Saturday, January 21, 2012

Batman vs. Fox News


DC Comics' superheroes come under attack in news report with echoes of 50s witchhunt.

From a piece in the Guardian...

On Wednesday, Fox 5 – a regional division of the network – aired a special report headlined "Relaunched comics using sex and violence to sell", which focused on DC comics' much-publicised back-to-basics revamp of its entire line last autumn (the publisher started all its comics again from issue number one with fresh creative teams in a bid to get new readers on board and tidy up decades of confusing continuity).

"DC Comics' characters include the likes of Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman. Today, some of these superheroes would make Archie and Veronica blush," ran the report, while comic collector Joe Blackwell opined: "They more or less darkened the characters up. Today, they introduce a lot more reality into it like homosexuality, adultery, all that stuff. It's in the books now."

Neil Bernstein, PhD, a child psychologist and author of How to Keep Your Teenager Out of Trouble commented: "It's sort of like a fictionalised Playboy for kids at its worst."

There are obvious echoes here of a similar furore in 1954, when accusations of moral turpitude threatened to bring the entire artform crashing down.

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