Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Why I'll never buy any comic with Tony Harris name on it.

Because I refuse to buy shit drawn by a misogynistic asshole.

Kids, this is what an asshole looks like.
Credit: The Bird and The Bat.
Tony Harris is the artist who drew amongst other things, Ex Machina series for Image, which is unfortunate, because now I will never buy the trades. I could make a long winded post about how people like Harris are killing the geek/nerd subculture with this exclusionary bullshit and misogyny towards women in general and women new to the subculture specifically, but instead, I'm just going to quote from and link to an excellent post made by John Scalzi earlier this year.
Who gets to be a geek?

Anyone who wants to be, any way they want to be one.

Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it. There are lit geeks, media geeks, comics geeks, anime and manga geeks. There are LARPers, cosplayers, furries, filkers, crafters, gamers and tabletoppers. There are goths and horror geeks and steampunkers and academics. There are nerd rockers and writers and artists and actors and fans. Some people love only one thing. Some people flit between fandoms. Some people are positively poly in their geek enthusiasms. Some people have been in geekdom since before they knew they were geeks. Some people are n00bs, trying out an aspect of geekdom to see if it fits. If it does, great. If it doesn’t then at least they tried it.

Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.”

Any jerk can love a thing. It’s the sharing that makes geekdom awesome.
I'll admit that used to have a bias against what I saw as "faux-geeks and nerds", but you know what? I got over it. If someone wants to call themselves a comic book geek, but only reads Deadpool or Avengers Academy, who cares? At least they're reading comics. If a woman likes dressing up at a comic book character, even if they have nothing but a brief familiarity with that character, then who cares? Maybe it'll pique their or someone else's curiosity in that character and they'll start reading the comics, thus giving the industry what it desperately needs - new blood. I mean, is it really killing anybody to see women cosplaying as Harley Quinn, Captain Marvel, Maria Hill, or what have you? I didn't think so.

Tony Harris and his ilk need to crawl back into their fucking dank holes with the other sexists and not come out until they learn to respect women period.

h/t rraaaarrl.

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