SEXISM IN COMICS IS WITHOUT GENDER BIAS: PART TWO

Do I really believe that drawing boobs and buttocks acts unconsciously as a rebellious attempt to assuage internal tension brought on by obeying the commandment to emasculate superheroes? No. But it sounds fairly convincing, cloaked, as it is, in the contextual robes of academic theoretical language. And in the context of often far-fetched theories, my analysis even makes a sort of rough sense. Perhaps, even, as Bernard Shaw has claimed, “every jest is an earnest in the womb of time.”

In perpetrating my jest, I seem to be ridiculing academics and their seriousness of purpose. And, of course, I am—the deadly seriousness but not the purpose. In fact, I was motivated by mixed emotions. Comics have enjoyed nearly overwhelming academic attention in recent years. Seriously purposed tomes have been coming forth regularly for over a decade—more with each passing year as “comics studies” achieve a kind of intellectual legitimacy in the ivied halls of academe.

All the attention makes me a little uneasy. I keep thinking of Bernard Shaw’s adamant refusal to let any of his plays be published in American literature anthologies for use in classrooms. He thundered that American attempts to teach Shakespeare had ruined the Bard for generations of readers/audiences, and he didn’t want his plays to suffer the same vandalism. (And as long as he lived, none of his plays were included in literature textbooks.) By the same token, I don’t want enjoyment of comics to be destroyed by academic excesses in well-intentioned but often misguided attempts to enhance our appreciation of the medium.

On the other hand, academic interest in motion pictures fostered the notion of film as an artform. Without the attention that the professorial legions lavished on studying movies, motion pictures might never have achieved status as art. In like manner, the academy’s embrace of comics has undeniably helped in raising the cultural status of the medium. I suspect, however, that a burgeoning fandom, beginning in the 1970s—demanding higher quality “European-like” reproduction in comics products—had an even larger role in the levitation. And once comics specialty shops staked out turf for the medium thereby defining a market, publishers took notice and began to produce works that appealed to that market. Still, interest manifest in the ivied halls of academe can’t hurt. Unless Shaw is right.

Pinioned by the horns of this dilemma, I surrendered to temptation and committed my joke in Part One of this diatribe. I probably shouldn’t have done it. (Then again, I’m probably attaching more importance to my foray into satire than anyone else does.) (I may even be seeing satire where no one else does. It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve been subtle to the point of vague.) Or maybe — (continued in Part Three).