#comic criticism

My argument is not “Arab villains are bad” or “Ra’s al Ghul can’t be evil.”

My issue is with how the comic constructs him and what representational frameworks it draws from.

Orientalism is not just individual prejudice. It is a system of representation that frames the “East” as irrational, excessive, mystical, authoritarian, violent, primitive, and fundamentally different.

These patterns shape interpretation before a character even acts.

As Edward Said argues, representation does not simply reflect reality — it constructs meaning. Comics are especially important here because they rely heavily on visual shorthand and immediate recognition.

Characters are rapidly simplified into recognizable types: hero, monster, threat, savior, fanatic, victim.

And Absolute Superman very consciously constructs Ra’s as spectacle.

Look at how he is framed: hypermuscular, towering, looming over Superman. Heavily shadowed. almost inhumanly massive

The nudity matters too.

Ra’s is repeatedly drawn with large exposed areas of skin while Superman remains clothed and visually controlled. The body becomes spectacle.

The proportions push beyond ordinary humanity into something monstrous and mythic: heavy muscles, exaggerated size, animalistic posture, overwhelming physical presence and dominance.

That matters because Orientalist depictions of Arab/Muslim men have historically framed them as barbaric, hyperviolent, sexually excessive, patriarchal and physically threatening. The body itself becomes coded as danger.

This isn’t accidental visual design. It’s part of a long representational history.

Ra’s also isn’t framed as a psychologically grounded person so much as an archetype. He becomes less a psychologically grounded person and more a ritualistic, prophetic archetype; eternal, imposing, almost inhuman. Meanwhile Superman is framed as emotionally readable, illuminated, morally centered, rational and humanized. The contrast is intentional.

Ra's characterization becomes symbolic instead of personal.

That’s why the resurrection imagery matters too Lazarus pits, ritual language, dynastic authority and rebirth imagery. He becomes less a political actor and more an immortal Eastern patriarch archetype.

Another issue is how systemic problems become displaced onto Ra’s specifically. The comic gestures toward environmental collapse, inequality, global instability and authoritarian systems but these issues become condensed into ONE racialized body.

So instead of engaging structurally with those problems, the narrative transforms them into individualized evil. Ra’s becomes a symbolic container for extremism, apocalypse, overpopulation discourse, authoritarianism and irrational violence.

This is especially important because many of the ideas attached to him (population control, eco-authoritarianism, necropolitics) have real historical roots in Western political systems too. But the comic relocates them entirely into an “Eastern” villain figure.

That displacement matters. It obscures structural accountability by making one racialized body carry the weight of multiple global anxieties.

And these portrayals do not exist in isolation.

The American media has a long history of constructing Arabs and Muslims through spectacle, threat, mysticism, and dehumanization, especially post-9/11.

"ivy's more cruel and egotistic after she was resurrected and I don't like it" yes that's the whole point? she got her full power back and once again it's been going to her head? part of the character's whole thing is that her love of power corrupts her noble intentions???

i keep seeing people say they don't like that g. willow wilson's ivy can be vain and cruel, which is a wild thing to say about that character specifically because historically that's been like. her whole thing. literally her first appearance in batman (1940) #181 is essentially because she can't stand that people aren't paying attention to her. for years she was directly depicted as a villainous sadist who loved tying people up and playing with them and who specifically got off on humiliating and dominating men. there's definitely a conversation to be had around the degree of misogyny and homophobia that went into her characterization immediately post-crisis, but regardless not a single writer or artist who has worked on the character has ever been subtle about her capacity for cruelty, including in her most sympathetic depictions.

her cruelty was so well established that in detective comics (1937) #751-752, published in 2000 in the aftermath of no man's land, batman and robin are shocked to realize that ivy's rescuing and caring for children instead of kidnapping and killing them. there are some earlier sympathetic depictions of her; in black orchid (1988), ivy's a tragic figure who feels more deeply than anyone gives her credit for. in batman: legends of the dark knight (1989) #42-23, she initially seems sympathetic, but turns out as a classic femme fatale out to deceive. detective comics #693-694 is the first issue of the mainline comics to reveal that she can feel the pain of the earth and to introduce a desire to protect plant life as part of her motivation. this story was published in 1995, only a few years after batman: the animated series first depicted ivy as an ecoterrorist. batman: poison ivy (1997) is not only one of the first stories in which she's depicted as subject instead of object, but it's a story about her seeking revenge against unethical weapons manufacturers for genuine wrongdoing. fruit of the earth, which spans across issues of batman, detective comics, and shadow of the bat in 1999, begins the story that concludes in detective comics #751-752, showing us ivy as a nuanced figure. we already know that ivy has a connection to the green, thanks to black orchid and secret origins (1986) #36, but it's rarely referenced until the no man's land arc; when robin asks the kids in ivy's care why she lets them live, they answer simply: "because we respect the green." in batman: gotham knights (2000) #61-65, ivy sacrifices literally everything to save her park orphans when they begin turning up dead. yet it's not until detective comics #817 and batman #651, both published in 2006, when ivy's motives shift from protecting plant life to straight up ecoterrorism.

the whole time this is happening, she's still cruel and sadistic and conceited and haughty. it's almost a cliche at this point for batman to tell her she's doing the right thing the wrong way, or for someone to comment that ivy could be the one to save the world if she just got over herself. the fact that she's cruel and vain is actually so important because it contributes to her complexity, just like her relationship with harley does. a woman known for her cold heart who notoriously hates humans suddenly cares about a human, and this raises questions: why does she care? what does caring about someone bring out in her? what does it look like when she cares about someone? so many of ivy's most interesting layers became visible through the process of answering these questions and weaving those layers with her more unscrupulous ones in harley quinn (2000), harley and ivy: love on the lam (2001), and gotham city sirens (2009).

even post flashpoint she's still vain and cruel. birds of prey (2011) is (in my opinion) such an awful take on an iconic title, but it and the new 52 era complicate poison ivy further while still maintaining her cruelty and her ego by giving us a version of pam who grew up in a violent and unstable home, whose research was effectively stolen by wayne enterprises, who transformed due to a freak lab accident and got revenge on the father who murdered her mother. this is a pamela who is dying (of what, we never learn), and has no problem betraying her teammates to save herself, all while assuring them that her friendship is genuine. batgirl annual (2012) #2 also adds incredible nuance to pam, exploring the ways in which she experiences emotion and humanity, further compounded by the contents of her first solo series, poison ivy: cycle of life and death (2016), appearances in harley quinn (2013), harley quinn (2016), and batgirl and the birds of prey (2016) (though i don't like her depiction in this book, personally), all of which eventually leads into another odd era for the character, one in which DC for a moment appears poised to rehabilitate her as a hero.

this is how we lead into the events of batman (2016) #41-43, then heroes in crisis (2018), then harley quinn and poison ivy (2019), and her absence during the joker war, all eventually deciding that pam is not, in fact, a hero. instead she remerges in fear state as two halves of a whole, for the second time in five years. this of course leads into poison ivy (2022), which in my opinion feels like a return to form for the character. it alchemizes the best parts of her from all these different depictions, pre- and post- crisis, and balances them so delicately and well. i've been reading comics for so long and i genuinely think she's one of the most difficult characters to write because there are so many moving parts to consider with her. i think anyone who can write her as cohesively as g. willow wilson in poison ivy (2022) or amy chu in cycle of life and death or john francis moore in batman: poison ivy, is doing something that requires so much skill, even if these takes aren't perfect.

literally the key to getting this character right is making her cruel and vain and selfish. that is who pamela isley is. she is also fiercely protective of the few people she allows behind her walls, a ray of pure joy when she gets to work with plants, a genuine warrior of the earth, a hater of abusers, a woman who tries to hide her feelings, even though every emotion hits her with more intensity than she can bare. she's literally all of these things because she's complicated as fuck! she's the messiest person in gotham! this is literally what makes her so fun to read about.

Do we really need another character who was raised to be a super secret and important weapon that is tied to random stuff across the whole universe? Don’t we already have two of those? Don’t you think it’s better when batman characters are just normal people??

I've been ambivalent about Homestuck Beyond Canon, I might as well get that out of the way. some of that is inevitably personal. I was inside the blast radius of several of the explosions that rocked and finally ended HS2 and it's difficult not to resent it all getting spun up again by, largely, strangers. I also admittedly found early updates fairly, nhyaaauhm, boring? they couldn't really do much, tasked with bringing to ground story beats left in the air with HS2's cancellation. it felt like a narrative on autopilot, with the rough edges that to a great extent define Homestuck smoothed over to win back the audience.

the update I'll talk about here isn't the first that made me sit up and really pay attention. that was the Jade/Yiffy update a couple months ago, which will have its own review down the line. this is the first time though that the art direction, the staging, the comic part of the comic really made me excited. there's a lot to love here in general, of course. as a Terezi/Rosebot fanatic I'm dining well, the fucked, codependent energy between Rose and Dirk is great, and we've finally got an introduction of new, adult sprites for the characters that look phenomenal while going in a completely different direction than we did with the Godfeels adult sprites.

but it was the panel above that prompted me to do a writeup for this update. it's a deceptively simple image, I think. it's using the stark style of the ancestor panels from way back in Homestuck act 5 act 2, emphasizing the mythic register that these characters have reached. it also emphasizes Dirk's relative power within that dynamic--Terezi may be a caretaker of this new planet, but she serves at Dirk's pleasure, and as the text of this page makes clear she is limited in her ability to oppose his plans.

there's something more to this image, though. for me, this image flickers. the foreground and the background aren't so clear. I think it's possible to read it as Dirk looming in shadow behind Terezi--though, it wouldn't make a lot of sense from the prior two panels. it's certainly a more literally plausible image than what I'm about to suggest.

but how I read it initially was that Dirk looms so large because he is, simply, closer to the camera--to us--than Terezi is. Terezi is the figure. Dirk is the ground. he is the negative space. we are viewing her and indeed the entire narrative through him, and this panel literalizes that by having Dirk stand in front of us, transparent, defined by the negative space of his own making, his own orange color, the only filter through which we can observe Terezi at all.

I was originally just going to say "well of course this is just a particular reading, it's as valid as any other and emerges just from the ambient visual rhetoric, it's probably not intentional-" but actually the more I look at the blocking--the characters moving through the set and moving around each other--of this sequence the more it looks an awful lot to me like this is... just exactly what's happening. Dirk is positioned ahead of Terezi with his back dismissively to her, he turns to face her and confront her about her own motivations, and finally she shoves past him in disgust. if this is intentional, I gotta say, it's really, really nicely staged to make a pretty obtuse leap in visual rhetoric actually scan! @coruscatingDerelict (rip cohost) (edit: @solarpoweredwolf on here!) also noted that Terezi's red colors here, rather than her traditional teal, could be seen as a hemospectrum demotion, from near-highblood to candy red anomaly. I love that her own outline is entirely contained within Dirk's silhouette, making the weird visual flip flop between foreground and background possible, and again emphasizing her demoted status in the story. it's just one of a lot of really, really nice touches in this update's artwork, but it's certainly the most experimental and virtuosic.

this is an exciting update overall if you're into structure. one of my favorite parts of HS2 was the early Dirk monologue where he laid out explicitly a series of the rhetorical devices the comic would use, explaining how the narrative would shift between a more traditional Homestuck mode and the text format of the Epilogues. this update recalls visually the original Terezi/Rosebot update, which somewhat infamously used a single extra large panel and a large block of text. it feels like they're establishing that this is the stage on which this set of gods will play, and I love that.

the page that embraces this aesthetic also makes really compelling use of the colored narrating text. I'm not sure this is quite as successful? there's a lot I love about it, mind--like, switching to the "neutral" black text means that when Dirk threatens to assert control, forcing Rose to go along with their plan (and, implicitly, forcing her affection toward him--it really feels like some of those Homestuck rough edges are coming back!) stands out without having to be explicitly described in-text. I love love love the gradient on the ellipsis after she thanks him for taking her with him. you can practically feel the muscles relaxing. (also, in Homestuck this would've been done most likely with an image, but here it uses pure css to put the gradient on the text, which I just like a lot. in general the HS2/BC css is much cleaner and more logical than original Homestuck. though, in fairness, original Homestuck also had a backend running on a damn phpbb board, so.) I just think that more could have been done to emphasize the perceived "neutrality" of the black text narration. Sarah suggested that this should have been in third rather than first person and I think I agree, it would have underscored the shift back into Dirk overtly playing his hand as manipulator.

but, also, I think the black text, and in particular the way Rose defuses the danger to herself by playing to Dirk's mood, suggests an interesting possibility: we know that text being black does not preclude a hidden narrator from running the show. is it possible Rose is more in control here than Dirk realizes?

this remains to be seen, but for now I'm just thrilled to once more have formal stuff like this I can discuss in this much detail! Beyond Canon feels like it's finally coming into its own.

Fuck me sideways what was that hot garbage.

I went into Robin & Batman: Jason Todd #1 hoping for a nuanced, character-driven exploration of Jason’s early days. A chance to show what makes him distinct from Dick, what makes his story tragic and compelling.

Let’s start with the art. Yes, it’s “pretty” in that washed-out, painterly way, but it does Jason zero favors. He’s stiff, lifeless, and half the time looks more like a haunted mannequin than the vibrant kid he’s supposed to be. There’s no kinetic energy, no spark that says this is the street kid who stole the tires off the Batmobile.

The writing isn’t much better. Jason's dialogue feels either sanitized or wildly generic. Like you could swap his name with any other Robin and not notice. The emotional beats are surface-level at best, cribbing the usual “you’re not Dick” tension with Bruce but never developing it. It all feels like it was written by someone who read Death in the Family once and said, “yeah, I get it.”

Also, where’s the grit? Where’s the moral ambiguity, the frustration, the charisma? Jason Todd is so much more than “the angry Robin.” He’s clever, sarcastic, passionate. He tries too hard and feels too much. None of that comes through here. We’re given a Jason who's already halfway on the path to tragedy, but without the heart that makes you care.

And let’s talk about the utter character assassination of both Bruce and Alfred while we’re at it. This comic acts like Jason Todd showed up and ruined the vibes in the Batcave, when older comics made it clear: Jason brought joy into their lives. Yes, he was a handful. Yes, he was rough around the edges. But he lit up that house in ways Bruce and Alfred desperately needed.

In the classic run, Alfred dotes on Jason. He worries about him. He teases him. Basically his grandpa! But here? Alfred feels cold and emotionally distant, like he’s barely tolerating this kid’s presence AND clocks him as dangerous.

I'm not going to touch Bruce with a ten foot pole.

Anyway. For a comic supposedly about Jason Todd’s early days, it does everything in its power to make you wonder why anyone would have ever wanted him there in the first place.

I'm incandescently angry. I just want like one competent writer for Jay. Just one.

Batwoman (2011-2016) #1

Okay so first of all, Kate; rude much?

Second of all... was Flamebird's costume really that impractical? Especaially when compared to Kate's costume.

While admittedly Flamebird's original costume was not exactly the height of practicality...

(Although she still seemed quite capable of holding her own in it)

Beast Boy (2000) #2

However she later does in fact get a more practical outfit which she also kickass ass in.

Beast Boy (2000) #4

And we do know that its Flamebird's second (more practical-looking costume) which Kate burns, as Bette ends up suiting up in her aforementioned spare after Kate fires her...

As a character we very rarely get to see in the present and very rarely from his own perspective its an egregiously uninteresting move to remove the key element of moral conflict from Jor-El's character and his legacy. Now instead of having a mixed legacy of an inhumane über-prison AND Superman, Jor-El's legacy is overwhelmingly positive as it's reduced to his son. Removing the flaws from him reduces the avenues for moral conflict for Clark as he is now free to wholeheartedly valorise his long-dead father and has no personal connection to the Phantom Zone, which was the core of his conflict with using the Zone for a significant period of time. Removing the flaws from a character to make them seem entirely good is never interesting, and that's the misstep DC and Mark Waid did with this retcon. Hope they realise that and change it back.

Also what accountability is she supposed to take? Wanda's been taking accountability ever since she got back in 2010, restoring the depowered mutants powers and not expecting forgiveness from them because she's not owed that just for restoring their powers.

If we're going to have a discussion again about accountability, it should be one about how Pietro, Magneto, the Avengers, and the X-Men need to take accountability for making it happen too, because it was just her. The fallout of a much needed discussion could've provided rich tension and development in characters

I agree with you about Wanda, she has literally been in this same cycle for a decade, and not one writer is willing to move on, she's already gone through this, it's already been done, and yet Williams throws this back at her again why? My theory is that it's cheap, familiar, drama, there was no need to do a set up for those scene, EVERYONE knows about House of M/M Day, so it was easy to use it for some "heightened stakes" but the issue with that is, that isn't wasn't supposed to be about Wanda's past "misdeeds" which she already atoned for! How many freaking times does she have to go through this cycle???

This book was supposed to be about Magneto, and a mystery, but now its all gonna be solved without even the help of the X-Factor detective team! What use are they. Also what was up with Tommy and David in the vines? We literally have not seen Pietro's reaction to any of this. Why are so many plot lines dropped in the space of 4 comics? Where is the TRIAL OF MAGNETO?

I don't agree that this was all Pietro's fault, Pietro was reacting, he wasn't setting out to hurt people like the Avengers/X-Men who all decided that they had to kill Wanda. He and Wanda are victims of the Avengers/X-Men's choices, and I am really tired of Pietro & Wanda being blamed when they have already done everything they could to atone, both already suffered. Pietro had his powers taken from him, he did alot of bad things, he later tried to make up for it and he took full accountability for his actions. Wanda has tried to fix what she did as well already. But you know who has never been blamed or done anything about this? The ones who wanted to kill Wanda, their FRIEND, because they were afraid of her. Erik also has some blame because of his inaction to stop them, prompting Pietro to ask her to change the world, and also because he killed Pietro.

I am very tired of the Maximoff Twins tied to the House of M and unable to move on because everyone wants to write "aftermath" of M Day. The Twins have done enough, they have been through enough, and Trial of Magneto was sloppy writing built on shoddy grounds, if they wanted to undo the retcon they failed, if they wanted to provide a good story, they failed. There is only one more issue left but I know it's not gonna be enough to fix this mess of writing.