adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

Looks like this essay was needed, so I went ahead and did it. Not sure I said everything I wanted to say, but I tried.

So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects…

I guess I’ve got a little prescriptivist streak in me after all. Whenever I see someone say something like this… which boils down to “well, Mary Sues are just empowerment fantasies”… I just want to shake someone.

“Mary Sue” had an original, specific definition that I thought was a very useful concept, and gender was almost beside the point. Under this specific definition, yes, “Marty Stus” were absolutely possible. It wasn’t just about empowerment fantasy— it was about laziness in service to empowerment fantasy. It was about a writer’s refusal to treat his/her world as real, because he/she’d rather live out power fantasies on the page at that world’s expense. Batman, when written well, is a character who either needs help sometimes, even often, or a character who pays a price for his awesomeness that most of us, in real life, wouldn’t be willing to pay. Mary Sues, by the original definition, are sometimes allowed to doubt themselves because of their incredible, perfect modesty, but their writers never doubt them for an instant. They always win, they are always right, and they are islands, who are nevertheless rewarded by the admiration and/or romantic love of every worthy person around them.

If you don’t acknowledge that everyone on Earth, from the most put-upon drudge to the most admired hero, has at least genuinely arguable flaws, then you’re not writing a story that other people can relate to, except in a pat, idealized “gosh I wish I were perfect” way. The fact that “Mary Sues” usually showed up in fanfiction, where their presence usually forced established characters to act out of character, only made this more obvious.

But I don’t know whether to call out the blog poster for this or to call out TV Tropes, because years of lazy critical-thinking skills have broadened this original definition to something like “annoyingly overpowered woman.” That’s really not any one person’s fault, I guess, but it’s a case where lexical drift has left us with something I think is less useful than what we had before. And that’s sad.

rosalarian:

Inspired by this Comics Alliance article, which stated, regarding many female comic characters, “They read like men’s voices coming out of women’s faces.”

This isn’t to say men can’t write good women, or shouldn’t write women. It’s great when anyone writes fantastic female characters. But as far as I’m concerned, a lot of comic writers have never written women at all, only hollow wooden sex puppets.

(Prints of this if you want them.)

At times, Prometheus is downright profound.

Continued at link. This comic is really, really funny.

Not my intent, and I’ve re-spliced your copyright and signature in (though it doesn’t look like that’s propagated to the reblogged versions, as I hoped it would). The image is a direct link to your website, because I want people to go there.

To keep my tumblr from descending into visual chaos, I’ve been trying to keep my snippets consistently 480x240. That’s usually meant either including the whole work, signature and all, or including only a representative slice, with the link to guide people to the full experience. Turned out OVC was just the wrong size for this treatment. But I wasn’t AIMING for your signature, and didn’t even realize I’d clipped it out.

This is extra embarrassing, because I have noticed other people erasing signatures from artwork in ways that seem inarguably deliberate, maybe due to some sort of misguided information-wants-to-be-free ethic, and I do find that an abhorrent practice (especially when they don’t link back to their source). I apologize, and I’ll try to be more careful about such things in the future.

Permit me a moment of triumph here, regarding Magick Chicks. Looks like we indeed managed to engineer a story surprise that nobody saw coming, and that nobody felt cheated by when it came. That’s not easy to do these days.

(It was Dave Zero’s idea. I just added one or two suggestions to make the surprise a little more unguessable. But that involvement is still enough that I feel a little pride in ownership.)

How to beat the Flash. This guy’s got it all figured out.

My old friend in comics Maritza Campos is stretching her science-fiction muscles alongside the incredibly talented Bachan in the new online miniseries/graphic-novel-in-the-making Power Nap.

It’s all about what happens when most of the world decides sleep is passe. Our protagonist is one of the holdouts who still sleeps, now regarded as somewhat disabled by his co-workers, boss and everyone else. But all is not what it seems.

Just a handful of pages up so far, so go get hooked!

Glad io9 turned me on to Scott Bieser’s Quantum Vibe. It takes its time, but the results are rewarding.

Exercise: Add one panel to an existing comic that you feel improves what’s already there. Redraw it in your own style if you prefer. Credit your source. (Inspired by Rosscott.)