Sociology

Even if you feel Big Barda does not speak for you, it's hard to dislike that sweet Bruce Timm cover.

How Sony, Ikea and DC Comics approach marketing to women. Hint: only one of these companies actually tried.

Grace Bello has taken the bold step of going to cartoonists and asking them for sex advice -- and posting the results on Nerve. The results may shock you. Not really, but we had to say that, just because "cartoonists" and "sex" were long considered a bad match --unless you were one of those swinging '60s Don Draper cartoonists in the NCS, of course. Anyway, back to the present day. Rick Altergott on the pecking order:

Yesterday's comments by Tom Brevoort on the lack of sales support for female characters at Marvel did not go unnoticed by the usual gender issue commentators.

The long on-again, off-again life action Akira movie is decidedly on again at Warners, with Jaume Collet-Serra to direct the Steve Kloves script. Given that AKIRA is a worldwide classic of anime and Japanese film in general that hugely influenced both animation and the cyberpunk movement, it seems ripe for reinvention in that Hollywood way. And of course, also in that Hollywood way, despite the story being set in and infused with Japanese culture, because American moviegoers are all white and cannot be persuaded to pay money to watch Asian people on the screen, the film is being moved from New Tokyo to "New Manhattan " (essentially New New York) and replacing all the Asian characters with white people if casting rumors are true.

Over the three years (!) of the Great Recession, it's been noted many times that the Fantasy Economy has held up better than many other segments. Yes, comics sales are down overall, but they took a while to take a hit and rebounded strongly when something interesting happened (New 52). But why? Maybe it's because America's stay-at-home male population is also growing, as Politico notes.

This article on the "Speed Dating" sessions at the recent New York Comic Con paint an interesting picture of the social dynamics of Nerd World, especially with the growing participation of women due to the anime and Vampire influences.

I don't know who Richard Famous is -- a gay British man who makes little-watched YouTube videos -- but what he has to say about "the brokeback pose" and how hyper-sexualization depowers female comics characters is pretty dead on.

In the interests of equal time to our male readers, we'd like to point out this story where a female Gizmodo writer did not feel comfortable dating Magic the Gathering World Champion Jon Finkel after she met him via OK Cupid:

Only a year ago, Tom Bouden's gay-themed adpatation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was fighting rejection on Apple's mobile platforms, leading to cries of a double standard where sex and violence were concerned. But now LGBT publisher Northwest Press is claiming victory by having Teleny and Camille, Glamazonia: The Uncanny Super-Tranny, and Rainy Day Recess: The Complete Steven's Comics all approved by Apple. All are now available via the iBooks app.

There have been about 42 multigabillion reactions in the media to the new multi-culti-ultimate Spider-Man, and we're not going to link to all of them, but here are the three best that have crossed our desk today. Perhaps we'll update this post if more good ones come in. • As you can see Stephen Colbert weighed in last night with some funny, funny jokes. Colbert is an avowed comics fan with many crossovers in his resume already, including having Joe Quesada on as a guest, and guesting himself in an issue of Spider-man.

In one of my rebuttals to one of the idiotic racist postings on The Beat yesterday, I Almost....ALMOST made a reference to Glenn Beck along the lines of, "Glenn Beck should start a line of comics just for all the angry white men; sales would soar." And then I thought, oh that's too knee-jerk. What was I thinking?