Enough has finally become enough when it comes to being politically correct in comic books. D/C Comics finally showed that they do not have the stones to stand up for their creative integrity by pulling a variant cover for an upcoming issue of Batgirl. The cover in question… see above is a tribute to one of the most iconic Batman stories ever Alan Moore’s “the Killing Joke”. The story won an Eisner Award was written in 1988 and went on to influence both Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s vision of the Joker. It was one of the first books to show that comic books could challenge you and held more depth and weight than men in tights playing cops and robbers. So for feminists to get out raged that some in comics would pay homage to a classic graphic novel like “the Killing Joke” well it really holds no weight and if that is all you have to get your panties into a wad about then go live in a third world country where people actual problems that go beyond getting upset about something they saw on the internet. Hell… there are people who have no internet at all, in fact they don’t know where there child’s next meal is going to come from, there is something that is upsetting not Bat-girl crying.
But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Rafael Albuquerque dropped his purse on his keyboard after requesting D/C pull the cover and said he understand it touched a nerve and didn’t want to make people hurt or upset. Grow some thicker skin pal. Art is supposed to touch nerves, especially when you are depicting villains, when you are dealing with the dark world of Gotham, the evil has so be horrendous worse stuff has happened on the show, and that ABC. Comics should be edgier than ABC. D/C attempted to placate the audience in question by saying “violence and harassment have no place in comics or society”…what? Now this can be taken two different ways one that people fighting on Twitter and making death threats is wrong. If you take anything anyone says to you from the safety of the anonymity the Internet provides then it’s time to go to Wal-Mart and buy your self a pair of big-boy panties. But this could also be taken as violence and harassment don’t have a place in comics meaning Bat-man and the Joker really just need to sit down in group therapy and talk it out. There no need for Captain America and the Red Skull to keep punching each other. D/C if violence had no place comics would not exist; violence is always the means of resolution in comics, at least the good ones. An example of no violence in comics would be Super-man Returns. Kent didn’t throw a punch the whole movie and it sucked…end of story. In fact comics should have more violence, one of the best moments in comics was when Sentry ripped Ares in half during Siege. Give me more of that and if you don’t like go back to reading My Little Pony. You want peaceful inspiration where every one is respected, go talk to Rainbow Dash.
My five-year-old daughter loves Batgirl. If she saw that cover in the comic book store with me she might wonder what was going on and I would tell her some times the good guys win and some times they don’t, looks like Bat-girl is having one of those days. Once she is twelve she is welcome to read my copy of the Killing Joke and make her own judgment about it. Will it send a negative message about women’s place in the world? I don’t think so. Women get shot every day. Men get shot every day. People get shot, that’s the world we live in. Barbra Gordon got shot. Not because she was a woman, but because the Joker will shoot you, even if you are Booster Gold and try to go back in time to stop him from shooting Bat-girl. The Punisher will shoot you too and he’s a good guy. That’s the world we live in. Deal with it.
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