AlephZeroHeroes

Nice article! I guess one thing to emphasize though is that the issues of gender in comics and their related movies are quite complex and hard to get right.

There is a nice (recent) paper on the topic called “Diana in the World of Men: a character network approach to analyzing gendered vocal representation in Wonder Woman” at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2018.1510846.

The short version is that just having strong female characters isn’t enough, with Wonder Woman as a case in point. The movie was given many plaudits for having an empowered, independent female character, but when the film is quantitatively analyzed we find that Diana loses out to her (male) sidekick.

So many superheroes’ origins get rebooted because either:
– they have a tech origin, and tech moves on, e.g., Spiderman’s radioactive spider (in the atomic age) later becomes a genetically modified spider.
– an artists wants to explore some aspect of the character and uses a reboot of the origin to shift the context, e.g., Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

But (as identified in the article) Batman’s origin is universal. Cliches exist for a reason. Tech wasn’t a big part of the deaths, and you can take a character in a lot of directions from this single origin point. So there hasn’t been a need to change. And there is also tremendous resistance from the fan base to big changes. It would be a brave writer who tampers with that origin story.

Nice article!!!

One of the problems (for comics) is that they are often judged in the public mind by their worst, most trivial instances. The stigma associated with them means that many people don’t even look at what’s out there. It’s as if we judge all prose by some throw-away kids book from 50 years ago. And incidentally, this is happening in a context where parents are increasingly pushing younger and younger kids towards ‘big-kid’ books.