Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain: The Love Canal Girls

Can comic book characters become toxic?  I'm not sure if they can, but I certainly know those lovable, laugh-a-minute kids at DC love to stir up all sorts of comical trouble!  First the irrepressible scamps went all over town posting charmingly misspelled homemade posters trumpeting the appearance of a version of long-neglected fave Stephanie Brown as Nightwing in their Smallville Season 11 comic, which they planned to print on a jury-rigged press down at their dilapidated clubhouse.

Then Butch and his henchman the Woim gummed up the works with a lot of mean-spirited pranks, causing the darling ragamuffins who run DC to canter away in their mule-drawn taxi cab with its goose-powered horn, shouting over their threadbare sweater-clad shoulders, "Oops, sorry.  That's not Stephanie Brown, isn't gonna be Stephanie Brown.  It's Barbara Gordon instead!"

Given their record with female characters in general and with Stephanie Brown and her fans in particular, the DC people had to know replacing even an alternate universe version of Steph with an alternate universe Barbara Gordon-- the regular version of the latter having already supplanted the regular universe version of the former-- wouldn't go over too well.*  And it hasn't!

But the gang at DC are a group of never-say-die youngsters who just can't keep out of mischief!  Whether it's crashing some hoity-toity catered charity affair and embroiling a lot of stuffed-shirt types in a massive food fight or rebooting their entire universe for the umpteenth time because they've run out of original ideas while denying it's a reboot, you can be sure of sidesplitting laughter and tear-jerking moments of pure sentiment when the latest Our DC Gang short comes to your local theater! 

Here's where it gets surreal.   Corinna Lawson, senior editor at Geekmom over at Wired, says sources tell her it's because Steph and her pal Cassandra Cain are considered "toxic" in the DC offices.  At practically the same time, a writer going by the name LOLtron over at The Outhouse quoted similar sources-- multiple this time-- one of whom is quoted directly as saying, "Toxic?  Yup, that about sums it up."

While I find anonymous sources suspect and toxic might be just a buzz word, it might be true.  Both characters have easily roused fans who feel slighted by DC's treatment of them, including me.  Maybe Dan Didio or Jim Lee or someone else at DC just said, "To hell with it.  Using these two is thankless."  This might be especially true of Stephanie Brown.  Her death and DC's bizarre refusal to acknowledge her importance in the family of books in which she appeared inspired a website protest movement, and her fans and others were disturbed just last year when DC shunted her aside in favor of putting Barbara Gordon back in the Batgirl costume, a move that also alienated a lot of fans of Barbara's previous identity as the Oracle.  Lots of baggage there, lots of hurt feelings that are still pretty raw.  People are convinced certain elements at DC have it in for Stephanie, and not without some justification.

Supporting the idea DC doesn't want either Steph or Cass in their books anymore, perhaps inadvertently, is a Tumblr post by Batgirl writer Gail Simone, a straight shooter, who chimed in with the insider info the switch came because Smallville Season 11 writer Bryan Q. Miller, a nice guy who earned Steph-fan gratitude by writing her own Batgirl series was asked to use someone other than Stephanie Brown.  Was asked.  That says someone made a conscious decision to kick this hornet's nest again.  Perhaps in emulation of a recent movie based on another movie adapted from a best-selling line of books.  Comic book companies love to imitate success!  Hence Smallville Season 11 in the first place, DC's version of Dark Horse's popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer continuation.

Simone, of course, didn't address toxicity or reference-- to use another phrase I read about Steph, Cass and the lack of certain others from the DC narrative-- their having been "benched."  As in Cass and Steph have been deliberately benched, along with those other unfortunates.  Unlike people who speak without using their names and titles, Simone is definitely too smart and probably too discreet to let something like that slip even if it is true, and I wouldn't blame her.

On the other hand, if these anonymous ones are telling the truth and toxicity is the DC policy towards Steph and Cass, that would make it more than a little strange DC would let Scott Snyder say, "We talk about where in the stories they're going to show up" at one of their roundtables as recently at their panel at C2E2 as recently as last April.  And the extended, remixed version:  "They are characters that we love too, we talk a lot about using them.  We want to bring them back in a way that really matters.  They're on the table, we promise we want to use them as well."   Oh, and I was sure at one time I  heard no less a DC personage than Grant Morrison promised Cass would be back in the New 52 Card Pick Up or whatever it's called, but all I can find to confirm that are old comments from people saying they also heard the same thing.  In 2011, apparently.   Something more recent with a direct quote might have been more reassuring.

You'd think everyone there would be instructed to stay on message and not make promises, vague or otherwise.  You know, if DC really has no plans to use them, Snyder or someone could just say, "Sorry, we don't have any plans to use them at this time."  People get upset at that kind of bad news, but a lot less so than they do when they feel a company has deliberately screwed them over.  And in this easily avoidable case, there's no way for Steph fans to feel otherwise.

Whether the put-upon duo has been declared toxic or are still viable, this whole thing just seems odd to me.  Maybe I lack a true insider's frame of reference or mindset, but I'm just thinking how easy it would be just to throw Steph and Cass back into the mix.  It's not as if other changes to these characters required any creative heavy lifting in the past.  Just re-set Cass to her silent super-dangerous former glory while still calling her Black Bat and tell us in the New 52 she never was a Batgirl-- and finally ditch all those nasty lingering elements from her bad old days.  They turned her villainous, brought her back, had her quit being Batgirl in ludicrously off-hand ways, so why stick at this one like it's some kind of quest for the Unified Field Theory?**

On the other hand, I'm not sure how Steph fans would react to bringing her back as Spoiler minus her Batgirl stint.  Since they were so excited about even a fake-Steph outside the regular continuity and with only loose ties to the version they truly love, maybe they would accept this as well as long as the writers wrote her in a dignified way.  I'd hope so, anyway.  Considering the alternative, it certainly seems preferable.

Whether all this will translate into lower sales for DC's other comics, the current Batgirl title or Smallville Season 11 remains to be seen.  I doubt it.  Smallville's got this digital first print thing and should have a lot of appeal to fans of the TV show, which I never got into.  I just remember a number of them demanding Bryan Singer-- hey, another Bryan-- cast the show's star in his eventual dud Superman Returns.***  DC's probably counting on them to jump all over this book from their home computers and iPads or whatever the heck it is people read comic books on these days.

And as far as the dedicated comic book readers go, from what I gather, while there are some people giving up on DC, other people irked by the switcheroo are still going to buy DC titles featuring other characters they like or written and drawn by creators they want to support, so any negative impact on DC's bottom line, the true arbiter of toxicity, will be negligible.  DC's actually going to make money off the whole thing.  So the end result is, the small vocal core of fans truly upset by these events, or non-events, the ones eating waffles, will just have to get used to this new reality.  One where a character they care about simply does not exist for an indefinite period.  Perhaps permanently.

 The Outhousers have dubbed the easily avoidable Smallville fiasco "Stephgate."  Do you think it's likely we'll get an announcement from DC directly addressing Toxicgate?  I'm not exactly waiting around for the press release.  We'll probably see a book called BFFs:  The Adventures of Steph and Cass before that happens.

*God, how I love funny books!
**Unless, of course, you really don't have plans to use her again.  For whatever reason.
***That was on the IMDB message boards, and I'd sooner say "Bloody Mary" three times in a mirror at midnight than link to that here and risk calling down that hell.

I'm not surprised by DC's Nielsen survey results because I live backwards in time, kind of like T.H. White's Merlyn...

DC's big reboot brought readers a-flockin' to the banner-- but mostly people who already read comics.  Those elusive brand new readers continued to shun superheroes the way financial success does me.  That's pretty much what I predicted would happen way back  in June, 2011.  Remember?  No?  Luckily for you, I do!  I remember everything because I'm a wizard.  Allow me to educate you by turning you variously into different types of furry animals, birds, insects and fish.



People describing themselves as "avid fans" seemed to love the new DC, accounting for 70% of the sales.  "Lapsed readers" like it, too, making up "a quarter of in store consumers."  But new readers make up a whopping 5% of the buyers.  And most of these are guys.  Women seem to have stayed away in droves.  But then when you step back, most people of whatever gender tend to do that when it comes to comics.

Here's what really interests me in the discussion about this survey:  while reporting a 1% drop in female readership, the DC Women Kicking Ass blog got another one of those "leave DC alone!" type comments from someone claiming women are nothing more than a niche market hardly worth DC's while to approach.  The comments in response to that genius are worth a read, especially when yet another person chimes in to reiterate it.  It's like certain comic book guys go to some kind of school to learn how to miss the point.

The idea is to appeal to as many people as possible.  Because, face it, tiger, comic book readers themselves are the niche market the way things stand.  Everyone else seems to have something better to do with their time.  Or so they think, and nothing DC's tried so far-- or Marvel, for that matter-- has done anything to change this.  You know-- the endless reboots, taking heroic characters and thrusting them into nihilistic stories, the casual misogyny, the massive multi-part stories that undermine any forward momentum the individual monthlies might have, the deaths and rebirths and creative team shuffling.

Nothing really seems to appeal to the general public, of which somewhere around half are women.  Which boggles the mind when movies starring superhero characters are all the rage at the box office.  People in general seem to like Superman and Batman in the talkies, but don't want anything to do with them on the printed page or even in digital form-- which, according to this survey, hasn't turned into either the industry's savior or the death knell of paper and ink-- just the most recent iteration of the infamous chromium-covered variant edition of the regular printed edition for people obsessive enough to need multiple versions of the exact same thing.

What's to be done?  Well, trying something new, some heretofore unseen strategy-- whatever that might be-- could possibly help.  But you know what never will, kid?

Yelling at the girls to keep their icky cooties out of your super-secret he-man boys-only tree fort.

My guess is DC would love to have a vast new readership even if that means losing people like you and the other people who endlessly shift their loyalty from book to book depending on whatever's trending that month.  But you know what?  After reading about this survey, I think you'd probably still buy comics even if they were suddenly colored a gross-out pink and dolled up in ribbons and lace and Batman and Superman started doing a bunch of sissy stuff like talking about their feelings and spending all their time-- ewwwwww-- kissing their girlfriends!  Who probably also have icky cooties, no doubt!

You're a comic book fan!  Buying comics is what you, almost exclusively among your fellow citizens, do!  And to be honest, I don't see those vast new audiences ever showing up to buy comics, so your furtive little hobby is safe in all its sexist glory, buddy.  You did it!  You defeated the fangirls.  Enjoy.  Enjoy the onanistic pleasure of double-bagging your superhero comics in monastic solitude.

Weirdly, over here in Japan, where comic sales are slumping, the reverse is true.  It's hard to throw a rock without hitting a comic book reader.  Let's leave aside the Nielsen survey and some sticky questions about its validity and methodology-- which actually I think are beside the point if DC commissioned it and plans on relying on its data-- let's look at some other numbers.  The top selling Japanese title vastly outperformed the top American book.

I'm talking One Piece, an international sales juggernaut of epic proportions, versus Justice League.  One Piece sold 37,996,373 copies in 2011.  That's just in Japan.  DC's Justice League of America sold in the 40,000-50,000 range before it spiked to 180, 709 in September for its second issue after DC chopped off the geographical signifier and entitled it simply Justice League as part of their New 52.  In total, it sold 1,026,441 copies during all of 2011.  To get this figure, I added all the Justice League of Americas and Justice Leagues, including the second month sales of Justice League #1, but I don't know anything about math.  It was never my good subject.



Still, even if I left out a few or a lot we're not anywhere near One Piece's numbers and we live in a world where more people care about what happens to Monkey D. Luffy than to Clark Kent.  If you want to be a stickler, feel free to add things up yourself and toss in Justice League International, Justice League Dark, various Justice League-related trade collections and possibly Marvel's top selling book as well. See how many American titles it takes to equal One Piece.

Look at it this way:  Japan's population is 127, 450,460.  Just over a third of them bought One Piece.  If I ride the train here tomorrow and look at the person sitting on my left and the person sitting on my right, there's a pretty good chance one of them has read One Piece.  How niche-y do you feel now?  Think DC wouldn't love to figure out a way to push their books on a third of the North American population?  Think Time-Warner, Inc. and its stockholders wouldn't love that?

Any strategy that involves concentrating on a very few declining readers while ignoring new markets isn't one that's very viable for the long term.  My palliative-- which is all it can ever be because I really don't think those readers are out there-- is always tell better stories, with better art.  Care more about the characters than the events.  Give books time to grow their readership without involving them in crossover events.  Experiment with genres.  Scout for and cultivate new talent from unexpected places.  These things would bring me back as a regular reader to DC (as opposed to sporadic whenever I go on a jag related to one character or another), but I'm not sure any of that would work for a wider audience because the days of kids riding their bikes to the convenience store to find a spinner rack of brightly colored fun are long gone.  These days they ride their virtual robots to the virtual battlefield to shoot virtual bullets at each other online.  Or something that seems like some kind of horrifying magic to my Neanderthal mind.  Everybody else is too busy voting for American Idol or whatever it is people do.

Gail Simone, however, dissents.  She's pretty sure there's something fishy about these Nielsen numbers.  Hey, she may be right.  I hope she is.  But whatever, I'll keep finding ways to entertain myself over here in my own little niche.

From DC Women Kicking Ass: J. Bone’s cover for Retroactive: Wonder Woman the 70s

J. Bone’s cover for Retroactive: Wonder Woman the 70s

It's pretty sweet. Very Mike Sekowsky-esque. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd swear it was an actual cover from the 1970s. There are few comics I love more than DC's gorgeous books from that era, from the late 60s into the mid 70s when you might find Sekowsky, Alex Toth, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson, Mike Wm. Kaluta, Gray Morrow and even Wally Wood and Al Williamson on occasion handling the art. With Joe Kubert covers to Russ Heath illustrated stories starring Sgt. Rock. Oh, and a fairly well-known guy by the name of Jack Kirby writing and drawing a few titles. A Nick Cardy cover, a Gil Kane 8-pager, a Sergio Aragones gag strip, Curt Swan drawing Superman. Horror, superheroes, romance, Westerns, sports.

It's not nostalgia. You're not indulging in nostalgia when you look at Picasso or listen to Mozart. Those comics weren't awesome. They ARE awesome.

Give Cassandra Cain a mulligan: I second that emotion!

A mulligan. Not a mullet. I did a little "who's reading my crappy comics blog" search today and found that way back in November of last year, DC Women Kicking Ass linked to an entry I wrote about DC's big plans for Cassandra Cain in 2010. Wow, DCWKA, we see how well that turned out, eh?

Thanks to that link, I found this essay, where the same author runs down all the various re-bootings and re-startings of different charactes DC has tried over the years and applies that argument in favor of giving Cassandra Cain the same treatment. A mulligan. A do-over. I don't have anything to add other than to agree wholeheartedly. Get on it, DC!

This is a CBS News Special Report: Perhaps they have. This reporter just learned (several weeks behind the news curve) writer Scott Snyder will feature Cassandra Cain in the first issue of his Gates of Gotham miniseries. Which Cass will show up? The talkative, mopey one from the past few years courtesy of Adam Beechen... or the taciturn, ass-kicking one from the recent Red Robin #17? Will Snyder dump all the nonsensical "I wanna be a normal girl" emotional baggage writers (Beechen again) have had Cass lugging around in favor of the stripped-down fighting machine we're all hoping for?

Looks like we'll find out in May!