I have really enjoyed reading DC Comic's reboot of their most popular characters, collectively referred to as
The New 52. Well, most of the titles have been good. But I am going to have to quit. I've already been cutting back, but now that I know the creative direction they will be taking (downhill) and the insidious policies behind creating and managing their "creative" teams, I can't be a part of it, and don't want it sullying my eyeballs.
The writers behind the absolutely amazing Batwoman have quit, after management clamped down on their creative story lines, which had been mapped out for years. The final straw: forbidding Batwoman from marrying her girlfriend, even though their relationship and proposal have been met with much fanfare and popularity. Later, the execs said they were not shutting down the marriage because they are lesbians, but are making it a company-wide policy that heroes cannot have a stable or happy personal life, and certainly not a happy marriage. (Although I can't help but notice that they killed off Green Lantern's same-gender fiancé moments after the proposal was accepted.) Let's set aside the absolutely asinine theory that good and dedicated people with super powers (or bat-training) can't have lives that include other good and dedicated people. Clearly, not all heroes stories should include a happy personal relationship or spouse, but at least one hero, particularly this one they way she has been written, absolutely can. There is enough other struggle, personal and professional, to keep Batwoman swimming in pathos for years. Surely not for all heroes, but could an imaginative writer create a world with truth, justice, the American way,
and a wife? Yes. That's what would make a successful creative writer. So to make it a creative edict that "writers cannot hold more than one idea in their head simultaneously" is to cripple a creative team.
Speaking of cropping a creative team, DC has gone out of there way to make sure "certain" types of creative people cannot be included on their tam, and have designed an application process to make sure that only those male misogamists only apply. Calling for new artists, the graphic test is to draw in four specific scenarios, a popular female character committing suicide, naked. How the hell did this get past legal? Much less any man who is a manager and not a total and complete douchebag. I imagine "telling a good rape joke" will be part of the interview.
Think Progress has a great article lloking at these two particular developments, and what it reveals about the corporate ideaology:
What The Naked Harley Quinn Suicide Contest And Batwoman’s Banned Wedding Tell Us About DC Comics.
What it tells me is that this is a company and a creative product that from now on makes me sick, and is a corruption of my lifelong love of comic books.
Excerpt:
If people entering the contest had the option to pick from one of the four scenarios, the requirement might be less distasteful. But as Callie Beusman points out at io9, this isn’t just a content issue, it’s an employment issue. “What’s perhaps most disturbing about this contest — other than the way in which it showcases DC’s blatant disregard for women — is that it essentially prohibits comic artists who are opposed to the eroticization of violence against women from applying for the honor of drawing a strong female character,” she writes. In a way, DC is weeding out artists who are uncomfortable with the scenarios they’re putting forward, or who have other ideas about what might be interesting about Quinn (or other female characters).
If that’s what they’re looking to do, it’s yet another sign that DC might do well to drop any pretentions that it cares about readers, male and female alike, who care about rich character development for superheroines and supervillainesses. And if it’s an unintentional result of poor contest design, then once again, DC Comics is providing a clinic on their inability to imagine a full range of possibilities in the real world, much less in the fictional ones they manage.
Over at i09, there is
more. An artist is quoted there commenting,
"I'm a sequential art student, and I find it a bit appalling that the requirement for panel 4 is essentially drawing a female character committing suicide naked. The sexualization of suicide is something I will not be putting effort into for a talent search. I'll let the other fanartist draw naked Harley in a bathtub. I'll gladly draw anything but sexualized characters and suicide scenes for a very well-developed character."
Well said.
Update: From
Comic Book Resources—
Memo to DiDio: Superhero marriages don’t have to be happy
Where we differ is with this apparent perception that marriage is a perpetual sunny walk through the park. Without turning this into a Henny Youngman routine, the truth is that any relationship, married or not, takes work and doesn’t guarantee “happily ever after.” While this is far from breaking news, the United States has a 53 percent divorce rate (although I think I should be more troubled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the government agency tasked with tracking that statistic).
That doesn’t mean every superhero marriage should end in divorce, but there are countless ways to stick to the stated edict while still allowing one character within the Batman universe to marry.
