I have discovered the gayest comic of all time. Gayer than an issue of Gay Heartthrobs or Meatmen. And I fully intend to take advantage of the fact that I’m probably one of the few bloggers who can get away with a post like this, by telling you why Sensation Comics #1 is the gayest comic of all time.

Here’s the DC Millenium Edition cover, as I, for some reason, don’t have a lot of high-quality Golden Age comics in my collection:

First of all, the lead story is Wonder Woman. A heroine from the island of Lesbos, I mean Paradise Island, who has gone on to be more well-known as a gay icon and inspiration for drag queens than a crime-fighter.

Next, we have the Black Pirate. I mean, just look at the guy. As if the Freddie Mercury moustache and big gold hoop earring (in his left ear, indicating he’s a “top”) aren’t clue enough, he’s a freaking pirate! What, exactly, do you think cabin boys were for?

Next up is Mister Terrific. Really, really bad taste in clothing aside, he’s a classic over-acheiver and neat freak. Just like every fastidious gay man who ever tried to impress a distant and uncaring father is. And while MT never officially came out, the signs are definately there.

Moving along, we come to the Gay Ghost. No comment is neccessary, I believe…

The next feature is Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Sounds like the back-up dancers in a drag cabaret. But what we have is the opposite of Mister Terrific’s wardrobe. It’s simply not possible for a heterosexual man to co-ordinate that well, no matter how many “queer eyes” he gets trained on him.

Lastly, we get the origin of the swellest, butchest, most masculine super-hero of all time, Wildcat. I mean, come on…he’s a little too butch to be straight when you get right down to it.

Part 1: Why I Hate Super-Hero Fans

Part 2: Why I Hate Indy Comics Fans

Let me make a forced analogy by way of introduction. There’s a certain type of person who listens to jazz music. He doesn’t listen to it because he enjoys it. He listens to it because there’s a certain cultural cachet to being a “jazz fan.” This type of person listens to jazz because he understands that other people will tend to think that jazz fans are arty, cool intellectuals, and more than anything else, he wants to be an arty, cool intellectual too. So he will make a big show of letting as many people as possible know that he is a jazz fan. He will talk loudly, and at length, about all the jazz concerts and festivals he has gone to. He will spend outrageous sums of money on obscure recordings and back-catalogs of musicians who are only remembered by music historians. And, perhaps most importantly, he will take every opportunity that presents itself to denigrate other genres of music and the fans of those genres.

Get it?

We generally call these people “posers,” though I personally find the phrase “self-consciously hip” tends to describe them better. This type of reader spends a lot of time trying to make other people realize how cool and interesting they are. For them, the actual quality of the work isn’t as important as which company happened to release it. For this type of reader, incomprehensibility in a work is actually a plus. They like autobiographical comics a lot, because for some reason they’re really able to identify with self-important people who think that the entire world gives a damn what they think (yes, I do have a web-site, why do you ask?). They like works to be “important” as it gives them the opportunity to look disdainfully at anyone who has the audacity to complain that they didn’t understand it “Well, of course, you wouldn’t” is their victory cry, their proof that they are the hippest of them all. Fortunately, this type of reader has, for the most part, either left comics for other terminally pretentious mediums now that Raw is no longer being published, or writing reviews for The Comics Journal and can therefore be safely ignored.

(Of course, this is not to say that “complex=bad”. Good writers and artists are fully capable of creating multi-layered, intellectually stimulating works of quality. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are the first examples that spring to mind. Their work rewards careful reading and deep analysis. Coincidentally, these are the two writers whose work I most often hear complaints from super-hero fans about. For super-hero fans, complex most certainly does equal bad. To everyone who says to me “I don’t understand Rock of Ages” I can only respond: that says more about you than it does about Morrison.)

Related to the posers, but not quite the same beast, are the indy scenesters. These are people who have mostly crossed over to comics from some other, well, scene, usually music scenesters, goths and emo kids. Their sole criterion for a comic is that it not be a super-hero book. It could have been printed on recycled paper towels at Kinkos, on a printer running out of toner, on black paper to boot, and they won’t care because it’s just one more accessory that they need to complete their look. To be fair, they generally do enjoy the work they buy. But their standards for quality are woefully low. And they have an unfortunate tendency to look for the next hot thing before their friends do so that they can tell everyone that they were into it before it became popular. It is with some sense of shame that I confess that when I was their age (they’re always young as well) I was just as guilty of placing a work’s “indy” credentials or value as a prop above its merits. Unlike the posers, who are generally a lost cause, these kids will hopefully grow out of this phase and learn that quality really does matter.

And lastly, there are the people who just sort of miss the point. They’re the people who insist that Spawn is an indy comic, on the grounds that it’s not published by DC and Marvel. Well, that statement is only partly correct. Marvel and DC, as the two largest publishers of super-hero fiction, not to mention their corporate identities, certainly qualify as “the mainstream” in super-hero comics. In the sense that the book is not published by Marvel and DC, something like Spawn can maybe be called “indy” by the broadest possible definition. But one of my personal pet peeves is that what comic-book fans call “mainstream” is the opposite of what everybody else in the world calls “mainstream.” For the rest of the world, super-heroes are this strange aberration of a genre, not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy, not quite pulp. To the rest of the world, “mainstream” means “designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.” By that token, books like Spawn, Savage Dragon and Witchblade are about as far from the mainstream as you can get, designed to appeal primarily to people whose emotional maturity stopped somewhere in early adolescence.

Luckily for all of us, and in direct opposition to the status of the super-hero fan, the vast majority of indy readers don’t quite fit into any of these categories. They mostly represent the people who have out-grown super hero comics (more or less, there’s no shame in enjoying quality super-hero comics as an adult, so long as you acknowledge that the quality super hero work is few and far between) but still enjoy the medium as a whole. I salute those brave souls, going into their comic book stores, week after week, searching for comics with something to say, the talent to say it, and the sense to not try to use people in tights hitting each other as the way to say it.

Part 1: Comic Book Fans

To be more precise: super-hero fans. For the purposes of this discussion, that’s a more useful distinction than the generic “comic book fans.” Not only do super-hero books dominate the current English-language comics market, but the fans of super-hero books are of a fairly recognizable type. There is a remarkable uniformity in thought and behavior, which indicates to a reasonable observer that there may be common factors in background and psychological make-up, certainly enough to make some general observations about the group as a whole.

As I see it, the prevailing psychological component of the super-hero fan’s mind is reactionary conservatism. This doesn’t necessarily translate into the political spectrum, as most super-hero fans tend to be fairly apathetic towards politics, as they are towards anything that they don’t see as having any direct effect on their lives. What this does translate into is a fear of anything new or different and a nostalgic desire to return the world to the condition it was in when they were children. Or, at the very least, return comic books, which are the only things that really matter to them anyway, to the condition they were in when they were children.

Let’s examine the fear of the new and different first. I’ve heard more casual, unthinking racist, homophobic and misogynistic statements come out of the mouths of comic book fans than any other group I’ve ever spent any time around. To examples come immediately to mind: “I’d like that Authority comic if it weren’t for the fags” and “I can’t believe they made Firestorm a colored kid.” And when their statements are challenged, super-hero fans seem surprised that anyone could think that they actually meant the things they said. Which is perhaps true? Most of the super-hero fans are heterosexually identified white males. And like most heterosexually identified white males, they seem to somehow believe that they don’t have any kind of sexual, racial or gender identity. They believe, even if only on a subconscious level, that they are the standard to which others should be compared. So it’s not as if they truly dislike someone of a different sexuality, race or gender. Other people are just “not like” them, and “not like” is the same as “bad.” So they will use words like “gay,” “nigger,” “Jew,” “cunt,” and “bitch” as pejoratives without pausing to consider the wider social contexts of those words. Now, this is possibly a failing of Americans in general, not just of comic-book fans. But consider the loud wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on whenever, say, a new creative team is announced for a book, or a different direction is taken. “Different” in all these cases is almost universally considered “bad.”

This is directly comparable to the idea of anything “new.” What are the best selling comic books in direct market stores right now? Revivals of older properties, tie-ins to other media products, and the same titles that have been published continually for the last thirty to sixty years. New concepts launch with low numbers and rarely survive any length of time without being tied in some way to a recognizable and well known element, such as a popular creator or links to a title “family” such as X-Men or Batman. “New” is, at a basic level, the same thing as “different” and therefore “bad.”

Why do super-hero comics appeal to this personality type? One of the primary failings of the super-hero genre as a story-telling medium is that it presents a world in which the primary goal of all of the characters is to maintain the status quo at all costs. There is the illusion of change, small trivial details may be changed to reflect current tastes, but the basic story never deviates from the central premise. It doesn’t matter whether Batman is fighting the Joker this month, or the Riddler. The structure of the story will never change: man in tights fights criminal, criminal is put in jail only to escape again. Repeat ad infinitum. Real change, on those rare occasions when it does occur in super-hero comics, occurs on a geologic scale. It took sixty years for Clark Kent to marry Lois Lane, and forty years for Aunt May to find out that Peter Parker is really Spider-Man (and on some message board somewhere, I can almost guarantee that somebody is complaining about even those changes). This is a world, in short, in which it is impossible for characters to learn or grow or reach any kind of conclusion. Because as soon as they appear to, it’s time for the next issue to come out and they start all over again at the beginning. It’s a comfort world, in which the reader can be reassured that no matter how scary the real world is, and no matter how rapidly things change, this little world will always be there for them and nothing there will ever change.

This brings us to the nostalgic nature of the super-hero fans. For most super-hero fans, the titles they enjoy were always at their best at the point at which they started to read them. Everything that has come after is but a pale imitation of the title’s glory days. The examples are frankly too numerous to list but let’s touch on a few of the more common ones. Any golden age comic is a good case to examine this claim. Have you read many golden age comics? The art is terrible and the stories make absolutely no sense. The golden age Green Lantern comic is particularly painful to look at. Yet the “Golden Age” is considered to be the greatest period of all time for super-hero comics because the children who read them at the time grew up to write the histories and early critical studies of comic-books. The Marvel titles of the 60s are another good example. The majority of the titles were tepid rehashes of earlier concepts or specific attempts to emulate the success of DC’s super-hero revival. Stan Lee’s scripts often bear little to no relation to the illustrations and beggar all common sense or internal consistency. And the art on the titles often appears rushed and half-finished. And moving into more contemporary work, Alex Ross seems utterly incapable of drawing a DC character in anything other than the costumes they wore in the 70s. Because that’s when he started reading DC comics. These readers are unable to move beyond their childish attachments to the characters. So they campaign to have their favorite, long since cancelled titles brought back, and then complain when they are brought back because “they’re not like they used to be.” No Green Lantern other than Hal Jordan will ever be acceptable. No group of Teen Titans other than the originals, or at least facsimiles of them, will ever be acceptable. And God help you if you try to publish a new version of an older title that doesn’t pick right up from where the old series left off. About the only super-hero title that did possess the illusion of forward momentum was the Legion of Super-Heroes, and marketplace demands eventually required starting over from scratch on that title so that it more closely resembled the Legion that super-hero fans grew up reading.

All of which has lead me to a disturbing realization about some super-hero fans. Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of autism which is characterized by an inability to socialize with peers and encyclopedic knowledge of a very narrow field of inquiry. They are unable to read social cues such as eye contact and smiles, and have very little familiarity with the concept of “personal space.” They have a lack of empathy for others, an inability to understand that other people have feelings or opinions of their own that are as valid as those of the person with AS. They prefer “sameness” as one researcher puts it, and dislike anything new or changes to their routine or the world around them. This sounds remarkably like a number of super-hero fans I’ve come into contact with over the years. I think a great deal of what gets chalked up to “fanboy” behavior and attitudes may actually be symptomatic of undiagnosed cases of some form of mild autism, not necessarily Asperger’s Syndrome, but something like it. If this is true, this explains a great deal about the market for super-hero comics and the appeal of super-heroes in general. They’re an almost ideal entertainment medium for those who are unable to adapt to their environment or form meaningful relationships with other people. They never change, and can be a refuge from the changes in the outside environment.

This is not to say I’m trying to pathologize super-hero fans and their behavior. Take this as anecdotal evidence and a broad, preliminary hypothesis based on that evidence. Most super-hero fans, I’m sure, have no developmental disabilities of any kind. But if the more obnoxious of the stereotypical “fanboy” behaviors are indeed symptomatic of an autistic disorder than this places the behavior in a more useful context than “that’s the way nerds act.” And this is also not a plea for “mature” super-hero comics. If anything, super-hero comics are an ideal entertainment for children and child-like minds. And after “Watchmen” there really isn’t much more to say about the subtexts of the genre. Further attempts along that line can only pale in comparison, especially when all the recent examples of “mature” super-hero comics, notably “Supreme Power” and “Ultimates” don’t say anything new about the genre.

Coming soon in this series:

Why I Hate Indy Comics Fans

Why I Hate Manga Fans

Why I Hate Comics News Sources

Why I Hate Webblogs