Blerd Chick Stories: NOK

In which my favorite comic company fails yet again, makes epic and transparent excuses and then makes them some more.

In other news, a bunch of people fail to apply basic critical thinking and just accept stupid excuses as if they had any hope of being true.

So DC has come up with what they, and the Furious Fanboys, apparently, think is a good excuse for denying Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer and the thousands upon thousands of LGBTQ fans who love them a wedding.

Firstly, Dan DiDio stated that there were complaints when she started as a lead character in 2006 but that DC continues to support her as a character to this day. That she’s a hero first, and that being gay is “a part of who she is.”

She’s clearly a member of the Bat family, and that as a result she shouldn’t have a happy personal life. That she’s committed to defending others at the sacrifice of personal instincts and personal lives.

So its important to establish their personal lives, but then they have to set them aside. And that heroes shouldn’t get married.

If you are currently screaming “BULLSHIT,” at you computer screen, fear not, you are not alone. I mean, maybe you are alone, in which case you are possibly scaring your pets, like I did.

Lots of comic characters are married. Lots of them at DC. I mentioned three or so from memory, last post. And “she’s a member of the Bat family and thus she can’t be happy,” doesn’t make any kind of sense given that marriage is not, as far as anyone who has ever been in one can testify, a panacea for all one’s mental and emotional ills.

Anyone with even a tiny bit of sense can see that writing a married member of the Bat family has to capacity to open up a huge number of story lines and conflicts that have never been explored by DC’s flagship book. But no. That can’t happen.

The authors of Batwoman had been planning the wedding for a year. If “no wedding,”s is DC policy  then someone would probably have mentioned that, you know, a year ago. But they didn’t and now the former authors aren’t just leaving early in protest, that are out, period as of right now.

But we should all just move along because there’s nothing to see here?

No. Dan DiDio is lying and he’s not even doing it well. He’s just throwing out some transparent bullshit in the hopes that we’ll fall for it and stop calling him on his behavior.

Let’s not fall for it. Further, let’s continue calling him and DC in general on their behavior.

The other controversy, which I needed some distance (and possibly some rum) to be able to write about coherently. According to Furious Fanboys,

Popular husband and wife team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner are working on a new satirical Harley Quinn comic, and DC is holding a contest for someone to draw a page from it that will make it into the final book.

According to FF,

Gawker decided to fan the flames of click baiting with the headling, “DC Comics Contest: Draw a Naked Woman Committing Suicide.”

OK, well yes that’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is, Gawker wrote a headline that is significantly more factual than they can usually be counted on to provide and FF is trying desperately to attack Gawker’s credibility because otherwise they have no leg to stand on.

Fine, FF’s is a more elegant sentence. Mine is true though, so I’ll stick with it.

The fact that they authors of the Harley Quinn honestly feel back on Bullshit Internet Excuse Number One “I Was Kidding,” means that they were wrong and they know it. It does nothing to mitigate all the criticism that was leveled at them for starting a contest that involves a beloved character trying to kill herself over and over and over again, AT THE START OF NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION WEEK, nor does it address the deeper criticism of the sexualization of violence and suicide via said contest. All they came up with was “we were kidding.”

That’s not acceptable. If they had succeeded in being funny the rest of us would be laughing too. Clearly, a lot of us aren’t. They weren’t’ being funny. What they were doing was being cruel and refusing to be compassionate to a huge portion of their fanbase.

The second part is particularly troubling since DC’s got a whole subsection of the Green Lantern mythos that functions on and spreads compassion. Yet they can’t muster the basic compassion necessary to post some variation of “We are sorry that our actions caused you harm.” Even if they have no intention of changing their decisions the compassion exhibited could go a long way toward making their fans not pissed off at them anymore.

Seriously, how is this complicated? When you hurt someone, you tell them you are sorry for their pain. This is grade school stuff.