Digital Femme Online

While white, Asian, Latina and biracial female characters are forced to fulfill duties as the resident eye candy, black female characters are usually quietly solving problems and taking charge in the background or behind the scenes. When no one sees you as a sex object, you actually get to be a real person. A capable person. That’s the good news.

The bad news? When you aren’t considered to be a sex object, the men that are hired to draw the characters that share your features generally do not care whether those features are rendered correctly. After all, those features don’t appeal to a majority of readers. Why waste time? And the men that are hired to write about characters that share your features will pay minimal attention to the romantic entanglements and familial ties of those characters and will instead focus on fleshing out the characters they find alluring.

But like I said, I’m kind of wary to shine a spotlight on the phenomenon, because when you do demand equal billing and attention or you do finally reach a widespread audience? The whitewashing begins. And you go from this to this.

Particularly interesting Frank Miller’s Sin City pages in there, too.

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Posted in Colored Commentary by david brothers |