Mary Marvel Cooch Cover Benefit Dinner For Free Speech

Comic by Comic points out this cover by the usually awesome Alex Ross, showing an upskirt panty shot of Mary Marvel. There is some criticism about this cover, as it sexualizes a teen character.

But if we are working from the premise that even hard core illustrated depictions of teens and children are okay -- because they don't "hurt" anybody -- why should anybody get upset at this cover?

It's well-known that there is a big market for "barely legal" depictions of teenage girls. In the interest of free speech, shouldn't DC (or any other company) be allowed to have covers like this? Especially if it could bring in more money?

In fact, the sexualized teen Supergirl should have been defended by free speech advocates in the same manner as other high-profile cases, right? The fact that DC felt they were "forced" to change Supergirl (and I don't care what their official story is on the matter, I know better) was a blow for free expression, right? The equal of if Alan Moore was asked to cut scenes out of "Lost Girls," right?

But it all boils down to the following...

This is "low-brow" comics:
And this is "high-brow" comix:


No one is ever going to do a free-speech dinner for DC's right to publish images of sexualized teens in their superhero comic books. Even DC themselves would be too damn embarrassed to attend that dinner.

But if we are talking about freedom of expression, then isn't DC in the right if they want to publish covers like the above Mary Marvel image? And if that is the case, aren't "feminist bloggers" who complain about this and other "sexist" imagery in comics really against freedom of expression? In fact, isn't a lot of what feminists complain about as being "sexist" in the media just -- AGAINST FREE SPEECH? And if *that's* the case -- shouldn't they be publicly called out on it by self-appointed crusaders of Assorted Freedoms?

Lastly, if we are saying that any drawn image is "okay" because it's only imaginary and not hurting anyone, should there be any complaints about racist imagery? For example, those who are against Memin Pinguin. Or how about Jack Chick? To rail about Jack Chick's portrayal of a number of groups of people -- homosexuals, Catholics, Pagans, etc. -- would be really railing against free expression, right? Even to be critical of the images undermines one's stated belief of "images are harmless." If the images are truly harmless -- why criticize them? Why not just live-and-let-live, like one big happy family of creative ideas in a free society?

And yet, comic book bloggers are going to still complain about this image and that. It's inevitable. And implicit in those complaints is the idea that though these images and stories are "imaginary" -- they have a potential to negatively impact others. And if those images have a potential to negatively impact others -- that means they are not essentially "harmless."

As for me, I don't care for the Mary Marvel image. But I know the audience it's catering to. A flash of cooch, a knowing smile. What do all those budding Hollywood child-actresses say in interviews? "I'm not yet a woman, but no longer a little girl! Tee-hee!" Hollywood does it too, all the time. Don't make it right, tho. But it's a mentality as tenacious as head lice.

I can see the blog headlines now:

"Comic Industry Goes All Out To Defend Mary Marvel Cooch Cover; Benefit Dinner Starring Moby."

Forgot To Get The Memo

I find it very, very interesting that for the last two years, I've been patted on the back and lauded in many circles for my stance on sexist and sexually violent comic book material -- but have recently slammed for a similar stance against illustrated child porn.

This is, obviously, because on the Comics Trendiness Scale™, feminism is only a 7.8, whereas child porn free speech cases ranks a 8.9. See, I forgot to get the memo on that. It's probably the same memo where I'm told what situations I am and am not allowed to hate Dave Sim.

But also, a lot of that sexist stuff is in "low brow," non-ironic comic book material -- you really can't get Moby to give a shit about things like that. And without Moby -- what do you have, really?

And truly, I totally "get" the idea that if I support the sale of vibrators, I should also support the right for people to view Homer shoving his cock down Lisa's throat. It's like if I support the use of medical marijuana, I should also support the use of meth. Right? Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense.

Anyway, you may think that I don't sympathize with people who feel their rights to free speech are systematically and daily curtailed. Forced to submit to Groupthink. Bedeviled by the horrors of Doublespeak. Afraid to speak one's mind, for fear of swift censor by self-appointed arbiters of What Is Right, forced to fit a rigid and unbending dogma.

Oh, but I do.

How Free Is Free?, Part Two

Regular "OS" commenter Lewis Lovhaug has a new comic book you can download called "Revolution Of The Mask." Sort of like "The Watchmen" meets "V For Vendetta" (something to tide you over until the inevitable crossover), "Revolution Of The Mask concerns a society where all media is vetted and censored. Obviously, his comic book is a fantasy, a least as it pertains to the U.S. and all other freedom-loving nations of the world.


Yet, the website Project Censored has a list of 25 legitimate and important news stories that have blacked-out by the mainstream media (or, MSM). These stories aren't of the "tinfoil brigade" type, but include information about threats to our basic liberties, our security, and our health. In fact, the venerable Walter Cronkite wrote of Project Censored, "Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcast outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."

Why wouldn't the MSM cover these stories? The reasons are Conflict Of Interest, and I Don't Want To Be Targeted Or Have Any Threat To The Comfortable Lifestyle To Which I Am Accustomed To. In the former, the entities mentioned in the news stories might have or potentially have some business relationship with the media company in question. In the latter, there is the threat to the media company of some sort of vague and ugly retribution, possibly involving either the FCC, the IRS, or the head of a horse.


But even if we had a fearless and intrepid Edward (or Edwina) R. Murrow to cover these controversial topics, we would still need a receptive audience who would actually give a shit. Unfortunately, the tired and harried 9-to5 worker who trudges home after a long day in their ergonomically-designed salt mines might not want to get depressed further by sad facts regarding matters beyond their control. A story regarding them losing their basic human rights would only make them feel more helpless, whereas a mentally-disturbed Britney Spears skinny-dipping in a stranger's swimming pool is kinda hot. And so the market determines the the content of the media.


For all these reasons, it seems to be The Comedy Show that is most able to bring sensitive and often censored stories to light. Seeming jesters such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher are too goofy to really be a threat -- right? With a spoonful of ironic sugar, they often end up feeding us more important issues -- and/or are more blunt -- than the MSM itself. And when confronted on the matter, they can simply lift their hands up like any storefront fortune teller and say, "for entertainment purposes only!!!!"


Of course, a tiny industry concerned with the production of Funny Books doesn't add up to a hill of beans in the face of the larger media machine, and what we are looking at in this post might not have any relevance to said industry or related MSM at all. Still, though we are but humble comic book fans and creators, it is always good to periodically revisit these topics.

However, I realize after such a heavy topic, a palette cleanser is necessary:

How Free Is Free?, Part One

The idea is that we are the most free nation on Earth; this is what I have been taught. I never saw a need to question it. Freedom of press, freedom of speech.

I still think in some ways we are pretty free. I mean, in a more repressive country, someone like Jon Stewart would have been thrown in a gulag a long time ago, accused of speaking out against his government. We would have no "Saturday Night Live," unless it was called "Our Country, It Is Glorious."

And yet, I do not think we are completely free, or at least as free as we have been taught from infancy that we are. It might be that asking to be completely free is too much to ask. Some might interpret "completely free" as being able to just walk up to some chick on the street, honk her breast, and say "good mornin' stranger!" So we could use the word "free" but only with the proviso that the freedom in question doesn't encroach on other people's well-being and rights.


Then again, the man who feels that his need to honk a breast uninvited as a necessary part of his well-being might find that a value judgment against his happiness has been made, and that he is not indeed free. So right from the beginning, we have had not only to place limits on freedom, but make certain assessments as to what is and what is not acceptable. I think this is needed. But does this gets extended into areas where there might or might not be any immediate danger to another person?

Say the breast-honker is an artist, and makes a comic book for himself and others of his ilk called "Breast Honk Monthly." "Breast Honk Monthly" is made up of nothing but stories of guys going up to women and honking their breasts without permission. Should that comic be banned or censored under the idea that it incites or condones such behavior? And if it is censored for those reasons, would we say that the artist's freedoms have been unnecessarily curtailed? Indeed, would the artist feel he is living in a repressive regime? Or is he just a skank?

World's Finest #195 Next To Be Pulped?

Rumors swirled this morning that World's Finest #195 was next to be pulped by DC Comics.

The cover depicts Batman holding a gun and making Robin and Jimmy Olsen dig their own graves. To the side, Superman watches in glee.

As we all know, Batman has a very strict code against killing, especially with guns. Yet not only do we have this cover, but inside there are a host of gory scenes that are inappropriate:

* Jimmy Olsen and Robin are roasted by Superman's heat vision, their skin melting.

* The hearts of Jimmy and Robin are cut out and placed in a Lucite case.

I don't care if this is an imaginary story -- it's cruel and hurtful and breaks down everything these characters stand for.

ASBAR #10 and The Coming Comics Witchhunt?

Would a parent accidentally buy these comics for their child?



Look folks, I don't have kids to accidentally buy these comics for, and I know too much about what's currently going on to make the mistake even if I did.

But when this crowd:


finally decides to make this the bee in their bonnet du jour, there's going to be a lot of fucking problems.

And you can say: "well, fuck them anyway, they're a bunch of reactionary maniacs." And you might be right. But as time goes on, and the gore and the sex and language gets more extreme on books that are both not clearly enough marked for adults only AND feature characters that are cross-marketed to kids -- there becomes less and less of a defense.

But what really scares me is the possibility that books of real quality -- such as Watchmen, Preacher, etc. -- will get lumped into the comics witch-hunt. That the good stuff will be taken down because of the crap.

Not that I think books like Watchmen, etc. would get banned from libraries and certain bookstores just because some conservatives were pissed off. You only gotta worry about that if, say, some religious fanatic gets into office after her aged and sick running mate bites the bullet. And I mean -- what are the chances of that happening?

But a book like Watchmen is far too deep to them, too far removed from the funnybooks to really make a lovely self-righteous case out of it. It's not sexy enough for Fox News.

But you know what is?

This.

The utter fucking stupidity of insisting on printing black censor bars over the actual lettering of All-Star Batman and Robin #10 -- why, so you can be real cute and have the letters peek tantalizingly over the sides, so you can only imagine what curse word is being used?

The fact that, even with the black bars, you would think that dialog like this was acceptable in a comic starring characters which are licensed full-tilt to little children, in a comic with a cover that looks like the most iconic and "safe" Batman story you can find:

"...little jailbait CUNT's making us look bad... we cut her come on...

...sweet piece in sweet slices... tasty sliced booty the little CUNT..."

It's not even justifiable by saying "artistic license" -- this is like eight grades down from one of Quentin Tarantino' s lesser films. This is Frank Miller simply picking up his paycheck, the same way he plunked his arm down on hunk of bristol for the cover of Dark Knight Strikes Again, traced it, and got a big paycheck for an awesome cover.


You know what's missing on that cover? The middle finger.

But while discussing the pulping of All-Star Batman and Robin #10, these weren't the biggest issues on my mind. First question I asked: "Who will get blamed?"

And I thought about it, and said: "I don't think there's enough assistant editors left over there to scapegoat over this."

Fredric Wertham: Awful or Awesome?

Was Fredric Wertham an evil monster who took comics away from the kiddies? Or simply misunderstood?

Comic Mix points out a Slate article on the psychiatrist who, in the 1940s and 50s, led a crusade against what he thought were "bad elements" in comics. In 1954 he wrote a book called "Seduction of the Innocent" which blasted the comic book industry and resulted in a bunch of really crappy issues of Wonder Woman where she goes stamp collecting.

Was Wertham a villain for attacking books like EC Comics' horror line and, essentially, driving them off the spinner racks of our great nation? Was he leading a witchhunt? Or, as the Slate article seems to be saying, was the witchhunt eventually turned upon Wertham?

"Wertham was particularly concerned about the violence, misogyny, and racism that were endemic in comics (and other popular art forms). He wasn't wrong on this point. Many of the comics now nostalgically celebrated by Hajdu and Chabon were extremely unsavory in their social attitudes. EC comics regularly featured husbands and wives ending marital spats with knives, axes, and poison. On the racial front, Will Eisner's much-loved Spirit featured a Sambo-like sidekick named Ebony White, who was childish, had thick lips, and spoke in an illiterate minstrel dialect."

The question as to Wertham's relative guilt or innocence in terms of his place in comic book history is a tough one. Certainly, as the result of his interference, a lot of crappy books came out from The Big Two until Showcase and Lee/Kirby.

On the other hand, having read a number of these EC horror titles -- some of this stuff is really, really gruesome. Having some sort of warning on those books as to the content, instead of racking them up next to Superman, might have prevented a lot of EC's grief. I know some people hate this argument, and hate the idea of putting warning labels on comics. But a comic about Superman meeting a caveman and a comic about a baseball diamond covered with internal organs are not the same thing.


I clearly remember looking at a stack of Fangorias when I was seven over some friend's house. Those images -- severed legs stacked on a table, melting heads -- played over in my head and gave me nightmares for years. I would say that these images of violence are far worse for a child to look at than even the T&A and "bad language" the American entertainment industry so assiduously tries to protect youngsters from. If I have to choose between reading the word "s**t" or looking at a boob in a comic and viewing someone getting their brains blown out, I'd pick the former.

Then again, Wertham seemed to have this idea that comics like Batman promoted homosexuality. Which is indirectly how we got that annoying Aunt Harriet in the TV show, by the way.


So maybe he was a jerk.

What do you think: was Fredric Wertham aw-ful or awe-some?

(note: I've seen his first name spelled "Fredric" and Frederic" on various websites. I'm going with Wikipedia.)

Porn Comics Vs. Mature Readers Comics

If you haven't heard, there's a bit of a fracas going on in Guilford, CT concerning a teacher who gave a 14-year-old student a copy of Dan Clowes's "Eightball" to read.

The teacher has resigned, but the student's parents, who said that their daughter is now the target of other pupils angry that the teacher was forced to leave, think it's not enough of a punishment for him.

Add on top of that the fact that all these parents from the school district are seeing "Eightball," published by Fantagraphics Press and the book "Ghost World" appeared in, as "porn."

"Eightball" is not porn. "Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut" is porn. "Cherry Poptart" is porn.


Now, I read both "Wendy" & "Cherry" at the local comic shop where I worked when I was 16. Should I have had access to them? Was the shopkeeper responsible for keeping them out of the hands of me and my underage co-workers?

But what about comics like Gilbert Hernandez's "Birdland," which features crossover characters from "Love and Rockets" but has explicit sexual content? Or Kate Worley and Reed Waller's "Omaha The Cat Dancer?"


I read "Birdland" and "Omaha" too when I was in my late teens. I would posit that they have more artistic merit than "Cherry" and "Wendy," as the first two have somewhat of a story that exists outside of the sex and the latter two are straight porn narratives. (though that said, both "Cherry" and "Wendy" were well-drawn and occasionally witty, so it's not a knock on their creators)

For that matter, I read Judy Blume books written for teenagers with sexual content when I was 12!


The difference, I suppose, is in weighing the artistic merit of each work against its adult content. But who will do that? And will the citizens of Guilford have the same yardstick for assessing what is "art" as does New York City or Seattle? And does the medium of the graphic novel itself -- which has been so inextricably bound up in memories of their "funny book" roots -- confuse the issue even more?

Charles Brownstein of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund commented on this point to the local press:

"Somebody could do a superficial glance of the material and not put the contextual pieces together, thereby perhaps seeing a panel with violence, perhaps seeing a panel with nudity and taking the image out of context as something that it’s not," he said. "The more people are educated about the category, the less those sorts of misunderstandings occur."

And while we are on the topic of mostly "indie" comics, what of more adult content in mainstream superhero titles?

Why is this:


so much more different than this:


That's why we have debate, opinions, and laws, folks. It's not black-and-white.

Well, "Cherry Poptart" is rather black-and-white. She has a best friend named "Patty Melt" and a boyfriend called Johnny F**kfaster. But you know what I'm sayin'.