A preview image of DC’s Brave New World has been floating around the interweb for a bit. Apparently some people are a little put off by the cover’s lack of diversity.
This is really amusing to me. It’s not the first time a comic has featured all / mostly white people on the cover. It’s certainly not the first cover to not feature a gay person. Case in point (Warning: the preceding link features a cover where the ratio of white people to black people is 30 to 0).
Now, if we’re going to point out the fact that there are no black people, gay people, bi-sexual, lesbian or transgenger people, you have to be fair to the other minorities as well.
Where are all the mentally handicapped people? Where are all the people in wheelchairs? Clearly DC is prejudice against the disabled. I don’t see one blind person on the cover! It’s obvious that the editors at DC want all non-white, non-american, non-healthy, non-heterosexual people to die and that is what this comic book cover is representing.
While we’re at it, let’s be sure to point out that there are no little people on the cover either. Also I don’t notice anyone who is missing a limb. I don’t see any conjoined twins. I don’t see anyone on this horrible neo-nazi-like cover who is overweight and I certainly don’t see any senior citizens. I see no children or babies either.
I think the solution to this problem is simple. Everyone should boycott DC Comics until they create and publish a comic book about a black, mentally retarded, gay, blind, wheel-chair-bound, armless, overweight, little person super-hero.
7 responses to “The Non-Diverse Brave New World”
Where are all the mentally handicapped people? Where are all the people in wheelchairs?
Thank you for comparing being a woman or a person of color to being physically or mentally disabled. I think the comparison is quite apt, but probably not for the reasons you do.
Let’s see: having a person in a wheelchair serve as a superhero is somewhat problematic (though not impossible: Oracle, anyone?), same with being blind (still possible – Daredevil, anyone?), for the obvious physical reasons. Mentally disabled – same thing. It’s harder to chase villains when your legs don’t work, and hard to fly after a nuclear missile when you can’t see it.
Being a person of color or a woman makes it difficult to be a superhero because….em….well….. I dunno. Maybe we trip over our boobs or something?
You’re welcome… although I wasn’t comparing being black, a woman, or gay to being mentally retarded or handicapped. .. or a child or a baby or old. I was just pointing out that I don’t see any of those particular “minorities” in the ad.
For the record, I have no problem with seeing a so-called minority on the cover of a comic or in an ad. I have a problem when people complain that a particular minority is left out of the cover or the advertisement.
Adding a character simply to appease a group is nothing more than a marketing ploy. The only reason a comic book company should have a gay character, or a black character or a woman character is because it’s realistic. It makes sense to have these types of characters because in real life these types of characters would exist.
What is unrealistic is to expect a representative of each minority to appear in every advertisement or comic book cover.
If that last statement is true, then why complain about any comic book cover or ad when there are plenty of comic book covers and ads that feature particular minorities that were left out of other covers. If DC only included straight white males on the covers of their comic books and never deviated from this formula, I could see a basis for an argument… but they don’t.
Look on the bright side of this. This means that none of the minority heroes are sitting around moping in the ruins of civilization.
I think the issue people are taking is the assumption that all “minorities” are created equally. Though there are a good number of, say, people in wheelchairs or gays or midgets, the number of blacks, asians, latinos, etc. are significantly higher to the point where they number in the billions rather than, as in the case of say midgets, the hundreds of millions. It’s an order of magnitude thing. Limit it to the US specifically, pretend that 1/2 of the population is white. Split the remaining equally between the commonly used racial groupings (black, asian, latino, etc.) and you still get a need for at least one or two non-white superheroes here and there. People with disabilities or congenital defects are in an incredibly small minority, one never pandered to by politicians. People of different races are considered voting blocs.
I have written a follow up to this article, which clarifies my viewpoints on this matter.
I’m not gay