the oppressive existence of deadline monkey
One of the things about nerd culture that has always mystified me is the generally conservative atmosphere. As a general rule, the silent majority of science fiction fans seem to want more of what they already have: familiar characters, new takes on old scenarios, etc. For these people, nerd media - even with its heavy focus on fantasy, possibility and wonder - doesn't function to challenge, inspire, or innovate; instead, it's something like a warm bath in a familiar room.
I suppose that's fine as far as it goes; it's a big, weird world, and whatever gets you through it sane is probably a good thing.
What's frustrating is that the silent majority is where the money comes from, and they tend to recoil, hissing, from anything they don't already know. (That is, unless they're hit with a multimillion-dollar, multimedia ad campaign, on the level where it's less a marketing initiative and more the PR equivalent of the Visigoths sacking Rome.) You see a lot of this just about everywhere; the examples that come readily to my mind are "Firefly," Beyond Good & Evil, and the recent Sarah Polley movie Splice.
The mainstream comic book industry is worse about this than just about anything else, which is part of why both DC and Marvel are stuck in constant crossover mode. Both have made good-faith efforts to launch new or at least new-ish comics over the course of the last decade, and very few of them have reached the point where they're even a qualified success. Marvel in particular
At the moment, DC's drawing fire for inadvertent racism, high levels of violence, and the deeply weird decision to kill off a gay supporting character in Birds of Prey in the middle of LBGT Pride Month. (To be fair, Gail Simone's said that there's more to the story than it looks like, but I'm not sure how the timing on that could have been any worse.)
For a while, Marvel looked like it might have avoided the controversy. This week, however, they released the early art for their Women of Marvel tie-in covers, and Storm is the only non-white character in the bunch. They included Jean Grey, who's actually still dead somehow, and a character who appears to be the Golden Age Blonde Phantom, but didn't think to throw Monica Rambeau, Armor, Surge, Nico Manoru, Arana or Misty Knight on there.
Oops.
It's a tricky situation. On the one hand, both companies make their living using holdover characters from, at best, the early sixties. While both companies have relatively high-profile non-white characters, both companies are also stuck with a central cast that was mostly created before the civil rights movement. (Marvel has a very slight edge in this department, mostly because of Robbie Robertson, but they didn't have a black superhero in his own book until 1972.) A lot of the newer fans that they so desperately need are clamoring for equal representation in these superhero universes - more non-white heroes, more gay heroes, etc. - but both companies are hamstrung by their dependence on the older fans' goodwill. Give a new character his own book (or even an older character who was created after 1965 or so) and it sinks without a trace; give a new character too much of the limelight in a team book and the fans bitch in droves.
What interests me about the discussion, though, mostly has to do with Greg Pak's work at Marvel. Pak's Korean, and got his start writing a bunch of miniseries that nobody really seemed to care about, like Rise of the Imperfects. Since then, he's written some high-profile stuff like World War Hulk and Incredible Hercules.
In a lot of Pak's work so far, he's managed to very subtly work in non-white and female characters without really drawing a lot of attention to it. He created Amadeus Cho, who's one of the more successful new characters to come out of Marvel in the last decade. Pak's War Machine run rehabilitated the extremely '90s character Suzi Endo from, of all fucking things, Force Works, in a book that also featured James Rhodes and Bethany Cabe (who's probably one of the most obscure, yet awesome, characters at Marvel).
Pak didn't sit back and write angry letters to somebody until he got the characters he wanted. He started as a student filmmaker and eventually wound up at Marvel. Once he was there, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Sometimes it's really fucking blatant, like that Korean SHIELD guy in Phoenix: Warsong (who is, seriously, only one or two steps above an author avatar, and who Pak later partially redeemed by making him a sort of well-meaning fuckup in War Machine), but Pak did it right. He created the change he wanted.
The other writers in the new crop at Marvel - Jeff Parker, Paul Tobin, Fred Van Lente - are all similarly adept. Tobin mostly writes the Marvel Adventures books, but did a pretty good turn with Venus and Namora recently in Fall of an Avenger. Parker is best known for shoehorning the Agents of Atlas, which are led by a Chinese guy, into absolutely everything he possibly can. Fred Van Lente introduced the half-Indian Jackie Kane in Marvel Zombies recently, and created the new Scorpion, Carmilla Black.
To some extent, I think these are decent examples of how to effectively diversify the character lineup in mainstream comics. You have to trick the audience into it, introducing one character here, pulling one out of obscurity there, gradually refining the universe until its supporting cast more effectively resembles the world outside the reader's window.
The important thing to remember, though, when discussing the issue of race in comics (or anywhere else, for that matter), is that progress is actually being made, if only a little bit at a time. We are moving forward.
The problem is finding a way to be part of the solution, but at least that part's relatively easy. One of the morals of the twentieth century, which we seem to conveniently forget a lot of the time, is that change doesn't happen by asking other people to change. Change starts with you.
If you want to see characters in fiction that look more like you, then roll up your goddamn sleeves and write that novel. Learn to draw. Go to film school. Make what you want to read. That's what I find useful about Greg Pak's work at Marvel so far, and what I find frustrating about the ongoing debate concerning race. If half the motherfuckers complaining on the Internet went out tomorrow and decided to add their own culture to the mixture, we'd be living their dream in a decade.
I suppose that's fine as far as it goes; it's a big, weird world, and whatever gets you through it sane is probably a good thing.
What's frustrating is that the silent majority is where the money comes from, and they tend to recoil, hissing, from anything they don't already know. (That is, unless they're hit with a multimillion-dollar, multimedia ad campaign, on the level where it's less a marketing initiative and more the PR equivalent of the Visigoths sacking Rome.) You see a lot of this just about everywhere; the examples that come readily to my mind are "Firefly," Beyond Good & Evil, and the recent Sarah Polley movie Splice.
The mainstream comic book industry is worse about this than just about anything else, which is part of why both DC and Marvel are stuck in constant crossover mode. Both have made good-faith efforts to launch new or at least new-ish comics over the course of the last decade, and very few of them have reached the point where they're even a qualified success. Marvel in particular
At the moment, DC's drawing fire for inadvertent racism, high levels of violence, and the deeply weird decision to kill off a gay supporting character in Birds of Prey in the middle of LBGT Pride Month. (To be fair, Gail Simone's said that there's more to the story than it looks like, but I'm not sure how the timing on that could have been any worse.)
For a while, Marvel looked like it might have avoided the controversy. This week, however, they released the early art for their Women of Marvel tie-in covers, and Storm is the only non-white character in the bunch. They included Jean Grey, who's actually still dead somehow, and a character who appears to be the Golden Age Blonde Phantom, but didn't think to throw Monica Rambeau, Armor, Surge, Nico Manoru, Arana or Misty Knight on there.
Oops.
It's a tricky situation. On the one hand, both companies make their living using holdover characters from, at best, the early sixties. While both companies have relatively high-profile non-white characters, both companies are also stuck with a central cast that was mostly created before the civil rights movement. (Marvel has a very slight edge in this department, mostly because of Robbie Robertson, but they didn't have a black superhero in his own book until 1972.) A lot of the newer fans that they so desperately need are clamoring for equal representation in these superhero universes - more non-white heroes, more gay heroes, etc. - but both companies are hamstrung by their dependence on the older fans' goodwill. Give a new character his own book (or even an older character who was created after 1965 or so) and it sinks without a trace; give a new character too much of the limelight in a team book and the fans bitch in droves.
What interests me about the discussion, though, mostly has to do with Greg Pak's work at Marvel. Pak's Korean, and got his start writing a bunch of miniseries that nobody really seemed to care about, like Rise of the Imperfects. Since then, he's written some high-profile stuff like World War Hulk and Incredible Hercules.
In a lot of Pak's work so far, he's managed to very subtly work in non-white and female characters without really drawing a lot of attention to it. He created Amadeus Cho, who's one of the more successful new characters to come out of Marvel in the last decade. Pak's War Machine run rehabilitated the extremely '90s character Suzi Endo from, of all fucking things, Force Works, in a book that also featured James Rhodes and Bethany Cabe (who's probably one of the most obscure, yet awesome, characters at Marvel).
Pak didn't sit back and write angry letters to somebody until he got the characters he wanted. He started as a student filmmaker and eventually wound up at Marvel. Once he was there, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Sometimes it's really fucking blatant, like that Korean SHIELD guy in Phoenix: Warsong (who is, seriously, only one or two steps above an author avatar, and who Pak later partially redeemed by making him a sort of well-meaning fuckup in War Machine), but Pak did it right. He created the change he wanted.
The other writers in the new crop at Marvel - Jeff Parker, Paul Tobin, Fred Van Lente - are all similarly adept. Tobin mostly writes the Marvel Adventures books, but did a pretty good turn with Venus and Namora recently in Fall of an Avenger. Parker is best known for shoehorning the Agents of Atlas, which are led by a Chinese guy, into absolutely everything he possibly can. Fred Van Lente introduced the half-Indian Jackie Kane in Marvel Zombies recently, and created the new Scorpion, Carmilla Black.
To some extent, I think these are decent examples of how to effectively diversify the character lineup in mainstream comics. You have to trick the audience into it, introducing one character here, pulling one out of obscurity there, gradually refining the universe until its supporting cast more effectively resembles the world outside the reader's window.
The important thing to remember, though, when discussing the issue of race in comics (or anywhere else, for that matter), is that progress is actually being made, if only a little bit at a time. We are moving forward.
The problem is finding a way to be part of the solution, but at least that part's relatively easy. One of the morals of the twentieth century, which we seem to conveniently forget a lot of the time, is that change doesn't happen by asking other people to change. Change starts with you.
If you want to see characters in fiction that look more like you, then roll up your goddamn sleeves and write that novel. Learn to draw. Go to film school. Make what you want to read. That's what I find useful about Greg Pak's work at Marvel so far, and what I find frustrating about the ongoing debate concerning race. If half the motherfuckers complaining on the Internet went out tomorrow and decided to add their own culture to the mixture, we'd be living their dream in a decade.