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2.2.0 4 Places where DC can improve

2.2.1 Superman and Queer Storytelling

DC has had a stellar year in terms of diversifying the line. There were a couple of significant misses this year, however, in their handling of queer relationships. One of the biggest misses occurred during DC’s Round Robin Tournament, where DC created a March Madness-style bracket of potential books that they could publish, including Blue Beetle: Graduation Day, Jesse Quick: Control, Etta Candy: Holliday Hero, Inc., and other books. The primary problem with the event came from the eventual winner, Robins, and the first book it faced, Justice League Queer or JLQ.

The basic idea of the event was that in every round, voters would get more info about the books up until the final face-off. When JLQ and Robins were up for a vote, however, the obvious winner was Robins. Fans have been clamoring for a Robins book for a long time and this was DC saying, “Hey, we’ll give it to you,” in spite of already having released an unrelated Robins webcomic in the form of Wayne Family Adventures. Meanwhile, JLQ was pitched as a queer DC book — the only queer book DC would release that month. It was then placed against the tournament’s easy favorite in the first round, basically being doomed to fail before more information could come out about it. Fans, only knowing the name JLQ, had to choose whether they wanted that or a long-desired Robins book. The answer was relatively obvious. [Read more…] about DC’s 2021 Review Part 5: How Can DC Comics Improve?

2.1.0 Diversity in Character Inclusion

In part 2, I talked briefly about DC’s lack of diversity during Rebirth and how Infinite Frontier has been a significant improvement. I want to look closer at the data. How many books were given to characters who are BIPOC and/or queer over the last four years? In order to do this, I went through every other solicit since January 2018 and wrote down the number of in-continuity books that had a BIPOC lead character or a BIPOC-majority cast. I did the same for queer representation. I wrote down the number of books each month with a majority-queer cast or a queer lead.

I only included queer characters and books where queerness was a prominent feature in the book. For example, Wonder Woman is canonically bisexual, but the comics consistently don’t showcase that side of her. As such, I did not include her. Similarly, Jonathan Kent is now canonically queer, but in 2018 he wasn’t. As such, Jonathan Kent only contributes to the book being a queer character in the year and era that he came out: March 2021 and after. So Adventures of the Super Sons doesn’t count, while Challenge of the Supersons does, because the latter book was written in late November but released physically during this period of time. [Read more…] about DC’s 2021 Review Part 4: Diversity of Characters