Earlier this week Chris Mautner linked an article about a prefecture in Japan flagging woman’s manga magazines (out of 9 on the list) as “harmful”. This prompted a post on Melissa’s personal blog about the reaction to fanfiction on the Internet, and how the same mindset might be on display:

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November 20th, 2008 is the 10th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance: The event is held every year to draw attention to anti-transgender violence. Jenn Dolari is requesting submissions for the Transgender Day of Remembrance Webcomics Project.

For those of you who don’t know about the project, in a nutshell, we’re a group of webcomic artists and authors who put together a remembrance strip for late November. There is always a running theme, but the themes are voluntary (especially if your comic has no TG characters). If you’d like some examples of the earlier entries, you can see previous projects for yourself at the Webcomics DOR site at http://www.dolari.net/dor.

All we ask is that you link to the other comics running images as well, and keep the images up for your normal comic-length. We’re aiming at having these displayed on the week of the 20th. After the comics are done, I’d love your permission to keep them on my Day of Remembrance site, at http://www.dolari.net/dor

This year’s theme is a little less dark than last year’s. The theme this year is to illustrate a word or a feeling that the Day of Remembrance makes you feel. This could be a poem, a scene, a feeling, anything that the DOR makes you feel. Good, bad or otherwise.

In particular my plan this year is to illustrate “Hope.” An artist drawing with her back to a tree sitting next to a warmly lit graveyard, remembering a time when trans murders were ignored and underinvestigated and how it’s all changed (which is hasn’t, but that’s where hope comes in). If you have a different feeling, draw it. If you’d like to do Hope, too, please do.

Again, the themes are voluntary, and if you have an idea you’d like to pursue, or a better idea for a theme that you’d like to present, please do.

Please let me know if you’d like to participate this year by letting me know via EMail. IF you know someone who may be interested, but isn’t on this list, by all means, forward it along (especially as real life has kept me from researching the newer comics out there).

This post contains a lot of spoilers for the last Captain America issue, so if you aren’t up to issue 42 you might want to skip it.
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Fiction creates a false positive for personal experience. Tales that have been told since the dawn of civilization, that are outdated now or that have allegorical meanings long since forgotten are still being told today. And not in the contex of some important lesson about the seasons or social relationships, but to entertain and maybe teach very simple ideas about good and evil.
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I bought a car today. (Bear with me, this leads to a point.)

The coworker who drove me to the dealership to pick up the car couldn’t help himself. He had to annoy me while he was doing a nice thing for me.

“So, I bet in a couple weeks we’ll see a scrunchy around the gearshift.”

“What?”

“A scrunchy, or a hair tie left around the gearshift. That’s what all women do.”
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Politics continues to intrude on our fantasy lives this week in the form of DCU: Decisions #1. By most accounts it was a predictable story, but it included an unexpected reveal about Lois Lane.
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I’m going to say right off the bat that this post is not about Sarah Palin, even though it does begin with Lynda Carter’s opinion of her.

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What it comes down to is a lack of effort.

This is being passed around the internet. While a wonderful post, it’s not offering any new idea. The argument that so-called strong female characters often turn out to be hollow sexual objects has been kicked around the internet for longer than I’ve been writing; and it’s a well-known writing rule that flaws are what make a character compelling to readers.

But certain writers still don’t seem to understand this when it comes to female characters so these posts continue to be written and passed around. The notability of any such post isn’t that the idea is new, but that it needs to be stated in a new way to get the idea across to writers. This post offers a new mantra–”We need WEAK female characters”–that will be repeated for some time by bloggers but likely won’t penetrate the skulls of the majority of writers.
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There are several blogs and communities scattered about the internet dedicated to analyzing popular fiction for themes relating to social issues such as gender roles, racial stereotypes, sexuality and religion. And for much of the year, these blogs and pick apart the various books, comic books, television programs, movies and stories that compose our culture and teach humans about the universe.

And for much of the year, these blogs and communities are assaulted by visitors who admonish them for wasting their time with fiction. Visitors who tell them that it doesn’t make one bit of difference that a fairy tale heroine doesn’t ever talk to other women without shoving them into an oven or that the only reason two black people ever talk in that comedy is to discuss the craziness of the main white character or that the gay guy is the only one who doesn’t hook up by the credits or that there are no non-terrorist Muslims in this season and so on. Visitors who tell social issues bloggers to get off our asses and help real people rather than discuss fiction, as though we never do anything worthwhile in real life and as though they do.
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The extended Just Past the Horizon hiatus will be broken this week for a guest post by John DiBello, best known as the human companion of Bully the Little Stuffed Bull. John noticed serious problem at SDCC, and asked some of his friends to post the following article on their blogs so that it could reach the widest audience possible.

Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: “These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, ’cause I wanted to see what her reaction was.” This was only one example of several instance of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.
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This comment amused me more than the webcomic that started the thread:

okay… And here I’m going to probably be ripped apart from all sides… but…
I’ve noticed that a large number of female Comic Book Store Staff tend to veer towards these comics… … And Grant Morrison for some reason (don’t know what the connection is there!)
Perhaps because they tend to avoid the latex brigade since the old “her breasts are bigger than her head” thing…
Guys (again, in general) tend to veer TOWARDS the latex brigade for the same reason…

This is JUST A GENERALISATION! I know I’ve just kicked over the tin of worms that will lead to countless messages of “I’m a guy and I love Mouse Guard”/”I’m a girl and I love Power Girl”… “…and I’m not gay!” (Those would be thier words, I’m not implying anything…)

So carefully worded, and he goes out of his way to frame it with “Please don’t rip me apart.”

I’m going to be gentle and not rip him apart, but he did get me thinking about perceptions of female comic book store staff, and female comic book readers.
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I think I’ve said it before on this website, but nothing bothers me more than people who see things purely in extremes. Human society is so complex that any commentary on it needs to be approached with thought, perspective and sympathy.

It’s the lack of thought that really gets me. Most of what I write about–dustups over social issues–can be not only cleared up but avoided with a little thought. With a little sympathy. And certainly with a little perspective, because what it usually come down to is someone who is unable to think from the perspective of another person.
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First, I must apologize for the long hiatus that this column has taken. A few sudden brushfires in my day to day life called for an abrupt withdrawal from the web and I’m just now making my way back.

As a result, I’m a slight bit behind in my blogreading, but I am fortunate enough to have friends who email me particularly good pieces like this analysis of politics and race in a 1960s war comic from bitterandrew at Armagideon Time:

In a sane world, this facsimile of logic where “falling short of ultimate evil” somehow equals “good” would be greeted with universal shock, horror, and/or rage, but in this world, it is seen as a valid argument by a large segment of the populace.
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Every human being has a set of strategies in their social toolkit designed to protect themselves from the unpleasant rigors of empathy, self-examination, and the dreaded realization of their true place in the universe. There’s nothing wrong with this, provided you take inventory of these tendencies so that they don’t pop up unrecognized, use them only when appropriate and keep them properly calibrated to prevent them from harming another person in their use.

I’ve been carefully updating my own inventory by observing the online comics fan community, where one can see a variety of social strategies deployed in a full range of severity.

For example, just this week on this very blog I encountered a number of people employing a tactic known throughout the activist blogosphere as “Silencing.” Sometimes, when a person speaks an unpleasant truth that other people don’t wish to discuss the other people will gather round and do what they can from stopping the person from talking about it.

There are a number of ways to do this.
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On April 29th, the mothership ran this interview with Captain Britain and MI: 13 writer Paul Cornell. Within a few hours of posting, it was edited to remove offensive content and the message board thread comments pertaining to the edited area were removed.

This screencapture of the offensive content has been passed around the blogosphere:

A number of people are understandably upset by the second question and the circumstances under which it disappeared. Rather than do an editorial this week, I contacted Matt Brady for a short question and answer session about the subject.

Due to a severe scheduling and location conflict, this took considerably longer than we meant for it to. I apologize for the delay.

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The event was simple. It began when the first previews of It’s a Jungle Out There! hit the mainstream feminist blogosphere.

No… It began when Amanda Marcotte, writer of It’s a Jungle Out There and well-known progressive political blogger wrote an essay without referencing the women of color who gave her the ideas.

No, that wasn’t the first. It began when the first cover of It’s A Jungle Out There was first released, and criticized for racist imagery.

No, that’s not early enough. It began when prominent feminists began siding with Clinton over Obama, claiming gender was bigger than race… Or was it a fallout in the ’70s at a feminist convention over racism? Or was it the ’40s when there was an advertising blitz to recruit women to the workforce, and all of the images featured white women?

No, let’s face it. It began in 1607 when the first African slaves were brought to the continent by English settlers.

Or was it earlier when the first white guy set foot in the Western Hemisphere? It wasn’t exactly the right foot to start out on.
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You are all aware that there are different levels of context, aren’t you?

I’ll admit that its been a few years since school, and I don’t quite remember the curriculum but I know we did talk about context. I remember there were different kinds of context.

I remember context within a sentence, where you could deduce the definition of a word from the surrounding words. And I remember context for a sentence, where you needed the entire paragraph to understand that “It was SO big” did not necessarily mean something dirty.

There’s immediate context within a story that explains weird behaviors, such as why Sherlock Holmes never got evicted for regularly firing a gun inside a rented apartment or why Adora didn’t know she was on the bad guy’s side when they first introduced She-Ra.
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“It’s just a comic book.”
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I happened upon some interesting ideas in my weekly reading.
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So this week a panel from Mighty Avengers #11 has surfaced from the depths of the blogosphere, with a piece of Doom’s dialogue drawing harsh criticism:

Naughty language below the cut
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