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tonkysexist · 1 year

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For Jewish American heritage month I want to post two of the most important comic moments in history:

First in Uncanny X-Men 150. Magneto almost kills Kitty in the what appears to be just the latest of the many generic villain plans that readers had grown used to. However, this was the moment that his characterization changed forever. He is immediately regretful over striking a young child and starts to remember his own time as a child during the Holocaust. It's notable that while Magneto doesn't know this, Kitty is Jewish. She is a young mutant child who is the first textually Jewish character in Marvel comics (introduced a year before this issue came out in Uncanny 129). It’s so important to know that Kitty Pryde is the catalyst for the reveal that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor. A young girl who is both Jewish and a mutant. Who, to Magneto, represents all he ever wanted to protect. He’s trying to shape the world for kids like her, and this is where he realizes he needs to rethink how he does that. This retcon was established by Jewish author Chris Claremont and is the very foundation of the Magneto X-Men fans today know and love.

Later in Uncanny 199, Kitty and Magneto attend a reception at the National Holocaust Memorial together. At this event different survivors introduce themselves and speak of family members who fates they don't know about. Kitty speaks on behalf of her grandfather to inquire about her great aunt Chava, who like most victims, has no records of her life or death to be found. Multiple survivors, including Magneto, had met Kitty's great aunt and speak about her with Kitty. Two survivors, Ruth and David, recognize and hail Magneto as a hero to them in Auschwitz. Magneto dismisses the notion he's a hero, but Kitty seems to think otherwise.

This retcon is the most important in all of comics history. Magneto is the Jewish character. He bears so much importance in representing, as the panel above states, the strength and endurance of Jewish people. The wonderful community that is being celebrated this month.

#long but necessary post #magneto #kitty pryde #x men #tw holocaust mention #jewish american heritage month #jumblr

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traincat · 4 years

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Hey I was wondering, how do you feel about the whitewashing of characters like Stanley Osborn or Janice Lincoln, characters who aren't as prevalent in the comics but still tend to be whitewashed so brutally, sometimes to the excuse that they're mixed (although we don't know what Janice's mom looks like, biologically kids of people with albinism tend to have more usual skin tones relating to their race)

Yeah, it’s just bad, in a word. I know I’ve talked a lot about Marvel’s tendency to remove character traits that mark Jewish characters as obviously Jewish -- from Kitty’s curly hair and Magen David necklace, both no longer things the character is commonly depicted with, to the lack of acknowledgment with Bobby Drake that the character is half-Jewish in anything modern, because I’m Jewish and that’s my area, but this is a really huge problem at Marvel. I think there’s a whole handful of problems to address that ties into Marvel’s whitewashing of their characters, from minor characters like Stanley Osborn, to more prevalent but not mainstream characters like Janice Lincoln, and even extremely popular characters like Storm. There was, for example, the recent case with the Marauders book where characters like Storm and Gateway were depicted with very light skin, where this got all the way to publication without anyone correcting this -- and then the comic received well-deserved backlash when those issues hit the stand, only after several instances of which was there any visible attempt to fix the issue. And in cases involving characters like Storm, I think it’s very easy to say that individual colorists should know better. But then there have been interviews with colorists in the past who have talked about how editors at Marvel have asked them to lighten characters’ skin tones, so there’s evidence to suggest that in at least several cases that this is deliberate instead of an extremely ignorant oversight. So I think one of the questions has to be, where does the responsibility for this lay within the chain of command at Marvel? A chain of command where at the very top there is a white editor in chief who has in his career pretended to be an Asian man for his own gain?

With Stanley Osborn in particular, I do wonder whether the people drawing and coloring Stanley Osborn know anything about him. I think with Stanley there’s probably in several instances just a thought process going on with the artist and colorist like, this is Harry’s baby and Harry’s depicted with a very pale skin tone so we’ll color the baby the same as him. Like, especially with very young child characters, I think there’s a tendency among creators, both writers and artists, to think of that character as an accessory to the parent and not as an individual character -- which is a problem in and of itself, although not the problem we’re addressing right now. I think this is something that in an ideal world would be addressed by editorial -- a mandate that says to Spider-Man artists that Stanley Osborn is biracial. But like we’ve addressed above, when you have editorial staff that have asked colorists to lighten the skin of black and brown characters, how do you trust them to relay that information reliably? You can’t, in all good faith. And even with Harry himself -- there’s a fairly common reading of the character among fans as mixed race, Jewish, or both, due in part although not solely to the hair texture he’s always been drawn with in 616. This is complicated by recent series like Spider-Gwen, where young Harry, whose classmates labeled him the “Green Goblin” because of his family’s money (a pretty clear anti-semitic remark), was drawn with bushy, curly hair and darker skin while 616 avoids the issue entirely. JRjr in early ‘00s was drawing Harry’s first child, Normie, with Z-type curls, while current depictions of the character have reverted to wavy light brown hair and more Caucasian features. I’ve likened Marvel’s editorial, particularly in regards to Spider-Man, as like a tank of dead fish before but I think that’s actually inaccurate. A tank of dead goldfish bears no responsibility. Marvel’s Spider-Man editorial can do things like tell fairly popular writers that Peter Parker isn’t allowed to swear in comics but then let whitewashed depictions of Stanley Osborn and Janice Lincoln slide. So it’s not a matter of not caring at all so much as what they care about, and it’s very disappointing that they clearly don’t care about this.

#*replies #Anonymous

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Why Marvel Fired an Artist for Inserting Religious and Political Messages into an X-Men Comic

A passage from X-Men Gold #1 by Ardian Syaf (all images courtesy Marvel Comics)

This week, news of a scandal at Marvel Comics involving an Indonesian illustrator flooded the web, with nearly identical articles published by outlets ranging from the BBC to the AV Club. X-Men Gold illustrator Ardian Syaf was discovered to have included coded references to the Quran in the backgrounds of X-Men Gold #1, released on April 5, in order to comment on Indonesian politics.

Indonesian readers quickly discovered the allusions, and Facebook user Haykal Al-Qasimi sent a public letter to Marvel explaining the references and asking the company to address the controversy. When it was determined that the references were anti-Semitic and Syaf openly supported Muslim right wing political organizers in Indonesia, Marvel promptly fired him. Ultimately, the controversy proved to be less about the political messages Syaf included and more about the charged political context they were launched into and the globalized product that mainstream comics have become.

The cover of X-Men Gold #1 by Ardian Syaf

The references themselves are so subtle that editors and audiences in the US failed to notice them. For instance, in a scene where the X-Men are playing baseball (perhaps the most wholesome category of standby X-Men scenes), the character Colossus is wearing a T-shirt that reads “QS 5:51.” Later in the comic, Kitty Pryde partially obscures a street sign that says “Jewelry” (in the comics, Pryde is Jewish), while a nearby sign reads “212.”

QS 5:51 refers to Surah 5, verse 51, a controversial passage of the Quran that, like certain Bible passages such as Leviticus 18:22, has special weight in a contemporary political context. The passage is interpreted in some contemporary translations to mean: “Take not the Jews and the Christians as leaders/advisors.” The verse’s meaning is a particularly sensitive issue in Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world.

In September of last year, the governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (often called Ahok), said during his reelection campaign that his opponents were improperly using verse 51 of the Quran to claim that Muslims could not vote for him because he is a Christian. The comment provoked a tremendous public outcry, and on December 2, more than 200,000 Indonesian protesters called for Ahok to be tried for blasphemy under Indonesia’s laws against insulting religion. The widespread protests were seen not only as a criticism of Ahok, but as a sign of Islamist groups’ growing strength in the country. Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen described the protests as “a threat to the secular state here in the long run.” Syaf’s inclusion of the number 212 was a reference to the date of the mass protest, on the second day of December.

When the controversy came to light, Marvel immediately terminated Syaf’s contract. Syaf had been working as a freelance illustrator for Marvel and DC since 2009. After being fired, the artist posted on Facebook: “My career is over now.” He sought to downplay the significance of his easter eggs, writing that the numbers stood for justice and love. However, it quickly became apparent that Syaf is indeed an active supporter of hardline conservative Muslim groups in Indonesia when he posted a selfie of himself meeting with the leader of the Islamic Defenders Front. While claiming he was not an anti-Semite to Indonesian newspaper Jawa Pos, he nevertheless added: “Marvel is owned by Disney. When Jews are offended, there is no mercy.”

A passage from X-Men Gold #1 by Ardian Syaf

The story of Syaf’s inclusions didn’t erupt into controversy because fans were excited about the references to contemporary Indonesian politics, but rather because of the way it played into the contentious contemporary discourse on Islam. The headline-grabbing news of a foreign Muslim artist inserting anti-Semitic, anti-Christian political messages into X-Men comics resonates because certain elements in the current administration view contemporary politics as a clash of civilizations. The fact that the X-Men have a history of being used to comment (somewhat problematically) on diversity and oppression only increases the cultural reach of the story.

This is the second time in recent months that Marvel has been pitched into a controversy around issues of political correctness. Explaining an ongoing slump in sales, Marvel vice president David Gabriel made some clumsy statements about the weak showing being due to the company’s new roster of more diverse characters. “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” the damning quote read. “They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.”

The sentiment is, on the face of it, ridiculous, as Marvel’s diverse titles are among its bestselling comics — Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther was the top-selling comic of 2016. As Alex Abad-Santos explained, the context for Gabriel’s statement is the entirely backward system of comics distribution, whereby retailers order comics without seeing them and are unable to return them if they go unsold. This system privileges known commodities while sidelining emerging artists and untested content. Gabriel was echoing the voices of retailers and some communities of longtime fans who were less than enthusiastic about Marvel’s increased focus on non-traditional (read: not white male) characters.

Both recent scandals point to the emergence of Marvel as a global cultural juggernaut and the accompanying growing pains of its rise. Long gone is the era in the mid-1990s when a bubble in the comics market nearly bankrupt the company. While Marvel Comics still operates as a comic-selling business, its true value to the Walt Disney Company, which acquired it in 2009 for $4.24 billion, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a well-oiled machine that now produces three to four blockbusters per year. In its more Machiavellian moments, the company makes clear that it sees the comics more as content incubators for movies and video games than valuable products. This was the case when the company canceled the Fantastic Four series, in part because it does not own the rights to those movies.

Superhero comics are now global products in both their production and consumption. Marvel draws on an international pool of artists, and in that sense, the scandal around Syaf’s messages echoes the “iPhone Girl” scandal surrounding a Chinese Foxconn worker who took selfies with an iPhone that was later sold in the US. Like Apple products, mainstream comics are less and less associated with the individual artists and writers who work on them (can you imagine the designers of an Apple computer stamping their signatures into the inside of the case?) and more with the corporate branding and franchise-extension directed by the companies that own them.

After all the chatter around Syaf’s drawings has died down, one of the few lasting effects of the controversy will most likely be that it will be harder for Muslim artists and writers to work for conflict-averse cultural behemoths like Marvel. As G. Willow Wilson, the creator of Marvel’s popular Muslim character Kamala Khan, writes: “Ardian Syaf can keep his garbage philosophy. He has committed career suicide; he will rapidly become irrelevant. But his nonsense will continue to affect the scant handful of Muslims who have managed to carve out careers in comics.”

The post Why Marvel Fired an Artist for Inserting Religious and Political Messages into an X-Men Comic appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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