Also, obviously Amazigirl needs to keep being a superhero. You can’t just go to all the trouble of training your vocal cords to always talk in blue and not follow through on the crime fighting.
“I’m from the Office of Redundant Redundancy, and it has come to our attention that your redundant comment about the redundacy of the previously redundancy comments about redundancy, has not yet reached the critical level of redundancy to be considered a redundant comment, with all redundant factors figured in, your current comment cannot be considered sufficiently redundant. So, carry on… Or, would that be redundant as well..?”
Okay barely related but now I’m wishing walky dressed up as Might Guy for Halloween since it’s a neighboring letter off from night guy. Im not even a Naruto fan i actively dislike it, it just would’ve been really funny
“I’m from the Office of Redundant Redundancy, and it has come to our attention that your redundant comment about the redundacy of the previously redundancy comments about redundancy, has not yet reached the critical level of redundancy to be considered a redundant comment, with all redundant factors figured in, your current comment cannot be considered sufficiently redundant. So, carry on… Or, would that be redundant as well..?”
“Just so the message is clear, I’m from the Office of Redundant Redundancy, and it has come to our attention that your redundant comment about the redundacy of the previously redundancy comments about redundancy, has not yet reached the critical level of redundancy to be considered a redundant comment, with all redundant factors figured in, your current comment cannot be considered sufficiently redundant. So, carry on… Or, would that be redundant as well..?”
No, ewe are just feeling Baaahhhdd.
And I really wouldn’t want to pull the wool over your eyes on this one.
Whoops! I’ve been noticed!
I’d better take it on the lamb, and get the flock out of here!!!
Yep. And even if you leave the Church, the Church never completely leaves you. (I was raised Catholic, 35 years out of the Church, I’m still Culturally Catholic.)
I read something from an American writer in italy who was asked if he was Protestant or Catholic. He answered he was an atheist. “Yes, but are a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” (Personally, I’m a Catholic atheist.)
I mean, Lewis had his period of atheism, that Tolkein played a major part of pulling him out of/bringing him back to Christianity, though I believe Tolkein hoped Lewis would join the Roman Catholic Church rather than go back to Church of England. But Tolkein, to my understanding, always was Roman Catholic and never went atheist. And I mean (understandably) really old guard Catholic. I read that after Vatican II (where the church went from forcing Latin on everything but the Bible readings and sermons), he’d embarrassed his grandson by loudly responding in Latin to the the English/”vulgate” prompting in the ceremony.
The version of that story I heard is that he was in Ireland, which makes more sense to me because of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants there.
You are correct! While Catholicism is indeed a belief system, Judaism is an ethnoreligion. This means that you can be culturally/ethnically Jewish, religiously Jewish, or both! There are plenty of people who identify as Jewish without practicing Judaism, which usually means that they have Jewish heritage. Dorothy seems to be one of those people! Hope that helps. 🙂
-Your friendly neighborhood Jew
Indeed.
I, for example, had a ethnically and religiously Jewish grandmother who married a Catholic and religiously converted. And while my father was raised Catholic and went Atheist (as often happens), it is my Jewish heritage that my father identifies with even though his mother was actively pretending not to be Jewish.
I, meanwhile, eschewed it all and declared myself pagan.
To be honest, there’s always fuzzy line between religion and ethnicity. More so in Judaism, but in others as well. Especially for groups that were underprivileged minorities. Which long included Catholics in the US.
One of my personal, pet anthropological theories is that religion is really just codified culture; it’s just a bit more confident about itself than a culture is. Like, a culture will say that eating eggs commemorates the moon god, or whatever, but a religion will say that commemorating the moon god is important, so you should eat eggs. And while a culture might look down on you and shame you for not eating those eggs, a religion might imply that you’re going to The Bad Place for the lack of egg-eating.
A lot of the differences end up feeling like hair-splitting, is what I’m saying. Christianity (and Islam) being cross-cultural religions is something of an innovation (and interestingly probably rhymes well with the Roman imperial religion, in that it syncretizes with but also colonialised indigenous religion; there’s a lot of theory-of-empire stuff mixed in there, too, like core-and-fringe demarcations or what not).
No and yes. Heritage, family obligation, traditions, plus if you were raised Catholic and especially baptized, the church considers you always Catholic. It’s more or less the same with most denominations, excluding some Calvinism. But the Catholics are pretty adamant about it, they call former Catholics “lapsed Catholics”, a presumption they’re still Catholic.
That’s not Dorothy’s case, she’s just ethnically Irish Catholic, iirc.
The simplest way to put it is that the Jews are an ethnic group, a nation. They have a really old religion called Judaism, whether or any individual puts faith in it, they usually consider it to be an integral part of their cultural heritage.
My understanding is that Catholicism can make a major imprint on someone’s sense of a cultural background, but it’s not actually ethnic. The word Catholic actually means something like “universal” or “global”, its adherents consider it to be a faith for the whole world.
Also, “putting faith in it” is a uniquely Christian framing — your religious identity being based on your personal beliefs is Christianity’s biggest contribution to religious thought.
One’s Judaism isn’t based on belief, it’s based on heritage, identity, and actions. There are tons of Jewish atheists, who are religious because we are members of the tribe (identity) and are practicing the religion in community (actions). Jewish atheists aren’t a problem for us.
We haven’t seen Dorothy doing anything Jewish, but she retains the identity.
Derry Girls where Catholic and Protestant students are supposed to be listing things they have in common and they end up listing stereotypes of each other instead. And one is that Catholics like statues, then Sister Michael’s all “that one’s true, I love a good statue”
I worked at a Catholic publisher in my younger days, and I remember it being a pretty big thing that people considered themselves culturally Catholic while being nonpracticing. There were whole books about it.
(Fun but unrelated fact about my days at a Catholic publisher. It was named “Crossroads” and we got a surprising number of Crossword submissions, I assume from people who saw the word cross and stopped there)
I’m not Catholic, but my dad was raised, his side mostly is, and my sister married a non-practicing Catholic guy.
What was explained to me – which might be completely off-base – was that if you’re baptized Catholic, to the Catholic church, you’re Catholic. You’ve already got your foot in the door to heaven. Then, just don’t commit any mortal sins, and if you can, get those last rites before you die, and you’re good; otherwise, you might be waiting in Purgatory for a little while.
Ex-Catholic sounds to me like “I was raised in this but I don’t believe in it anymore.” Non-practicing Catholic sounds like “I’m basically agnostic but I’ve got this insurance policy just in case I’m wrong.”
Religions are belief systems, but from a sociological perspective, are also cultures interwoven into larger society. America as a whole contains people of all belief systems, but it is quite obviously far more culturally influenced by Christianity than, say, Hellenism. The phrase “America is a Christian nation” is *sociologically* true (to an extent; America is a complex place), though not in the way American conservatives *say* it is, since they mean it *prescriptively*.
So while Dorothy may not be a believer in Catholicism, if she grew up in a family that was, it’s accurate enough to describe herself as one in this context.
And the US is much less culturally any one particular religion, since it’s a country of immigrants who brought different religions with them. In Europe, up until pretty recently in historical terms, even Protestant denominations were largely national state religions.
I think cultural Catholicism without belief is way more of a thing than with other Christian denominations. Based on observation through the Internet and media at least, Catholicism is barely a thing where I live lol.
I follow a YouTuber who’s Catholic upbringing factors into his analysis of stuff. He calls himself a professional lapsed Catholic. A prolapsed Catholic, if you will. (Flaw peacock if anyone knows him)
Super heroes are arguably just appropriations of older folk tales and heroes anyway. Robinhood, King Arthur, Beowulf. Hell it’s pretty much common knowledge Batman was inspired by Zoro. How deep we wanna go with the appropriation guilt?
Why can’t we forget about “cultural appropriation?” If cultures don’t mix, they stagnate. Cultural mixing appears in all American art, especially music, but even in cartooning. American cartooning is now heavily influenced by Japanese comic art, which is apparent even in DOA, and more so in Questionable Content.
Oh, wait. Will you tell me there’s a difference between mixing and appropriation? As far as I can tell, it’s mixing when one approves of it, and appropriation when one doesn’t. I call bullshit on such a distinction.
I don’t think anyone thinks either of those things when he borrows from other culture. If I were to put on a Sioux war bonnet–which I never have–it would be because I thought it was cool, not because I’d think, “this is mine” etc.
There’s also an element of how you present the thing you’ve “borrowed” from another culture, and a question of whether people of that culture have a history of being mocked or oppressed for that very thing.
If you think a Sioux war bonnet is cool, and you’re walking around with it, and a white American tells you, “hey cool hat”, will you take a photo with them, post it online, and brag about how great your hat is and how many compliments you get on it, maybe even open your own store of hats in that style branded with your youtube channel? Or will you say “thanks, it’s actually from the Sioux culture, you should check out the history / go to this Sioux-owned shop to buy one”? Obviously most people will just say “thanks” for the compliment and move on, but a small nod to the culture of origin is better. And you can probably see how the first response would be appropriating. I personally think people online like to call “cultural appropriation” *way* too often, but I have unfortunately seen instances of the first example and imo that’s Not Cool.
It is appropriation when dominant cultures exploit marginalized cultures, turning a profit while leaving their inspiration marginalized. That should not be forgotten.
there’s a lot of antisemitism in the name of opposing antisemitism too. John Hagee speaking at the same event as congressional leaders that was supposedly to oppose antisemitism was a big tip-off. Like Jewish Voice for Peace gets defamed as antisemites constantly. The first tenured professor to be fired for supporting Palestinians’ rights is Jewish, and was fired by a Lutheran college. Jewish people are be punished by non-Jews for not having dual loyalty.
Honestly, I think all of this cultural copyrighting is a little ridiculous. Ultimately there isn’t a single idea nowadays that hasn’t been done exactly before or isn’t a combination of existing ideas. The idea that superheroes belong to a particular culture simply because some of the individuals who pioneered the aspects of superheroes that define the trope today belonged to that culture is laughable. What’s even more laughable and/or repugnant is that certain cultures deserve more protection from this “idea appropriation” than others simply due to how prevalent the cultures are.
My point wasn’t really that appropriation itself doesn’t matter just that any percieved guilt from Amber was likely misplaced because even superheroes were inspired by other folk heroes and myths and legends. I have been educated in this very thread that Batman who AG pulls heavily from was created by Jewish men even as his gimmicks were inspired by others, which was kind of my point. That shouldn’t however take away from the impact of the Jewish origins in creating a modern interpretation of what we think superheroes are.
But much like my culture of black people and their contributions to music, `appropriating the Jewish contribution to super heroes isn’t bad as long as we know the origins and respect it. No one’s calling out AG for stealing superheroes gimmicks but it can be done offensively. I recently think of this Israeli superhero the Iron Dome.
Admittedly I’m not sure where this fits on the appropriation debate. But it does seem like it can be done wrong or be an antithesis of the origins of the creators intent.
Culture is (collective) intellectual property, so it can’t really be “stolen”: A still has all of its culture while B now also practices some parts of it. I don’t see “appropriation” unless B somehow prevents A from performing a culture fragment that B has adopted from A.
I think the idea also includes concern about stolen money (types of copyright or trademark infringement) and/or miseducation to others (incorrectly popularizing wrong information and preventing the correct information from getting known).
Batman is actually likely to be mostly inspired by The Shadow, although I wouldn’t doubt Zorro fits in there somewhere. But Bats only gets shuffled in with the “Super Heroes” retroactively, he’s really more like a themed vigilante/detective, the basic concept for Super Heroes is the super-powers, that pretty decisively starts with Superman. Supes has his own lineage of various inspirations, but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster get well earned credit for constructing the formula.
Good points. I only really mentioned Batman because that’s the hero Amazi-Girl most rips off for her super hero appropriation. I’m not sure where the line between pulp detective/vigilante to superhero truly is, just that AG’s brand of masked justice likely isn’t infringing on the Jewish origins of supes unless she starts flying.
Oh, I should mention for the record that Bill Finger and Bob Kane (creators of b-man) were also definitely Jewish, early comics is loaded with my tribe.
>Batman is actually likely to be mostly inspired by The Shadow, although I wouldn’t doubt Zorro fits in there somewhere.
As a big fan of Zorro, I will say that the 1920 movie with Douglas Fairbanks basically invented both Clark Kenting *and* Bruce Wayning years before Kent or Wayne even existed.
Yeah, the “foppish aristocrat / masked crime-fighter” thing starts with the Pimpernel, who spawned several imitators, many of whom have been mentioned already in this subthread.
Depends on how specific you want to get. In the original works he is a master of disguise and may have worn masks at time, but not a specific, distinctive mask.
So, do we want to be indignant that a female creator is not better recognized for her contribution, or humbled by the realization that an aristocrat contributed something of value?
I mean, on one hand, her grandfather was an accomplished knight of the St. George order, her father composed classical and operatic music, and she came up with ideas about the masked man rescuing people from mortal danger in dramatic and operatic fashion.
On the other hand, she was an aristocrat born into privilege, her family moved to get away from a growing peasant revolt, and she wrote the Scarlet Pimpernel character to rescue aristocrats from the guillotine executions.
So a clear mix of both good and bad traits, from our modern non-upper class viewpoints.
Pulp magazine standards such as Doc Savage, Conan the Barbarian and Fu Manchu fit in there somewhere as well. Of course, they normally didn’t wear masks…
What? Are you suggesting that Bruce Wayne’s decision to wear a mask, name himself after an animal and fight crime in secret is inspired by seeing the Mark of Zorro five minutes before his parents died?
While it was added to the canon later, I believe it’s fairly standard that the Wayne family was returning home from a Zorro movie on the night T&M were murdered, so the influence is fairly recognized I think.
If we can agree on Superman beijg the first iteration of what we today consider to be the superhero-genre (cosume+superpowers+heroics and adventure, etc.). Then it (the origin) is more based on Moses than any of those examples. In other words, two jewish men created a modernised version of a jewish myth. And the result resonated with a lot of people in the world.
As a Jew, while the term, most big-name individuals, and the specific motif of modern “superheroes” as caped/costumed crusaders and what-not were mostly invented by Jews, superheroes are an American mythos – not a specifically-Jewish one. It is, in no uncertain terms, entirely kosher for anyone of any race creed culture or what-have-you to write/be superheroes, and the only context in which Jews need to be considered when it comes to superheroes is when acknowledging who made the characters that resulted in the concept being popularized.
At some point the whole toxic copyright law concept of “all intellectual creation must be purely original and no one can have outside artistic influences and also the creator then wholly owns it effectively forever and no one else is allowed to be influenced by it” found its way into social justice thinking. Putting a mask and a cape on a hero is racism, just like putting shorts on a mouse is theft.
Putting a mask and cape on a hero is theater. Putting shorts on a mouse is getting ahead of that portion of the public who turn viewing-with-alarm into a competitive sport.
This is a very interesting point to bring up. And correct in many ways.
Considering the invention (if we agree on Superman being the original iteration of what we now consider to be the genre) was made by jewish people, but then quickly turned into corporate control of the resulting capital. The way that the superhero-genre of today is driven, and shaped, mainly by IP-control and commercial interest, viewing writers and creators as exchangeable pieces carrying the corporate interest forward through times and generations, feels very USA-y :O
How many years were the estates of Siegal/Schuster fighting for ANY recompense and acknowledgement of their creation of the now-corporate-owned IP? It was only recently that a court ruled that Marvel/DC do not own copyright on the word “superhero.”
You know, whoever came up with the nomenclature for those types of carvings — I’d say they got it wrong. “Grotesques” should be the ones with rainspouts, and “gargoyles” as the figures without.
“Gary… I’ve been meaning to ask, but… *why* do you have a rain spout coming out of your mouth?”
[Gary mutters unintelligibly]
“That’s just grotesque, man. Why can’t you just act like us normal gargoyles?”
I guess because it gargles or gurgles water. So they are not just regular grotesque they are your dad gargling mouthwash in his moth-eaten underwear grotesque.
Comic superhero-ing is pretty Jewish, yeah, though you do also get Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, and The Golden Bat blurring the lines on this, since a lot of the tropes that’d be used by Jack Kirby, Carl Burgos, etc, was in use before they entered the scene.
That being said, I still get where Amazi-Girl is coming from here, that what she’s doing obviously draws a lot from specifically Jewish-created comic heroes.
…ARE superheroes a distinctly Jewish thing though?
I mean, if we’re talking specifically the “Men in Tights” then that’s like… Action Comics, I think.
If we’re talking the concept of brooding people with powers beyond standard mortals… Well, Gilgamesh just had another chapter from the oldest recorded human story uncovered.
Well….evidence does suggest that Babylon had Jewish people in it. (They had colonies everywhere in the greater region.) So maybe, possibly, probably the Gilgamesh oral stories had Jewish contributions long before they were codified and recorded into writing (er, cuneiform, etc).
Hmm Former catholic I assume, I wonder if her family practices the catholic faith despite being from Jewish descent or if Dorothy converted through 2 different religions in her 18-19 years of life.
i do like that amazi-girl still self-identifies as a superhero, like she did earlier when talking to dorothy/walky, but she won’t do Superheroing (verb form)… it’s really cute tbh i love ag
Jew here, and I consider myself to be a comics person. My two cents:
It’s totally fine for non-Jewish people to use superheroes, but it’s nice to get some credit now and then. When superheroes came out there was a wild feeding frenzy of everyone shamelessly ripping off everyone else, that and the extremely cheap printing methods used allowed the medium of comic books to really explode, so it feels weird to complain about it now. Will Eisner said something about that period like “It was raining and I was holding a bucket”. The only other thing I would add is, just don’t use superheroes to attack or defame Jewish people, but also don’t do that generally.
Superheroes may or may not be of Jewish origin or derivation, but I’d like to posit that robots and programming ARE Jewish. I give you the golem, an inanimate being made of clay or mud that comes to life when certain ritual incantations are spoken over it. In other instances, embedding a piece of Hebrew scripture into the figure will also animate it, much like running punch cards or old-time punched paper tapes through early computers would cause them to perform their tasks.
I’d disagree. The golem isn’t really a robot (in the sense of being a slave) or programmed (in the sense of carrying out pre-scripted behavior, no matter how complex); but it was a prototypical generative AI because its creator basically gave it a piece of text someone else wrote and it developed free will based on that.
I actually find the concept of superheroes being “a Jewish creation” kind of offensive. Certainly the modern big name superheroes were created and written by Jewish people but that doesn’t make them any significance to Jewish culture or identify.
Like yes a lot of superhero stories draw from Jewish concepts and experiences but that is true of any creation by any person. They all imprint part of themselves into a thing they made. It would be very odd to ask if the production or consumption of peanut butter is appropriation of black people. Sure a black person made it and it’s an achievement black people venerate. Peanut butter is for anyone to enjoy. It’s food. Consuming it or making it isn’t appropriation. It’s the intended use. Comic book heroes were made to be read, idealized and worshipped. Do you honestly believe that the people who made comic books didn’t want them to be accessible to everyone?
The issue I have with it is that it “others” Jewish people. It’s a “Jewish” creation because a Jewish man made it. But there’s probably more to him than just his race. When I draw I am a black artist. I will inevitably draw from my experience as a black man while writing. But my comics are not a “black creation”. They’re MY work. I don’t make my comics just for my race. I draw cuz I want to tell my stories. Taking something as universally beloved as superheroes and tying it to any one race’s creation based on the scant individuals who started the trend is dissmissive and harmful.
Marvel and DC comics super heros, BatMan and Superman, archetypes known all over the world, the modern superhero scene as we know it today was all started by Jewish brothers
It’s just giving credit where credit is due, reminding us that the culture we love in the USA has its roots in from all over the world, places worth exploring, even if that’s just via internet. In the end it’s about building bridges between people!
Credit where credit is due of course. My point is that that there’s a difference from crediting the original creators for their creation and limiting the vast genre that comic book superheroes occupy to something inherently Jewish. I simply don’t think someone being a certain race makes that creation inherently a racial creation where imitation is appropriation. It removes the individuality from the creation. If we were discussing whether or not comic book superheroes should be considered created by Jews I would agree ( there’s a lot about the first “superhero” that is up to debate). But does that mean any super hero in existence is appropriation? Even black owned ones like milestone comics or All Might from Hero Aca? There’s so much culture that went into AND evolved from superheroes. It’s not just a Jewish thing in the same way rock and roll isn’t just a black concept.
As Veronica said below, Jews created some of the most iconic superheroes today because we weren’t allowed at well-paying advertising jobs at the time.
Very similarly, Rock and Roll evolved from Jazz and Blues, which in turn was pioneered by black musicians who worked on their craft full time in northern cities often precisely because they couldn’t get jobs back in the south, as well as facing a lot of other shit there i need not mention.
The point of the Cultural Appropriation thing isn’t like “oh, you not allowed to be inspired at all by other cultures” or “this belongs to this culture ONLY”; that a rubbish idea.
The point is to raise awareness that some of the greatest parts of culture and art we love came about as a result of some of our greatest, meaningful struggles as diverse human beings, not to make people despair but to give hope to those struggling now.
Themz not all racial struggles either.
Dumbing of Age itself was born when Willis decided to document his struggles as a college student and someone losing his faith, and with it his culture, family and basically EVERYTHING.
I mean the point of cultural appropriation is to draw reference to people maliciously taking from a culture and divorcing it from its original people. It’s to point out injustices against people and is as much an indictment on participants than a celebration of creation. Calling it cultural appropriation to borrow from superhero tropes is likening it to a theft of culture.
Right, but the comic is quickly saying that it’s *not cultural appropriation.* AG wondered about it for a minute, asked someone for their input, and now can move on.
It just seems like the comic is agreeing with your stance, so I’m not sure what the issue is. That sometimes people might not know the line and consider it might apply to things it doesn’t? That’s annoying if it’s enforced on others, but here it’s just someone wondering about their own actions.
Or, I guess you could take Dorothy’s comment to mean that superhero-ing *could* be done in a culturally appropriative way, but I don’t think she has an idea of what, specifically, a Jewish-appropriating superhero would be.
Superheroes were largely pioneered by Jews, and what we would recognize as magazine style “comic books” as an industry was largely pioneered by Jews as well. It was largely an adaptation to the magazine, illustration and advertising industries being resistant to employing Jews at the time, conflating with some sudden opportunities for cheap mass printing on the cheapest of paper. It was a theretofore largely unbuilt and unclaimed industry.
But most superhero comics were never intended to be “Jewish Culture”, they were very much marketed to the masses, and if anything pretty whitewashed of explicitly Jewish character. Even the names of many (not all) top Jewish comics people were changed to sound more gentile. Bob Kahn became Bob Kane, Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee, Jacob Kurtzberg became Jack Kirby. I think we should give Jewish people credit for what they did and remember the contribution they made to pop culture.
“Appropriation” would be if Amber put on say, a tallis and a yarmulka and used them as props for what she’s doing, because that sort of thing definitely is sacred Jewish culture, that would be disrespectful.
1930: The Golden Bat, Japanese. Arguably the first “Superman”: a being from Atlantis, sent forward 10,000 years, living in the Japanese Alps. Super-strong, invulnerable, can fly. I have no idea if he could have plausibly influenced the Superman creators.
1930: The Shadow, Walter Gibson. Philadelphia German
1933: The Spider, Harry Steeger. NYC German, with a Jewish business partner.
Fantastic Four 1961, Spider-Man 1962, X-Men 1963, all created by the Jewish Kirby and Lee. I’m just noting the 23 year gap between Superman and Fantastic Four. Or between the DC icons and the Marvel icons.
Spider-man
He’s the perfect marriage of an amazing costume design, inventive powers, a great personality and iconography. He’s a superhero maaade to look good in motion and his comics and .movies and games utilize that perfectly.
Honestly Spider-Man is so interesting because of how he fits into the culture of new York. Spider-Man literally can only function as well as he does because he lives in a place with such tall and congested architecture. You cannot separate Spider-Man from New York without it effecting his character.
Haha well since that’s a book I’m currently writing I’ll have to share some details for anyone to know what I’m talking about. In a world where thousands of people have developed superpowers Rhea’s gravity powers overshadows them all. And she’s a twelve year old extremely traumatized orphan making it her mission to stop all adults from abusing their authority.
I guess you could say she’s a product of the culture of outcasts, critiquing society from the sidelines. The big theme is talking about children in terms of an oppressed minority, which I know a little about as an autistic trans person who has been a child. As much as the struggle for liberation and justice is fundamental to any given superhero story.
Bending the rules a bit: I’ll take the Phantom over actual supers, the origins of whose powers always seem too hokey for me to take them seriously. Phantom treats a useful tradition as a personal obligation and works hard to make himself a person who can execute it as well as possible — I like superior skill and training better than superior force.
I’d give Batman second place for similar reasons, but his opponents are just silly. (You may perceive that I’m primarily influenced by the TV series.)
Hmmm…It’s definitely a toss-up between Jaime Reyes the Blue Beetle, and Nadia Van Dyne the Wasp, but I’ll go with Nadia Van Dyne since that’s the more interesting answer.
Culturally speaking, I think I really just love how, while Nadia is a fascinating and wonderful character, her comics aren’t really about her, it’s about everybody and everything else in her life – the science she does, her team/friends circle of awesome lady action scientists, the people she saves, and the people who save her. At their worst, superhero comics can often be very hyper-individualistic, so I love comics like these which turn that on its head and emphasize the richness and heroism of the entire world around the main character instead.
Also, Nadia is low-key definitely aromantic, and I’m a sucker for great representation. ALSO also, there simply aren’t enough comics out there about girls and women in STEM being awesome! Please read The Unstoppable Wasp, and join me in constantly complaining that Marvel never saw fit to make it more than a single mini-series!
I mean… yes and no? Like yeah they created the modern interpretation of superheroes but even then before there was Batman or Superman there was Zorro almost 20 years earlier. Exceptional individuals using their great power to achieve legendary feats while protecting others and defeat evildoers is a concept as old as civilization. Greek heroes certainly come to mind and there was Jewish Samson with his fabulous hair giving him super-strength.
Samson: wasn’t it rather his vow of dedication to his God that made him useful to said God, who favored his endeavors? The hair was in token of the vow. IMHO mortals favored by the gods are a separate, though similar, genre.
Superheroes have their powers in their own being, however they get them. Superman was born that way; Captain America got his through technology; Spider-Man acquired his by what boils down to magic, through the medium of the then audience’s superstitious awe of atomic energy.
Yeah but I simplified it a bit for comedic effect XD
And then there are the ones who are just Really damn good at what they do like Batman with his crazy training and gadgets… I was kind of disappointed that Deku from BNHA didn’t go that route and instead inherited One for All.
Not to mention that many Greek heroes were descended from gods (often Zeus) and that was the source of their superhuman abilities. Then you have someone like Achilles whose invulnerability came from being bathed in river Styx as a baby.
“Jewish invention” is stupid. They weren’t invented by jewish culture, they weren’t invented as a celebration of jewish customs or as part of jewish religious or ethnic traditions.
They were, arguably, invented by people who incidentally were jewish. If anyone calls “appropriation” on that, they’re dumb as fuck, or worse yet it’s a deliberate attempt to cause minorities to NOT be able to succeed in industries by making it so that any majority-ethnicity person enjoying anything made by a minority-ethnicity person somehow an “appropriator”. What a convenient way to make it so that minority authors/creators/artists aren’t allowed to find success.
Frankly it’s worse than if she had asked if she was trademark infringing from Marvel or DC.
Did their creators actually call their superheroes “jewish creations” ? Or is she instead choosing to impose that on someone else’s creations, her being the one choosing that their ethnicity matters? Why is she not asking whether she’s “appropriating” from men, since their creators were men? Would she prevent non-Americans or non-white people from acting like that because they are “American” creations or “white” creations?
This is the actually offensive awfulness of American pseudoprogressivism, that wants to put things in tiny little boxes and force what people are allowed to enjoy or copy based on ethnic lines, just like fascists and the bigots would. “Am I allowed to enjoy the work of jewish people?” asks the pseudoprogressive and the antisemite alike.
AG is aware that not a lot of white people realize that some of the greatest names in USA superhero comics and their formatting known the world around were pioneered by Jewish folk who started doing what they did because of racism in the advertising and magazine industry.
Marvel for instance. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby weren’t even their real names. They were Stanley Leiber and Jacob Kurtzberg respectively, they had to hide their Jewishness so they could better appeal to a market for comics then dominated by Christian white people.
United States capitalism as usual meant us Jews and other minorities have been long erased from some of the most pivotal parts of United States history and culture.
The point of this strip is that AG did the right thing by actually asking a Jewish person about something important to USA culture from which Jews were erased and thus affected by. Which is ironically also the same reason why stupid white folk acting as the authority of cultural appropriation with stupid shit like “oh this belongs and can be used by THIS CULTURE ONLY” is still racism.
It’s because racism is ultimately something AG (and any other white person in her place) CANNOT rightfully have the final word on because it’s a pervasive system which was built upon for centuries solely to benefit white people at the expense of minorities, and is something which by very design they will NEVER experience themselves.
Is this because the creators of Superman were Jewish? I confess I was totally baffled by today’s strip because in my mind “superheroes”, or people who do superheroic stuff, can be found in all cultures and I thought it stupid of AG to even say that they were a Jewish creation.
The creators of Superman, Batman, Captain America, and the X-Men were Jewish, also at least some of the creators of Spider-Man. Chris Claremont, who didn’t create but greatly shaped the X-Men, is Jewish.
So the creators of most of the US’s most iconic and famous superheroes were Jewish.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, written by a Hungarian-born Countess in 1905, is generally considered to have invented the specific conventions of the comic book superheroes Amber has copied. Or you could go back to Robin Hood, Beowulf, Gilgamesh. . .this feels like she just pulled something to neurotically question the ethics of out of her ass.
I had a dream that the latest page was Sarah standing over Jacob while he and Lucy went at it hard, with Sarah psychoanalyzing him through a quippy back and forth while Lucy occasionally interjected to moan. Each panel, Lucy and Jacob were doing a different act or position. At the end it suddenly turned into a Chuck E. Cheese ad, but toucan Sam was there. Sarah and Jacob morphed into purple rats. In this dream, these rats were recurring villains of Chuck E. Cheese ad lore, like the Noid. Bam, there i was, standing in a shady arcade room at a shady hotel in Orlando, FL, in front of a Chuck E. Cheese shooter game, holding a baby that wasn’t mine. Nor Lucy and Jacob’s, for that matter.
Remember that scene in Kevin Grevioux’s “I, Frankenstein” (2014), when Bill Nighy’s character says, “well, actually, you’re not gargoyles, you’re grotesques. Gargoyles spout rainwater out of their mouths. And you’re not Frankenstein, Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, you’re Frankenstein’s monster.” and then Frankenstein said, “rrrrarh, no. I … Frankenstein”.
And then him and the gargoyles teamed up to beat up all of Nighy’s demons because of it.
people big mad because a fictional teenager thought something *might* have been appropriative and asked a friend about it
the appropriation police aren’t real and they’re not coming for your comics and it’s not weird for someone to want to be cool to others even if they come off as a bit goofy
Yeah. I don’t think superheroes are Jewish culture either, but it really says something about people when they get incredibly offended at the suggestion.
There is a moral conspiracy to make me, personally, feel guilty about wider cultural concepts. Clearly this can be the only reason anyone would question anything, it’s all to hurt my feelings in specific and take something away from me.
I’m allowed to have opinions on things tbh. I have my reasons to be adverse to certain lines of thought and my expression of dissatisfaction is based on that.
Sorry if you find it weird.
I say just because you are allowed opinions doesn’t mean you gotta have them and share them. Sometimes you can just sit out of a topic you might not really know much about.
Jews didn’t invent superheroes, they invented the idea of the superhero either being or disguising himself as an everyman. Previously, superheroes were all royalty or captains of industry.
Has Amazi-Girl been expressing concern that she’s appropriating another culutre before? Is that why she’s not hero-ing? And if so, why is she asking Dorothy of all people, who she would at least know is an athiest, and raised without religious bias, rather than either Ethan or Joe, both of who were raised in a Jewish household? Is she concerned she’ll be offending either of them?
And this seems like a weird thing to be concerned about. Yeah, the person who made the first superhero was Jewish, but superheroes aren’t culturally Jewish any more than Bluetooth is culturally Dutch. And stories about heroes with magical or godlike powers have been a thing ever since the Epic of Gilgamesh. Lee Falk was not appropriating Babylonian culture when he created the Phantom.
I feel like there’s either a storyline or strip that I somehow missed, or this is a joke that’s going over my head.
Honestly, this comes across to me as a character in a story behaving like a real person and asking a question that’s just occurred to them. In that context, it doesn’t matter if she’s expressed the concern before. Even in fiction, sometimes our thoughts aren’t fully thought-out and structured.
I’m surprised nobody’s tried that as a marketing tactic. “See our movie in theaters – twice! – or else you’re a bigot!”
Related to the burnout though, I will posit that you’re not burnt out on superheroes, you’re simply burnt out on mediocre or bad superheroes. This modern fandom culture where everything is at once the most important thing ever and completely disposable once the next thing comes out, it just not good for any humans.
wow, a lot of goyim in these comments are real excited to “um actually” one of the few artistic media where jewish influence is popularly acknowledged
yes, the idea that amazi-girl could be culturally appropriating superheroism is silly, but y’all are going out of your way to insist that she’s wrong to think there’s anything jewish about comic book superheroes (which, to be clear, she is not. just because you wouldn’t recognize a jewish theme or concept in a comic book doesn’t mean they aren’t there)
You know maybe Amazi-girl and dorothy should hang out more, now there’s a less. Batman and Lois Lane relationship going on (and yes I’m namechecking them specifically for a reason, because generally speaking Batman and Lois Lane don’t try to fuck).
I honestly had no idea what Amber was talking about. I thought she meant golems for some reason? Like Steven Universe. Crystal gems are Monday like superheroes
Anybody ever wonder how the flaming frick she can get up to the peak of that roof so fast, while holding a short conversation?!? Let’#s be honest, that high up, THAT quickly? That’s pretty much superhuman…
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… I’m a Mizrahi Jew and all for seeing Amazi-Girl in action?!?!
to quote Enda Mode,
WHAT THE — IS THIS A QUESTION?!?!? XD
It may be a relief, but it’s not a gargoyle.
this pun was also my first thought lol. wonder if it was intentional.
the pun fucking sends me. ~<3
I thought a relief was a carved slab.
By “Glory”, I think you’re right
This is a truly grotesque series of puns….
Also, obviously Amazigirl needs to keep being a superhero. You can’t just go to all the trouble of training your vocal cords to always talk in blue and not follow through on the crime fighting.
I don’t know, I think they’re pretty solid, but not carved in stone, so we shouldn’t take them for granite, as they are kind of basaltic…
The grotesque is holding a carved slab or bas relief
Also, her foot is on the edge of a relief as well!
LOL
Drop that bas!
Night Guy has the super heroics covered anyway. AG would be redundant.
And since Night Guy is already redundant, AG would be redundantly redundant.
I’m making a redundant comment about AG and NG being redundant.
“I’m from the Office of Redundant Redundancy, and it has come to our attention that your redundant comment about the redundacy of the previously redundancy comments about redundancy, has not yet reached the critical level of redundancy to be considered a redundant comment, with all redundant factors figured in, your current comment cannot be considered sufficiently redundant. So, carry on… Or, would that be redundant as well..?”
Okay barely related but now I’m wishing walky dressed up as Might Guy for Halloween since it’s a neighboring letter off from night guy. Im not even a Naruto fan i actively dislike it, it just would’ve been really funny
a relief!!
To quote the alt-text…
there’s a joke to be made here, but I’m feeling too sheepish
Any joke you made would probably be grotesque, anyway.
“I’m from the Office of Redundant Redundancy, and it has come to our attention that your redundant comment about the redundacy of the previously redundancy comments about redundancy, has not yet reached the critical level of redundancy to be considered a redundant comment, with all redundant factors figured in, your current comment cannot be considered sufficiently redundant. So, carry on… Or, would that be redundant as well..?”
“Just so the message is clear, I’m from the Office of Redundant Redundancy, and it has come to our attention that your redundant comment about the redundacy of the previously redundancy comments about redundancy, has not yet reached the critical level of redundancy to be considered a redundant comment, with all redundant factors figured in, your current comment cannot be considered sufficiently redundant. So, carry on… Or, would that be redundant as well..?”
No, ewe are just feeling Baaahhhdd.
And I really wouldn’t want to pull the wool over your eyes on this one.
Whoops! I’ve been noticed!
I’d better take it on the lamb, and get the flock out of here!!!
Ah, material for another rarepair AU.
How is Dorothy both a Jew and Catholic? I know you can have Jewish heritage, but I thought being Catholic was a belief system. Am I wrong?
No you’ve got it right. She’s Jewish by blood, was raised Catholic, and is currently atheist.
Yep. And even if you leave the Church, the Church never completely leaves you. (I was raised Catholic, 35 years out of the Church, I’m still Culturally Catholic.)
I wasn’t even raised religious and am still culturally christian (Easter, Christmas, etc. are all codified as federal holidays)
If i remember correctly she was actually raised a religiously and let to choose her own beliefs but one of her parents is catholic.
I think she means in sense of her heritage is from both even though she chooses to be atheist.
You can have culturally Jewish people, who identify with the cultural/genetic heritage but aren’t religious.
Weirdly, the same is true of Catholics.
And, well, of lots of groups, really. I mean, you can pretty much always tell an ex-Catholic atheist from an ex-Pentecostal atheist.
I read something from an American writer in italy who was asked if he was Protestant or Catholic. He answered he was an atheist. “Yes, but are a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” (Personally, I’m a Catholic atheist.)
It all depends on if you’re more of a CS Lewis person or a JRR Tolkien person.
I mean, Lewis had his period of atheism, that Tolkein played a major part of pulling him out of/bringing him back to Christianity, though I believe Tolkein hoped Lewis would join the Roman Catholic Church rather than go back to Church of England. But Tolkein, to my understanding, always was Roman Catholic and never went atheist. And I mean (understandably) really old guard Catholic. I read that after Vatican II (where the church went from forcing Latin on everything but the Bible readings and sermons), he’d embarrassed his grandson by loudly responding in Latin to the the English/”vulgate” prompting in the ceremony.
Nuts to C.S. Lewis. Except _The Screwtape Letters_. I like that.
The version of that story I heard is that he was in Ireland, which makes more sense to me because of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants there.
Northern Ireland specifically, and it also exists with a Jew instead of an atheist.
Ain’t no atheist like a catholic atheist. I should know, I’m one ^^
Works with Protestants and Mormons, too.
How can you tell, is it tattooed on the back of their neck?
Jewish is an ethnicity as much as a religion. For some Jewish people maybe more of an ethnicity than a religion.
Yee, that me.
(mixed-race Mizrahi-black and an agnostic atheist)
You are correct! While Catholicism is indeed a belief system, Judaism is an ethnoreligion. This means that you can be culturally/ethnically Jewish, religiously Jewish, or both! There are plenty of people who identify as Jewish without practicing Judaism, which usually means that they have Jewish heritage. Dorothy seems to be one of those people! Hope that helps. 🙂
-Your friendly neighborhood Jew
Indeed.
I, for example, had a ethnically and religiously Jewish grandmother who married a Catholic and religiously converted. And while my father was raised Catholic and went Atheist (as often happens), it is my Jewish heritage that my father identifies with even though his mother was actively pretending not to be Jewish.
I, meanwhile, eschewed it all and declared myself pagan.
Arg – typo. That should be “It is his Jewish heritage that my father identifies with…”
To be honest, there’s always fuzzy line between religion and ethnicity. More so in Judaism, but in others as well. Especially for groups that were underprivileged minorities. Which long included Catholics in the US.
One of my personal, pet anthropological theories is that religion is really just codified culture; it’s just a bit more confident about itself than a culture is. Like, a culture will say that eating eggs commemorates the moon god, or whatever, but a religion will say that commemorating the moon god is important, so you should eat eggs. And while a culture might look down on you and shame you for not eating those eggs, a religion might imply that you’re going to The Bad Place for the lack of egg-eating.
A lot of the differences end up feeling like hair-splitting, is what I’m saying. Christianity (and Islam) being cross-cultural religions is something of an innovation (and interestingly probably rhymes well with the Roman imperial religion, in that it syncretizes with but also colonialised indigenous religion; there’s a lot of theory-of-empire stuff mixed in there, too, like core-and-fringe demarcations or what not).
No and yes. Heritage, family obligation, traditions, plus if you were raised Catholic and especially baptized, the church considers you always Catholic. It’s more or less the same with most denominations, excluding some Calvinism. But the Catholics are pretty adamant about it, they call former Catholics “lapsed Catholics”, a presumption they’re still Catholic.
That’s not Dorothy’s case, she’s just ethnically Irish Catholic, iirc.
Catholic culture has a way of leaving a trace even if your family aren’t practicing.
The simplest way to put it is that the Jews are an ethnic group, a nation. They have a really old religion called Judaism, whether or any individual puts faith in it, they usually consider it to be an integral part of their cultural heritage.
My understanding is that Catholicism can make a major imprint on someone’s sense of a cultural background, but it’s not actually ethnic. The word Catholic actually means something like “universal” or “global”, its adherents consider it to be a faith for the whole world.
Also, “putting faith in it” is a uniquely Christian framing — your religious identity being based on your personal beliefs is Christianity’s biggest contribution to religious thought.
One’s Judaism isn’t based on belief, it’s based on heritage, identity, and actions. There are tons of Jewish atheists, who are religious because we are members of the tribe (identity) and are practicing the religion in community (actions). Jewish atheists aren’t a problem for us.
We haven’t seen Dorothy doing anything Jewish, but she retains the identity.
In the short term that’s true, but over the long run (generations) it’s the religious part that tends to keep people in the community.
Fun fact: there are actually a ton of catholic churches out there that are unaffiliated with the Roman Catholic Church that everyone knows about.
Her grandparents were a mix of Jewish and Catholic, her parents were non-religious. Somehow Joyce has mostly remembered the ‘Jewish’ part (after the ‘atheist’). https://x.com/damnyouwillis/status/1719520562278502723/photo/4
I’m not sure if her grandparents were 3 Catholics and 1 Jew, or of two grandparents were each of Jewish-Catholic heritage.
*or if two
…And how is AG’s interpretation Catholic?
…because it’s guilt-motivated? Expiatory?
Because she’s posing next to a grotestque. 🙂
That was my interpretation, at least.
Derry Girls where Catholic and Protestant students are supposed to be listing things they have in common and they end up listing stereotypes of each other instead. And one is that Catholics like statues, then Sister Michael’s all “that one’s true, I love a good statue”
Huh. OK, thank you for the explanation! 🙂
I worked at a Catholic publisher in my younger days, and I remember it being a pretty big thing that people considered themselves culturally Catholic while being nonpracticing. There were whole books about it.
(Fun but unrelated fact about my days at a Catholic publisher. It was named “Crossroads” and we got a surprising number of Crossword submissions, I assume from people who saw the word cross and stopped there)
I’m not Catholic, but my dad was raised, his side mostly is, and my sister married a non-practicing Catholic guy.
What was explained to me – which might be completely off-base – was that if you’re baptized Catholic, to the Catholic church, you’re Catholic. You’ve already got your foot in the door to heaven. Then, just don’t commit any mortal sins, and if you can, get those last rites before you die, and you’re good; otherwise, you might be waiting in Purgatory for a little while.
Ex-Catholic sounds to me like “I was raised in this but I don’t believe in it anymore.” Non-practicing Catholic sounds like “I’m basically agnostic but I’ve got this insurance policy just in case I’m wrong.”
Religions are belief systems, but from a sociological perspective, are also cultures interwoven into larger society. America as a whole contains people of all belief systems, but it is quite obviously far more culturally influenced by Christianity than, say, Hellenism. The phrase “America is a Christian nation” is *sociologically* true (to an extent; America is a complex place), though not in the way American conservatives *say* it is, since they mean it *prescriptively*.
So while Dorothy may not be a believer in Catholicism, if she grew up in a family that was, it’s accurate enough to describe herself as one in this context.
And the US is much less culturally any one particular religion, since it’s a country of immigrants who brought different religions with them. In Europe, up until pretty recently in historical terms, even Protestant denominations were largely national state religions.
I think cultural Catholicism without belief is way more of a thing than with other Christian denominations. Based on observation through the Internet and media at least, Catholicism is barely a thing where I live lol.
I follow a YouTuber who’s Catholic upbringing factors into his analysis of stuff. He calls himself a professional lapsed Catholic. A prolapsed Catholic, if you will. (Flaw peacock if anyone knows him)
Though I’d say “cultural Christian” in general is a thing, we’re just so steeped in it in the US/Europe that we don’t really recognize it.
And exvangelicals are a thing, much like recovering Catholics.
Um, that’s not a gargoyle. It’s a grotesque.
Well I think it’s cute.
alt-text!
Super heroes are arguably just appropriations of older folk tales and heroes anyway. Robinhood, King Arthur, Beowulf. Hell it’s pretty much common knowledge Batman was inspired by Zoro. How deep we wanna go with the appropriation guilt?
The main thing is to be careful about appropriating from cultures that have been historically degraded and erased.
speaking as a Mizrahi Jew I’m all for Amazi-Girl doing what she gotta to protect her friends ^^
Absolute Zorro erasure on display here to be sure. And just toss the Scarlet Pimpernel out with the trash, why don’t you.
That is where the Scarlet Pimpernel belongs, yes.
Oops. Hit the Report button. Sorry.
Why can’t we forget about “cultural appropriation?” If cultures don’t mix, they stagnate. Cultural mixing appears in all American art, especially music, but even in cartooning. American cartooning is now heavily influenced by Japanese comic art, which is apparent even in DOA, and more so in Questionable Content.
Oh, wait. Will you tell me there’s a difference between mixing and appropriation? As far as I can tell, it’s mixing when one approves of it, and appropriation when one doesn’t. I call bullshit on such a distinction.
Appropriation is “This is mine now, to use as I see fit, and fuck yourself if you don’t like that.”
Mixing is “Hey, let’s collaborate and have fun together.”
Yes, they’re fucking different, and your “wait will you tell me the obvious answer” shit is cowardly.
I don’t think anyone thinks either of those things when he borrows from other culture. If I were to put on a Sioux war bonnet–which I never have–it would be because I thought it was cool, not because I’d think, “this is mine” etc.
There’s also an element of how you present the thing you’ve “borrowed” from another culture, and a question of whether people of that culture have a history of being mocked or oppressed for that very thing.
If you think a Sioux war bonnet is cool, and you’re walking around with it, and a white American tells you, “hey cool hat”, will you take a photo with them, post it online, and brag about how great your hat is and how many compliments you get on it, maybe even open your own store of hats in that style branded with your youtube channel? Or will you say “thanks, it’s actually from the Sioux culture, you should check out the history / go to this Sioux-owned shop to buy one”? Obviously most people will just say “thanks” for the compliment and move on, but a small nod to the culture of origin is better. And you can probably see how the first response would be appropriating. I personally think people online like to call “cultural appropriation” *way* too often, but I have unfortunately seen instances of the first example and imo that’s Not Cool.
It is appropriation when dominant cultures exploit marginalized cultures, turning a profit while leaving their inspiration marginalized. That should not be forgotten.
But is Judaism/ Jewish ethnic culture really “marginalized” in America? I Mean, after the 1950’s?
NYC aside, I think we still have some antisemitism bubbling around in this country.
Yes.
It had seemed better for a long time, but explicitly antisemitic fascism has been on the rise for years and even more so for the last year or so
It hasn’t even been five fucking years since a crowd of torch bearing asshole marched chanting “Jews will not replace us” so what do you think?
there’s a lot of antisemitism in the name of opposing antisemitism too. John Hagee speaking at the same event as congressional leaders that was supposedly to oppose antisemitism was a big tip-off. Like Jewish Voice for Peace gets defamed as antisemites constantly. The first tenured professor to be fired for supporting Palestinians’ rights is Jewish, and was fired by a Lutheran college. Jewish people are be punished by non-Jews for not having dual loyalty.
Try to get Yom Kippur off work outside of NYC and ask that again.
Honestly, I think all of this cultural copyrighting is a little ridiculous. Ultimately there isn’t a single idea nowadays that hasn’t been done exactly before or isn’t a combination of existing ideas. The idea that superheroes belong to a particular culture simply because some of the individuals who pioneered the aspects of superheroes that define the trope today belonged to that culture is laughable. What’s even more laughable and/or repugnant is that certain cultures deserve more protection from this “idea appropriation” than others simply due to how prevalent the cultures are.
This is gibberish.
My point wasn’t really that appropriation itself doesn’t matter just that any percieved guilt from Amber was likely misplaced because even superheroes were inspired by other folk heroes and myths and legends. I have been educated in this very thread that Batman who AG pulls heavily from was created by Jewish men even as his gimmicks were inspired by others, which was kind of my point. That shouldn’t however take away from the impact of the Jewish origins in creating a modern interpretation of what we think superheroes are.
But much like my culture of black people and their contributions to music, `appropriating the Jewish contribution to super heroes isn’t bad as long as we know the origins and respect it. No one’s calling out AG for stealing superheroes gimmicks but it can be done offensively. I recently think of this Israeli superhero the Iron Dome.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210601-israel-superhero-gets-ratioed-by-captain-palestine/
Admittedly I’m not sure where this fits on the appropriation debate. But it does seem like it can be done wrong or be an antithesis of the origins of the creators intent.
You are free to cook up your own definitions. I’ve never heard the “dominant culture” one before. It sounds like an excuse to feel guilty, to me.
That’s a distinction a lot of people draw, for good reasons.
And Japanese comic art (or animation) was influenced by US comic art, especially Disney…
Culture is (collective) intellectual property, so it can’t really be “stolen”: A still has all of its culture while B now also practices some parts of it. I don’t see “appropriation” unless B somehow prevents A from performing a culture fragment that B has adopted from A.
I think the idea also includes concern about stolen money (types of copyright or trademark infringement) and/or miseducation to others (incorrectly popularizing wrong information and preventing the correct information from getting known).
But Japanese cartoon style was heavily influenced by American cartoons post war. So where do you draw the line?
Batman is actually likely to be mostly inspired by The Shadow, although I wouldn’t doubt Zorro fits in there somewhere. But Bats only gets shuffled in with the “Super Heroes” retroactively, he’s really more like a themed vigilante/detective, the basic concept for Super Heroes is the super-powers, that pretty decisively starts with Superman. Supes has his own lineage of various inspirations, but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster get well earned credit for constructing the formula.
Good points. I only really mentioned Batman because that’s the hero Amazi-Girl most rips off for her super hero appropriation. I’m not sure where the line between pulp detective/vigilante to superhero truly is, just that AG’s brand of masked justice likely isn’t infringing on the Jewish origins of supes unless she starts flying.
Believe it or not, the flying was added in later. The earliest iterations of Superman could “leap tall buildings in a single bound!”
Oh, I should mention for the record that Bill Finger and Bob Kane (creators of b-man) were also definitely Jewish, early comics is loaded with my tribe.
I did not know Bill Finger and Bob Kane were both jewish. That’s cool.
If you like that real-world cultural influence upon superheroes, look into the creation of Wonder Woman. 🙂
>Batman is actually likely to be mostly inspired by The Shadow, although I wouldn’t doubt Zorro fits in there somewhere.
As a big fan of Zorro, I will say that the 1920 movie with Douglas Fairbanks basically invented both Clark Kenting *and* Bruce Wayning years before Kent or Wayne even existed.
Oh damn looking at that trailer has me salivating… Yeah I gotta see this, Fairbanks is awesome.
This makes me wonder who is credited with the idea of a guy wearing a mask and fighting crime under a false identity? How far back does it go?
I believe the Scarlet Pimpernel was the first?
Yeah, the “foppish aristocrat / masked crime-fighter” thing starts with the Pimpernel, who spawned several imitators, many of whom have been mentioned already in this subthread.
Depends on how specific you want to get. In the original works he is a master of disguise and may have worn masks at time, but not a specific, distinctive mask.
So, do we want to be indignant that a female creator is not better recognized for her contribution, or humbled by the realization that an aristocrat contributed something of value?
I mean, on one hand, her grandfather was an accomplished knight of the St. George order, her father composed classical and operatic music, and she came up with ideas about the masked man rescuing people from mortal danger in dramatic and operatic fashion.
On the other hand, she was an aristocrat born into privilege, her family moved to get away from a growing peasant revolt, and she wrote the Scarlet Pimpernel character to rescue aristocrats from the guillotine executions.
So a clear mix of both good and bad traits, from our modern non-upper class viewpoints.
Debatably … The Man in the Iron Mask” novel, by Alexandre Dumas, 1847. 🙂
Pulp magazine standards such as Doc Savage, Conan the Barbarian and Fu Manchu fit in there somewhere as well. Of course, they normally didn’t wear masks…
What? Are you suggesting that Bruce Wayne’s decision to wear a mask, name himself after an animal and fight crime in secret is inspired by seeing the Mark of Zorro five minutes before his parents died?
Preposterous!
Inconceivable!
Batman has one superpower: money.
“What’s your superpower again?”
“I’m rich.”
While it was added to the canon later, I believe it’s fairly standard that the Wayne family was returning home from a Zorro movie on the night T&M were murdered, so the influence is fairly recognized I think.
Let’s not forget Doc Savage. First published 1933.
When did the Lone Ranger show up?
Radio show 1933. Published in print 1935.
If we can agree on Superman beijg the first iteration of what we today consider to be the superhero-genre (cosume+superpowers+heroics and adventure, etc.). Then it (the origin) is more based on Moses than any of those examples. In other words, two jewish men created a modernised version of a jewish myth. And the result resonated with a lot of people in the world.
I’ve heard Superman compared to the Jewish Golem.
Also, most DC heroes were inspired by Luchadores. So if anything, superheroes are Latinos.
wouldn’t the relief be below the grotesque lol
The pop pop fiz fiz is where you find it.
As a Jew, while the term, most big-name individuals, and the specific motif of modern “superheroes” as caped/costumed crusaders and what-not were mostly invented by Jews, superheroes are an American mythos – not a specifically-Jewish one. It is, in no uncertain terms, entirely kosher for anyone of any race creed culture or what-have-you to write/be superheroes, and the only context in which Jews need to be considered when it comes to superheroes is when acknowledging who made the characters that resulted in the concept being popularized.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were ethnically New Yorkers, so …
“Ethnically New Yorkers” is about as specific a term as “Ethnically Human”
Shuster was Canadian.
At some point the whole toxic copyright law concept of “all intellectual creation must be purely original and no one can have outside artistic influences and also the creator then wholly owns it effectively forever and no one else is allowed to be influenced by it” found its way into social justice thinking. Putting a mask and a cape on a hero is racism, just like putting shorts on a mouse is theft.
Putting a mask and cape on a hero is theater. Putting shorts on a mouse is getting ahead of that portion of the public who turn viewing-with-alarm into a competitive sport.
Up
I think that was more of a coming of age movie than a superhero movie? I might be wrong, it’s been a minute since I’ve seen it.
This is a very interesting point to bring up. And correct in many ways.
Considering the invention (if we agree on Superman being the original iteration of what we now consider to be the genre) was made by jewish people, but then quickly turned into corporate control of the resulting capital. The way that the superhero-genre of today is driven, and shaped, mainly by IP-control and commercial interest, viewing writers and creators as exchangeable pieces carrying the corporate interest forward through times and generations, feels very USA-y :O
How many years were the estates of Siegal/Schuster fighting for ANY recompense and acknowledgement of their creation of the now-corporate-owned IP? It was only recently that a court ruled that Marvel/DC do not own copyright on the word “superhero.”
if you can pose like the greats, you’re already halfway there.
To close like it, you gotta pose like it.
You know, whoever came up with the nomenclature for those types of carvings — I’d say they got it wrong. “Grotesques” should be the ones with rainspouts, and “gargoyles” as the figures without.
“Gary… I’ve been meaning to ask, but… *why* do you have a rain spout coming out of your mouth?”
[Gary mutters unintelligibly]
“That’s just grotesque, man. Why can’t you just act like us normal gargoyles?”
I guess because it gargles or gurgles water. So they are not just regular grotesque they are your dad gargling mouthwash in his moth-eaten underwear grotesque.
Should they be “vomitesques” since the water spews forth from them? They’re from Rome too…
Do you want the water to be coming from somewhere else…?
But “garg” means “throat”. Like in the word “gargle.” So we get “gargoyle.” 🙂
I never considered the etymology before! Good insight, all!
Comic superhero-ing is pretty Jewish, yeah, though you do also get Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, and The Golden Bat blurring the lines on this, since a lot of the tropes that’d be used by Jack Kirby, Carl Burgos, etc, was in use before they entered the scene.
That being said, I still get where Amazi-Girl is coming from here, that what she’s doing obviously draws a lot from specifically Jewish-created comic heroes.
She’s being empathetically considerate. Very kind of her.
The hover text beat me to it
It’s almost as if Willis knew what joke he was going to make.
oh brother
had a dyslexia moment and read “amazi-girl have you thought about shooting up heroin again?”
Fuck it, she may as well.
AG would only do legal drugs, so like whippets or huff.
which one would be more detrimental to your long term health?
I mean your certainly going to get shot up doing one, but the shooting maybe more lethal in the other.
Finished coloring that AG/Dotty thing from yesterday:
https://i.imgur.com/Go9Z5cm.png (Still SFW, slightly spicy I guess)
Very fun stuff
Heh thanks, someone in the comments was all about AG “topping” Dotty which I thought could be a good lark.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS INCREDIBLE????????????????????????????
Wow, thanks!
Wow that is fantastic, and definitely the right levels of spicy, and still sfw.
Thank you for sharing. 🙂
Thanks! 🌶️ 🌶️
This is amazing. I cant believe I almost missed it. Pointing out the difference between gargoyles and grotesque is my favorite foreplay too.
The legend himself! Thanks man, we missed you! I been pickin up your slack
Well, technically the relief is under you, AG
…ARE superheroes a distinctly Jewish thing though?
I mean, if we’re talking specifically the “Men in Tights” then that’s like… Action Comics, I think.
If we’re talking the concept of brooding people with powers beyond standard mortals… Well, Gilgamesh just had another chapter from the oldest recorded human story uncovered.
Superman, X-men, BatMan, a lot of the original DC comics and especially Marvel, the biggest names in comic history
the superhero scene as we know it today was started by Jewish brothaz! ^^
Well….evidence does suggest that Babylon had Jewish people in it. (They had colonies everywhere in the greater region.) So maybe, possibly, probably the Gilgamesh oral stories had Jewish contributions long before they were codified and recorded into writing (er, cuneiform, etc).
Hmm Former catholic I assume, I wonder if her family practices the catholic faith despite being from Jewish descent or if Dorothy converted through 2 different religions in her 18-19 years of life.
Haha it’s funny because “relief” is a type of sculpture, as well as a feeling.
Deanatay said, explaining the joke
i do like that amazi-girl still self-identifies as a superhero, like she did earlier when talking to dorothy/walky, but she won’t do Superheroing (verb form)… it’s really cute tbh i love ag
<3 Agree
Did anyone else see “superheroes are a Jewish invention” and think of it as a reference to the Golem of Prague?
It’s more a reference of all the Jewish creator that were the starter of what we know as superhero comic from what I understand.
I assume that too, but I don’t think we can rule out Dorothy (or maybe just Willis) knowing and hinting at deeper lore
I did not, and thank you.
A bas-relief!
Ia! Ia!
Jew here, and I consider myself to be a comics person. My two cents:
It’s totally fine for non-Jewish people to use superheroes, but it’s nice to get some credit now and then. When superheroes came out there was a wild feeding frenzy of everyone shamelessly ripping off everyone else, that and the extremely cheap printing methods used allowed the medium of comic books to really explode, so it feels weird to complain about it now. Will Eisner said something about that period like “It was raining and I was holding a bucket”. The only other thing I would add is, just don’t use superheroes to attack or defame Jewish people, but also don’t do that generally.
This Jew agrees! Honor the greats on whose shoulders we stand, have fun, and don’t use em to be antisemitic. 👍 There! THE JEWISH PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.
Dumbing of Age, Book 17: Just Keep Posing Next to the Gargoyles
“Catholics do shame; Jews do guilt”
“Jews invented guilt, but Catholics perfected it.”
“Catholics merely adopted the guilt; Jews were born in it, molded by it!”
Superheroes may or may not be of Jewish origin or derivation, but I’d like to posit that robots and programming ARE Jewish. I give you the golem, an inanimate being made of clay or mud that comes to life when certain ritual incantations are spoken over it. In other instances, embedding a piece of Hebrew scripture into the figure will also animate it, much like running punch cards or old-time punched paper tapes through early computers would cause them to perform their tasks.
I’d disagree. The golem isn’t really a robot (in the sense of being a slave) or programmed (in the sense of carrying out pre-scripted behavior, no matter how complex); but it was a prototypical generative AI because its creator basically gave it a piece of text someone else wrote and it developed free will based on that.
Willis reminding everyone that he really, really loves Batman.
I actually find the concept of superheroes being “a Jewish creation” kind of offensive. Certainly the modern big name superheroes were created and written by Jewish people but that doesn’t make them any significance to Jewish culture or identify.
Like yes a lot of superhero stories draw from Jewish concepts and experiences but that is true of any creation by any person. They all imprint part of themselves into a thing they made. It would be very odd to ask if the production or consumption of peanut butter is appropriation of black people. Sure a black person made it and it’s an achievement black people venerate. Peanut butter is for anyone to enjoy. It’s food. Consuming it or making it isn’t appropriation. It’s the intended use. Comic book heroes were made to be read, idealized and worshipped. Do you honestly believe that the people who made comic books didn’t want them to be accessible to everyone?
The issue I have with it is that it “others” Jewish people. It’s a “Jewish” creation because a Jewish man made it. But there’s probably more to him than just his race. When I draw I am a black artist. I will inevitably draw from my experience as a black man while writing. But my comics are not a “black creation”. They’re MY work. I don’t make my comics just for my race. I draw cuz I want to tell my stories. Taking something as universally beloved as superheroes and tying it to any one race’s creation based on the scant individuals who started the trend is dissmissive and harmful.
Marvel and DC comics super heros, BatMan and Superman, archetypes known all over the world, the modern superhero scene as we know it today was all started by Jewish brothers
It’s just giving credit where credit is due, reminding us that the culture we love in the USA has its roots in from all over the world, places worth exploring, even if that’s just via internet. In the end it’s about building bridges between people!
BELIEVE IT! ^^
Credit where credit is due of course. My point is that that there’s a difference from crediting the original creators for their creation and limiting the vast genre that comic book superheroes occupy to something inherently Jewish. I simply don’t think someone being a certain race makes that creation inherently a racial creation where imitation is appropriation. It removes the individuality from the creation. If we were discussing whether or not comic book superheroes should be considered created by Jews I would agree ( there’s a lot about the first “superhero” that is up to debate). But does that mean any super hero in existence is appropriation? Even black owned ones like milestone comics or All Might from Hero Aca? There’s so much culture that went into AND evolved from superheroes. It’s not just a Jewish thing in the same way rock and roll isn’t just a black concept.
Yee.
As Veronica said below, Jews created some of the most iconic superheroes today because we weren’t allowed at well-paying advertising jobs at the time.
Very similarly, Rock and Roll evolved from Jazz and Blues, which in turn was pioneered by black musicians who worked on their craft full time in northern cities often precisely because they couldn’t get jobs back in the south, as well as facing a lot of other shit there i need not mention.
The point of the Cultural Appropriation thing isn’t like “oh, you not allowed to be inspired at all by other cultures” or “this belongs to this culture ONLY”; that a rubbish idea.
The point is to raise awareness that some of the greatest parts of culture and art we love came about as a result of some of our greatest, meaningful struggles as diverse human beings, not to make people despair but to give hope to those struggling now.
Themz not all racial struggles either.
Dumbing of Age itself was born when Willis decided to document his struggles as a college student and someone losing his faith, and with it his culture, family and basically EVERYTHING.
I mean the point of cultural appropriation is to draw reference to people maliciously taking from a culture and divorcing it from its original people. It’s to point out injustices against people and is as much an indictment on participants than a celebration of creation. Calling it cultural appropriation to borrow from superhero tropes is likening it to a theft of culture.
Right, but the comic is quickly saying that it’s *not cultural appropriation.* AG wondered about it for a minute, asked someone for their input, and now can move on.
It just seems like the comic is agreeing with your stance, so I’m not sure what the issue is. That sometimes people might not know the line and consider it might apply to things it doesn’t? That’s annoying if it’s enforced on others, but here it’s just someone wondering about their own actions.
Or, I guess you could take Dorothy’s comment to mean that superhero-ing *could* be done in a culturally appropriative way, but I don’t think she has an idea of what, specifically, a Jewish-appropriating superhero would be.
BTW how’s Japan treating you? :p
The whole reason Jewish artists did comics was because they weren’t allowed to do the actually well paying art jobs in advertising.
They wouldn’t have been doing comics if they weren’t Jewish.
Superheroes were largely pioneered by Jews, and what we would recognize as magazine style “comic books” as an industry was largely pioneered by Jews as well. It was largely an adaptation to the magazine, illustration and advertising industries being resistant to employing Jews at the time, conflating with some sudden opportunities for cheap mass printing on the cheapest of paper. It was a theretofore largely unbuilt and unclaimed industry.
But most superhero comics were never intended to be “Jewish Culture”, they were very much marketed to the masses, and if anything pretty whitewashed of explicitly Jewish character. Even the names of many (not all) top Jewish comics people were changed to sound more gentile. Bob Kahn became Bob Kane, Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee, Jacob Kurtzberg became Jack Kirby. I think we should give Jewish people credit for what they did and remember the contribution they made to pop culture.
“Appropriation” would be if Amber put on say, a tallis and a yarmulka and used them as props for what she’s doing, because that sort of thing definitely is sacred Jewish culture, that would be disrespectful.
re: yarmulka, true,
but for reals if possible I’d invite her to have corned beef and challah bread, it tasty
Masked vigilante history:
1905: Scarlet Pimpernel. Baroness Orczy, Hungarian
1919: Zorro, Johnston McCulley. Doesn’t sound Jewish.
1930: The Golden Bat, Japanese. Arguably the first “Superman”: a being from Atlantis, sent forward 10,000 years, living in the Japanese Alps. Super-strong, invulnerable, can fly. I have no idea if he could have plausibly influenced the Superman creators.
1930: The Shadow, Walter Gibson. Philadelphia German
1933: The Spider, Harry Steeger. NYC German, with a Jewish business partner.
1936: The Phantom, Lee Falk. Jewish.
1938: Superman, Jewish.
1938: Batman, Kahn and Finger, Jewish.
Fantastic Four 1961, Spider-Man 1962, X-Men 1963, all created by the Jewish Kirby and Lee. I’m just noting the 23 year gap between Superman and Fantastic Four. Or between the DC icons and the Marvel icons.
(Also I messed up: 1939 Batman).
Though Captain America is also a Marvel icon, if originally published by Timely Comics.
1940 Simon and Kirby, Jewish.
Point of order! Spider-Man was partially (some say *mostly* created by Steve Ditko. I’m unaware of his ethnicity.
Maybe Amber should just start writing some Amazi-Girl comics or something. They’d probably get pretty popular.
Would anybody like to play a game?
Q. Favorite superhero/superheroine/supershero/etc.?
Q2. How might you describe some cultural aspect of your favorite superhero, if any?
probably Goku haha XD
Dragon Ball Z is very much influenced by American Superhero comics like Superman,
the original Dragon Ball manga was inspired by Journey to the West, a very well revered Chinese mythology, Son Goku is literally the Monkey King ^^
Captain America i like how every artist interpret what moral ways methods ideals create captain america/good american
Sogeking the King of Snipers, he is the source of strength and courage! Also scaring the crap out of girls
Spider-man
He’s the perfect marriage of an amazing costume design, inventive powers, a great personality and iconography. He’s a superhero maaade to look good in motion and his comics and .movies and games utilize that perfectly.
Honestly Spider-Man is so interesting because of how he fits into the culture of new York. Spider-Man literally can only function as well as he does because he lives in a place with such tall and congested architecture. You cannot separate Spider-Man from New York without it effecting his character.
Have you ever read the early Steve Ditko stuff? It’s really fun!
Not sure, but I think you want “affect” there, not “effect.
My favorite is my own creation, Rhea Winter.
Haha well since that’s a book I’m currently writing I’ll have to share some details for anyone to know what I’m talking about. In a world where thousands of people have developed superpowers Rhea’s gravity powers overshadows them all. And she’s a twelve year old extremely traumatized orphan making it her mission to stop all adults from abusing their authority.
I guess you could say she’s a product of the culture of outcasts, critiquing society from the sidelines. The big theme is talking about children in terms of an oppressed minority, which I know a little about as an autistic trans person who has been a child. As much as the struggle for liberation and justice is fundamental to any given superhero story.
Bending the rules a bit: I’ll take the Phantom over actual supers, the origins of whose powers always seem too hokey for me to take them seriously. Phantom treats a useful tradition as a personal obligation and works hard to make himself a person who can execute it as well as possible — I like superior skill and training better than superior force.
I’d give Batman second place for similar reasons, but his opponents are just silly. (You may perceive that I’m primarily influenced by the TV series.)
Yeah, gotta go with Superman. I never found him “boring” or “overpowered” like the critics did.
Hmmm…It’s definitely a toss-up between Jaime Reyes the Blue Beetle, and Nadia Van Dyne the Wasp, but I’ll go with Nadia Van Dyne since that’s the more interesting answer.
Culturally speaking, I think I really just love how, while Nadia is a fascinating and wonderful character, her comics aren’t really about her, it’s about everybody and everything else in her life – the science she does, her team/friends circle of awesome lady action scientists, the people she saves, and the people who save her. At their worst, superhero comics can often be very hyper-individualistic, so I love comics like these which turn that on its head and emphasize the richness and heroism of the entire world around the main character instead.
Also, Nadia is low-key definitely aromantic, and I’m a sucker for great representation. ALSO also, there simply aren’t enough comics out there about girls and women in STEM being awesome! Please read The Unstoppable Wasp, and join me in constantly complaining that Marvel never saw fit to make it more than a single mini-series!
I wouldn’t go so far as my favorite, but I’ll second the recommendation. The Unstoppable Wasp was a hell of a fun series. (Or two series, I thought?)
Oh my gosh, that pun was grotesque. I love it!
objection! Dorothy’s claim of being Catholic is tenuous AT BEST since she was raised areligiously by her parents
It counts as long as she feels guilty about it.
I mean… yes and no? Like yeah they created the modern interpretation of superheroes but even then before there was Batman or Superman there was Zorro almost 20 years earlier. Exceptional individuals using their great power to achieve legendary feats while protecting others and defeat evildoers is a concept as old as civilization. Greek heroes certainly come to mind and there was Jewish Samson with his fabulous hair giving him super-strength.
Samson: wasn’t it rather his vow of dedication to his God that made him useful to said God, who favored his endeavors? The hair was in token of the vow. IMHO mortals favored by the gods are a separate, though similar, genre.
Superheroes have their powers in their own being, however they get them. Superman was born that way; Captain America got his through technology; Spider-Man acquired his by what boils down to magic, through the medium of the then audience’s superstitious awe of atomic energy.
Meh. Potato tomahto. 😉
Yeah but I simplified it a bit for comedic effect XD
And then there are the ones who are just Really damn good at what they do like Batman with his crazy training and gadgets… I was kind of disappointed that Deku from BNHA didn’t go that route and instead inherited One for All.
Now I remembered that comic series about Muslim superheroes “The 99”. Each hero apparently got a power inspired by one of the 99 names of Allah?
I don’t think you can so easily separate “mortals favored by the gods” from superheroes, though I think actual mythology is different.
Modern superhero comics include plenty of divinely powered characters, from Thor to Wonder Woman to Shazam
Not to mention that many Greek heroes were descended from gods (often Zeus) and that was the source of their superhuman abilities. Then you have someone like Achilles whose invulnerability came from being bathed in river Styx as a baby.
“Jewish invention” is stupid. They weren’t invented by jewish culture, they weren’t invented as a celebration of jewish customs or as part of jewish religious or ethnic traditions.
They were, arguably, invented by people who incidentally were jewish. If anyone calls “appropriation” on that, they’re dumb as fuck, or worse yet it’s a deliberate attempt to cause minorities to NOT be able to succeed in industries by making it so that any majority-ethnicity person enjoying anything made by a minority-ethnicity person somehow an “appropriator”. What a convenient way to make it so that minority authors/creators/artists aren’t allowed to find success.
Frankly it’s worse than if she had asked if she was trademark infringing from Marvel or DC.
Did their creators actually call their superheroes “jewish creations” ? Or is she instead choosing to impose that on someone else’s creations, her being the one choosing that their ethnicity matters? Why is she not asking whether she’s “appropriating” from men, since their creators were men? Would she prevent non-Americans or non-white people from acting like that because they are “American” creations or “white” creations?
This is the actually offensive awfulness of American pseudoprogressivism, that wants to put things in tiny little boxes and force what people are allowed to enjoy or copy based on ethnic lines, just like fascists and the bigots would. “Am I allowed to enjoy the work of jewish people?” asks the pseudoprogressive and the antisemite alike.
Thank you for putting it more eloquently than I could.
AG is aware that not a lot of white people realize that some of the greatest names in USA superhero comics and their formatting known the world around were pioneered by Jewish folk who started doing what they did because of racism in the advertising and magazine industry.
Marvel for instance. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby weren’t even their real names. They were Stanley Leiber and Jacob Kurtzberg respectively, they had to hide their Jewishness so they could better appeal to a market for comics then dominated by Christian white people.
United States capitalism as usual meant us Jews and other minorities have been long erased from some of the most pivotal parts of United States history and culture.
The point of this strip is that AG did the right thing by actually asking a Jewish person about something important to USA culture from which Jews were erased and thus affected by. Which is ironically also the same reason why stupid white folk acting as the authority of cultural appropriation with stupid shit like “oh this belongs and can be used by THIS CULTURE ONLY” is still racism.
It’s because racism is ultimately something AG (and any other white person in her place) CANNOT rightfully have the final word on because it’s a pervasive system which was built upon for centuries solely to benefit white people at the expense of minorities, and is something which by very design they will NEVER experience themselves.
Thanks you so much for sharing you point of view.
> by making it so that any majority-ethnicity person enjoying anything
> made by a minority-ethnicity person somehow an “appropriator”.
This, this is what annoyed me about this strip, the exclusionary language of Amber having to ask for “permission” to be a superhero.
Is this because the creators of Superman were Jewish? I confess I was totally baffled by today’s strip because in my mind “superheroes”, or people who do superheroic stuff, can be found in all cultures and I thought it stupid of AG to even say that they were a Jewish creation.
The creators of Superman, Batman, Captain America, and the X-Men were Jewish, also at least some of the creators of Spider-Man. Chris Claremont, who didn’t create but greatly shaped the X-Men, is Jewish.
So the creators of most of the US’s most iconic and famous superheroes were Jewish.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, written by a Hungarian-born Countess in 1905, is generally considered to have invented the specific conventions of the comic book superheroes Amber has copied. Or you could go back to Robin Hood, Beowulf, Gilgamesh. . .this feels like she just pulled something to neurotically question the ethics of out of her ass.
I can’t believe the fictional teenager said something that might sound stupid.
You can’t go wrong with posing next to gargoyles.
Unless you are an invading barbarian and the sun is about to set
I had a dream that the latest page was Sarah standing over Jacob while he and Lucy went at it hard, with Sarah psychoanalyzing him through a quippy back and forth while Lucy occasionally interjected to moan. Each panel, Lucy and Jacob were doing a different act or position. At the end it suddenly turned into a Chuck E. Cheese ad, but toucan Sam was there. Sarah and Jacob morphed into purple rats. In this dream, these rats were recurring villains of Chuck E. Cheese ad lore, like the Noid. Bam, there i was, standing in a shady arcade room at a shady hotel in Orlando, FL, in front of a Chuck E. Cheese shooter game, holding a baby that wasn’t mine. Nor Lucy and Jacob’s, for that matter.
You have fun dreams.
So I can’t wait to learn whence comes Dorothy’s emotional need for a superhero.
Remember that scene in Kevin Grevioux’s “I, Frankenstein” (2014), when Bill Nighy’s character says, “well, actually, you’re not gargoyles, you’re grotesques. Gargoyles spout rainwater out of their mouths. And you’re not Frankenstein, Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, you’re Frankenstein’s monster.” and then Frankenstein said, “rrrrarh, no. I … Frankenstein”.
And then him and the gargoyles teamed up to beat up all of Nighy’s demons because of it.
The ending pun… Dammit… XD
As a Jewish comic book fan AG is *waaaaay* overthrowing this. But her heart’s in the right place I guess lol
*over-thinking
people big mad because a fictional teenager thought something *might* have been appropriative and asked a friend about it
the appropriation police aren’t real and they’re not coming for your comics and it’s not weird for someone to want to be cool to others even if they come off as a bit goofy
Yeah man people are being soooo weird about it.
Yeah. I don’t think superheroes are Jewish culture either, but it really says something about people when they get incredibly offended at the suggestion.
Yeah it just, maybe this is something you didn’t gotta have an opinion on?
There is a moral conspiracy to make me, personally, feel guilty about wider cultural concepts. Clearly this can be the only reason anyone would question anything, it’s all to hurt my feelings in specific and take something away from me.
I’m allowed to have opinions on things tbh. I have my reasons to be adverse to certain lines of thought and my expression of dissatisfaction is based on that.
Sorry if you find it weird.
I say just because you are allowed opinions doesn’t mean you gotta have them and share them. Sometimes you can just sit out of a topic you might not really know much about.
You don’t really have to share your opinion either, for the record. Its fine to sit this one out.
But but but if someone, fictional or not, even hints at the mildest question of ethics, that means something is being taken from me!
What? Jews are responsible for superheros? And just when I thought they couldnt get any cooler.
As a Jew I think that’s an absolutely ridiculous question. But I guess that is something college kids would think of
Jews didn’t invent superheroes, they invented the idea of the superhero either being or disguising himself as an everyman. Previously, superheroes were all royalty or captains of industry.
Your mom’s a captain of industry.
Carla: “You better fucking believe she is.”
Robin Hood originally was just a yeoman, not a noble.
I’m super confused by the last two panels.
Has Amazi-Girl been expressing concern that she’s appropriating another culutre before? Is that why she’s not hero-ing? And if so, why is she asking Dorothy of all people, who she would at least know is an athiest, and raised without religious bias, rather than either Ethan or Joe, both of who were raised in a Jewish household? Is she concerned she’ll be offending either of them?
And this seems like a weird thing to be concerned about. Yeah, the person who made the first superhero was Jewish, but superheroes aren’t culturally Jewish any more than Bluetooth is culturally Dutch. And stories about heroes with magical or godlike powers have been a thing ever since the Epic of Gilgamesh. Lee Falk was not appropriating Babylonian culture when he created the Phantom.
I feel like there’s either a storyline or strip that I somehow missed, or this is a joke that’s going over my head.
Honestly, this comes across to me as a character in a story behaving like a real person and asking a question that’s just occurred to them. In that context, it doesn’t matter if she’s expressed the concern before. Even in fiction, sometimes our thoughts aren’t fully thought-out and structured.
Hmmm. So if I’ve gotten tired of the MCU and burned out on superheroes does that mean I’m being antisemitic? Crap.
I’m surprised nobody’s tried that as a marketing tactic. “See our movie in theaters – twice! – or else you’re a bigot!”
Related to the burnout though, I will posit that you’re not burnt out on superheroes, you’re simply burnt out on mediocre or bad superheroes. This modern fandom culture where everything is at once the most important thing ever and completely disposable once the next thing comes out, it just not good for any humans.
They’ve been running that particular tactic into the ground for years now. I imagine it no longer works.
Who’s been running which tactic?
Hollywood running the “Call them a bigot” tactic.
wow, a lot of goyim in these comments are real excited to “um actually” one of the few artistic media where jewish influence is popularly acknowledged
yes, the idea that amazi-girl could be culturally appropriating superheroism is silly, but y’all are going out of your way to insist that she’s wrong to think there’s anything jewish about comic book superheroes (which, to be clear, she is not. just because you wouldn’t recognize a jewish theme or concept in a comic book doesn’t mean they aren’t there)
Everyone who is being weird about the superhero thing I actually making me uncomfortable.
I wonder how many people realize that Willis deliberately included that “Superheroes are a Jewish invention” bit as bait for forum arguments.
It’s that true?
Weird conversations about cultural appropriation aside, that’s a bad idea Dorothy’s pushing.
On the other hand, there’s always more rapists to punch, and someone oughta do it.
Guessing Amber makes Taco Tuesday really awkward too.
You know maybe Amazi-girl and dorothy should hang out more, now there’s a less. Batman and Lois Lane relationship going on (and yes I’m namechecking them specifically for a reason, because generally speaking Batman and Lois Lane don’t try to fuck).
I honestly had no idea what Amber was talking about. I thought she meant golems for some reason? Like Steven Universe. Crystal gems are Monday like superheroes
Anybody ever wonder how the flaming frick she can get up to the peak of that roof so fast, while holding a short conversation?!? Let’#s be honest, that high up, THAT quickly? That’s pretty much superhuman…