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Wednesday Runaround – Don't Tell Her Pike!

FrostWatch: Forces Of Geek report that actress Rosamund Pike has undergone testing for the role of Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class. She has been spotted at the offices of Lucinda Syson, who has been a casting director for Matthew Vaughn a number of times, with a copy of Valerie D'Orazio's Emma Frost comic.

Well, she certainly seems to have the dress sense down pat.

PirateWatch: Manga companies Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha, Square Enix, the Tuttle-Mori Agency, Vertical Inc, Viz Media, Tokyopop, Yen Press and the Hachette Book Group team up to fight the threat of pirated scanlations. But will they have a misunderstanding first and fight amongst themselves, before realising they're on the same side? Or is that what they've been doing for years anyway…

ClothesWatch: Not content with the heights of French design, DC Comics are now doing a deal for Superman-styled clothing and shoes with Adidas and basketball player Dwight Howard.

WebWatch: Web comics publisher Wowio, who used to be owned by Platinum, have bought the Drunkduck webcomics site, which was owned by Platinum. Terribly incestuous, don't you think?

TweetWatch: Erik Larson and Gail Simone have been engaging in quite the tweet war over… well, if it isn't Women In Refrigerators, the website that just keeps on giving. Giving us such out-of-context highlights as;

Erik: having been linked to the list it struck me as unfair that the sole mention was ALL girlfriends of Savage Dragon were dead.

Gail: I wasn't talking about your book, I haven't read it.

Erik: so if Bruce Wayne's parents are murdered his mom's death counts more because there are fewer women in comics

Gail: One odd thing about Wir is, we found that a ton of the stories happened while the writer was breaking up or getting a divorce. Fun fact!

Erik: we can continue this later at some point–or never–but thanks for the conversation.

My take has always been that it reflected a certain temporary state where everything got too much and came to a head. Female characters seemed only to be used in a certain way, there not as characters but as plot devices. And it was something that creators might like to have considered when writing.

Of course, then Identity Crisis went bastshit crazy culminating in an actual Woman In Refrigerator Zombie in Blackest Night, but at that point it was all terribly meta anyway.

This all span off from a discussion whcih also involved Kurt Busiek regarding The Killing Joke, a common Women In Refrigerator target, the plot crippling Batgirl to get a rise out of Comissioner Gordon. In which all participants seemed not to like the book – but for different, combative reasons!

Kurt: I don't think sharing a laugh with the torturer of someone you love is a "way out." It's a bad story from an excellent writer. We don't have to tie things up in knots pretending it's good. It doesn't work. Moore thinks so himself.

Erik: Barbara was a plot device–not a person–and Moore did nothing to make readers care about her–which made it less powerful

Gail: A Killing Joke DID fridge Babs. There was no glimmer of Oracle in it, that was completely a matter of John and Kim saving her.

Me, I like Killing Joke pretty much for the same reasons I like the reappearance of the fridge in Blackest Night. Its just so terribly meta and I can't help myself. And yes, I do like the observation that Batman and Joker are fucked up people and Gordon is not. And it is a good joke too. And yes, I know Alan Moore doesn't like the book anymore either, but then he thinks that he created Blackest Night. So, you know.

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