboot and other controversies implies that all the educational material at DC Comics must date back to 1955 at the latest. It seems just so backwards, and their attempts to be understanding and empowering to women are even worse.
Considering they just brought back Barry Allen, who was dead for… 30 years or so, and unknown as the Flash to my generation… yeah.
When we going to bring back Wonder Woman’s original “if she’s tied up by a man she loses her powers” weakness, for that matter? Surely it’s about time.
Honestly, the BS that is going on in the larger comics publishing market reminds me a little bit of what is going on with newspaper strips. You have these million year old legacy comics with out-of-touch creators who seem to have minimal contact with real humans and so no idea how offensive or just plain alien their characters come off. Meanwhile there’s a deluge of alternative comics on the web that present characters and situations that the publishers would never dare have the balls to cover in their comics. It’s only a matter of time before web-based is the master here, and large studios go the way of ham radio operators.
…Tell me more of this “ham radio.”
it’s a two-way communications device involving pork products.
I’d like to know which Sunday Comic strips are out of touch.
Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, Rex Morgan MD, Family Circus, Funky Winkerbean, Crankshaft, Garfield, Beatle Bailey, Pluggers, Mark Trail, Snuffy Smith, Dennis The Menace, 9 Chickweed Lane, Judge Parker… I could go on.
Of course I read the Comics Curmudgeon almost daily, so I do realize that the insane disconnect from society that these comics betray is quite humorous on it’s own.
I would have to disagree about Mark Trail on Sundays. That strip is extremely educational about animals on Sundays. On the other hand, stuff like Prince Valium…err…Valiant, that’s another animal altogether.
Well I wasn’t specifically limiting the social obliviousness of comics to sunday comics.
But Mark Trail’s author can still be pretty oblivious to the world in general on Sundays. More about Jack Elrod’s social obliviousness can be found on the Internet!
Wait, how is 9 Chickweed Lane out of date?
The words I used were “out of touch”, not out of date. Though admittedly 9CL is not a million year old legacy comic, but it’s author is just as out of touch with reality as Jeff Keane or Jack Elrod. Witness the masturbatory “philosophical” story line from the last two weeks. I keep checking in to see if McEldowney is done masturbating, and still he continues. This happens a lot in his comic. Don’t get me wrong, though, he is a tremendous artist. He’s just a terrible writer who thinks he’s way more clever than he is (reading his blog congratulating himself about how clever he is inspires multiple facepalms). He’s the Stephanie Meyer of the comics page.
I remember that comic before it jumped the shark…
Except that the Web comics, by comparison, are actually big-budget, popular TV series and movies, such as Spectacular Spidey or Brave and the Bold, which actually seem to “get” the characters better than the actual comics do.
Well, except for the Green Lantern movie. Let’s not talk about that.
With the exception of some secondary characters, I don’t think the best movies hold a candle to the best comics stories. There’s just so much crap to go along with it. I can’t even remember the last time I enjoyed a Spider-Man comic, but stories like Kraven’s Last Hunt and the Death of Jean DeWolff still blow me away every time. The 80′s were good to Spidey.
Hey! I have a ham radio license…Amateur radio is just technically-minded people doing something they enjoy. They don’t HAVE a fanbase to alienate with a jaw-droppingly sexist product.
I’m not sure if 1955 is the correct year.
Truthfully, this seems more like Dan DiDio (am I the only one finding it strangely meta that the guy who canned ReBoot is now in charge of a massive reboot?) and Jim Lee are trying to stuff the DC Universe as full of Dark Age tropes as possible. The more I look at the costume designs, the way characters are reinvented, etc., the more it looks like “What if 1990s Wildstorm was in charge of DC’s creative direction”.
“What if 1990s Wildstorm was in charge of DC’s creative direction”.
O___O
Wow.
This is so true.
You’re half right in that we’re getting your way AND the other way.
Pretty much the worst possible union of masturbatory Silver Age idolatry and 90s titsngritty
A match made in Hell.
by the Violator.
This… This EXACTLY how I felt when I first was hearing about the concept previews of the reboot 2 months ago.
This is the really disappointing thing.
They aren’t all like this.
demon knights, Wonder women, supergirl, etc are GREAT. But they aren’t the ones being reported on. The good comics, the positive ones, are ignored, and only the bad things are being talked about.
The Wonderwoman reboot is good? Thank god, that was the one I planned on picking up.
Haha, it’s really not. Issue one of Wonder Woman is so terrible it’s not even worth laughing at. Half of the women in the book show up wearing little, if anything, and the other half are apparently sex workers. On the other hand, if you like the idea of watching a man burn a bunch of prostitutes to death, go for it.
Wow, Solomon, I think you picked up some other series. The 3 women seemed to be groupies, of some kind definitely not sex workers.
Except for the fact that Diana is asleep when we first see her I don’t remember a single scantly clad woman…I guess weird peacock chick (hera?) might count.
Honestly it was the most interest I’ve had in a Wonder Woman series in ages DC’s greek gods were so boring it hurt. I’m really excited to see what Apollo is going to do. Honestly you are the first person online or in person I’ve seen who said the book was bad. I’ve heard folks who just weren’t excited but BAD? Especially in comparison to the other 12 books DC dropped last week? As I recall only X-Factor got higher marks from me. (With Batman getting slightly lower ones.)
You don’t remember any scantily-clad women? Not even the woman who’s in her underwear for the entire comic and is only important because she’s pregnant?
for me, i did like the Wonder Woman, Batwoman, and Batgirl titles, but I’m so angry about the bad stuff I just don’t want to support any of it at all.
Everyone knows that comics ain’t for socially well adjusted peoples.
I completely and totally agree with this.
Though Starfire’s costume, granted, was always more risque in the comics, the point you’re making is 100% valid.
You know, I’m the first one to defend poor Power Girl when people dump on her costume (I have a similar chest and I think the keyhole looks COMFORTABLE, darn it!) but the reboot art really highlights the fact that it’s not necessarily the costumes, it’s the way they are portrayed.
Think about it, Batman and Catwoman have basically the same outfit, but it’s unlikely that Bruce will be posed and drawn so that you get to see vinyl clinging to the innermost recesses of his tush every panel.
A lot of the unitards female heroes have traditionally worn are not necessarily hideously sexy in and of themselves. If they had more bows, Sailor Moon (a property designed for and by girls) could wear them. And we do have male heroes like Martian Manhunter and Plastic Man showing a lot of leg… but they are not presented like sex objects. Just a martian in hot pants, hanging out. You can have a skimpy outfit and still have agency. (I was heartened in that my MOTHER brought up the example of Xena last night, in reference to this.)
Those unrealistic bikinis, though…. just no. Those are not garments. Boobs don’t work that way.
…Compared to what Starfire’s (not) wearing, Power Girl’s outfit is relatively modest.
Also, the fact that Catwoman uses a whip as her main weapon seems relevant to the sexualization thing somehow. A part of me wants to bring up that Bruce has a cape that would normally cover him from the back, but I’m fairly sure that’s not as relevant as it seems.
Ah, but Indiana Jones also has a whip for a main weapon!
Not that I think everything is excusable (“Nooo, you don’t understand, their culture totally wears nothing but metal bikinis!”) but I think the [normal versions of] costumes are so much less of the issue than the presentation. People complain about showing leg, but shoujo manga heroines show leg… they just don’t show it whilst wriggling around on the floor, or contorting around to show off the goods, or taking off half their costume…
THESE PARTICULAR panels, blegh. I’m just saying it’s remarkable how much more skin-tight the exact same skin-tight leotard becomes on females, rather than males.
Point taken, but Indiana Jones doesn’t run across rooftops in a skintight leather catsuit (And I hope it stays that way. The years have not been kind to Harrison Ford).
But yeah, I see your point.
Also, Catwoman’s weapon was a whip because it was a cat o’ nine tails. It fit in nicely with her theme. Cats! Catwoman is my favorite female comic book character, and I have no problem with a skintight purple jumpsuit and a whip and claws and having sex with Batman. Those are all the things I love about her! But you can do all those things while still making it a good story about an awesome lady, which they apparently did not do.
Well, it’s been a leather jumpsuit for several years now, but I agree with your sentiment. The costume and the whip are intended, at least since the 80s, to evoke a dominatrix sort of image. And that’s fine, honestly, because despite using sexual imagery, Catwoman was really heavily developed as a character in control of her sexuality, starting in the miniseries shortly after Miller’s Year One, continuing on in Brubaker & Cooke’s run on volume 3 (the purple costume years…not so much). This new series, her narration boxes say she _needs_ to sleep with Batman, so much so that she forces herself on him (but that’s okay, because he’s BatMAN, he can’t be forced into sex). That is..not the way a positive female character in control of her sexuality works, I don’t think.
shes had a crap day and she wants a release. i see no problem with that. i think that what she *needs* is not for the great batman to allow her to have sex with him, but to take control and get The Batman to do something he really didn’t want to do
How bad a person does it make me to want to have the comic visit her home world now to see everyone (and to be clear, by everyone, I mean at least 50% of the aliens on screen being male) dressed in purple metal bikinis…And have the entire (extremely masculine) guard unit in even skimpier versions, cause they’re manly, and thus need only postage stamps and a cod piece for armor? (and utter lines like “You wear bullet-resistant shirts?! WIMPS!”)
Please become a comic writer. I’d buy that, and then buy it for all my friends, just for the hilarity.
Omg
OMG
I never knew I wanted this until now
(And just for my own honor, I want to disclaim I’m so not remotely defending the barely-there-bikini-wear art or any such version of a costume. That’s just beyond the pale, and beyond the realistic limitations of gravity. Echoing the general sentiment, those look like they belong in Top Cow. Except that might be too mean to Top Cow.)
Martian Manhunter has pants now. Just like Robin. Only women get stuck in regressive outfits (WW).
The pants and jacket are a GOOD LOOK for Wonder Woman, seriously.
…And this is why comics are better off being made into non-paper media. :/
I loved Teen Titans as well. It sucks to hear what they did to the Starfire character.
To be fair though she was never like how she was in the show, in the main Teen Titans comics. She wasnt this bad, but still.
If anything, DC should have used the reboot as a chance to make Starfire more like her cartoon counterpart, considering that that version is by far the most popular incarnation of the character.
Indeed. When the show first came on, I was upset that they seemed to have changed most of Starfire’s personality from “Badass alien from a warrior race” to “quirky adorable exchange student”.
But it grew on me, and I’m rather surprised that they didn’t learn from its popularity.
Plus when we finally saw how the Titans came together, we saw she WAS a badass alien warrior, she just became more friendly.
Yeah, that’s the thing. They managed to make a badass character and STILL make her likable. Now… we have this. Yay.
I agree they should have made her like the show incarnation because sadly willis was very accurate because I saw some of the panels online and its like shes saying look at my body, lets go have sex now! I remember the confused passionate alien who loved and was full of emotion, this new one is devoid of it and people will have torches and some will just throw the issue out saying why the hell did I buy this, some will say damn she looks good, and some will ask for there money back. Me? I’m not even picking it up and sticking to the show version because she was great, emotional, friendly, bad ass, alittle confused by things at times and loved mustard
Seriously, they missed the point. Starfire came from an alien culture that was moer free with love then humanity. But this encompassed the entire spectrum, not just sex, in the sense that people had less emotional guards up and were more open and caring. Star wanted to love everybody she could, mostly in a plantonic sense, and was comparatively blunt and fast moving by human standards when she was interested insomething physical as well. This did not mean she wanted to sex everybody.
The new starfire actually seems to be the antithesis of the old. The vapid slut one could assume her to be if presented some parts out of context seems to be all the folks ever saw. The accusation is actually true now, she read as utterly detached from any intimacy.
I scoffed at people who said comics were dying, but this reboot, for this and plenty of other reasons is making me think there’s something to that.
Exactly. If there is anything that DC proved they could learn about their female readers it was the existence of Harley Quinn. If they could import an entirely new character to the comics, AND give her a comic series of her own, why couldn’t they figure that out with Starfire and make her lady-friendly for all the kids who came up on teen titans???
Poor Harley didn’t fare much better.
So far it seems like the reboots are mostly quite disappointing, with a few bright spots.
Wait… women liked Harley Quinn? Really? An independant career woman corrupted by a dark twisted soul who’s been shown to physically and mentally abuse her, with no hope of her reforming him…
I can see why us guys liked her. Skin tight outfit that fit with the Joker’s motif, implied lesbianism when she was working with Poison Ivy, the fact that she feel she truly loves the Joker despite his flaws holding out a hope for us guys who are flawed, but nowhere near as flawed as the Joker…
I know a lot of women who like Harley, actually, although they’re also into her for the sex appeal.
For that matter – changing Harley’s outfit to something skimpy, to “increase her sex appeal” I would assume, is phenomenally stupid. She’s already popular FOR her sex appeal despite basically showing no skin!
And, for all that she’s a “strong woman who got corrupted”…in BTAS, she is also a three-dimensional character, and one of the most accurate depictions of an abuse victim as you’ll ever see on television. That kind of depth is a big deal when the comic gives us…well, this version of Starfire.
Hell, I’m fairly geeky, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that DC would’ve been well served to make most of their properties more like their animated counterparts. They are, in many ways, the definitive versions.
The crazy thing was that when they pulled to very controversial move of making Barbra Gordon Batgirl again (meaning she can walk and is no longer/never was Oracle–meaning that in one decision DC lost one of their most powerful characters who also happened to be a woman and in a wheelchair)…um..long parenthesis..
Anyway, their reasoning for that was that Barbara was the “most iconic” Batgirl, and that when regular people thought “Batgirl” they thought “Barbara Gordon.” Nevermind that until The Killing Joke, Babs was about as relevant to the Batman mythos as Krypto was to Superman’s. That was THEIR Batgirl, and since Babs is Batgirl in the DCAU, I guess I can follow.
But Harley Quinn and Starfire can’t look anything like their better-known animated counterparts. And Flash will be Barry Allen, because screw that generation who grew up on Justice League Unlimited, amirite?
For that matter, John Stewart is now THE Green Lantern to anybody who doesn’t read comics. Everyone around me was asking why they made Green Lantern white in the movie.
Most of my early comics came from garage sales and school fairs. Secondhand stuff. Thus, I had a broad range of comics with no connection to each other and no continuity.
The only Green Lantern comic I can remember having from from this period had John Stewart as Lantern, though he said at one point he was still new to it.
The only other Lantern comic I remember owning did have… I think it was Hal Jordan. It was set on a space ship, someone had hacked a computer, and a stowaway boy died because he mistook an airlock for a regular door. I really NEVER want to see them depict that kind of death again. It was horrible.
Probably why I collected Marvel when I went into proper comic collecting.
But yeah, for me, John Stewart was the Lantern I remembered and liked.
Yeah, I heard that question a few times too. Considering how poorly the movie did, if we’re really going for “iconic and recognizable” DC could do worse than to throw in the awesome former-Marine (and if they want to maybe do the whole John and Hawkgirl thing too, I wouldn’t object…).
Of course, my GL was always Guy Gardner, but him I can accept in a supporting role because he works best there. John can carry a story and a title, I would think.
Ideally Guy works the way Wolverine ideally works – you’ve got a bunch of other characters doing their thing, then Guy shows up, says some shit nobody wants to hear, acts like a dick, gets punched in the face, does something heroic, acts like a dick about it, gets punched in the face again.
For me, it was just that the first green lantern in a comic i read was Jon Stewart. So when the cartoon came out, my thought was just “oh, Jon Stewart, that’s his name, I forgot that.” Then as I found out about the corps and saw other people in the uniform, (I think next time I looked it was Kyle) I just assumed that any body that large might have more then one of a species at some point.Later looked green lantern and now like the series as a whole. Still for me, and I wager many other people even that started in comics, when you say green lantern, Hal isn’t’ the first guy to pop up in the brain.
For me, it’s Kyle Rayner.
I never got into the Lantern comics until some time around Blackest Night myself, but I never got into the Justice League cartoon at all really so I had little to no exposure to John Stewart as the lantern there. I did however catch Hal Jordan as the lantern on reruns of Super Friends. It’s funny to me that you guys say most people couldn’t tell why the movie cast the green lantern as white because of the JL cartoon, whereas I caught a few episodes of that and thought they were just trying to be PC and diversify the team some more until I found out later they were two completely different guys. So yeah, that confusion could go either way under the right circumstances.
The powers that be have said Harley’s supposed to look more like she does in the Arkham video games. I don’t really see it, though.
It’s not the naughty nurse outfit from the first Arkham game and it can’t be the Arkham city costume because that outfit has pants and lacks the stupid half-red half-black hair. While I like the City costume better than the DCnU costume, I wish it had the hat.
Also, I still think that her original harlequin outfit (that including the face paint showed literally no skin) is the sexiest costume she’s had.
Right one the money. Harley Quinn doesn’t even exist that long but looking at how often you can see her in Fan art or Cosplayed I’d say see has easily one of the most iconic looks when it comes to Female comic characters.
I actually like new Harley’s hair. It would have looked good under her old costume. Or on someone else.
It’s all Bulls*it anyway. “AA” Harley had a makeshift Nurse outfit, witch is ok. In the DCAU She did dress up for the crimes She and Mista. J. would comit (some times). “AC” Harley seem to wear a red/black colored more combat oriented get up, but her look there makes way more sense than the crap She wears in the comics now since it looks like it would actually give here a little protection if She had to fight someone.
This really is the truth.
YES. I really don’t get why they aren’t — particularly as Marvel stands poised to completely demolish them under the power of a cohesive, accessible brand.
The animated series (of the last decade or so) have pretty much always made the characters beloved by everyone, including hardcore fans, and have not done annnnnnnything majorly stupid. (And even the elseworlds make sense!) So why couldn’t we just reboot into the Dini/Timmverse? SERIOUSLY? How would that not be a good idea, with build-in fans?
Speaking of remnants of the past, it seems like DC’s decided if Marvel’s going to be Gallant, then they have to be Goofus…
Comics Starfire was by no means the most direct translation to the animated series, but she sure had a lot more in common with Cartoon Starfire than she does now. Comics Starfire was fiery and badass, sure, but she was also loyal, caring, and passionate. Also pretty dang monogamous until recently. Cartoon Starfire changed her personality but still kept the core of her character intact. The reboot doesn’t even bother to do THAT much.
I’m going to have to disagree with you about the monogamous part. Entirely.
Starfire was always and has always been a sex pot, and certainly not monogamous.
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4f5xrqKAY1qc7r93o1_400.jpg
I agree there, but my problem was never the sex with Arsenal, as I could see her offering sex to comfort an old friend. It was the “idiot-goldfish/sex doll” personification of the character.
Sigh.
At least everyone in Blue Beetle dresses sensibly. So long as there are no strippers in All-Star Western I don’t think I’ll be boycotting anytime soon.
All-Star Western will almost certainly have whores. Jonah Hex always did a lot of whoring.
Yes, but if the writing is any good than they won’t just be whores.
…Wait, didn’t he have a wife?
No, he did not. Never mind.
No you’re right, Jonah hex did have a wife. A Chinese immigrant who ran away with their son Jason Hex once she realised that gunsmoke and death would always be entwined around Jonah Hex’s life.
Oh, right, Mei Ling. But she left, so I guess the whoring option is back open.
I kind of hold Gangsta Paco against whomever wrote that.
I don’t. Gangsta Paco makes me laugh, because he reminds me of guys I went to school with. Cool guys, just kinda stupid sometimes. I’m kind of hoping that connecting with people how actually know guys like that is what they were going for, and not just stereotyping.
Yee-up. This here is why I often refuse to read DC and Marvel; the rampant male gaze BULLSHIT.
…and yet, I might end up reading Blue Beetle, because I love that character enough. Sigh.
You probably shouldn’t. Jaime’s gone all stereotypical angsty teen and been saying stuff pre DCNU Bianca Reyes woulda chewed him out for, but isn’t doing now.
Also, apparently his family doesn’t know he’s the Blue Beetle, which frankly was one of the best parts of the character.
I can’t argue with the first bit, but how can you complain that his parents don’t know he’s the Beetle when he just transformed for the first time in the last panel of the only issue? I’m sure he’s going to tell them after whatever incident said transformation causes plays out.
No. He isn’t. That was poorly phrased. What he MEANT is that the INTERVIEW in the back of the comic talked about how they were ditching the fact that Jaime told his friends and family about it.
You know, because DC is apparently run by chimps now. Watch, this is gonna be like the Power Rangers, where the bad guys (the Reach) can find him at any time, but he still doesn’t tell his friends and family to look out for the aliens hunting his ass.
aghh you got to be kidding me. The Whole Family part of his character was great. I had very little intrest in DC for 20 years (Read afew as a kid in 85, liked the issue where Superman needed a power armor due to losing his powers), but DC held little intrest for me so I turned to Alt and Manga. I got back into DC with Powergirl’s lead into Infinate Crisis, and Miss Martian, and then BB3 and Static on Teen Titians. But eh now I’m losing intrest again. I’ll see how Static goes however.
Marval isnt at all that bad at the moment though.
Could do with more female writters, but I dont remember anything remotely like this and I read a fair bit.
Well, Marvel pisses me off for different (also sexist) reasons. Joe Quesada’s vendetta against wives pissed me off to no end. Killing off the Wasp to “make Hank Pym more interesting” was disgusting. I stuck around for Incredible Hercules for a while, and now that that series has ended its arc, I am Marvel-less and happy.
To be fair Marvel is getting a little better (but its not hard to look good against DC right now). The change in EOC has helped I think.
Huh, you know, I didn’t think about that, but man, you gotta point. I mean, Spiderman was obvious, but I didn’t connect Wasp that way. And in Hulk, they bring Betty back just to turn her into an unlikable and rather unreasonable woman right off: “how dare he go and get married when he not only thought I was dead for years but also was on a different goddamn planet!” And It was Betty that said that, not She-Rulk.
Hell, even Hudlin’s mastrabatory Black Power couple ended up with some distance being put between them.
Stupid midlife crisis.
Yo Dr. Bolty, did you know there’s still a Hercules series? Apparently it’s pretty good although a little different. If that’s your thing, you should take a look.
Are you reading a different Marvel than I am? One that doesn’t regularly find ways to sex up freaking SQUIRREL GIRL?
The only time Ive seen Squirrel Girl recently was in the (very funny) Spider-Island Avengers.
She was badysitting and wasnt remotely sexed up.
Other then that Spiderman hasnt remotely had anything “sexed up” or anti-feminist, not since Dan Slott took over writting anyway.
(artworks been pretty good too, for that mater)
Not seeing anything that bad in any of the Fear Itself stuff either, allthough admitably I’m not reading everything from that event. The spider-island stuff has a lot more fun to it. (The “I Love New York” shorts are quite good…..like Spider-mum)
hmz…what else.
I read XFactor, but thats good downhill in general recently so a bit hard to judge. Fant…Future Foundation, a bit nutraul.
Obviously their could be a lot more female leads. But not seeing overt sexism or sexing up in anything I have read.
I love the Strong Female Characters pose in panel 6
Sexism is OVER
Ha ha ha, I didn’t recognize the pose until you mentioned it. Awesome.
Spines are overrated. Especially when you’re required to pose like that.
I thought DC instituted a policy as part of the reboot that all women would have their spines replaced with rubber rods whenever puberty struck? Did you miss the memo? Or did they change their minds again?
This wasn’t hyperbole: “sex prop” is the exact term I would use to describe her in that book. It was a little creepy actually.
Hey she’s a sex prop AND weapon. Not a person, at all, but at least she’s two different things!
It’s a really disgusting mar on what could have been a fun comic.
Stupid sexy gun?
Everybody who wanted to rekindle their childhood love of Transformers with the live action movies feels this way too….well, at least with ROTF.
Just you watch, in 20 years they will reboot My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
I can’t wait to see Pinkie Pie as a goth. And the performance enhancing drug storyline with Rainbow Dash will be fantastic.
Actually, I’m betting both of those things happen in the current run.
Actually, if I’m being perfectly fair, Pinkie Pie kinda did become a goth when she thought her friends didn’t like her. Her colors even dimmed.
What’s sad is I know exactly which episode you’re referring too T_T
Pinkie is WAY more emo than goth. She doesn’t wear makeup or dress in black or anything. Instead her hair gets straight and she complains about how her friends don’t understand her and no one appreciates her unique and special arty ability (to make great parties). That’s textbook emo stuff right there. If RD hadn’t showed up, she would have started the pony equivalent of LJ poetry.
The difference THERE is that the Transformers movies are amazingly popular. Doesn’t matter if the nerds don’t like them as much as they could, they’ve got MILLIONS of fans.
Or you could appreciate them as an adult.
In other words, grow up.
Ah, yes, robots and dogs humping, weed jokes, racist caricatures… VERY adult.
I forget who, but someone once described Michael Bay as “The world’s oldest twelve year old”. Hit the nail on the head.
I’d rather someone hit Michael Bay with a truck, but that’s just my childhood screaming for blood.
Steam Roller, or what do they call them now? Road Rollers?
Don’t leave things to chance I say.
Maybe one of those Civics with the sticky gas pedals that can get up to 120 mph. A steam roller might not be fast enough. The only thing steam rollers were good at running over are Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Yeah to the core this is correct.
So HELP me, Batwoman has been the only thing I can universally recommend. And it wasn’t even technically a reboot.
Did you try Demon Knights? The fact that it’s a few hundred years removed from whatever cluster the DCnU has become may help, but it’s some stellar art and snappy writing that just makes it a FUN comic. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but still makes the effort to tell an engaging story. The first issue was mostly introducing all the players, but it does look as if there will be at least two (possibly three, it’s really hard to tell with Shining Knight) women in the main crew of six, and Cornell’s already got himself a reputation as a nice guy who realizes women also read comics and wants them as part of his audience.
Animal Man, Action Comics, Swamp Thing, Demon Knights, Frankenstein, Batwoman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have all been terrific. And lots of other stuff is promising/varying degrees of good. I really liked Supergirl (which seems pretty young reader friendly) but it just felt too short.
While I agree with the article on females in comics (though Starfire has always been a sex symbol, IIRC), the bad at math thing seems doubtful. In all honesty this strip would’ve been better without the last two panels and ‘bad at math’ because before that it outlines the problem quite well. Afterwards it’s just a lame attempt to attach meaningless numbers and a dig at the artist, I guess?
I disagree, I think the numbers are relevant.
One of the big arguments against this being a troublesome turn of events is that “these comics aren’t for girls/women, so ladies shouldn’t care that they aren’t being catered to.” And the question from us girls arises: Why aren’t comics being made (in the USA) for girls? The market is certainly there; and as proof that the audience exists, Willis reminds everyone of the TV show Teen Titans, which definitely DID have a girl audience (and a larger audience in general than comics do). Maybe comic publishers should take some notes?
I don’t disagree that there’s a female audience, but I have the same problem attaching numbers here as I do anywhere else, it’s just a faceless application to a multifaceted problem, and trying to appeal to DC’s (or indeed, any company’s) business sense won’t do much. They’re probably not going to listen to StarfireFan1247′s opinions about how to grab more readers when they have analysts themselves. The accuracy of the claim isn’t what’s relevant, but how it’s presented.
It’s one reason why most people don’t take claims of piracy affecting sales of different media so seriously, and also why video game companies don’t listen to fans of certain games that are coming over to the states. These numbers, while having a certain degree of truth, are not at all concrete.
Aaaactually, based on interviews I’ve read in the past… they DON’T have analysts. I’m completely serious here – they fly completely by the seat of their pants and have no hard, actual demographic information.
Then I suppose the only explanation would be the “I want to make the comics /I/ want to make, not the ones society dictates I SHOULD make!” argument.
Though, when your work is shitty, that tends to be an empty argument.
and/or what appeals to the people currently in charge, and their ideas of what was cool from three decades ago, when they were young fanboys.
Y’know, that actually makes sense. I recall reading somewhere that Marvel and DC now consider comics their marketing research – see what works, then develop it into movies, TV, and other more profitable ventures. It makes a depressing amount of sense that they wouldn’t do marketing research on their marketing research.
Actually the math argument is perfect, outlining the problem with DC is not just the sexism, but rather the inability to grab new readers, many of whom are people who watched their other media properties. They’ll do crap like changing the COSTUME of a character to more match a movie or the like, but they don’t change the stories or the characters to match the iterations most people would be familiar with.
And don’t get me wrong, I loved the comics version of the Titans more than the cartoon, but if you’re going to do a big reboot, then why not take advantage of the entire idea behind a reboot and make it match the more popular vision?
I can only conclude that THEY DON’T WANT to appeal to the mainstream in case it pisses off their core readers for some reason.
I have no real proof of this, just a nagging suspicion.
That’s just the thing, I’m not entirely sure they WANT new readers. A lot of these people are returning the status quo to what they read when they were kids (the killing of the successor to The Atom pissed me off), and now they want to sex it up to fulfill their fantasies.
Either way, I’m not entirely certain that trying to incorporate their animated media into the comics is a smart move, either.
I think you might have something there. On one hand, they keep saying this is to draw in “new readers” and they’ve gone so far as to have television commercials for the actual comics and not just merchandise, but on the other hand, they’ve also said the new audience they’re targeting with this relaunch is the “18-35 year old male” demographic which…welp, that pretty much was the old audience too. Possibly a few more women than they realized.
Some people even get attached to an art style. Like the Young Justice cartoon I like, then they go to read the comics and it’s “DIFFERENT ART BLARG!” Then they sex prop popular characters like Starfire and Catwoman and wonder why female readers aren’t picking up comics with women in them. Uhm.. Catwoman looks like a porn mag, and Red Hood turns into a porn mag.
Also, they can’t seem to write strong women OR they pull out some trope like “Mystical Pregnancy” (possibly even “Mystical Rape”). Yes I’m looking at you Wonder Woman and Batgirl. I doubt Nightwing would get wobbly legs, or freeze, hell I don’t think they’d even pull up a traumatic event just to freeze him either. (Yeah and Gail Simone wrote THAT ONE.) If they did, he’d somehow come back to reality quick and save the day!
Being fair on that one, it’s a credible thing for her for the fact that she’s just getting back into it, the way I read it. It’s a lot more believable than her not having any mental trauma over having gotten paralyzed. Combine that with the fact that this villain appears to have been designed for precisely the purpose of calling up things from the past, and, well…
In fairness, I remember the end of the Knightfall storyline (after Bruce’s back healed) when he had to stand on top of a gargoyle and leap out on a line: it took him a few attempts before he was ready to do that, and there was nobody pointing a gun at him. I thought the ending of the Batgirl issue was quite plausible, although the security guard’s reaction was unfair.
Meanwhile, over at Marvel, look at Hulk #388. A villain called Speedfreek is dashing around at superspeed with knives, so he slices Rick Jones’ hands open (minor injury) and also stabs Jim Wilson in the chest (major injury). Rick wanted to help Jim, so normally he’d have applied pressure to the wound, but Jim was HIV positive and Rick froze up.
I’m going to admit that your rants sometimes strike me as petty, but this was an absolute, out-of-the park home run. Well done.
Useless Math Fact: The current CentiBatman is 520 copies/calendar month.
THANK YOU WILLIS. This was my reaction exactly. That comic was nauseating. Yes, she slept with people in the comics. But goddamnit, she was a stunningly beautiful person inside and out. Her pesonality was inspiring. Fictional or no, she really meant a lot to me.
I’ll miss you, Kory.
…And this is why I read webcomics instead of paper ones. Willis hits a home run with this strip!
Two million viewers of a cartoon and DC industry doesn’t want to capitalize on them.
Just like they didn’t capitalize on the audiences of Batman: Brave and the Bold. That show could have revived interest in Aquaman and made him a star. In fact, that show made DC easier to access than the entire DC relaunch. But WB cancels it.
And just like they don’t want to capitalize on the twenty million kids ages 8 and up growing up right now.
Someone needs to grab Didio and make him look out a window at all the Moms with carriages walking with kids carrying Nintendo DS’s. Not to mention all the pregnant women. Hey, there’s your new readers. Make product for THEM, not people over 30.
On another note The cartoon really captured the spirit of Starfire. I loved the way she was portrayed there.
Didio turns her into a mindless sex toy.
Not just people over 30, you mean. Specifically, men over 30.
If we are being specific here then lets be a little more clear “maladjusted asocial misogynistic” men over 30. And add the tag line “we write for people just like us”.
THIS. YES. THIS.
Aquaman was a character I didn’t give a crap about UNTIL Brave and the Bold. Heck – BatB made me more interested in the DCU as a whole because of all the obscure cameos.
Aquaman was the totally the breakout character in BatB. Some time he came of a little too stupid (1-2 times) but over all he was such cool/ fun character (that actually even on land could hold his own).
He get’s his own solo series again soon but I don’t think they will take his BatB characterization in to much consideration. At least His wive Mera seems to be a big part of it witch I grew to love through the “Blackest Night” event.
To me, that’s the whole point of BatB: take a character everyone knows and loves, pair him with characters they don’t yet. It works beautifully, and the show works for kids, casual fans, and hard core fans all the same.
Make us more comics like that, DC, and I’ll start reading.
This really sums it up for me. I loved the show long before I even knew Teen Titans was a comic book, and I’m a little sad to see what happened to Starfire
Thank you for this comic, Willis. I haven’t have the urge to read any comics that aren’t manga (or web comics) for a while and this controversy may have turned me off superhero comics for good.
“But comics aren’t FOR girls deal with it lolololol”
I encourage you to try out some independent comics. There are still good paper comics out there (Atomic Robo and Hellboy, for instance) that don’t do all the crap you see in the mainstream, big business comics.
You know, there are so many amazing web comic artists out there, creating things that simply blow my mind, I hardly have the urge to look at anything published any more.
I mean, just the other day the great Kate Beaton linked to this comic: http://www.dylanmeconis.com/outfoxed/
21 pages and I loved every page. AND I got it for free. Why pay $16 for a Hellboy GN? Not that Hellboy isn’t lovely, but I’d rather just donate a few bucks to that artist (which I just did, as a result of this post).
I have to make a second vote for Atomic Robo. That comic is as close to pure joy in comic form as you can possibly get, and it’s the first one I want to put in people’s hands.
The second one, of course, is Next Wave. Or JLI.
I also want to plug “Invincible” here, an Image Studios production by Robert Kirkman. It’s actually the best superhero comic out there.
This is why things like Red Hood and the Outlaws make me sad: they turn potential readers away from the GOOD superhero comics. The ones that don’t treat women like sex objects and tell compelling stories. The bad ones get all the press…
Look up Animal Man, or Wonder Woman. Two of the best comics of the relaunch, and they both have great female characters in them. Fantastic art, too.
Though I second Atomic Robo.
This week should’ve been a great week for female characters, there was some really good stuff. It’s a shame.
I await the day when a strong female character does not have to be defined by sexuality.
I am going to be waiting for a long while.
You’re looking in the wrong places. Check Misfile, Grrl Power, or (if they hadn’t canceled it) Arana. Or, just keep an eye out. The first two are web comics, but the last I listed was a Marvel comic.
Not remotely enough.
What about Gunnerkrigg Court? I have yet to see Annie defined by her sexuality. Or, come to think of it, Persepolis. Or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Girl Genius? Zebra Girl? Out at Home? Sluggy Freelance? Gastro Phobia? You Say it First? No Pink Ponies? Girls with Slingshots?
Yeah, I’m having a little bit of trouble coming up with print comics characters that aren’t defined as sex objects. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there.
There’s also Something Positive, but that comic is offensive as hell. Proceed with caution.
And the equally-offensive Super Stupor, which I love!
Have you seen the Super Stupor comic books that Randy sells at conventions and online? The web comics are mostly one-shot jokes, but the print books are honest-to-god superhero stories. They’re kind of like Alan Moore’s _Tom Strong_, which was simultaneously a biting satire of superhero comic book tropes and a really good, totally straight execution of the same tropes.
Great list! I’d add to that everything by Magnolia Porter (go check out Monster Pulse if you haven’t already!), and Cat and Girl.
Supernormal Step. Many strong females in that series.
How is Girl genius not full of sex objects? Have you seen the breasts on EVERY SINGLE FEMALE CHARACTER, each globule lovingly and patiently rendered?
Sorry, but I realized that since they entered Castle Heterodyne, I have found the time to attend and graduate from college. I stopped reading, has the plot moved anywhere yet?
But, they’re not defined by it. Most of the time I’m too enthralled by the crazy to realize that they’ve been naked for a week.
Um…they’re in control of most of the castle now.
And there’s been at least 2 related coups and three armies conveging on the city. And the emperor might be dead.
http://catwoman-cattales.com/
This is how to write a sexy female character who is not a sextoy. Can someone please hold a gun to DCs dicks and make them read it. Especially Pussywhipped, which was specifically a criticism of Frank Miller and made exactly the same point!
Not really sure whats so different. One is not as well drawn but…
Yeah.. I opened that link and got a blank black page on my iPad.
I’ll check it out when someone learns to build a website.
Dan Slotts run on She Hulk. Seriously really good writting and made me love the character.
Its volumes 1-6 I think (of the most recent run). It focus’s on Superhuman Law, and is very smart.
Those are wonderful, I’d recommend them too. I’d also recommend “The Sensational She-Hulk” Shukie’s other great solo Series (first trade came out this April).
John Byrne draws by far the cutest and sexiest She-Hulk and she breaks the 4th wall Deadpool-style, she beats up lost of 3rd rate villains and has crazy space adventures. it’s everything a good comic should be and the reason that she’s my favorite female Marvel hero (over all 2nd only to Power Girl).
Thirded. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more talk of She-Hulk as contrast to this nonsense. I love web and indie, but it’s totally possible to have competent mainstream superhero women, too.
Even when they deal with Shulkie’s sexuality, it’s in very much in-character and powerful. One could even read her being asked to leave Avengers Mansion as indication of others being unable to cope with her very dominant lifestyle… and she’s not the least bit apologetic about it. It’s only relevant in so much as it would be to a real (you know, traditionally MALE) character.
This web comic list looks very shiny to me. Some of my faves have already been mentioned…I’d like to add Namesake, Dead Winter, and Mega Tokyo <3
Wonder Woman. Supergirl. Batgirl. Batwoman. They all have their own solo comics in the relaunch, and are not at all defined by their sexuality. Batwoman is the only one of the four who has any romantic interaction, and it’s brief, tastefully done and doesn’t dominate the character (and also, it’s with a woman! which is neat).
This comic just about sums up my anger at DC. They have two popular cartoons that have wide appeal to non-comic book readers (Teen Titans and the newly launched Young Justice) and yet DC chose to ignore both continuities when relaunching their universe. How does that make sense? If their goal is to bring in new readers then they’re def going about it the wrong way. Yes they’ve gotten a lot of lapsed readers back into their local comic shops, but they’ve done a really poor job of attracting actual new readers.
They cant make the Main Universe more like Young Justice. It is alrerady a Universe. Universe-16.
They’re soft-rebooting in a way that invalidates some stories, preserves others, and combines characters from three different lines of comics (DC, Vertigo, and Wildstorm), one of which was already an established continuity (Earth-50) in the multiverse.
They can use elements from whatever existing continuities they want.
Yeah, but I (and SO many other people, judging from the comments I have read so far) would LOVE to have Artemis be in the comics. She is kickass, beautiful and has an extremely interesting story line. I´d buy her comics ten times just to prove a point.
I’m not a comics reader but thanks to Willis, looking up things for myself, and other sources and history I’ve read, I know that in the past, when comics were getting big, they would actually take the cues that first came about in non-comics media and filter them back into the comics.
For example, the Superman radio shows back when made it so that the ‘Daily Star’ was called the ‘Daily Planet’ thereafter in the comics. That name was first coined as a change to the comics canon in the radio stuff.
Whether they were doing a real ‘reboot’ of continuity or just miraculously using a new name or new art style in the ‘next’ issue of an existing storyline, it stands to reason that 2 million viewers of the Teen Titans cartoon and what they would want out of a Teen Titans reboot is at LEAST as important as taking the popular culture cue of how everyone had started thinking of Clark Kent’s newspaper as ‘The Daily Planet.’ So yeah, Young Justice or Teen Titans or whatever is working right now should definitely factor in.
Ignoring Teen Titans continuity is a good thing if you’re trying to attract the cartoon fans. They changed most characters pretty drastically. Gar and Vic weren’t that off, I guess, though they de-perved Gar (who bragged about owning all of Starfire’s nude calendars) a lot.
Disregarding the last 20 years of Titans history is def a good thing! They’ve really screwed around with a lot of these characters.
Sorry I wasn’t clear before, but I don’t get why they released this new sub-par Titans book instead of releasing a new Young Justice comic instead. When you can do whatever you want with these characters, wouldn’t it make way more sense to tie in strongly with 2 really popular cartoon series than just do more of the same? The book wasn’t succeeding before, at least this way you have larger appeal to a more mainstream Cartoon Network audience.
THANK YOU!!! This is something that’s been irking me too.
*applauds* Thank you, Willis.
Now admitadly in the comics Starfire was more um….open with her sexuality and prefered not wearing clothes. This new take on her tho… ugh….she’s got the memory of a goldfish, doesn’t care about humans at all, doesn’t remember her time amongst the Titans, ect.
I don’t understand DC’s thought process AT ALL. None of the reboot clears up anything continuity-wise, I haven’t heard anything good yet about the major characters and the only person who did have anything nice to say is only buying the Animal Man and Grifter books (he dropped every other DC series). The AM book is apparently very good BTW.
It is. It tells you everything you need to know about who Buddy Baker is, doesn’t try to make him seem like a fool or anything in the eyes of the public despite the goofy name of “Animal Man,” portrays a realistic home life of a superhero who has a family, has beautiful artwork, and had great horror elements.
And the ‘mystery’ of why most girls who frequent comic shops prefer manga over comics is solved.
Not that manga doesn’t have its own strong recurrent issues with sexism. But at least they’re /trying/ to write stories for girls and women.
Yeah, although I dumped mangas for comic books, but if they do stuff like this (Starfire, Catwoman…) I get depressed. or really really angry, especially at people like DiDio.
I’m pretty sure Starfire always looked like that pre-Reboot, because I had the same reaction when I started reading DC, lol
Looked like that, yes. Acted like that, hell no.
Starfire is from an alien race with fewer inhibitions, so from the get-go writers and artists could use that as an excuse to give her little clothing and lots of sex.
The difference is that Kory from pre-DCnU was someone from a race where, as she said “We allow ourselves to love many people, sometimes physically, always emotionally.” Sex was very literally making LOVE in Kory’s eyes, and an emotional thing. Something t be enjoyed as often as possible, but inseparable from love itself.
New Kory is more along the lines of “Do you wish to sex me now, person who’s name I can’t remember?”
Yup. She’s always been scantily clad, always been pretty sexualized. They kept her naked for an entire comic a few years back.
I think this take is worse because she has no personality, but cartoon fans being shocked at the portrayal of Starfire is nothing new. Would’ve been smart to make her more cartoon like here though.
i completely agree with today’s comic but people come on its 1 title out of 52 not all of them will be good. Action Comics, Animal Man, Resurrection Man, Deadman and quite a few others have been fantastic.
…the problem is the stuff they’ve been pushing the most is terrible, especially the books with the flagship characters, barring Batman.
And one of those IS Action Comics. They made Superman a Batman-level jerkass. How is that a good idea? Not only does it screw over Superman himself, it completely ruins the dynamic between the World’s Finest.
you didnt like wonder woman?
…okay, so haven’t read wonder Woman, so I guess I was talking out my ass a little.
Read Wonder Woman! I’ve never been interested in the character outside of team books and I was blown away. Plus, you get awesome Cliff Chiang art.
Action Comics is one of my favorite of the relaunch. Superman is once again like he was pre-WWII, which was a cocky street-level middle-finger-to-the-man.
I also dig the pants.
Batman carried a gun back then too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea now.
Batman dropped the gun-toting within a few months. Superman was a dick for decades. He was popular because little kids are vengeful little suckers.
The retro Superman is once again appropriate because society is cyclical. We’re once again stuck in a world where economic hardship and inequity are widespread. I prefer a Superman who fights that social inequity rather than big strong boring aliens. It feel it makes him more heroic. And more patriotic.
I’d like his social crusading more if he wasn’t trying to IMITATE Batman as he did so.
Well, you can’t punch a corrupt businessman in the face like he’s Darkseid. You’d end up with corrupt businessman face bits everywhere. In fact, “normal” Superman tactics don’t really work in these instances at all. What, is he gonna save the day by waving the American flag at them?
Meanwhile, Superman is very sweet and kind to everyone who’s not a corrupt jerk. Classic Superman. Nobody ever notices or remembers that stuff, apparently.
Maybe I’m a dangerous radical, but it does seem like a good reason to punch them like if they were Darkseid.
Alternatively, sun: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/09/05
Scaring them a little? That I don’t mind, but his opening narration in Action Comics #1 sounds EXACTLY like Batman.
Also, the good he does is kind of supplanted by the whole “throw a guy so hard into a river that he breaks six ribs and several other bones.”
I loved when Superman droped his american citizenship
I haven’t been able to get any of the new 52, second and third kid and other stuff, but the reason I dislike superman is because he was no longer fighting for ethics. He’s superman, not many people can beat him up but that wasn’t the point, he is selfless incarnate so he fights for the good of the people, not just with his fist. (Did all of you know he was written by Jews as a form of rebellion against Hitler.) So Mr. Willis, thanks for informing me, I’ll look for them.
Superman is once again like he was pre-WWII, which was a cocky street-level middle-finger-to-the-man.
And now that Morrison’s had someone draw a comic out of that series of bullet points, here’s hoping he intends to write an actual story out of it.
More likely, having rewritten the character to fit his personal vision, he’ll wander off to some other project in need of his GENIUS and leave all that messy cleanup and restoring-the-status-quo to some other hapless writer.
Again.
That would be a good argument if Morrison was JMS. But he isn’t, so it’s not. Morrison writes pretty long, complete runs. He went from Batman & Son to Batman to Batman & Robin to Batman Inc. and finally jumped off after years and years of doing the character. Did he have a responsibility to write Batman forever? Or should he have put no stamp on the character and have “Batman fights a villain and ultimately triumphs through punching, detective work, or some combination of the two.” stories for a year or two? Should he have killed Batman so that no one would have to deal with the changed Morrison version (lol, check)? I just don’t get your complaint.
Superman was written nothing like Batman in Action Comics. The only remotely Batman like moment he had in the whole comic was the interrogation scene at the very beginning.
It’s my favorite so far as well.
As hilarious as this strip was, and as sad the cause for the strip is, I really wish people wouldn’t be so quick to bash the entire reboot, let alone the entire industry over dreck like Red Hood
Don’t get me wrong, it deserves all the bashing it gets. Heck, Willis could run strips lambasting Nu-Starfire for two weeks straight and it still wouldn’t be enough.
Yeah, sure, DC published it so they’re partially to blame.
But Scott Snyder isn’t. And neither is Gail Simone. Or Jeff Lemire. Or Brian Azzarello. Or Paul Cornell.
Or all the other writers who aren’t sexist pigs and who delivered some really awesome comics these past weeks.
So yeah, vote with your dollar, let the misogynistic drivel rot in the shelves, but make sure not to punish the wrong people. And most of all not to punish yourself by not getting Animal Man, Batgirl, Wonder Woman and co.
This is probably because comics media is small to begin with, but I HATE how comics media focuses so much on the negative and so little on the positive. Not only did we get a pretty incredible Batman comic this week, we got the best Wonder Woman comic in years. AND NO ONE TALKS ABOUT IT BECAUSE STARFIRE IS NOW A SEXY GOLDFISH.
If people ignore Flash and All-Star Western next week to talk about Voodoo I am going to kick something. No wonder Marvel and DC are always putting offensive crap in their comics, it’s the only way to make sure they get talked about.
This doesn’t apply to Willis/Shortpacked, as it’s very much not a comics news site.
A comic just being lousy is one thing, unfortunate but expected. But Kory’s not an isolated case. Amanda Waller has gone from being a hefty, formidable older woman to being a sexy model-type. Catwoman is likewise a sex puppet in a book that was marketed as “a sexy, dirty, sexy book” (SOL any fans of the Brubaker run that treated her like a person). Power Girl is MIA, but her alter ego appears to be Mr. Terrific’s “friend with benefits.” Barbara Gordon has gone from being on of the most powerful characters in the DCU to just a sidekick-type. Harley Quinn is in…that outfit…
It’s a lot of things adding up, but the problem with the Kory thing (and Harley Quinn) is that it seems like a huge misstep, when a little effort in a different direction could have appealed to an ACTUAL new audience, instead of lapsed fanboys.
And there have been good books. Demon Knights is currently my favorite offering from the DCnU.
I hate a thin Waller as much as the next guy, but unless I missed the scene in question, all we’ve seen of her is cleavage up. Yes, it implies svelteness, but I think it’s jumpy the gun to declare her a supermodel just yet.
You can see that she’s skinny. No one has any doubt on the issue (except you apparently). Go take another look if you’re unsure.
All skinny people are sexy model types? News to me.
Skinny people with huge boobs, pouty lips, and a perfect figure? Umm, yeah they’re super model esque if not actually working in the industry.
You should mention Demon Knights by name!
Seriously that comic is far and away the best of the bunch so far and it’s probably going to be cancelled by issue 12.
Damn straight, Mr. Wills.
Not since Metroid Other M has a character so respectable been so grossly mishandled.
DC better lose money on this. Lots and LOTS of money. Because honestly, that comic is a stellar example of all the idiotic missteps DC would like us to forget.
Good grief, and good riddance.
i know its to early to tell in the long run how much money this reboot will make or lose for dc but most of these issues have been selling out
And the lesson is that engaging in a months-long marketing blitz will indeed spike sales.
Sorry, I just got pissed off. I grew up on the Titans, and to see something this disrespectful accepted as canon…
It’s just insulting.
It’s a really bad first impression for the continuity. The best case scenario is that all it does is alienate longtime fans. Here’s hoping they don’t do something unforgettably stupid and this gets forgotten mighty quick.
You nailed it better than anything else I’ve read on the subject.
(Also, taking bets on whether or not this comic’s comment count will exceed that of the bigger ones of the recent storyline.)
A world of word to this. It is like DC are allergic to my money!
I’ll still be buying Unwritten in TPB and maybe Batwoman, but everything actually associated with the reboot is turning me off.
This is such a succinct, well-articulated summation of the issue, and it seriously hits the nail on the head in my case. I’ve been reading your comics for years, and this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to comment. Just… well done, and thanks.
Thank you for this. This perfectly puts forward the problem. I hope people at DC see this.
This sums up my sadness at what they’ve done to Starfire. It encapsulates it perfectly. My Starfire is sweet and warm and vivacious and full of LOVE. This is not my Starfire. This is an insult.
DC, you suck.
I guess you could say Lucy liked it better before Starfire learned to speak real english.
Oh-HO!
Yeah, despite DC’s best efforts, the new Starfire no longer gives me “The Boner.”
Perhaps DC thought that Starfire was no longer giving guys “the boner” and felt they needed to fix the situation?
If they are not careful, I fear that Starfire will not inspire “the boner” again ever.
Well, Star’s characterization was a pretty big mistake.
Perhaps we can say that Starfire gave DC comics “the boner?”
*rimshot*
I wasn’t a big fan of Starfire from the cartoon series, but Starfire from The New Teen Titans was my most favorite comic character EVER! A big reason why the Starfire from the cartoon and Starfire from New Teen Titans was so likable was because of her passionate emotions! Grrrrrrrrrr! *TANTRUM*
Seriously. Whichever older version of Starfire someone likes, Starfire was defined by her PASSION. I mostly know of the comic Starfire via Crisis on Infinite Earths – and she always had a smile on her face. Her cartoon counterpart is known for being cheerful comic relief.
This rebooted version pleases nobody who actually cares about her as a character. Which tells the world how the writers and editors think of her.
Right right! I’m glad you agree. T_T Her reboot is so shallow now…
Luckly, my two must-read DC comics are (cartoon tie-in) Young Justice, and the (other cartoon tie-in, ish) Batman Beyond.
Fortuntely neither is effected by the Reboot
Bit disapointed Stormwatch/The Authority was rebooted/transplanted into DC mainverse though – I enjoyed that for its uber-ott plots. Having a gay batman and superman doesnt exactly work when theres also regular batman and superman either.
To be honest this whole debacle has me seriously worried they’ll strip Apollo and Midnighter’s sexualities.
Gay badasses don’t fit into the early-90s-boobiefest mentality they seem to be going with…
True.
Allthough that might be a step too far, not sure DC is quite that stupid.
I think they will tease it our for a bit. For all DC’s problems they have a fair few gay characters.
That said, I dont think they will be popping up to kill a planet of Hitlers for sport any time soon.
Jimmy, Nu Stormwatch is grand, and the author has gone on record saying that Apollo and Midnighter are gay, they just haven’t hooked up yet. (cause you know they just met on the last page of issue 1 and all.) Also Martian Manhunter works better on Stormwatch then I ever thought possible.
I”m sad that Max Lord isn’t in the team somehow though.
Why can’t Max be a good guy again? (Also do we need Stormwatch, Checkmage, Cadmus, SHADE, and something like 8 other secret organizations running about?)
ooo Thanks! I hadn’t seen him say that. That’s a relief.
Relief indeed.
“(Also do we need Stormwatch, Checkmage, Cadmus, SHADE, and something like 8 other secret organizations running about?)”
yeah, its a little silly if you think about it.
Probably could make a diagram too as to “who is secret to who”. (that is which secret agencys know about eachother and which don’t).
I´d love to buy Young Justice tie-ins, but I live in a small town- no comics apart from the big titles… So, now I decided to quench my thirst for superheroes by watching the TV series Arrow (If you haven´t checked it out, you should, its awesome), and don´t plan on buying any comics except maybe batwoman, the flash and supergirl
DC Comics is very good at math, when the math concerns the dollars of 18-24 yr old males. Because as we know, those are the only dollars that really COUNT.
And thus did young Lucy grow up to become . . . SYDNEY YUS. dun dun DUNNNN.
I’m surprised you’re the first one to comment on it! She really does.
DC needs some new blood in the writing staff badly. And I am not talking about hiring someone from Marvel or Image or any of that, I mean new people, DiDio should stop surrounding himself with proverbial yes men who want to read the exact same comic they read in the seventies, only with more sex…
To paraphrase DiDio himself, taken from the forward of the Flash: Rebirth hardcover; Change is not something to be afraid of…
Isn’t it hilarious how one of the most navel gazing, backward thinking, emblematic of all of DC’s current issues comics ever had an introduction about how amazing CHANGE is?
So as far as anyone can tell, DC is trying to recapture people who used to read comics but stopped. So the audience for this relaunch is people in middle age or fast approaching it.
Just keep that mental model of the reader in mind when you’re reading about what’s in the new 52.
OK, I’ve read these issues, twice, and I still fail to see what is so morally heinous about it. She has an odd nature, amnesia, and focuses on something rather obsessively. All standard comic book elements. But as soon as sex is mixed in to it, she becomes some kind of double standard-perpetuating embarrasment? Are fictional women not allowed to act like this? A lot of DC jams fanservice in wherever they can, sure. I still don’t see how adding fanservice to this corrupts her into some kind of misogynistic nightmare.
DC has female characters that aren’t sexualized, and ones who are. The idea that sexually focused characters have no place is wrong, and the idea that fanservice has no place is wrong.
TL;DR She’s not a “slut” (hate that word/concept), she’s obsessive.
Completely leaving aside the question of whether sexualizing a character is good or bad (problematic slut-shaming on one side, incessant sexualization of female characters on the other) the objection is that her personality has absolutely nothing in common with her MOST POPULAR EVER incarnation. If attracting newer/more readers was their goal, they are doing it exactly the wrong way.
“DC has female characters that aren’t sexualized, and ones who are”
As you say. Maybe if JLI decided to use Booster Gold for some blatant fan service, we’d have slightly less of a problem with the fact that any time a female character shows up, odds are better than 50/50 that her sexuality will have to come into play. Male characters can and do have sexual lives, but most of them can also have stories that don’t even need to make reference to it if it’s not relevant to the plot.
The specific problem with Kory is the way she’s written and drawn. It’s not a case of people freaking out because a character is sexy and likes sex. It’s because she’s…cold. Clinical. She’s like some creepy puppet that the writer and artist are posing to best please her audience. She’s not a character, she’s a blow-up doll, and it feels sleazy and deliberate.
In fact, not unlike that time Sleaze drugged/mind-controlled Barda and Superman into making a porno…
good lord i actually know that comic…
I guess that’s where I disagree then. Do you see that kind of odd focus as a creepy excuse for fanservice, rather than as her being character in her own right?
I guess we read it differently then.
Man, if you don’t get the blow-up doll feeling from Starfire in Red Hood and the Outsiders, I don’t even know what to say. It seems like such a basic human reaction to the depiction of the character.
Well, technically she’s also used to kill people and blow things up. So I guess he’s more like a blow-up doll taped to a nuclear bomb.
Loved that. I´d laugh if it weren´t so damn sad.
I think there is a massive difference between a character who is sexual and a character who is sexualized. A character who is sexual enjoys sex. Sex is part of who they are. They take ownership of their enjoyment. A character who is sexualized exists to please the reader. A sexualized character has no ownership over their sexuality; they are there merely as a fantasy object.
Now, when every female character that DC portrays appears to have the exact same Playboy model body, posing gratuitously with her tits out in a see-through bikini, you cannot make me believe for a second that every one of those ladies is sexual instead of sexualized. Why do they have to look like porn stars? To please the male readership. Why do they pose like porn stars? To please the male readership.
Show me a sexual butch dyke in a DC comic. Show me a plus-size one. Show me a disabled one. Show me a character who enjoys sex but NOT as a male fantasy. Then maybe we’ll talk.
Honestly, the real problem with Starfire is that she was written terribly.
I have most of the pre 52 teen titans, starfire was sexy and a good character without trying to sleep with multiple guys at once
And this is why Lucy will end buying the new edition of the Sailor Moon manga and not dc comics XD (And Sailor Moon isn’t the most feminist booj around to be exact XD)
I thought Lucy would be too young to be in college but now I made some counting and you are actually right… now I feel old XD
old? i loved that show as a kid and i’m only 16 now, i feel younger than ever!
I feel really old because I am no longer an teen and just realized that 8 years have passed since Teen Titans got shown on tv the first time
If I could put a gif of clapping Orson Wells here, I would You’ve captured the problem brilliantly. Not just the irritation at seeing oversexed characters replace formerly awesome-and-sexy characters, but just what a missed opportunity that whole reboot mess is.
Nail on the head.
The character in the comic books now is not TOO far away from the version of the character in the very first NEW TEEN TITANS issues, which was, even by modern standards, a pretty blatant play for the attention of lonely, nerdy males. And you know what? That doesn’t really matter one bit. It’s a reboot. The creators are allowed to change the characters around almost as they please. And they pleased to bypass the more generally popular version of the character in exchange for the nostalgia of the existent, aging fanbase… and what few modifications they’ve made have only served to dehumanize her further.
Also, she’s still got a personal history with the Teen Titans and romantic history with Dick Grayson, despite having a personality that makes that functionally impossible. (Unless Dick Grayson, while I wasn’t looking, has been rebooted into the kind of guy who’d spend years as the boyfriend of a joyless amnesiac sex prop.)
Granted, this is also the comic that features Roy “Dead-Cat Nunchucks” Harper and Jason “Constantly Reminding You Why You Voted To Kill Him” Todd, so maybe they’re just trying to get all their most toxic ideas into one series.
Yeah, I’m kinda interested in why there’s been no commentary on how sleazy this comic makes *Roy*, too. Because he clearly remembers their Titans years and HAS SEX WITH HER ANYWAY. Dude, you’re supposed to be her friend.
Here here! This mirrors my sentiments exactly. I’ve had plenty of back and forth arguing with my comic-nerd brethren over at GameFAQs about how awful this Starfire stuff is, but the whole time I kept thinking: “Man, long time comic book fans are used to this nonsense, but the real victims here are the people who became fans of Starfire and the Titans’ franchise via the cartoon.”
Bad at math? You sure it has nothing to do with the fact that cartoon series cost a lot more to produce than a comic book?
I mean, the whole ‘needing voice actors’ part, the whole ‘more than 22 pages of art’ part and the whole ‘we cant draw people in the background as blobs’ part?
Your argument has nothing to do with the drastic change of personality they gave the character. Yes, an animated cartoon is more expansive and takes longer to produce than a comic book, but if they had made the comic using the same/similar Starfire character that so many people loved, than the comic might have 2 million customers instead of only 100,000.
They intentionally alienated a huge number of potential customers. THAT’S bad at math.
I agree that your argument doesn’t follow. Giving Kory her happy cartoon personality which was loved by millions would have cost them nothing on the drawing board. It was a golden opportunity to cash in on the cartoon’s investment for free, and they blew it.
You seem to be saying that… because comics are cheaper to make than cartoons, they shouldn’t bother to do anything to attract readers? Because no matter how little readership it gets, a comic will still cost less to produce than a cartoon? What ARE you saying?
I think he might be implying that higher production values means higher viewership… But if that were the case we’d never have any failed blockbuster movies.
So yeah, I don’t get it either.
Do…do you work for DC? Because that post displays exactly the kind of relentless unreason required to get you a board position.
Seriously, “hey let’s not exploit our millions of new fans generated by our existing investment to drive up readership of our titles we declared were designed to drive up readership; instead we should drive them away in favour of the remaining few T&A brigade who can afford comics but don’t have the internet yet, because the paper comic is cheaper to produce” makes sense to you?
Because that’s effectively what you wrote.
Sooooo……
They cancel the series. (It hurt, but the 5th season was absolute balls, with the exception of the series finale)
They say their to reboot EVERYTHING about DC….AGAIN
And then Starfire turns from a bad-ass Tamaranian chick to a stereotypical preppy girl who cares only about who has the biggest penis.
This planet….it’s problems are many.
She’s more like a badass Tamaranian chick who can’t tell humans apart and is completely lacking in personality now.
I also loved Starfire in the Teen Titans cartoon, and I also will never buy a DC comic again, although, unlike Lucy, I’m a guy. Since I’m not in the all-important 18-to-24 age bracket, though, I doubt DC cares about losing my business.
Ah well, I can still look up to Pinkie Pie.
I dunno man, I quite liked the new book. Teen Titans Starfire was annoying as hell, this one actually seems interesting as far as an alien who doesn’t give two shits about humans goes.
What do you find interesting about her?
I will give you a hint. He finds two of her traits most interesting…
Yeah, but she’s always had those ‘traits.’
Teen Titans Star had moderately sized “traits.” You could even call them small. Notice how that version he finds annoying…
lol, so true. (and Starfire was my favourate character in that show.)
What is wrong with you DC? It’s decicions like this that caused you to reboot in the first place.
I like you, DC, but you have done so many things wrong that I have to wonder if you are really trying. I’m starting to wonder if I should switch to Marvel or an independent, but nothing from those fronts has really caught my eye. (At least JLI and Deamon Knights was good.)
There are so many better ways to attack DC for what they’ve done on these relaunches to pretend that someone who watched TEEN TITANS GO five years ago is going to wander in for some more STARFIRE based on that experience coupled with DC advertising and even recognize the character on the cover as her. The character in the toon only ever really shared skin pigment and hair color in common with the look of the comic version.
There’s more fertile ground for criticism elsewhere.
But I don’t have a problem with most of DC’s relaunches. Why would I attack what I don’t dislike?
Personally, I’d like to hear more about what you like! I’d like to vote with my money, not simply by avoiding the shit but through embracing the good stuff.
Sssssssssssssssssssssaaaattttiiiirrre?[/dr.impossible]
Um, my three year old pointed to my teen Titan comic, (the part were she’s about to kill krypto for digging in her garden.) And said Starfire mad. Till then she had only ever seen the tv show.
I love the way you draw Dan Didio. You somehow manage to capture his goofiness and naivete perfectly. I’ve never seen him not smiling. You can’t put this man in a bad mood. This is greatness.
Lucy, the long lost sister of Sydney.
Lucy is cool. It would be interesting if we get to see her more.
I will second this excellent suggestion, good sir.
At least I have Teen Titans: Games to look forward to… T_T RIP Starfire!
Yeah, This is basically my reaction. I mean, while I read it, and kind of enjoyed it, it’s not the Starfire I remember. And I’ve read quite a few years of the original Teen Titans comics – she’s really misrepresented in the rebooted Outlaws.
I really, really liked comics. I was dropping like, $60 a month on them. But things exactly like that killed it for me. I don’t read Marvel or DC anymore. I don’t even go to the comic shop. Sometime around the first round of 52 completing.
I miss Young Justice.
Theres great stuff outside marval and dc at the moment though.
Boom comics as Irredemable and Incorruptable which I am enjoying no-end. Not to mention their Darkwing Duck comic which is often the funniest thing I read in a week.
Then theres “The Unwritten” which is utterly superb and very original.
iZombie is pretty darn fun too.
Me too!
DC Reboot: Ruining everything good, all the while amping up all the shitty.
Hope you read DC in the 70s but wished there was more blood and titties.
Cuz that’s all you get.
FUCK COMICS ARGHGGHFFG.
Yeah I was trying to decide which ones of the 52 I needed to drop and “Outlaws” is the first.
I don’t agree with the article you linked that Catwoman’s treatment was anything compared to Starfire’s at least Catwoman had some semblance of a personality left throughout the book, then again I kinda wrote off the “fan fiction ending” as “ooh DC when will you ever learn” because the subtext of some of the interviews I’ve read with DiDio seem to imply they hire their writers from Fanfiction.net…
I’ll be dropping Catwoman too of course, but I just meant perspective wise, there’s bad and there’s “Red Hood and the Outlaws” bad.
I thought Catwoman was a bad comic but I am honestly shocked at the level of outrage over it. Comics do WE WILL LEAVE OUR COSTUMES ON sex scenes all the time! That’s why people make fun of them! I don’t remember anyone freaking out when this happened in Spider-Man a little while back.
And the artist is the same artist who was drawing her in GCS, in the same cheesecakey way. I don’t get it.
Spider-Man didn’t have a penetration shot. They kissed and then the scene shifted and they had obviously had sex. WORLDS of difference there. The point (of the Spider-Man x Black Cat stuff) wasn’t to work off a quickie on the finale, it was to introduce a sexual relationship into the plot. The point of the Catwoman part was “dirty, sexy fun”. Aka, material for sad comic fans’ spank banks.
GOD BLESS YOU WILLIS.
TV Starfire = Awesome.
Comic Starfire = Crap.
I haven’t seen hte New comic starfire, but before the reboot, after even afterh t Crisis. Starfire was freaking awesome! Brainy, as well as strong, and super freaking loyal to her friends to whom she treated like family. cartoon Starfire was freaking annoying as shit.
Well, it looks likes nether of us will be happy with this new version of Starfire, so we both lose. And so does DC.
I like the way that you can see the effect gravity has had on Lucy’s hair over the years.
Bravo. Imma link this on my livejournal.
It’s kinda true. I loved the starfire from the cartoon series. Heck, I got the whole series. XD But I realized that she was in a comic so I looked her up. Got a little freaked out by the difference in design though. But what the heck. If I can i’m gonna read the starfire comics. Sure she’ll be the exact opposite of her cartoon self. Getting married two times only for one of them to die in war, and one doing something else. -__- But the rest of the series, and the rest of the characters and starfire are still awesome in their own way. So yeah…DC sucks at times, but at least we get her back.
I hear that Lobdell didn’t choose to put Starfire in the book. He set out to write a book about “outlaws” then got told to use a character that didn’t fit his ideal. So yes he messed up writing Starfire, but there’s some unnamed idiot out there who shouldn’t have let a pervert write her in the first place.
He wanted Crimson Avenger (the female one) and Raven but was told he had to use Starfire instead. Pretty obvious he found a way around the Raven thing, wish he’d at least tried to write Kori like Jill with different superpowers.
I feel like in comics a writer needs to be able to work with the hand they’re dealt. Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis were kept from using almost every major character for their Justice League relaunch and they still made magic happen.
Yeah, that actually is something a writer has to be able to do, make the most out of what they got. Hell, think of all the times on Batman TAS that the writers were able to get aroud editorial mandates to make the scene even scarier.
Much agreed. Also consider Grant Morrison’s JLA: he had to use Electric Blue Superman, Evil Businessman Lex Luthor, and Kyle Rayner. It’s pretty clear from his later work that he didn’t want to use any of those. However, he put in a hell of an effort to make all of them work: Superman got to look cool because he was Superman. Luthor came up with a corporate-minded attack on the JLA. Rayner was presented as the greatest Green Lantern of all time. And at no point did any of these characters represent Morrison’s preferred versions.
I liked Starfire from the cartoon better, too! I was wondering, though… I know the old Comic!Starfire had the same design as the new one, but were they essentially the same?
((I’m trying to finish out my Milestone collection and then get a few Young Justice and Avengers comics before I move on to Teen Titans, so I haven’t actually read it yet. Help?))
Before the reboot she was drawn for TNA a lot, but she wasn’t written like this at all. She legitimately cared about her friends, and wouldn’t forget them so easily. Also she had a long term relationship with Nightwing whom Jason tried to kill a few times, so she wouldn’t sleep with Jason.
Pre-boot she was still super sexualized- she had nude calendars, there were issues of her naked, there was a storyline where a character took her form and did pictures for Playboy- but she had plenty of personality. She was more space hippie/free love when it came to the sex.
She’s always been fan-service, but the sort that you’d expect from a character created back in the ’70s, by an artist that was all about equal opportunity in eye candy and a writer who was fairly bold for his time.
This succinctly expresses the whole effing problem with the DCnU. It isn’t just offensive. It isn’t just stupid. It is offensively stupid. I mean– we can complain about collars on outfits all we want, but that is negotiable. I just thought that the reboot was supposed to WIDEN the demographic. Instead it seems narrower than ever.
Of course reading ANY version of comic book Starfire would be disappointing to fans of the cartoon version of that character. Though how anyone could like the cartoon version of Starfire who IMO was one of the most annoying cartoon characters ever created I don’t know. Then again I will never understand how the Teen titans Cartoon actually got fans. To me that cartoon was a disgrace and always will be one.
Your subjective opinion is objectively wrong. :p
My opinion is right to the only person why my opinion matters to myself. Really I know a lot of people liked the Teen Titans cartoon and that’s fine. I honestly found it to be horrible. There are maybe ten episodes I liked out of the show and ten of 65 is not a good thing.
You don’t have to agree with my opinion but my opinion that Teen Titans is a bad show is no more wrong then any other opinion. An opinion is only wrong if facts can prove it wrong and well when it comes to the quality of a show facts can be shown for ether opinion.
tongue-face ( :p ) means I’m just poking fun, didn’t mean to offend. I’ve been on the “wrong” side of opinion on shows & movies myself before (don’t much care for the Godfather, couldn’t stand Seinfeld, I liked the movie ’23′, etc).
Saying this a women, and a comics fan, I don’t think the problem with DC today isn’t the over-sexualization of female characters, they’ve always been bad about that (and whenever they try to do a feminist series it is usually much worse). It isn’t even really that they’re writing for the lowest common denominator of 12 to 15 year old boys. The problem is that they’re doing the exact same things they were doing in the 90′s that nearly killed the comics industry. Big crossover events are a mixed bag from a sales perspective, they tend to boost sales on poorly selling titles if they’re featured as a central part of the crossover, but when they’re not doing any stories but Super Mega Ultra Crisis in Terra Houte, the preceding build up story arc, followed by the tragic aftermath which ties into the build up to the next crisis which will retcon out all of the effects of the last one it hurts the ability of solo titles to maintain it’s own story which kills long term readership (and, you know, any possibility of a good story). The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn’t even new people making the same old mistakes. These are the same writers who were doing it twenty years ago. Honest to god, there are like only six writers on a non-flagship title in the “new 52″ who weren’t writing a fifth-tier X-Men book at some point in the 90s.
And while I’m ranting, OMFG! there is seriously a book called Justice League: Dark. WHY!?!? And a new Hawk and Dove series, becuase the fan outcry for that was so overwhelming…
Justice League Dark is just a badly named Shadowpact. A team book for magic users seems like a no-brainer to me.
That sounds like a good reason for me to get Justice League: Dark since I liked Shadowpact.
Speaking of the new Hawk and Dove, Liefeld’s doing the art! Talk about trying to bring back the 90′s.
It’s sad. There was a period during the late 90′s and early aughts when things seemed to be doing a bit better. Oh well.
This new DCU, the continuity’s more confusing not less (batman’s had 4 robins in 5 years? Everything that ever happened is in a shrodinger’s canon/non-canon state until specifically mentioned one way or the other?), the tone’s even more dreary and depressing and kid-unfriendly then it was immediately prior to the shift, the characters for the most part all seem much more lifeless….
Yeah. It’s a big publicity stunt, and I’m sure their sales will be great for a month or two, but apart from the online distribution angle, I don’t see any moves or changes that seem like they’d actually draw in any new readers, and I see a lot that could alienate existing ones.
Liefeld’s doing the art? That… that just broke my heart. And probably causes Hawk and Dove’s wrists and ankles and feet to disappear. And ten million pouches to exist FOR NO APPARENT REASON OR USE.
You forgot that their eyes will develop so many wrinkles that they can’t be opened, and the schedule slippage…
As soon as my comics buddy commented “They seem to be putting a darker edge on their comics after the reboot” my immediate reaction was “…because that worked SO well for them in the 90s, right?”
Oh dude!! this would be SO MUCH BETTER if not for the ad beside your comment…although the women are actually wearing clothes, one is in the classic much-mocked breast/ass pose, and another woman has her arms crossed under her chest visibly pushing up her breasts! Irony, oh painful irony.
Thank you for this, Willis. And thanks for the link to a fantastic editorial on the subject.
Man, the new Starfire is so babies.
Lucy looks just like Sidney Yus…
Coincidence?
…probably…
There’s something wrong with the world when Stormwatch is one of the least sexualized titles a company is producing.
Whatevs, I would have banged her…
I hope you’re prepared to buy 100 copies of each issue.
See, that’s part of the issue – You’d bang her. You wouldn’t make love to her. There would be no cuddling. Frankly, this version seems rather anti-cuddle anyways. She’s all about the banging – clingy-ness will get you kicked out of bed.
Old!Starfire, any continuity, would always have a hug for a friend. This one doesn’t have friends, she has useful sex toys.
Just throwing this out as Devil’s Advocate.
Wasn’t there a comic based on the Teen Titan’s cartoon. Does anyone know how well that sold. I’m seriously asking. Does anyone know?
Whatever the numbers were, could be the reason DC has decided not to forward that version of the characters. I loved the TT cartoon but watching something essentually for free and plunking money down for it are not the same thing.
It didn’t sell great. “Teen Titans Go” started off around 30k/month, quickly dropped to 20k/month, and then slid down to about 10k/month toward the end of its run. (For comparison, the main Teen Titans book did around 70k/month.)
However, that’s not necessarily because there wasn’t a market–DC did very little to promote the tie-in book, the way they chose to brand it was fairly weird, and the market it would have sold do–KIDS, mind you–had to beg their parents to drive them to a comic book store so they could plunk down $3 for 23 pages. Kids’ comics don’t do well in the “Direct Distribution Only” environment that comic books seem to have backed themselves into. (And rumor has it, not that I’m in a place to know, that people at DC Comics hated the cartoon well before that tie-in book started.)
It might be more relevant to look at how well DVDs of the show sold. Also, part of the point of this comic is that kids who weren’t in a place to pay money for comics back in 2004 now have the disposable income to pick up a few issues that they’re interested in.
The reason I ask is because they might use those sales to justify their approach to Starfire and other such characters. I can only assume and I’m not tossing blame either way, but it’s a strange case where people who were fans of a show start buying the comic and are mad because it doesn’t match the show. If they do change the character to match the show, people who were originally following the comic feel slighted for the “newbies”. It’s sort of a no win situation. Wasn’t that the complaint against All Hail Megatron. That they tossed out most of Furman’s stuff in favor of making it more like the cartoon?
The truly sad thing is, they tossed out Starfire’s comic characterization, too. This would be like if All Hail Megatron had been further from both the cartoon AND the previous comics at the same time.
I dunno – it wasn’t so much that they threw out Furman’s stuff that the writer had a story idea.
I like Furman’s run, and I enjoyed AHM as well. Heck – a lot of my continuity issues were addressed in the second half of the series anyway.
If you want to get picky on people disregarding continuity, I think Costa’s probably been a bit more guilty. There’s been points reading the ongoing where I think the only thing keeping me reading was the fact it’s Transformers fiction.
Though I’m enjoying it now. But ironically, the earthbased story moreso than the space opera story.
YMMV on All Hail Megatron. I have no feelings on that particular comic. I’m just saying that that was a popular complaint about that story.
The issue with All Hail Megatron, AFAIK, had little to do with whether they made it more or less like the cartoon, and mostly to do with throwing out three years of a slow-burn story build that was just about to hit its payoff in favor of a fairly mediocre stor. (I’m also a little disappointed that they wasted the brilliant “Decepticon Propaganda” visual concept on such a mediocre series.)
For that matter, since I forgot to mention it, McCarthy did a lot of great things.
Starscream/Megatron’s relationship was consistent with what came before – I’d argue Costa actually went backwards in Coda with Starscream, given how McCarthy seemed to stay true to their complex comic relationship.
And Kup was pretty darn awesome, too. Heck – even the humans come across better in AHM – it honestly bugs me how we’ve barely heard mention of Spike’s father, given how prominent he was in AHM (never mind how likable I found him – his characterization seems far more ominous in the ongoing than it seemed in AHM)
Then there was how McCarthy ambushed us all with Dropshot – several people had noticed the Universe repaint of Scattorshot was in the army convoy and chalked it up to an Easter egg. Then he transforms, and we find out he was actually there all along as a spy. It was one of those few moments in the fiction where I’ve been genuinely surprised by a robot in disguise.
I guess there’s two theories at play here. One is that Starfire has been turned into a bubblehead sex doll, and two that she should be more like the version from the cartoon because that is aguably the more popular and well known version.
The first issue, the lack of decent characterization in favor of T&A I have no comment on, other that they need better writers. It’s the second that I’m not sure I agree with. That’s the sort of thing I’m sure drove Eastman and Laird nuts back in the day because the zany cartoon was more popular and even though the comic was first, there were tons of people mad that it wasn’t like the “true” comic they grew up with.
The sad thing is “Lucy” risks being representative of a sort of audience worthy is criticism. People like Geewuners who liked something from their youth and are now complaining because when they came back to something after a ten year gap, it’s still not catering to their memory of how something should be. The fact that something was popular is not always the best reason to change something. Heck, the whole reason Starfire is a walking sex toy is because sex is always popular.
Well the thing is that if a writer is going to completely rewrite a character so that their previous characterization and story doesn’t exist ANYWAY, then the answer to the question “Why not make that character like the version of the character that was much loved by the demographic you’re supposed to be appealing to for new readers?” has to be something like “…because we have an interesting new take on the character that fits this story better than either of those two previous ones.” and not “loLOl, if you type 518008 in a calculator and then turn it upside down it looks like ‘boobies’… wait a second, that gives me an idea for starfire’s new personality!”
Pissing off the established comics fans of the character, poisoning the well for an easily accessed potential source for new comic fans, AND doing all that while adding nothing of actual value to the property… this is failing to make “the sense”.
I guess that is the real question. Just how different is Starfire now from her previous comic adaption? Is there anyone who read Teen Titans before who could provide some insight. I do know her comic incarnation was always dressed kinda stripperiffic I don’t know personality wise how different she is.
Still I would be curious to what longtime readers of the comic have to say sense they’re the reason the comic is still around. I’m less likey to put stock in someone who never read the comic of a property but is pissed because it doesn’t match whatever movie, cartoon, etc version they did see.
Case in point. They’re changing Oracle back to (walking) Batgirl because this is the “popular version” people who watched the cartoon and movies know. Meanwhile, longtime readers hate that they’re throwing out her Oracle persona simply for the “newbies”.
I read Starfire back in the 80s and pretty much grew up on her. When the Teen Titans cartoon started, I was taken aback by her new characterization, but she grew on me fast. If I wasn’t a woman, I’d probably be exactly in the target demo for the “New 52″ — old-time comics reader who hasn’t been in a shop in ages. I had thought about checking out the new Wonder Woman and Animal Man, as they seemed promising.
After this? I’m not buying any of the comics. Starfire just horrified me, and it’s pretty clear DC has no interest in my money.
I just realized the sheer brilliance of this strip.
Most of the “new readers” Didio wants to target are 18-25. These were the kids who grew up on Batman: TAS, STAS, JLU, Teen Titans, The Batman and Legion of Super-Heroes. Those incarnations of the characters are what THEY grew up with, and what they’d expect to see in a comic book.
If they went to a comic shop and saw this…abomination called Starfire or any DCnU character they’d be totally turned off comics for life. So basically DC is alienating 6 or seven million viewers and potential customers (by their flawed marketing plan) to appeal to the same 100,000 people who were buying comics anyway.
Brilliant commentary on DC’s flawed businessplan Willis. Brilliant.
While that’s all lovely the animated Starfire was a little kid, this one…well she isn’t. Here’s my two pence worth…
http://fourcolouralchemy.blogspot.com/
No one’s mad that Starfire is sexual. And being naked is only one component of her visual depiction. You’re missing the point.
Draw Warlord not only naked but in an awkward pose that arches his back and emphasizes his package… then I’d agree that’s on equal footing with visual Starfire.
I recommend you read the link below the comic up top.
I wrote something longer, but this picture sums it up better:
http://newcomicreviews.com/unsorted/5/new/1312480215384.png
Brilliant. Good show, sir. Good show.
(Applauds.)
It’s really tough to say which of those I like best. I was going to go with Spider Jerusalem until I saw Morpheus.
… Somehow it works on Deadpool.
Well, it’s Deadpool. That sort of oddity is up his alley.
Is…is that Liefeld? Well played.
Also, thank you for remembering the most important part of Cable’s anatomy.
I don’t think you are addressing the point raised in this comic. TV Starfire was extremely popular. DC could bringing in millions of new viewers by having the rebooted Starfire that is based on this successful incarnation, rather then, well, whatever this shallow mockery is.
It’s learning from past success and doing the math. She can do all this and still be highly attractive. Where DC is going is very shortsighted.
Lead Sharp, it’s not even about the sex. Sex isn’t new or edgy. Even in the Victorian Era there were sexually liberated women in literature (called “whores” who often met will ill fates or repented). I’m seeing precious little that separates stringBikini!Starfire from that overplayed and stale troupe, and from your article, it sounds like Cat Woman is by profession a prostitute, so she fits there well.
Women do generally have sex, but… that’s not something we tend to relate with characters over. Men have characters who came from a wide variety of circumstances (born weak, strong, or in-between, born rich, poor, or middle class) who they can identify with (they have careers, life-goals, ideological passions, guilty, etc).
We women are being given characters… who have sex, but whose sexuality most of us can’t identify with. And many women who could potentially, those who are/were sex workers, are unlikely to, as I’d best my first born that they don’t even show that realistically. Starfire isn’t a traditional prostitute, she’s more a “lost woman” or whatever, and it seems exceedingly questionable that she even gets anything out of it.
I do buy comics. I buy comics where there are female characters who 1.) I could potentially relate to or at least wouldn’t jump off of a bridge if I could relate to them and 2.) two they do interesting things. Someone else having sex just isn’t that interesting compared to aliens and world-saving. Every generation before us has done it, many times.
I’m sorry I’m not entirely sure what your writing about.
Honestly go and read my article again and this time make it to the end without throwing your hands in the air and shouting typical male pig.
Relating to characters from a superhero comic is about the single daftest thing I’ve heard in a while. The closest we’ve (as comic readers) ever got to that was when Spider-Man started out and he was supposed to be a socially inept looser, just like his readers. These day’s he works for two futuristic labs, two Avengers teams, has clones and made a deal with the devil. I struggle to shave in the morning.
I think the other thing that annoys me about this whole situation is that not one person has actually said, ‘This comic is crap because it’s a badly written and drawn load of tripe.’ Which it is.
So you’re saying that if a fictional character’s life circumstances aren’t like mine, then there can’t possibly be any kind of emotional resonance in the way they deal with things? I hope I’m just missing your point, because otherwise that may be the single daftest thing I’ve read in a long while.
As for your blog post, I’m afraid all it does for me is raise the question of why we’re seeing her through the ex-prisoner’s eyes. Why isn’t she worthy of her own character arc? And if “they’re getting to it,” then why does he come first?
and yet (based on your Gravatar) you seem to identify with Spider Jerusalem, another comic book character. Curious.
+1, Lead. +1.
more like STDfire now, amirite?
Sadly true. So, so sadly true.
Perfect. And just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.
wow, yes, this. Also thanks for the recommended list in the middle of all that commentary, good comics with strong female characters who are badass and sexy and strong.
This “reboot” needs, like the comedy routine goes, a “boot to the head”
I actually did try to read that article yesterday and I do indeed see your point about the Starfire character loosing it’s appeal to an audience that only knew her through the cartoon and would thus be turned off by this depiction.
BUT as I said, we are seeing Starfire through Roy’s eyes and that’s appropriate for this (rated T for teen) comic.
Is this really that different from the half a dozen semi naked woman that walk out of the ocean in the Bond movies? Not really as the pose compensates for the lack of motion and let’s be honest, there’s a grand total of 3 deliberately titillating shots in the book and then there’s there’s a spooky woman with no eyes who stepped out of a Japanese horror flick. I’m more wigged out about THAT than I am about some cheesecake.
So this comic isn’t being marketed to teenage girls? It’s not like it’s called ‘Starfire from that cartoon you loved’. She’s not even prominent on the cover. There’s plenty of other female characters to get behind. They just changed this one, and as we all know fanboys hate change.
(the Warlord thing was actually just kind of a gag though)
Gonna call BS on the “she’s not even prominent on the cover.” There are three characters on the cover. The titular Red Hood takes up the most space and none of his body is blocked, so he is the most noticeable sure. However, if there’s only three characters, and they’re all centered, ALL THREE are prominent. Duh. And if one of them is different in some way, that character might draw your attention. Like say if one of the characters was a different gender than the other two, colored orange, wearing purple, and shooting energy blasts out of her hands. That might (just MIGHT) draw some visual attention.
Next up, you say that it’s okay Star is written like crap because the scene’s not about her. Well, you’d think in a comic about a team three people big, none of them would be cannon fodder or set dressing. The James Bond example is bad because he does not work in a team. Instead, think of the Ocean movies. Or The Expendables. Or… you get the idea. You wouldn’t have Brad Pitt become a casualty because “this scene is about Clooney. Because all the characters count. Also, why is the scene about Roy anyway? He’s not the title character either, so he shouldn’t be any more important than Star.
Final complaints: the rating has nothing to do with which character the scene focuses on. As if a lower (or higher) rating would be the only way to write a female character competently… And disregarding all the quite logical complaints as “fanboys hate change” is despicable and you should just stop talking altogether if you’re going to resort to idiotic straw men.
Preach!! How the hell do these guys keep their jobs? Though I failed in Algebra 101 twice (yeah, I suck at math so what?) it doesn’t take rocket science to understand what Nintendo did with Mario, what Pokemon did with their … uhm… pokemon. How come DC can’t think of this sh!z?
Epic comic is epic.
Here’s the problem Mr. Sharp (and anyone else who agrees that there’s nothing wrong here).
Starfire was always conceived to be a sexually aggressive, visually enticing character. The teen toon notwithstanding, the brains of boys always dropped out when she was present.
Buxom, however, was never meant to mean bimbo or sextoy. Sexually free was never meant to mean shallow [expletive deleted]doll. Starfire was PRIMAL. Intelligent, passionate in battle as she was in passion. For all her cheesecakiness, she was a fairly well rounded CHARACTER, often played in counterpoint to her looks and how idiot boys react to those looks.
NOW she is the embodiment of the debasement of women and some boys are giggling about like the secret pervs they are.
But the strip at the top doesn’t need to be about some twenty-something girl. It can also be about the young men whose minds these sorts of images and depictions further warp. Is it the worst of such depictions? Absolutely not. But does it contribute to the overall pall that has fallen over DC comics in regards to women? Absolutely.
There’s nothing defensible here. Nothing “creative” happening. A competent writer and editorial team could have given us a Starfire that was both sexy and, well, a character.
We got one that is neither. She’s just a masturbation doll and, to me, that’s pretty ugly.
Mileage varies.
We’ve had ONE issue and you’ve condemned the book for a change of character.
Just don’t buy the book, simples.
Trust me ‘young men’ don’t need warping, there warped enough.
Ahhh I’ve said my piece, goodnight Gracy.
The thing is sexual liberation gets to comic, Starfire can stilll be awsome, intelligent and brave, but doesnt have sexual taboos of earth. She just doesnt care, and while I dont agree, I can see the old nerds want OLD starfire back. IT always happens, Willis had stated that he liked Wally West better than Barry Allen, Maybe he grow up with Wally but I grew up with Allen (due to old books beign a lot cheaper than new ones) and the Silver Age.
Just wait and see where this goes, Willis is not the only one that can have a morally questionable character (Roz), and Starfire is probably Bi so then you got more sexually diverse characters (Though DC best gay character was Obsidian)
Uh, but Willis doesn’t have pages and pages of Roz cheesecake shots. And Roz actually has thoughts, feelings, and motivations beyond “it sextime now lol.”
It’s not about the fact that a character likes sex. It’s about the fact that that character is written and drawn as if she were a blow-up doll, with the men in the comic using ventriloquism to make her speak.
She can still be awesome, intelligent, and brave? Well, I don’t find “sleeping with one of the ex-bf’s mortal enemies” awesome. That’s not a “sexual taboo” it’s a “don’t be a prick” thing. Intelligent? She can’t tell human beings apart. Because… well there’s no stated reason. Her species are humanoid in every way except for their orange skin, but humans are completely forgettable? Umm, BS. Brave? Well sure, but 99% of superheroes are “brave.” It’s more notable when one of them is consistently frightened by what they do honestly.
I tend to condemn crap when it rises. This was particularly egregious and very much part of why I don’t read DC comics anymore.
Starfire is my favorite in Tiny Titans too! I guess I just like the innocent little tyke version of her. The cartoon was fantastic! Well made animation with great episodes that were “just dark enough” for young viewers. Oh well. There are other comics to read.
Starfire was an innocent and carefree spirit. Somewhere along the way the writers/editors at DC thought it meant “slut”.
Why when a man have multiples partners he is a “winner” and when a woman does she is a “slut”? I dont like It but those days Kids are “sex friends” that go with just sex no emotion. I dont fin it “evil” or “inapropiate”, Is just sad and bad that they had to recicle old characters. I loved Marv Wolfman, Davin Grayson and Geoff Jhones Titans.
If a dude was in an established sexual relationship with one chick and then he randomly had sex with a coworker (that would make things fairly awkward from then on), nice things would NOT be said about that guy. That specific case is not slut shaming. For evidence, note the scene in X-Factor when Jaime accidentally has two different one night stands on the same night which causes serious problems for the next 50 issues or so.
what?! The guys that were behind Marvel’s doomed reboot are screwing up with DC’s fifth reboot?
DC’s ‘reboot’ has been brought to you by Megabyte and Hexidecimal-evil and chaotic all wrapped up in a nice FU to the fans.
I’m still pissed at them taking Stephanie’s Brown time as Batgirl away from her. She was the best one ever and having her in the role actually made me buy a BatFamily title for the first time in 25 years of reading comics.
I find Irony in your stament, since Dan had a hand in canceling Reboot.
This is NOT glorious, friends.
This is SO good! The best response I’ve read. Thank goodness a new all ages comic store Little Island Comics opened up in my town so I have someone doing a great job curating the best stuff for my son. They even have superhero stuff. Because it’s possible to do superhero comics for everyone.
Come on, thats a lie. Just because Starfire show a little skin It doesnt make Teen Titans useless porn. Besides if Lucy liked Starfire that much she would be reading Marv Wolfman and George Perez. The New 52 cant be that bad, at least I need citation of the script or a download of images.
After all Didio and WB are not the lords of DC, there still is Geoff Jhones and Grant Morrison (I would love if Mark Millar came back, I love his work!). Other than that is always comon that some old nerd complains about “how they ruined comics”, is almost a joke how pathetic It is.
Of course I hate the reboot, I loved Rose and Joseph Wilson, also the relationship with Raven and Gar was pretty well done. Roy Harper was a hell of a character, of course that comes with the price of pushing too much tragedy upon him (greek style). And Nightwing’s Outsiders were Ok.
“Besides if Lucy liked Starfire that much she would be reading Marv Wolfman and George Perez.”
But Lucy’s not a comic book fan. Lucy’s a casual fan of DC in other media who maybe could’ve been converted into a comic book reader (which is supposedly what this relaunch and all the associated publicity is meant to achieve) if some of that old characterization (or any characterization other than the casual attitude toward nudity, really) had been preserved. It wasn’t, and so she’s not going to bother researching the history and rooting through the back catalog, let alone contribute to ongoing revenue by exploring other titles.
You are right, main problem with comic books is that old titles dont get relaunched as old books are, Stephen King have a huge catalog to choose.
But If I was lucy´s friend I could buy her some old books, I bet she would love Geoff Jhones take on the Titans
” Just because Starfire show a little skin It doesnt make Teen Titans useless porn. ”
No, it doesn’t. Starfire has shown plenty of skin in past incarnation. That’s not the problem. The problem is her aggressively approaching multiple men whom she doesn’t know or care about and demanding sex /while giving absolutely no indication that she is enjoying herself./ Then she prances around thrusting her chest and ass at the ‘camera’ while in the background, the men she’s had sex with brag about what studs they are.
THAT is what makes this “useless porn.”
Well said, mikeyten
Indeed. Brilliant summery.
Good! Now you all know how pissed I was when they started whoring up Mary Marvel these past five years or so.
Something else to consider: Starfire (looong before the cartoon version) ignited a lot of controversy when she appeared in bed with Dick Grayson. Unmarried. We didn’t have the benefit of an internet back then or I’m sure it would have gotten more attention than it did (several letters appeared in the letters column of the book calling Wolfman/Perez out on it).
I’m giving this book a day in court because I love Rocafort’s artwork. I won’t condemn it over the course of one issue. We don’t know what’s going to happen to our favorite Tamaranian princess yet.
I loved Wolfman/Perez, they went trough much hardships to make a good comic book, till this day both Davin Grayson and Geoff Jhones had admited that Wolfman and Perez “invented” the Teen Titans.
Is just pathetic how people complaint about how Cartoon Network ruined Teen Titans, now they complaint how DC ruined the Titans and how good the Tv Show was.
Nerds get senile early. Just read your own coments. Times oh they are changing!
It’s pretty simple. I liked Starfire when she was sleeping with Robin. I liked angry tempest in a teapot Starfire when Wolfman/Perez were at the helm. I liked innocent waif Starfire from the cartoon. I liked “letting Lobo see my titties” Starfire from 52. I liked John’s version of Starfire as trying to lead a new, younger group of Titans. I like Starfire. She’s a fun character. To say that there’s any one “right” version of her is infantile. She’s a complex character that can be many things to different audiences. Not sure why people have such issues with it unless we’re afraid of tits again like we were during the Super Bowl about 5-7 years back.
Here’s how I see it. If Lucy loved Teen Titans so much, why wasn’t she buying it way back then instead of waiting a decade? As was mentioned above, why wasn’t she buying “Teen Titans Go!”? DC is a company just like any other and they have to sell what sells. It’s a little naive to think that a company will say “well let’s reboot this character to be more like her cartoon incarnation, the fans of whom don’t buy comics – even comics explicitly based on the cartoon they loved.”
Also, and let me preface this by saying that I have not read “Outlaws” yet, but it is my understanding that EVERYONE in that book is screwed up. Wouldn’t it just be reverse sexism for Starfire to be the only stable character in a group of nutcases? And since this is only the first issue, might it not be acceptable to give the writers a chance to explain why Starfire is suddenly like this before swearing off comics altogether. For all you know it could be a major part of the story. Nobody is jumping off of Batman (at least nobody I know of) because of the supposed change in Dick Grayson: they are giving the writers a chance to explain what’s going on. Yet it is assumed that the changes in Starfire will remain permanent and unexplained?
(Note: I’m not saying there is anything deeper going on – like I said I haven’t read the comic. I just find it odd that when a hero acts wildly out of character, the default assumption is that there is some unknown factor causing it, but when a heroine acts wildly out of character, the default assumption is sexist writing.)
You do not always had the power to buy things you want where you are ten, probably time passed. Years later she discovered starfire came from some comics, heard about the reboot on national tv and decided to try the title with Starfire whom she remembered fondly…
Because Lucy was a child? You remember how that is right? Money, freedom, information, these are all things a child doesn’t have.
I’m all for capitalism. Make your dollar your voice. I appreciate this, but I really think your expectations are unreasonable for someone her age.
It specifically states that Lucy’s decision to check this out is brought about by a combination of nostalgia and DC’s marketing campaign. I don’t see how that’s invalid. It doesn’t portray her as having been an avid comic fan from a tender early age. In fact it seems to be strongly indicated that Red Hood and the Outlaws is her giving comics a shot. Didn’t like what she saw, moved on. It’s all quite valid as a process.
“It’s a little naive to think that a company will say “well let’s reboot this character to be more like her cartoon incarnation, the fans of whom don’t buy comics – even comics explicitly based on the cartoon they loved.””
Their stated objective was to bring in new readers. Might as well say it’s naive to expect a company to say “I’m gonna have all these people who don’t play videogames buy my new videogame console” when that was exactly what they told us they were gonna do with the Wii.
You don’t bring in fresh blood by targeting the people who already buy your product.
As a rule, the absolute worst possible introduction story arc is: “This character is acting differently than normal, why are they acting this way?” Because it’s an INTRODUCTION story arc. Why the eff would you introduce the character in an out of character way? Why would you try to make readers question the actions of a character they do not even know yet? Thus, several comics have done this as their opening arcs because many comics are written by chimps.
Also, please note that most of the previous Starfire material is rendered invalid by the nature of the reboot, so in effect this is her “first” appearance. And this is the way the writer chose to portray her. Hence the sexism complaints.
Oh and finally I HATE that Dick was demoted off Batman. If I had the disposable income to be buying single issues in the first place, I would’ve dropped most of the Bat titles in disgust/protest.
That’s like saying “Action Comics 1″ is Superman’s first appearance. It’s naive at best. Even if these are supposed to be the introductions of characters in the new universe, those characters still have years of stories that create expectations of what they will be like. So it is not crazy to think that a writer would deliberately introduce an incongruity to the character as a story hook. Now whether you think that is good writing or not is up to you (and largely dependent on the skill of the writer in question), but that still ties in with the same concern I had above: If it was a male character – even if you weren’t hooked by the “mystery” it would still just be seen as bad writing.
But… Action Comics #1 is Superman’s first appearance. lol, I know you weren’t referring to the original version, which was the first appearance of that (Golden Age) Superman. But I disagree with your premise. Man of Steel #1 IS the first appearance of the Superman we’ve had since then (until the reboot) and now the new Action Comics #1 is the first appearance of this new Superman who’s a new character.
The new versions are new characters in many cases. Wonder Woman certainly appears to have shared no storylines with her predecessor. Batman compressed his entire career into 10 years or so now, and managed to go through 4 Robins, have a child, and die and return in that time. Oh but maybe not through Final Crisis, possibly through some other method.
My point being, if we don’t know what new Superman was like, any guess we made about an inaccuracy (He’s too mean, he must be a fake) could be completely wrong. Maybe the new Superman will be mean for a while. We don’t know. It is bad writing, but that doesn’t automatically make it safe from being sexist too.
Come on DC and Marvel, make me regret giving up on comic books two years ago. I dare you.
Thank you!! It’s bad enough that they spent years making every panel Starfire was in a pin-up, but reducing her to a sex crazed bimbo with a five minute memory is….I don’t know, I almost said “character assassination” but that’s putting it mildly. And I want to punch the next person who says that this is a positive thing because they’re “sexually empowering” Starfire. This reads like bad fanfic at best and wish fullfillment smut at worst.
Also, I’m kind of confused by the reboot. Some characters have had their entire histories wiped out like Blue Beetle, Superboy, and Supergirl; but the Batbooks I’ve read don’t look rebooted at all. And if the core characters are all younger like the art seems to imply (Wonder Woman and Superman look like they’re early 20s), then Dick, Jason, and Tim probably spent about five minutes each as Robin.
It actually reads pretty similarly to this.
http://www.collegehumor.com/article/3594788/excerpts-from-a-romance-novel-i-wrote-as-a-child
I mean substitute in “That’s lame and you’re lame” and have it go past second base and you’d basically have the starfire portion of this story.
LOL! What’s sad is that’s a little better written than Starfire’s portions of the comic.
What really disgusts me even more is that with her very limited memory (and presumably, limited attention span), her relationship with Jason and Roy seemed more like pet and owner than friends or colleagues.
I loved Starfire from Teen Titans although I loved Raven more. Even before this reboot I didn’t care much for the DC comics the characters were based on. I know comics especially these days are going to be darker and more graphic, but sometimes I like lighter stuff. Regardless fans need to be careful what they pick up and read.
From what I’m seeing, the depiction of women really is bad, but you also nailed a bigger issue – I have no idea how they think these reboots are going to expand the audience more than trivially.
My 10 year old son is just getting into comics, and has been spending at least a half hour a day reading my old G.I.Joe, Transformers, X-Men, etc. all summer long. I was pretty exclusively Marvel when I was a kid, but with the DC reboot, I was hoping that would be a great starting point to read some new stuff together.
Unfortunately from the violence, sex, and horrible treatment of women, there’s no way we’re reading any of this. It’s a massive wasted opportunity in my mind. Looks like we’ll just stick with my old comics for now.
Seems to me the end could say, “Lucy will never by any comic ever again.” While we’re focused on DC, this is really indicative of the Big 2 over all (and a lot of the smaller companies… I’m look at your Grimm’s!).
God, feminists are just impossible to please (Not that I disagree, this shit is crap, but that’s comics for you). Male characters have been all about meaningless emotionless sex for decades and nobody listens when we complain. And yeah dudes may not frequently show skin, but they’re still wearing perfectly skintight outfits showing every last muscle, which is hard for a dude to live up to since you have to both work out AND cut caloric intake to get that.
You really don’t understand the difference between how males are portrayed and women are portrayed, do you.
Yeah, guys are naked and well-muscled in comics. This is done to emphasize their strength.
Girls are naked and bending over in comics. This is done to emphasize their bangability.
The two things aren’t equal. “Guys are hyper-muscled in comics” is a very obtuse way of dodging the real problem.
I love you a little right now. The strength vs bangability dichotomy is one of my biggest problems in general hero comics.
Also, that article you linked to was exactly what I’ve been trying to explain to my husband for years. thank you!
Also, the sentence “feminists are impossible to please” makes me think you’re either a bigot or a troll. Please prove me wrong.
It’s true though Willis! First women complain when there are no women in comics. Then they complain when they introduce the hot girlfriend who totally loves the hero and has sex with him all the time and loves all his hobbies too! Even when they do the deep storyline where she totally gets raped and murdered by the villain! I mean that’s deep, real life issue stuff. The hero almost never has such deep stuff happen to him! Women are just impossible to please.
(The above is a parody of a certain way of thinking. Please don’t ban me for sarcasm)
Yeah, it’s all women in general, not just a selective group.
It’s hard to really say whether it’s possible to please feminists — or women — in comics or not, since so far, nobody’s tried.
…and meanwhile, in Japan, the most popular comic among girls/young women is Shonen Jump, home to series like Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece. It is a magazine primarily aimed at teenage boys.
This is because, unlike DC, the editors at Shonen Jump are serious professionals, who do something called “market research,” and do not need to have their jobs explained to them by a webcomic.
Good one, and just to add to that, I love one piece. Nami is hot, and when I read it in high school, the girls who read it thought so too (not in a lesbian way, more like Shaun Connory is bad ass kinda way)
Dead on. Saw a similar article yesterday and that was it for me, no more DC, ever. Screw them.
People who watch superhero cartoons are primarily male. I don’t have any hard numbers, but I think it would be fair to venture a guess of 2/3rds to 3/4ths.
Most of those males, having been boys when Teen Titans aired and now being college age, would find “Sex-prop” Starfire to be a very… interesting development. See Rule 34, and the fact that they are college-aged males. Two million times at least half is one million, which is a good 10x as many as a “best-case” comic book would get.
David Willis, bad at math.
(This post is made in jest and lovingly)
But isn’t that assuming that the college-aged boys can only be interested in female characters if they are made super sexy, that stereotype reeks of LCD thinking.
Actually, I think that gets to be ‘LICD thinking’…
Then again, I can’t figure out why that’s something like the 3rd-most popular comic on the Net either…there can’t be that many unreconstructed fratbois out there, can there?
Rule 34 is porn of the existing character. There’s a blatant difference between using animated starfire pornographically, and putting snookie in a wig to sell the ensuing sex tape to starfire fans.
Susan’s gender has nothing to do with this.
If I want Starfire, or any superhero/superheroine porn a can spend five seconds googling it and pay nothing instead of spending five minutes driving to the comic shop and paying $3 dollars
David, you totally nailed it! A friend sent me this strip – you now have a new fan.
I had to share this with my readers: http://alldaycomics.com/2011/09/26/dc-new-52-another-take-on-the-starfire-controvesy/
I couldn’t figure out the pingback, so I wanted to make sure you had a heads-up that I linked to your site…
They raped Lucy’s childhood!
Wow! Look at all those comments!
Well I really dislike the new Starfire. It’s as if DC has lobotomized her.
You guys should wait for the Sandman reboot.
…That pose has got to be uncomfortable. I mean, even if you were that desperate to show off your boobs and your butt at the same time, there’s got to be a less painful way to do it…
I’m pretty sure it’s an homage to this: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=311
Okay, I know this comic is already two years old, but the link from today’s comic made me come back here so for anyone else time-traveling like me:
No. Both the Hark a Vagrant comic AND Willis’s illustration of Starfire are references to the ACTUAL COMIC BOOKS that ACTUALLY PORTRAY WOMEN THAT WAY.
I wish I could be so young and naive as to think Willis had to be referencing HaV’s parody comics, but I am not. I know of Rob Liefeld, and the Strong Female Character Pose.
But didn’t DC have an actual comic based on Starfire’s aspect of the carton character, indeed of all the carton characters in their own comic? If those people didn’t start becoming DC fans at that point, while the show was running with its own comic, why would DC assume that 5 years later they would?
Because five years later the fanbase is reaching an age where they have money. In 2003 my luxuries were what my parents bought for me. My bountiful collection of what I considered personal belongings was a stereo, two cds, and a library card. I was just beginning to discover a love of comics through easily available free products like Megatokyo and the library’s assorted collection of quality products like Love Hina, the eXiles, and The Hobbit.
Now I’m a college student with an income that often gets spent on the interests first developed between in that previous time era. This means that my ears perk up when I hear things like “New Digimon Series” and “Hey! Our comic has Starfire in it!” and I start tallying up my budget.
Every other corporation seems to understand that when you hook the children it means that later you have a fanbase of adults with money. The question is how this not secret managed to elude the good folks at DC.
In terms of spending money, I’m going to completely disagree with you based on my OWN personal spending, if we’re going there. I had more free income in high school than I did college as college was a time to spend on school and high school, working and having a generous set of parents, allowed me to have a lot of crap and more free time to enjoy than when I hit college. Individual experiences may vary, but the proof of the comic NOT selling that well to the people targeted to seems pretty concrete.
Highschool, sure. I had tons of money in highschool and no expenses. All I would have had to do to find myself buying Teen Titan’s Go! in highschool is go online and run a search on auxiliary Teen Titan’s related purchases to make, discover the comic, find my local comic book retailers, call them up to see what they have in stock, look up the appropriate bus routes, spend an hour busing down to the retailer and make the purchase. Totally within my power to take the initiative there.
Lucy doesn’t look sixteen in panel one to me though. She’s certainly not pubescent yet. I’d place her somewhere between ten and thirteen, which would more closely match the target demographic of both the cartoon itself and the network and timeslot it played in. At that age this is quite clearly not the case. Once again money, freedom. These are things a ten year old lacks. A ten year old often lacks the ability to independently seek information too, which means that if they’re not told about the comic they’re supposed to want they’re not gonna know about it.
Don’t get me wrong. I can fully appreciate how the company may have come to the conclusion that animated Starfire isn’t the Starfire that sells. I get that just fine, but Lucy is quite plainly representative of a number of people that could have been drawn in to this if Starfire was just an even halfway appealing character to read right now, and which have not been drawn in because someone on the staff decided to give her a Lobotomy. She wouldn’t have had to be an exact copy of Animated Starfire or anything. She just needed to not be this.
I don’t know who it is that says that Women don’t need to be targeted to be brought into comics. They just need to not be actively offended. Someone I follow says that a lot. Anyway the same general idea goes here. They didn’t have to pander to the fans of animated Starfire. They just needed to not make Starfire a repulsive force. That is to say a force that actively repels people who might be checking this out for Starfire away from the comic. Wouldn’t be hard. Just give her a personality. Any personality will do. Perhaps a fully functioning mind and a basic ability to hold meaningful interactions with her fellow person wouldn’t hurt. Not asking for the moon here.
Let’s also remember that however few non comic book reader fans Starfire may have, Arsenal and Red Hood have fewer.
I like that people are worried that an imaginary fan might be disappointed.
Well, Lucy is bascally an alligory for any of the actual fans of the show who might use this book as a starting point in comics. So, she might not be Lucy, but she does exist, and that’s why many of us are upset.
I can’t speak for Lucy, but I can speak for myself. I started because of DC Animated Universe. I liked Batman: TAS, I liked Superman, I liked the Justice League, and I loved the Teen Titans. Starfire was my favorite character from the Teen Titans, and it’s like child Lucy was channeling me word for word with why she likes Starfire. I bought the dvds, and I bought the TTG comics. I tried to follow the then-current Teen Titans stuff, but I just lost interest. It was too continuity-heavy, I didn’t recognize many of the characters, and my favorite couple was broken up. I stopped reading. Seems a lot of people did.
A few years passed, and I heard that DC was rebooting everything. I heard that Starfire was one of the three main characters in Red Hood and the Outlaws, so I bought it for her. I read it, and my exact words were “WTF is this s***?!”
I bought TT: Games, and I loved it. I’ve gone back and started reading the old 1980s Wolfman/Perez run, and I am enjoying it.
I don’t really have much to say about sexism or whatever. I just know that I liked the old Starfire a lot, and this new one not only made me stop buying it myself, but made me tell most of my friends how much I dislike it, and how much it sucks that they changed her character so much.
This is a relaunch supposedly aimed at new readers. When most peoples’ common opinions are going to be influenced by the animated series more than anything else, making her a complete 180 from that character is probably going to alienate them. It certainly alienated me.
“I like that people are worried that an imaginary fan might be disappointed.”
Isn’t that why companies HAVE marketing departments?
Something I’m curious about. In an era where all the major real-life figures in pop culture are running out to clubs and being photographed with no underwear, going on racist rants, drinking themselves to death and so on-why does the comic industry have to lead the way in feminism?
I’m not saying the starfire thing wasn’t completely absurd (Moreso than the Catwoman controversy, anyway) but this is just ridiculous fingerpointing-placing the blame for problems anywhere but ourselves. OH HOW DARE THOSE EVIL COMIC SEXUALIZE WOMEN IT IS NOT AT ALL OUR FAULT. Unfortunately, Starfire is perfectly representative of the culture we live in now.
I’m not defending DC for putting this out-it doesn’t belong in comics. But the bigger fuss made about this, the more people ignore REAL problems, some of them of the exact same type, and much, much more serious.
There are a few issues here, with comics in specific, and popular media in general. To start off, for a long time, comics was such a male-centric arena, that going in to comics shops, for a girl, was somewhat intimidating; they practically screamed “GIRLS NOT WELCOME.” This has changed, at least in some places, I think in large part due to the growing popularity of Japanese comics in the US. Japan being a country that not only doesn’t exclude women, but actively caters to female comic fans. I should point out at this juncture that Japan is often accused (justly) of being a massively sexist society, but even there they realize that there’s a buck to be had by catering to 50% of the population. Yet for some reason US comics don’t even try.
Now it’s definitely not comics alone that have this problem. Films and television shows strangely have a similar slant; the desired demographic is 10-35 year old men. The incredible failure of a majority of film to pass the Bechdel test continues to baffle. Even so, film and television, while more often aimed at the male demographic than the female one, rarely actively excludes the female audience the way comics do. Women are present in film and television, and they do not constantly wear skimpy clothing and pose like living real dolls. I count myself lucky that I don’t live in Italy, for example, where apparently scantily clad ladies posing sexfully is de rigueur on television, even for newscasts.
Now your question comes as to why this is important to discuss. Why make a big deal about it? Well, the truth is that women, especially young and impressionable women, are affected by things like this. Not necessarily this specific comic, which they may never see, but rather the pervasive miasma of “Men do things, while girls are sex objects” which seems to permeate popular culture. I want my nieces to be able to read about/watch heroines whom they can admire, who can inspire them to greatness themselves. Instead they get the idea that the only way to be even visible in the world is show a lot of skin. It’s deeply troubling to me. It would be even more so if I had daughters.
Of course I’m a woman, too, but being that I’m in my 30s I’m less concerned with something like this shaping my personality and goals, and more just upset that if I want to read comics that cater to me, I need to stop reading American comics. That doesn’t sit right.
Er, that was supposed to be “18-35 year old men” Stupid lack of an edit button…
I agree with just about everything in your post.
I just take issue with one thing, and it’s more an implication that I see, not anything you said directly.
The general thrust of your issue with this is that you seem to be implying that Boys can find something to admire in any of their comic book heroes, where girls just can’t seem to find a heroine worthy of that adulation.
Where is all the outrage over the sociopathic anti-heroes that these boys are going to grow up admiring? I don’t think this ‘THINK OF THE CHILDREN’ outrage flying around has any real moral high ground until they start thinking of how it’s going to affect all children, not just the girls.
I’m prepared to be flamed into oblivion for this, but I am really tired of hearing about how put upon and difficult girls have it, while boys are just expected to take whatever they’re given, and often do.
Thank you for this, Fata!
Maybe we criticize comics because we care about them as a medium, and we want them to grow and mature (and not die a slow death). And as an aside, maybe we don’t give a crap about celebrities and their stupid antics. I’m sorry, what exactly are you trying to argue? That until society gets all its shit straightened out, it’s unfair to point out that comics need to change?
You seem to be assuming that there is some top-down solution to society’s ills, and as a result addressing these issues on the individual level is a waste of time. I’m not saying that’s impossible – by all means, if you’ve got ideas then throw them out. But until then, we’re going to call out bullshit when we see it.
Look, I get what you’re saying, but I just feel that making a huge deal of this is somewhat ridiculous. Absolutely, people should not buy this, and make DC realize that this was a stupid direction to take with the character-but does it deserve this level of discourse?
No, not really. Comics is a mixed bag of progressive and neanderthal. Bemoaning the fact that comics is not leading the way with progressive, strong female characters when the rest of the planet can’t even seem to get that right consistently seems sort of oddly unfair, like you expect comics to set an example, and not reflect the times they’re created in.
You’re wrong. Sorry, your opinion is wrong. It deserves exactly as much level of discourse as people are interested in giving it. It might even deserve more, but it certainly doesn’t deserve less.
Don’t try to pull the “Other things are more important” card. Whales are dying, children are starving in Africa, somewhere a clown is crying, and issues of how women are portrayed to the developing generation — to the teenage boys and girls who will become our next generation — in popular media are. still. important.
It’s one of the oldest silencing tactic in the book and it’s not going to fly here.
No, I’m not wrong. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here.
What we have here is a train wreck of a comic, and two differing opinions on it’s importance. My opinion is that this level of hysterical hand-wringing about the future of our children based on this comic is stupid. For two reasons.
1) Comics have always been a subversive medium. People have been whining and moaning and screaming about their soul destroying properties since they found their way onto newstands for the first time. This is not the first time something offensive has been found in a comic, and no matter how much pissing and moaning about how offensive it is, it won’t be the last.
2) No matter how upset you are at DC for allowing this to happen, raging about it on the internet is playing straight into their hands. Look at this thread for an example. Despite the public opinion being overwhelmingly negative, at least one person picked up the comic BASED ON WHAT THEY READ HERE. Your rage against DC? They laugh at it. Any publicity is good publicity for them, and you’re giving it to them, in spades.
Also, I’m not trying to silence anyone. Talk all you like. But I’m entitled to tell you what I think, too. This thread is full of knee-jerk, reactionary protest. No one actually cares about the content of the comic, but bitching about it entitles them to feel as though they’re progressive, enlightened people for a few moments.
So, I’ve changed my mind. If this is the level of discussion elicited, I DO wish people would be silent. Or at least TRY and put their brain into gear before they make any statements about this. But hey, by all means, go on telling me how wrong I am, and continue your self congratulatory faux-progressive rants on how terrible this comic is without ever actually DOING anything about it.
At least if you’d shut up about it, it’d be one less mouth offering free publicity to DC.
Simultaneously claiming that you’re not trying to silence me, then telling me to shut up. Nice double-think there, Bean!
You seem to be under the impression that this is all about the Red Hood comic. If so, you’re missing the point. If this was an isolated incident, then we’d be blasting Lobdell alone. But it’s not just one book, it’s the latest instance in a long trend. Comics have spent decades pandering to the 18-35 male demographic, at the expense of female readers.
And this really isn’t a “corruption of the innocent” sort of thing. Most of us aren’t concerned about whether comics will make our children grow up to be misogynists. What we are concerned about is that the comics industry is actively turning away potential female readers, and making the current ones feel unwelcome. If you haven’t already, go read Laura Hudson’s article that Willis linked. One of the key lines there is, “superhero comics don’t even need to specifically target women as much as they need to not actively offend them.” Every time women in comics get written as props or drawn simply for eye candy, DC might as well print a little box that says, “Thanks for the money, ladies, but your enjoyment was never really our concern.”
Seriously, read that article until the end, then look around at the comments echoing her sentiments. Feel free to ignore any that don’t specify that the writer is a woman (because we all know that anyone upset about something that doesn’t directly hurt them is just some white-knighting, ego-feeding tool). Would you like to go tell them that they aren’t really bothered by this? That they’re just having an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction?
So now that we’ve established what the argument is ACTUALLY ABOUT, why are we making a big deal about it?
1) If we didn’t, then for a large portion of the comic book audience, this would probably pass by without people noticing anything was awry. Because this sort of thing is NORMAL for comics. It’s on the upper bounds, yeah, which is why it’s become the new poster child for the issue, but it’s still in that range of normalcy. And that’s not a good thing.
2) Because making a fuss is part of getting things done. Certainly, not buying the book is good advice. But do you really think that’s all that we need to do? Silent boycotts tend to be pretty ineffective. If the subsequent Red Hood books don’t sell well, DC can come to any of a number of conclusions about why it failed. But if the boycott is accompanied by a big ol’ crybaby tantrum, then the message is a lot more clear. Do you really not see that? Your “playing right into their hands” argument is pretty silly. Sure, they might get a handful of extra sales out of morbid curiosity, but so-bad-it’s-good is not usually a good strategy for growing a brand. Which, if I remember correctly, was the whole point of this reboot.
Whew. You wouldn’t believe how exhausting it is to type that much while refusing to put any thought into my argument. Seriously, I started to come down from my faux-progressive ego trip a couple times, and I thought I felt neurons firing. It was scary.
Oh great, you actually said “hysterical”! That’s the last phrase I needed to be able to call out “Anti-Woman Troll Bingo!”
Do you know what that word means, and where it comes from? If you did, I’m pretty sure you’d make a point to not use it.
Okay, I have to admit this comic finally prompted me to go pick up a copy of what is out there of the “new 52″… from a legitimate source of course…. I didn’t pirate it or anything…. except I kinda did. Which normally I’d feel bad about, but this time I feel it may be the only rational way to experience the horror of what DC is doing without supporting it.
There are just no words. There is just no way to prepare yourself for how bad this reboot turned out. I’m not one of those people who goes “OMG! They’re Raping My Childhood!” every time a company retools a series. I normally laugh at people who say stuff like that. I finally understood that feeling today. While I was reading the Bat-Family titles today it was like I could feel a small part of myself dying, and in the back of my head there was a little girl crying and trying to reassure her Lisa Hayes, Batgirl, and Malibu Black Ops Skipper dolls that it would all be okay because it wasn’t real.
These new bat books were all first issues, you expect to be introduced to characters (and reintroduced to old friends), and you expect there to be a big hook to make you want to read the next one. There wasn’t any of that. Everyone in all of the new titles came across as completely flat. There was just no characterization. None at all. It was like everyone was mildly autistic with blank affects. All of the (massive amount of) sex going on did nothing for the story but add T&A. The hook apparently is that everyone is trying to write The Boys without realizing that when you go to that level of grimdark it is meant to be ironic. It just… bad… no think more about scary books.
I will say that Morrison’s Action Comics was interesting, but it’s Morrison so that’s kind of to be expected. The thing is that while it’s good, it doesn’t feel flagship title good. The basic premise of a modern retelling of pre-war Golden Age Superman is neat, but to me it feels more like a conceptual miniseries than something that can work long term in a main continuity, especially with it mixed up with the Justice League.
Ironically enough (considering I was ragging on it a lot before I read it) the new Hawk and Dove is worth a read. The art is absolutely terrible, the story is only mediocre, but somehow it kind of works. It is not good. It just isn’t bad either, which makes it something of a standout title among this steaming pile DC has left on our collective lawn.
So yeah, big Thanks Willis for making me want to see the train wreck.
Who goes from childhood to college in 5 years?
The show started ten years ago.
Again, math.
Uh, Willis it’s 2011. 2003 was EIGHT years ago. Who’s bad at math now? (Given, I still feel old knowing that.)
I’m allowed to round! And even so, a girl who’s 18 now was ten eight years ago.
This one generates nearly 400 comments.
yet http://www.shortpacked.com/2006/comic/book-2-pulls-the-drama-tag/06-the-drama-tag/theboner only got 7. “The boner” should be a tattoo on batman’s ass. Quotes and all.
That comic is really old and as such predates the current comment system. It actually got 76 comments.
Well done. I agree completely.
Starfire on the Teen Titans cartoon was a 180 opposite of what she has always been in the comics. The new Starfire in Red Hood may not be good, but she is closer to the comic original than the cartoon ever was.
I disagree. Cartoon Starfire and comic book Starfire were both very passionate. “Passion” is how I’d sum up either Starfire in one word. New comic book Starfire doesn’t seem to have much emotion at all, and has sex not out of love, but out of boredom.
Comic Starfire was passionate and loving, but in a perfect body and a skimpy costume. She has always appeared in provocative poses. She was never the mental child she was on the cartoon.
Why are you telling me things I know. I say “What makes Starfire Starfire is her passion” and you’re telling me “but she’s always naked.”
I KNOW THAT SHE IS OFTEN NAKED. I am addressing her PERSONALITY. This is NOT about SEX.
So if she was still drawn in cheesecake poses, wearing next to nothing, but acted like cartoon Starfire, would you have an issue or not?
Well, she’d have to act like a grown-up cartoon Starfire, because cartoon Starfire is clearly characterized as a young teenager, and sexualizing and objectifying teenagers is kind of gross. (Which is another reason why I tend to prefer the cartoon’s Teen Titans over the “actual” Teen Titans, because ewww.)
(And no, a grown-up cartoon Starfire is not And The Outlaws’ Fuck Machine Seven-of-Nine.)
But yes, I would still have one issue with an objectified Starfire who acted more like the cartoon Starfire, instead of two issues (both objectification and mischaracterization). Objectifying is only fair if it’s equal. If Starfire’s going to be given an entire page for her to strut around like she’s in a swimsuit catalog photoshoot, we’re gonna have to see close-ups of Jason Todd’s barely-clothed, barely-contained package as well, not just him and Roy sitting around in the background high-fiving over their slamdunk sexual conquest.
Hmmmm. Would women premit cheesecake and long as there’s equal beefcake? Or does cake all around offend? (no Portal jokes please.)
More time-traveling:
Part of the problem with cheesecake is the institutionalized power imbalance. Even if you had men and women equally objectified in a comic book, it would do more damage to women than to men.
Plus, personally I don’t want men to join women in the broken-spines-vacant-stare-sex-doll club: I want everyone to leave that club.
Which is not, ftr, the same thing as wanting everyone to stop being sexy. You can be really, really sexy without being simultaneously objectified.
The problem with saying Comics Starfire should be more like Titans Cartoon Starfire is that a lot of the characterization in the cartoons is based on whitewashing the origins of the cast. Starfire’s origin involves a lot of overtones of body horror and rape that leave her with motivations that are based on a take back the night mentality. She’s always had a degree of an aggressive sort of sexuality, but that used to have tragic overtones of just being one more aspect of her life in which she needed to maintain control. That’s not really a story you can tell kids show.
Having 6said that, Geoff Johns did a wonderful job of establishing an older Starfire who was a lot more at peace with her life and was much more accessible to someone who only knew her from the cartoon. The reason nobody was complaining about him (much) when she was doing fan service all the time in 52 (is that now the “old 52″?) was that she had a real story to go with it. The buddy cop movie relationship she developed with Animal Man is, I think, one of the finest stories ever told in comics. She teased Animal Man with her sexuality, but (I think it’s a sign I read too much manga when I find myself saying stuff like this) it was in a very kid sister to her older brother sort of way. My point is that 52 was such a strong story that it motivated me to go to the comic shop every week to pick up the next issue, while the new 52 has actually managed to demotivate me so much I doubt I’ll pirate anymore of the run.
While I’m ranting, I’ve heard a lot of people try to defend the portrayal of women in the new 52 by citing Wonder Woman and Batgirl. Wonder Woman is not bad, but it is such a let down after the Straczynski run that I don’t know anyone who is a fan who isn’t underwhelmed by the reboot. There isn’t enough in the first issue to form much of an opinion, and to me the possessed drunk party girls as villains doesn’t speak well of the feminist virtues of the title. Batgirl is okay-ish. It’s Gail Simone, she writes Sex and The City with spandex. Don’t get my wrong I like that sort melodrama, but I’ve always thought she writes for the kind of women who aren’t going to read comics no matter how you brand them. I don’t really have a problem with her stuff, including the new Batgirl, other than it isn’t really my cup of tea.
Never once did I say it was about sex. My point is if you accept the Animated Starfire as the definitive version (which I absolutely don’t, I fell in love with comics Starfire 20 years earlier and don’t see anything of her in the cartoon) than you would be surprised and possibly offended by any comics version of Starfire before or after the animated series. And partly because she wears a skimpy costume.
The reboot Starfire looks like the old comic Starfire more than the animated Starfire. But the old comic Starfire’s personality had a lot more in common with the animated Starfire and almost nothing in common with the reboot Starfire. *That* is what I dislike about the new version.
You are absolutely right! DC is really letting down its readership with these odd and insulting decisions.
True story. Nicely played.
Good one, David! Comic writers, even some good ones, seem to want to write the gender first and the character second when it comes to women. Maybe it’s time somebody should tell them they’ve had it backwards all this time.
I have information relevant to this conversation!
http://io9.com/5844355/a-7+year+old-girl-responds-to-dc-comics-sexed+up-reboot-of-starfire
That post is +1,000,000 for Truth, Justice, and Epic Win
Must… repost… link…
Cartoon Starfire was fairly well-known, and was a fairly PG-rated version of the Wolfman character. Sure, she wasn’t a sexpot, and the “foreigner” aspects of her character were played up for comedy, but she was open, emotional, romantic, and proactive. NuStarfire is none of these.
Cartoon and Comic Starfire didn’t share much, but they did have one very big thing in common: they basically liked everyone, whether platonically, romantically, or physically. It was this universal love that led to an atmosphere of happiness from both characters. NuStarfire ditches that in favor of becoming the male fantasy of the strong woman who wants to jump on his dick; the equivalent of including lesbians in stories because the writer wants them to have sex. It doesn’t advance the idea of the sexually liberated woman; it just lets you masturbate to it.
What’s more, it also ignores the most famous version of Starfire – in fact, it distances her from it. Oracle loses the chair so Batgirl can be a redhead again, and Starfire, a character notorious for being something of a nude emperor when it comes to her sexuality and how people attempt to justify it, just becomes even more of a whore.
they had a comic based on the teen titans cartoon. no one bought it
No one buys any comics.
Sales for all comics have been in the tank for years, in part because when the switch to the direct market basically made it so the only people who were looking for comic would find them. This was fine during the late 80′s early 90′s when their was a massive sales boom from speculators. When the bubble burst sales took a nose dive and because comics could no longer easily attract new readers, the sales haven’t recovered.
“Teen Titans Go!”, the comic adaption, outlasted the TT cartoon by two years (the show ended in 2006, “Go!” in 2008). I heard it was only cancelled to make way for “Tiny Titans,” although the last issue of “Go!” seems to have shipped after the first issue of “Tiny Titans.”
“DC respects women.” DC has officially stated that it *must* be true.
(Nope, could not write that with a straight face…
)
dc wasnt responsible for the cancellation of teen titans on carton network. cartoon network had a working agreement with warner bros. to produce the show because warner owns that property(they own the right to produce these characters in an animated format), cartoon network supposedly got fed up with having their hands tied somehow by this agreement and cancelled the show. but yeah, dc aren’t helping themselves with this.
I understand everyone’s anger about the reboot, but you are forgetting one very important factor. “Sex sells.” all in all comic companies are simply that, companies. they will use whatever factors will achieve the best sales. they don’t care about the readers, who aren’t that large to begin with, since the creation of digital media. So sorry to make you angry, but they’ll probably get more sales from the pubescent masses. since they can legally be sold to minors.
I don’t think you understand everyone’s anger about the reboot if you think the problem is the sex.
it was meant as a broad spectrum term, not just intercourse.
Willis tweeted this “fixed” Starfire comic yesterday. It really illustrates how you can still do the stupid cheesecake but make Starfire an actual, you know, character instead of a sex prop.
Now that comic still wouldn’t be a comic I would want to read because of the pornstar boobs and the Strong Female Characters posing, but at least it wouldn’t be something so actively offensive to me. It would be something I would just ignore, instead of something that makes me hate DC and wish for their demise.
Try removing sexuality from the issue entirely. Try and for example imagine how we would react to post-relaunch batman having a goldfish memory and caring about no one and nothing to the point of having forgotten about Dick, Jason, and Tim after they went their separate ways. A Batman who spends a page fighting crime before spending the rest of the comic hanging around Wayne manor inexpressively. Is this the greatest interpretation of Bruce Wayne we’ve encountered so far?
For that matter, try and imagine this design as an entirely new character. He’s the newest member of Teen Titans and calls himself “Memento”. Is he your favorite new member?
It’s… just not fun to read. I don’t feel that lobotomy is the proper way to go about redesigning a character.
boo hoo hoo, Starfire in comics has never acted like the cartoon counterpart. She’s been having meaningless sex for the past 10 years (at least) with Dick Grayson and numerous others (most recently Captain Comet before the reboot). She even bathed nude in front of Animal Man during the original 52.
http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/10782716361/the-response-to-the-starfire-strip-was
Yup.
heh, I like how your hair is blowing back
Thanks for this – I’m basically a real-life Lucy, even though I was much more partial to Raven myself…
I mean, I’ve always wanted to check out comics too, but it’s annoying that all of the women look like strippers in comic books…
Same, but no all of them looked like strippers. While it can be said Starfire was “stripperish” in the comics, Raven wasn’t as bad. She wore the same outfit in both the cartoon and comics most of the time(a little revealing, but not bad), and she wasn’t a “sex crazy whiny bitch”…Sorry Starfire. In fact Raven didn’t have that many relationships either. I think Raven only had two relationships(one of them being with Beastboy)…before going insane…again. Although it can be said a good amount of female comic characters either have emotional issues,love issues, or go crazy.
Well, now that I’ve had a little more time and my thoughts on the matter have become slightly more coherent, please allow me to provide my two cents in a slightly more coherent fashion.
It honestly seems (to me, at least) like they deliberately wrote Starfire’s character so that no effort had to be put into her characterization beyond playing her up for fanservice. With any character, even an OC, this would be offensively misogynistic and reprehensible in execution. With Starfire, a character beloved for her devotion to all she treasured, it’s particularly shameful.
DC needs to realize that you can’t hinge entirely on new readers–you have to take the old guard into consideration as well.
I dunno, considering what Starfire’s original costume looked like back when she was created… I see no big changes there.
In personality, sure. I still don’t see why they had to break up her relationship with Dick.
Historically, you’re absolutely right about that first costume. Subjectively, one could argue that George Perez’s drawing style was still a bit too cartoonish to really be offensive. These new illustrators take it up a notch or 2 or 100.
*clicks the link*
… good lord, I thought you were exaggerating the costume in your take up there. If anything you’ve toned it down. WTF?
And if I was to openly read something like Stripperella or the old Dirty Pair comics people would think I was a perv. Tame in comparison.
So were they.
They originally wanted Star’s swimsuit to be semi-transparent.
…Why….
Thanks for adding to this DC Reboot nonsense with a personal, yet logical point of view. Remember the good old days when DC was bragging about how much they listened to women at the cons this year? What a crock! It’s one thing to have clearly-labeled “naughty comics”; sexualizing this well-known kid’s character (2 million viewers) is just plain dumb.
Just because Teen titans had alot of viewers doesn’t mean anything. It was pretty much free to watch whenever it aired. It wasn’t like there were kids begging their parents to buy cable so they could see teen titans. 10,000.00 people (in your numbers) paid money to read. Gave actually money instead of just sitting on their butts and watching something for free. Your logic is faulted in that their the same thing. Getting someone to do something that’s free to them is always going to be easier. So your two million viewers means nothing compared to 10,000 people who spent their money to read the actually comics and not the show made for children. Plus if the example little girl had picked up an actually comic in any of the five years she would have a right to complain about the character. But since all she has seen and done was watch one show aimed at children and never contribute to the world of comics (where she could have voiced her opinion and changed the focus) then leave the comics to the fans and go watch Barney where all they do is hug and love one another. Comics are action/comedy reflections of current times not a children’s show aimed at teaching you to be nice and always get along.
You seem to have missed the point, DC could have widened its demographics by making parts of the DCAU canon and made more sales. The reboot was done to increase sales under the ultimatum WB is going to dissolve the comics division and DC’s characters will only be used in cinema, programes and computer games. They’re failing on a businessn level because of stupid editorial mandates, which was the problem last time.
I love it when you punk DiDio. No one has it coming more than that sexist idiot.
Now if you’d only care about Steph Brown and Cass Cain being put on a bus, that would make my day.
So did you actually plan to make Lucy a character when you introduced her here, or did you think of it later on?
The one thing that some people have yet to understand is the Starfire in the Teen Titans cartoon and the one in the comic (both old and re-boot) are totally different characters. The biggest reason is the wirtiers couldn’t give the Cartoon version her comic book backstory and keep it PG. So the mentality of the cartoon Starfire and the mentality of the comic version are going to come out differently. She still does have feelibg (good feelings) for Dick Grayson AKA Robin I or Nightwing. But it wasn’t meant to be in comic book land. The way she acted in the start of the comic was do to her being in isolation for so long and thinking she’s not wanted any where or by any one. But as the Red Hood and the Outlaws series goes on she does develop a deep bond with both Jason (Red Hood) and Roy (Arsenal). When she and Roy think that Jason’s in trouble when he went back to Gotham. She’s the first to greet him saying that she wouldn’t know what she’d do if anything bad happened to him. She even hints to her sister (who’s somewhat good) that she’s starting to fall in love with Roy. So yes, I am defending the action of this Starfire, not DC’s need to re-boot everything.