Tagged: Doom Patrol

Joe Corallo: Diversity — People, and Content

Marvel MysteryIn addition to being really into comics, I’m also really into history. I like to know where things came from and how they were made. This fact about myself has resulted in my reading of quite a few comics from the Golden and Silver Ages. Nearly all were reprints, but comics of those ages none the less. Although some of the comics then may not offer us the kinds of lessons in diversity and inclusion I’m normally advocating for, they actually do give us a valuable lesson in diversity that is lacking in mainstream comics today.

The norm for decades in comics was an anthology format. Marvel Mystery, Adventure, Action, Detective, Showcase, Journey Into Mystery, Police, Crime Does Not Pay, Eerie, Creepy, My Greatest Adventure, all of these and more would offer us up multiple stories featuring different characters in each. The first issue of Marvel Comics featured the Human Torch, the Angel (not that Angel), Sub-Mariner (yes, that Sub-Mariner), Masked Raider, a short story titled “Burning Rubber” and Ka-Zar. Yes, it wasn’t the standard 20-22 pages we see in most comics, it was 64 pages. The point being that you could have a single issue with many characters and stories. One title being the feature, with the highest page count, and the other stories being back ups.

action-comics-2852360As the years went by, anthology style comics at the big two were either getting canned, or morphing into books about one hero or team. My Greatest Adventure turned into Doom Patrol, Action into another Superman comic, Detective another Batman comic, Journey Into Mystery a Thor comic, and so forth. DC in particular tried to carry on with that tradition longer, having books like Legion of Superheroes have a feature story with a large portion of the team followed by a shorter back up with only one or two members to help us all get to know them better. Eventually, these efforts more or less faded away. Occasionally, like in Action Comics, Detective Comics or Justice League they’d have some sort of back up, but it was just furthering the feature story and not really it’s own thing.

police-comics-8746283DC did try bringing back more anthologies with Adventures of Superman, Legends of the Dark Knight, Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman, but all of those only featured the character in the title. Though those weren’t a bad idea, I do think it misses a key point of the older anthologies; to help introduce new characters to a market that might otherwise not pick up a book featuring one of those characters.

Both Marvel and DC have hundreds of characters at their disposal. The market only allows a certain amount of comics hitting the shelves at once while still being able to sell X amount of them all. Maybe instead of testing out different solo titles, they could try more anthology style comics.

Wouldn’t it be great is characters like Batman got more people reading Batwing and Batwoman because they were in the same book? What if you alternated who had the feature story, so maybe Batwoman would be the feature for a few months, but that Batman story in there helped keep enough readers on the title who otherwise wouldn’t be and kept the title afloat? What if we used a format like that to expose readers who otherwise wouldn’t go out of their way to read a comic with racial or religious minority characters, or LGBTQ characters in it?

DC editors recently decided they needed to stop “batgirling” and get back to “meat and potatoes.” That kind of talk usually ends up meaning going back to a less diverse time in comics. I get worried when I see Marvel or DC seemingly spread themselves too thin in certain areas. For example, as I mentioned last week, DC now has Harley Quinn, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy, three white bisexual women as leads in their own solo titles. That won’t last forever. Maybe when that starts to change, a Gotham City Sirens book featuring all of them would be easier to maintain.

I think if comics are going to be serious about diversity, they have to do more than just cater to the readers of the different communities. Preaching to the choir is one thing, and it is important, but it’s not everything. We need to get more people outside of those communities to be exposed to them, and understand them better. It’s an important and necessary component in making comics a more diverse place and assuring that it won’t just end up being a fad.

Besides, this feeds into nostalgia, and what comic book reader in their right mind doesn’t love that?

Joe Corallo: Coagula, DC’s First And Only Transgender Superhero

CoagulaLast week I met with my friend Kelsey to get a tarot reading. I brought along my copy of Rachel Pollack‘s Arthur C. Clarke award winning novel, Unquenchable Fire, to lend to her. Beyond being a novelist, Rachel Pollack is a well-published authority on tarot, a transgender woman who tackles the subject in her different works, as well as having written comics.

She wrote Doom Patrol for two years following up on Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s popular run on the series over twenty years, when it moved from DC’s main line to the Vertigo imprint. Her run built on the bizarre nature of Grant’s image while creating new characters.

The most important of which was Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, DC’s first – and to date only – transgender superhero, with the power to coagulate liquids and dissolve solids at will. Prior to joining the Doom Patrol, she tried out for the Justice League, and it’s implied that she was rejected in part for being an out transgender lesbian activist, brandishing a pin on her jacket stating, “Put a Transsexual Lesbian on the Supreme Court.”

Rachel Pollack was able to use the character of Coagula to discuss trans issues and to inform readers who were unaware of these issues as to what it means to be trans. She even crafts a brilliant moment in storytelling where a transcendent being requires the strongest example of a man and a woman, and Robotman and Coagula are the man and woman the best personify those genders, driving home the fact that a trans woman is a woman. Period.

So decades before the biggest and most active push for more diversity and representation in comics on the page and behind the scenes, DC had a trans superhero written by a trans woman. You would think that’d be a bigger deal, wouldn’t you? It would seem to fit right into what people have been clamoring for, doesn’t it?

That’s not to say that DC hasn’t created trans characters before; they just haven’t been superheroes. Wanda from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman run was trans, and has been both embraced by fans keeping it in the context of the time it came out and criticized in hindsight. Shvaughn Erin, the Legion of Super-Heroes Science Police Liaison, was trans but that has since been retconned and she’s back to being cisgender. Gail Simone put in the effort and created Alysia Yeoh, Batgirl’s transgender roommate for her New 52 run on the book, and often incorrectly sited by blogs and news sites as the first true transgender character at Marvel or DC. Unfortunately, after Gail Simone left the book, Alysia Yeoh has mostly faded into obscurity and the team that took over Batgirl afterward was quick to fumble on trans issues. They have since apologized and the issue in question has been modified to remove the transphobic dialogue in subsequent reprints.

I am not counting any characters that are magically trans, or have powers that allow them to change their genders, because that’s not a trans character and you shouldn’t count those either. Marvel has even less trans representation.

If you haven’t heard of Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol, it’s probably because it’s never been reprinted. And if you haven’t heard of Coagula, it’s for the same reason. Her stories have never been reprinted. After Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol ended, no one seemed to know what to do with the character, and she would appear just a little more before being unceremoniously killed off.

In order for me to read those stories, I used a combination of eBay and multiple comic shops to find all the issues. You should be able to find all the issues reasonably priced if you feel so inclined. It’s a fantastic run, and a worthy follow up to Morrison’s Doom Patrol. Rachel Pollack, in my opinion, is the last writer that truly understood the Doom Patrol.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles written lately about the efforts DC has been putting in to making more diverse comics. If they’re really invested in that, why not bring back their only trans superhero and reintroduce Coagula to a new generation of readers? Or at very least just reprint Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol run? Reprinting those issues in a couple of trades or so would be a great start for DC to show that they have an interest in trans representation.

And while they’re at it, they could hire a few trans writers and artists, too. We have more openly trans writers and artists working on comics now than at any other point in the history of the medium. They’re here, they’re queer, many of them could use the opportunity to craft stories at DC or Marvel, and we could all benefit from the opportunity to read them.

Martha Thomases: Change

green-arrow-300x182-1036412The drugstore on my corner, Avignon Pharmacy, went out of business over the weekend. We should have known the writing was on the wall when the pharmacy was sold a couple of years ago and the store just sold skin-care, shampoo, bandages and stuff like that. Still, the place had been in business, serving the neighborhood, since 1837. They were the place that could get that hard-to-find lotion, or the medicine the insurance company didn’t know existed. I’m going to miss them.

Change is hard.

Change isn’t just hard for old people like me. It’s hard for all of us. As the link says:

“The problem is that change involves ‘letting go of what we know to be the current reality, and embracing new thought,’ said Jaynelle F. Stichler, professor emeritus at San Diego State University’s School of Nursing. ‘Even something as seemingly mundane as changing the brand of toilet paper can cause a reaction.’”

Superhero comic book fans can be especially traumatized by change. A lot of us (by which I mean, of course, me) fell in love with comics as children, and any change in continuity seems like an assault on our sense of reality. Which is kind of ridiculous, given that superhero comics have hardly anything to do with reality.

I’ve been reading superhero comics since at least 1958. The Silver Age heroes are my touchstones. I loved the original Supergirl because she tried so hard to be helpful and good, just as I did when I was seven and eight years old. I also like the sillier of the trick arrows in Green Arrow’s quiver.

This isn’t to say that I’m against all change. I immediately preferred Barbara Gordon as Batgirl over Betty Kane. I loved the vision of Batman created by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. I liked the Wolfman/Pérez Teen Titans more than the original. The Vertigo Doom Patrol was, I thought, much better than the earlier versions.

Maybe because I’ve liked some changes, reboots and continuity lapses don’t upset me. If a story has a plot that moves and character development along with an engagement with thematic issues that appeal to me, I’ll like it. If I don’t like it, I’ll complain, probably, but I’ll also go look for something else to like. Maybe I’ll check back in a year or so to see if I like it again.

See, here’s the thing I learned when I worked in marketing at DC: every title is someone’s favorite. Books (and characters) I loathed were loved by others, and vice versa. Since I am, generally, in favor of more pleasure, I thought all kinds of people should have the books they wanted.

Giving everyone something different to read might be good for readers, but it doesn’t necessarily work for publishers. Traditionally, corporations make a lot more money from one title that sells 100,000 copies than they do from ten titles that each sell 10,000 copies, especially when these books are only on sale for a few weeks. However, the marketplace has changed enough now, with the growth of trade paperbacks and digital distribution, so that a title that starts slowly can build to sustain a committed and profitable fan base.

The advantage to these smaller audiences is that, taken together, they grow the size of the market so that everyone profits. And by growing the market incrementally, publishers can be much more experimental than they can with big blockbusters.

The movie business has shown us, recently, that putting all one’s creative eggs in the blockbuster basket can ultimately shrink the marketplace. For decades, Hollywood went after the young adult male market as if there was no one else on the planet who wanted to go to the movies. And that worked very well for a while.

Until it didn’t.

The top three grossing movies of the year so far have female leads. A movie aimed squarely at the over-50 market, trounced all the other movies that opened against it.

Blowing things up and super-powers are no longer enough to make a movie a hit. While I enjoy this kind of movie personally, I rejoice at more choices.

The conventional wisdom, that women won’t go to see action movies, especially if they feature female leads, has been convincingly proven wrong, as the conventional wisdom so often is. It turns out that girls and women enjoy watching a woman face a challenge, especially if it involves more than simply romance. It may take a few years to convince the men who run Hollywood, but I’m pretty sure they’ll come around.

Because if there is one thing that doesn’t change, it’s the media industry’s love of money.

 

ComicMix Cinema: “Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods”

  • News
  • August 14, 2011

What better way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon than watching one of those guys from the land where it rains all the time?

This 80-minute feature produced by Respect Films and Sequart contains interviews with Morrison, along with various folks he’s worked with and inspired throughout a thirty year career writing everything from All-Star Superman to Zenith, and just might give insight for what he’s going to do when he reboots Action Comics next month. (Not included is the story of how I saved Grant’s first Doom Patrol story from being completely incomprehensible.)

Enjoy.

Cracked’s Creepiest Comic Book Characters

To be filed under "Hey! that’s OUR thing, man!" Cracked.com recently posted a list of "The 6 Creepiest Comic Book Characters of All Time," leaving me wondering why they chose to make it a list of six characters. Why not five… or ten? "Cracked Six" just doesn’t sound right, while ComicMix Six is practically candy for the ears.

But I digress…

Highlights of the questionably named list include Proty, the "sentient spunk blob" from Legion of Superheroes, and Comet, Supergirl’s bestiality-minded superhorse.

Also, Comet periodically turns into a full human, at which point he does what any horse would do: Try to get laid with Supergirl before she can figure out he is really her horse.

The Cracked crew also gives a nod to Inner Child, one of Grant Morrison’s creations during his Doom Patrol run, which seems like a cop-out, seeing as how 95-percent of the characters created by Morrison are pretty freakin’ creepy.

Check out the full list at Cracked.com.

 

‘Doom Patrol: Planet Love’ Review

  • News
  • March 24, 2008

doom-5735315

And so we come to the end. It’s taken DC Comics sixteen years to collect all of Grant Morrison’s classic run on Doom Patrol, but it’s complete now. I don’t know if new readers coming to Morrison’s Doom Patrol in 2008 can understand how different that series was in the early ‘90s – the era of million-copy runs, of the Image founders becoming Marvel superstars and then packing up to become “Image,” the biggest boom that superhero comics have ever seen.

There was bombast in the air, then, on all sides. Superheroes were long past their days of stopping bank robberies and foiling minor criminals. The era of cosmic threats all the time had been inspired by Secret Wars II and the first Crisis, and had grown through Marvel’s summer crossovers and everyone’s monthly gimmicks. You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a would-be world conqueror, or a megalomaniac with an anti-life formula, or some other unlikely threat to everything.

You have to remember that background when you read Morrison’s Doom Patrol, just as you have to remember the stolid seriousness of ‘80s superheroism when you read his Animal Man of the same era. Morrison wasn’t parodying what everyone else was doing – he’s only very rarely been one to specifically poke fun at other creators – but he was pushing it further, in the direction of his own obsessions and ideas, than anyone else was willing to do. (Take a look at his Arkham Asylum for another example; it’s the epitome of the “crazy Batman” idea that percolated all through that time — the concept that Batman attracted so many damaged and insane villains because he was inherently damaged himself.)

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