The comics blogiverse is an increasingly diverse network of comics pundits, fans and fanatics — not to mention professional creators themselves — where one can find a variety of fascinating and/or obnoxious opinions to suit any taste, or lack thereof. Every Saturday — give or take a couple of days! — I’ll offer up excerpts from five of the more interesting, thought-provoking posts I’ve come across over the past week, for better or worse. Enjoy!

Fun With Keyword Searches
Occasional Superheroine

The next I’m going to group together, as they are related.
“supergirl horny”
and
“supergirl minor sexy”
I know there has been a lot of head-scratching recently about that DC Direct f**k-doll Supergirl mini-statue. “Who would buy something that exploitative?” Well, at least we have two customers right here.

Next,
“power girl raped”
That’s pretty ugly, isn’t it? And yet the keyword “rape” in association with superheroines are quite popular — they are listed in the recent keyword searches for my blog almost every day.

“wonder woman boob”
Now, this is fairly innocuous. It’s almost rather quaint.

Superhero Comics Aren’t for Girls
Comics Worth Reading

“Superhero comics aren’t for girls” is true the same way “romance novels aren’t for boys” or “action movies aren’t for girls” are. They’re gender-identified genres. The people who make them and the majority of the people who consume them know who their audience tends to be. Recognizing that doesn’t make you sexist or invalidate anyone’s tastes; it’s just realism. “Chick lit” and fashion mags are aimed at women; Mack Bolan books and gun and car mags are aimed at men.

That doesn’t mean that they’re 100% enjoyed by only members of that gender, but it does make the cross-gender participants exceptions. It’s great that those oddballs (said lovingly, since I’m one too) have used the net to find each other…

I’m sure there are occasional males who read romance novels, too, but if one started blogging about how the genre needed to be overhauled to be made more attractive to men, they’d be giggled at… and rightly so.

Hey, Kids (With Willies)! Comics!
The Comics Reporter

I’m not certain I agree with her specific implications, emphasis or even the way the argument is constructed, but Johanna Draper Carlson floats the interesting notion that maybe superheroes are targeted towards boys because superhero comics are boys comics. A modicum of flipping out follows.

One of the odd things that crops up whenever you get into a characterization discussion regarding superheroes is that there’s still an underlying assumption with some folks that superheroes should be subject to criticism and reforms as if they were the entirety of comics. This notion crops up in other places; it led to a long period where many comics critics conflated the growth of the art form with the reform of a genre, even demanding the application of literary standards to works that might naturally and rightfully resist such standards.

In other words, when I was 10, my idea of an artistic achievement in comics and the best Spider-Man comic ever was the same: maybe Peter Parker could go on a journalistic assignment in a foreign land and leave his costume at home. When I got older I figured out I’d rather read Joe Sacco on the journalistic assignment and that Peter Parker was better off spending two pages at the Coffee Bean and 22 pages punching Green Goblin in the head.

Amy Reads the Week (of May 11th, 2007)
Arrogant Self-Reliance

I am Not A Manga Fan by trade, by profession, or by blogging, but that is not to say that I pooh-pooh the Idea of Manga. Rather, much of the Manga I had seen was of the open-mouthed wide-eyed screaming variety, and while I enjoy big eyes and screaming as much as the next person—having some rather large eyes and a rather big mouth myself—all of the Manga I had encountered was a bit manic for my tastes. A little too flashy, a little too loud, and frankly, I’m rather anti-black-and-white pen medium. I like my books colorful. I like my comics a bit brooding.

Also, I like superhero books, and I’m Rather Fond of the Flights and Tights crowd. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Black Canary (known to scream herself On Occasion!), these are my heroes, and while Sandmans and Deaths and Homicidal Maniac Johnnies and Vampire Slayers and Hellboys grace my shelves, all are rather lacking in the Flights and Tights department. Manga just wasn’t superheroic enough for This Humble Author, it seemed.

That is to say, until Free Comic Book Day, 2006.

Just Past the Horizon: I’m Missing Something Here
Blog@Newsarama

In the last Legion of Superheroes reboot, two black characters (XS and Quantum Kid) were discarded, and Starboy, a white character, was rebooted as a black character. The official line was that Starboy was changed to reflect racial diversity. The racial diversity they had before the reboot. Now, logically, if this character was important enough to change it would be important enough to use him but in the first two years of the new series Starboy wasn’t vital to any of the plotlines. He was barely used. They could just as easily have kept the other characters, or turned one of the more prominent characters a different race (Cosmic Boy, Invisible Kid) and gotten their diversification, but instead they changed the race of a minor character, and they picked the spot where a little identity ambiguity would support the plot in one of their more popular books. And then they claimed sensitivity.

I can’t be the only one irked by that.

Still, I saw more fighting when they changed the character at the reboot than I do at the lack of use.