Pop Mythology, Buying and Selling: A Report from the First Asian American Comic Con
Before exploring the panels I went to the “Artists’ Alley” which featured tables with well-known comics professionals sitting elbow-to-elbow with lesser-known self-publishing indie creators. While the program provided a blank page to collect autographs (film actor and Secret Identities managing editor Parry Shen walked right past me) I was drawn to the indie creators. One of the more interesting of these was Alitha E. Martinez, whose portfolio pages showed some of the most dynamic comic art I have seen in a long, long time. Martinez, who has penciled such mainstream titles as Iron Man, Black Panther and Fantastic Four, among others, is not a newbie but is moving into the creator-owned realm with her Manga-inspired property Yume and Ever. And therein lies the rub: among Martinez’s fantastic pages were postcards emblazoned with images of her Japanese, female lead Yume, kimono hanging open, breasts front and center, sucking on a lollipop Lolita-style. Absent the context of the story I am not willing to condemn it (although that is what a postcard is, a representative image, right?) but this made me pause… and not just for the obvious reasons. This image raises all sorts of questions for me about the relationship between Orientalism, sex and gender, the fetishization of Asian women vs. the potentially empowering re-framing of stereotypes… and the use of use of these images by other PoC. When answering questions about her experience at AACC on her blog Martinez writes that she was “well received” but “some of the attendees said a few insensitive things… about my looks and heritage and what I ‘consider’ myself. I let it roll off of my back, the art is the thing. What I am or from whense (sic) my people hail has nothing to do with my work. It’s just very sad that such ignorance still exists.” I only spoke with Martinez briefly–to compliment her excellent artwork– and I didn’t ask her about her postcard specifically, although it really struck me. I’d be interested to hear more about what she intends with this character, so I may follow up with her.
At the apex of “Artist’s Alley” was a table set up by the group racebending.com, which was formed by Jordan White specifically to organize the boycott against the movie version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. While White talked with a reporter from MTV I was brought up to speed by an awesome Avatar fangirl, who turned out to be Nora (i.e.”nojojojo”), of the great blog The Angry Black Woman. The controversy around the casting of white actors in roles that were conceived as Asian and Inuit has been covered elsewhere, so I won’t repeat the details here except for three points that crystallized for me during my conversation with Nora (thanks Nora).
1) The offense stems not only from the white washed casting, but from the purposeful re- imagining of an entire SF/Fantasy universe that was based on a panoply of Asian and Inuit cultures into a European one. For PoC fans of SF/Fantasy, who often have to endure racist and ethnocentric content embedded in their fiction ::cough:: Lord of the Rings Trilogy ::cough:: Avatar was a rare opportunity to see a PoC fantasy universe realized.
2) The controversy around the movie version of Avatar is proving to be a catalyst for activism beyond the fan community. Nora told me about a colleague of hers who is not an Avatar fan, who got involved with racebending.com because the movie represents a direct assault on representations of PoC in the mainstream media.
3) To paraphrase Jordan White, “we don’t just want the movie to fail, we want it to fail because fans rejected the casting.” Amen.
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