More reaction to the Gail Simone firing...

DC Women Kicking Ass has a sharp take on DC's abrupt and low-class firing of one of their top writers and New 52 cheerleaders, but it's one of the comments that inspired I found intriguing.  Here it is:

 "I think Marvel or any other company would welcome her with open arms." --jayb3 

 If Marvel is smart, they'll immediately announce they've offered a top-flight title to Simone.  I have no idea what her reaction to that would be and I wouldn't want to speculate, but the evil Texas businessperson side of me can't help but hope something like this happens.

In fact, if I were J.R. Bryan, Stetson-wearing editor-in-chief of Marvel, I'd be on the phone with Simone today with a Southern-accented sales pitch along these lines:

"I want to hire you right this minute.  We've got an idea that Dani Moonstar and Xi'an Coy Manh are so sick of all the factions and in-fighting among the X-Men they've decided to buy a van and travel these United States lending a helping hand to those in need.  Kinda like that ol' Lee Van Cleef-Timothy Van Patten show The Master, only awesome because you're writing it.  Other than that basic concept, you've got carte blanche to do whatever you want, set the tone, add other members to the cast, no one's off limits, slap any title you like on there and we're gonna give you a big PR push in the media and at the conventions.  How 'bout it?"

I predict at least 50k in sales.  At least.  And I do know Ms. Simone is a lot classier than I am.

Gail Simone off Batgirl...

Not Cass Batgirl, obviously.

You know, I haven't read that much of Gail Simone's comic book writing.  A few issues of Birds of Prey and one of the new Batgirl, a smattering of her decent but not world-beating Gen13 relaunch, and that's it.  I hated, hated, hated her "Angel of the Bat" proposal for Cass Cain.  It just seemed forced and wrong.  Sometimes sending a character off on an unexpected tangent works, and that just wasn't going to be it.  It was too much like "Frank Castle, Demon Hunter" or whatever it was Marvel did to the Punisher for a while before they took him back to his roots and made the character relevant again-- with two crappy movies to show for it, two more than Cass will ever have.

But I have read a number of Simone's message board posts where she's engaged with other creators-- sometimes contentiously-- and fans and she's often been my hero of the moment.  Scoring points, fighting the good fight, taking the high road and other such cliches you use when someone impresses you with his or her discourse.  People dig her writing, but professionals and fans also like her as a person and with good reason.

Gail Simone was the one saving grace in all the reboot turmoil, all the clumsy re-configuring of continuity and the whimsical explanations for various inconsistencies and character omissions.  Plus the largely ugly costume updates.  Yikes.  And with her dedicated fan base, she was the one person who could have possibly taken Barbara Gordon from Oracle back to Batgirl with all the problematic changes that involved-- essentially killing off a character/concept with a lot of symbolic importance for a number of readers, pushing aside another fan-fave character-- without a comic fan apocalypse.  Without having hundreds of fans storm the DC offices as if it were the Bastille (the regime in control of which the upper management there is increasingly resembling).  Even with her involvement it was a near thing.  Through it all she displayed nothing less than class.  Just a first rate performance as a creator being scrutinized under the harshest of lights, in a pressure-filled moment.  Grace under pressure.

She's doing it again under much worse circumstances right now, too.

I have no idea what goes on at DC Comics.  I'm not a fan of the New 52 and just about the only current character I like at all is Katana (with the best costume at DC now that Black Bat is defunct).  They don't seem to make many decisions aimed at bringing me back as a reader, unless it's something to do with their back catalog and, frankly, Marvel and Dark Horse both own them there.  The creator turnover lately has been troubling.  There's probably some good reason for dumping a writer from a title that's aces with both the critics and the money-paying fans.  As a non-professional, non-industry, outsider type person I can't imagine what that might be.  But I do think firing someone (especially someone who's had DC's back the way Simone has for the last few years) via e-mail is a tasteless move by someone who knows full well what being fired in a tasteless move feels like.  He's also managed to wreck the next writer and probably scuttle the book entirely.

Anyway, that's my take on this.  The next few days should be quite interesting!

And breathe out...

Well, I guess that's all for the James Gunn controversy. Gunn has issued an apology and it's up to the offended either to accept or reject it. I have been only a concerned bystander who happens to think his comments were stupid, so I can do neither of those things. I can only hope this dialogue-- one of many occurring each year, it seems-- will have a positive effect on fan discourse regarding female and LGBT comic book characters.  We'll have to come up with an amusing name for this mess when we wrap up all the year's comic book news, but for now it's time for Cass to slip back into her toxic, non-entity status where she'll only be discussed here on this lonely little blog or else occasionally mocked on The Outhouse.

More on James Gunn and a question about sex...

The James Gunn "sex with superheroes" list fall out continues with more interesting and thoughtful commentary from Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress.*  Yeah, I found this doing yet another melancholy Google search for some new Cassandra Cain news, read it and liked what she had to say, plus she also mentions Cass's entry, so I'm linking to it here.  I'm pretty sure ol' David Cain taught Cass to kill before she was eight years old, but that aside, I have a question. 

The three essays I've linked to here each talk about how it's not the list itself that's wrong, just the asinine commentary.  I think the same, but at the same time I can't say I've spent much time pondering which superheroes I'd sleep with.  They're not real people, are frequently poorly written and the drawings of them can be grotesque-- hence the term "Escher girl," which is gaining currency-- so I can't really parse the notion of wanting to have sex with a comic book character as anything more than a joke.

Yes, I appreciate good girl art or cheesecake drawings, especially when they're by someone like the late master Dave Stevens or Adam Hughes, and like cute, appealing stuff by Rumiko Takahashi and even Bryan Lee O'Malley, but none of that makes me want to sleep with the characters no matter how awesome or cool or kick-ass they might be in the stories.  Years ago, I worked with a guy who made a lot of noise about having a huge thing for Shampoo from Ranma 1/2, but I just shrugged.  Good luck with that, man.

The closest I probably came to having these fantasies about any comic book character would have to be when I was around 14 and obsessed with Dani Moonstar from New Mutants.  We were the same age, so it seemed a natural fit.  A lot of it was tangled up with wanting to be her, but pretty soon I realized that was only slightly less likely than meeting anyone like her in real life and I moved on to crushes on actual people.  And from there to real relationships.

I just prefer my fantasy characters hooking up with each other in the stories (if they must) and keeping my reality apart from that.  Gunn makes a snide comment on his list about a drawing of Starfire ruining real women for him, and even though I know that's just a joke and not true at all, I'd have to say I feel just the opposite.  Real women have ruined funny book characters for me, so I can't really feel sexual attraction to some two dimensional image with a one dimensional personality.  Even if the character is richly written and complex, I'm still kind of, "Well, I like reading about her, but she doesn't exist and there are so many fascinating people in the real world for me to meet, so why get hung up on some ink on paper?"

Actually, I don't even have to tell myself that.

For example, I'm a big Cass Cain fan ("Really?!" you say in astonishment), but I've never given even a moment's consideration to sleeping with her.  It's just never crossed my mind.  I think she's cool, yeah.  I've had a few idle wishes that I were here so I could have wild and crazy adventures, but that's it.  That she's one of the few female characters not particularly sexualized-- her few desultory experiments with being "sexy" according to the Barbara Gordon model didn't exactly work out for her-- is hardly the point for me.  I don't feel any physical attraction to the overtly sexy characters, either.  Starfire, She-Hulk, Power Girl, Dark Phoenix, evil Mary Marvel, evil Invisible Woman, Star Sapphire, the Gen13 girls.  Nothing.

Don't think I'm saying you can't fantasize about superhero sex while being in a relationship with a real person.  You absolutely can.  I feel certain doing so is part of a healthy sexual imagination, as opposed to exclusively fantasizing about comic book characters to the exclusion of all other relationships.  I don't do it, but lists like this make me curious, as does all the sexy fan fic out there.  How many people seriously give thought to what superheroes-- or any fictional characters, for that matter-- they want to have sex with?

I'm guessing I must be the odd person out here, especially within genre fandom, but I'd really like to know.

*It's even on Huffington Post now!

James Gunn splatters mud on Cass's cape as well!

You already know what this is about.  Some stupid poll about what superhero you want to have sex with, and film director James Gunn's notes about each entry.  It's over a year old, but journalist/essayist Susana Polo of the website The Mary Sue recently found it and tore it apart for the "slut-shaming, homophobic" junk it is.  And now it's a huge thing with a lot of people sharing their opinions.  That Gunn is the director for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy film with none other than Joss Whedon's endorsement has certainly raised the stakes for comic book fans.  Whedon!

I'm pretty sure I read this very list a long time ago and thought it was a stupid attempt at rude dude humor, the kind of frat boyish junk that didn't amuse me even when I was young enough to be a frat boy, then flushed it down the memory-toilet to who knows where.  My subconscious or whatever.  Flash forward to this morning.  I fired up my work computer, did my usual quick Google search for anything new having to do with Cassandra Cain and waded into this huge stinking mess, a backed-up septic tank of a mess.  I knew I shouldn't have flushed it, but it was easier than dropping it in the garbage can and having the sanitation workers judge me.  Lesson learned.

Living 12 hours in the future here in Japan-- at least compared to my North American friends-- I'm hours late to this party.  Everyone has already said all that needed to be said.  But because I'm practically the only Cassandra Cain blogger left standing, and like Cass I never, ever quit, I'm going to weigh in just a little bit here.

Look, I love satire and absurdist humor.  I've already been in trouble with Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake fans due to my use of the latter.  Even if Gunn's intent was merely to spoof the stereotypical men's magazine take on superheroes, sexuality and gender, he's failed.  I agree with Rachel Edidin the root of his failure is his over-the-top voice is actually the in-the-middle voice of a lot of people involved in the comics industry, both professionally and as fans (as well as with her description of Gunn's commentary as "fucked up").  The kind of thing where people don't read it and think, "Gosh, I've been wrong-minded just like the guy Gunn's pretending to be and now I'm gonna change," but one where they shout, "FUCK YEAH!  PREACH ON, BROTHER GUNN!" while their next-door neighbors pound the wall they share and yell, "SHUT UP! WHAT ARE YOU SCREAMING AT?  WE KNOW YOU'RE IN YOUR APARTMENT ALONE, YOU NOISY ASS!"

And that's really sad.  Not my angry neighbors scenario, but the very real situation where what Gunn might think is out there is really quite in there.  It's really hard to top some of the crazy junk I read back in the day when I was a more active participant in the comic fan wars over misogyny and homophobia, the kind of stuff people still post on message boards all over, or the way actual comic books from certain top companies tend to deal with characters and even fans, which at times is shockingly suspect.

So while many people have already hammered Gunn and his attempt at humor or whatever it was with a lot of points I don't feel like repeating here despite agreeing with them, I also feel a strange little pleasure in having Cass talked about at all, even in a minor way.  There's rarely anything new about her online these days unless it's something stupid by me, and if Polo's tossing her name in there brings a few more people to the discussion and makes them seriously think over these issues, then as a character, she's accomplished something positive.

Also... I did not know Stephanie Brown gave birth and put her baby up for adoption.  Huh.  That's interesting.  I didn't know this because my only information about Ms. Brown comes from her appearances in Cass's old Batgirl book in which I don't believe they ever ever discussed the issue, at least not on panel.  I could be wrong.  There are a few issues towards the end of the run where I'm a little hazy on the details due to having read them only once or twice.  I tend to re-read the earlier, more kick-ass issues when Cass was on her game, and the ones drawn by Rick Leonardi because they're beautiful and I enjoy looking at beautiful comic book artwork.  So those I know more about.