New DC Comics have “Too Much Sex and Violence for the Kids” — Let’s Rant

January 20th, 2012

Here’s a link to an article describing the new DC comics line-up as relying on sex and violence to sell.

I thought to myself, maybe that’s true.  For the last 30+ years comics having been getting more adult.  This reflects some symbiotic relationship involving the suppliers offering more complex material and older/more sophisticated readers.  The 1980s saw Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Chris Claremont, and others pushing the envelope both in specialty titles and in mainstream books involving Batman and the X-Men.

This is fucking old news.

Let me explain how old.  The article goes into Starfire being transformed from a kid’s character (presumably on the anime version of Teen Titans) into a bikini-clad bombshell with a lot of sexuality.  Know how she looked when she was first introduced 30 years ago in DC comics?

Complain if you want that she was the stereotypical sexy big-breasted superheroine, much too common.  Don’t be an ignoramus complaining that DC recently made her into this as an intentional move to alter a version of a character from a children’s show when this was how she always was in the comics.

I hate the ignorant pontificating, especially when they rarely seem to follow up with an apology for being idiots.

A friend of mine (the awesome Andy Duncan if you know him) got a letter published in People magazine after the first X-Men movie came out.  They’d run a review about that movie that complained that this was a movie based on a comic book, and since when did a kid’s medium have stories about discrimination?  Well, for DECADES!  And I recall a Time magazine review of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, complaining that it was a thinly veiled AIDS allegory, demonstrating a reviewer totally ignorant of the fact that the book came out years before the AIDS crisis hit. Reporters and reviewers out of their element is nothing new, unfortunately.

But this is only a minor aspect of my annoyance.  I’m already too used to folks who know nothing about comics complaining about them for stupid reasons.  Let me expand my ire to the “protect the children” crap that this article endorses with the extreme quoting from a child psychologist:

It’s sort of like a fictionalized Playboy for kids at its worst,” said Neil Bernstein, Ph.D., a child psychologist and author of “How to Keep Your Teenager Out of Trouble.”

“I think too many kids would be put in harm’s way or at risk,” Bernstein said.

The female characters are more sexualized. One of the most noticeable transformations is Starfire. The character goes from a kids Cartoon Network superhero in a full-length jumpsuit to a scantily clad, voluptuous version in the comic Red Hood and the Outlaws. This Starfire is shown in a barely there bikini or the equivalent of pasties over her breasts and a thong.

“Do you want to have sex?” she says propositioning her boyfriend’s pal, and later says, “Love has nothing to do with it.”

It is these kind of images and suggestive language that concern Bernstein.

“It’s a misrepresentation of reality. It sends the wrong message,” he said.

“We want our kids to think sex is an act between two consenting mature individuals who care deeply for one another. That doesn’t really come across and it’s too easily to misconstrue things particularly for a kid,” Bernstein said.

 

Ugh.   Where to start?

“Misrepresentation of reality?”  Well, crap, let’s get rid of all science fiction and fantasy!  Protect the kids!

>More importantly, these comics are labeled with intended audiences by age ranges.  The things he is complaining about are for older teens and adults (appropriately rated T and T+).  One the one hand, people scream for ratings to protect the children.  When they’re there, they ignore them and complain about what the children are being exposed to.  Hypocrites. Once upon a time I had girlfriend who thought cartoons — in any form — were intrinsically for kids, and we had a big argument about it.  I’m still mad about that.  She was just wrong.  Comics/cartoons are an artistic medium that can and is chosen to tell different kinds of stories.

Additionally, and I see women’s studies professors if not a child psychologist acknowledging this even if they’re not always universally consistent: sex and love need not go together.  If they do, fine, that can be good and healthy.  If they don’t, well, that can be good and healthy, too.  I’m not a fan of people, psychologists or not, pushing their morality.  I actually think it’s healthier to tell people that not everyone believes they have to go together, as a lot of people of both sexes get hurt when their sexual relationship turns out not to be a love connection.

And the violence?  When were comic book superheroes NOT about violence?  Punching, kicking, power blasts, disintegrations, radiation poisoning, gunshots, oozing bloody wounds, broken ribs, swords through the body, murdered innocents…this was all COMMON back in the 1970s and 1980s.  I’d need some convincing that it suddenly exploded in 2011 or 2012.

I think this article is crap.  Scare mongering and cheap “protect the children” crap.

You want to protect the children?  Don’t go after comics, where a small subset of kids are extending their reading skills and learning to appreciate art.  Go after cheap B-movies found on cable and the internet that are exploitative of sex and violence and very accessible to kids (even though we have v-chips in our tvs that I never heard of anyone using).  Go after the big dog of Hollywood…and see what influence real money buys. And I guess “moral” senators have over the years, with some of the same problems of ignoring the existence of ratings and blaming the wrong people.

Personally I think most kids can take more adult stuff than most adults give them credit for.  The sex, to me, is less damaging than the violence, although I’m not convinced fictional violence makes for violent people.  Most seem able to distinguish between fantasy and reality, the way adults do.

Don’t like it?  Don’t read it or watch it.  And don’t go telling everyone else they can’t have it either, especially when you lie about trying to protect the children.  Let their parents do that if they’re inclined.

End rant.

 

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2 Responses to “New DC Comics have “Too Much Sex and Violence for the Kids” — Let’s Rant”

  1. Joe Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 6:53 pm

    Here’s different take on the recent DC relaunches. Nothing about protecting the children or whatnot, this piece looks into DC’s attitude toward its current readers, male and female.

    http://www.johncartermcknight.com/blog/?p=1298

  2. Mike Brotherton Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 7:49 pm

    Thanks for the comment and link. I’m not sure I totally agree with the analysis there, but there are plausbile aspects to it and it’s not so obviously buttheaded I feel the need to rant about it. ;)

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