This week I am going to step away from Magic to talk about something that has recently become a large part of my life: comics. Now I can’t pretend that I’m a religious comic reader—to be honest, until I started at my current job last September I was oblivious and couldn’t tell you the difference between The Flash and Flash Gordon. Over the last few months that has changed completely. A large part of my job is organizing the back issues which has led to me learning a lot about comics in a very short period of time. Now I’m not an expert by any means but I can’t pretend that they haven’t drawn me in since I started at That’s E. I’ve always been a fan of movies like the Avengers and Iron Man but now you’ll find me binge watching Agents of Shield and Jessica Jones in my free time and reading various comics and trades on some of my lunch breaks.
I was pretty excited when I opened up last weeks Comic Shop News to see the big headline ‘Women Making Marvel History’ and they weren’t wrong. For Women’s History Month Marvel is spotlighting 25 titles with ‘Women of Power’ variant covers. More importantly, major titles featuring women such as Spider-Gwen and Thor have become increasingly popular. In April The Unbelievable Gwenpool will be launching to add to the ever growing list of comics with female leads. And it isn’t just women that Marvel has been doing a great job of making sure are better represented, with African-American characters such as Miles Morales Spiderman and Sam Wilson AKA Falcon as Captain America. They’re not perfect by any means but no one can accuse Marvel of not making progress towards being more diverse.
On the other hand, DC has been dropping the ball, hard. Last week they release the new Suicide Squad trailer alongside some sneak peeks of the new Wonder Woman movie slated to come out next year. I have been waiting impatiently to see how they would portray Harley Quinn in the newest trailer after the Comic con preview was so disappointing, making Harley look like a really talented stripper more than anything. Unfortunately they didn’t do any better this time, something I won’t dive into but is well addressed in this article. Tl;dr: They put the Enchantress in an unnecessary skimpy costume and took out Harley Quinn’s beautifully complex backstory.
It felt odd to see the Suicide Trailer alongside the Wonder Woman first look. It felt like DC was just try to beat their corporate equality drum almost desperately. I watched one right after the other and was having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that the same company released these trailers on the same day. DC is pretty well known for screwing up, there is even a website http://www.hasdcdonesomethingstupidtoday.com/. Yes that is a real website, go ahead and click the link (when I was writing this article it had only been five days since they had done something stupid apparently). I’m not the first to make this assessment, here another author addressed some of DC’s older snubs toward women and minorities. They’ve done this to women, gay characters, disabled characters, the list goes on and on. They are afraid to leave the boys club mentality that the comic industry is so well known for. Unfortunately for DC women make up almost 47% of comic book readers, and while they have claimed they are becoming more diverse it’s quite obvious that is not the truth. If DC wants to thrive than they need to hire writers of all backgrounds to create characters from all backgrounds.
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As I start to dig into comics, finding characters to follow and fall in love with I’m going to stick to Marvel. I’ve already found great characters I love through them such as Jessica Jones in Alias who suffers from PTSD. I also find myself enjoying their movies and television shows that, while not quite perfect, at least seem to acknowledge women as people. The fact DC felt the need they had to put a supermodel in a Bikini to play the Enchantress is proof enough to me that DC isn’t worried about relating to women. It’s DC’s loss. I’m sure they have some really well written comics but I don’t see the point of wasting my time falling in love with characters who I don’t feel like are respected by their creators.
Kate hails from Worcester MA and also does a bit of Card Altering. Check her Stuff out on Facebook! She mainly plays legacy and modern though will occasionally find herself playing EDH or Standard if she’s desperate.