{"id":964,"date":"2011-02-24T04:09:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T11:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=964"},"modified":"2011-02-24T04:09:39","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T11:09:39","slug":"i-hate-to-urinate-during-somebodys-eulogy-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/i-hate-to-urinate-during-somebodys-eulogy-but\/","title":{"rendered":"I hate to urinate during somebody’s eulogy but …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dwayne McDuffie died<\/a>. He’s the author of many comic and series, including a run I enjoyed<\/a> of the Fantastic Four<\/a>. He will be missed. But I have to take issue with the article announcing his death:<\/p>\n

\nhttp:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/monkeysee\/2011\/02\/23\/133988062\/dwayne-mcduffie-rip-championed-diversity-among-champions<\/a>
\nHis individual contributions as a writer and producer, which I’ll get to in a bit, remain impressive. But McDuffie was more than a writer, he was a voice \u2014 a passionate proponent for change in a genre (superhero comics) that reflexively resists it<\/em>. And it’s that voice that will be most acutely missed.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McDuffie will be missed, and perhaps he was a passionate proponent for change … but what superhero genre, precisely, has the author of the NPR article been reading over the last forty years? Because it sure ain’t the one I’ve been reading. (NOTE: the author of the article claims to have started reading in the early 1970’s and to have skipped the 1990s, and I started reading in the later 1970’s and skipped part of the 1980’s which I’ve since mostly caught up on, so we are essentially contemporaneous).<\/p>\n

Superhero comics were a force of stasis in the 1950s to the 1970’s<\/a> largely because of the Comics Code Authority<\/a>, which effectively censored comic book content; innovation existed but largely got squeezed out into underground comix whose heyday was the late 60’s to early 70’s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But issues of social relevance – drug use, alcoholism, environmentalism – began to kick in in the 1970’s<\/a>. Titles like Squadron Supreme<\/a>, the Dark Knight<\/a> and later Watchmen<\/a> subverted the conventions of the genre in the mid 1980’s. By the 1990’s, the modern age of superhero comics and its antiheroes<\/a> had begun – and the genre has continued to evolve, with newer iterations like widescreen comics changing how stories are told<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Examining other areas, for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered comics we’ve gone from demonizing<\/a> and censoring<\/a> them to talking about it and introducing characters in the 1990’s<\/a> to putting them front and center in the 2000’s<\/a>, including the modern Batwoman, a female superhero and lesbian of Jewish descent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even on the author of the article’s signature issue, race<\/a>, we’ve gone from ridiculous and marginalized cariactures<\/a> to prominent front and center characters<\/a> to Ultimate Nick Fury<\/a>, based on Samuel L. Jackson and later played by him after he considered the comic version a flattering portrayal<\/a> as the ultimate nexus of coolness in the Ultimate Marvel Universe …<\/p>\n

Need I go on? No. <\/p>\n

There will always be people marketing towards the least common denominator, but that subset does not define or limit or even accurately describe the arc of the superset – a very typical mistake that people with axes to grind will make.<\/p>\n

Clearly, comics has a lot of work to do, and I’d never suggest it doesn’t have further to go. Resistant to change, however, it has not been … not at least for the last forty years.<\/p>\n

-the Centaur <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dwayne McDuffie died. He’s the author of many comic and series, including a run I enjoyed of the Fantastic Four. He will be missed. But I have to take issue…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[48],"class_list":["post-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-across-the-transfinite-canvas","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":971,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions\/971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}