Reading some Captain Marvel from 1983 where Monica Rambeau is the titular character. A black woman hero and all I can think of is if Marvel did this today there would be endless whinging on twitter about muh white genocide.
Much of life was "apolitical" back then. Sure, she was a black woman in the title role of a comic book, but she wore the same skin-tight outfits as everyone else and posed in the same sexy ways.
Eventually people got smart to Marvel "inserting politics into everything" and we started the downward spiral
Yeah they still showed off her body a bunch of times. Still though for racists today, even a black woman being a sex object is too far.
I guess the real difference is racist comic book fans didn't have an internationally accessible platform
What Alan Moore said captures my sentiment about comic books quite well.
"I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism."
Possibly just as racist, but the internet was still such a small and underdeveloped thing that the racism would just be echoed between small groups of like 10 or 20 people entirely separate from each other.
Now all those tiny groups are on the internet can feed off each other and amplify each other's racism.
I'd argue this is partially because the internet turns everything into a signifier of itself. People's ideas of a comic aren't created by the media itself but by other people's reactions to it. You're going to see a shitty reactionary meme about a comic long before you see real discussion of it. The Punisher is no longer a comic, it is a reactionary identity that has a comic associated with it. Obviously these issues existed before the internet, but the internet hasn't helped
My impression, based on nothing, is that the apparent increase in reactionary nerds might be due to the crumbling of liberal worldviews
There's always going to be an appetite for feel-good slop, and an important element of that is always going to be making us feel better about whatever the status quo happens to be. In liberal storytelling, this often takes the form of capeshit, with the Great Men in capes helping a well-meaning if slightly overbearing empire in its neverending task of preventing chaos
That's not the only kind of capeshit though, as batman demonstrates. Maybe the empire isn't overbearing - maybe the chaos is already here. Maybe, in fact, our militant billionaire protagonist is implied to be too fair
So the happy-faced capeshit keeps getting made, because there will always be an audience. The angery-faced capeshit will presumably grow as more liberals grow reactionary, but they won't stop buying the happy shit too, so its audience gets more whinily reactionary
Source: own rectum
