Comment Policy
Offensive, harrassing or baiting comments will not be tolerated and will be deleted at my discretion.
Comment spam will be deleted.
Please leave a name and either a valid web-site or e-mail address with comments. Comments left without either a valid web-site or e-mail address may be deleted. Atom Feed LiveJournal SyndicationLOLcats feed
Monday, January 03, 2005
Marvel and Gay Characters: Howard The Duck #33
This issue of Howard The Duck was written by Christopher Steger and drawn by Val Mayerik, and was released to coincide with what was going to be the successful film adaptation of the Howard comics. This sequence takes place over the last three pages of the book, after Howard has won a fortune in the lottery and lost it in an attempt to create the "perfect" wife.
So, the character picking up Howard while he's hitch-hiking is listening to show-tunes over the radio, uses effeminate language like "cheerio" and "duckcakes" and bears a vague resemblance to Walt Disney. I'm sure the stories about the Disney company forcing Marvel to redraw Howard so that he didn't resemble Donald Duck had nothing to do with this slanderous caricature. Oh, and he's traveling to San Francisco, and we all know what kind of perverts live there, don't we?
Oh, and look, he's got a limp wrist as well. How terribly original.
What the? "Fruit?" "Sally?" Not only is the caricature tired and cliched, but Howard's insults are as well. Oh, and he's listening to Judy Garland? Like we hadn't figured out yet that the character was meant to be gay, I suppose.
I'm going to be the bigger man and assume that the reference to Merv Griffin didn't have anything to do with those rumors.
Amyl nitrate? Marvel published a comic in which Walt Disney offers Howard the Duck poppers whilst propositioning him for sex? How the hell did this get past Marvel's legal department? And calling a gay man "nancy" is about as unoriginal an insult as ever there was. I mean, "somdomite" is about as old and stupid an insult as "nancy."
I mean, at least in that Hulk magazine I talked about a while back there's a potential reading of how Bruce Banner really wants to have sex with another man, but this is just three pages of Howard spewing homophobic epithets. And it's not even funny. It's too sad and stupid to really be offensive for that matter. It's pathetic.
