It all started two weeks ago with a questionable newspaper article in the Stockton Record, Family finds comic book gift offensive.

Stockton, by the way, is in California, although you’ll look far and wide across that newspaper’s site to find a reference to what state it’s in. On what had to be a slow news day, reporter Yasmin Assemi covered the “story” about a local mother outraged at the “racist” content she found in a 20-year-old comic she grabbed at a dollar store for her 11-year-old foster son. We have to assume that this mother made the assumption that all comic books are for kids and grabbed three comics at random and threw them in with all the other cheap crap she’s grabbing from the dollar store to fill his stocking.

The article is rather ridiculous and shouldn’t have been run, in that this mother is so ill-informed on many levels. We’ll leave aside the stupidity of not examining one’s purchases and then complaining about them. (Er, actually, let’s NOT leave it aside: she had to have not even looked at the logo!) The comic was canceled 15 years ago but she wants the author to “stop putting out this offensive material.” I’m going to make a logical assumption that after researching this by contacting Marvel and asking a comic historian about it, Yasmin did NOT call Jeanette Boswell back to tell her she was upset about a canceled comic from ages past, but instead tied up the article with a quote she already had from Jeanette. Thus, it makes it sound as though Jeanette isn’t even satisfied that the book is no longer a going concern.

Yasmin made another error in not getting hold of the author before running the article; Will Shetterly is easily reachable. He even has a blog, where he is currently discussing the controversy with ample kindness towards the naive mom and the harried reporter looking for an easy, eyeball-grabbing story.

But has some good come out of this? It’s certainly been good publicity for Will Shetterly, who is getting attention for a dead-and-gone property of his. Apparently it’s a creator-owned comic, as Will has decided to pretty up the pages, edit the dialogue a bit (“I’m tightening the dialogue and making people’s speech a little more blunt. I was awfully wordy then.”) and publish them on his blog.

Frankly, now would be a good time to color it and release it as a trade!

Much of the comic fan reaction has been quite vitriolic, calling the mother everything from “retarded” to “one woman who should have never been allowed to breed,” (by someone who didn’t notice that the comic was for a foster child) with at least one person thinking that she was looking to find something to be offended by, though Shatterly’s description is probably more accurate: “She wanted to do something nice for a kid.”

Others are angry that once again anything related to the Confederacy is automatically racist. “Captain Confederacy” is a book which deals realistically with what a world would be like if the South had successfully succeeded. That means treating the characters with more complexity than is usually given in our society. (Indeed, just yesterday I was re-reading Alan Moore’s run on “Supreme” and one issue shows a modern reality where the South won by developing an atom bomb and nuking Washington D.C. Unfortunately, Moore’s simplification of this has northerners talking with southern accents, Supreme wearing a battle flag costume, women not working and comic books about the Klan. None of that is totally inconceivable, but it’s ignoring the different directions history would have taken in an alternate reality. The Klan, for instance, probably wouldn’t even arise as a secret rebellion in a Confederacy-ruled America, since slavery wasn’t squelched by the North.) Captain Confederacy is thus a thinking man’s book, where the reader must see the characters in depth and understand that they are products of how their society has developed. The casual reader would only see the name, the costume, some racist language (by the bad guys) and think it’s some kind of bigoted fantasy.

Let’s just say what everyone is REALLY mad about: it galls fans that comic books are STILL seen by the general public as pure kids stuff. To Mr. and Mrs. Unwitting America, anything four-color on newsprint is for kids, and the only difference between “Little Lotta” and “The Hulk” is one of genre. Our inclusive little community…and sorry, but that’s what comic book fandom IS…has spent the last 20 years convincing itself that “Dark Knight Returns,” Sandman, Alex Ross and Watchmen have busted comic books out into the adult mainstream and smashed all the old notions of “kiddie books,” establishing a whole new viable medium for the adult consumer. Then something like this comes along and reminds us that the remaining 299 million people in our country not only DON’T read comics but have no clue what we’re talking about, and they still regard comic books as something cheap and innocuous you can give a kid to keep him busy while you’re vacuuming.

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