August 27, 2005

• I read somewhere a while ago (I think it was thru Boyd McDonald) that Burt Ward wore not 1 but 2 jockstraps under his tights so as to deemphasize his bulgy naughty bits... Anyway, how many adult men have boy wards with whom they do not snog? DC should lighten up and embrace gay characters like Marvel has.
• It is art, and therefore, protected under the 1st. They forgot to addd the case of the sexual Barbie that was deemed art, and therefore protected speech. The artst won the case against Mattel.
• Whether it is protected or not, it isn't very creative. People have been talking about Batman and Robin as potential lovers since Whertham in the 50's.
• Well, that's pretty shrewd- it's the guy's best shot at generating interest in his paintings, given their quality...
• DC has gay characters, incidentally. The Pied Piper is gay, and though he started out as a villain, I think he came out when he was on the good side of the law. Then there's the Wildstorm label, that has the poster boys of gay heroes, Apollo and Midnighter, or the Wildstorm equivalent of Superman and Batman. Of course, the Vertigo label has who-knows-how-many gay characters, though there aren't many super-heroes in that particular set of comics. Most of the other characters who are gay in DC are C-listers at best, but honestly, neither Alpha Flight or the aforementioned "Rawhide Kid" are going to have a movie made about them any time in the near future. I suspect it's more the underage thing that bothers DC, though they are certainly going to be protective of their A-list heroes and their underaged wards.
• Someone refresh my memory -- wasn't there, several years ago a gay superhero (I want to say he was Canadian) who contracted AIDS? May have been Marvel.
• To the bat pole!
• NO, it wasn't AIDS, it was some mysterious magic curse that had exactly the same symptoms as AIDS and got lifted. It was Northstar from Alpha Flight and the reason he got this curse? He was a fairy. I am not making this up... Fortunately, that part was later retconned.
• You're kidding. He was a fairy. This is Marvel's idea of a progressive homosexual character.
• Thanks Stan the Bat, for saying what I was thinking.
• What the hell? You shut your pervo yaps, sikos. Quit polluting this site with your male craptacular smegmatic worthless boy hoohaas emphasizing your questionable ascendancy. We are keenly aware of your sexual urgency, and the card's in the mail.
• Plus, "sikos" does not really refer to Greek people. But the rest of you are naughty.
• Yes'm.
• Did the whole stupid gay Batman/Robin thing really start in the fifties? Or did it start after the comedy television show in the sixties?
• It started as soon as the boy wonder was introduced in the comics, I should imagine.
• Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham was published in 1954. Among other things he claimed:

  Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend's arm. Like girls in other stories, Robin is sometimes held captive by the villains ... Robin is a handsome aphetic boy, usually showing his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident. Other times Batman ends up in bed injured, and young Robin is by his side. At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and "Dick" Grayson. Bruce is described as a "socialite" and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and they own a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown.

  He argued that Batman and Robin was "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." (Quotes taken from this site that popped up when I googled for Batman and Seduction of the Innocent).
• aphetic!
• Hasn't this already been posted here?
• aphetic Trobin... Probin... Throbbin... /slooow in the uptake Back in the forties/fifties it would have been only a few folk who thought much about the boyness of a fictional man's companion. whether ward, nephew or simply diminutive sidekick. People in the forties/fifties were much more naive about human saxuality. An age of innocence equaled an age of ignorance. Boy companions were fairly ubiquitous in what I think of as American cereal-box radio shows featuring boys who had adventures alongside adult protagonists or who were themselve the protagonist. Certainly very common in the then-popular western comics as well as radio -- Bobby Benson of the B-Bar-B was a kid with a whole ranchful of guys, I think Sky King had a niece and a nephew, and even Red Ryder had a small Apache (?I think) as his companion. (Hey, Donald Duck ended up with three nephews.) Post-war saw the strange character of the displaced waif Donde in comics, befriended by assorted soldiers, if I recall aright. Few people expected a homosexual relationship to emerge in the Sunday funnies or in public; folk generally failed to see these boys as potential victims in the way people nowadays are prone to do. The extension into fantasy comics with adult hero plus boy companion raised few eyebrows. The boy companion is part of a long tradition in popular boys' fiction going at least back to Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys in the US. One huge problem with being a boy adventurer is that it is hard to drive cars or fly planes sans adult. Action tales for boys traditionally tend to either pit the boy against his communnity/school, or else he ends up getting involved in mysteries/detections/struggles. (In British fiction for kids, Kipling managed to combine there two strands wonderfully tales of Stalky, but it was not until much later that John Humperdinck Stover hove on the scene in American tales for boys though whether skool stories actually can reflect much of the real world is open to question). Was little middle ground, or light reading for youths -- American stories for boys either went all Catcher in the Rye/Rebel Without a Cause or you discovered SF, and went gallicanting down the Buck Rogers/Tom Corbett road. Believe it's almost impossible nowadays to have a boy hero in a real-world setting -- simply because hero doesn't equal victim, and these days boy/child equals victim. Hence the success -- among kids of both genders -- of a Harry Potter. In some paralleling that of my rudderless generation's going so strongly for Frode. So the Boy Adventure Hero in the Real Adult World is dead, effectively, in contemporary fiction -- kids like to place themselves inside the skin of a hero, vicariously experiencing triumph, but those days seem gone except in SF -- or possibly -- very limited contexts like sports or freeing a Willy. People have to have heroes -- if ye haven't any, there's no way to believe things can get better. The world of the child's imagination has become immesurably impoverished by this turn of events, i think, just as the inner vision of so many has grown dark. My own interest in comics lapsed about the mid-fifties, just as television started being commonplace in many North American homes and I got old enough to spend Saturdays reveling in Old B-grade westerns and Flash Gordon serials. Many of these old radio/movie seriess were later translated onto television screens -- a deluge of westerns, old and new: the boy companion emerged in The Range Rider's Dick West for a couple or so years, but Dick I seem to recall as a bit older than Robin.
• aphetic Trobin... Probin... Throbbin... /slooow in the uptake Back in the forties/fifties it would have been only a few folk who thought much about the boyness of a fictional man's companion. whether ward, nephew or simply diminutive sidekick. People in the forties/fifties were much more naive about human saxuality. An age of innocence equaled an age of ignorance. Boy companions were fairly ubiquitous in what I think of as American cereal-box radio shows featuring boys who had adventures alongside adult protagonists or who were themselve the protagonist. Certainly very common in the then-popular western comics as well as radio -- Bobby Benson of the B-Bar-B was a kid with a whole ranchful of guys, I think Sky King had a niece and a nephew, and even Red Ryder had a small Apache (?I think) as his companion. (Hey, Donald Duck ended up with three nephews.) Post-war saw the strange character of the displaced waif Donde in comics, befriended by assorted soldiers, if I recall aright. Few people expected a homosexual relationship to emerge in the Sunday funnies or in public; folk generally failed to see these boys as potential victims in the way people nowadays are prone to do. The extension into fantasy comics with adult hero plus boy companion raised few eyebrows. The boy companion is part of a long tradition in popular boys' fiction going at least back to Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys in the US. One huge problem with being a boy adventurer is that it is hard to drive cars or fly planes sans adult. Action tales for boys traditionally tend to either pit the boy against his communnity/school, or else he ends up getting involved in mysteries/detections/struggles. (In British fiction for kids, Kipling managed to combine there two strands wonderfully tales of Stalky, but it was not until much later that John Humperdinck Stover hove on the scene in American tales for boys though whether skool stories actually can reflect much of the real world is open to question). Was little middle ground, or light reading for youths -- American stories for boys either went all Catcher in the Rye/Rebel Without a Cause or you discovered SF, and went gallicanting down the Buck Rogers/Tom Corbett road. Believe it's almost impossible nowadays to have a boy hero in a real-world setting -- simply because hero doesn't equal victim, and these days boy/child equals victim. Hence the success -- among kids of both genders -- of a Harry Potter. In some paralleling that of my rudderless generation's going so strongly for Frode. So the Boy Adventure Hero in the Real Adult World is dead, effectively, in contemporary fiction -- kids like to place themselves inside the skin of a hero, vicariously experiencing triumph, but those days seem gone except in SF -- or possibly -- very limited contexts like sports or freeing a Willy. People have to have heroes -- if ye haven't any, there's no way to believe things can get better. The world of the child's imagination has become immesurably impoverished by this turn of events, i think, just as the inner vision of so many has grown dark. My own interest in comics lapsed about the mid-fifties, just as television started being commonplace in many North American homes and I got old enough to spend Saturdays reveling in Old B-grade westerns and Flash Gordon serials. Many of these old radio/movie seriess were later translated onto television screens -- a deluge of westerns, old and new: the boy companion emerged in The Range Rider's Dick West for a couple or so years, but Dick I seem to recall as a bit older than Robin.
• Curses!
• Wertham's argument is blitheringly irrational and patently homophobic, IMHO, and not worthy of serious discussion, as bees points out. Friendship and bonding between men is not gay, and the WASP teeth-gnashing over depictions of such a thing is a manifestation of 20th century queer-fear. What a fucking load of cobblers. Fun to make jokes about, of course, but nothing more serious than that. And if you ask me, these paintings aren't all that good.
• Wertham's argument is blitheringly irrational and patently homophobic Not to mention not backed up by a single statistic. His colleagues kept requesting he produce more than mere anecdotal evidence that comics were indeed corrupting our nation's youth. He never did, because he never performed an actual study, and even some of his anecdotes look suspicious. One memorable exchange has him asking a young comics fan what he wants to be when he grows up, and the boy replies, "A sex maniac!" Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. Didn't matter, though. He had half the mothers in the US terrified that little Johnny would be perveted by Buttman and Throbbin, and made a fortune going around the country spewing this drivel to women's groups, posing as their children's salvation. Bang zoom, here comes the Comics Code.
• I love "aphetic" -- I wonder what the hell he thought he was saying? -- and, like bees, I came up with "throbbin'" as a good word for Robin to be an aphetic variant of.
• Mephitic? /my best guess
• Just a typo for athletic, folks. Move along, nothing to see here. (Apart from Dick Grayson's burgeoning adolescent cock bulging barely contained from his tights, a pearl of milky liquid shimmering at it's tip like an opalescant beacon, beckoning the caped crusader on, on on... ) /collapse
• How about a typo for pathetic? No -- wait! typo for HOMEO-pathic!
• otherwise, my mind's a blank
• I honestly feel that it is counterproductive to sexualise all male bonding relationships. If even every male-male friendship is viewed with suspicion of being homosexual, it's just going to make the world a bit more homophobic. Why should it be that close male friendships are all homoerotic? Close female-female friendships aren't usually viewed in such a sexualised manner. I've seen fanart that was better than this, really. I don't really see anything very artistic about it, intellectually, technically or aesthetically.
• MonkeyFilter: We are keenly aware of your sexual urgency, and the card's in the mail. MonkeyFilter: What a fucking load of cobblers. Just keep it up, you guys. You are sooooo going to hell.