(1) WOMEN WITHOUT NOMINATIONS. A fully-illustrated protest, “The International Festival of Comics (Angoulême): Women Banned from Comics”, can be viewed at More Words, Deeper Hole.
With the announcement today of the list of nominations for the Grand Prix d’Angoulême 2015 – an award for which we comics creators are asked to vote – the ax fell:
30 names, 0 women.
The creators of the protest called for a voting boycott.
Subsequently, organizers grudgingly added some female names to the list says Comics Reporter.
FIBD To Add Female Names To Grand Prix Nominees List; Makes Long Statement
Maybe it’s missing something in translation — I read it both ways but my French is pretty bad — but that may be the most obnoxious and angry statement I’ve ever read from an official party in a comics milieu. I won’t be going over it again in detail, I don’t think — life’s too short, and it made me a bit ill. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s patently not true, though, including bellowing at made-up accusations at the fringes of what’s being discussed, a standard of working cartoonist applied here that hasn’t been applied to past presidents like Watterson or even their current one. There are also, and this is where my French may fail me, one or two extraneous digs at people. Sheesh.
(2) REY BACK IN PLAY. Entertainment Weekly reports Rey will be added as a game piece to future editions of Monopoly: Star Wars.
In response to fan outcry that the board game doesn’t feature Rey, the lead character played by Daisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the toymaker announced Tuesday that she will be added in an updated version.
“We love the passion fans have for Rey, and are happy to announce that we will be making a running change to include her in the Monopoly: Star Wars game available later this year,” a Hasbro spokesperson said in a statement to EW.
(3) TESTIMONIALS. A post from Mary Robinette Kowal quotes from the requests sent by 83 of the 100 people she and other donors gave supporting memberships in the 2015 Worldcon.
Mark-kitteh says, “I noted that there are several that seem to identify as puppy-sympathetic in some fashion; there are of course others that are anti-slate and many that don’t mention the kerfluffle in any way. (In true clickbait fashion, I will say that You Won’t Believe How Eloquent #5 Is!)”
(4) MORE STAR TREK STAMPS. Trek Today has images of new Star Trek stamps.
The United States isn’t the only country releasing Star Trek stamps.
Two other countries, Palau and Guyana, have released stamps based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The stamps from Palau feature Deep Space Nine ships including the Defiant, the space station itself, a runabout, a Cardassian Galor-class ship, and a Bajoran solar sail ship.
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 6, — Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrates the telegraph.
- January 6, 1973 – Schoolhouse Rock! premiered.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born January 6, 1925 – John DeLorean, creator of the car with the gull-wing doors that traveled Back To The Future.
(7) JEDI STEPS. James Altucher is convinced “The Force Will Awaken in 2016”.
This has been the worst year of my life. So bad I thought I would die, over and over. But then wonderful things happened. Things that will change me forever. And nobody really knew because I practiced my own daily practice throughout. I say this not because I want sympathy. I say it because I’m proud. …
SURRENDER TO THE MOMENT
I am always anxious about the future. Or I regret the past. It’s hard not to regret losing lifetimes worth of money.
It’s hard not to feel anxious about the future for me, my family, my loved ones, my friends, because everything is so frustratingly uncertain.
But recognize when those worries come up, and bring it back to right now. What can I do now to best serve the cards dealt me this moment?
Anxiety will only take away energy (the Force) from the current moment and never solve the problems of the future.
I saw this again and again this past year. What a waste it was to ask “Why?” about moments already gone, instead of trusting my own resources for the next moments.
(8) VATICAN PANS STAR WARS. Speaking of spiritual news – Rolling Stone reports the “Vatican Paper Deems ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Not ‘Evil” Enough”.
But the film’s harshest – and least expected – critic could be the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which trashed the sequel for its lack of convincing antagonists. “The new director’s setup fails most spectacularly in its representation of evil, meaning the negative characters,” reads the non-bylined review, via Los Angeles Times.
“Darth Vader and above all the Emperor Palpatine were two of the most efficient villains in that genre of American cinema,” the article continues, noting that Abrams failed to craft evildoers on that same grandiose scale. “The counterpart of Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, wears a mask merely to emulate his predecessor, while the character who needs to substitute the Emperor Palpatine as the incarnation of supreme evil represents the most serious defect of the film. Without revealing anything about the character, all we will say is that it is the clumsiest and tackiest result you can obtain from computer graphics.”
(9) COLBERT EXPLAINS. Rolling Stone also covered Stephen Colbert’s facetious attempt to justify the Vatican’s review.
…on Tuesday’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert examined why the Catholic Church responded so harshly to The Force Awakens.
“The Vatican, and this is true, gave a better review to Spotlight, and I’m not joking,” Colbert said of the film that tackled the child sex abuse scandal in Boston churches.
(10) JETS AT SUNSET. James H. Burns’ article about the New York Jets missing the playoffs contains an ObSF reference to Isaac Asimov.
With all the millions commissioner Roger Goodell is spending on expanding the league’s brand to Europe and other international markets, should he not be spending a bit more attention to the boroughs and burgs that are in fact, his neighbors?
(11) ATTEMPTED HUMOR. Honest Trailers is often better at sounding unimpressed than being funny, as in its latest effort, The Martian.
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Will R., Mark-kitteh, John King Tarpinian, and Joe H. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Shambles.]
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*sigh*
Some lists of women comic creators : granted, the Wikipedia list is flagged for citation (although their citation rules are as far as I’m concerned a bit dicey in the sense that newspaper publication counts even though many articles in newspapers have been shown to be inaccurate), but it’s a starting point.
And the other lists are more specific and detailed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_comics_creators
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/category/top-50-female-comic-book-writers-and-artists/
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/03/11/essential-8-women-working-in-comics-yes-gail-boys-like-comics-too/
http://jezebel.com/5871670/13-fantastic-female-comics-creators-of-2011
People who are “I don’t know about any X therefore they don’t exist” really ought to learn better, especially since ya know we’re in the internet age when you can google queries if you are able to understand that your ignorance is not going to stand up against experts who know the field. (I am actually not a comics fan, but I read a lot of feminist essays on comics issues, ditto gaming, because I like reading feminist commentary on popular culture.)
@JJ
If you want to experience a proper developer brain seizure, allow me to (re-?)introduce you to INTERCAL and its output format of “extended” Roman numerals:
Having now read the Fibd Angoulême statement (in English, and with some difficulty in French), I generally agree with the Comics Reporter piece. I also understand how it’s possible to read that piece and not see what he’s talking about, especially if one is like Vivien a self-described “very casual BD amateur,” because Spurgeon doesn’t go into detail on some of the background that informs his opinion. So I’ll try to clarify what I think he is referring to.
1. Spurgeon: “bellowing at made-up accusations at the fringes of what’s being discussed”
Fibd: “the Festival regrets that its relationship with female authors is currently being looked upon solely through the reductive prism of the Grand Prix” – this is narrowly true if you focus on the word “currently”, but quite misleading since there has been plenty of discussion in the past about the festival being too insular in various ways, including gender. This piece from 2012 is similar to many others I’ve read. (Note that while Vivien is correct that last year the Grand Prix was voted on by the general population of comics professionals, throughout most of its history the jury only consisted of previous prize winners.)
2. Spurgeon: “a standard of working cartoonist applied here that hasn’t been applied to past presidents like Watterson or even their current one”
Fibd: “The last three winners embody the nature of this prize. Their names are Willem, Bill Watterson, Katsuhiro Otomo… These artists have been creating for several decades. When one goes back that amount of time to observe what role men and women played in the field of comics, it is clear that there were very few recognized female authors at the time”
Except for a brief unsuccessful stint as a political gag cartoonist, Watterson’s entire professional comics career lasted for 10 years and 2 weeks. While he’s obviously very talented and influential, you can only say he was “creating for several decades” if you include all his childhood drawings and his (virtually unknown to the public) non-comics work as a painter.
(It’s also bizarre to talk about “very few recognized female authors” in the context of someone who worked exclusively in newspaper comic strips— in Watterson’s native land, women have been much more prominent in that form than in comic books. They were pretty central to how that form developed in the first half of the 20th century, though modern readers who have mostly seen endless reruns of Garfield and Beetle Bailey wouldn’t know that— in fact, part of the reason Watterson was so important was that he came along at a time when the form had really atrophied and lost much of the creative vitality it had had in prior decades.)
3. Spurgeon: “There are also, and this is where my French may fail me, one or two extraneous digs at people.”
I’m actually not entirely sure what he’s getting at here, but I’m guessing that he means the way Marjane Satrapi and Posy Simmonds are mentioned in the third-to-last paragraph. Satrapi and Simmonds are (unsurprisingly) two artists who appear on virtually everyone’s recent lists of women who should’ve been nominated, so it’s unsurprising that Franck Bondoux has referred to them repeatedly in the last week, including in this statement, offering various reasons why they didn’t make the cut. Here, the argument is basically “well, they did get nominated before, but they didn’t win, so what do you want?”
By definition, most nominees do not win. Does that mean most nominees should not have appeared on the shortlist at all, or should never be nominated again? It’s hard to see what the point is supposed to be here unless it’s basically a passive-aggressive way of saying “They can’t have been very good, can they.”
For what it’s worth, Bondoux also repeated many of the same arguments in a TV interview [http://www.canalplus.fr/c-emissions/c-le-grand-journal/pid5411-le-grand-journal.html?vid=1348099&sc_cmpid=FBSharePlayer], which I haven’t seen, but many French-speakers I consider trustworthy said that he went quite a bit further in attacking Satrapi and Simmonds and they were pretty taken aback by his tone. So it’s possible that in this case Spurgeon is conflating that interview with this press release to some degree.
@Vivien:
You can’t be serious. The link to the English version— the official translation provided by Fibd Angoulême— is right there on the French page Spurgeon linked to. It’s the part where it says “Read this statement in English.” I found it within five seconds of reading Spurgeon’s piece.
@Eli: You stated incorrectly that Brétécher was awarded the Grand Prix — in fact she never was; as I just learned from reading through the BD Égalité site, only one woman (Florence Cestac) has been awarded in the prize’s 43-year history
It is reductive to focus pn the GP but the rest of angouleme is no better, at all.
This is seen through the lens of hiring people/promoting people, but Google has done a good presentation on Unconscious Bias.
Yes, but IIRC INTERCAL also had the COME FROM instruction, in comparison to which the debugging output is a minor headache.
@eli
Sorry, I missed the english translation and I didn’t get there would be one from the Spurgeon’s article.
@James,
output in “extended” Roman numerals was part of the original version of INTERCAL; COME FROM was added in a later version (see Section 4.1.14 in the 1996 “Revised” manual).
Further, Threaded INTERCAL uses multiple COME FROM statements with the same source label to spawn multiple threads – as a natural extension.
Whoa, update from Angoulême: After 12 male authors refused their nomination, the board first added six wonen to the list then shortly thereafter abandoned the nomination list altogether and said the voters (that is, all published bd authors) could vote for any author at all. The implications…?
@Vasha, sorry, you’re right of course – Brétécher was awarded a special “10-year anniversary” prize that they did that year in addition to the Grand Prix. It was still basically a lifetime achievement award given to an artist who didn’t fit with the narrow definition of “cartoonist” as “cartoonist in the album format” that a commenter had proposed.
Er, Ramona Fradon is still alive (can’t say how well the French would know her work).
(Link first, then post.)
Just wondering about Alison Bechdel. She’s been represented in newspapers since 1983, and the Broadway musical adaptation of her graphic memoir just won, you know, five Tony Awards and all… Plus, of course, the Bechdel test.
I think we have to be careful about projecting non-Francophone expectations onto Angoulême, which is after all a Franch prize. I must admit I for one have never heard of Cathy Guisewite, and I wonder if she is really well-known in Europe.
However, even by those standards, Angoulême has failed. Checking through the archives, I find that back in 1975 it presented its Best New Writer award to Annie Goetzinger, who also won a Best (realistic) Album award in 1977 and is still writing and publishing. Edith Grattery shared a Best Album award in 1993, and is also still writing and publishing. And Claire Wendling, who is a Guest of Honour at next year’s Worldcon, got a Best Newcomer award at Angoulême in 1989. It’s pretty ironic that sf fandom has given her more recognition than the biggest comics festival of her own country.
I don’t think format can be the reason Brétécher’s prize was hors-série so to speak; here’s the list of laureates, which shows that the other people (very illustrious) who were awarded special prizes for anniversaries or other occasions were album authors. However, that list makes me partly take back what I said — the special prize seems like no insult to Brétécher, rather the reverse. That raises the number of female laureates from one to two in 43 years!
@Hypnotosov: “in SFF it often seems LeGuin was the only female writer ever. . . .”
There are older SFF readers of both sexes who know better. I realize that “often seems” is a serious qualifier (amost as good as an if–your if is the only peacemaker; much virtue in if), but the tendency to see the past, as flawed as it often was, as an inverted-edenic and undifferentiated swamp of error and bigotry made glorious by this sun of postmodern ethical awareness is a kind of Whiggishness that flattens the complex textures of squamous history. (Sorry, the pesky Bard keeps crawling into my prose [and yes, the parentheticals are running away with me {because my second thoughts are having second thoughts}].)
And having mixed metaphors and allusions with abandon, I’d better quit while I’m confused. Anyway, I’m running low on abandon and need to resupply.
@Vasha: No, I wasn’t saying that the format of her work had anything to do with the nature of the prize. That was just a continuation of my response to the other commenter who had suggested that only long-form creators are considered “cartoonists” in Franco-Belgian terms. I think that’s pretty obviously untrue, but to their credit the festival did not make such an argument, it was just a side comment here.
Here’s the statement from the Festival on their latest decision.
(Can someone whose French is more current than mine tell me how “.e” is read out loud?)
@Russell Letson
…the tendency to see the past, as flawed as it often was, as an inverted-edenic and undifferentiated swamp of error and bigotry made glorious by this sun of postmodern ethical awareness is a kind of Whiggishness that flattens the complex textures of squamous history.
What he said!
@Vasha: I don’t think there’s really a way to say “auteur.e.s” out loud. It’s just short for “auteurs/auteures”, more or less the way “s/he” means “she or he”, except that the masculine and feminine forms of “auteur” are pronounced exactly the same anyway (unlike “créateur/créatrice”) so it’s only relevant in print.
@Vasha
You can insist on the “e” of auteure if you really want to make the point that you are talking about a women, but like Eli said, auteur and auteure are really meant to be pronounced the same way.
Super short version of the latest Festival statement: all voters will get to nominate anyone (but only one), then everyone votes again to pick from the top 3 nominees. The statement presents this mostly in general terms of wanting to be more democratic.
They also state that this should make it more likely for the award to reflect the increased prominence of women in comics (which they refer to as an “ongoing process of feminization” of the field– I hope that that last word doesn’t have quite the same connotation in French as in English)… or, at least, that that will happen whenever the general population of voters/creators decides to make it happen, since the nominations are now in their hands. I don’t think I’m imagining the mildly bitter undertone to that last part– it’s sort of like “If y’all think you’re more enlightened than us, prove it.” Which on the one hand is sort of an evasion of responsibility, and on the other hand is… kind of a good point.
@McJulie
Well put – why I like the idea of calling Ren “Darth Gater.” He’s being an evil creep with all the engine workings out in the open, all the fear and weakness without the cool villain schtick to cover it.
That was what I was inarticulatly getting at. Those women existed, flourished even, but they seem to fade from SFF history* and so the narrative that women weren’t active in SFF/comics/war/whatever in the past gets replicated.
* popular history anyway, where Le Guin is often the token female alongside the Asimovs, Heinleins and Tolkiens.
Nate Harada:
I like it. Puts Kylo Ren in far more immediate danger from the Snoke monster versus the more abstract “falling to the Dark Side,” which is certainly dangerous but also something we’ve seen before in the storylines of both Ep.III Anakin and Ep.VI Luke.
Eli:
I definitely get that impression. Even though I don’t expect it to happen, it would be mildly amusing if after all that the top three nominees turned out to be women.
Re: Cathy being the only single working woman comic strip. Not by even several decades. If nothing else, Brenda Starr, Reporter was running strong from the 1940s. Heck, one can even make a case for several long running stories in Little Orphan Annie when Oliver Warbucks was out of the picture. I’ll grant that Cathy was consciously aimed about being about the meta-aspects of being such (I can’t even recall what her job was) and debuted at a time when things were changing, but it was far from the first.
Personally, I’d rank Lynn (For Better or For Worse) Johnston considerably above Cathy Guswaite with respect to female comic strip creators from that period; much better art, did both drama and humor, managed decades long continuity with aging in real time characters, etc.
There have been quite a few strips about single working women. Tillie the Toiler, Somebody’s Stenog, and Dixie Dugan come to mind. Apartment 3-G was about three such, sharing an apartment (and I swear it used to be good!).
One ought to point out, too (or at least I’m going to point out) that being a native speaker of English doesn’t actually inoculate anyone against other languages, and English speakers who can also read and speak French are, well, hardly unheard of.
(I’m too rusty these days to be considered fluent, myself, but I can get by. Just don’t ask me to take a physiology class or direct a light opera.)
Shao Ping:
Which is logical, as she didn’t write the comics for more than five years. They were done by her son for the next 16 years. She is not someone I would give a grandmaster award for in comics.
Tom Galloway wrote
Ooo, good point. I really liked For Better Or Worse! And you have a good point about maintaining continuity and having the characters age, which it took me longer than I care to admit to notice was happening, because I wasn’t expecting it.
Tom Galloway:
Good one! More popular than Cathy and more awarded. I also like it much better.
I’m back! Missed you all. Had some sudden problems with lack of spoons, internet connection and other RL stuff. Participation will probably be spotty for a couple of more weeks, but for now I can be here.
On to reading this scroll, catching up with all the Filer news and emptying my inbox!
junego: Yay! Spoons are important. How else could we cut the heart out of people?
@junego
Welcome back! I’ve seen a couple of names pop up again in the last few days (I’m guessing the Christmas season lead to breaks) so – welcome back to anyone else who took a break and is back now, too.
@Mike Glyer
I don’t think I said earlier – I laughed when I saw the date on this one. 🙂
And as the day draws to an end here in:
@junego
Welcome back. Missed you too. Snugs if wanted on spoons and stuff.
I don’t remember who originally brought up The Core as a movie that should be watched (I remember it had to do with unobtanium, though) but that person owes me 2 hours of middle-aged single person weekday life.
I admit, that’s not worth much on the open market, so I’ll settle for 1 draft cider, very cold.
I’m really tired so I’ll just address my compliments to Mike; It was a wonderful way to bring us together,
So, my thanks!
Scott Frazer: I don’t remember who originally brought up The Core as a movie that should be watched… but that person owes me 2 hours of middle-aged single person weekday life. I admit, that’s not worth much on the open market, so I’ll settle for 1 draft cider, very cold.
MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!* 😈
Hey, if you’re going to be at MAC II, I’ll be happy to make good on that — and maybe we can throw in a discussion of all the outrageous faux science plot points.
* hyphens stolen from the Nielsen Haydens
@Hampus:
Welp. There goes my righteous, uninformed anger.
FIBD appears to be acting out the stereotype of the obnoxiously smug, passive-aggressive French – it’s like they want to be seen to be like villains in a cartoon.
@JJ: Well played. I almost choked on my soda when they decided to “step outside”
It’s looking like my con-attendance this year is going to be limited to a couple of board-gaming events, sadly. But August is quite a ways away yet 🙂
INTERCAL: No. Non. Nyet.
Kip W beat me to saying that back in actual Roman times, they didn’t do IV and IX — just IIII and VIIII. I think this might have carried on to higher numbers, but for sure 4 and 9 (And let us bless the Hindu mathematicians who invented the ancestors of what we’re using now).
@David KM Klaus: It’s like you can practically see them shrugging and smoking a tiny cigarette, while laughing HONH HONH HONH HONH.
Dammit, all this Lynn Johnston talk reminds me of Farley the dog. *sniff*
@junego: Welcome back. This is not a good time of year for spoonies. I only left the house today because my choices were either buy cat food or become it.
OK, now I’m curious: When did the IV, IX, etc, come in, then, and why?
I have seen the Cathy strip in US papers, but I never really managed to connect with it. Oddly enough, I’ve always had a lot more problem connecting with American gag strips, because I was often lacking the cultural background, and usually liked the adventure and romance strips better. So it’s quite possible that the Cathy strip simply doesn’t really connect very well with European audiences, which of course does not diminish the achievements of Cathy Guisewhite at all.
As for female creators in Franco-Belgian-Dutch comics, I read a lot of Franco-Belgian-Dutch comics as a teen (my Dad worked in the Netherlands and my Dutch was only good enough for comics) and back in the day (i.e. 1980s) the creators, at least of those comics I read, really were all men, even if many of the comics had female protagonists (which was part of why I liked them so much). I’m actually a little afraid to reread those comics, just in case the sexism fairy has visited in the meantime.
However, that was 30 years ago and nowadays there are many female creators of Franco-Belgian-Dutch comics. Never mind the many female comic creators in the US, Japan and elsewhere who have been active for decades, so Angouleme really has no excuse.
@lurkertype
I only left the house today because my choices were either buy cat food or become it.
Hahaha (snort). You might like this article, then.
Study says cats would kill you if they were bigger
@Scott Frazer: There are two parts of THE CORE that I liked. One was when they fell into the middle of a giant geode– I have no idea if such a thing is possible, but it was a beautiful effect and a rare quiet moment as noisy thrillers go.
The other was the Golden Gate Bridge bit, which I admired just for being so straightforwardly, unapologetically stupid. For some reason a deadly microwave beam descends randomly from the sky, and it’s only about 20 feet wide– OF COURSE it has to hit the middle of the most frequently destroyed bridge in cinematic history. They only could’ve made it more perfect by having that spot on the bridge be occupied by the car of a heroic policeman who’s just one day away from retirement, so his partner could vow personal revenge on the microwave beam.
My comment on this, when I first saw it, was that they may not be able to recite comics history, but they could stand to learn more of it.
Yes, comics history tends strongly toward male-dominated, but anyone who uses that as an excuse for treating women as if they weren’t there at all is being an idiot. 25/5 is male-dominated. 27/3 is male-dominated. 30/0 is erasure.
There have been women in comics the whole damn time. There are women who are absolutely worthy of being nominated for lifetime achievement awards. And if Angouleme is going to disqualify them for not being currently active in the field, or for not having enough decades of history, they should look to the make nominees who weren’t active in the field or had relatively short histories, and wonder why those rules didn’t apply.
Plus, of course, there are still the women who are active and have been for decades, doing excellent work.
“We can’t rewrite history” translates to “Sexism overlooked or marginalized excellent work in the past, and we’re fine with that, that’s the ‘history’ we’ll work with.”
Bleah.
IIRC, IV and VI came in in the Renaissance. In the original form of Roman numerals, you could handle addition just by dumping everything in together and then reordering / collapsing tokens. (Multiplication, now, was a challenge.)
Well, that’s going a bit far. It used to be beautifully drawn, and coherently written. But it was always stupid, like any Nick Dallis-written strip.
But to add another to the list of working-women strips, Winnie Winkle (the Breadwinner) is another long, long runner.