beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2014-08-04 09:53 pm
beccatoria) wrote2014-08-04 09:53 pm
Comics! Does Vertigo Count? (No, no, not Count Vertigo; I hate Green Arrow.)
I'M NOT DEAD!
I do need to find more time to post here. So to start with, I was just inspired to write something reasonably lengthy over on tumblr, so I'm actually going to copy it here because god but I loathe tumblr as a space for complex human interaction or discussion. And this is my place of Archiving Thoughts.
Also I think we all just have to accept that a large percentage of this blog will be Comic Books for the forseeable future. I'm genuinely sorry. <3
So the setup:
There was a text post as follows:
To which there was then a response effectively composed of animated .gifs of DC's television/film output from the last decade, but unusually including all the stuff Warner Brothers makes based on DC properties that aren't part of DC's main superhero universe but were published under various imprints (primarily Vertigo).
I sort of wasn’t going to reblog it because it was a little petty? But then I saw the “makes Black Widow movie” and got bitter because what the hell, if you're going to do that, I'm going to pretend there's obviously an upcoming Wonder Woman film and that they're casting Dwayne Johnson as Shazam and SCREW IT I SUCCUMBED TO PETTY BITTERNESS!
But I also reblogged it because I really liked that it included DC's Vertigo output in there, but...I've been wondering for a while now how that stuff should figure into the conversations we have about these companies and/or about their shared superhero universes.
This is a genuine question to which I have no good answer. Because DC and Marvel generally ship a comparable number of titles; DC more often ship slightly more but that includes all their Vertigo stuff (as well as, I think, more licensed comics, though particularly with Star Wars, that may be shifting).
And on the one hand, it’s only fair to compare like with like - superheroes with superheroes. That’s a specific genre with representational problems, and it’s a specific type of story we all love (or well, us superhero fans do, I mean). Vertigo publishing a 70s gangster comic, a revenge-thriller, a creepy supernatural book and a retold set of fairytales, all starring women, doesn’t fix my problem if what I want is a woman in spandex punching a volcano. It really doesn’t. The Losers’ majority poc team doesn’t fix the whiteness of superhero universes.
"Go somewhere else," isn’t a useful response.
"We do that stuff, but in our Vertigo line," sends a message of ghettoisation.
But at the same time, Vertigo forms part of DC’s output and almost never figures into conversations about what DC is doing, media-wise. They put time and resources into maintaining an imprint that specifically exists to publish original “indie” style comic books, even though they could almost certainly make more by putting out another Bat-related title.
I mean, a certain amount of this is nostalgia. I’m probably a comic book fan at ALL because of Vertigo in the 90s, and I think that’s likely true of a lot of women my age. Karen Berger probably did more than anyone else in the industry to normalise the graphic novel and its place on the shelves of our bookstores. (And I guess I also think it’s cool that Vertigo has only ever been headed up by women; Shelly Bond succeeded Karen Berger).
But…okay, knowing Watchmen is somehow a DC property is probably not that unusual, but I honestly wonder how many people know that movies like Red, the Losers, Road to Perdition and Stardust are all also based on graphic novels and comic series originally published by DC?
Probably not many?
And like I said, I think you can use these points to dodge the issue. Agent Carter is a big deal because a woman is anchoring a TV series - they are making superhero-related media starring a women. Pointing out that DC (well, it’s parent company) are putting out iZombie, which also stars a woman, isn’t a cleanly relevant parallel.
But it also seems sort of shitty to pretend iZombie isn’t there.
Also amusingly nowhere in that gifset did I see the 2004 Catwoman movie. There are just some things no one can bring themselves to mention voluntarily... (Lol, except me: SKIN LIKE LIVING MARBLE!)
Anyway, yeah. There is my unanswered question. I hope you've all had a nice month while I've been in posting limbo. :)
I do need to find more time to post here. So to start with, I was just inspired to write something reasonably lengthy over on tumblr, so I'm actually going to copy it here because god but I loathe tumblr as a space for complex human interaction or discussion. And this is my place of Archiving Thoughts.
Also I think we all just have to accept that a large percentage of this blog will be Comic Books for the forseeable future. I'm genuinely sorry. <3
So the setup:
There was a text post as follows:
MARVEL: *makes Avengers*
MARVEL: *makes Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America sagas*
MARVEL: *makes Agents of Shield*
MARVEL: *makes Guardians of the Galaxy*
MARVEL: *makes Black Widow movie*
DC: hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...... MORE BATMAN.
To which there was then a response effectively composed of animated .gifs of DC's television/film output from the last decade, but unusually including all the stuff Warner Brothers makes based on DC properties that aren't part of DC's main superhero universe but were published under various imprints (primarily Vertigo).
I sort of wasn’t going to reblog it because it was a little petty? But then I saw the “makes Black Widow movie” and got bitter because what the hell, if you're going to do that, I'm going to pretend there's obviously an upcoming Wonder Woman film and that they're casting Dwayne Johnson as Shazam and SCREW IT I SUCCUMBED TO PETTY BITTERNESS!
But I also reblogged it because I really liked that it included DC's Vertigo output in there, but...I've been wondering for a while now how that stuff should figure into the conversations we have about these companies and/or about their shared superhero universes.
This is a genuine question to which I have no good answer. Because DC and Marvel generally ship a comparable number of titles; DC more often ship slightly more but that includes all their Vertigo stuff (as well as, I think, more licensed comics, though particularly with Star Wars, that may be shifting).
And on the one hand, it’s only fair to compare like with like - superheroes with superheroes. That’s a specific genre with representational problems, and it’s a specific type of story we all love (or well, us superhero fans do, I mean). Vertigo publishing a 70s gangster comic, a revenge-thriller, a creepy supernatural book and a retold set of fairytales, all starring women, doesn’t fix my problem if what I want is a woman in spandex punching a volcano. It really doesn’t. The Losers’ majority poc team doesn’t fix the whiteness of superhero universes.
"Go somewhere else," isn’t a useful response.
"We do that stuff, but in our Vertigo line," sends a message of ghettoisation.
But at the same time, Vertigo forms part of DC’s output and almost never figures into conversations about what DC is doing, media-wise. They put time and resources into maintaining an imprint that specifically exists to publish original “indie” style comic books, even though they could almost certainly make more by putting out another Bat-related title.
I mean, a certain amount of this is nostalgia. I’m probably a comic book fan at ALL because of Vertigo in the 90s, and I think that’s likely true of a lot of women my age. Karen Berger probably did more than anyone else in the industry to normalise the graphic novel and its place on the shelves of our bookstores. (And I guess I also think it’s cool that Vertigo has only ever been headed up by women; Shelly Bond succeeded Karen Berger).
But…okay, knowing Watchmen is somehow a DC property is probably not that unusual, but I honestly wonder how many people know that movies like Red, the Losers, Road to Perdition and Stardust are all also based on graphic novels and comic series originally published by DC?
Probably not many?
And like I said, I think you can use these points to dodge the issue. Agent Carter is a big deal because a woman is anchoring a TV series - they are making superhero-related media starring a women. Pointing out that DC (well, it’s parent company) are putting out iZombie, which also stars a woman, isn’t a cleanly relevant parallel.
But it also seems sort of shitty to pretend iZombie isn’t there.
Also amusingly nowhere in that gifset did I see the 2004 Catwoman movie. There are just some things no one can bring themselves to mention voluntarily... (Lol, except me: SKIN LIKE LIVING MARBLE!)
Anyway, yeah. There is my unanswered question. I hope you've all had a nice month while I've been in posting limbo. :)
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Some of the Marvel series I have really loved, like The Incredible Hercules, and Journey into Mystery, I have loved because they felt like 90s Vertigo comics. I remember when I first read The Incredible Hercules, and feeling like I'd been cheated all these years. Because Marvel was publishing fantasy comics and I'd never realised. Obviously The Incredible Hercules is part of the superhero universe in a way that, say, Books of Magic wasn't – but it still fills the fantasy niche for me, rather than the 'superheroes punching things' niche.
Or, a couple of years back Marvel put out a bunch of short series that to me seemed like 'series designed to appeal for teenage girls' (although I think it was actually 'series based off old Wildstorm properties'). They did this under their main imprint. And I thought it was interesting to compare that approach with what DC had done a few years earlier with Minx. Though, obviously these were happening against different backgrounds – DC's felt like 'oh wow teenage girls are reading all this manga, how can we get in on that?' and in that context a separate imprint makes more sense. At the time, I thought it was cool that Marvel just threw them in under their main imprint – although in retrospect, I wonder if they would have done better if Marvel hadn't. Vertigo is visible in a way that Marvel's non-superhero comics aren't. And Vertigo is read outside of the population of superhero fans in a way that Marvel comics are not.
Um, so I think it's one thing if we're just discussing superheroes, but if we're discussing Marvel as a publisher then the comparison should be to DC and its imprints, not just what's branded DC.
Also, I would quite like to pretend iZombie isn't there, but I'm bitter because it sounds like it won't really have much to do with the comics :P I'm too over-invested. I am too invested in Hellblazer as well, which is why I don't think I'll be watching Constantine. Apparently DC's media strategy fails for me because they're adapting stuff I care too much about ...
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lulz WHAT. The whole DC vs. Marvel thing has always seemed so strange to me, except then I fell in love with Diana and saw that in discussions of women in comics, people totally forget she exists, and THEN I GOT TRIBAL. And it's totally not rational, but when people are like THOR WILL BE A LADY WARRIOR, HOW GROUNDBREAKING, I do kind of lose my mind. And I honestly do not know how to counter that, or stop filtering comics/movie discussions through that lens.
It would make more sense to me if more of the conversation focused on what the companies ACTUALLY DO, instead of cherry picking stuff that you like about your particular preferred publisher/studio? And in that regard, it seems like Vertigo ought to at least be part of the discussion, if only to illustrate how sometimes the simplistic comparison of Blockbuster Superhero Movies to Blockbuster Superhero Movies is incomplete. Like iZombie shouldn't be an argument to dodge the issue of the lack of female leads in superhero-related properties, or an an "answer" to Agent Carter, but neither is it totally irrelevant. It's just not a simple comparison all the time, sorry if that makes Tumblr's life harder!
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