Blurred Productions

I mentioned earlier that we would sell out immediately of the sexist Adam Hughes Mary Jane statue.

Well, that statue isn’t out yet but as of around 6:30 we sold out of this:

Which, of course, just came out today. Ah, the state of the comics merchanizing business these days, eh?

Here are two interesting links that I ran across today (via Ragnell): the first is a discussion of a couple of recent PVP strips. The comments are well worth reading for both educational and entertainment purposes.

The second follows a similar vein, wherein Scott Kurtz makes a jackass out of himself by getting in an internet slap fight with one of his critics.

I’m posting these links for two reasons. Firstly, to let Psycholarry see them because I am sure he will get a kick out of all of this. Secondly, becasue I may write more about this topic later because I think Scott Kurtz is an interesting case study in the dangers of living your professional and personal life on the internet and the potential for that experience to turn a usually nice guy into a jackass.

Oh and the last week or so’s boob centric PvP strips have some sexist implications.

This the 200th post here at Blurred Productions (version 8.0). First things first, I’d like to thank BP staff writers Psycholarry, Tito, Sam Taffy, and the Kaiser for helping me keep things up and running here. Without them BP’s relaunch wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks.

Secondly I’d like to thank Kalinara and Ragnell for their support and much appreciated linkage. Without their support we would truly be whistling in the dark here, instead of whistling in a very poorly lit room.

Thirdly, I wish to talk about this: (From DC’s preview of Previews)

This cover is, of course, horrible. I believe that poor Mary Marvel’s “skirt” no longer fits the dictionary definition of “skirt” in that it doesn’t “extend downward from the waist” but more floats outwardly in a vaguely revealing manner.

Not even the unfortunate 13-year old hormone-blinded version of myself understood the “improbable skirt phenomenon” that so plagues our post-Image comic book world. Such drawings are so patently meant to objectify women almost to the point of self-parody. I mean, Mary Marvel’s unfortunate costume choice almost puts Sailor Moon to shame. Even Frank “inventor of the hawt naked Ultron” Cho is above such things.

My central point is this: drawings such the one above are sexist and silly. I continue to be amazed that editors continue to accept such output from their artists and that readers continue to think that an artist with such an output is a quality one. The above art is bad art and sexist art AND bad sexist art. Why DC would let such an image grace the cover of what is their self-proclaimed “flagship” title is beyond me.

Finally, it took us roughly 10 months to get to 200 posts. I wonder how long it’ll take us to write another 200.

Because late is better than never, here’s the best of the best from last month.

• Speak of the devil…
•  Say you want a revolution
• Spoilers!

Congratulations are due to long time Blurred Productions staff members/supporters Psycholarry, Mulligan, Tito and Pat C (co-president of Gimptoria) on escaping undergraduate life as full, honestly to goodness university graduates. You have my envy and condolences.

I sincerely wish you all the best of luck in whatever you decided to do, my friends.

Again, congratulations!

I have been meaning to write about this since March and just haven’t found the time. It is a great honor to linked by Randy Lander’s blog, because Randy and his writing has been extremely influential in my thinking about comics.

Randy’s stuff was some of the first stuff I read when I discovered that people were actually talking about comics on the internet. I was just getting back into comics as a young, socially inept teenager. This was around the turn of the century (and I was in high school!) and Randy was writing for Newsarama (I think). When he and Don MacPherson moved to The Fourth Rail and I became a die-hard reader of their’s. I found out about some great books through Randy’s reviews, most memorably Blue Monday and Fables.

But over time I had an ‘intellectual break’ with Randy’s thinking about comics. It was around the time he published this review of Avengers: Disassembled. Randy was moving away from mainstream superheroes and event driven comics while moving towards more indie work. I was moving in the opposite direction. This was my ‘mainstream zombie phase’ the era of House of M and Countdown to Infinite Crisis where Joey Q and Dan D could do no wrong and Geoff Johns and Brad Meltzer were some of my favorite writers. I even read Wizard.

For of course, I’ve grown up since then and my thinking has progressed since those dark days of teen-hood. Time and experience has proven Randy right and teenage Smith Michaels wrong. It was a long, slow process but Infinite Crisis finally broke my completely accepting love of Marvel/DC.

Now it was reading Randy on The Fourth Rail and now at Comic Pants that helped me grow intellectually in my thinking about comics.

So, yeah, anyway, thanks for the link Randy.

(Via Living Between Wednesdays)

This, again, is well traveled ground but Adam Hughes, my friends. Adam Hughes!

Horrid, no?

By the way, we will sell out of this statue within two weeks of its release. This I promise.

I can’t believe I missed this exchange until this morning. Much of what I’m going to say here has been covered by commenters and bloggers (Dick, who hates other comics blogs [and probably this one too] has some good points) but I want to throw my two cents out there. I’ve done some work this semester on gendering as a historical process (and it has been said I am only as intelligent as the last book I read) so issues like this are fresh in my mind.

Fundamentally, I believe that no genre is gendered. Typically, of course, many are. Romance novels (you know with the bare chested dude and swooning woman on the cover) are gendered female, either by marketing and/or creative intent. But that doesn’t mean that romance novels are on the basic level (you know like the Platonic ideal of a romance novel… or something) are feminine works of literature. A writer could easily write a romance novel gendered towards males or one that was gendered neutral.

Another example of this assumption is ‘light fantasy’, like say D&D novels (and other D&D products). I read about two or three D&D novels a year to give my brain a rest from overly heady history and to maintain my uber-geek cred, and I have discovered more often then not that these books are gendered male. Does this mean that they have to be? That they are fated by the GODS OF FANTASY to be that way? That if one was to write a D&D novel towards a female audience, or a gender-neutral audience, it would loose something fundamental to its genre? That’s just not true. Both on a philosophic and practical level (For an example: see the excellent Forgotten Realms novels of Elaine Cunningham).

Thus the Platonic ideal of a superhero comic book (or something) is not sexist or gendered male. Yet historically, of course, superhero comics often have been. Thus critics, like Ragnell and others (including me sometimes) are well within their rights to bitch about the current (and past) expressions of the superhero comic industry’s sexism.

So, yeah, despite her master’s degree in fan studies (!?), Johanna Draper Carlson is very way off the mark on this one.

I know this is well-traveled ground but I just wanted to get my take on this out there because I find argument like Carlson’s view wrong headed and, ultimately, defeatist.

Alright guys, Lost is really really good. I want to stress this for anyone that dropped it mid-season because it slowed down. I haven’t been this enthused about anything for a long time. The season 3 finale is next week and if you want to catch up, all the recent episodes are free online at ABC.com. In honor of this show, I give you this:

(more…)

…Countdown (#51) is a bad comic. I have to be brief because time is not my ally on this one, but I wanted to say something about the weekly book that we are doomed to discuss for the rest of the year. This book’s lack of quality begins with the cover, which is just ugly and rushed (example: what’s up with Big Barda?). It’s just bad art.

See last week, I read this comic called Teen Something-or-other and in it The Joker’s Daughter was sort of a hero (kinda). But here she’s dropping pop-stars to their deaths. Not sure what happened there. I guess since she’s from an alternate earth now or something.

And when the hell was Jason Todd a hero?

Plus, you know, what exactly happened to not abusing the new (everything old is new again) ‘multiverse’ concept? I would consider straight away building your next major crossover book around the concept abusing it. But I’m just fucked up like that.

Billy Bastion just ditched his sister in the hospital with no so much as a get-well card? That, my friends, is fucked up.  I long ago tired of bitching about the cluster-fuck that is the Shazam! property in the mainstream DC universe, so I’ll leave it at that.

Okay, well, maybe I’ll add that, I’d put money on Mary Marvel becoming some grossly sexualized DC version of Penance by the end of this. I mean that in all seriousness. I expect this “hero’s journey” will  mostly just involved heaping (sexualized?) abuse on this character for the next 51 weeks. Doubters, I will see you here in a year for you all to pay up. I accept traveler’s checks and Visa.

This issue is filled with so, so, so many overwrought and horrible puns (and pseduo that at one point it was painful for me to read the dialouge. “I’m in the wind”? ACK.

Being that we are all going to have to live with this book for next year, this was certainly a horrid way to start.