Essay on Comic books

[PanicA]

Hello Everyone!

I'm writing an extensive essay for school. As a topic I would like to compare the evidence of inequalities between genders and characters of different nationalities in some comic series when it first was published and a reasently released issue.

I'm not a big comic fan myself, I stick to webcomics, so I would very much appriciate if one more knowledged than me would enlighten me. I'm wondering whether there's prejudice in portrayal of women or non-caucasians characters in the early releases of Batman.

Thank you for your assistance!

Best Wishes/Amanda

(I will be posting the same question in the forums for Superman and Spiderman as well)

[Trey Krimsin]

Some early appearances of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl tend to be stereotypical, with Batman and Robin not recognizing her early on as an equal. That's really all I can think of in Batman. May I suggest focusing on Wonder Woman. Even though she's considered one of the Big Three in DC, certain aspects of her mythos seem suspect, including losing her powers when bound by a man. Hopefully this helps.

[stealthwise]

You might want to check out www.sequentialtart.com and ask around on their message boards.

[rfahey]

If you want to go really far back, many of the WWII-era comics had pretty bad German and Japanese stereotypes. It might be interesting to compare them with the forthcoming Frank Miller project in which Batman takes on al Quaeda. Miller has said that he is deliberately harkening back to the WWII comics where superheroes fought Hitler, etc. Wonder Woman also used to have some offensive Asian supervillains.

Also, when black heroes increasingly debuted in the '60's and 70's, their superhero names were generally preceded by 'Black' (like Black Lightening). Many were written by white writers and talked in stereotypical manners. Similarly, many female characters have superhero names ending in '-girl'. I'm sure there are a lot of things you could explore.