James Robinson to Issue Statement on "Airboy" #2 Controversy

[Joker]

The thing ends with him stating that he didn't have a problem with the transgendered woman. I don't know why anyone's upset about that scene. I think that's a pretty trans positive scene, even if you didn't like the word used in it.

I also think it's dangerous to start censoring art, let alone censor it because you didn't like something in it. This wasn't a hate piece. It's all book burning at the end of the day, and that never made anything better or anyone smarter.

[RJT]

I didn't find the scene offensive, either. But I'm also a straight white American male born into the body of a straight white American male. I've grown up witnessing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of positive portrayals of straight white American men. I don't know how offensive I would find jokes at my expense if there had only been a positive portrayal of a straight white American man in a few issues of Batgirl, or one arc of Sandman. I can't imagine--and won't pretend to be able to--how the scene in Airboy would make me feel if I were transgendered. So what I'll probably do is refrain from comparing the possibly valid complaints of a still misunderstood and disenfranchised minority group to book burning or censorship and try and do what James Robinson and JM deMatteis have done and listen to those complaints with an open mind and try and learn something from them.

[Rene Narciso]

Seeing as I don;t think it needed an apology, I found it very heartfelt. I like to consider myself very liberal and progressive, and if someone tells me they identify as female, they're a girl to me. But I still don't think I could bring myself to have sex with a transgendered girl without it freaking me out. The fact that the character has no issues seeing her as a woman and making sweet bathroom stall mouth love to her makes him far more tolerant than I am IMO.

I think the main complaint is about the Airboy character, as he is shown to be freaking out completely when he discovers he is having sex with a trans woman, and how this is essentialy the "trans panic" defense that murderers have used in the past to justify killing trans people. I dunno, we gotta be honest, a lot of men in this situation would freak out at least a little. It isn't like the comic is showing Airboy getting violent after his discovery, is it? But I understand how the scene may be uncomfortable to trans people.

Also, I read complaints about the "Robinson" and "Hinkle" characters because they seem to need to be wasted to bring themselves to have sex with the trans women, and that they complain among themselves about being "reluctantly" attracted to the trans women. So it's another uncomfortable situation with straight guys in real life complaining about trans women being "too attractive" to them, and "forcing" them to doubt their own sexual orientations on account of that attraction.

And also the ever-present trope of trans people being depicted as sluts and exotic hookers, I guess.

So yeah, I understand the discomfort with the scene. But it's a strange situation, because there are a lot of other straight guys that would not use the word tranny or anything, and would be respectful to trans women, but would not want to have any sort of sexual contact. So are the protagonists more progressive than normal? Less progressive? I dunno. Complicated.

[Joker]

I didn't find the scene offensive, either. But I'm also a straight white American male born into the body of a straight white American male. I've grown up witnessing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of positive portrayals of straight white American men. I don't know how offensive I would find jokes at my expense if there had only been a positive portrayal of a straight white American man in a few issues of Batgirl, or one arc of Sandman. I can't imagine--and won't pretend to be able to--how the scene in Airboy would make me feel if I were transgendered. So what I'll probably do is refrain from comparing the possibly valid complaints of a still misunderstood and disenfranchised minority group to book burning or censorship and try and do what James Robinson and JM deMatteis have done and listen to those complaints with an open mind and try and learn something from them.

This is all really well said. I agree with shutting up and listening, and I'm not trying to negate the possibly very valid complaints or concerns. But this wasn't done as a hate piece, or intended to belittle anyone. Yet there were cries demanding that Image pull the issue, which I think is a step too far. I think context and intent matter, and I think that was ignored in favor of putting a comic book on blast for using an apparently harmful term.

By this standard, Southern Bastards' racist characters shouldn't speak accurately, because the words they'd use would be offensive. Is that really a line that we're interested in stepping over?

I applaud Robinson for listening, and apologizing, even if I'm not entirely sure he needed to. It was clearly the right thing to do.

[Turn the Page]

Robinson seemed pretty sincere and legit in his statement, he didn't mean any harm. This book definitely isn't for everybody, but I think Robinson handled the backlash really well seeing as he could have pulled a Remender "Hobo PIss" incident.

[RJT]

This is all really well said. I agree with shutting up and listening, and I'm not trying to negate the possibly very valid complaints or concerns. But this wasn't done as a hate piece, or intended to belittle anyone. Yet there were cries demanding that Image pull the issue, which I think is a step too far. I think context and intent matter, and I think that was ignored in favor of putting a comic book on blast for using an apparently harmful term.

By this standard, Southern Bastards' racist characters shouldn't speak accurately, because the words they'd use would be offensive. Is that really a line that we're interested in stepping over?

I applaud Robinson for listening, and apologizing, even if I'm not entirely sure he needed to. It was clearly the right thing to do.

Have there been complaints about the characters/language in Southern Bastards? I haven't heard of any, but if there has been I would like to think we should listen to those complaints as well. I don't know why listening to other points of view is a line we need to take care about crossing.

[ian0delond]

Also, I read complaints about the "Robinson" and "Hinkle" characters because they seem to need to be wasted to bring themselves to have sex with the trans women, and that they complain among themselves about being "reluctantly" attracted to the trans women. So it's another uncomfortable situation with straight guys in real life complaining about trans women being "too attractive" to them, and "forcing" them to doubt their own sexual orientations on account of that attraction.

They also need to be wasted to have sex with a cis gender woman believing the first issue.


Airboy does not even understand why men does not wear suits. Why the building are not decorative. Those even lead him to think Nazi won the war. That Robinson and Hinkle are evil stooges.
Everything existing in the ordinary world of everyone in a city such as San Francisco are hostile to him.

Robinson lies to Airboy about something even contemporary people can freak out about.
And yes he is pissed off when he discovers it.

But there is nothing here that apologies murder. Airboy is not mad about transgender people. He is never disrespectful about her, he even keeps calling her a lady when he screams at Robinson.
He is mad at Robinson to lie to him and behaving like a degenerate (I don't want to offense anyone, but some one who f people and take drug because it is just one of those days is not the mid 30's archetype Airboy would define as a respectable man).

I am actually angry against the Mary Sue article. Not because I am a white straight cis man that don't care about other people problems. But because reading those they seem to be immature responses to problematic that are not the one treated in the actual story. Then those responses don't look to solve the problems they dig out but are looking to avoiding them. I am not okay with people doing that under the appearance of any form of journalism.
I am especially thinking about the "the trans panic". As I said before trans panic is not the problem here. But it justify the to book to be especially abusive against trans gender minority. Then by digging out it, it makes an amalgame between Airboy's reaction with murder. Then conclude the article with a reminder about the suicide rate of this minority. I feel like the treatment of her case concluding to an abusive and deadly dangerous book is fallacious.

Murder and suicide leading abuses are never the point of the book. Those are what the complainer thought with her own reading of the book. Treating what her experience of the book and what the book is as one thing is wrong. Dangerously wrong, because such behavior are cause of miscommunication actually leading to real and serious prejudices.

[Rene Narciso]

Murder and suicide leading abuses are never the point of the book. Those are what the complainer thought with her own reading of the book. Treating what her experience of the book and what the book is as one thing is wrong. Dangerously wrong, because such behavior are cause of miscommunication actually leading to real and serious prejudices.

I agree with you. The book is sort of crass. Satires involving sex almost always are. But I don't think there is any hatred against trans people involved. I was just saying that those were the problems people perceived. Myself, I don't think those are big problems. I also think the link between Airboy's reaction and trans panic being used to justify murder is very, very thin.

Also, Robinson's apology was a class act.

[Joker]

Have there been complaints about the characters/language in Southern Bastards? I haven't heard of any, but if there has been I would like to think we should listen to those complaints as well. I don't know why listening to other points of view is a line we need to take care about crossing.

That's not what I said, or meant, but I think I'm done talking about this issue.

[RJT]

That's not what I said, or meant, but I think I'm done talking about this issue.

What did you mean then?

[Zeitgeist]

Gail Simone just tweeted out about this issue:

It panders to the worst people, the only people who find this funny are bigots, and they eat this stuff up. Is that who you want as readers?

Isn't that kind of reaction a skewing of the narrative though? The characters/comic isn't intended to pander to bigots, nor are their negative actions meant to be seen in a positive or rewarding light.

Can creators no longer hold a mirror up to society, warts and all?

[Joker]

What did you mean then?

I'm bowing out of this one. It's a more in depth and delicate conversation that I want to have online over a word in a comic book.

I think a lot of the backlash is overblown and I think Robinson is a class act for stopping, listening, and apologizing for offending anyone. That's all I've got at this point.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

Gail Simone just tweeted out about this issue:



Isn't that kind of reaction a skewing of the narrative though? The characters/comic isn't intended to pander to bigots, nor are their negative actions meant to be seen in a positive or rewarding light.

Can creators no longer hold a mirror up to society, warts and all?

I agree. I expect more of Simone than this sort of knee jerk, overly "politically correct" response. Comedy in particular has to be allowed room to stretch, to occasionally even offend for it to be at all effective. Jerry Seinfeld was complaining about this particular thing recently and, from what I've read, he's hardly the only one.

But what's really irritating is how this totally misrepresents what Robinson was doing here. He was not, in any shape or form, poking fun at any of the transsexual characters that appeared in these scenes. The butt of the joke was clearly and I do mean CLEARLY the Robinson and Heinkel characters and the unenlightened use of the word "tranny" was clearly just a reflection of this particular point. As for Airboy himself being grossed out by getting a BJ from a transsexual, again, this is clearly a reflection of his obviously old-fashioned point of view. More than that, while I'm all for respecting anyone from the LGBT community as people and, of course, for respecting their proclaimed sexual identity or persuasion, I don't quite understand why there's anything wrong with a straight man being, shall we say, turned off by having some sort of sexual encounter with a person that HE still sees as a man. Sexual persuasion is a large continuity and while it's reasonable to say that some straight men might be perfectly OK with having sex with a transgendered woman but that doesn't mean that all are - or, for that matter, if we are to respect the sexual persuasion of all people, should be expected to. Hell, the comic pretty much explicitly shows this in the different ways that Robinson and Airboy react to their situations.

But most of all, I'm just sickened by the idea that writers. artists and comedians aren't allowed to tackle subjects like sexuality and prejudice because a bunch of people who apparently seemingly didn't even bother to try and understand what they're actually saying, might get offended by something that very clearly IS NOT THERE and is so obviously not intended as harmful.

"Political correctness" is thrown around a lot as a dirty word and, more often than not, it's done so by people with whom I fundamentally disagree (members of the far-right), but this is a pretty clear case of political correctness running amok and hurting, rather than helping society. Really, we are only a hop, skip and jump away from real censorship here - and anyone who gives a crap about art being able to, as you say, "hold a mirror to society, warts and all" should understand just how dangerous such a path so obviously is.

[RJT]

As I said up thread, I'm not going to pretend I understand enough about transgenderism to know why this scene was offensive to some people in that community.
But I take with issue with the claim that this is in any way "dangerous" to art. There was a time when blackface was an acceptable form of comedy. Eventually public mores changed to the point that that kind of comedy was no longer acceptable and while I'm sure there were a share of people making similar claims at the time, the truth is that it not only did it not damage comedy, in fact the comedy artform got better. It got smarter. I'm not saying there is a causal link, but it is evidence that eliminating an offensive stereotype (several, actually...I'm sure someone has compiled a list of groups you can't make jokes about) doesn't really do any long term damage to the artform.

I have to believe that art exists as a form of communication between artist and audience. If there is something that is so offensive that it prevents them being able to communicate with a portion with their audience I don't think there is anything wrong with examining how integral the offensive portion is to the overall work. Someone earlier mentioned Southern Bastards and given the theme of the book the offensive language is probably necessary enough that Aaron and Latour might feel it's worth it to potentially alienate a portion of their audience. Robinson might not feel the same way about the transgender jokes in Airboy.

Also, transgender individuals have human brains, so you can probably stop trying to explain to them why the scene wasn't offensive. They understand the context of the scene and still found it offensive.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

As I said up thread, I'm not going to pretend I understand enough about transgenderism to know why this scene was offensive to some people in that community.
But I take with issue with the claim that this is in any way "dangerous" to art. There was a time when blackface was an acceptable form of comedy. Eventually public mores changed to the point that that kind of comedy was no longer acceptable and while I'm sure there were a share of people making similar claims at the time, the truth is that it not only did it not damage comedy, in fact the comedy artform got better. It got smarter. I'm not saying there is a causal link, but it is evidence that eliminating an offensive stereotype (several, actually...I'm sure someone has compiled a list of groups you can't make jokes about) doesn't really do any long term damage to the artform.

I have to believe that art exists as a form of communication between artist and audience. If there is something that is so offensive that it prevents them being able to communicate with a portion with their audience I don't think there is anything wrong with examining how integral the offensive portion is to the overall work. Someone earlier mentioned Southern Bastards and given the theme of the book the offensive language is probably necessary enough that Aaron and Latour might feel it's worth it to potentially alienate a portion of their audience. Robinson might not feel the same way about the transgender jokes in Airboy.

Also, transgender individuals have human brains, so you can probably stop trying to explain to them why the scene wasn't offensive. They understand the context of the scene and still found it offensive.

Of course, they have "human brains". As I said in a post before, I understand why they might be offended but that doesn't make them right. To put it this way, it is very, very clear that because of the prejudices against them transgender individuals are incredibly sensitive to how they are portrayed by other people and in the media. This is very, very understandable. However, because their whole transgendered identity is such a sensitive issue to them - and, again, it's easy to understand why - it's inevitable that they will see offense in something that was neither meant to be offensive nor can it actually be construed as offensive if you actually take a step back and actually look at the "offending material" in context and without that raw nerve exposed, it is pretty clearly nothing of the sort.

Now, of course, you might say that because transgenders are, at this point in time, so sensitive to how they're portrayed, artists and writers need to be extra careful not to do anything that might conceivably or inconceivably offend them. But is this really fair on the artist? Because of personal experiences - be it dealing with gender identity, a death in the family or previous traumatic events - different people will react very differently to different works of art; some very, very badly. However - and this is the point - if any given artist is supposed to back away from anything that might potentially, possibly, maybe offend someone then their work will invariably suffer tremendously by overly vigilant self-censorship or worse, overly vigilant censorship from others. And again, this becomes especially fatal a flaw when dealing with works that are supposed to be funny.

As for the black face comparison, it is an interesting one. But there is, I think a line between something that is as purposely malicious as "black face" and, say, making fun of black people in a way that many beloved comedians do. For another example, as a Jew, I am very sensitive to anti-semitism but I understand that there is a huge difference between, say, the ranting and ravings of Mel Gibson (or, sadly at this point it seems, Roger Waters) and those lame Jewish jokes that Trevor Noah made on Twitter that caused a huge controversy for some unknown reason or, for that matter, South Park making fun of its Jewish characters. Context and intent are crucial in these matters and I'm sorry but I do think that the inevitable extremely high sensitivity of some of these transgender readers meant that they were unable to really see the context and intent of what James Robinson was doing. I hope this doesn't come across as patronizing towards transgendered people but the point is simply that people don't always react logically and are often influences by their own biases, insecurities, sensitivities and situations.

But trying to take into consideration all these different variables about all the different potential consumers are the piece of art is not the responsibility of the artist. Yes, an artist should be conscious of the repercussions of their art, while staying true to their own conscience, but there are limits to how much we can expect from them before such trains of thought lead to an utter paralysis in their ability to actually express what they want to express. Again, especially in the case of comedy, which is so reliant on pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable.