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Sunday, September 08, 2013 

DC decides not to greenlight a lesbian marriage

And for this, the writers of the Batwoman title, where it was going to take place, decided to split:
DC Comics may have made history last February when an edition of its Batwoman comic included the first lesbian wedding proposal in the genre. But now the writers behind the female Caped Crusader’s adventures have acrimoniously left DC claiming the female superhero’s marriage was “prohibited” by the publisher.

In a blog post co-authors J.H Williams and W. Haden Blackman declared that they were exiting DC in December alleging they had been asked to “alter or completely discard many long-standing storylines that we feel compromise the character and the series”.
They probably figured at this point that it wouldn't help them any more than it helped Marvel when they did something similar with Northstar in X-Men last year (no, it didn't help sales at all). Yet, I have a feeling that, if DC thought they could pull it off, they would have gone through with it, if that's the kind of political correctness they believe in, while at the same time shunning heterosexual marriages.
The comic, relaunched in 2010 as a standalone story about Kate Kane, has so far seen Batwoman’s day-to-day persona forced to leave the U.S Military Academy after allegations arose that she was gay - a pioneering storyline which came before America’s controversial Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy regarding homosexuals in the military was repealed.
Gee, since when did the US army ever force its members to skedaddle over that? The storyline they concocted sounds greatly exaggerated, and its biggest problem is that they just can't keep themselves from politicizing these issues.
The co-writers say they have been told at last minute by DC to change several longstanding story arcs including “most crushingly” showing Kate and her girlfriend Maggie getting married.

Williams and Blackman wrote: "We were told to ditch plans for Killer Croc's origins; forced to drastically alter the original ending of our current arc, which would have defined Batwoman's heroic future in bold new ways; and, most crushingly, prohibited from ever showing Kate and Maggie actually getting married. All of these editorial decisions came at the last minute, and always after a year or more of planning and plotting on our end."
Not that I could possibly care, and judging from how minor sales numbers really are, not many others do either.
Very few comic book characters have been gay in the genre’s history: Green Lantern came out in an edition of his comic last year; and Batman has been “outed” for the purposes of a new novel by Italian writer Marco Mancassola, Erotic Lives of the Superheroes, although rumours about his inclinations - and relationship with Robin - have been circulated, and made tacit, in Batman films and comics for decades.
This paragraph is ridiculous. Aside from the sensationalized references to the sleazebag novel by Mancassola, they obfuscate how it was Alan Scott, the original GL who was forcibly retconned, and predictably have no qualms about abuse of famous creations for politicized agendas.
America's leading LGBT rights lobby Glaad, formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has praised Batwoman and gave it an award last year. Last month the group published research examining the 101 films made by Hollywood’s 'Big Six' studios last year, which found that big budget action films, sci-fi and fantasy films, were the least sexually diverse – with just 3 out of 34 such films featuring an LGBT character.
I guess they'll be turning against DC Comics now. No matter. The entertainment medium would be better off without those leftist propaganda groups poking their noses into everyone else's business.
Batwoman first appeared in DC Comics in 1956 when she was introduced as a love interest for Batman to help combat rumours of the Caped Crusader’s homosexuality which arose out of 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent by German psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
Oh, this is funny. They obscure at least one other noteworthy love interest of Bruce Wayne's, Vicki Vale, who debuted in 1948, well before most of these controversies arose. This is just another superficial citation.

The UK Telegraph says:
It has been indicated by other comic book writers on Twitter that the dropping of the story arc was because comic book publishers are anti-marriage in general, as young readers are not interested in seeing characters become married.
What if they're not interested in seeing LGBT characters get married, and would rather see herterosexual characters get married, or their weddings restored, like Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's? Those are the ones who've really been abused, as decent marriages between men and women were erased and thrown away, with Spider-Man's being a major example. How come that never occurred to them?

Well, if DC loses sales over this, it really won't matter much. It's become pointless already, and did nothing to restore faith in them. Ironically, it's another domino in their loss of contributing writers.

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I'm surprised they decided to nix that storyline, but I commend them for refusing to kowtow to political correctness. No one even reads Batwoman to begin with.

And I also wish moonbat groups like GLAAD would bug off and quit trying to force diversity on comics. It's as though every version of entertainment has to pass some kind of politically correct litmus test these days in order to avoid lawsuits or condemnation from these moonbat outfits.

And thanks for bringing up Vicki Vale. I always thought she was underused as a character, and it's amazing how people forget that she was Batman's primary love interest from the late 1940s into the 1950s.

DC seems to be trying to emphasize that the editorial mandate was not against gay marriage, but against marriage in general. Dan Didio said at the Baltimore convention that Aquaman and Mera are not married. That statement contradicts DC's official website. And Didio also repeatedly referred to Batwoman as "Kathy Kane," apparently confusing the new version with the 1950's version. But then, the way the goalposts are constantly being moved around, with endless retcons and reboots, it's no wonder that even the publishers can't keep up with it all.

The biggest problem is not the issue of the marriage, specifically. It's that twenty writers and/or artists have left DC recently, because of constant interference and last-minute changes that make it impossible for a series to maintain any sort of logical continuity. The "heroes can't be married" edict is just the latest example.

Batman/Bruce Wayne had girlfriends almost from the very beginning of the strip, long before Dr. Wertham's allegations. Julie Madison was probably a regular cast member before Robin first appeared. The idea that Kathy Kane had to be brought in to combat rumors of homosexuality is based on an incomplete knowledge of the character's history.

I'd forgotten about Julie Madison, his girlfriend in the early 1940s. She was an actress, wasn't she? If memory serves, she became kind of like the DCU's version of Grace Kelly, in that she eventually married a European prince.

And as for the writers leaving bit, I wish they'd fire everyone who currently works at DC (Marvel, too) and start over with new blood.

Julie Madison was supposed to be an actress, but she seemed to spend more time getting kidnapped by villains (and then rescued by Batman) than she did making movies. In between her regularly scheduled abductions, she mostly criticized Bruce Wayne for being an idle rich guy. His next girlfriend was Linda Page, a nurse. Since she had a real job, it may have carried more weight when she criticized Bruce for being a layabout. Linda (played by Shirley Patterson) appeared in the 1943 movie serial. Vicki Vale (played by Jane Adams, IIRC) was in the 1949 movie serial. Catwoman was the longest-lasting love interest for Batman, but made relatively few appearances in the 1950's and 1960's. That is probably because the Comics Code had a rule against portraying criminals as glamorous or attractive. Maybe the original Batwoman was intended as a Catwoman-like character who would be on the right side of the law.

Could be. I think the Code was the reason why Catwoman disappeared until an issue of Lois Lane's comic in the mid-60s, where Superman was turned into a cat.

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