Were you offended by KickAss #1?

[ZdrowcaB]

[hadmatter]

[merboy]

No wonder they say satire is dead...it's clear some people don't get it

It doesn't MATTER whether he used the word faggot or nigger or cocksucker or Chuck Austen, he was creating an exaggerated depiction of a culture in the style of a bombbastic action movie to reflect a point about our culture! It is called satire. It is called parody. It is meant to make a point.

If he'd really wanted to be homophobic he would have had his main character almost get ass raped at the local YMCA.

Were you also one of the people offended by the "The A doesn't stand for France" in Ultimates?

[stevieDisme]

mark millar isn't just a fag...but he's a dick too!

from afterelton.com:

Mark Millar: Comic book writers don't kill off gay superheroes, supervillains do

Comic writer Mark Millar isn't thrilled to learn that his story was the breaking point that inspired Perry Moore to tell a positive story of a gay superhero. A 2005 story by Millar was brought up in Sunday's New York Times profile of Moore:

But things work out relatively well for him, which makes sense given Mr. Moore’s distaste for how some gay comic-book characters have been treated. His hackles still rise at the death of Northstar, a mutant hero who made headlines in 1992 when he uttered the words “I am gay” in the pages of a Marvel comic.

In 2005 Northstar was killed by a brainwashed Wolverine, which enraged Mr. Moore. He thought the murder of Marvel’s biggest gay hero by one of its most popular characters (in comics, films and merchandising) sent the wrong message.

“I thought I was going to have to stop buying comics,” he said, but instead, “I waged my own little jihad.” He visited a comic store armed with Post-it notes, which he affixed to copies of the “Wolverine” series (first on the covers, then, more slyly, on interior pages). They asked questions like “Can there be a gay superhero?” “Homophobic?” and “Ask yourself: equal rights?”

Death is rarely final in comics, so it’s no surprise that Northstar came back to life. “They couldn’t bother to mention he was gay,” Mr. Moore said of Northstar’s most recent appearance in “X-Men.”

Taking a cue from Gail Simone, a comic-book writer who first gained notice as a fan with her Web site, “Women in Refrigerators”, detailing the mistreatment of female heroes, Mr. Moore created his own tally. “Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero?,” which he has delivered as a speech, includes more than 60 gay and lesbian comic book characters who have been ignored, maimed or murdered.

“Yes, bad things do happen to all people,” he wrote in it. “But are there positive representations of gay characters to counterbalance these negative ones?”

Not nearly enough, Mr. Moore said, and that’s one reason he wrote “Hero,” for which he already has ideas for future installments.

Millar wasn't thrilled to see a story he wrote mentioned as a low point in superhero comics' treatment of gay characters, and he reacted on his website:

Oh, tell him to f**k off.

He didn't die because he was gay. He died because he'd been brainwashed by The Hand.

The key point -- and the one that Millar completely misses (probaby because he never bothered to read the article, just the portion quoted to him) -- is that positive gay characters don't gain prominence very often and that when a character like Northstar gets killed off (or, in this case, killed and resurrected three times in a single storyline) it makes a small number of gay superheroes even smaller. Unfortunately, when a good gay superhero character comes around, they eventually end up losing the qualities that made them positive role models. (Millar also is the writer who had Apollo raped in his first story arc of The Authority.)

That's the point I've taken from Simone's "Women in Refrigerators" list. Northstar is a character who goes for years sitting on the sidelines, only to reappear as a victim. Millar's story might have gotten a different reaction if Northstar had been used positively before, but, as with Apollo, one of the first things Millar did with the character was to make him a victim.

Back when the story first appeared, Millar tried to defend the storyline claiming an overall history of gay-positive stories, citing a 2003 Spectrum Award (for the Authority issues where Apollo and Midnighter marry) and for setting the seeds for Colossus to be gay in Ultimate X-Men run (Millar, unfortunately, only gave out vague hints about Colossus' orientation -- the next writer could have easily written him as straight without any inconsistency which, thankfully, didn't happen.) However, his larger history with gay characters and his reaction to Moore's criticism indicate that Millar doesn't understand how everything that happens to a minority character is magnified because those characters happen so rarely.

Then again, does anything hurt Millar's case more than claiming that he had no control over the fictional villain group he was writing?


and on top of all that...he's a GIANTPHOBE!!!
http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/3785816.html#cutid1

_________________
Y'know....yeah.

[hadmatter]

Why should a gay comic book character be treated any differently than any other comic book character? I thought we wanted equality.

Nothstar was not an A-lister. In the comic book world, that makes him expendable! I'd be far more offended if they treated him with kid gloves. Yes, Northstar or other gay characters take on greater personal significance for gay readers... that's inevitable, and naturally those readers are going to have a somewhat inflated reaction to everything that happens to those characters.

Does this mean that a writer has some special responsibility to those readers when he uses a gay character in a story? FUCK NO. If a writer spends his time worrying about what this demographic or that demographic is going to feel about this scene or that scene, then the story is going to be a pandering nightmare of mediocrity. Northstar should be free to die and be resurrected just like any other comic book character! That's what I call equal rights.

[merboy]

I'd rather Northstar was dead. He was a snotty uptight queen who thought he was better than anyone else, and then they tried to make him all "positive" like Perry Moore wants, by making him this caring teacher which just sucked. And don't even get me started on Chuck Austen doing the whole "I'm gay but I'm in love with a straight guy, woe is me".

I would have done exactly what Mark Millar did with him. Nobody's moaning about Marvel hating Russians, and look what happens to all the Russian characters. DEAD, that's what. Or ex KGB spies. etc etc etc.

Perry Moore is a faggot. There, I said it.

[hadmatter]

[merboy]

I wouldn't mind being three homos making a mess

[MrVinegar]

[hadmatter]

Nope. I did not miss the point of the article at all. I just completely disagree with it. I would have told that guy to fuck off, too.

[howtaobrowncow]

I wouldn't be surprised if Millar had a "knee-jerk" denial of deliberately killing off Northstar because he was gay. Wouldn't you? Even if you go so far as to say that he's blind to gay sensitivities in this area, that's a far cry from saying "He killed Northstar because the character is gay." I'd expect Millar to object to the latter.

As gay fans, I think we're in a bind. B/C/D list characters drop like flies. (Even the occasional A-lister like Barry Allen can get killed if the powers that be find it useful.) So if you refuse to kill off a gay B-lister character because he's gay, on the grounds that you're being "sensitive", that's equivalent to saying "The gays aren't tough enough to take the same knocks that everyone else does."

At the same time, we have so few comics icons, that we do, in fact, want them treated specially. So are we desperate enough to take the charity? Probably.

Between wanting my favorite gay characters to survive, because they're so darn few of them, but being uncomfortable with special treatment, I'd have to double- and triple-think the circumstances before accusing anyone of being unfair. Mark Millar? I don't know. Zeb Wells, who combined two teams of young heroes in a book (Civil War: Young Avenger / Runaways) and the 4 members that got captured and tortured just happened to be the 4 queer characters? Oh yeah.

_________________

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
- Brendan Gill

[MrVinegar]

[hadmatter]

Wow, for a minute there I almost stopped having fun. I had to re-read the comic to remember why I enjoyed it.

[NCDavid]

The use of the gay slurs in the comic didn't bother me any.
It kind of reminded me of some of those ground-breaking early issues of Spider-Man
back when he made similar remarks to his villians:

[merboy]

that nine inch remark made me all wet and sticky. I cannot tell a lie.