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beccatoriaI went back and forth on posting this. I'm doing it because I realised I felt pretty strongly about it, but some people I respect are on the other side of the line. So I don't want to be a jerk.
But dudes, I think we're being played here. I think we're all looking for vindication regarding our anger about other things, and have obligingly been provided with a brand new DC pinata, but all we're doing is beating a book many of us have been waiting for to a bloody, inky pulp.
I really think we need to separate how angry we are about the Batwoman thing from the Harley Quinn thing because basically Rich Johnston broke the story in a sensationalised headline on Bleeding Cool (in an article that opened with some sort of line about how it was a sensationalised headline) and now everyone's freaking out with absolutely no attention paid to two pertinent pieces of information that were freely available at the time of this competition's genesis but that no news coverage that I saw thought fit to mention.
1) that the comic was a fourth-wall breaking loony toons style depiction of Harley's search for an ongoing artist for her new series.
2) that it was being written by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti who have a long history of creating fantastic, fan-favourite comic book runs with female characters who have, shall we say, a previously complicated and/or difficult and/or ludicrous relationship with being sexualised by the media. Power Girl is the obvious one, but I'd also point to Ame-Comi Girls and The Pro.
This book is so up their alley it's like they've been fucking typecast and everything about that typecasting says that this isn't going to be some creepy sexualisation of suicide.
But it reads like that on the page? No! No it doesn't! It's the fourth in a panel of surrealistic images of Harley attempting in various ways to kill herself/being in danger, each one with a different expression on her face. She's dodging lightning while waving around a detached cell phone tower looking panicked, or she's rolling her eyes because crocodiles won't eat her even though she's covered in raw chicken. These are not images that invite you to imagine the final panel as some sort of sexy-tragic death.
But it doesn't matter because it's depicting sexualised suicide? Well, I kind of disagree it's necessarily sexualised. An artist might choose to draw that, but I think it'd clash with the tone of the script. If we have her head and shoulders above a ton of blue water and bubbles, is that really all that sexualised? As compared to like, everything else in comics?
But it's still depicting suicide! As a joke! Well, okay, sure, but it's also in a comic where we know that she's breaking the fourth wall and auditioning artists and we have no idea what she's saying. Is the artist talking shit to her? Is she complaining at the artist that he's put her in such a hackneyed plot? Context isn't a fucking weakness. It's not automatically an attempt to excuse bullshit or make a terrible thing better. Sometimes it's crucial to the fundamental thing that's being said.
Sure, I roll my eyes at "ironic" depictions of shit all the time. If you draw a supersexy escher chick in a comic and then "hang a lantern" on it, I'm not gonna be first in line to defend it because it was "making a point". But part of that's because then the thing you say you're calling out, you're also delivering at the same time - i.e. the sexy escher chick to look at. If the problem is suicide, well, I kind of think that you remove that same "providing it while pretending to condemn it," problem, if Harley is mocking the writer.
Which okay, we don't know she is because we really know nothing for sure. Although Jimmy Palmiotti's tweets and facebook posts on the matter certainly seem really sad and sorry that he confused anyone and stress that the impression people have of the tone of the sequence is mistaken - he continually stresses that it's a sequence where Harley and the artists/writers are in communication and actively discussing the situations that she's in.
I guess this makes me saddest because I don't think that most people took the time to stop and think about the situation, because they were just mad at DC, or because they legitimately didn't know the history of the creative team, or the character herself, or the totality of the script because most news outlets ran with the sensationalised headline and little else.
And fine, there are certainly reasons to be mad at DC. And there is a painful wider context about the treatment of women in comics. And I don't blame anyone for NOT being familiar with the creative team or the concept of the issue in question. But here is my fear:
That we are tearing down a comic that is written by two people with long histories of respectfully handling characters like Harley by offering sharp commentary rooted in humour. Harley Quinn in a book anything like their run on Power Girl would do wonders to help the character reclaim some of the dignity that was stolen from her during the relaunch. Putting Amanda Conner on a Harley Quinn book would have sounded like some kind of impossible, redemptive dream to many of us after we saw her debut in Suicide Squad.
I'm worried we're screaming at what will turn out to be a really fantastic - and all too rare - solo female-lead comic that's smart and funny and not based in sexual exploitation, and also, co-written by one of the most respected female artists in the industry.
Obviously I don't think Amanda Conner is immune to co-writing a sexist thing, or that supporting her work is automatically the Right Thing To Do, but I do think that the fact DC is launching a fan-favourite female-lead book, co-authored by a fan-favourite half-female creative team, who have a really strong history of actively subverting the brutal sexualisation of women in comics, is...being totally lost here amidst the desire to be angry at DC Comics.
And just...it's okay to be mad at DC Comics for all those other reasons. We don't need this one too, we really don't, we already have enough. I worry we're just depriving ourselves of what might turn out to be a really awesome comic. Because the narrative of it being an exploitative mistake has already been written.
Update: So the book finally came out. For the record, the page is based around the artist getting confused about the fact that Harley was in a team called the Suicide Squad and Harley getting pissed at him for misunderstanding and threatening to feed him a sledgehammer. They also changed the last panel so instead of the bath thing, it's Harley riding a rocket through space with a fishbowl on her head. Honestly, even though I feel this sort of vindicates my reading of the situation, I'm glad they changed it, not only because it wasn't worth the upset it could cause people, but also because the artist they picked has a more Jim-Lee-ish sexualised style. He's a very technically proficient artist, but I didn't feel his style fit that well with the loony toons tone of the page/book.
(Which is, for the record, pretty neat. A couple of the pages fall flat, and if you're not passingly familiar with some of the reputations of the artists, you may not get all the jokes, but the pages that are good are HILARIOUS. For instance, you know you need to see Darwyn Cooke drawing Amanda Conner beating up Harley Quinn at her own wedding while cracking jokes about sales figures on All-Star Western and Batwing...)
But dudes, I think we're being played here. I think we're all looking for vindication regarding our anger about other things, and have obligingly been provided with a brand new DC pinata, but all we're doing is beating a book many of us have been waiting for to a bloody, inky pulp.
I really think we need to separate how angry we are about the Batwoman thing from the Harley Quinn thing because basically Rich Johnston broke the story in a sensationalised headline on Bleeding Cool (in an article that opened with some sort of line about how it was a sensationalised headline) and now everyone's freaking out with absolutely no attention paid to two pertinent pieces of information that were freely available at the time of this competition's genesis but that no news coverage that I saw thought fit to mention.
1) that the comic was a fourth-wall breaking loony toons style depiction of Harley's search for an ongoing artist for her new series.
2) that it was being written by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti who have a long history of creating fantastic, fan-favourite comic book runs with female characters who have, shall we say, a previously complicated and/or difficult and/or ludicrous relationship with being sexualised by the media. Power Girl is the obvious one, but I'd also point to Ame-Comi Girls and The Pro.
This book is so up their alley it's like they've been fucking typecast and everything about that typecasting says that this isn't going to be some creepy sexualisation of suicide.
But it reads like that on the page? No! No it doesn't! It's the fourth in a panel of surrealistic images of Harley attempting in various ways to kill herself/being in danger, each one with a different expression on her face. She's dodging lightning while waving around a detached cell phone tower looking panicked, or she's rolling her eyes because crocodiles won't eat her even though she's covered in raw chicken. These are not images that invite you to imagine the final panel as some sort of sexy-tragic death.
But it doesn't matter because it's depicting sexualised suicide? Well, I kind of disagree it's necessarily sexualised. An artist might choose to draw that, but I think it'd clash with the tone of the script. If we have her head and shoulders above a ton of blue water and bubbles, is that really all that sexualised? As compared to like, everything else in comics?
But it's still depicting suicide! As a joke! Well, okay, sure, but it's also in a comic where we know that she's breaking the fourth wall and auditioning artists and we have no idea what she's saying. Is the artist talking shit to her? Is she complaining at the artist that he's put her in such a hackneyed plot? Context isn't a fucking weakness. It's not automatically an attempt to excuse bullshit or make a terrible thing better. Sometimes it's crucial to the fundamental thing that's being said.
Sure, I roll my eyes at "ironic" depictions of shit all the time. If you draw a supersexy escher chick in a comic and then "hang a lantern" on it, I'm not gonna be first in line to defend it because it was "making a point". But part of that's because then the thing you say you're calling out, you're also delivering at the same time - i.e. the sexy escher chick to look at. If the problem is suicide, well, I kind of think that you remove that same "providing it while pretending to condemn it," problem, if Harley is mocking the writer.
Which okay, we don't know she is because we really know nothing for sure. Although Jimmy Palmiotti's tweets and facebook posts on the matter certainly seem really sad and sorry that he confused anyone and stress that the impression people have of the tone of the sequence is mistaken - he continually stresses that it's a sequence where Harley and the artists/writers are in communication and actively discussing the situations that she's in.
I guess this makes me saddest because I don't think that most people took the time to stop and think about the situation, because they were just mad at DC, or because they legitimately didn't know the history of the creative team, or the character herself, or the totality of the script because most news outlets ran with the sensationalised headline and little else.
And fine, there are certainly reasons to be mad at DC. And there is a painful wider context about the treatment of women in comics. And I don't blame anyone for NOT being familiar with the creative team or the concept of the issue in question. But here is my fear:
That we are tearing down a comic that is written by two people with long histories of respectfully handling characters like Harley by offering sharp commentary rooted in humour. Harley Quinn in a book anything like their run on Power Girl would do wonders to help the character reclaim some of the dignity that was stolen from her during the relaunch. Putting Amanda Conner on a Harley Quinn book would have sounded like some kind of impossible, redemptive dream to many of us after we saw her debut in Suicide Squad.
I'm worried we're screaming at what will turn out to be a really fantastic - and all too rare - solo female-lead comic that's smart and funny and not based in sexual exploitation, and also, co-written by one of the most respected female artists in the industry.
Obviously I don't think Amanda Conner is immune to co-writing a sexist thing, or that supporting her work is automatically the Right Thing To Do, but I do think that the fact DC is launching a fan-favourite female-lead book, co-authored by a fan-favourite half-female creative team, who have a really strong history of actively subverting the brutal sexualisation of women in comics, is...being totally lost here amidst the desire to be angry at DC Comics.
And just...it's okay to be mad at DC Comics for all those other reasons. We don't need this one too, we really don't, we already have enough. I worry we're just depriving ourselves of what might turn out to be a really awesome comic. Because the narrative of it being an exploitative mistake has already been written.
Update: So the book finally came out. For the record, the page is based around the artist getting confused about the fact that Harley was in a team called the Suicide Squad and Harley getting pissed at him for misunderstanding and threatening to feed him a sledgehammer. They also changed the last panel so instead of the bath thing, it's Harley riding a rocket through space with a fishbowl on her head. Honestly, even though I feel this sort of vindicates my reading of the situation, I'm glad they changed it, not only because it wasn't worth the upset it could cause people, but also because the artist they picked has a more Jim-Lee-ish sexualised style. He's a very technically proficient artist, but I didn't feel his style fit that well with the loony toons tone of the page/book.
(Which is, for the record, pretty neat. A couple of the pages fall flat, and if you're not passingly familiar with some of the reputations of the artists, you may not get all the jokes, but the pages that are good are HILARIOUS. For instance, you know you need to see Darwyn Cooke drawing Amanda Conner beating up Harley Quinn at her own wedding while cracking jokes about sales figures on All-Star Western and Batwing...)
