Everybody had great suggestions for the first of the new year’s calendar series (thanks so much!) but the very first reply by lunarpineapple was the winner. And I just felt like Batwoman was kinda left out last year, because she totally was in the calendar just not for her own month…
Donna Troy, essentially the kid sister of Wonder Woman, but in some ways so much more in touch with regular people.
Donna is a warrior. She’s strong and powerful but also intensely compassionate, caring, and a best friend and counselor to nearly everybody. As the only female member of the…
Donna’s the best friend you wish you had.
As hokey as it sounds, I’ve teared up a little re-reading this.
This is the pitch Gail Simone made back when Cassandra Cain was still Batgirl. It would’ve involved Cass saving a minister from a robbery, and in the midst of her violent beatdown upon the thugs who’ve attacked him, the minister would’ve begged for Cass to stop. Cass is, at first, unable to comprehend his ability to forgive so easily, and she begins visiting him in the hospital. His faith in God and his compassion really moves Cassandra, and she begins to study the bible. From that point Cass becomes truly devout and spends her time helping the downtrodden of Gotham that the Bat Family doesn’t normally deal with. The poor, the mentally ill, the immigrants, the runaways, and the homeless. She would’ve adopted an all-white costume, and people would start calling her the Angel of the Bat, Essentially, it would’ve been about Cass finding religion, but not in a hamfisted, Lifetime Movie/Mel Gibson’s Passion sort of way.
For whatever reason, this idea was considered too controversial to the editing staff at the time, and they decided to go with Cass becoming evil and leading the League of Assassins, which was met with universal disdain and resulted in a few years of writers attempting to rectify the damage, only for Cass to give up the Batgirl name and give it to Stephanie Brown.
I don’t know if I would’ve supported it then. I mean, back when Cass had just turned evil, I had only broken the surface of mainstream comics and started collecting them regularly instead of doing research on obscure characters from the 40s to 80s, buying the odd issue, and trade paperbacks. The only Batman books I bought were Batman, Detective Comics, and Nightwing (though that stopped after three or four issues).
I have to give Miss Simone credit for attempting to write a story about a character finding religion, especially when she herself has admitted to being an atheist. At least I believe’s she an atheist. I also can’t help but note a parallel between Cassandra finding religion, and the subject matter that Peter David handled when he wrote Supergirl, which dealt with redemption and joy and an analysis of certain religious beliefs in the case of Matrix and Linda Danvers.
All I know is, this seems like another representation of a boneheaded move made by DC’s editing staff.
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This is something that happened a good while back. It didn’t get that far, really. What was happening was that both Nightwing and Batgirl were starting to drop in sales. For whatever reasons, readers were dropping both books.
My editor at the time, the fabulous Joan Hilty (one of the great editors in the business and an actual feminist), asked me what I would do if I had the books. It was official/unofficial. DC asked me for my pitches, but it was all very tentative.
I didn’t want to take over Nightwing…my friend Devin Grayson had been writing that book, and I felt she had not gotten a fair chance to really leave a mark on the book due to a ton of crossovers and such. I didn’t want to step in after she had left unhappy. So, I had some ideas for Nightwing, but told them I wouldn’t write the book. I don’t think it was intentional, this stuff happens, but I just didn’t feel right about it.
But I had just started following Batgirl and I freaking loved it and that book’s writer was leaving (not positive of the circumstances). So what I was trying to do was;
a) Save the book from cancellation, and
b) Create a buzz story, to get some attention, with the intention of bringing her back to her already-cool status quo once more eyes were on the book.
The idea was to have her be like she is with everything, a passionate, committed student. She sees this message that the priest gives, and she sees it as power, as a kind of combat, and immediately wants to master it.
But it was always meant to be a story, a long arc, maybe a year or so.
It’s odd, but it’s one of the most skeptical responses I’ve ever gotten from an editor. I don’t know if it’s because I’m an atheist, which I am, but they seemed to think it would not be played straight, that it might be offensive. My goal was the opposite, she would be deadly serious and committed, and would start to have a genuine philosophical difference with Batman, leading to some interesting friction.
In the end, she would regain her self and her previous belief system. But it was interesting that with all the violent, dark choices for story arcs out there, they would be skittish about a bat-character learning about her spiritual beliefs.
I don’t know if it was ‘boneheaded,’ a lot of pitches happen when a book is getting a new direction, and this may genuinely not have been the best one. But I think it would have been very interesting.
Fascinating.
In Wonder Woman: Eyes of the Gorgon (written by one of my favorite comic book writers, Greg Rucka), Diana is challenged to a battle with Medusa that she is honorably bound to complete. I love how true to Wonder Woman’s mythological roots this story was, and I LOVE how the situation’s handled.
…
This! Lois Lane goes overseas to find the truth in a difficult and controversial war and then risks her life to save a wounded solider. Lois Lane is a human. She has no superpowers. She wears no costume. She’s the first woman of Action Comics. She was created in an era ripe with sexism in a time…
The winner of favorite Huntess artist was Marcus To. Today we have a long running character that has many incarnations - Supergirl.
Curt Swan drew the cover of Supergirl’s debut in Action Comics as well as drawing her other covers and comics:
Kurt Schaffenberger was mainly known as the…
When she left DC Comics in September of last year, Janelle Asselin was one of the few female editors at the company. Asselin, who worked on the Batman line, was an editor on Birds of Prey as well as an associate editor on Batwoman, Detective, Batman and few other books. During her time at DC Comics, Asselin began work on graduate thesis in publishing at Pace University. The topic was one that I have a lot of interest in — increasing the sales of comics among women. I follow Asselin on Twitter and kept tabs on her progress over several months. With the thesis finished, I set up some time to speak to her about her findings. The following is an interview with her about the findings of her thesis and thoughts about women in comics.
Janelle, you took on this thesis when you were an editor at DC Comics, which as you say in your piece, focuses on male readers. Tell me about how you came up with the topic.
I knew when I started my masters program that I wanted to do as much as I could to turn what was a generally focused publishing program into being comics related. I often used comic companies for assignments and things like that. So I knew that I wanted my thesis to be about comics from the very beginning. My thesis advisor had me come up with two possible topics, so I chose women and comics as one and copyright and comics as the other. Through the course of doing some basic research and talking through both topics with friends and family, it became clear that while both interested me, the topic of women and comics was the one I was really passionate about. I worry that a lot of times, commentary on the topic of women and comics veers into the negative, w
hich is so easily dismissed by people on the other side. I wanted to write something positive - something that admitted the problems in the industry (which are plentiful) but more importantly offered what I saw as solutions. And certainly being in the midst of the early days of planning the New 52 and watching, from the inside, as DC hatched marketing plans and all that as I came up with my topic was…influential.
That seems to imply you had some questions about how they were choosing their targets for the new 52. Were you surprised about the lack of targeting of female readers (i.e. the identification of the male 18-34 target)?
I wasn’t surprised, but it was hard to think - I’m working on a book like Birds of Prey which I’m OBVIOUSLY pushing to be aimed at women 18-34, and instead the whole part and parcel was aimed at one narrow demographic. I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore a demographic that could be so valuable and which is largely so untapped at this point.
We’re not here because it was our first choice. Events led to our moving from California to a state neither of us would have picked as a ‘Top Ten’.
We’ve been here almost ten years now, & while I’ve never done a happy dance about being here I’m particularly ashamed to be a Tennessee resident at the moment.
Two reasons: an attempt to pass an anti-bullying bill that would provide a loophole for ‘religious & political beliefs’ for students who want to ‘express their views on homosexuality’ and the Tennessee Tea Party is trying to erase slavery & genocide from the history books in order to prevent the Founding Fathers’ reputations from being tarnished.
No. Really.
The links take you to more information & on-line petitions saying ‘hell, no!’.
All this around the same time that this hate-monger & devoid-of-facts jerk found himself banned from a local eatery.
…The restaurant has been packed since.
Yesterday as part of my essay on Women in Refrigerators: 13 years late for Women Write About Comics I suggested that we need an additional lens in which to examine women in comics.
Part of that was the creation of a new site that celebrates positive portrayls of women in comics. As I…
