Peeking into the rock

So there's this cute little tumbler called "Problems with Webcomics."  It presents the results of a painstaking study of webcomics and how they present "nonheteronormative sexuality" (is that the ugliest way to say that which isn't meant to be derogatory I have ever seen? I am not sure) and race.

The conclusion: There are no transgender or queer characters in webcomics. That's right, none.

This was a shocking discovery to me, as I only follow fifteen webcomics, and every single one of them features main or major characters who are homosexual, bisexual, or transgender:  Three of my fifteen have main or major characters who are transgender.  20% is not zero.  Of course "webcomics that Lucy follows" is not a valid sample. (one nice side effect of bumping into this is that I've gone and tracked down some other comics that I had lost track of over the years, so that now I think I am following eighteen or nineteen comics).

The other conclusion is confusingly stated: 18% of webcomics have only one character of color. Does this mean that the other 82% have several each? Surely not, if over four hundred of the over six hundred characters they counted were white.

How did the people who did the study arrive at these conclusions?

They gathered up 500 webcomics from one webcomic server's list and personal recommendations of their friends and chose a random one hundred to study.  Then they counted things and presented them as percentages of each other. This shows a pretty shallow understanding of what statistics is for, if you ask me (and of course nobody did). 

There's nothing very comprehensive about the initial group.  And it's a small enough group that there's no reason to choose a smaller group within it.  Sampling is what we do when a population is very large and unwieldy and we want to make it maageable.  Randomization is only one of the tools used to ensure that samples are representative.  If you take a random sample of the entries in the San Jose telephone book to represent the households of the Pacific Coast States, it really doesn't matter how meticulous your randomization method is, the sample will not be an accurate representation of the population you say you are studying.

This seems to be what happened here. 

There are other problems with "Problems with Webcomics."   I need to qualify all this by saying that it's kind of difficult to say what's a criticism and what's not, or even, in some cases, what's from the authors themselves and what's a comment or a response to a comment. Tumblr is a lousy format: sorry, all you enthusiasts out there, but it is.  Furthermore, the report is presented as speech balloons spread over a number of unidentfied characters, scattered over the panel so that the relationship of one statement to the next is obscured.  It's hard to say which points are just raw data, which are being presented as actual problems with webcomics, which are exceptions or mitigations, or what.

Once they get beyond mere numbers, it's just plain confusing.  It is sort of the nature of the problem, to a degree.  Is it more of a problem when characters are presented with some simple indication of diversity of skin color, hair texture, etc., without cultural details beyond geekhood, or is it more of a problem when characters are presented with the same seven or eight ethnic markers ?  Is it wrong to slap a bindi on a character's head and then have them never show any evidence of being Hindu? (and if a character is wearing a bindi and has no other ethnic marker, how are you sure they're not a Mexican schoolgirl from Watsonville, California, about fifteen years ago? It was all the rage at Lakeview School back then).  But there's no discussion of this, though it is a problem webcomics, like all media, should confront early and often and with different conclusions all the time.  It's just brought up as a complaint that there are "ambiguous"-raced characters and characters who are drawn with one or more "racial" markers who are lacking in any other racial or ethnic markers.

The only discussion of genre appears to come out of the finding that there are three romance-oriented comics that feature gay male characters, and the comics that feature lesbian characters are not romances.  Though the statement is broader than that: there are no romances feature main or major lesbian characters.

Of the hundred comics they studied, four were ones I have read (I follow one of them).  Of them, one,"Girls with Slingshots," must be mischaracterized -- or some of the zeroes in the findings would not be zeroes. I suppose they dismissed the two lesbian romances in the comic because one of them has one of those black characters that don't exist in webcomics and the other one features a couple where one of the women is bisexual (another thing that doesn't exist in webcomics) and the other is asexual.  Which of course means that the romance is not lesbian and is not a romance?  Another comic on their list , "Scandinavia and the World," (which is one I have read but do not follow.  I understand that it is an attempt to de-nature stereotypes and to reduce everybody to the same level of mockery, but it often just doesn't work for me and seems like it's the same old racism after all, in spite of what I do believe is a sincere author.  Sometimes sincerity isn't enough) has to be mischaracterized also,  if the claim that "there is no alternative sexuality represented in webcomics" is to be supported. (those are their words, not mine)  Here I think the fluidity of the characters' sexuality disqualifies them in the eyes of the "Problems" authors.  I think.

Oh, and it's apparently offensive that there are 35 non-human characters among the six hundred and somewhat.  No, I got that wrong.  What's offensive is that there are more non-human characters than there are any other category that is not "white." What I think is offensive is counting non-human as a non-white category, which they totally did there, in a chart and everything: leaving us with "white, human" vs. "non-white and non-human."  What the hell, children?

I wish that they had sampled their comics in a more comprehensive way, and that they had paid some attention to genre: as it is, the only mention of genre is the complaint that only gay men get romance comics. Further, I wish for a couple of different studies.  I wish that someone would interview webcomic artists about their intentions as to the ethnicity and sexuality of their characters, and then have readers complete surveys about the ethnicity and sexuality of the characters in the webcomics, and then analyze the two together.  Don't you think that would tell us something about what's actually happening in webcomics?  Another cool thing to do would have been to try to look at what happens to webcomics about people of color.  Do they get lost?  Do they get featured in the same way comparable webcomics about white characters do? 

Really, if they want to talk about what isn't there, I just wish they had spent the extra effort, and recruited more kiddies to work on it, and counted a lot more than a measly hundred webcomics from a dubious sampling method. 

It's not that I don't agree that there's a big deficit all across the board here.  But I think that when you look at webcomics and deny the existence of comics about characters of diverse sexualities and colors and castes, and you erase what's actually out there, you're not, even if you intend to be, creating a call to action.  You're impeding action.  You're sending your readers back to square zero, when they have a right to be in square one or possibly even three or more, when they have a right to build on the work that's already being done.

I really should, at this point, offer up a page of links to the comics I read and have read, but it's one-thirty in the morning and I need to write an obituary tomorrow.

You know Gil Scott-Heron died over the weekend, right?

He was only four years older than me. He had barely reached the Social Security minimum retirement age. I believe his life was substantially shortened by two related things -- his crack cocaine addiction and his sixteen years of incarceration for possession. In one of his interviews after his release, Gil Scott-Heron said he was not over the addiction, though I think he was living clean.

I was just going to talk about his music. I was just going to say how eloquent and compelling his words were. But I started thinking about this thing, and the revelations of Iran-Contra, and the documented fact that crack cocaine was introduced and popularized by employees of the CIA in order to raise money for weapons for counter-revolutionary efforts in Latin America and the Middle East. Doesn't that sound like the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic, or the plot of an implausible thriller? But it's history.

We're all in control of ourselves -- up to a point. It wasn't inevitable that Gil Scott-Heron would be caught up in this net, and his life truncated like this. But if the CIA hadn't introduced crack to the ghetto, the drugs available to him would have mostly been much less devastating. And if the sentencing laws (and their implementation) were equitable for powder cocaine and crack cocaine, Gil Scott-Heron likely wouldn't have lost so many years.

I am absolutely, one hundred percent, certain that in the strategizing meetings where the Iran-Contra plans were drawn up, somebody noticed the potential for neutralizing uppity voices.

What's your favorite Gil Scott-Heron song? I think it may be "Johannesburg." Everybody remembers "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." I think my brother's is "We Almost Lost Detroit," which I heard this weekend on my way to the airport. The advantage of living here is that, even though I don't get any television unless I pay for cable (as much for cable as a week's groceries), I get seven public, school, and community radio stations. So naturally there were some Gil Scott-Heron memorial marathons this weekend. I also heard his newer song "I'm New Here Again," which I loved. I saw the Youtube video of it and I think it would make me cry even if he hadn't just died.

On another front: my usually entirely unplayful cat has been playing with all the stuff on my desk, and looking a bit desperate and embarrassed about it. After he rolled over on the keyboard and opened a new firefox window, I forcibly removed him to the top of the printer, and he subsided.

I haven't wanted to say anything about the "racefail" crap because it's crap and there's no way to address the crappiness of it without getting told that you're saying somethign that you're not.

But eventually I will have to discuss race and the rest, here, in my own terms. Not necessarily racefail -- I'm not a participant in any of the social circles where this has been playing out, so I may not have to engage that at all -- but because I have been reflecting on race, color, language, ethnicity, class and caste with both hands -- I have to: my job (my calling) demands it. I can't avoid it.


I no longer have much ambition to someday get to Wiscon, though. Not because of any particular event, but because it doesn't sound like the exciting intellectual place that it used to sound like. It frankly sounds dreary. And the people who are defending it the most sound the dreariest, though not the only dreary ones. Which is a loss for me, but I haven't even made it to BayCon since the nice fellow died, so the loss of the idea of Wiscon is probably not that huge.