Geek Girl Con was so much fun, I don’t even know where to begin. Autumn and I have a zillion photos and reams of panel notes, and Autumn interviewed some ladies from NASA. So we’ll be posting our Con Converge as quickly as real life allows. (Damn real life!)
Barbara Gordon as Oracle from her Wikipedia page
This panel was proposed and moderated by Katelyn Bruhn. The other panelists were Greg Rucka, comic writer and novelist; Jen Van Meter, comic writer; Teal Sherer, actress and producer, and star of the webseries My Gimpy Life; and Jill Pantozzi, writer who contributes to many sites including The Mary Sue. This is a long write up because it was so awesome and so much was discussed.
So what inspired the panel, among other things, was the backlash last year when DC announced that in the New 52 reboot of Batgirl, Barbara Gordon would reprise the role. She had been using a wheelchair after the Joker shot her through the spine and had become the Oracle. In the reboot, she would be walking again.
Pantozzi says she was mostly in the dark about new 52 but a friend from DC gave her a heads up that they were getting rid of Oracle and putting Barbara back as Batgirl. She found it extremely upsetting. “Oracle is a role model of mine,” she says. And to have a bad ass female character alone is unique in the Dc universe, let alone one in a wheelchair. And of course back then, she had no idea how they would do it. Would they magic the wheelchair away? Pretend it never happened?
Sherer says she felt basically the same way. There are so few characters out there with disabilities.“There’s this misconception out there that people with disabilities are broken and need to be fixed..Maybe she doesn’t want to be fixed.” She released a youtube video dressed as Oracle to argue that side of it last year. (It’s hilarious and I suggest you watch it. On having to be Batgirl again: “Girl, I’m 30 years old!”)
Rucka says he’s curious now, a year later, how you feel about it and how it was handled? He’s quick to add not about Gail doing a good job, because that’s a given.
Pantozzi says Barbara Gordon is a good character no matter what. “[Gordon] as Batgirl is interesting but also, we have seen that story.”
Rucka agrees and adds that Oracle was so successful as a story because the entirety of her journey was in the books. Readers got to see her before the wheelchair, and see the trauma of being shot and then disabled, and see her cope with it and accept it and move on. If DC were to say, Okay, we hear you, toss in another wheelchair-bound lady crime fighter, it would feel apologist.
Bruhn asks, How important is it that when we rejoin Barbara she is recovering physically and emotionally even though she’s out of the chair? Bruhn is a big Marvel fan, so she’s big on the idea that when you fix something with Tony Stark you give him another problem. It’s a constant battle.
Panelists Sherer, who has appeared on The Guild among other things, and Pantozzi, a writer known online as The Nerdy Bird
Pantozzi says before the reboot was released, the biggest question was how they would handle it. If would be a magic fix, science, not mentioned at all. Gail Simone probably had a big hand in saying, ‘we are going to explain this.’ But the biggest thing that is missing with Oracle right now is the Birds of Prey. Pantozzi has enjoyed the book but finds there’s a gap there. She also notes Gordon’s recovery happened very fast.
What role does gender play? Bruhn asks the panel. We see her recover over the course of years, and saw her in the chair. But how often do her male counterparts get similar injuries and are back fighting crime a week later?
Rucka says Batman had his injury magic wanded away. “I think that sort of answers your question.” Unless it’s built into the character, like Matt Murdock’s blindess or Tony Stark’s situation, it is going to get fixed. With Barbara it comes down to corporate. When Commissioner Gordon shot the Joker, Rucka and his cowriter went round and round saying Gordon had to kill the Joker. Joker killed his wife and it was the right ending. Less than a month later, Joker was fine.
It all comes down to money. They took her out of the wheelchair because Barbara is Batgirl in the mainstream, or what DC thinks is the mainstream. If they’d given Stephanie Brown a few more years, she would have replaced Gordon in that. “It was a financial decision, not a story decision.”
Pantozzi adds that they sometimes miss what the general public wants. “Sometimes I think they’re using a scrying ball,” Rucka agrees. For the most part, the publisher doesn’t understand it is the fans that lead the public knowledge.
Van Meter says that something she has noticed is that the money they want is from 18 to 35 year olds, but the people who are making those decisions are 55-60. They don’t believe the general public knows anything beyond Adam West. They think it because “oh we would be selling more comics otherwise.” They have “weird tornadoes of logic.” They think they can take this character ‘no one loved anyway and leave her in the chair.’ But her time as Oracle is what made her beloved to the people reading comics right now, so pulling her out of that role is the opposite of what her fans want.
Audience question: It was mentioned that they were pulling Gordon out of her chair and into a suit. Why can’t these characters wear a suit in the chair?
Van Meter says they can and they do. But it seems when someone is in the chair the chair becomes the costume. Partially because if you’re in the chair people can tell who you are whether you’re in costume or not, so the you get demoted to civilian. Rucka adds that the other problem is the misconception that disabled are incapable.
If Oracle comes back and if I ever write her, I will make her wear a costume, Pantozzi promises to a big cheer from the audience.
Disabled characters include Dare Devil and Tony Stark. Hawk Eye has been deaf, sometimes. How much do you think about disabilities when crafting the stories? asks Bruhn.
Panelists Bruhn, Rucka, and Van Meter
Anytime Van Meter is asked to write a character she hasn’t written before, she always takes extraordinary care not to screw up. She wants to make sure that the disbility isn’t the only thing bout them. Because any character runs the risk of becoming about just one thing in comics. “The whole thing gets easier if I imagine the reader as someone with a similar disabilities.” It gets a ton easier to ask the right questions. “If I change the imaginary reader, a lot shifts.”
Bruhn brings up the visual aspect. Pantozzi wrote a great piece on how wheelchairs are often drawn incorrectly.
Gail said the artists are on deadlines so unless you’re writer is super specific, you will get a hospital chair or something, Pantozzi says.
Rucka thinks it’s ridiculous. The first thing you should have drawing Barbara Gordon is appropriate reference, he says. “It would be like drawing Superman’s ‘S’ backwards. It’s unforgivable.”
Sherer mentions it happens a lot on tv and movies too. A character ends up in wheel chair, and it’s some terrible hospital grade chair.
It’s weird that artists can get Barbara’s chair wrong when they are meticulous about the getting the guns right, or the model of car, Van Meter points out.
Audience question: metal disabilities/invisible disabilities. Why is there this portrayl of patients with metal disabilities as shades of generic crazy? And why are good guys sane and bad guys insane?
The way I approach these characters is that none of them are crazy, Rucka says. “The only character I’ve written that was crazy is Joker. But the rest of them make internal sense. Poison Ivy is coldly sane.” The difference between mental disabilities and “crazy” “crazy” is a lazy writer’s tool to explain villain motivations.
Audience Question. What other comics do you love for how they portray disabilities?
My favorite ones are the ones not supposed to be disabled but are, answers Bruhn. X-men. The Hulk. The characters aren’t traditionally disabled but really are.
Sherer is more a fan of heroes that don’t have powers but use technology to fight crime. Being disabled and having metal rods in her back, and having her wheel chair, she connects to that idea.
The panel ran out of time, but no doubt the discussion could continue for hours. What are your thoughts? What heroes with disabilities do you enjoy reading? What kind of disabilities would you like to see comics or other media portray in the future?
9 comments
cloudsinvenice (@cloudsinvenice) says:
08/13/2012 at 3:04 pm (UTC -7)
Thanks so much for making this post; what an illuminating panel discussion that was. I’ve been following the Oracle controversy since it began but I never got an explanation of the decision regarding Barbara, and the corporate culture at DC, that made so much sense to me before. Between this and other choices I can well believe that they are just THAT out-of-touch. After all, geekdom is mainstream now – they need to realise that the average member of the public is a whole lot more clued-up about comicbook characters than was the case ten or even five years ago.
Disabled characters include Dare Devil and Tony Stark. Hawk Eye has been deaf, sometimes.
I love so much that Tony Stark gets identified as disabled here. I didn’t realise other people saw him that way, but I identified so much when I saw the movie. I think maybe not everyone recognises the disability because Tony is functioning – hyper-functioning, in fact, whether you look at just his crime-fighting or his inventing, let alone both. But that’s a huge point about assistive technology that people often don’t realise: it helps you to live your life in such a way that other people don’t always notice your disability.
But your disability is still a profound shaper of the way you approach the world – and as we saw in Iron Man, if your assistive tech fails you (and we’re computer users, so I think we all know tech can fail
), you’re in big trouble and suddenly you lose whatever levelling of the playing field your assistive tech had got you.
My favorite ones are the ones not supposed to be disabled but are, answers Bruhn. X-men. The Hulk. The characters aren’t traditionally disabled but really are.
Oh my god, yes! I discovered the X-Men when I was twelve and I was a few years into living with an invisible, chronic illness. I think my health issues were a major factor in my falling for the X-Men. You couldn’t always tell someone was a mutant, but their powers (symptoms) could manifest in unexpected, destructive ways that scared other people and isolated them even from their own families. It was more empowering, for a young kid, to think of myself as a mutant than just someone with an invisible illness most people around me didn’t understand and which I felt pressure to conceal, while wanting to be able to be open.
Mutant powers and identity have been a fantastically flexible metaphor over the decades: it’s about race, sexuality, immigration, disability, subculture, the teenage years… no wonder so many people identify and imagine themselves going to Xavier’s school and being with other people who get it. I wanted to be one of Wolverine’s kick-ass teen girl sidekicks when I was 13.
Oh, and Wolverine – GOD, there’s interesting territory, whether you consider the berserker rage of his early comics years, or the healing factor, which is something a lot of disabled readers might kill for, but also imposes its own horrors: the slow ageing, the loss of his memory of his early life – see the Origin mini-series – the living through healing from horrific maimings that would kill anyone else. There’s a lot of body horror inherent to the concept of Wolverine, and body horror is incredibly interesting from a disability perspective.
Hulk is also really interesting, especially as compared to disabilities that never allow the person NOT to be aware of them and compensating – I really liked that line at the end of the Avengers movie when someone asks Bruce Banner how he stops himself getting angry and he smiles and says, “I’m always angry.” It both made sense for the character logistics, and rang true as to how someone would actually deal with the ramifications of uncontrollable rage. And it’s not just Banner who’s disabled: the Hulk is too. And he knows that he is; his tragedy is that he CAN’T just move through life in a red mist without human feeling or knowledge of his state.
Talking to my boyfriend as I type this, and he suggested that Clark Kent is disabled – going through every day having to hobble himself. His natural state is to have the powers of Superman, yet he’s forced to disable himself for so much of his life. Look at the original Superman movie – you’ll see a man who is clumsy, who stutters, who is constantly unable to live to his potential. If you see disability as potential that is stifled, whether by society (social model of disability) or by one’s own body (medical model), then there’s an argument for viewing Clark that way.
Tori says:
08/13/2012 at 3:28 pm (UTC -7)
Yess it was such a good panel too. I wished it had been longer since it could have gone on and I’d have loved more talk about invisible disabilities in comics and fiction, but given that they only had 50 minutes, I think they covered a LOT of ground.
>>I think maybe not everyone recognises the disability because Tony is functioning – hyper-functioning, in fact, whether you look at just his crime-fighting or his inventing, let alone both.< <<
I still haven’t seen or read Iron Man, but I do think part of the problem is the misconception that disabled people are simple low-functioning or incapable so I think it’s good to keep pointing out characters who are disabled in less obvious ways.
Rachael says:
08/14/2012 at 12:18 am (UTC -7)
So, so sad I missed this year and this panel. I’m recognized as disabled with my heart condition so someone like Tony speaks volumes to me (he’d be perfect if he were Iron Woman haha) as many people don’t see me as disabled, either. High-functioning and all of that.
It simultaneously enrages and encourages me to hear about the big wigs at DC; enrages because why are these fuddy-duddies still in charge, but encourages because at least the talent is vocal about it and not making excuses for them or defending them. It’ll be interesting to see how DC evolves once these corporate clowns retire.
as for mental disabilities – it has always been the villains of Batman that trump the entire archive of Marvel for me, simply because they’re all so broken in a very realistic way. I don’t even see Joker as “crazy crazy” most of the time; I just see him as the rogue who managed to jump the furthest from reality and is perfectly happy to stay there. From time to time the others are able to reel themselves back in through intensive therapy; some of them have really put in the effort to make another go of their lives without the villainous persona. 99% slide back. Some of their motives – Poison Ivy in particular – come from a logical seed (pun!) but it’s the morally bankrupt execution of their ideals that get them into trouble and come off as “insane”. Riddler, Ventriloquist, and Mad Hatter have had their true mental illnesses explored and I love DC for that. What makes the Batman mythos so brilliant is the yin/yang aspect of Batman and his rogues – not just Joker – as most, if not all, of them suffered a great trauma(s). They couldn’t do what Bruce did; they did not have the tools (coping/support/inner strength/etc) to find the inner Batman. They went another way, a darker way, a “crazy” way. Wait – where was I going with this?
Oh, yeah. Dang, I’m sad I missed this panel.
Tori says:
08/14/2012 at 2:57 pm (UTC -7)
Hopefully you can make it up next year. There was acutally a second, similar panel on Sunday and both were popular, so clearly it’s something that people want to discuss. I have no doubt they’ll do it again next year.
Gail Simone says:
08/14/2012 at 10:17 am (UTC -7)
I am so bummed I missed this amazing panel.
Tori says:
08/14/2012 at 2:58 pm (UTC -7)
I know! There was too many great panels happening at the same time. I had to make some terribly difficult decisions, and given your own schedule, you probably didn’t have a lot of options.
Gail Simone says:
08/15/2012 at 9:54 am (UTC -7)
I didn’t have an option, my panel was either during or immediately after, but I heard about this one all weekend. The panel on disability that I was on the next day was equally amazing, I think, just a fascinating group of panelists so I was mostly just an observer and that helped I AM SURE.
Katelyn Bruhn says:
08/21/2012 at 7:35 pm (UTC -7)
Thanks again for this great write up, and helping to continue the conversation. I was so nervous, it was all kind of a blur, so it’s also nice to have it chronicled.
So so SO much ground we didn’t get to, I’d love to be able to do another similar panel next year. I could easily write an essay about the Marvel movieverse and how that lab scene in Avengers is all about Tony convincing Bruce to accept his disability, deal with it, and join team Gimpy and Proud. Um, as it were. It’s a really great disability community moment/relationship, IMO. But then, I over identify with Tony Stark.
And the X-Men, man. My gateway drug. I started reading them in high school after the first movie came out, and didn’t even realize at the time why I identified so strongly. Sure, every awkward nerdy teen feels like a freak and an outcast and like they need to hide their true selves (also secretly hoping to develop superpowers). But in college, as I began to identify as disabled, and to think more critically about why and when and how I “passed” (or didn’t, or couldn’t, or chose not to). Not coincidentally, this is also about the time my symptoms started becoming more pronounced, and I no longer was able to pass as effectively as I once did. And I found a renewed kinship with Rogue, Nightcrawler, Mystique, Wolverine, and even Cyclops, though I’d always found Mr. Summers to be a bit of a stick in the mud. The characters whose powers were also liabilities, or who were judged based on appearance and longed to pass as “normal”, were always my favorites, but now I know why.
Aaaand I really should just write a thesis on this stuff already. I’m sure all my friends and family are getting tired of my constant MY THOUGHTS ON SUPERHEROES LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.
Tori says:
08/22/2012 at 11:10 am (UTC -7)
You did really well but i would have been nervous too. It was a great discussion though.
You should! Or an essay or something. And I hope you return and repeat the panel next year (obviously with different angles and stuff). It’s a conversation that should absolutely keep going.
I love your thoughts on Superheroes!