Perhaps Wonder Boy's Time Has Come

[snurri]

scans_daily has Alan Moore's three-part essay on women in comics circa 1983, "Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies." Interesting to read that in the context of, well, now. There are more women working in comics, but a lot of the same crap is still happening; and folks like Frank Miller, whom Moore cites as doing right by female characters (i.e. Elektra), have gone a fair ways backwards in recent years. This is also interesting to read in light of the recent Dave Sim/Gail Simone confrontation (if it can really be called that, seeing as how Sim mostly weasels out of actual responses to Gail's fair and thoughtful questions) over at Sequential Tart's forums. That conversation is still going on, BTW, even though Sim has slunk away.

Every time I read an interview with Sim I remember the slimy feeling I got when I was slogging my way through Reads. It went beyond making me ashamed of my gender; by the end I was uncomfortable with being from the same species as such a hateful, backwards person. Yuck. It's amazing to me that he can still inspire these feelings in me a dozen years after I gave up on his work.

Comments

[readingthedark.livejournal.com]

Wow. I think this is the first comic book thing where we're not on the exact same page. For me, it was heartbreaking to watch a creator succumb to a disturbing strain of schizophrenia and the thread made me sad again. I didn't like reading it.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Well, I had never heard the schizophrenia theory before Nick mentioned it. If that's the case, then of course that's heartbreaking; but I'm not sure where you guys are getting that information.

Not so much a theory as it is an admission

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

To me, it’s a gender thing. When I had my breakdown in ’79—when I was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic—it scared my wife and she called my mother and my mother came over and both my wife and my mother proceeded to get scared and decided that I needed to get medical help (the court of first resort for most emotion-based beings).

Re: Not so much a theory as it is an admission

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that; I hadn't seen that before.