The Ugly American On Batwoman

So, I've been purposefully trying to avoid Bunny Talk... but I have to get back to it this week.  It's a little depressing, but it's also important.  Sometimes you have to do the Good Work even though it may not feel like fun.

What set me off this time were violent threats sent to certain folks at DC over JH Williams unscheduled departure from Batwoman.  Williams recounts the usual sins when these things happen, and they happen a lot lately.  Stories are broken, creative work gets approved, and then at 11:59pm editorial sends a note saying "change everything, and get that to us by midnight".

The wrinkle here is that Williams specifically pointed to DC vetoing a proposed marriage between Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer as a sticking point.

Uh oh.  That'll get the Bunnies attention, won't it?

So now we've got death threats coming into DC if JH Williams is a credible source, and I don't see why he'd lie about that.  Not to belabor the obvious, but this is not (just) about a creator leaving a book before the fan base is ready.  This is about an "attack" on gay marriage, and a small but unduly influential group responding as they always do when somebody has the audacity to disagree with them.  The Bunny credo is - think like I do or be silent, be gone, and now…. be dead, I guess.

I've been banging this drum for a while....but are folks finally getting the idea that the Soft & Fuzzy Bunnies are not the tolerant, benevolent creatures sold in the brochure?

It does not surprise me a lick that DC is hesitant to let JH Williams run with his gay marriage storyline.  It's storytelling 101, and DC is (supposedly) in the business of storytelling and not gay politics.  DC has no gay agenda, and no anti-gay agenda. DC has a money-making agenda, and marriage (gay or otherwise) has never been a big breadwinner.

Do people not remember the lengths that Joe Q went through to nix Peter Parker's marriage? When DC went to the reboolaunch, they instantly split up Lois and Clark.  Personally, I think the marriage dampening effect is overrated, and a good writer could very easily concoct some marriage-based stories that would heighten drama, not diffuse it. But the truth of the matter is that people are far more interested in "will they or won't they?" then "happily ever after."  And in the storytelling game, interest is a pretty precious commodity.

Moonlighting figured this out the hard way.

 Things tanked pretty hard when Dave and Maddie finally hooked up, and that wasn't even a marriage thing.  That was just a boyfriend/girlfriend thing.   Of course nobody remembers Moonlighting, so that’s probably a bad example. How about this one? People want to watch Rick Castle and Kate Beckett dance the Dance of Longing, not pick out curtains.  You can build an entire show around sexual tension, and sink the whole ship by finally pairing people up.

But things are even more dire for Batwoman, because they can't even get the initial tension thing right.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to make two chicks making out boring? Williams and Co. have done it. They should probably invent a new Eisner award just for pulling that off.  Batwoman's crime isn't that it wants to portray gay marriage; its crime is that it is deadly dull.  So when Williams is proposing to make the comic even more mind-bendingly dull, DC can and should send the book in another direction.

When all this hit, the JH Williams blog indicated they’d be staying on until issue 26 and then packing their bags. DC saw the excrement hitting the fan and put Mark Andreyko starting with # 25, and you know what? Good for DC! I’m not in love with the editorial micro-managing that appears to be the norm over there, but if somebody is going to shit all over you, they don’t get to pick when they leave. An advisory not to let the door hit your ass on the way out is an appropriate response in those cases.

Everything comes back to bigotry and intolerance and bullying and oppression these days. Except this situation isn’t about being anti-gay, it's about being anti-boring.  Ask Orson Scott Card about DCs anti-gay agenda.

Incidentally, bigotry is still prevalent in comics, in significant doses.  It doesn't work in the manner that the Bunnies would have you believe, though.  Let me show you how comic book bigotry works in reality, on the page.

So let's take a look at how the police are portrayed in three recent comics: Daredevil # 29, The Movement # 1, and Robocop: Last Stand # 1.  It bears mentioning that in order to make this point, I didn't have to dig back thirty years to find three obscure examples of the phenomenon.  What I'm about to show you are very recent examples typical of the way comics depict police.

I'll start with Mark Waid's Daredevil story, in which papier mache redneck cops attempt to frame a black paramedic of a crime, and then attempt to murder him.

“No wonder they didn’t think they’d get caught”, says Daredevil. “Sounds like these racist fanatics have infiltrated the whole justice system. My justice system.”

I have to say, if I were Frederick Douglas, or Sojourner Truth
, or Jackie Robinson, or Martin Luther King, I would be super pissed right now. Because all of those sacrifices I made, and all of that progress I bled for, and all the benefits I worked pretty goddamn hard for…apparently none of it made a difference.

Could I please let everyone writing comics today in on a little secret? It’s not a very well-kept secret, but you’d never know it by reading the books – institutional racism is OVER. It’s over, and it’s been over for quite a while, and I know you like Mississippi Burning, and I do, too. Gene Hackman? The guy is fantastic. But it’s not 1955 anymore, and that’s mostly a good thing. So please do celebrate that!

Do individuals still exhibit racism? They surely do, and it’s not ideal, and we have lots and lots of safeguards to protect against that kind of thing because again… the Institutional Racism is over. Ask Paula Deen how institutional racism is going right now. The institution is now set up to gulag little old ladies with cooking shows if it turns out that they once whispered a mean racist word 20 years ago. That’s how institutional racism is doing these days. By the way, have you met the President? But I digress.

You know, art is supposed to be the lie that tells the truth. But I don’t find any truth in Daredevil’s extended assertion that our justice system is infested with racists, bent on destroying black paramedics. Instead, I find chilling evidence of quite the opposite when I read about Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami.

Did you hear about them? No, you probably didn’t. They’re a couple of reporters for the Virginian- Pilot, beaten by a mob of somewhere between 30-100. As the story goes, the pair were stopped at a red light when one of the mob threw a rock completely unprovoked and broke a window. When Forster inexplicably got out to verbally confront said rock-thrower, pandemonium and many head injuries ensued.

Their own newspaper failed to cover the story, and only one teenager was ever charged. Why wouldn’t the paper cover it, and why wouldn’t the police aggressively pursue the case? Because the assailants were black, and it’s bad form. The institution would rather people be beaten, even die, then appear racist. That’s the bizarre truth. I don’t know what’s going on in Daredevil’s world, because I don’t recognize it. That’s not art lying to tell the truth. That’s just lying, and I call bullshit.

Then you've got Gail Simone's Movement story, in which a pair of dirty cops confiscate some recreational drugs from some street youths. Their intention is to take it back to the car for “evidence”, because that's what cops do in 21st Century comics.  They don't stop crimes, they create them. They harass and bully people who have done nothing wrong, with no motive other than the intense pleasure they derive from doing so. You’ll notice the racist officers doing a lot grinning in these scenes, because they love it so much.

The crooked cops are considering letting the kids go, but not before Joe decides he needs to see one of the girls naked.  Who knows where things would lead from there?  We'll never find out, because the creepy degenerate Movement folks step in and prevent whatever crimes were about to occur.  Sexual assault of some type was on the menu for sure.

Speaking of cops committing sexual assault, how about the OCP merc police in Robocop: The Last Stand # 1?  These guys are even worse.  Not even any idle talk about letting these ladies go.  Nope, here the police just want to get straight to the raping.

Robocop kinda sorta gets a pass because it's a dystopian tale dedicated to the idea that there is only one good cop, and that's Murphy.  It's hard to tell the story of a world gone bad with only one good cop unless the other cops suck.  But it kinda doesn't get a pass, because it might be worse to build your story around reinforcing the stereotype.

I’ll give Gail some credit as well, because not all of her cops are strict caricatures. The Captain has a little more literary meat on his bones, and he suspends Joe and Luis. But I don’t think the Bunnies would forgive a movie featuring characters in black-face just because it also starred Sidney Poitier, so I’m not sure how much leeway is due there.

The “Bad Cop” stereotype exists everywhere in today's funny books.  The Ugly American has already recounted the tale in which he ejected from Green Lantern over the terrible, horrible people in law enforcement that had audacity to believe that Simon Baz might be a terrorist just because he happened to be a Muslim driving a stolen truck filled with explosives that accidentally blew up a whole building.

Bendis and Maleev's Scarlet comic is built from the foundation of dirty cops murdering her friend.  And hey, here's a new book:  Hit Police!  Well, now it's just "Hit", they took the police part off the title.  But make no mistake about it, those are definitely cops working outside the law to commit murders.  Because in comics, that's pretty much all the cops do. Sort of.

I guess there are four types of police officers currently depicted in comics:

• Cops that are racist
• Cops that like to rape
• Cops that commit murder
• Racist, rapey, murderous cops

Mostly, comics are populated with Cop # 4.  By the way, police corruption is a real thing, (entire history of New Orleans, I'm looking at you) and I'm not suggesting that writers can't talk about that.  What I'm telling you is that there are a wildly disproportionate number of despicable, evil, racist police officers.  These depictions are cartoony, largely inaccurate, ham-fisted, lazy, and destructive.

Listen, by day I work with police officers all the time.  They can be a difficult group to deal with, to be sure.  I see arrogance, and short fuses, and apathy, and all sorts of other human foibles that come with being human.  Mostly what I see are good people putting themselves in harm's way both physically and psychologically trying to protect ingrates that don't appreciate them and communities that don't support them.

Can you guess how many racist, rapey, murderous police I work with?  I don't think I've met one yet.  And I've met a lot.  Sometimes they don't come right out and announce that they're rapey murderers, so there might be some error variance to account for.  Let's say that as many as 4% of police officers might be racist and rapey and murderous.  You'll find bigger numbers than that at your PTA meeting, folks.  Comics are demonstrably and crushingly unfair to the police.

Except...hmmmm....is it all the police that are bad?  Because if we go back to The Movement # 1, there are two officers in that scene.  One of them wants a "peek" at a victim, and the other guy has a darker complexion and is named "Luis".  It's non-white Luis who actually suggests they let the kids go, and then evil white Joe suggests that not-as-evil-because-he’s-more-brown Luis should sack up and get on board with the sexual harassment part.

So is it cops that are bad, or is it white cops?  Hmmm.

If we go back to Daredevil, all of the white cops and the white judge are twisted and criminal.  The only officer in the whole book who isn't on the take is the Asian female cop.

 Huh. Interesting. If you're an Asian female cop, you're just trying to do your job, and you're hyper-observant, and you twig onto what's happening and valiantly try to stop the racist white cops.

So really, the message is that mostly cops are bad, but not all. A minority cop might be OK.  White people, though?  Evil.  Always evil.  Put a badge on them and all they can think about is forcing your sex from you. And executing you.

Incidentally, you'll never catch the Bunnies crying about any of that.  You won't find any lamentations over police depictions over at the Comics Beat.  I really doubt we'll get a "white people crunching" chart over at Bleeding Cool this month.  Why is that, do you suppose?

The answers are a little too involved to get into in this column entry, which is already overly long. There's enough material there for a book in those answers, honestly.  It's a complex cocktail of good intentions, vanity, willful ignorance, greed, and fear. Lots and lots of misplaced fear. Maybe I'll start attacking that next column, or maybe not.  It feels important to me, but I want us to enjoy ourselves as well.  I don't want to turn this column into an endless screed.

In the meantime, you'll notice that the “mean and insensitive Ugly American” is not only taking a pass on threatening Waid, Simone, or Grant with any violence...but I enjoy the work of all three.  I don’t believe these authors are doing anything for the greater good by stacking on to the Fallacy of the Omnipresent Dirty Cop/Evil White Guy, but I don’t see any malicious intent, either. I believe that each is probably a good person stuck in 1955 and simply running the playbook with the best of intentions. Of course, how would we pave the road to hell without those? My point is not to grind an axe or tell anybody to shut up.

My point is that we need to start publicly talking back to this stuff, because ultimately we get the world we deserve, and you don't solve bigotry with different bigotry. 

We need to get smarter fast, though, because running wild with New Bigotry is giving rabid Bunnies the idea that they have license to threaten people with violence, and with impunity.  It's getting scary out there, folks. Danger, Will Robinson!