PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS

In my previous post I cited a 2008 essay in which I argued that "big events" in commercial comics were nothing new; that the industry had started using such events at least in the 1960s. I associated this old essay with one subject covered by the YouTube link I provided, in which author Yellow Flash argued that the Big Two companies in the US had become dependent upon rebooting their franchises in order to boost sales. Yellow Flash offers an interesting parallel to the 2008 jeremiad of one Dick Hyacinth, in which the latter was arguing that "story values" were being neglected in favor of "big events." But the new version of the old argument is that because of the dominance of Modern Progressive values in the Big Two comics, those comics have lost their readership, principally though not exclusively to American reprints of Japanese manga-- which presumably appeal to their audience thanks to the aforementioned "story values."

This line of thought got me wondering, though: when do fan-writers say that the Progressive Era of American comics got started? It's of personal interest to me since, as I stated in the previous essay, I feel that I was "cancelled" because of a Progressive author (little though the cancellation mattered to my overall welfare). But it also bears upon the history of this blog. Unlike, say, the defunct HOODED UTILITARIAN, the ARCHIVE has never been primarily political. But I like to think that even in the late 2000s I took a lot of shots at flawed thinking both liberal and conservative, even if it often took the form of picking at the statements of Heidi McDonald. However, I'll freely admit that since I stopped buying a lot of comics in the middle 2000s, I didn't personally witness the rise of the Progressive Wave in American comics.

So where did it start, the "patient zero" of Comics Progressivism? I found two distinct answers on YouTube.

The podcaster Thinking Critically focuses in this essay on the 2007 rise of the website Comics Alliance. It's a good if biased examination of the Progressive mindset of the period. However, Comics Alliance was just a bunch of vocal fans, with no real power to change things, unless people in the industry chose to regard them as a bellwether. Liberal ideology had come to dominate comic book fandom since the Silver Age, and a lot of liberal fans continually stumped for more diverse racial representation, more equitable treatment of female characters, and so on. But the industry did not change from the impact of fans alone.

Probably more on target is this essay from The Fourth Age. The author cites Joe Quesada as his "patient zero," though I would somewhat fault the essay for not providing more context for Quesada's career from 2000, when he became Marvel editor-in-chief, to 2009, when Quesada took the fatal step that bound his star to that of the Progressives. This act, according to Fourth Age, was the "diversity hire" of Muslim-American writer Sana Amanat, still best known today for her co-creation in 2014 of the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel. In this Wikipedia quote, Amanat herself mentions that she was hired to bring a "different voice" to Marvel Comics:

According to Amanat, an executive at Marvel approached her for the job because she was different from their average employee. She said that the executive told her she had "something different to offer than the regular fanboy who has read comics since he was a kid. She has a different voice, and they need her voice in order to change Marvel."

Fourth Age extensively quotes Quesada in support of the thesis that Quesada, believing that the hardcore comics-audience was not enough to sustain his company's fortunes, sought to enhance Marvel's reputation for diversity with a "non-fanboy" readership. Roughly twelve years later, there's no evidence that Progressive comics wooed a new readership to the medium, and that despite what might have been a vital cross-fertilization from the MCU movies, beginning with the 2008 IRON MAN. Quesada's hiring of Amanat might not be quite as consequential in itself as Fourth Age asserts, but there can be little doubt that Marvel Comics, and possibly DC to a lesser extent, became very concerned with projecting the image of diversity in many if not all of their projects. What I see happening is that established hardcore fans who already held Progressive sympathies became emboldened by the diversity agenda, while others reacted against the politicization, one reaction being the somewhat later Comicsgate conflict of the late 2010s. 

Of course all of these things happened within the greater context of American political events, and perhaps Sana Amanat's hiring mirrors in a small way the ascension of Barack Obama to the Presidency that same year. As yet I have not found a good overall history of the rise of Progressive Liberals, but I would imagine that their agenda too was given an ideological boost by Obama's election, particularly their endorsement of intersectional representationalism. Quesada was clearly seeking to be intersectional by hiring a Muslim-American woman who in 2009 had little experience in writing commercial comics. That said, her early issues of MS. MARVEL (the only ones I read) are at least pleasant and not infected with the fanatical righteousness I've found in the few Progressive comics-writers I've encountered. 

I should also stress that under the right circumstances, a "diversity hire" can be a good thing. Prior to Gail Simone being hired by DC Comics, she was best known for launching the 1999 website WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS and for a Comic Book Resources column. She may or may not have been a diversity hire, though there were so few female creators at Marvel and DC in the early 2000s that her hiring would have had the same effect, regardless of intention. However, in contrast to Sana Amanat, Simone showed with her long run on DC's BIRDS OF PREY (2003-07) that she was fully engaged with superhero mythology and the expectations of its "fanboys." I disputed WOMEN IN REFRIGATORS' flawed logic in my essay NEGATIVE I.D., but I found BIRDS OF PREY to be more engaging than its author's ideology, and unlike MS. MARVEL I followed the former to Simone's final issues (and a little beyond). Though PREY focused on boosting the reputations of DC's female characters from a POV of a female author, I recall none of the viciously divisive ideology of the Progressive feminists, no harping on toxic masculinity and the like. 

In conclusion, I'm now of the opinion that a lot of the Progressive measures of the 21st century were a politicized version of "big events"-- the Falcon becomes the new Captain America, Carol Danvers takes on both the name of Captain Marvel and assumes the status of "The Marvel Comics Wonder Woman." Most of these I admit I have not read, so that I can't be entirely sure that they lack all "story values." But the comics-reading audience certainly favors the story values of Japanese manga-- some of which may not even be all that remarkable, like (say) the popular NARUTO-- and it would appear that the comics industry's link to cinema is the only thing that keeps Patient Zero on life-support.