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Bitches on Comics Podcast: Q&A with the Creators

Bitches on Comics Podcast: Q&A with the Creators

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“Subtext! Hunt for the subtext!” Sara Century is describing her early days of comic book fandom, as a young queer woman, searching for more representation in her most favorite medium. She laments that her burgeoning interest in comics was often met with recommendations for authors she describes as ‘creeps,’ like R. Crumb or Alan Moore, instead of queer and feminist writers and creators like Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For) or Gail Simone (Birds of Prey, Deadpool, and many others). Hence her constant search for subtext and her ongoing desire to find feminist and queer perspectives and creators in comics, both past and present. 

These days it’s a lot easier to find queer and feminist storylines in comics, though many of those stories have yet to translate to the silver screen quite so queerly. Still, comic book culture itself can still pose barriers for anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotypical definition of a comic book fan. As an artist, musician, and organizer, Century’s work has been driven by making space for underrepresented perspectives in a variety of scenes. Her longtime desire to bring more inclusivity to comics, and pop culture alike, found allyship with S.E. Fleenor in a Slack channel for SyFy writers, as both of them write blogs for the incredibly irreverent blog, SyFy Wire Fangrrl.

Bonding over a shared obsession with White Canary/Sara Lance of Legends of Tomorrow, their friendship quickly evolved into a podcast called Bitches on Comics. The self-described advice podcast debuted in September this year (and is available on all your fave platforms), dedicated to making comics more accessible and welcoming, for women and LGBTQ fans in particular. The duo’s conversational style is delightfully nerdy, and each episode dives deep into topics like color palettes, gatekeeping, libraries, the gayness of X-Men, and tropes they wish would go away, like dead lesbian syndrome, as discussed in episode 11. Even when discussing the more troublesome aspects of comic book culture, the joy of their fandom always shines through.

As community-driven literary events like Denver Pop Culture Con, Denver Zine Fest, and Denver IndiPop X prove, there’s a huge and growing audience for spaces offline where fans can get together and nerd out about comics and pop culture with unabandoned glee. Which is exactly what happened on Sunday, December 8th when Bitches on Comics headed to Mutiny Information Cafe. Their special guest this last week was Kristina Maldonado Bad Hand, a local illustrator, designer, educator, and entrepreneur. 

Why did you decide to focus on comics versus other mediums for storytelling in Bitches on Comics.
Sara Century (SC)- Comics are always kind of exclusionary. I’ve been reading comics since I was a little kid, and people always talk to me about how comics are hard to get into, or how they never got into them… they say, ‘‘Aren’t comics just for dudes?’.  And I always had a history of trying to do things that were more inclusionary, I am always trying to bring people into things, and that has always extended to comic books too. I mean, I haven’t heard a lot of podcasts by women or queer people who are trying to get more people – who weren’t raised up on comics – into comics. 

S.E. Fleener (SF)- Sara and I both had experiences in life, where it felt like men were actively trying to push us out of comics, whether it be a comic book store where the bookstore owner our told me a 15-minute story about how 17-year-old he dated, when he was 33, was rude to him… appropo of….I don’t know? I think the story came down to how she wouldn’t put out, and I couldn’t figure out what it was about my presentation that said to him, ‘Please tell me this story!,” But then I realized it wasn’t me, it’s comic book stores!  I mean, I don’t want to shit talk comic book stores as a whole, because some of them are amazing, and I really believe in the work, and the services that they provide. Especially since it’s goddamn hard to get comics sometimes… you know, that’s just one example, it could also be the person who tweeted at me that I wrote an article that sounded like it was for someone who’d been in a coma for 17 years, because I didn’t write a 501 about Deadpool. I wrote a 101 about Deadpool.

SC – Rude!

What’s a 501?
SF – They were frustrated that I didn’t write a 501 level on TV’s Deadpool, where I got into all this weird backstory or whatever. I wrote a 101, because I was purposefully trying to bring people into the conversation, based on the film, and not the comics, which they might not have been part of before. Essentially there’s a lot of gatekeeping out there when it comes to who gets to have input about what comics mean.

SC – They’re saying, ‘I know more than you!”, right? So they read an article that’s by somebody who isn’t, you know a straight white dude, and then they have to establish their dominance in the conversation and they have to establish that they know more than you… all of those things suck. That’s why we do the podcast.

SF – What I love about Bitches on Comics is that it is both accessible and thorough. We are always doing a feminist critique, we’re always doing a queer critique, we are always nerding out hard, and we’re always breaking things down. What we found from the responses we’ve gotten from people who are comic book nerds, people who are queer, or women, and/or just nice… they find our podcast exciting and interesting. People who don’t read a lot of comics say, ‘Shit! Now I wanna read comics!,’ Bwahhaha, exactly our goal!

What about the podcast medium appealed to you?
SC – It’s conversational, right? That’s what’s great about podcasts as a medium that’s different than blogs. With blogs, you can go deeper into it, you can be intellectual, and you can go further, but with podcasts the conversationality is the most important thing. You’re learning about comics, but you’re also just listening to a couple of friends talk, so that automatically makes people feel more comfortable with the conversation and they want to be part of the conversation. So I think that that’s why it’s great. 

SF – The other advantage of podcasts is that there’s such an emotional experience you have with voices, that you don’t have to written word. We make each other laugh, but it’s the best when we make our sound engineer, Kate laugh, because then we know we did something really funny. Listening to podcasts is like being welcomed into someone else’s life. When I listen to the Nicole Byers podcast, it’s because I want to pretend I’m her friend. But Sara and I are not pretending, all of you who love comic books are our friends!

Bitches-on-Comics-Sara-Century
Sara Century, cohost of Bitches on Comics Podcast

What podcasts do you listen to when you’re not recording Bitches on Comics?
SF – I love The Good, The Bad, and The Basic.

SC – Oh yea, and that’s two women talking about movies, and they’re really, really funny. 

SF – Are they bring a beautiful feminist lens, an intersectional lens to their discussions.

SC – I also like My Favorite Murder. I like their conversationality, and how they can talk about really heavy subject matter in a way that is still funny. I like the No Sleep podcast, which is just horror stories that didn’t really inspire this one… I also like Explain the X-Men which breaks down a bunch of the X-Men Comics. Even as somebody who read all of the X-Men Comics, I’m still learning things from them. When you hear somebody confirming the stuff that you were thinking, it’s huge because… being queer growing up, reading X-Men, nobody else shared my opinions on the X-Men. People were definitely reading the same comics I was reading, but I was realizing, ‘Oh my god, Kitty Pryde is in love with her friend Rachel!’, and people just said ‘No, no, no, no, she’s in love with Colossus, the boy”. But then years later you hear a podcast where people are talking about queer issues and saying, ‘Wow, Kitty and Rachel, right? They were in love with each other.” And I’m listening to the podcast, through the headphones, thinking, ‘YES!’. 

Talk about the intersection of queerness, feminism, and comic book culture.
SC – Let’s look at the history of queer comics, there were always queer comics right? Trina Robbins was at ground zero, right alongside R. Crumb – not being a creep – and she was making really great, feminist, lesbian comics.  You have this really rich and healthy background of people like Roberta Gregory, of queer people, or just weird people, coming into comics and doing really great work, right? But those are people that get brushed aside. You know, those are people we don’t really talk about that that much, whenever we talk about comics history… you talk about the men who have done really good comics, the straight men, who have done great queer stories… Love and Rockets, Strangers in Paradise… and those comics are brilliant. But we almost never talk about the actual queer people who have been in comics since the beginning.

It’s so important for us to always be talking about queer comics, because there’s a renaissance of that happening right now. There’s queer comics everywhere now! It used to be, I was always thinking, ‘Subtext!, hunt for the subtext!’  in every superhero comic, but now there’s queer superheroes! There are weird, independent comics that actually have opened a lot of doors and they’ve brought a lot of people into reading comics, and into making comics as well.

So the conversation that we always have to be talking about is, “What’s our history?” because as queer people, we are always under constant threat of being erased by history. So we always have to keep talking about it, saying, ‘We’ve been in comics this whole time, and if YOU want to be into comics, here is the easiest way to get acquainted with them.’ We have to foster that community, otherwise it vanishes. 

SF –  We’re both also super committed to staking a claim on comics. It’s not just saying that you are welcome, it’s saying, “You belong here.” We belong here, and we’re not going to listen to the people who are tweeting weird things at us or the people who comment weird things on our articles or whatever. We’re going to fiercely reclaim and honor those who have always been holding down queerness in comics. But like you said, Sara, it’s about the importance of how we tell the story of what it means to be queer. 

I’m just thinking of Jane’s World, by Paige Braddock, one of the few syndicated comic strips featuring lesbians. It’s so banal. It’s just about their life, and their camping trips, they lose beer in the river, and everyone dates everyone. It’s super sweet! I just read that for the first time this year, but it was first released in the late 90s. And when I read it recently, I was thinking the whole time, “Holy shit, no one even told me!.”

SC: Yet everybody’s handed us a copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen and everybody has handed us R.Crumb comics, despite how much we probably aren’t into reading R.Crumb comics. 

SF: Why do you hand me Y: The Last Man, when you could hand me Woman World? They’re two different versions of the same plot, which is that men stop being being born. Y: The Last Man is told from the perspective of the last man alive; we can’t even be the lead characters when there’s no.men.left!  Also, there are no trans people, there are no nonbinary people, they’re erased, they’re murdered, they’re villainized throughout the comic. 

You read Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal, and one of the main jokes is, ‘Well what are the straight women going to do??’, someone yells that to the president, and the president says, ‘How many of you were bi leaning anyways?.’  It’s every woman… there’s two women who don’t raise their hand. So Woman World is all about how women make a beautiful society, where there’s tenderness, and gentleness, and there are trans people everywhere. The idea is that what’s really happening isn’t that men are not being born anymore, it’s that no one’s identifies as male anymore. It’s not about genitalia or chromosomes, like it is in Y: The Last Man, it’s about identity. It’s really fascinating how different that treatment is and also how much funnier. Women’s World is so funny… and queer as all get out. 

Bitches-on-Comics-SE-Fleenor
S.E. Fleenor, cohost Bitches on Comics Podcast

Bitches on Comics is an advice podcast; describe some of the more surprising questions you’ve received so far.
SF – A lot of people say, ‘Thank you for taking my question seriously.’ We had a question about color palettes and we went all out, because we’re nerds. The person who asked it said, ‘Thank you, that’s exactly the level of nerdiness I wanted, you answered the question simply, and then you just geeked out, and that was great, because now I learned all these facts I wouldn’t know.’

SC – The question that surprised me the most was when somebody asked us if we had seen the Joker movie and what our thoughts were on it, because we had to respond and say, “No, we haven’t seen that. Sorry.” We want to try to meet people halfway, but going to see the Joker movie seems really hard to do. We don’t like the Joker that much! We don’t think it’s bad to like the Joker, I guess, but we also don’t personally like him.

What we are much more excited about is The Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn movie, which will be released in February 2020. Harley Quinn was always the abused girlfriend of the Joker character, so we’re excited because she is breaking up with him! We absolutely need to see a woman getting out of an abusive relationship and having a much better, more female-focused life. We want to see her leave that guy, she already did that in the comics. Our interest is more about that kind of subject matter, the stuff that is not the Joker. That’s honestly exactly what we need, as opposed to the Joker, which I would say is mostly meaningless, same shit we’ve seen like a thousand times, right? People getting on the Joker’s “side” and trying to empathize with the villain has been happening for long enough. 

SF – That’s another book people should stop fucking hand to everyone when they start trying to read comics, The Killing Joke. It’s very, very bad.

Are there other feminist and queer issues or themes you feel are overlooked in other pop culture and comics conversations?
SF – We talk about survivor stories a lot. Sexual assault is portrayed so poorly, most of the time, so we try to highlight where it’s done well. We talked for a long time about a recent episode of Doom Patrol, which is a TV adaptation of the comic, that I believe is single-handed best representation of sexual assault I’ve seen on the screen. 

SC – Yes, because it doesn’t linger on the assault, and it doesn’t throw the actual violence of it in your face. It shows you the after effects of it, right? We also talk about the concept of “fridging” a lot, which is a huge theme in comics, where the girlfriend is killed for the male character’s storyline, so he can say, ‘Now I must get revenge!’. 

Where does the term, “fridging” originate?
SC – A woman getting put in a refrigerator. 

SF – Yep. Green Lantern #54, Alexandra DeWitt is chopped up and put in the Green Lantern’s fridge, and then the villain leaves a note that says, ‘I left you lunch of the fridge.’ Green Lantern opens the fridge and then you’re supposed to think, ‘Oh, poor Green Lantern, his girlfriend is dead’. 

SC-  Nobody has commentary on the girlfriend, or what she went through or anything… she’s treated as less than an object.

SF – She becomes a plot device. It happened in Deadpool 2, it happened in the movie Han Solo film.

So it happens in many genres and mediums…
SC – The term, “fridging” comes from a comic book writer named Gail Simone. She observed this phenomenon in comics, in a time when it was happening to all of the women in comics.

SF –  It happened to Wonder Woman, in her own comic! Gail Simone also started a website called Women in Refridgerators that lists names of characters who have been fridged. It’s not currently updated, but it’s a very long list. 

SC – Fridging happens in superhero comics mostly, but we’re talking about the early days of comics when representation of women in all of comics… was pretty dicey there for a while. Characters who were women who would get their own title, but then they would get fridged in their own title, because the title was written by men, and things like that. So while Superman gives his heroic arc, Batman gets his heroic arc, that man has his back. But then he comes back from it stronger than before. Wonder Woman just has her powers taken away, and then had no powers for three years, and then Gloria Steinem got involved and said, “That sucks. You guys should like give her her powers back!’ and they said, ‘Argh, feminists, why?!’ So they finally had to do it, but there was no acclaim. There was no fanfare. They just said she has them again, and ‘Hope you’re happy, feminists’. Bonkers history. But comics are better now, there’s been a lot of feminists calling this stuff out.

SF – Feminists who are creators, who are artists, who are critics… like us. Another thing we talk about a lot is diverse gender representations. Not just binary but… what else and who else exists, how we code characters as nonbinary. Obviously we went off for a long time about that with Swamp Thing and Doom Patrol, all kinds of characters and the nice thing is that there are actually characters now who are openly non-binary, and that feels incredible. 

It’s so fun for us to be people who get to say, ‘You want to know where you want to start in comics? Don’t listen to those people, now by here’s your nonbinary comic list. This will make you not feel like you don’t matter, or are being erased. These are comics that will embrace you, accept you, treat you like you matter. We are offering personalized reading lists on our Patreon page!

SC – We will be having non-binary got guests on our podcast on as well, so that is really exciting! You know as much as there’s like no lesbian representation in comics, there was even less nonbinary representation for a long time, and so we’re actually getting to a place where we can say, ‘Here’s these creators and you know, our cohost for instance, who are non-binary. Anytime we can highlight perspectives outside the gender binary is so important, because for the longest time you would have characters that are represented as being nonbinary, but they’re still referred to by he/his, she/hers, the standard pronouns, right? No, they/thems in comics at all. So it’s nice to see that opening up more. And that’s another reason to do it though is because we have to keep pushing. Otherwise we backslide.

Tell me about your new Patreon. How are you currently funding your podcast and how will your Patreon campaign support you?
SF – Right now, Sara and I pay for everything out of our own pockets, because we believe in what we are doing. We pay our sound engineer because we want high quality production for our listeners. Neither of us are being paid. We kept it pretty thin, but we also pay for a website, logo, branding, music. We cared about having a professional launch and we care about the sound quality. We want you to feel like you’re listening to a podcast, not like you’re listening to us with a phone call. For us, this means respecting the work that other people put into this podcast, compensating them fairly and making sure that we put out a lot of really quality content.  We have been working really hard to be putting out a lot of quality content, and the Patreon, has been our main focus thus far.

Our goal with our Patreon page is to become more sustainable and to to pay our sound engineer, Kate Warner, as well as cover some of our operating costs. We also would like to pay guest hosts to do their own segments. Sara and I are both white, and there are limitations to our perspectives, we know that, and we don’t feel it’s appropriate to ask people who are Black and Brown to come on and give us free labor. We feel strongly that that’s one of the first things we will do once, we can pay Kate!

SF –  We also create personalized reading lists for our patrons, where we tell you, ‘Here’s exactly what comic book to start with, this is the number, this is the year, the writer, illustrator, title… this is another title you might find it under, and here’s where you can find it. whether it be digital, library, what have you. We also produce a hilarious side episode called Intoxicated Comics, where we enjoy refreshments and then tell you the history of your favorite comic book heroes. It is outrageous.

SC – You have to give us extra money for that, because it’s embarrassing, I’m drunk the whole time. We want to be able to afford afford extra guests, we want to do more reviews, longer reviews. We want to give people more content. 

SF – Our goal is to make comics more welcoming to LGBTQ folks and women. We hope that this podcast is one piece of something larger will be doing in time, and that it won’t just be comics, but science fiction, fantasy, horror, you name it. We want LGBTQ folks and women to know they have space and belong in comics.. 

Going back to your question, the reason we chose comics is because we found it to be one of the most extreme places for exclusion and the place where we felt like we have a lot of wealth of knowledge that we were perhaps not using as much as we wanted to. 

Have you both done other work around comics and education or criticism, in addition to your podcast and blogging on SyFy?
SC – I do a lecture series called History of Queer Characters in Comics, and I say lecture in quotations, because I don’t have any educational background whatsoever. I stopped going to school and I was in seventh grade.

SF – Sara is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and it’s so much fun. I don’t know if you listened to our first episode but she made the connection between a character when they were alive in Swamp Thing and when they were dead in Sandman, I was just thinking about that in the shower this morning… who else would notice that? I read both those comics, all of them! I had no idea it was the same character.  I think the podcast is as much about valuing other kinds of intelligence, and knowledge, and saying storytelling is not lesser, and comic book storytelling is not lesser than any other form of art or storytelling. 

SC – Yeah there weren’t any comic book classes you could take when I was a kid, that’s for sure. Everybody thought that I was gonna grow up to be a mutant, because I was reading so many comics. People definitely would say, ‘Oh you shouldn’t you shouldn’t waste your time, you shouldn’t read comics .” – like they’re bad for you. ‘They rot your brain!’,  all of that kind of stuff… and now people say to me, ‘Whoa, you know so much about comics! You’re so smart.’

SF – Whose brain is rotten now?

I definitely want us to write a book. We do have a goal on our Patreon, which is that if we reach 100 supporters, we’re going to start writing articles that go with the podcasts. I want to do this series called Justice for… so for example, Justice for Wonder Woman, Justice for Alexandra DeWitt. We want to start retelling those stories and sharing them.So if there’s infinite universes in comic books, which there are, what’s another universe in which Alexandra DeWitt is Green Lantern? Let’s keep thinking about how we can reclaim these stories, and let them be stories of power, and the strength of survival. We talked a lot about Gwen Stacy, and I think she’s such a model for what we could do. She’s Spider Gwen in a parallel universe. In the prime universe, she dies when Green Goblin throws her off a bridge and Peter Parker tries to save her, and captures her with his web, but when the webbing catches, and he breaks her neck. That’s her whole fuckin’ story. 

SC – Fridging.

SF – It’s fridging. But now, Spider Gwen is the spider person of her universe, the main one. She is acrobatic, funny, an incredible fighter. She tells people she’s Spider Woman, because she doesn’t want to live in shame and fear. She accepts the consequences of the things she did wrong as Spider Woman. She knows that she died in all these other parallel universes, and she doesn’t take for granted what she has. It’s very inspiring to me, as so many people have died, so many women and queer people have died, been murdered, spent their lives in the service of straight white men. Even more so, the people who live at the intersections of disability, of being Black or Brown, of being nonbinary or trans. It seems silly to make that connection, between that and  comics, but to me, it’s about claiming the space to say, ‘We don’t have to be memories, and we don’t have to be victims, and we can tell our own stories. We can reclaim the stories told about us that are bullshit.”

SC – Because now you’re seeing reverse fridging happen, you’re seeing people come back from fridging, and it’s good. Gwen Stacey is a character that was fridged for decades and then in the last five years, people said, ‘Let’s tell her story.’

SF – Turns out it’s a great story, and we all love it! There’s also these alternate timelines and bombshells that I think have a lot of reverse fridging in them as well, where the characters who were depowered now get to be so powerful. It’s interesting, as we get more diverse writers and diverse and creators of all kinds, who are being trusted with intellectual property, either by the big two (Marvel and DC Comics) or by any anybody… the stories are changing. Are some remain the same and shitty and awful. Yes! 

SC – The Joker…

SF – But N.K. Jemisin is writing the new Green Lantern. The first black female Green Lantern, okay? I think we’re headed in a good direction. 

SC – Yeah, I’m really excited for that book and I hate Green Lantern. Space cops? No, no, thanks. And then you say N.K. Jemison’s name and you’ve brought me back in again.

Listen to a new episode of Bitches on Comics every Wednesday on all your favorite podcast platforms and you can support the podcast by pledging a monthly donation on the Bitches on Comics Patreon page.

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