How do you implement affirmative action in the DCUniverse?

WARNING: This post is all comics babble. If you are not a comics reader, you might want to just skip it.

One of the funniest and truest lines ever uttered on the Simpsons belongs to Edna Krabappel. When she ditched Comic Book Guy at the altar, she explained their incompatibility with, "It's like I'm DC Comics, and you're Marvel." I don't have any elaborate theories as to which gender tends to lean toward DC and which one toward Marvel.

I'm Marvel. My brother's DC. This makes sense to the two of us -- he has always been attracted to heroes who are simply better than the rest of us, and who band together based on merit and character; I like my freaks of nature to have personality issues with each other and the world at large. There's some cross-publisher pollination -- he likes Marvel's Runaways, I loved the Wildstorm books back in the day, especially Warren Ellis's run on Stormwatch and The Authority, and Wildstorm is a DC imprint -- but by and large, I dig the X-Men. My brother's IM icon is usually set to the Flash, and he can recite the rosters of the Teen Titans from memory.

One of the reasons I fell in love HARD with the X-Men back in 1983, when I picked up Uncanny X-Men Annual #5, was that it featured not one, but two women kicking ass and taking names on an alien planet. And one wasn't much older than me! Oh, Kitty Pryde -- you should be named one of Gen-X's most influential members. (The real Generation X, not the X-Men team.) And as I grew into comics and began reading more titles, I felt more at home in Marvel because, frankly, Marvel felt like a more female-friendly universe. I was in middle school and high school when the New X-Men were tearing it up; I read books where teenaged witches subdued demons, young women became Valkyries and the boys on the team relied on the girls' leadership skills and battle chops.

It was my misforture to take a day trip into the DCU right when the Joker was taking out Batgirl. Back to Marvel with me!

However, I began reading DC's Birds of Prey a few years ago, and was instantly smitten with the series. The book's premise is pretty simple: that Batgirl the Joker took out? Is still crippled, but she's now reinvented herself as the premier information broker of the Justice League -- and she's decided to assemble a mostly-female fighting team to carry out missions the Justice League can't.

Chuck Dixon did a decent job taking second- and third-tier characters -- because by this point, both Oracle and the Black Canary were basically background noise for the A-list -- and building a compelling partnership. But the book really began to sing when Gail Simone wrote it. Simone loved her characters and it showed -- they began to display the "human" aspect of "superhuman." And Simone consistently portrayed female friendship and cameraderie in an entertaining and insightful way. Also, she writes the best dialogue I've read in comics. Not only is she innately funny, Simone's talented enough to be able to write several different brands of funny, so you get the sense that each character has her own sense of humor. The odds that they'll all call someone "Nickname McNicknamepants" are low.

Simone left Birds of Prey after a while, in part because DC needed her to go rehab Wonder Woman. When she stopped, I pretty much stopped reading too. I guess I was not alone; DC Comics confirmed that they're cancelling Birds of Prey .

 I don't think DC should have kept the book solely to have a chick title in the DC Universe. But I do think the DC Universe has a woman problem. You could argue that both DC and Marvel have women problems, but I think there's a critical difference between the two universes. The Marvel universe's teams tend to operate in two modes: familial (the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Runaways) and circumstantial (the Avengers). Consequently, the male and female characters are generally given equal pull, in everything from powers to leadership. By contrast, the DCU teams tend to operate on merit. Why, when the publisher rebooted the Justice League after Infinite Crisis, the first issue of JLA has Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman judging who's worth letting into the JLA.

There are worse things than a superhero meritocracy, to be sure, but I think that the gender assumptions of the DCU writers get in the way of deciding who's worth entry into the good storylines. In reading DC, there are some relationships that provide endless storytelling fodder -- the deep friendship between Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Green Arrow Ollie Queen, the fraternal bonds between the Green Lanterns, the [fill in the blank] between Batman and [fill in the blank]. (Seriously, for being such an inscrutable loner, Batman has more longterm relationships than damn near anyone else in the DCU.)

I think that the friendship and hetero-life-mate partnership between Babs and Dinah belongs up there. But I worry that its merits will be judged and found wanting. I think there's an institutional bias: relationships between women? Save it for indie comics, Terry Moore. Relationships between men? Ah, there is the stuff of heroic epics!

DC writers might counter that they're working with an audience that doesn't really warm to female relationships, and that's the real problem. I'd buy that argument, except that the sales figures seem to suggest something different. Marvel's consistently beating DC in sales this year. Dark Horse's Buffy series is in the top 10, month after month. A female-centric title, a more gender-equitable universe ... I'm thinking the problem is not a "OMG, MAI COMIC, THERE R GIRLZ N IT" attitude among readers. The problem is how those women's stories are being told at DC.

 Birds of Prey rehabbed the characters of Oracle, Black Canary and Huntress. Here's hoping DC can rehab Birds of Prey and bring it back like -- dare I say it -- a phoenix.

Comments

[Nick]

Unfortunately I think we've already seen what happens when you implement affirmative action in the DCU; You get Black Canary and Power Girl made leaders of the JLA and JSA respectively. Except, of course, they are leaders in name only, once the chips are down, it's always Superman, Batman, or Alan Scott calling the shots. Sad really. I think this actually was DC's solution to the lack of strong women in their universe: editorial mandate that women be made more relavent. Of course without the actual writers interested in telling female centric stories, this just becomes pathetic.

I love Gail Simone. I'm sad her Welcome to Tranquility got cancelled with no resumption in sight. I know it wasn't in the DCU, but it had the potential to tell great character driven stories with a diverse cast, both in ethnicity and gender. I know it's early on in her run still, but I've found her Wonder Woman, while well written, to be kind of sidelined in the mainstream DCU. No guest stars of note, no real synchronicity with the rest of the universe (except for Amazon Attacks. Ugh, I swear someone wanted to handicap her form the start). I'd love to see her take charge of a big multi-book crossover like Geoff Johns has with the Lantern's corner of the universe. Maybe she could elevate some of the neglected female characters into actually important roles, not just token ones.

[Lisa S.]

You get Black Canary and Power Girl made leaders of the JLA and JSA respectively. Except, of course, they are leaders in name only, once the chips are down, it's always Superman, Batman, or Alan Scott calling the shots.

Yeah, I stopped even READING either title recently, but I would not be surprised that the next time there's a massive screw-up of some sort, it'll coincide with Black Canary or PowerGirl calling the shots.

Also, while I'm ranting about DC ... Black Canary getting married to Green Arrow ... don't even get me STARTED. It is like Winnick and Co. were like, "How can we undo the tremendous character rehab Simone did?" AIGH.

I totally agree with you that the underlying problem is that the writers are simply not interested in telling the women characters' stories. I get the feeling that if you scratch half the existing DC writers, you'll find a teenaged boy who doesn't quite get girls.

[verucaamish]

Marvel was what got me hooked on comics but I am more of a DC reader now. I actually got hooked because of New Mutants. While I never thought about it, this was a book with a multicultural cast and interesting backstories and character development. You have a Kentucky Coal miner, a native American, a Vietnamese refugee, a dark-skinned Brazlian, and a Scot. Noone felt token because they all had these complex stories that related to where they came from.

[Lisa S.]

Veruca, do you still have the single issues? I don't -- but Marvel's been kind enough to compile three different TPBs, up through the first Lila Cheney story.

[verucaamish]

Sadly I don't. Parents downsizing meant no room for the comics. I stopped collecting New Mutants when the wretched Inferno crossover was in full swing. BTW, Chris Claremont really should give a learning annex class to all the other writers about women in leadership positions. I loved the issue where a depowered Storm battles Cyclops for leadership of the X-Men and kicks his ass.

[Lisa S.]

Yeah, for everything CC does wrong, writing complex, admirable and interesting women is not one of them.

That said, I think Grant Morrison wrote the best Emma Frost. I REALLY disliked Joss Wheedon's take on her, an the Mike Carey writing right now ... ugh.

[Josh]

Yay, a comics post! (It does my heart good)

I've actually drifted much more to DC over the past few years (having started out as a total Marvel Mutant Zombie). I was finding things more interesting with great titles like Starman, Birds of Prey, and my much loved, much screwed up Legion.

Claremont's dialogue is stale now, and he's got this bad tendency to recyle plots that he never got to finish in X-Men until he gets to write them the way he wanted to, but I still prefer his X-Men over everyone else's.

I do think this post is interesting in that it focuses on the gender aspect of affirmative action at a time when DC is launching an integration of the Milestone characters into the DCU proper, creating a significant infusion of black characters into the DCU.

Of course, I also think that BoP is going to "relaunch" because #1 issues sell big and give an instant boost to the bottom line. I hope so, because I would miss having Oracle stop by every month.