smacky and bucky

As a comic book writer, Brian Michael Bendis is good at getting people talking. He likes writing "EVENTS" (Avengers Disassembled, for instance, in which he managed to kill three Avengers and drive one batshit insane). He once bragged about how an upcoming storyline would "crack the internet in half." (Wow, I can't believe how easy it was to find the original utterance. The first result of a "crack the internet in half" Google search is Bendis saying it in 2005 HERE.)

Anyway, he writes a lot of dialogue. A LOT. Sometimes nothing happens for pages and pages. Bendis gets in the zone and he's writing a conversation between Spider-Man and Luck Cage that reads like Quentin Tarantino on a three-day caffeine bender. He is sometimes criticized for changing characterization for the sake of shoe-horning in a good quip. Currently, it's the gem below, from Mighty Avengers #11:



As you can imagine, folks are abuzz. "When Fangirls Attack," the blog that describes itself as, "A Compilation of Articles on Gender in Comics and Comics Fandom," has links to what others are saying (some interesting and some amusing. I never knew so many women kept up with comics. Yay!)

• Lisa Fortuner has an essay on it HERE. She says it's not the misogynism, but the dialogue itself. Doom might yell, "Silence, woman!" but he wouldn't say "Shut your cow-mouth!"

• Laura Hudson, in her post "Vic Von Doom ain't nothin to f**k with" says people expressed shock that the above dialogue was not a photoshopped parody. She then presents a couple of her own, including Doom spouting angry rap lyrics.

I agree with the general consensus: Dr. Doom is a villain, an egotistical asshole, and it's not out of character to see women as items to be used. But he doesn't talk like that. He doesn't curse to be edgy. He's a genius dictator. Why would he need to talk like that? To impress someone? Doom does not impress. He awes! (See how easy it is to do "Doomspeak?" Just sound like a jerk full of hot air. It's not necessary to say whore, cow, etc.)

I hope no one in the "mainstream" media sees it. We don't need Hillary Clinton doing a tirade about the bad influence comics have on our children. They did that in the 1950s. Don't need to do it again. Besides, kids don't read comics. Comics cost way too much for kids to buy them; kids hardly read anymore, and if they did, it would be Harry Potter, not a comic book.

We already know everything the government gets involved in turns to crap. Old white men who don't understand how things work making decisions about how it should be regulated. Not smart. See Ted Stevens describing the internet as "a series of tubes." The man was born in 1923. I'm not saying that someone really, really old can't understand "new" technology, but he's clearly an example of that. He's also the subject of an FBI corruption investigation and tried to get funding for his "bridge to nowhere." He might not have a Victor Von Doom-sized ego, but he's clearly an asshole.