The De-Gaying Of Arthur Suydam’s Cholly And Flytrap Bleeding Cool Comic Book News and Rumors
Hmm. It’s unclear to me exactly what’s going on in this revision, because I haven’t read either the original or the revised version of the book. But this does seem rather strange and worth investigating.
So if I understand correctly, in the original version two characters were portrayed as male and engaged in a homosexual relationship. In the revised version, although one character continues to refer to the other as a “boy,” that character now claims to be a girl. So instead of a “normal” homosexual relationship, we have either: a) a delusional homosexual man in a relationship with a girl he thinks is actually a boy, or b) a relationship between a man and a transgendered character who identifies as female, but whom the other character refuses to acknowledge as such.
Rich Johnston says that this looks like a case of “orientation cleansing,” but I think without further investigation it’s hard to label it as such. It’s definitely a different interpretation of the characters, but for all we know this may have been the author’s original intent and maybe it wasn’t clear enough in the first version, so he decided to edit the text to make it more obvious.
If anybody has read either the original or the revised version, I’d love to have your insight on this.
![‘Superman’ #701: Starting Off on the Wrong Foot - ComicsAlliance
Another negative review of Superman. Chris Murphy mentions that Superman comes off as “wandering preacher” lacking any internal conflict, a character “absolutely certain of the things he believes and using this trip as an attempt to share those opinions with anyone unwise enough to stop him and ask to talk.” Murphy also points out a scene that is pretty blatantly ripping off Morrison’s All-Star Superman, and doing a poor job at it.
But it gets worse!
It’s the execution of “Superman” #701 that’s flawed. Pretty much across the board. (…) And the bitter cherry of awkwardness on top of this sundae of failed opportunities is the continuing trend of DC poorly treating minority characters in a way I believe and hope is an accident.
(…) DC’s unfortunate treatment of minority characters continues here. In his trip to Philadelphia, a city whose black population is slightly higher than its white population, the first black character Superman has an exchange with is a drug dealer on page eight, about a third into the story. Superman proceeds to destroy the drug caches of said drug dealer, making the neighborhood safe for its upstanding population, symbolized by a little white boy. (…) Then on the next page, this happens:
[see image above]
(…) That’s right, out of the three people in a car, it’s the one black character who first urges the white driver to run the red light, only to have a grinning Superman guilt the three into obeying proper traffic laws on the next panel. Again, I don’t think this is intentional, but I have to ask how this happened. I don’t want to believe that in Stracznyski’s script, characters’ races were assigned for such minor roles and all the bad role model parts were specifically given to black characters. But that leaves two options. Either the art team of penciller Eddy Barrows and colorist Rod Reis read the script and decided that, clearly, those parts should be portrayed as black characters while others should not be, or the editorial team on the book made the decision. At the very least, the editorial team approved the book and didn’t find anything wrong with this scenario. This isn’t what makes the book bad, but it does make a sub-par book at times uncomfortable in addition to the rest of what’s wrong with it.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5pej5hXqW1qzzflao1_500.jpg)
