The World That's Coming

Loki seems to have lost his solo title in the Secret Wars upheaval. Angela may be bisexual, but I don’t think it’s been established. Some readers insist that Deadpool is bisexual, but he’s only ever made jokes about it. There’s a rumor that a long overdue Northstar series may be announced soon; that might have felt like a gain if we hadn’t lost Loki and Hercules. Right now, Marvel’s best days as a publisher of queer-friendly comics are definitely in the past.

None of which is to imply that Marvel hates LGBTQ people, or that Alonso is any kind of bigot. It would be easy to characterize my comments that way in order to dismiss them, so let me be clear: I know there are LGBTQ people at Marvel, including at an editorial level. Neither the company nor the editor-in-chief dislikes gay people.

But I don’t believe the company is sensitive or receptive to the issues or the audience. Marvel is too quick to dismiss critics with derision and contempt, even when those critics are queer comic fans with a legitimate complaint, and that makes the company look hostile. Combine that hostility with a lackluster publishing slate and a track record of marginalizing LGBTQ characters, and Marvel’s failures come into sharp relief. The straightwashing of Hercules just draws attention to it all.

Meanwhile, DC is courting queer fans with books like Midnighter, Catwoman, Constantine, Harley Quinn, Bombshells, and Secret Six. So if you want to know which major superhero publisher is listening to you, and if you want to know which publisher treats its LGBTQ readers with respect, the answer to that is straighter than Hercules ever was.“

Movement Conservatives now bank on the idea that any media other than Fox is biased toward an un-American point of view. In 2012, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich summarized the argument. He called out the media for ignoring the Americans who “so deeply want their country to get back on the right track,” and who were tired of “elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system.” But mainstream news channels do not seem to understand the history of the Movement Conservatives’ political attack on impartial media. For Movement Conservatives, any news coverage that does not explicitly endorse their viewpoint is biased and un-American by definition, no matter how well sourced or argued it is.

In their attempt to honor the American tradition of impartial and fair media, mainstream news channels have worked to give more and more airtime to the Movement Conservative worldview, until we have reached a point where the first Republican presidential debate will allow only a minute for responses to how a candidate would deal with the most pressing questions in the world, and where the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for president—for the most powerful office in the world—is the ultimate salesman.