I don’t usually write about comic books on this blog because I actually have a blog specially for that, which I call The Four Color Media Monitor (and I’ve also got an extra one I call The Comic Book Discrimination Dossiers), since one of the leading…

I’ve been watching it and love it. I don’t see the “pot shots” myself. I’m more bothered they can’t seem to get away from London for more than one episode, and never from Earth, but I’m enjoying it.

Batwoman hero returns as lesbian

Comic book heroine Batwoman is to make a comeback as a “lipstick lesbian” who moonlights as a crime fighter, a DC Comics spokesman has confirmed.

Batwoman – real name Kathy Kane – will appear in 52, a year-long DC Comics publication that began this month.

In her latest incarnation, she is a rich socialite who has a romantic history with another 52 character, ex-police detective Renee Montoya.

52 will be published in the UK as a graphic novel by Titan Books in 2007.

The series is set in a world in which established superheroes like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman no longer play a part.

The new-look Batwoman is just one of a wave of ethnically and sexually diverse characters entering the DC Comics universe.

Others include Mexican teenager Blue Beetle – who replaces the character’s previous white incarnation – and the Great Ten, a government-sponsored team of Chinese superheroes.

Regular characters Firestorm and The Atom, meanwhile, have been reinvented as black and Asian heroes respectively.

The characters are part of a wider effort to broaden the make-up of comic-book creations in line with society as a whole.

Batwoman, who first appeared in July 1956, has not been seen since September 1979 when she was killed by the League of Assassins and the Bronze Tiger.

Kinda opens the door for Betty and Veronica!

As the summer reading months heat up Marvel and DC have launched PR offensives looking to highlight their big, ongoing projects, “Civil War” and “52″, respectively. Both events are set to realign their respective universes following massive shake u…

Just so I’m clear, is that the same Urban Dictionary which also lists gaywad along with the synonyms on the first line as “sound, fag, faggot, homo, homosexual, queer, ass bandit, douchebag, f***tard, and gay”?

If so, I can’t wait to share the information is such a studious publication with all of my gay friends, not to mention those who are negro and oriental. They will be so relieved that they’re finally getting the recognition they’ve struggled so long to achieve.

BigOrangeAxe, it does soud a bit like the Incredibles, but Marvel has been doing Registration in X-Men books since the early 80′s, so it’s not really a ripoff.

BTW, if HotAir needs a correspondent to cover the Nerdly Arts, I’m available.

“gaywad” AllahPundit? Is it in keeping with HotAir’s policy to refer to people as “GAYWADS”? Why not our faggot superheros or some other euphemism I wouldn’t even type here?

Because believe it or not, DPR, “gaywad” isn’t an anti-gay slur. At least not as I, and a lot of people at the Urban Dictionary, understand it.

This storyline was worth exploring once in X-Men. It’s sad to see such a lack of creativity in the industry that they have to re-visit it all over again.

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That’s a very good point. Think about any of the John Wayne war movies you may have caught this weekend. He made a ton of them in WWII to help morale. How many war movies have you seen lately? The only one I can think of is jarhead and it was a hit job on the military. You can’t find any movies about fighting terrorists. Want to see some terrorists get their butts kicked? You have to go back to the old Chuck Norris Golan/Globus films; most of them were pretty hokey but it’s amazing how similar the rhetoric is. I’d stopped collecting comics before they went downhill but I was shocked at how far they’ve gone. I’m sure the lefties are proud of how they’ve changed the message of various types of media. Even novels. I received a book for Christmas called The Camel Club; same author who wrote Absolute Power that Clint Eastwood starred in when it came to film; The Camel Club had so many leftist tropes and dipstick consipiracys I was laughing out loud. The antagonist was a rogue intelligence officer who staged a hit on the president of the united states using non lethal rounds to prove some our governments corruption. Anyway, it was really liberal, and really stupid. I’ll never read his books again…my point is, extreme lefties are like a fungus; they get into and politicize everything.

Duty, Honor, Country
(in THAT order)
Rowane

When I was a kid, there was a tv live action movie of Captain America starring Reb Brown (70′s or 80′s. I was a kid. I loved it. Now more politically aware, it was on tv again a couple of years ago. “Cool” I thought. After watching the first 30 minutes, I turned it off in disgust. It was such a liberal bias I was suffocating. The President was a liberal environmentalist who raised taxes and didn’t care if it hurt big business interests. The bad guys were led by Red Skull and included a rebellious head of the US military and various CEOs of large multinational corporations, especially big oil.

It wasn’t that long ago someone produced a black Captain America comic titled “Truth”. He was black because in those days the government would use black people instead of white people to test out experimental druds, which is how Captain America got his powers.

In the late 90′s there was a comic out where a self-righteous indigent Tonto punches out the Lone Ranger. The setting took place in a corrupt town where the corrupt mayor has a striking resemblance to Ronald Reagan.

Why can’t the comics just be comics?

And as for ripping off…Millar is an admitted fan of Alan Moore, and really, The Marvel Civil War smacks of The Watchmen to an extent, with a bit of M for Mediocre thrown in.

Millar is a joykiller, I hope he’s happy with himself. I’m sure Jack “King” Kirby is spinning in his grave. I wonder what Stan Lee’s take on all of this is.

It almost sounded like you were describing the plot of “The Incredibles”:)

No doubt, I was just pointing out Millar’s moral sympathy with Communism and his equivalence of its expansionism with America’s current foreign policy. Red Son also had an interesting but disturbing ending that implies that if you’re smart enough–like Lex Luthor–you could make managerial government succeed like clockwork.

Also, he did take the tack that lefties tend to take with the Soviet Union, which is to mildly admit its logistical failure while overlooking its mass murder and the way that murder arose directly from Marxist-Leninist theory. If Superman can hear factories on fire miles away why can’t he “hear the screams” (as Chambers puts it in the intro to Witness)? Cause Millar ignores them.

[quote]Not even getting into the politics, but this is ripped right from a DC Book called “Kingdom Come”.[/quote]
We won’t know if it’s exactly Kingdom Come, which is one of the great works of all time, until it’s finished, but KC was more about a generational conflict than brother versus brother/

It’s a pity that so many celebs and empty “Talking Heads” are also victim of the same rampant stupidity.

Oh, for the days of DC’s “Sgt. Rock” at a dime a pop!

Jack.

oh Alex K, I actually enjoyed Red Son because A. I love alternate history and this one kinda played well and B. It showed the only way communism works is with one superman controlling everything his subjects do, and yet the people will always strive for freedom

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Remember, when everything wasn’t so politicized? It must have been great, during the first half of the twentieth century to be able to decide on a movie, pick up a comic book, watch a television program, etc. without having to wade through the never-ending leftist propoganda embedded throughout most forms of entertainment today. I seriously doubt that there could be any movie from the Golden Era of Hollywood that could be remade today without some bit of leftist drivel added to it. I’ve not been to a movie in at least two or three years. I’ve not followed comic books for a long time so I’m only slightly aware of the sorry state in which they have become. I remember when comic books used to be an escape for kids, a means of using the imagination. The heroes went up against villains who wanted to take over the world with strange inventions.

Comic books are sadly a “niche” venue today, and don’t get the really major coverage they deserve. If they got more though, it’s quite possible that Michelle and others would be talking about them more than they actually do. But what coverage they DO get can often enough be very sugarcoated — and even sensationalized. I once used to read the works of a moonbat reporter who worked for Scripps-Howard, but today, as I’ve since concluded, his columns were absolutely awful. The last straw was when he wrote a sensationalistic column about DC Comics’ “Identity Crisis”, a miniseries that was shockingly misogynistic, yet MSMers and moonbats of his sort would rather have hidden those facts from our knowledge. It was also an allegory to 9-11, but because it didn’t use the same kind of in-broad-daylight approach that Marvel used when they put out trash like the Marvel Knights version of Captain America, you wouldn’t know it at first sight. If you need some more info on this, here’s some links that may help. It’s quite a lot I’m providing here, but they do offer a lot to think about, and some insight into what’s happened with comic books of recent:

http://comics.ign.com/articles/595/595631p1.html
http://comics.ign.com/articles/595/595630p1.html
http://comics.ign.com/articles/595/595646p7.html
http://goodcomics.blogspot.com/2004/12/rape-as-plot-deviceor-brad-meltzer-is.html
http://www.comixexperience.com/savblog/2004/12/hibbs-reviews-for-1215.html
http://precur.blogspot.com/2004/07/your-mangled-minute.html
http://www.comicsworthreading.com/blog/2004/07/problems-with-defending-identity.html
http://spatulaforum.blogspot.com/2004/12/review-of-identity-crisis-7-or-how-i.html
http://johnnybacardi.blogspot.com/2004/12/best-of-week-upon-further-review-what_18.html
http://highway62.blogspot.com/2004/12/listen-up.html
http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=887
http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=965
http://www.websnark.com/archives/2004/12/another_snark_a.html
http://goodcomics.blogspot.com/2005/04/identity-crisis-and-politics-or-im.html
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb05/art_0205_1.shtml

This, I am sad to say, is the kind of level that comic books today have been sinking to. Political biases, and even discrimination. If only they could get more discussion in the press, by the conservatives and even the liberals with more concern, maybe it’d be possible to solve some of the problems.

For anyone who wants to know what MSM coverage of comic books is like, feel free to visit my blog on the subject, where I do my darnded best to dissect whatever bad, knee-jerk articles I can find. It could help in knowing just what’s wrong with how the media reports about comic books, just as much as how they report about political topics.