#YES THEY ARE

[clearlycleverdestiny]

[djosfuture]

it just occurred to me that there is the smallest chance that one of the two new songs in wicked part 2 could be sung by fiyero… imagine they give him the live-action disney prince treatment like prince eric and the beast and let him sing a song by himself while he’s looking for elphaba, yearning for her, absolutely and utterly distraught that he can’t find her, and then realizing that he loves her…

[nights-at-crystarium]

happy pride 🖤

[elyssa0907]

I was watching stranger things with my stepdad one time and he looked at Mike and will during the van scene and just said “are they gay for each other” 💀

[annierosaart]

why do the wiki.gg Arknights admins keep making the wiki worse on purpose. are they stupid.

[siyratiin]

insane!!! what!!! v models!!!

[decaffeinatedpaperobject]

"are will and mike gay for eachother?" -my friend, who just started watching stranger things

[welcometotheduplays]

my (quick) next next next contribution

[dominiks]

are they flirting

[corvys-clover]

Inktober, day 1: Dream

In which Jonathan recalls the events of the night before...

[froggayzfartz]

Two bros chillin on a brick wall five feet apart cause their not gay (they are)

[this-blog-needs-a-new-name]

YEA SHE IS 🥰

[mechanicalinfection]

Forever.

[hopefulstarfire]

It's been said time and time again but I will keep screaming it from the rooftops; superhero comics, like all other art forms, are political, but ESPECIALLY so. They always have been, they always will be. They stand as a moral compass and ideal to follow, challenging our ideals and how we can strive to do better and become heroes ourselves, yes, but it goes even deeper than that.

Superman made his debut in Action Comics #1, ushering in the Golden Age of comics. He was created by two Jewish young men, one of whom lost his father during an armed robbery at his family store and then created a bullet proof man coming in to save the day. In his second comic ever, he kidnaps the commanders of two armies that are opposing each other (mostly for the sale of munitions, as Clark puts it) and plops them down and says, "Nope, I'm ending this because this is senseless. We're ending this by you two fighting each other so people stop dying senseless deaths." And they don't want to fight or for Superman to mop the floor with them so yeah. In his third, he faces off the corrupt owner of a mine that disregarded his workers safety - which was the fact that there was poisonous gas down there - and denied it ever even happened, even when rescue team members were left unconscious and there was at least one case of hospitalization where a person almost died. So what does Clark do? Lock him and a bunch of his rich buddies in the mines and makes them work their way out, with only 24 hours of oxygen down there and to point out there's not any working safety equipment. And then there's the radio show that eventually turned into a comic about Superman beating the fuck out of Klansmen.

One also has to remembr: Superman is a refugee from a destroyed planet, last of his kind, a literal undocumented alien whose parents probably had to forge his paperwork (and DID in the Smallville series), was raised in a small town by farmers trying to get by, who knew the value in looking out for their community and whose nemesis is a billionaire who in many cases goes into politics. Yeah and people still try to say this man would have voted for Orange Hitler.

That's not the only case of it though. Many of our most beloved superheroes came from Jewish creators because it was work they could get as many people deemed it as "lesser work" and America was also anti-semetic. Or you have the case of Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, who was a polyamorous man who loved his wife and their girlfriend very much and was heavily into BDSM (hence why Diana's only weakness originally was bondage) and they were both just as big a part in her creation, even being based off of the both of them. He was a psychologist (and actually invented an early version of a lie detector test, fun fact) that saw a female sexual revolution on the horizon and he was all for it and was trying to show that to others.

And that's not even beginning to go into the goddamn legend that is Jack Kirby. The very first cover of Captain America's stories shows him punching Hitler for God's sake and he's fighting HYDRA, who they make as the Nazi science division. This is also the same man who, when some nazis showed up demanding to see him and show the creator of Captain America "How Nazis really fight", he rolled up his sleeves and marched downstairs ready to annihilate them and they'd already run off with their cowardly tails between their legs.

You could also factor in the gun reform and Batman's anti-gun messaging in the early Comics, to the point he even called people who use them cowards, as well as the shift to him not killing anymore, a political move. Yes he killed in the very first comics but that died down just as quickly. He gunned down some monster men from the bat plane and also hung one by a noose from it and flew around with it, and some kids weren't okay with that, but namely it was parents. So Whitney Ellsworth, the chief editor at the time, marched into Bill and Bob's office and told them no more killing. Batman isn't allowed to use guns, and he's not allowed to kill, nor would any hero, as they had to hold themselves to a higher moral and standard than their villains (something Bill wanted from the start and Bob had rejected, until he saw how much more the comics were selling after that.)

These are just a few examples of the early comic creators. This is just a couple examples of the Golden Age stories and most of them showcased heroes on the home front, fighting to protect that. These stories were also used as a way to promote warbonds and were sent overseas to boost soldier morale and it absolutely did.

The political sphere stuck around after that when that lying bastard Fredric Wertham wrote his book Seduction of the Innocent, claiming comics were corrupting the youth, and was trying to push for censorship. He tried to say Blue Beetle was some Kafka-esque nightmare monster when in fact he was some fucking archaeologist in a regular blue suit. He claimed that Batman and Robin promoted homosexuality, claiming they were in a relationship when that was Bruce's basically adopted child and it's one of the many reasons we comic fans would fight Devin Grayson in a Waffle House parking lot, and altered patients statements to make it seem like that was the case as well as those patients fantasizing about them in a role play scenario between two patients that were apparently in a relationship. But who can say? He manipulated accounts by altering, combining and excluding information as well as chose very targeted demographics.

But it was the reason the Comics Code Authority got created, and they ushered in strict guidelines about what could be published under the code and it was why there's such a big difference in the Silver Age: there was a boot on their neck to sanitize everything down to appease guidelines that were only there because some asshole used falsified evidence as a scare tactic. Eventually it would start to get dismantled. Stan Lee had been a big forerunner in that area actually; he'd been commissioned by the FDC to create a Spiderman comic warning about the dangers of drug use, and the CCA wouldn't let him publish it because they did not ever want depictions of drugs. So he took it to the head editor, explained the situation and got it approved to be published without the CCA stamp on it. Eventually, they'd stop using it all together, followed by Archie, and, while DC had been publishing Comics without their approval for a while, switched to their own rating system in about 2011 and that killed it dead all together.

It doesn't. Stop. There. It never has and it never will. Look at stories like Civil War, which was a response to the Patriot Act, for example. The Absolute Universe for DC really seems to be touching base with there as well, between Blue Collar Batman going up against billionaire Joker, or refugee Clark trying to find the good in the world and what's worth fighting for in a corrupt system and Diana "Understand that any effort to fashion me into yet another arm of your military-industrial complex will simply not be tolerated" Prince. One of Spidermans biggest enemies is always going to be the insurance companies trying to fuck over Aunt May. The X-Men are always going to be representative of the oppressed, acting as representation for civil rights across the board and Magneto's literally a holocaust survivor. I could into detail about the fucked up intricacies and very dystopian nature about a hotline where people got to vote on if a 15 year old sidekick was brutally murdered by his adoptive father's greatest enemy, all because the writers at the time didn't like him or his existence, and even tried to have him killed off by stuffing his name into a suggestion box about having a character battling AIDS as a response to the AIDS crisis or completely doing a 180 in his character in the last two comics before said vote to kill or save storyline just to justify killing him - or making him look older so it'd feel less shocking. And some people voted just because they thought it would get his brother, who was in college and was in one of DC's most popular titles with a new identity and everything, to come back and be the Boy Wonder again.

There's a superhero for everyone. There are people you can see yourselves in all the time in comics and they are inherently political. Never let others diminish that or the work that has been put in to keeping them going to keep inspiring others. Comics aren't perfect. Superheroes aren't always going to be written by the best writers. But they've persisted all this time, despite the odds stacked against them.

And we will too.

[pyladeshungover]