DC at SDCC: Provocative (Grant Morrison in a Dress) is Good? (Final Part, Saturday)
Jul. 27th, 2011 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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scans_dailyThis is it! The final part of this massive clusterfuck! But first, legality!
DC’s New 52 Panel (Saturday Morning)
Winick says that with Batwing, he’s trying to mix superheroes with real-world issues in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He called Africa “a very politicized and ravaged country”.
“Now THERE’s that white privilege I was talking about! Good job we have mighty whitey to tell us how horrible of a “COUNTRY” Africa is! I get a huge feeling Winick is going to use this book as his mouthpiece for his opinions on the politics and culture of Africa, which he will grossly misunderstand and possibly turn into a "look at those SAVAGES" situation.”
DiDio made a list of heroines in starring roles. He says DC has the best percentage of females in starring roles.
“DC, DIVERSITY IS NOT ABOUT NUMBERS. Why don’t you guys GET THAT!? Also, I call bullshit on that anyway. Besides, Marvel is employing far more female creators (Deconnick, Immomen, Rios, Liu, etc.)”
Morrison says that Cass still exists in the DCU.
“Yay Cass!”
The same Batgirl fan from the panel who asked about heroines on covers asked this panel why there weren’t more female creators in DC. DiDio says, GET THIS, they hire the best writers and artists they can! And the audience applauds! Morrison mocks her by saying he looks great in a dress, then turns around and encourages the female fans to submit work to DC.
“So, DiDio implies that the female talent out they isn’t good enough for DC, and then Morrison mocks a justifiably upset fan. Then he turns around and saves face by encouraging the female fans to submit their work. Presumably to be told that they aren’t good enough for the wealth of talent that DC only employs, like the kind that puts out Cry for Justice or the Rise of Arsenal.”
DC’s The Dark and The Edge Panel (Saturday Afternoon)
Lemire says Animal Man’s main character is actually Maxine, Buddy’s daughter. She gets her own powers.
“Which is interesting, but I can’t help but feel it takes away from the “everyman” qualities Buddy was supposed to have”
Cornell SPECIFICALLY calls Horsewoman a “diversity character, to state it crudely”, and compares her to the Man with No Name [Clint Eastwood’s Western Character]
“Good Job Cornell, you just took away the good feelings I had for you. Turns out his wheelchair user was just there for diversity cred!”
Cornell says Apollo and Midnighter are still gay, but they meet for the first time in the first issue, and their romance is slow. He also says that if he changes anything he won’t expect to come out of the “Gays in Comics” Panel alive.
“Okay, I do like the idea that they don’t immediately jump down each other’s pants, like they did originally. But apparently Cornell feels like the only thing wrong with changing their sexualities would be the negative fan reaction? Uh, you shouldn’t change their sexualities because that would homophobic, not because you fear how the fans would react.”
This one is the worst. DC replies to the negative fan reaction towards Harley’s new costume by saying “Provocative is good”, but says that Harley still has the same personality.
“REALLY DC, why is PROVOCATIVE only good for your FEMALE heroes, so you can dress them is as objectifying clothes as possible, but your male heroes wearing briefs on the outside is SO BAD it needed to be changed IMMEDIATELY.”
“Oh and just to add, included were some pages from an unknown book showing a gratuitous scene with strippers. I think it was either from Blackhawks, Suicide Squad, or Sgt. Rock.”
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:19 pm (UTC)Also, your picture is borked. Host it with abload.de or something.
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:30 pm (UTC)out of curiostiy does Jewish count as white? i'm not entirey clear on that.
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:33 pm (UTC)I don't think Morrison was mocking HER, i think he saw a difficult situation and was trying to diffuse it through humor. was it ill timed and not at all well thought out? MOST DEFINATELY!
Dido on the other hand? (yeah i heard the audio) yeah he sounded really hostile
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:37 pm (UTC)Which is not to say that I haven't been treated like shit by Gentiles before, or just treated with lack of respect/concern borne of ignorance.
However, I was not badly or disrespectfully treated by the dominant religious group/culture in my country because of the color of my skin.
If that makes sense.
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:44 pm (UTC)i hope you don't mind me asking, but are you a Jewish Male?
side bar, i don't think it's fair to say that he is going to go off and
IMHO that is a pretty extreme leap. might he use it as a mouth piece? will he get some things wrong.... maybe... but we don't know. I for one often get confused over whether or not Africa is a country or a conitnent (give me a few seconds to think and yeah, i know its a continent. though my first thought is usually country) and this is coming from a Gay latino male.
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:52 pm (UTC)All this stuff about the "country" Africa makes me wonder if anyone besides me remembers Tales From The Heart. Maybe I'll dig around in the closet this weekend and see if any of my copies are scan-worthy. It's the only comic I own that attempts to depict an African country realistically. (Specifically, it's set in Bangui, and told from the POV of a White American who joins the Peace Corps in the 1980s.)
And not that I'm an NYT cheerleader, but a few years back there was this.
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 08:56 pm (UTC)Seriously, DC, you hired fucking Rob "FUCK! MY SPINE!" Liefeld. You're telling me you couldn't find anybody -male or female- better than him?
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:59 pm (UTC)I still look foward to Seven Samurai (/Magnificent Seven, same difference). in midieval times. I think Horsewoman may have been crippled already, then Editorial or PR or whoever just ran with it in a misguided effort to make up for Babs getting het bipedal locomotion back.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:01 pm (UTC)Glad to see people are paying attention though.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:03 pm (UTC)Though honestly his suggestion for women to submit to DC is also not very helpful. DC doesn't accept blind submissions. He may or may not know that, so once again, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. But yea, still not winning any points for that advice.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:05 pm (UTC)anyways. part of the reason I like Judd Winnick is his outspokeness about gay rights and gay issues. can he get soap boxy? yes (especially early on). BUT he has good intentions and for the most part he does well.
i'd like to beleive that here too he has good intentions... only the book will tell.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:07 pm (UTC)“Okay, I do like the idea that they don’t immediately jump down each other’s pants, like they did originally. But apparently Cornell feels like the only thing wrong with changing their sexualities would be the negative fan reaction? Uh, you shouldn’t change their sexualities because that would homophobic, not because you fear how the fans would react.”
No offence mate, but I think that you might be over reacting a little. He, like Morrison, was trying to be funny but seems to have been ill timed in that regard so people think that he was just trying to be flat out offensive.
And in regard to Horsewoman, yeah it was ill advised for him to bluntly say that she was there for diversity's sake, but considering they're doing away with Oracle this might be the only forum that DC has avaliable now to show that a wheelchairbound woman can just be as badass or strong a character as Barbara in Batgirl mode (in what I'm almost certain is an exosuit).
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:08 pm (UTC)Uh . . . then she wouldn't be wearing that. She'd be wearing something goofy.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:08 pm (UTC)I honestly don't know what to make of Winick's comments anymore. I don't think I can be hopeful about what he'll present of Congo (or Africa period), but I'll still browse through Batwing just to see how it'll go. (I know I won't be touching Catwoman.)
Is it bad that I wish someone would effectively make a point to DiDio? Maybe not in the most polite or reasonable way possible. (I think I couldn't be bothered by that post about Marvel yesterday because DC has just made me so ...I just have a serious headache with them.)
For a while, I just thought, once this Flashpoint and new origin stuff ends and gets retconned or whatever, everything will be okay! But ya know... No. It probably won't be. Why is it not that easy? ;n;
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 09:12 pm (UTC)yeah i think so too, her suit seems very tech heavy.
I agree with your post here. Morrison and Cornell were just trying to lighten the mood. they had good intentions, just bad timing. They Both SEEM to love and respect the characters they are writing (With morrison also claiming to be a big fan of Oracle, Cass, and Steph, if i am correct he hated her death, but don't quote me there)
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:13 pm (UTC)Oh, and naturally I dug out my TFTH comics and realize that I should have said the main setting is "Bangui, in the Central African Republic."
[facepalm] I should be working at DC. :o :o :o
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:17 pm (UTC)Next you'll be telling me breasts come in different sizes and that women don't stand every where posing sexily.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:21 pm (UTC)again these are all just my opinions.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 09:31 pm (UTC)To be honest, Dan Didio... Doesn't. He treats DC as a business, which it is, but it seems that he's going for what he feels would be best for sales or to promote publicity for a comic, even if it's at the detriment of storytelling.
For example, Mark Waid that that Dan hated 52, and would loudly walk around proclaiming as such. Didio would go on to say that Countdown was "52 done right", even though it was a massive critical failure.
I believe that the logic behind this was that since 52 was a pretty insular series (with Infinite Crisis acting as a buffer at the beginning and One Year Later acting as one on the end), people didn't have to buy the series to know what was going on elsewhere in the DCU for the most part.
Having a major event that wasn't a required read could argueably be seen as being part of a bad business plan.
So Countdown, which dipped and weaved into various other series that tied into it's story, for example, Amazons Attack, Death of the New Gods, Salvation Run etc. etc. it made having to buy EVERYTHING a requirement to understand what the heck was going on most of the time. This lead to some really bad storytelling where characters would appear and disappear with no explanation as to WHY.
And also, the fact that the series was being dictated to writers instead of Paul Dini etc. being allowed to create something on their own lead to the storyline dissolving into an incoherent mess as they were being passed snippets of Grant Morrison's plans of Final Crisis without getting the whole picture.
For example, Mary Marvel going evil. In Final Crisis her being possessed by Desaad made sense because Morrison's versions of the New Gods had a history of that kind of thing, and Desaad (the God of Perversion) taking over her brain goes a lot way to explain her sudden inclination for microskirts and get literally getting off of absorbing magic.
In Countdown, they had the note that Mary was going to go evil, but no explaination as to WHY this was. SO they had to make up a reason. A reason that seemed to fit in with the boneheaded idea that having evil powers made you an evil person, and that moral grey was for suckers.
And even when they eventually managed to rescue the storyline with Mary managing to struggle through her own little redemptive arc, the fact that she was redestined to get possessed by Desaad made her sudden and, most offensively, fully concious decision to go evil again after getting her old powers back made the whole plotline completely pointless.
Heck, IF they had had Darkseid forcing the powers on her that would have been in keeping with the following storyline, but Noooo, people who do bad things are automatically EVILLLLL (unless they are Hal Jordan) and even when it looks like they're turned to the lightside, the lure of villainy calls to them like heroin to a character from Trainspotting.
Blech. This has gone on for a long time, but I did my dissertation on the media's coverage of Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman, so I guess this might be force of habit a little.
I'll be quiet now.
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 09:37 pm (UTC)