Author Archives: vommarlowe

Ghost World: Hateable Girls, Part Eleventy-Billion

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‘Show, don’t tell’ the saying goes, and that’s what Clowes does here.  Ghost World, as those who’ve been reading along are aware, is the story of two teenaged girls fresh from highschool named Enid and Rebecca.  Ghost World chronicles some episodic interludes in their relationship and Enid’s life.

With its purposefully ugly art, limited color schemes, Satanists, cafe settings, music references, and f-bombs, this comic is painfully edgy.  The whole thing might as well scream: I’m new!  Different!  Hip!

And maybe the art is, maybe the setting is, but honestly I don’t really care.  The story is pathetically old school.

Clowes depicts the two girls, Enid and Rebecca, as being shallow shallow shallow.  They lead boring, directionless lives.  They like to make prank calls.  They pick on each other.  Enid, in particular, is full of loathing towards others.  When Rebecca challenges her to name one guy she finds attractive and would sleep with she says, wait for it!

David Clowes.

No, really, she does.  Self-insert Mary Sue-ism!  Ewww.

It’s one thing to show a set of characters as essentially problematic and unlikeable, but if you’re going to do it, and you’re not one of the group you’re deriding, then you’d better show them accurately and not rig the game in your own favor.

Which is why Ghost World so annoys me.  Clowes’s teenaged girls don’t behave like teenaged girls.  Here we have Enid telling Rebecca a story about meeting an old asshole, Ellis, and his kiddie raper friend.  Ellis ‘humorously’ suggests that the kiddie-raper check her out, since she’s only 18.

Rebecca’s response is shown below:

TakeMe

First of all, take a look at that body language.  As someone who wears a skirt from time to time, let me tell you that girls rarely spread their legs like that while wearing a skirt.  For one thing, it’s flat out uncomfortable.  For another, we get nagged about spreading our legs or showing off our panties or what-have-you.  Even in pants, spreading the legs is something that is usually done when one feels very comfortable and safe.  It’s not something that a girl does when she’s just heard some bozo suggest a child-molester hit on her best friend.

This panel is not an accident.  Look, I don’t like Ghost World, but Clowes has some drawing chops and he portrays body language effectively enough when he wants to. So what’s going on here?

A teenaged girl is not going to open her legs wide in a ‘take me big boy’ response, so why is she drawn this way?  I can only assume that Clowes thinks a girl would have that response or because he wants to titillate the reader with Rebecca’s spread legs.  Either option is unpleasant.

Then there’s the “lesbo” masturbation scene.

I’ve noticed that one of the ways Clowes mocks Enid is by having her mock people for something and then later having Enid do that mockable thing herself.  Enid makes fun of a guy who she used to have something of a teen-romance with in high school.  She says that he probably called her and jacked off while she talked.  Mock mock mock ew say Enid and Rebecca.  Then Enid visits an adult bookstore and picks up a fetish Batwoman hat and calls to tell Rebecca about the adventure.  While on the phone with Rebecca, Enid takes off all her clothes and gropes herself while looking in the mirror (but doesn’t tell Rebecca).  Mock mock mock.

It’s this weird circle jerk, but it doesn’t ring true.  It comes off to me as something Clowes wants to think teenaged girls do, much in the same way that the high school boys I knew hoped the girls in the gym showers got up to steamy hanky panky.  Never mind that in reality gym showers were places of horror, shame, body-fat hatred, silent prayers that you weren’t having your period (and if you were, that no one would find out–good luck with that) and tears. To the guys it was all a happy fantasy of hot girl on girl action.

Why is Clowes doing this?  I say it’s to do two things at once: make fun of Enid for being a jerk and to fantasize about her and Rebecca in a sexual way.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Take out the reference to Sassy and replace it with Lucky.  Remove the punk green hair and replace it with a blonde ponytail.  Switch the swearwords from fucking cunts to snooty bitches.  Remove Bob Skeeter the astrologist and replace him with Ned the computer nerd.  Pretty soon, if you took away the hipster faux-literary trappings and replaced them with mainstream teen story trappings, you’d have a boring and cliched tale of a couple of teenage girls who everyone loves to hate (and wants to date).

But maybe it’s not as OK as it used to be to hate girls just because they’re blond and pretty and not fucking you.  So, instead of going that route, make the girls “real” by changing their outfits and the bit characters and the scenery.  Then it’s not a cliched misogynistic screed, it becomes a “true” tale of how girls “really are”.

But it isn’t quite a tale of a guy who can’t get some, is it?  No, because Clowes draws the main character wanting him.  How much more proof could there be that this is a story about girls who are wanted/hated and the line between those two things?

There’s a fine literary tradition all about how women are shallow creatures and female friendships are suspicious and smothering.  But if you’re a old dude perving on the sweet young things when you’re arguing it, it looks a teensy bit suspicious, is what I’m sayin’.

So let’s take a look at the so-called emotional growth and story progression of their relationship.  What do they say and what do they do? Enid is thinking of going to college (to become someone new) and Rebecca decides to travel with her.  What do they say about this?  That it’s unhealthy.

Let’s take a look at that.  It’s unhealthy for a friend to accompany a friend on a quest to become someone new.

Do you think that’s true?  Because I sure as hell don’t.  I’ve gone on several quests to make myself better, move someplace new (emotionally or physically), and been enriched and enlivened by the people who are by my side, traveling those paths with me.  But Clowes, speaking through his characters, labels this as kind of creepy.

So what, exactly, does Clowes display as  Enid’s growth?  What is her progression?

If we take a look at the final pages, we see Enid in a new outfit.  We’ve learned in this comic that changing outfits means changing who you are (at least for Enid), so let’s take a look at what’s she changed into.  She’s well-groomed, with smooth hair done like Jackie Kennedy, and she’s wearing a neat, fifties housewife ensemble and carrying a hatbox shaped purse.  Examine that for a moment.

Does this hark back to a desire on Enid’s part?  Not as mentioned/drawn in the text, so we’re left interpreting the image in the way our society means it.  Nothing says housewife quite the way a fifties outfit does.  Is there anything (besides June Cleaver) that fifties suits and haircuts bring to mind, visually speaking?

Not that I know of.

What is this journey, anyway?  It’s a journey of Enid’s current life, and it ends when Enid steps on a bus.  What does that symbolize, within the context of story that Clowes has built?  Erasure of self.  Clowes likes to talk about it as creating someone new, but again and again he denies that Enid wants to be anyone specific.  At the end, presumably after her emotional change (indicated by the dress, the diner voyeur scene and the bus) he gives her no identity except that of a very stereotypical fifties housewife.

That’s the “growth” that he lays out.

Ponder that for a moment and ask yourself whether it is, in any substantial way, a positive view of Enid.  A positive view of girls, period.  Whether it is anything besides the author saying, “Girls like Enid eventually cease to exist“.  Not only does the author change them (into something trite), the girl herself wants to be anyone but herself.  Herself is so awful she cannot be.

That’s a pretty hateful message when you get right down to it, and I cannot look at that as growth, as anything besides old fashioned misogyny and a desire to turn Enid into, bluntly, a wife.  A person who exists not for herself, but who exists in relation to a man.*

But maybe I’m wrong.  It’s been known to happen, and a single outfit is a small thing to base an entire textual interpretation on, right?

Right.  Let’s look at the diner scene, which is the last line in the book, and the closure of Enid’s relationship with Rebecca.  What does Enid say?

She says, “You’ve turned into a beautiful young woman.”

A beautiful young woman.

Look at those words.  Consider the perspective of them.

Who is saying this?  What is the relation of the woman in those words?  To what aspect of the person are these words referring?

Enid (or Clowes through the character of Enid) considers this the mark of passage for Rebecca, the outside view, the praise.  But what kind of praise is it?

It’s the praise of someone outside the woman, wanting her sexually, and has nothing at all to do with the woman’s internal desires, personal happiness, emotional growth, interests, community, relationships, or personhood.  No, to say ‘She’s a beautiful young woman’ is to say she’s sexually desirable by an outsider.

And you know, as a bland statement of fact, it’s not so bad.  But as a statement of a woman’s journey through a friendship and her creation of a new ideal self?  That’s really fucking shallow, objectifying, and creepy.

This is not a tale of powerful female friendships post highschool.  Nor is it a tale of emotional growth.  It’s the same, tired story of how girls are shallow and their friendships are incestuous and unhealthy and most importantly how they need to become not-themselves.  Gee, that’s deep.  I’ve never heard teen girls and what they care about called shallow before!  How original!

* Yes, I’m well aware that plenty of women are happily married.  That’s not what I’m talking about, so let’s not go there.  What I’m talking about is defining a woman only as her role in regards to men.

Note number two: I was an odd clothes wearing weirdo who read strange magazines, once upon a time, so I’m well familiar voices and inner worries of this group.  Just so you know.

Empowered, Vol 1

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Empowered, Adam Warren

You know one of those weeks where you’re so tired you’re stumbling and your boss of course chooses to give you yet another boring but incredibly difficult project, and there is yet another freak ice storm which kills all your pansies, and you clean off your dog’s muddy foot and discover that you’ve just smeared dog poo around on your bare hand?

Yes, that would be my week.

I flopped onto my La-Z-boy one day during that awful hideous week and sighed. I was not up for another bad comic with lumpy people in spandex, I just wasn’t. I couldn’t face beautifully drawn pretty boys, either, in case there was random non-con. I just wanted something, well, fun. And funny, if it could be had. I pawed around my stack of to be read books rather listlessly, spilling them all over the floor and tossing them over my shoulder as I went. Tenant of Wildfell Hall–good, but too long. Toss. In Praise of Idleness–nice idea, but who needs philosophy? Toss. MARC 21 For Everyone–yeah, right. Toss.

Empowered. Huh.

That was supposed to be good, I thought, and wrestled off the aggressive shrinkwrap.

An hour later, I was still chortling when I had to go wrestle my Pookie back inside from where he was telling the facts of life (Thou Shall Not Look at my people, Thou Shall Not approach my yard, Thou Shall Not even think about coming over this fence) to the new yappy dog next door.

In this volume, we meet Emp, the heroine of the tale and the eponymous Empowered. She has this supersuit that gives her powers, but it’s shrinkwrap tight and very thin. When it gets torn–as it does very easily–it loses powers. She’s famous for getting taken hostage, tied up and gagged with a ball gag, wearing her torn and scanty suit. Despite this, she’s a better superhero than the rest of the Super Homeys, of which she is an Associate Member.

I found this comic incredibly endearing, direly funny, and rather feminist. Also, hot. Emp is beautiful, but she’s not hot just because she’s beautiful. I can flip through a lot of lovingly drawn bodacious babes in spandex and be bored. No, it’s Emp’s spunk and humanity that make her so hot. Also, she has a nice butt.

This is drawn by a man who likes women to have actual thighs, and unlike many superhero comics, her thighs are fat. It’s cute and hot. Emp, of course, is worried about how she looks. There’s a very spot on portrayal of her concern about the suit–which reveals everything–when Sista Spooky makes fun of Emp for having a panty line. Which means thereafter she goes without. Which means, ahem, that she has to take care of certain things down there so as not to show, well, wiry realities to all and sundry.

Emp is both brave and real–her concerns I would have and can relate to. Her bravery is amazing because she has these human feelings and failings. Supeman’s bravery is not interesting or amazing, because he’s never worried about how the tights looked on him and he’s not too worried that the train will smash him, either. Emp has to worry about both and she dashes into danger anyway.

She also has a terrible part time job in retail.

I laughed and laughed through this comic, because so much of it is so painfully true. Who hasn’t had a crappy job, struggled to make ends meet, and lied through their teeth to their mom when she’s called to ask how things are going? ‘Oh, fine,’ we say, eating consolatory ice cream, the only good thing in our lives and probably costing more per pint than half our grocery budget for the week, ‘things are going well.’ And Emp does this.

Along the way, she is joined by Thug Boy, who is a great boyfriend and Ninjette, who is a great best friend. But it’s Emp that I feel for and who I’ll be buying the next volume to get more of. There’s also a possessed alien device, superheroes who got their mutant powers through alien STDs, and some hilarious side jobs for Thug Boy. But I think Noah covered all of that.

Highly recommended if you are in need of a sexy and funny comic to cheer up your week.

Art and craft: xkcd

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xkcd, webcomic
Randall Munroe

As some of you know, I like to rant blog about the art aspect of the comics I read. I love JH Williams and I love Alphonse Mucha and Caravaggio, and from this, one might reasonably suppose that I abhor a lot of art.

Which I do. But I also love a lot of art. The great thing about successful art is that it communicates. Art doesn’t have to be perfectly anatomically correct, pure of line, based on divine proportion, or created with pigments ground from semi-precious stones in order to make the reader sigh, laugh, or feel that moment of beauty. It just has to work.

Check this out:

I love this. The art is simple, but it’s got a kind of silly grace to it that makes it perfect for its subject matter. There’s no weird lumpy anatomy getting in the way of the joke or the compassion. There’s just the guy on his deck and the woodpecker.

And this, titled “Duty Calls”:

Come on, who hasn’t been there?

The anatomy is perfect. Yes, I know it’s a stick figure, but work with me here. The impact on the keys. The forward focus. The flat screen and the computer chair.

This doesn’t depend on anatomy, but it does depend on perspective and layout. It’s also funny and sweet and warming. I like it.

See, I think there’s a lot to be said for simplicity and humor and just plain getting the point across. The art needs to serve the point of the communication. Some of the, hmmm, shall we say overmuscled super hero comics seem to miss the idea that the art needs to communicate as much as the words do. I often wonder what would happen if the dialog was removed from the mainstream comics I have been reading. Would anyone still look at it? I’m not so sure.

But back to xkcd. It’s funny. And I love that. I am going to leave you with one of my absolute favorite comics of all time, which I have been tempted to buy in tee shirt form. (I have not, as yet, ever been tempted to buy another comic in shirt form.)

This is really better large, so here’s the link.

Face Down in the Mainstream: Astonishing X-Men, Grumpy Vom is Grumpy

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Astonishing X-Men #30 by Ellis, Bianchi, et al.

I picked this up because the art looked cool. And, you know, the art is cool. The inks are interesting, with washes as well as lines and a very grimy palette of off green and brown and blue. The anatomy is well-done overall. The facial expressions, while not perfect, are realistic. There are some clear artistic patterns like large pouty lips. There are attempts to make the layout interesting by using weapons as layout lines. See?

Pretty, isn’t it?

But it was not enough.

For one thing, the art is very realistic. It’s not picture perfect (blue lion mutants with glasses don’t actually exist), but it’s styled to be real. The artist likes to include things like red lines in the eyes, to show the craziness of the villain or spittle flying to show that people are shouting.

Unfortunately, the craziness comes off more like caaaaaaaarrrraaaaaziness and the spittle just seems sort of gross. The story is just–irritating, and the art could be so awesome, and yet it doesn’t all mesh the way a visually told story should.

Instead of making me look forward to more or compensating, the art just reinforced those parts of the story that pissed me off. The basic plot is that the X-Men have found the source of some fake mutants. Their ex-fellow, Forge, has gone bastshit (as one does) and started to make fake mutants to combat evil warriors from an alternate dimension. They’ve denned Forge in his lair in order to stop him.

And Forge proceeds to act like a cartoon villain, right down to the rolling red eyes and the spit and the dramatic gestures and weird poses. It’s sad. I actually felt bad for the guy.

Especially when they cut off his leg and then laugh about it. I mean, jeez, people. Aren’t you the heroes? Wasn’t this guy your old pal?

(And maybe Forge really is a terrible person worthy of laughter, but really, people. Cutting off someone’s leg and then laughing is just bad form. Tacky! Yes, he had some mutant-dampener in it, but I don’t care. Show a little respect!)

The X-Men battle the fake-o mutants with no trouble. Forge wanted to lure the X-men into dealing with the cause of the interdimensional warriors by mounting an attack via a large cube (as one does). The X-Men tell Forge off, then whack off his leg in response. Which is gratitude for you, I guess.

You’d think, after the random amputation and cracks about how dumb/crazy Forge is to believe that the interdimensional warriors are a Threat To Humanity As We Know It, that they’d all just leave. But no. The blue lion guy has his girlfriend nuke the place from orbit, just to be sure. Which blows up the special cube and therefore through it to the interdimensional warrior scout dudes’ homeworld, which, blue lion now explains, is probably toast.

Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? I mean, clearly Forge was blood-thirsty and crazy for trying to send a couple of mutant warriors through to make sure no one messed with our Earth. So much better to just toss in a great big old world destroying bomb without bothering to make contact.

Corel Painter Official Magazine

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www.paintermagazine.com
With especial emphasis on the tutorials of Wen-Xi Chen.

For those who don’t play in the fields of digital art, Corel Painter X (or XI, which has just been released) is the big “other” art program. Unlike Photoshop, Painter is designed to mimic the natural materials so many artists use. Sure, Photoshop has some natural material brushes, but it doesn’t have a mixing palette or blending brushes or brushes which naturally and intuitively pick up the underlying paint and mix it, or make impasto, or a dozen other things. For the curious, here is a shot of the desktop:

See all the color options and the palette?

The mixing of paints, the vast variety of brushes, and the intuitive nature of color choices and ease of vast color picking make Painter a very strong program. One of the biggest flaws I see in digital art today is the tendency to use a very dark, very gray palette, with a photo-realistic, brush-stroke-less style for the people and a lot of green-gray-yellow shadows. This isn’t so much an artistic choice as it is a habit induced by some curious features of Photoshop. Art created in Painter has a tendency to be much livelier in color and to have unexpectedly quick and fun brushstrokes. It’s easier to do certain kinds of paintings spontaneously in Painter and it’s deeply easy for an artist decently skilled in craft but relatively new to digital tools to create something worthwhile:

This is a study of a gingko that I did about a year ago; it took me about an hour total in Painter. The entire time I just focused on what I wanted the piece to convey, and none of the time was spent mucking about with filters or complex low opacity blending techniques that Photoshop would have required. I did not know Painter then, I just picked up a bit of a tutorial, flipped through it, thought, how hard could it be, and did this piece.

Painter doesn’t get much respect at times, but I think that’s a shame. One reason that it doesn’t always appeal to artists (digital and traditional) is that it’s a rather powerful program and with great power, as we all know, comes great responsibility. Or at least the need for a tutorial or two. Which brings us to Painter Magazine.

Painter is so utterly different than Photoshop and so full of yummy options (a dizzying array of brush types and brush tips and watercolors that require special layers and some paints that interact and others that don’t) that a guide is delightful and necessary. Unfortunately, many of the traditional guide options suck. The books are either old or too complicated or are pretty much how to turn photographs into ‘art’, which is all very boring. Some of the Deviant Art tutorials are good, but they’re insufficient, by their nature.

Which is why I really like the Painter magazine. It’s one of those beautiful English magazines that comes with a CD full of goodies and some ads for cameras I’d never be able to afford. I have to buy mine at the Borders and they’re always a month or so behind the English release date, but it doesn’t really matter. The magazine isn’t cheap: It retails for fifteen bucks (14.99), but it’s well worth it.

The magazine is divided up into some regular sections and features. It’s designed to appeal to Corel Painter newbies as well as some really advanced artists. The format is roughly:

  • A tutorial on cloning a photo into art
  • A tutorial to create a painting in a famous artist’s style, using media brushes that the artist favored, like Baroque portraits or Sargent or Vermeer.
  • A tutorial on a brush family, like Sumi-e or art markers
  • A tutorial on creating the cover art
  • A traditional art tutorial (such as drawing skills)
  • A few more tutorials on differing subjects (like portraits, landscapes, color use or seasons)
  • Some reviews and interviews

The CD goodies always include a trial version of Painter, often a trial version of another software, and stock images, underdrawings from tutorials, brushes or special settings, and often a video tutorial

The tutorials are well done and have some unique features. My favorite is that they are graded by difficulty (easy, intermediate, and advanced) and have a suggested time. Five hours is a common time, but there are also tutorials that list 36 hours. I love that.

There are many fine artists who are, to put it politely, less than stellar instructors. Fortunately, Painter chooses its artists carefully. My favorite tutorial writer by far is the artist Wen-Xi Chen. Her art is stunning, but equally important, her tutorials make sense and help me make my art better. She is a frequent writer for Painter and has done at least two covers, the lush and beautiful feature on portrait painting eyes and the latest issue with Sumi-E.

This eye isn’t perfect, by any means, but I think it’s turning out rather well, and it’s all down to Wen-Xi Chen’s fine tutorial.

The latest issue of the magazine (at least the one available in the states) has another Chen cover. Her tutorial on Sumi-E brushes has me excited to try another simple portrait and test out some new brushes and tools. The program is lovely, but having this kind of solid, useful guide is fantastic and makes it possible for someone like me, who just does this as a hobby, to enjoy it more fully. I highly recommend the magazine. It’s not necessary to get it every month, but I hope if you’re interested that you’ll pick it up and give it a look see.

Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over: Part Two, Mainstream Comic Breakdown

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I’m going to be talking today about race in mainstream comics. Not all of them, just the handful I’ve picked up and read, and blogged about.

Before anyone protests that I haven’t read enough of the story to know about the level of racism in the comics, I’d like to explain that I’m not looking for personal racism. I’m looking at institutional racism. Institutional racism is very different from personal racism. In personal racism, a creator’s beliefs about another group of people’s inherent inferiority come out in racial slurs, whacko depictions, and so on. There is usually (not always but often) a level of consciousness about the racism. Black people are evil Nazis! (See Noah’s post on Wonder Woman.)

Institutional racism is not like that at all. Oh, there can be instances where small cogs in the wheel add to the overall racist nature of the machine, but it’s mostly about the grinding pattern of racism. That pattern becomes a paradigm, a way things are, a view of the world. Sometimes that view of the world colors things so sharply that it blocks out reality.

That’s what I’d like to look at today.

By and large, our media industry has a white point of view, regardless of the color of the creators or even its recipients (yes, there are exceptions). This includes comics. By point of view, I mean that the main character, through whom we view the story, is presumed white. White is the default point of view, in the same way that the default point of view is male. Yes, there are exceptions, which is why the term ‘chick flick’ came about. People call them chick flicks to designate that they are not normal. There’s no gender labeling of summer blockbusters. We don’t call the latest Exploding City and People With Guns PG movie scheduled for Thanksgiving Day release a ‘guy film’, because that would be pointless. In the same way, we have Blaxploitation movies, because white movies are the default.

Again, I would like to assert that I am not accusing any comic creator, be they artist, writer, colorist, inker, letterer or editor, of personal racism. I don’t know them and have no idea of their own race, political views, or personal actions. I assume, instead, that they are good people doing the craft to the best of their ability.

What I’d like to look at today are the comics that I have read or that I have picked up to read. These are current releases, picked because I thought the covers were pretty or they sounded good. They were not chosen on the basis of writing a column about racism in mainstream comics. They are, in short, my normal reading material. This is important, because what I want to look at is not whether these comics are racist in the sense that Noah’s beloved Wonder Woman was, but whether they are institutionally racist.

Does the white point of view (regardless of its origin) color over the reality, the accuracy, of the worlds that these comics inhabit?

I don’t know, although I have my guesses.

So let’s start with Supergirl (#44 October 2009). This takes place in Metropolis, and thus the analog is Chicago (I grew up near Clark’s stomping grounds, and the big city is Chicago.) Chicago’s demographics are roughly: 42% White, 37% Black, 4% Asian, 14% other races, 3% two or more races. 26% are Hispanic, of any race. This is from the 2000 census. The nature of the census makes counting Hispanics difficult in some ways, but I am assuming that some of the percentages of Whites and Other races make up the some of the Hispanic numbers. It would be unusual in my experience for Hispanics to count themselves as Black unless they were of mixed parentage that includes Black.

The demographics of Supergirl are as follows:

Scene 1

Whites: 10 (83%)

Blacks: 1 (8%)

Hispanic (a benefit of the doubt guess): 1 (8%)

Scene 2

Whites: 13 (100%)

Scene 3

Whites: 5 (83%)

Blacks: 1 (17%)

Scene 4

Whites: 6 (100%)

Scene 5/6:

Whites: 19 (100%)

Well, allrighty then. Not exactly reality is it? The city is totally inaccurate.

Let’s switch to the X-Men (X-Men Legacy issue 226). This episode takes place in San Francisco. I’m going to quote Wikipedia on the demographics, because they write it very well:

Like many larger U.S. cities, San Francisco is a minority-majority city, as non-Hispanic whites comprise less than half of the population. The 2005–2007 American Community Survey estimated that 45.0% of the population was made up of non-Hispanic whites.[116] Asians make up 33.1% of the population; people of Chinese descent constitute the largest single ethnic group in San Francisco at about one-fifth of the population. Hispanics of any race make up 14.0% of the population. San Francisco’s black population has declined in recent decades, from 13.4% of the city in 1970 to 7.3% of the population in 2007.[116]

For this episode, I’m going to skip counting any person who is a non-natural color (e.g., green, crayola toned, etc).

Scene 1:

Whites: 4 (100%)

Scene 3:

Whites: 34 (97%)

Blacks: 1 (3%)

Note: a crowd scene

Scene 4:

Whites: 5 (100%)

Scene 5:

Whites: 37 (81%)

Blacks: 7 (19%)

Note: Also a crowd scene

You think San Francisco is 97% white? Really?! And again at 81%.

Note that there were no Asians that I could find, despite two distinct crowd scenes that showed faces. Two. A full third of the the city, and yet none were there. NONE.

Both cities depicted here should have had a majority of people of color, because both cities—like most cities in America—have a minority of whites.

I was going to keep going and do this with several more comics, and if anyone really really wants me to, I might, but it’s too damn depressing.

If anyone doubts the importance of portraying the world accurately-that is to say, with a wide variety of faces and skin tones and body types-I’d like to point you to this excellent speech.

____________________
Update by Noah: You can read all posts in the roundtable here.

Find comics in libraries! Now possible!

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The Library of Congress and OCLC (the people who bring you Dewey Decimal, among other things) have made a change to the way books are cataloged that makes it easier to find comics.

I will skip the obscure librarian geekery and get to the part that is interesting.

Have you ever tried to find a movie in a library? Have you naively entered “Star Wars” into the search box and been deluged with books, VHS videos, weird audio adaptations of the movies (on tapes), audio adaptations of the books (on CD), and so on? You know how you can narrow your search to just DVDs? (Of course it will turn out that some shlub has checked out The Empire Strikes Back and has it overdue, but never mind that.)

Now you will be able to find graphic novels and comics the same way! It used to be that you could search for comic strips–like Peanuts–but the precise folks over at the Big Library of LC don’t like to label graphic novels and manga as comic strips because they’re not comic strips.

Assuming your library has a robust catalog, you will be able to find out, for instance, how many graphic novels your library has (total), whether they have graphic novels on certain topics (like dogs or relationships or autobiography), and if they have a specific work in graphic novel format.

I think this is very cool, because it’s a formal acknowledgment of the form, but mostly because it allows people to find the works.

For more information, see the OCLC Technical Bulletin 257: MARC Format Update.