Ethnicity, Gender, and other issues in comics and RAoF

The major comic book companies were not only extremely tardy in representing gays in comics, they were relatively slow in representing other racial and ethnic individuals or groups in comics. And, given the era back then, they were relatively sexist and perhaps didn't often realize that they were.

Marvel introduced the Black Panther in the 60's, and DC followed along. Even the Legion would have an African-American member late in the decade.

Ironically, within the Legion there was already a green legionnaire (Brainiac 5), an orange legionnaire (Chameleon Boy), and eventually a blue legionnaire (Shadow Lass). While the Legion had a girl from the beginning (Saturn Girl), she was immediately outnumbered by the boys, Lightning Lad and Cosmic Boy and, very quickly, Super Boy was asked to join the team.* Eventually, there would be Triplicate Girl, Shrinking Violet, Phantom Girl, and Light Lass; but there was correspondingly also Sun Boy, Invisible Kid, Colossal Boy, Star Boy, Bouncing Boy, Element Lad, and Mon-El in the earliest Legion after they were a regular feature in Adventure Comics from #300 forward.

So the ratio of male to female team members was always a bit unbalanced toward the male teammates. (They did try to recruit Supergirl in the third Legion tale in Action Comics #267, but red kryptonite aged her appearance and the Legion had an age restriction: if you were over 18--or apparently if you only temporarily looked over 18--you could not join this teen-aged team.)

In a nod toward future equality of the membership regarding gender, however, the rules were changed so that while previously the team constitution only allowed adding one new member a year, it now allowed one new boy and one new girl per year. Supergirl obviously beat out Shrinking Violet in Action Comics #276. (Sun Boy and Bouncing Boy were shown as the two boys who were attempting to join the Legion, along with Brainiac 5--though, as I mention in the footnote below, a green-skinned boy was depicted as already in the Legion when Superboy joined earlier--though I am now told that this was a change made during the reprints and not when the original comic was created. Regardless, continuity was often hit and miss in early comics; and the editorial, writing, and artistic staffs weren't particularly diligent in keeping errors such as these to a minimum.)

The writer and editor got themselves into hot water with many fans (especially female readers) with Adventure Comics #309 by having Brainiac 5 say, "We'll draw lots for the job...excluding Saturn Girl. Because it's too risky a mission for a girl!" They were forced to rectify this sexist mistake by AC #319 when Brainiac 5 says, "...But...it's too dangerous for a girl! I must eliminate you, Saturn Girl." She indignantly replies, "I was selected by fair chance and I claim my right to go."

When I got around to creating my own adult team, the Rainbow Arc of Fire, it formed slowly. First with Greg, then with Paul as the initial two members--a duo rather than a team, really. Eventually, William and Joseph and Marina and Joan were added. So the gender imbalance between male and female members would continue, just as it had with the Legion. Soon, Dino and Michael and Cleo and Jane joined. Parity was finally achieved with the addition of Liquide and Mercuria (though Liquide has her own unique quality that makes full equality rather tricky).

I also handled ethnicity similarly (though not with a green, orange, or blue-skinned member). Joan and Greg were Hispanic, or at least had some Hispanic heritage in their background, though this was not emphasized (the Legion could get away with alien and alien-skinned members in the early and mid-60's--but those comics would have had a tough time selling in certain parts of the country then if their "unique" members were depicted as black or Hispanic or Asian instead of orange, green, or blue). But for RAoF it would not be until Liquide and Mercuria joined the Rainbow Arc of Fire that there would be teammates who appeared to be a woman with Asian features or one with African-American features--though, again, each had her own unique qualities that were done to emphasize the ethnic imbalances that had existed in the early and mid-60's.

Did DC deliberately try to have an ethnically diverse Legion by making them differently (though alien) colored even if they knew they would not be able to have African-American or Hispanic or Asian legionnaires until much later in the decade? I don't know for certain, but it seems possible. Did the staff give Element Lad an obviously pink and white uniform and later show him as still single when he was an adult legionnaire because someone along the line wanted to hint toward him possibly being gay? I seriously doubt that, but I suppose some readers could fantasize that he might be gay--and at least the possibility remained to make him so. In the 2000's, for one Legion (there have been several over the years), Invisible Kid obviously had feelings for Brainiac 5; but that was undone by a new Legion which appeared more recently when that other Legion was shelved.

* An interior scene of the early Legion clubhouse did show the backs of heads of four more legionnaires, three of whom were girls; but we were not shown whom they were. A later panel in the first Legion comic also showed an unidentifiable young man in the foreground and another who could only have been a green-skinned Brainiac 5 along with a second unidentifiable boy member standing behind Brainiac 5.

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The Million Dollar Comic that Got Away

Back in the mid-60's, I came across Adventure Comics #290 at a junk yard in South Gate, California, the town where I lived and attended 9Th grade through college graduation. This particular issue featured the Legion of Super-Heroes before they became a staple in Adventure Comics from #300 forward. I immediately recognized them from the earlier Superman comic book, The Death of Superman imaginary tale, so I snapped up that copy for probably a nickle.

Not long after, I noticed that our corner grocery store (not exactly on the corner but close to it and about two short blocks away from our house on Cypress Street in South Gate--this was before supermarkets became more prevalent) carried a bin of used comic books. The cover prices were typically 10 cents or 12 cents but, being used, sold for less. There, I discovered a whole slew of Adventure Comics featuring the Legion because they were now a regular feature (#290 had obviously been out more than a year earlier).

I began to hunt down all of the Legion comics I could find. I even discovered that the corner drug store (which actually was on the corner of Long Beach Blvd., across the street from the market) carried new comics and I snapped up a new copy of Adventure Comics #311 in which Polar Boy and the Legion of Substitute Heroes declares war on the Legion.

After many weeks and months of this modest buying spree, I had every Legion comic except Adventure Comics #305. (I was also missing a Justice League first parter of their very first JLA-JSA crossover event.) I was told by a friend that in Huntington Park, the town just north of South Gate, on East Florence Avenue, near the corner of Seville Avenue was a used books and magazine store that also carried used comic books.

But I was also told that if the owner had copies of each of these prized comics, they would not be cheap. I learned as much when I was told that they would be fifty cents a piece. I was told to write down the title and issue number of each comic I wanted and to return in a couple of days so that the owner could visit his stock in the back of the store and retrieve them for me.

Just to put this in perspective, my first job at the South Gate Rod & Gun Club as a trap boy paid the princely sum of $1.25 per hour, and I worked there on Saturdays and Sundays through my senior year of high school. So you can see that even handing over $1.00 for two comics was an expensive proposition for me, but I just had to have those two issues and forked over the money and was handed the two comics.

Before I departed, the store owner casually mentioned to me that he had a copy of Action Comics #1, and that he would let me have it for $75.00. I may have noticeably blanched at such a fantastic sum of money; but I was certainly tempted by the offer, regardless of the price.

However, it was not something I could justify, not to myself, nor especially to my mom, who never could understand how I would fork over even a few pennies for used or new comic books (I never told her about the two comics for $1.00).

Needless to say, I never found a way to come up with $75.00. And, for decades ever after, each time I have heard of some wild auction in which a copy of that comic has sold for thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and now, just this past week, $1,000,000.00 dollars, I keep thinking of that opportunity that slipped past me approximately 45 years ago.

Certainly, I might have lost it along the way, or sold it for much less at some point. However, I did manage to retain my Legion comics collection for all those years, selling it for nearly $2,000.00 before I bought my condo in Denver, Colorado, in 1997, using that money, and the money I got from selling off my record album collection as a down payment for my condo.

Anyway, it's been a nice story to tell over the years whenever I hear that someone has paid such a fantastic sum of money for an old comic book that I could have had for what now seems like peanuts. And I always wonder whatever happened to that copy that could have been mine. Who bought it? Did they manage to preserve it all these years and sell it, as did this particular owner, for a huge sum of money somewhere along the way?

OK, I promise next post to discuss the Rainbow Arc of Fire issues that I mentioned with my last post.

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Gays In Comics

As I have said, I read comics for most of the 1960's and all of the 2000's. There was NO WAY gays were going to be featured in comics in the '60's. Such topics were not discussed in polite society, so gay characters were not going to exist in comic books. Cops routinely harassed and arrested patrons of gay bars in major cities in those days. The Stonewall Riots were very late in the decade.

However, the 2000's are another story. But the number of gay characters is still somewhat minimal (even if you only believe that gays comprise five percent of the population): Northstar, Apollo and Midnighter, The Rawhide Kid (mostly done for the silliness factor), Hulkling and Wiccan, Batwoman and, recently, Rictor and Shatterstar, and a few others over the years, some of whom were retconned back to straight.

There are those in the industry who don't like the fact that once-straight characters are turned gay (as if that doesn't ever happen in real life). And there are even gay comics fans who have expressed their distaste for the fact that, when a character is gay, his or her sexuality becomes the dominant issue--that sexuality can even detract from the quality of the comic itself and the super heroics therein. (I don't get this argument at all but no matter.)

Certainly, the Comic's Code contributed to the lack of gay characters in comics for so many decades. But I was never much concerned with why there were no gay characters in comics.

There were none when I was growing up, so my response was to not have straight super-heroes in the Rainbow Arc of Fire. If we could be excluded from their mainstream, then I would exclude them from my mainstream. It was not so much revenge as fair play and balance. Oh, I could include a straight character as a villain (just as movies often portrayed a lesbian or gay man as the villain in a film).

The Rainbow Arc of Fire was my super-hero universe, just like DC and Marvel created their own super-hero universes decades ago. Just like they waited for years to include GLBT characters, I waited for years to introduce straight heroes into the Rainbow Arc of Fire universe.

Superheroes are typically positive role models. For a gay kid growing up, I suppose I had to take comfort in the notion that many superheroes had secret identities, just as I had my secret gay identity that I kept hidden from the world. The Legion of Super-heroes, my favorite teen team, was in the future. One would have anticipated that the LSH would not have to preclude the introduction of gay characters, but even Star Trek didn't much address these kinds of issues for years and years. Don't Ask; Don't Tell existed even for the Legion of the future. If a legionnaire were gay, we were not going to be told about it, not with the morays of the '60's guiding the production of comics, even about superhero teams in the distant future.

Next post: ethnicity, dating, kissing, and marriage in Rainbow Arc of Fire.

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Violence In Rainbow Arc of Fire

Where do I stand on violence in my own stories and series?

If a story required violence of some sort, I did not shirk from going there and writing that. Not to give away too much, but in the second book, AUTUMN SAGA, there was plenty of violence. A beheading, a strangulation, several vicious attacks are defined in detail. But the reader has to decide what ultimately happened. One reader/reviewer on amazon got it all wrong, unfortunately.

In the Legion story when Lightning Lad was killed by the freeze ray, he did blow up Zaryan's Earth-invasion ship in space. Since he was dying and Saturn Girl then attempted to get him back down to Earth before he died, I don't really see how Zaryan and his minions in the destroyed ship managed to escape being killed when their ship blew up in space. The vacuum and the cold would have killed any human being in about a minute or less. (I guess the fluids in your body turn to gas. You also suffocate and freeze.)

However, even with the Legion code of not killing, this incident was glossed over by the writer, editor, and artist. All we know is that the invasion of Earth was stopped by LL's actions. No word was mentioned about what happened to the vast invasion force (in the single invasion ship?--even that part was not handled very well).

In a later Legion tale, when every single Legionnaire but one is killed by the Doll Man, no Legionnaire kills him even though they all die. I am afraid that my own characters would not allow themselves to be killed off without punishing their attackers. And, of course, the Rainbow Arc of Fire heroes do face a deadly invasion fleet in space, and they do know that if any of these invaders lands on Earth, humans will be killed. So, what do you think would be their response?

Realistically, I don't believe you can have stories, and invasions, on this scale and *not* have anyone in the invasion fleet not be killed. It would be far, far too difficult in the dangerous and even deadly realm of space to destroy invading ships and not kill the invaders within those ships.

The Rainbow Arc of Fire heroes certainly would not take a life needlessly or unnecessarily, but I never felt I would ever saddle them with a no-kill code. This isn't like a Death Penalty provision in the legal code. When an individual hero, or a team of heroes, is fighting powerful enemies to the death, I don't think it would be realistic to expect them not to kill those who are trying to kill them. And how many more Earthlings would die when you restrictively attempt to stop invaders from landing and killing the human inhabitants of the planet?

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Violence In Comics, Part Two

The first super-hero comic story I ever read was "Lex Luthor, Hero." But it will always be known to me by the title of the third part, "The Death of Superman". The story appeared in SUPERMAN #149 in November of 1961. The copy I read was missing its cover, and I don't even know how my step-brother managed to acquire a copy of the comic.

Yes, it was deemed an "imaginary tale", and I have it as part of a trade paperback, DC's GREATEST IMAGINARY STORIES. But that does not matter. Imaginary or not, it read like a real story. It felt like a real story, despite the disclaimer at the end, "The chances are a million to one that it will never happen." Later, of course, as part of a really BIG EVENT, Superman was killed off--for the time being back in the 80's.

When a significant comic book character is killed off, even if temporarily, it's an important event. And the comic book companies take full advantage of that event to publicize it and especially to sell more comics. Marvel took advantage not that long ago by killing off Captain America (Steve Rogers). But nobody believed it was for good, especially not with another Captain America feature film in the offing.

In the imaginary death of Superman, Lex uses green Kryptonite rays to kill him. There's certainly no blood and there's no gore, but Superman does turn green and eventually dies. And to this pre-teen at the time, it was a violent death and it was a prolonged death, even if it was imaginary. (Perhaps the cover made it clear that the tale was imaginary from the start, but remember that the copy I read did not have a cover, so I took it as real up until the very end and the disclaimer.) And the creators took full advantage by killing off Superman and then showing a huge funeral event after his death, with famous and not-so-famous characters walking past his glass coffin from all over the universe as well as from the future (the first Legionnaires Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Saturn Girl, my initial exposure to these fabulous teens from the future).

Not long after Superman was killed this way, Lightning Lad was killed off by a freeze ray from Zaryan the Conqueror in ADVENTURE COMICS#304. Of course, in AC #312, he was brought back to life, even if another had to sacrifice his life to revive him. The revolving door between life and death was now in full swing.

So, very early on in my own comic book reading, key characters were violently killed, even if the blood and gore were not depicted, and even if their deaths were eventually undone in one way or another. And, I might also add, President Kennedy was assassinated not long after the imaginary death of Superman, though his untimely death could not be undone. Real violence would become a significant part of rest of the decade with civil rights murders, civil mass murders, violent reactions to protests, violent protests, the war in Vietnam, and further political assassinations. One could not easily avoid the inherent blood and gore in real life.

Because comic books were still primarily the entertainment of choice of pre-teens and teenagers, blood and gore would stay banished for some years to come. Bloody violence might wash across the movie screens after BONNIE & CLYDE, but comic books would remain relatively blood and gore free for a few years anyway.

So, what to make of the violent, bloody death of Ares in SIEGE #2?

Frankly, I didn't much give a damn. It may have been quite visceral. But it is on the printed page, and all I could think of was that it reminded me of that plastic model kit that used to be available, also back in the 60's, The Visible Man. His body was clear, but his insides, if you painted them correctly, were quite colorful and realistic. Which is all to say that I have seen the insides of people before (even the faked guts spilling out that was depicted in the movie CATCH 22).

And the problem is that, no matter how graphic, the comic book companies have hedged their bets from almost the very beginning by either not REALLY killing off the character, or bringing back, no matter how impossibly, any famously "dead" character.

If Bendis and Company wanted to kill off Ares graphically, to prove that he was really, truly, totally dead, it doesn't actually work. Any future writer can resurrect Ares and it won't have mattered how graphically his death was once depicted. Hippolyta was killed off very graphically in the OUR WORLDS AT WAR series from DC several years ago. But like the Barry Allen Flash and Supergirl being killed in CRISIS, everyone can eventually make it back to life. So any depiction of comic book character deaths, no matter how violent or graphic, is simply an exercise and little more. (Wolverine gets hacked up and burned off and he still has the ability to reconstitute himself--and that has been shown more graphically than was Ares dismemberment.)

As I have implied, of all the deaths of all the heroes over all the years, none impacted me as much as my first, The Death of Superman, or the senseless killing of the little kitten, tossed against a wall in BAST. Everything else may be interesting in its own way, but it does not impact me at all. The deaths may be realistic, but those killed off can be, and are, resurrected almost all the time. As others have proclaimed, it's a turnstile or revolving door to the underworld and, therefore, has no real or lasting impact. Unfortunately.

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Violence in Comics

Welcome! All of the previous posts about the RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE series are still available along the column on the left. But I have decided to write posts as often as I am able about various subjects that may be reflected in the series itself or relate to topics that I have addressed in the series in one way or another, primarily or tangentially..

The following is my take on an on-going issue that comic books, which influenced my writing, have always faced since they were viewed, more so in the past than now, as a medium primarily for children and young people, Violence in Comics:

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I must admit that I am currently way, way behind in my comics reading. Not just weeks, perhaps, but months. It may be one of those temporary periods of personal malaise. Between Marvel Comics' DARK REIGN and DC Comics' BLACKEST NIGHT, was it all becoming too bleak, too unremittingly morose for me to take at this stage of my life? It may also have become one of those situations where, once I got behind, the task of catching up has become, in and of itself, a chore that has taxed my desire to read so many comics all at once. (BTW, I still keep buying my weekly comics, to the delight of my comic store guy, Ray. It's just that I buy them and leave them in the bag I brought them home in. Thereafter, the bags of comics pile up around my already snug condo.).

Now, the one advantage of reading these many series of comics titles in order is that I have a better chance of understanding what is happening with the titles I still do read (from Marvel: NEW AVENGERS, X-FACTOR, MIGHTY AVENGERS, and a few others now and then; from DC: GREEN LANTERN, FLASH, SUPERGIRL, JSA, JLA, and a few others now and then). And now Marvel has begun the special event SIEGE, and I am not even caught up with the preceding DARK REIGN--though the two events are related and SIEGE directly follows events in DARK REIGN..

I am much the same way with TV series I follow: I wait until the series seasons appear on DVD (and now, more than before, on beautiful Blu-ray), and I watch the entire new season episodes all at once: HEROES, SMALLVILLE, THE SIMPSONS, TORCHWOOD, FRINGE. I am a member of a gay online comic discussion group, the gayleague.com, and it was during an early issue of SEIGE that the group discussed at length the issue of violence in comics had come up yet again. One character, already unbalanced to say the least, has violently, and I have learned, graphically, killed another character (an inherently violent individual himself)..

How much violence is too much violence? How graphic is too graphic? Decades ago, when I first began reading comics widely and pleasurably, even subscribing to a number of titles, especially the Legion of Super-Heroes in ADVENTURE COMICS, where a character killing another character began the focal point of the specific issue. Star Boy, when faced with his own murder, kills his would-be assassin before he himself is killed. For the Legion, killing was against their carefully crafted code. Star Boy was tried, found guilty, and expelled from the Legion. Most fans were upset that Star Boy had been expelled, me among them. Around that same time, an episode of the E.G. Marshall TV show, the Defenders, found an abused housewife on trial for murdering her husband, a mean, nasty monster. I stopped watching the series when she was found guilty of murder rather than being let off for having acted in self-defense. College came along and my record album collection began to take precedence, and I stopped collecting and reading comics, except for the occasional Legion comic now and then..

Flash forward to 2000 or so, and after I found the GLA once again, having lost the Web site before that, and I began to contemplate two more RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE volumes that would definitely require that I read comic books once more to catch up. I was advisted to read CRISIS and SANDMAN and STARMAN and PROMETHEA and several other titles to catch up then. But even though, throughout the decade, I was reading many titles and trade paperbacks, I still never felt that I had caught up or ever would catch up. I had missed almost the entire 70's, 80's, and 90's; and that would leave me with a serious handicap I might never overcome..

By the end of the decade of the 2000's, comics had become more and more dominated by these BIG EVENTS such as AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED and INFINITE CRISIS and SECRET INVASION and then these newest, DARK REIGN and BLACKEST NIGHT. One BIG EVENT after another began to wear on me and eventually caused me to find myself with stacks of comics piling up, and I was where I currently am now. But in one minor comic, BAST, I saw something that made me stop reading that title and even returning that issue to the comic store in protest. A violent character took a little kitten and through it against a wall. The kitten's death was graphically depicted, and I was thoroughly repulsed. The writer and artist and editor had crossed the line as far as I was concerned. But how would I respond to this latest, violent event in comics, the death depicted in SIEGE? Tune in tomorrow, because I promise that I will have caught up with all the current issues of Marvel's latest event, SIEGE, and I will relate my thoughts.

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