The choice to target the same child and tween demographic that BMW once attracted, rather than the nostalgic millennial audience, is a smart and unsurprising choice for the Disney Channel. The swapping out of “boy” for “girl,” however, is a far greater change than the generational shift, and it is gender that truly separates the spin-off from its parent program. Unfortunately, from a feminist perspective, the execution of these gendered differences leaves much to be desired.

In BMW, protagonist Cory was the straitlaced, middle-class kid from a nuclear family; his best friend, Shawn, was the cocky daredevil from the trailer park. That dichotomy is replicated here in Riley and BFF Maya, but it’s not just Maya’s AC/DC t-shirt and refusal to do homework that mark her rebellion–it’s her sexuality. While Riley is barely starting to experiment with lip gloss, “cool” adult women in the subway remind Maya about the importance of walking provocatively. While Maya is willing to seduce a strange boy on the train as a game, Riley is left terrified and babbling when she trips and falls into the same boy’s lap.

The contrasts come up again and again in this middle school virgin/whore morality play, a theme made explicit when class nerd Farkle walks into the cafeteria with a slice each of angel food and devil’s food cake. And while Maya is never specifically reprimanded for the sexualized aspects of her behavior, the moral of the pilot is that Riley should “be herself” and keep her best friend out of trouble, not try to become her. The girl from the wrong side of the tracks is allowed to be the “whore” in need of saving, but Cory and Topanga’s baby girl must remain pure.

Aside from the virgin/whore themes, Farkle is the show’s biggest problem. His BMW counterpart was Minkus, the obnoxiously nerdy thorn in Cory and Shawn’s sides. But because Minkus was a boy on a heteronormative TV show, his annoying behavior toward the protagonists never veered into sexual territory. If Farkle’s archetype had been gender-flipped the same way Riley’s and Maya’s were, perhaps the character could have worked. Instead, viewers are treated to a character whose defining characteristic is his repeated and unproblematized sexual harassment of the main characters.

Then there’s the third problem: Cory himself, whose reaction to Riley’s interaction with boys is not so much paternal as paternalistic. When Riley is interested in a boy, Cory physically carries that boy out of the room. Yet when Farkle literally takes over Cory’s history class to rhapsodize on his “love” for both Riley and Maya, an affection the girls visibly do not share, Cory lets it proceed without complaint. As the parental and academic voice of reason and the primary nostalgic connection to the previous show (Topanga, sadly, has almost nothing to do in this pilot), Cory’s behavior is unconscionable; in just 22 minutes, he manages to deny his daughter sexual agency in two completely different ways.

BMW always had romantic elements; the characters who would become Riley’s parents first kissed in the fourth episode of season one. Yet the romance was never as all-encompassing in the pre-high school seasons as it is in GMW’s pilot, and it wasn’t confused with sexual harassment or the paternalistic determination of acceptable female sexual expression. In fact, one of BMW’s most triumphant episodes is season four’s “Chick Like Me,” in which Shawn and Cory pose as women and learn hard lessons about the kind of harassment women and girls deal with daily.

The change, however, is not surprising. BMW premiered at a time when “girl shows” were few and far between; most American children’s programming circa 1993 featured a male protagonist or a mixed-gender ensemble. The few girl-centric live-action shows that did exist, like Clarissa Explains it All, were in many ways feminist reactions against these boy-centric narratives. But in the two decades since, Disney and Nickelodeon have produced a slew of sitcoms with tween girl protagonists, creating the mold into which GMW is expected to fit itself.

This balancing of genders in children’s programming is a welcome step forward, but there are crevices of that mold that would be better left unfilled – like the prominent use of sexual harassment as humor in shows like Hannah Montana and iCarly. Though these problematic themes are by no means new (Steve Urkel from Family Matters and Roger from Sister, Sister existed contemporaneously with BMW), they have become codified elements of the tween girl sitcom as it exists today, and GMW is following that code.

Many of the elements that made BMW so charming are still present in GMW: tweens figuring out their place in the world, devoted best friends with opposite personalities, and the thematic tying together of school lessons and life lessons. I applaud the creators for bringing those tropes into an explicitly female space. But Girl Meets World is also burdened by the normalized sexism found in girls’ programming of the past two decades, and that may prove to be its creative and political downfall.

Figure skater Johnny Weir and his soon-to-be-ex-husband Victor Voronov.

More interesting than the current wave of TMZ coverage and tell-all Access Hollywood interviews, though, was the absence thereof before the official divorce announcement on March 19th. On February 11th, Voronov tweeted a photograph of the temporary restraining order he had filed against his husband, which detailed the night Weir allegedly assaulted Voronov and was subsequently arrested. Though the tweet was later deleted, it remained uploaded long enough for fans to save and repost it on various forums. And yet, the celebrity media, usually eager to sniff out scandal (especially scandal backed up by legal documents) remained silent.

On the surface, this may be unsurprising. The mainstream media has a long history of turning a blind eye to accusations of domestic violence leveled at male athletes; this may, actually, be the most masculine-coded role Weir has ever played in a media narrative. But the all-pervasiveness of the media silence is notable, and more likely stems from the fact that, at the time of the aforementioned tweet, Weir was in Sochi, Russia, covering the Olympic figure skating events for NBC alongside fellow former Olympian Tara Lipinski. Weir and Lipinski were the media darlings of the Sochi Olympics, lauded for their flamboyant outfits and keen commentary alike; in the aftermath of the Games, NBC even gave them a spot covering fashion at the Academy Awards. NBC had an obvious financial stake in not letting its star commentator fall from grace in the middle of its Olympics coverage.

Johnny Weir with Tara Lipinski in Sochi.

But the American media also had a political stake in not letting Weir, an openly gay former U.S. Olympian, become the face of same-sex domestic violence. Russia’s recent anti-gay legislation had become one of the biggest media talking points of the Sochi Games, and much of the moral high ground the U.S. held came from the recent Supreme Court dismantling of the Defense of Marriage Act and the country’s overall better track record on LGBT issues. The last thing anyone wanted to give Russia was evidence that the most visible gay man at the Games was in a same-sex marriage that wasn’t working.

Ironically, Weir himself, a known Russophile, had already found himself embroiled in controversy when he expressed his support for the U.S. presence at the Sochi Games and decried the anti-Russia protests organized by various LGBT organizations. In an article for the Falls Church News-Press, Weir wrote, “Many activists also believe that change starts with a revolution, a term that terrifies me. I am not against activism in any way, but I don’t have the strength of character to not only revolutionize my life on a daily basis but also the lives of others.” This desire to distance himself from LGBT activism is consistent with past statements Weir has made – he has no interest in being a role model, and has always seemed much more comfortable with his media image as skating’s “wild child.”

Yet the burden of representation remains. Weir and Voronov’s marriage had already been framed as a success story on the road to full LGBT equality. Now that the divorce announcement is official and the Olympics are over, the media has seized on the story as Weir and Voronov engage in one of the most high-profile same-sex divorces in American legal history. Voronov’s crisis manager, Wendy Feldman, has made this unprecedented quality explicit: “This case is really a true test of equal rights — in marriage and now divorce,” she said, in a statement released soon after the divorce announcement. And Voronov, Weir, and the media alike aren’t keen to let anyone forget that this is a gay divorce. From Voronov’s claims that Weir “forced him out of the closet” and only married him because a “Georgetown-educated lawyer” would make for a useful character on his (now-defunct) reality show, to the debate about whether or not Voronov should have worked during their marriage (rather than letting Weir alone bring home the bacon), discursive constructions of heterosexual and homosexual gender roles have become integral to the media narrative surrounding the divorce.

The domestic violence accusations bring in another level of ugliness, especially after Weir’s no-holds-barred account of what “really” happened the night he was arrested, which includes implications of attempted rape on Voronov’s part. The divorce raises questions about the power dynamics of money, fame, perceived femininity, and domestic abuse, even as the more shallow media coverage focuses on Weir’s collections of furs and Birkin bags and Voronov’s demand that Weir return the family dog.

How Weir and the media handle the rest of the divorce proceedings will be telling. Weir’s star text, as a media personality and as one of a small number of openly gay American athletes, is at stake, but so is, despite Weir’s protestations, the popular image of gay marriage and divorce in America. Weir may not want to be anyone’s hero, but he likely doesn’t want to be anyone’s villain, either – and in the black-and-white world of media narrative, he may not get to choose.

I saw Magic Mike on Monday night, with my mother, in a theater exclusively populated by cheering, hooting, unabashedly lustful women. The movie’s marketing had obviously hit its target. And yet, the film’s resolution turned out to be a bit of a bait-and-switch, promoting the idea that smart, attractive, morally sound women would never enjoy, or even sanction, male stripping. In other words, the film’s overarching message is a reprimand and a ridicule of the very women whose money it so desperately seeks.

While the film’s protagonists are all male, Magic Mike features many female characters. Unfortunately, most of them fall into one of two categories: sexually-promiscuous, exploitatively filmed, usually topless hangers-on of the male strippers who both literally and metaphorically represent the protagonists’ downfall, and attendees of the male revue who are portrayed as either drunken, childish floozies or desperate, unattractive objects of ridicule. (In one particularly distasteful scene, Joe Manganiello’s stripper character, “Big Dick Richie,” mockingly mimes back pain after lifting a heavyset woman, which seems like a poor business strategy for a man of his profession.)

The exceptions to this category are Olivia Munn’s Joanna, a bisexual, promiscuous psychology student who cruelly leads on Channing Tatum’s titular character; and Cody Horn’s Brooke, a responsible medical assistant and Mike’s ultimate love interest, who doesn’t approve of Mike or her brother (Adam, played by Alex Pettyfer) stripping. Of all the characters, Brooke is the one we’re asked to identify with and see as the moral center of the story. She has a “real” job, she doesn’t give in to Joanna’s scandalous advances, she never drinks or does drugs, she’s her brother’s primary caretaker, and she acts as the catalyst for Mike to realize that his stripping is immature at best and destructive at worst. By the end of the film, Mike has quit his job to focus on more mature pursuits, and Brooke rewards him by finally relenting to his romantic interest. (Unlike the usual gender-flipped stripper narrative, there is no indication that Brooke is attempting to “save” Mike’s virtue, or seeking to claim sole ownership of his naked body; it is, rather, her female virtue she is protecting when she refuses to associate with male strippers.)

There are more problems with this film: the insistent reinforcement of the male strippers’ heterosexuality coupled with mild instances of homophobia (only the morally suspect Joanna is allowed to be textually queer); the lack of characters of color who aren’t drug dealers (other than Joanna and Tito, Adam Rodriguez’s almost dialogue-free stripper character); and the fact that Brooke does nothing more than flail and scream when her brother nearly overdoses, despite her established medical training. But all of these issues tie into the same fundamental flaw: though the movie claims to be (and was certainly marketed to be) a film all about flipping sexist tropes and celebrating the female gaze, it can’t help falling back into problematic mainstream patterns: the male gaze, virgin/whore dichotomies, and the vilification of female pleasure.

Yet as I think back on my experience in that movie theater, I can’t help hoping that this is a sign of better things to come. Despite the film’s abundant flaws, Magic Mike has given women (including my mother and, let’s be honest, myself) the opportunity to go to a public, non-stigmatized place (unlike the private home party or derided strip club) to take in the sight of men putting themselves on sexual display for their benefit. The women in the diegetic audience of the strippers’ performances may be ridiculed, but it is still their hungry gaze we are invited to claim as our own. Magic Mike is not a great movie, but I hold out hope that its attempts to break the mold, however halfhearted, will inspire more and better versions of its kind in years to come.

Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson, the five boys who make up One Direction, are a fascinating case study in the changing dynamics of the modern music industry. While they share similarities with American boy bands of the past (from New Kids on the Block to *NSync) and with those original moptops of the British Invasion, they also represent a shift in the way such bands are formed, marketed, and made visible to the public. But what interests me most is the way in which the boys’ open, affectionate, and even homoerotic interaction represents a new (and welcome) shift in Western youth culture.

Perhaps the primary appeal of One Direction as a boy band is the combination of youth, exposure, and authenticity that is inherent in their marketing. The boys are all between 18 and 20 years old, already younger than the boy bands of the late 90s, but their youthful image is exacerbated by the rough, unpolished style of their marketing. While bands like *NSync and the Backstreet Boys spent years honing their dance moves, media training, and constructed personality archetypes in countries like Japan and Germany before hitting the Anglo-American market, One Direction has boarded an immediate and unstoppable roller coaster of international fame. As a result of this compressed timeline, the boys can’t actually dance (as anyone who saw their SNL appearance could attest), and their encounters with the press tend to be awkward and unpracticed.

In the era of instantly-posted YouTube clips, personal twitter accounts, and livestreaming webcam video, the boys of One Direction aren’t just reality TV stars – they are reality TV stars positioned in such a way as to appear stripped of almost all mediation and editing. This aesthetic celebrates notions of authenticity and connectedness with the fanbase, following the model my colleague Lindsay Hogan has studied regarding the stardom of Justin Bieber. As a result, YouTube is flooded with videos of the boys acting young and goofy in casual (or perhaps “casual”) settings: teasing each other, playing games, and generally acting like the teenage boys they are.

These kinds of shenanigans are not new. They are strikingly similar, in fact, to clips from the videos my own tweenage musical love, Hanson, would sell to the fans on VHS. The boys of Hanson, like One Direction, were younger than their ’90s boy band counterparts and thus free to act sillier. But Hanson was a band composed of brothers, and thus their videos lacked the final element of One Direction’s “authentic” portrayal of boy band friendship: comfortable homoeroticism.

Even a casual observer of One Direction and its marketing would notice the fact that the boys can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. They hug, grope, and fall asleep on each other constantly, pretend to kiss each other for laughs, and joke about queer relationships between them – to the extent of planning out elaborate hypothetical Valentine’s Day dates with each other. They are also remarkably affectionate, proclaiming their love and devotion to the other boys in the group without a hint of irony.

This is not, of course, the first time the idea of the boy band has been queered. “Popslash,” the term for homoerotic fanfiction about boy bands in the *NSync/BSB era, was one of the first large-scale internet fandoms for so-called “real person” fanfiction. And charges of queerness have always been levied at these types of bands by anti-fans seeking to use sexist, homophobic language to devalue the music tastes of young women. But past incarnations of boy bands always kept up defensively heterosexual presentations, to the extent that *NSync member Lance Bass did not feel comfortable coming out of the closet until 2006 (long after the band’s indefinite “hiatus”).

There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon. First and foremost, the One Direction boys are all quite open about their heterosexuality, publicly tweeting with their current girlfriends and giving interviews about their exes. Their homoeroticism, then, can be seen as a variation on the “bromance” trend – they can play with queerness because their heterosexuality is constantly reinforced, both in the reports of their personal lives and in their aggressively heteronormative song lyrics.

Yet this seems an inadequate explanation when, unlike the highly-constructed joke setups of bromance comedies, One Direction relies so heavily on an aesthetic of honesty and authenticity. What seems more likely is a phenomenon like the one sociologist Mark McCormack presented in a Huffington Post report, which points out the ways in which British teen boy culture is becoming less and less homophobic and more and more accepting of demonstrative male friendship. While the equivalence with American school cultures is less clear, the boys’ rapidly-growing transnational stardom, despite no national differences in marketing, may point to an increasing acceptance of this gentler form of masculinity in the American classroom.

Whatever the explanation, the casual affection and homoeroticism of One Direction opens up new avenues for analysis in the study of tween music cultures. How, for example, is the target tween girl audience responding to the softer masculinities of these presentations? And what effect might this marketing have on tween boys, particularly queer boys struggling to come to terms with their own sexuality?

I don’t have the answers right now, but I plan to keep looking. As soon as I finish listening to “One Thing” on repeat.

From the setup of the pilot episode, SMASH purports to be centered on a narrative trope I personally love – the rivalry between someone who has worked hard and followed all the rules, but never quite rises above mediocrity, and a newcomer who bursts out of nowhere, refuses to fit the mold, and sparkles with natural talent. I’ve written about this trope before, regarding comic book miniseries Mystic, noting its presence in celebrity media narratives (Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera, Evan Lysacek vs. Johnny Weir) and in fictional narratives like – appropriately enough – the musical Wicked.

The problem, however, is that Ms. Hard-Working But Mediocre is played by Broadway veteran Megan Hilty, and Ms. Natural Talent is played by American Idol alumnus Katharine McPhee. And while there’s no denying McPhee’s vocal talent, her voice simply can’t compare in power, vibrancy, and fullness with Hilty’s – a fact which becomes abundantly clear in the duet that closes out the pilot. McPhee is a pop singer, but Hilty is a Broadway star, and whatever the narrative setup, the competition (for the lead role of Marilyn Monroe in the new musical) in execution winds up being between someone who is hard-working and talented and someone with no experience and a weak voice. Given that reality, how is the viewer supposed to believe that McPhee (as a character who is definitively not a former American Idol contestant) would even be in consideration for the role?

This narrative problem could be chalked up to the perils (so familiar on the Broadway stage itself) of celebrity stunt casting. But I believe the issue goes deeper than that. This pilot implicitly urges us to believe that fresh-faced McPhee and her small, breathy voice are actually superior to Hilty’s singing-to-the-back-row style – not just for the sake of the narrative conflict, but for the sake of the show’s overall style. From High School Musical to Glee, musical theater in contemporary media has become a punchline, its songs and traditions reworked into airy pop confections that disdain their origins. The pop style itself is not inherently a problem, but the concomitant dismissal of classical musical theater styles creates a frustrating status quo for fans of the genre. And though the original musical numbers in the pilot (created by Hairspray composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) are by far the best parts of the episode, even the very idea of a “Marilyn Monroe musical” seems weak and uninspired – in an early scene, Messing’s character bemoans the popularity of revivals and movie-based musicals currently on the Broadway stage, but is a musical based on the life of a well-known public figure any more original than one based on a film?

Beyond this glaring problem inherent in the premise lies another, more insidious issue: despite the fact that most of the show’s main characters are women and gay men, the narrative relies on a number of tired sexist tropes for its forward momentum. When the egocentric director played by Jack Davenport calls McPhee’s character to his apartment late at night and demands she “do Marilyn” for him – implicitly by having sex with him – she’s horrified and runs to his bathroom in shock. But a moment later, she pulls herself together and decides to swap her clothing for a men’s dress shirt hanging in the bathroom and perform the infamous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” for her potential director, complete with a seductive crawl into his lap. When Davenport leans in to kiss her, she turns away, telling him the dance is all he’s going to get, and we’re presumably supposed to applaud her show of backbone. But the real message comes through clearly: McPhee’s character is admirable because she gives into sexual harassment just enough, accepting this as “part of the process” but not slipping into promiscuity. This scene comes on top of Messing’s unfortunate storyline, which involves her husband (Brian D’Arcy James) repeatedly berating her for focusing on her musical-writing career instead of their attempts to adopt a baby. Casting couches and work-family balance are certainly topics that could be thoughtfully explored in feminist narratives, and I hope the series improves on both past the pilot, following in the vein of the much stronger subplot about the show’s producer (Anjelica Huston) and her contentious divorce. My expectations, however, are not very high.

Whatever the merits of the show, I’m happy to see Broadway stars (particularly Hilty and Christian Borle, who plays Messing’s writing partner) getting the chance to gain mainstream exposure. And as a scholar, I’ll certainly continue to watch Smash, if only to see where the series goes and what it does to influence the popular perception of musical theater (and musical theater television) in a post-Glee world. But after such a frustrating pilot episode, riddled as it was with narrative disconnects and troubling sexism, I find it doubtful that I’ll enjoy the experience.

Joe Simon may not have the name recognition of his collaborator of more than a decade, Jack Kirby, or his protégée, Stan Lee, but his impact on the comic book medium was profound. His best-known creation, Captain America, came about in late 1940, when he and Kirby published the first story about the star-spangled hero, his fist iconically smashing into the face of Adolf Hitler on the cover. Simon in interviews was always unapologetic about the comic’s political content. As quoted in Bradford W. Wright’s Comic Book Nation, Simon explained that “The opponents of the war were all quite well organized. We wanted to have our say too.” He “felt very good about making a political statement…and taking a stand.” But a year before Pearl Harbor, with isolationists and Nazi sympathizers still very present among the American populace, not everyone was prepared for such an in-your-face anti-Nazi statement from two Jewish-American creators. Noted Simon, “When the first issue came out we got a lot of… threatening letters and hate mail. Some people really opposed what Cap stood for.” (1)

Though Simon and Kirby left Captain America after only ten issues, their work together would continue to have an impact. While Simon served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that later became Marvel, he and Kirby also did work for competitor National Comics (later DC), creating characters such as the Sandman and the Newsboy Legion. After serving in World War II, Simon and Kirby would move on to other comic book genres, including horror comics, western comics, and romance comics, a genre they essentially invented with the publication of Young Romance in 1947. Their partnership came to a close in 1955, as the comic book industry began to crumble in the face of slumping sales and the moral panic about the effect of comics on juvenile delinquency incited by Fredric Wertham and his Seduction of the Innocent. Kirby stayed in comics, going on to collaborate famously with writer Stan Lee and create most of the early Marvel Comics heroes, while Simon moved on to commercial art, returning to the medium only periodically.

Yet Simon’s legacy in the comic book industry still resonates. He was one of the first people in the industry to fight for the rights of creators to own their work, at a time when the late Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave up the rights to Superman for a paltry sum while its corporate owners made millions. It’s a battle that still rages on today, as comic book writers and artists on superhero projects continue to labor, un-unionized, under work-for-hire agreements that give the companies total control of any new characters they might dream up. Simon was also the one to give the first comic book writing opportunities to Stan Lee, by far the most recognizable face of the American comic book industry and one of the few surviving Golden Age greats. Joe Simon’s two biographies, The Comic Makers and the more recent Joe Simon: My Life in Comics, provide fascinating glimpses into the history of the industry and fantastic resources for scholars. He continued to participate in the comic book world well into his twilight years, attending conventions and granting interviews to scholars and journalists (particularly around the “Death of Captain America” storyline of 2007). He even lived to see last summer’s Captain America: The First Avenger, a movie set in the early 1940s of his own youth and modeled on his and Kirby’s original first issue, make millions at the box office.

In the spring of 2008, I attended the New York Comic-Con, still riding high from the completion of my 100-page undergrad senior thesis on “The Cultural Work of Captain America.” Wandering Artists Alley, where creators sit behind tables to chat with fans, sell their work, and sign comics, I spotted Joe Simon sitting quietly, his table somehow lacking a line of fans despite his stature in the industry. I remember shaking with nerves as I approached his table, holding out a recent Captain America comic for him to sign (his own work, sadly, being far too rare and expensive for me to own). As he wrote his name in big, blocky letters on my book, I thanked him for his contributions, and explained the work I’d done on my senior thesis. His handler had to repeat my words at a louder volume to compensate for the elderly man’s poor hearing, but Simon grinned broadly and shook my hand, thanking me for taking the time to analyze his work in that way. As a comic book fan and a budding comic book scholar, that moment remains seared in my memory, the high point of my fandom and my scholarship so far. I am immensely thankful that I had the opportunity to thank the person who inspired my academic work with his texts, and I regret that the next generation of comic book scholars will be deprived of that chance.

(1) Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. p. 36.

Festivities began on Friday afternoon, when the venerable Horace Newcomb presented his keynote speech, “Looking for the Best Funny: Comedy Program Recipients of the Peabody Award.” Newcomb, director of the prestigious Peabody Awards, provided valuable insight into the process of Peabody selection (with its unanimous vote requirement), the complexities of the Peabody archive (containing all submitted materials, not just those of the recipients), and the history of the recognition of television comedy by the awards. Though comedy Peabody Awards are commonplace now, Newcomb highlighted, through close readings of the award citations of years past, the ways in which a sense of “higher purpose,” rather than humor value, was frequently used as a justification for giving a respected award to a representative of a seemingly insubstantial genre.

Newcomb’s discussion of the Peabody archive continued into the first panel of day one of the conference proper, “Comedy and the Archives.” While Newcomb gave examples of non-program television material meticulously archived by Peabody over time, Nick Marx painted a very different picture of the nearly-nonexistent state of the improvisational comedy archive. Michele Hilmes, meanwhile, used archival material to provide valuable historical context for comedy as we know it, detailing the transition of the comedy genre from the vaudeville/gag aesthetic of early radio to the creation, in the 1940s, of the situation comedy. Together, these panelists raised questions for the audience to take up about the ephemeral nature of performative media, the reliability of a necessarily limited archive, and fears of a digital future devoid of the kind of paper artifacts that allow scholars like Hilmes to do their work.

Marx’s discussion of non-television improv comedy dovetailed nicely with the next panel, “Comedy and Industrial Practices,” in which Evan Elkins suggested that comedy is itself an industry that includes television but is not limited to it, as the prevalence of the comedy club circuit, improv troupes, podcasts, and other feeder systems prove. This idea of comedy as a transmedial enterprise was taken up by Max Dawson and David Gurney, who each explored the ways in which Internet comedy supplanted the comedy club and changed the dynamics of the comedy industry, creating a world in which TV and Internet comedy feed into and bolster one another (rather than one, as the popular narrative claims, “killing” or “saving” the other). Finally, Myles McNutt discussed the ways in which television channels, particularly HBO, brand their comedies, often attempting to hide the comedy identity that seems ill-fitting with a network’s self-image of prestige. All of this led to a fruitful discussion on the hierarchical nature of the work of comedians and of comedy taste cultures. This discussion of taste cultures would resurface throughout the weekend, as the conference tried to contend with the differences between mass-appeal, critically-derided sitcoms and niche, experimental, critically-lauded examples.

The next panel, “Boundaries of the Acceptable,” was marked by the introduction of the term “Post-PC” comedy, proposed by Amanda Lotz to describe the breaking down of taboos in modern TV comedy and the use of irony to talk about what could not be talked about before. Though Nora Seitz offered a critical example of how “Post-PC” comedy functions in modern sitcom depictions of rude or cruel parenting, and Ethan Thompson provided a historical context for the development of these new modes of comedy and the centrality of self-humiliating humor, much of the discussion that followed centered around the usefulness, or potential lack thereof, of “post-PC” as a term. Though the question was left unresolved, it was the first of many discussions over the course of the weekend about the need for a new critical language for the study of modern TV comedy and the new methodologies it requires for proper analysis.

Discussions of boundary-breaking and the privilege inherent in being able to make certain ironic, “post-PC” jokes recirculated in the following panel, “Comedy and Gender.” Ron Becker described his reception studies of straight males watching “bromance” narratives, while Timothy Havens brought in the idea of minority groups (particularly racial minorities) using satire as a tool against the oppressors, an idea that could have purchase with discussions of gender. Kyra Hunting explored the ways in which female-led or -targeted comedy is often categorized generically as “dramedy,” raising questions about the perception of women’s humor, while Victoria Johnson explored the ways in which current female-centric comedies like 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation negotiate cultural geography and, in the latter case, present a new comedy of earnestness. The diversity of these panelists’ ideas led to a vibrant, free-floating discussion of the relative masculinization of comedy, as well as a broader discussion of women’s roles in contemporary television comedy.

Rounding out day one was a lively discussion of “Comedy and Politics,” a panel that tried to contemporize Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch’s idea of television as a “cultural forum”. Jeffrey Jones highlighted the necessity of audience research to determine how political TV comedy affects audiences and their constructions of citizenship, while Amber Day focused specifically on the potential political consequences of Stephen Colbert’s “SuperPAC” and the extended civics lesson embedded in its comedy. Heather Hendershot pointed to another example of a television civics lesson in the form of Parks and Recreation, which promotes a liberal pluralist view that ridicules extremism and posits a world where people of differing beliefs can discuss ideas rationally in a functioning and important local government. On the other end of the spectrum, Jeffrey Sconce discussed the ways in which TV comedy, as opposed to generally “realistic” drama, acts in a more radical and modernist way to appeal to niche groups through messy tactics that may be incoherent to those outside the niche. The resulting conversation was heated and, in some corners, a bit pessimistic, but offered valuable discussion around of the need for effects research, the role of affect, and the merits of working within the confines of empirical American political science.

After the lengthy critical discussion of day one, day two held just two panels to finish up the conference. The first, “Comedy, Race, Ethnicity, and Nation” featured a wide-ranging discussion of comedy in national and cultural contexts. Christopher Cwynar and Serra Tinic discussed the formation of Canadian cultural identity in Little Mosque on the Prairie and British-influenced Canadian sketch comedy, respectively, while Racquel Gates and Matt Sienkiewicz returned to day one’s discussions of race, power, and the boundaries of the acceptable. Gates discussed the ways in which a focus on positive and negative representation may obscure discussion of the humor and quality of African-American-centric comedy, while Sienkiewicz considered the ways in which Family Guy’s random, stream-of-conscious style makes its ethnic humor all the more problematic. Though the resulting discussion picked up all of these topics, the most common thread was the discussion of irony and the ways in which it is used as both a tool of the powerless and a tool of the dominant who feel their power slipping, a way of both fighting against and reinforcing power structures.

The conference ended where it began, with a historiographic view of “Multi-Camera Sitcoms” and the transition to the single-camera form. Elana Levine and Michael Newman began by discussing the discursive construction of the single-camera sitcom as an “upgrade” from the multi-camera form and the ways in which the two forms actually represent divergent historical styles. In explaining the history of the laugh track and other elements of the multi-camera sitcom, they succeeded in historicizing the genre and highlighting the ways in which it has been a victim of classed and gendered assumptions. Andrew Bottomley took up the falseness of the single-cam/multi-cam dichotomy by exploring the ways in which How I Met Your Mother blends the two genres, while Christine Becker provided a similar analysis, in the British context, of the program Miranda. What ensued was a lengthy conversation about form, history, and the impact of such affective properties as nostalgia and identification on these formal decisions.

The UW-Madison Television Comedy Conference was a positive argument for the replication of small-style conferences in other schools and on other topics. The restrictive subject matter and presence of all conference participants at every panel created a common frame of reference among scholars, resulting in a discussion that could travel beyond panel borders and build over the course of the weekend and thereafter. Thanks in large part to Jonathan Gray’s strict timekeeping and moderation, everyone with thoughts to share found the opportunity to speak, and the result was a richer experience for all involved. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience for my first-ever academic conference, and I’m sure other participants share my warmth and enthusiasm.

Captain America, at the character’s comic book inception, was as much a propaganda tool as a narrative character. The cover of his very first issue, released in early 1941, featured the star-spangled hero socking Hitler across the jaw. It was a calculated political move, and not one without controversy, considering the isolationist streak that still ran through the American populace a year before Pearl Harbor. As the U.S. entered World War II, later issues of the comic implored child readers to buy war bonds and join Captain America fan clubs that required members to be vigilant and defend American values.

In the decades since the war, and particularly since his revival in the comics in 1964, Captain America has evolved significantly, becoming a nuanced character whose allegiance to the ideals of the American Dream trumps his allegiance to the fallible whims of the American government. But unlike fellow 1940s comic book heroes like Superman and Batman, his World War II origins have always remained the keystone of his back story, and it’s those origins that form the bulk of the current film.

The First Avenger, for the most part, does an excellent job of balancing the gritty reality of World War II and the over-the-top necessities of superhero action. By positioning the villainous Red Skull as the leader of Hydra, a Nazi splinter-cell, the film wisely creates a superpowered form of evil for its superhero to battle in a WWII setting without drastically changing the actual events of the war. But that balance is nowhere to be found in the USO sequence, which reeks of the influence of a cynical modern eye and a dismissal of historical realism, comic book necessity, and media effects.

In the sequence, the newly-transformed Steve Rogers, a formerly-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who has suddenly become the one and only super-soldier in the U.S. government’s arsenal, takes an offer to become a USO performer instead of remaining in a lab to become a guinea pig for possible replication of the super-soldier serum. Suddenly, in between filming movie serials and the production of the in-universe version of a Captain America comic book, he finds himself touring the country in an elaborate, Alan Menken-scored song-and-dance show, complete with special effects, patriotic chorus girls, and a man dressed as Hitler for Steve to punch in the face. Steve reads his lines awkwardly and uncomfortably, wearing a costume that is much closer to the comic book version than the one that will be used later in the film, and the entire affair is portrayed as laughable and cheesy, suitable only for the excitable children in the audience. When Steve and the chorus girls take the show overseas for the troops, the troops are completely unimpressed, hurling insults that question Steve’s masculinity and heterosexuality and begging for the chorus girls to return (for ogling purposes). This is the final straw for Steve, who soon afterward breaks ranks and goes off to become the soldier he was meant to be.

There are a number of problems with this sequence. Even on the surface, the discourse on masculinity is troubling, particularly in a film that has only two female characters with speaking lines – the love interest, Agent Peggy Carter, who is valorized because she can shoot a gun and knock out any man, and a secretary who tries to seduce Steve. Though the film purports to be about heroism in all forms, postulating that even the weakest person can become a strong hero, this heroism is cast definitively as a masculine heroism, a heroism of athletic feats, gunshots, muscles, and blood. Women exist primarily to be ogled or to be seductresses, and they don’t count as full human beings unless they work hard to replicate the masculine ideals. Steve Rogers’ USO appearances are feminized and consequently demonized, and it is only through strapping on military gear that he is allowed to come into his own as a superhero.

These gendered aspects of the sequence are unsurprising, if disappointing, in a film that is both an action film and a superhero film, two genres rife with examples of sexism. But what strikes me most about the USO sequence is the way it presents the idea that entertainment cannot bring about change. It isn’t just that militaristic, masculine heroism is presented as the only valuable form of heroism; it’s that media and entertainment artifacts are explicitly presented as silly, mock-worthy, and meaningless. While a throwaway line establishes that sales of war bonds increase after Steve’s shows, this is dismissed as a drop in the bucket, an insignificant victory. Meanwhile, the historical reality of the effectiveness of USO shows for boosting troop morale (even with male performers, like Bob Hope) is completely unacknowledged, revealing the cynical modern eye at work in representing a cultural artifact from the 1940s.

This lack of regard for cultural history is reinforced when the performing costume Steve wears is made to look deliberately ridiculous, and is later traded in for something less colorful and covered with unnecessary straps – a change made, according to director Joe Johnston, to help viewers to “take him seriously” and make the uniform more appropriate for a World War II story (more appropriate, apparently, than the costume actually designed in 1940). But beyond the disregard for actual history, the sequence serves to disregard the character himself, a character whose actual existence in the 1940s had an impact on popular culture and on World War II, and whose stories since have always reflected, anticipated, and at times intersected with cultural shifts.

As a media studies scholar, I’m wary of any claim that entertainment has no serious effect on the culture at large. But I’m especially wary when a piece of media itself attempts to make this claim. The First Avenger is a delicate film to produce in 2011, particularly when the global box office is so important and the name “Captain America” conjures up jingoistic, stereotypical images in the minds of the uninformed. By presenting the USO sequence the way they do, the filmmakers are actively working to distance themselves from any political impact or controversy their movie might create. After all, the story implies, a big entertainment spectacular all about Captain America is silly fluff, not to be taken seriously. By denying the impact of popular culture on real-world issues, Johnston & Co. create a fictional universe that explicitly attempts to distance itself from any potential controversy.

Only time and box office returns can tell if their plan will succeed.

It wasn’t the first time a comic book character’s death had been announced by mainstream (rather than specialized or pop culture-centric) news sources. When DC Comics killed off Superman in 1992, the issue, which was vacuum-sealed in an opaque plastic bag for secrecy (and collectability), made waves in the news media. Likewise, when Marvel killed off Captain America in 2007, the news spread across the internet like wildfire the morning the comic was published. And deaths aren’t the only comic book events that receive media coverage. In the past few years alone, headlines have sprung up in mainstream news venues about Archie marrying Veronica, Captain America carrying a gun, and Wonder Woman wearing pants. In each example, the news hit the wire before the issue in question was available for purchase – in the case of Johnny’s death, more than 24 hours before comics’ usual Wednesday release date, and hours before any stores would open for the early, unofficial Tuesday release of Fantastic Four #587.

The comic book industry is a small one with a tiny core audience, and it’s not shocking that companies like Marvel, DC, and Archie would harness the power of the mainstream press to try to get new bodies into the specialty shops where comics are near-exclusively sold. Fantastic Four #587, like the Death of Superman, was placed in a vacuum-sealed “polybag,” a practice reserved in the past for so-called “collectible” issues that largely went out of favor after the burst of the speculation bubble in the 1990s. The companies assume (correctly) that non-readers will hear the news and buy the issue out of an (erroneous) assumption that its “special event” quality will make it valuable years down the line, thus briefly spiking the company’s profits. And if even a handful of those potential collectors spots something on the comic book shelf that makes them come back the next week and the week after that, the corporate logic goes, so much the better.

What is more surprising, though, is the mainstream media’s treatment of these stories as legitimate, reportable news events, rather than as spoilers for serial narratives. I can’t imagine a scenario in which the Associated Press would report spoilers for a death on LOST before the episode aired, or the death of a Harry Potter character before the release of the sixth or seventh book. While rumors, advance reviews, and other easily-accessible sites for spoilers on the internet are commonplace, the mainstream news generally avoids directly reporting such information, at least until the general public has gotten the opportunity to consume the piece of media in question. But news organizations possess no such qualms about spoiling comic books.

This raises questions about the strange place that comic books occupy in the cultural landscape. The most popular comic book superheroes are some of the oldest, most iconic fictional characters in modern America, cultural strongholds from the 1930s through the present. Yet circulation of comic books themselves in the 21st century is pitifully low – a comic that sells 100,000 copies in 2011 is a blockbuster, and the average American is more familiar with the heroes through movies, cartoons, and merchandise. As a result, the news reports play to the lowest common denominator, revealing the key events in the comics without providing any context and sending the curious to comic shops to pick up an issue that will make absolutely no sense to anyone who has not been following the serialized story. A non-reader would never know that Archie’s marriage to Veronica was simply a fantasy of one possible future, that the gun-slinging Captain America was not Steve Rogers but his sidekick, former brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes, or that Johnny Storm died at the culmination of a long storyline involving alien invaders from another dimension. The only people who wouldn’t be confused by these things are the regular comic book readers – the very people who find the pervasiveness of the spoilery news stories so frustrating.

But for the news media, confusion about the narrative is not a concern, because the news media does not treat comics as narrative. Comics are periodicals, both in form (floppy, stapled pages of content and ads) and release structure (monthly or weekly), and the treatment of comic books by the media can be compared much more readily to its treatment of magazine periodicals than its treatment of television shows or book sequels. In the current digital climate, news of a celebrity having a baby or coming out of the closet hits the wire long before the physical issue of People hits the stands, no matter how allegedly exclusive the content. Comics, as conceptualized by the media, are no different – they are merely magazines reporting news from another universe, a universe full of players as beloved and well-known as Gwyneth Paltrow or Lance Bass. One needn’t be a diehard *NSync fan to be curious about Lance Bass’s sexuality, and, likewise, one needn’t be a comic book reader to care about what happens to the Human Torch.

The difference, however, is that despite the iconic status of their characters, the periodical status of their form, and the small size of their audience, comics are narratives, narratives lovingly constructed by hard-working writers and artists. In a spoilery media culture that ignores story for the sake of shallow reporting on the status of fictional people, that’s the fact that threatens to gets lost in the shuffle. Superhero comic books have long struggled for cultural legitimacy, fighting the derisive “Wham! Biff! Pow!” headlines, and as long as the American media landscape (not to mention corporate marketing departments) treats them as news delivery mechanisms rather than stories, that struggle will continue.

This is a small moment, to be sure. Yet it’s indicative of a step forward on the part of Marvel Comics in its portrayal of issues facing Latinos in America. The standard superhero comic book “solution” to language differences has always been the deus ex machina, the telepath or electronic device that instantly teaches fluent English to the non-speaker. The character’s native language is thus eliminated entirely from the narrative, unless the plot calls for a trip to a foreign country. The scene in Young Allies differs significantly from this approach, not just in its portrayal of the actual difficulties of second language acquisition, but in its implicit presentation of English and Spanish as equally valuable languages, neither one privileged or eliminated.

Super Hero Squad's Reptil

Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, himself Cuban-American, has frequently downplayed the need to increase the number of non-white characters in comics. Despite his protestations, however, Marvel has quietly responded to the increased presence of Latinos in America with a corresponding, if tentative, increase in the number of Latino Marvel characters. At the forefront of this new wave of Latino superheroes is Humberto Lopez, or “Reptil,” a Chicano teenage boy who can turn into various dinosaurs. In his short tenure as a comic book character he has become the leader of a group of new superheroes in the comic Avengers Academy and serves the primary audience-identification role as the sole teenage character on the Marvel cartoon Super Hero Squad, a series targeted at the elementary school age group. Also prominent in current Marvel Comics are Gabriel Cohuelo, a Mexican teenager with speed powers and one of the five new mutant characters in Generation Hope, an X-Men spinoff, and Julio “Rictor” Richter of X-Factor, a Mexican immigrant who has appeared in Marvel comics since the 80s but who has received renewed attention of late for his newly-revealed bisexuality. Though Marvel has featured LGBT characters in the past, Rictor’s relationship with (white) boyfriend Shatterstar resulted last year in the first romantic, on-panel male/male kiss in Marvel history, and he is the only prominent queer male Latino superhero in comics.

For these characters, Latino culture has been pushed to the background to a greater or lesser degree. Reptil’s heritage is expressed almost exclusively through his name and appearance, Rictor’s Mexican background has rarely been addressed beyond an offhand utterance of “amigo” or “adios” since the 90s, and Gabriel (who has only appeared in two comic book issues at the time of this writing) is too new to evaluate. Young Allies, however, has over its six brief issues consistently negotiated Latino culture and the specific challenges of being Latino in America, not only through the character of Toro but through Anya Sofia Corazon, a Puerto-Rican teenage superheroine who formerly called herself Araña but is now known as Spider-Girl. Anya is bilingual (though English-dominant), and is the only character who can communicate effectively with Toro; though their conversations are translated for the benefit of the English-speaking reader, they’re shown to be speaking Spanish by indicative brackets, and their English speech is peppered with untranslated Spanish words both common (“gracias”) and culturally specific (“zángano”). They share a clear linguistic bond, but writer Sean McKeever is aware of the differences between various Latino cultures, as evidenced by Anya’s reply to a fire-based villain’s taunts that she must be missing “that Mexico heat”: “I’m Puerto Rican, dipstick!” The presence of two different Latino characters in an ensemble cast of five allows for a diversity of representation of Latino experiences uncommon in American media, as well as the rare chance for interaction between two non-white characters in an integrated narrative world, rather than between a non-white character and a white character.

Young Allies, l. to r.: Gravity, Spider-Girl, Nomad, Toro, Firestar

Young Allies has sadly been cancelled as of October’s issue six, the result of poor sales. However, this Wednesday Marvel debuts a new Spider-Girl series by Paul Tobin and Clayton Henry, with Anya Corazon as its star. This marks the second solo series for Anya, whose Araña lasted only 12 issues in 2005. Unlike Araña, however, all signs point to a marketing push on Marvel’s part designed to make Spider-Girl a hit, including the character’s continued appearances in a Nomad-centric backup story in the high-selling Captain America and an official twitter account written from Anya’s perspective that actively responds to reader questions and will be featured within the text of the comic. Promotional interviews and solicits for the book have promised appearances from Nomad, which opens the possibility of Toro’s presence, and has encouraged hope from fans that Latino characters from her previous series (including her journalist father) may also make significant appearances. However, other signs indicate a potential focus on standard whitewashed definitions of “marketability” over cultural specificity – the cover of the first issue is colored in such a way that Anya appears to be blond and white, and the book’s very title ties the character more closely to Marvel’s white male cash cow, Spider-Man, than to Anya’s personal background, as the name “Araña” had.

Cover to Spider-Girl #1

Whatever the future may hold for Spider-Girl or any of these other characters, Marvel’s recent attempts at increased Latino representation are certainly worth noting, following, and analyzing by scholars, both of comic books and of racial diversity in media. Their audiences may be small, but in the increasingly multi-platform media landscape, the presence of Latino characters in comics (as is already the case with the TV version of Reptil) may ultimately shape and influence cartoons, merchandise, and blockbuster film franchises with a much wider cultural reach.