Citizens Against Bad Slash Interview with Jane St. Clair

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Citizens Against Bad Slash Interview with Jane St. Clair
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	Jane St. Clair
Date(s):	July 24, 2001
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Comics, slash
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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Citizens Against Bad Slash Interview with Jane St. Clair was posted in 2001.

It is part of a series of interviews posted to Citizens Against Bad Slash in which fans were each asked the same ten questions.

Some Excerpts

Inspiration. Wow. My problem's that I have trouble sitting on it long enough to get other work done. But, that said. My number one idea source is the comics. Reading them. Because comics, especially those published under the Comics Code Authority (things by Marvel and DC, anything with CCA on the cover) are similar to movies published under the Hayes Code. There's a lot you simply *can't* say, not explicitly. Sex and violence, but expecially homoerotic overtones. The CCA was established in the 1950s, and it embodies a kind of stylized and archaic values system. (One of the major arguments for its establishment was Batman & Robin's relationship, which was considered to be overtly homosexual and highly inappropriate for young readers.)

So there's all of that. What's not being said, what was almost said, what needs to be said. What never had a chance to work itself out.

What advice would I give? Read the comics. Can't stress this one enough. Learn about the background to what's being written (this isn't hard -- tons of this stuff is available on the 'net). What are the publisher's motivations? (Marvel particularly regularly makes content decisions based on the company's current financial status.) What do the writers/artists (who often have their own websites or contribute to forum discussions), have to say about what they created vs. what got published.

Do NOT sit around reading comicslash until something comes to you. The range of what's available is so limited that you can only fall into bad habits. And you run the risk of coming to the conclusion that comics fandom has OTPs (One True Pairings), which is. I'll be polite and say it irritates me.

Voices. The Marvel universe particularly has a massive number of characters with badly stereotypical accents (Moira McTaggert, Wolfsbane, Nightcrawler, Cannonball, Rogue, Gambit, Siryn), or just bad racial/ethnic stereotypes (Warpath, Dani Moonstar). I want the characters to be recognizable, but I also want to stay as far away from bad-accent land as possible. The other thing that comes to mind is angst-overload. I don't think all of this can be blamed on the slashers. The poor old superheroes are such masses of angst that it's a wonder they can keep walking around. And yet they do. And fight evil, and save the planet on a semi-regular basis. Which means, I think, that some pretty unpleasant psychology's going to come up.

Writing without considering that comics characters are either superheroes or just unbelievably tough. These people get bounced off mountains on a regular basis (well, in the case of John Constantine, just off the pavement, but British wizards don't come with superhuman invulnerability). These are not natural victims. In fact, they're precisely *not* victims. They're protectors, vigilantes, and sometimes thugs, but they don't tend to sit around crying. Especially not over themselves.

Refusing to acknowledge characters' dark sides. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a modern comic-book character who's not morally dubious on some level. People who write Batman mostly manage to accept this, but Batman's darkside's been drummed into our cultural consciousnesses since childhood.

Refusing to acknowledge a character's redeeming features. Relatively few characters are entirely bad. If they were it'd be pretty boring. Rogue can leave Gambit to die on the ice without being psychotically evil. But maybe more to the point, the superhero medium relies on a belief in redemption. If people were wholly bad, then it'd be perfectly legitimate to just kill them. (Some comics do operate under this principle, though they aren't regulated by the CCA, which frowns on killing. Both The Authority and Hellblazer cheerfully kill off characters whom they consider to be irredemable, but both comics operate under the world views of some pretty jaded people -- Jenny Sparks and John Constantine.) Most superheroes take the bad guy (or girl) down and then make him (or her) understand that what he/she did was *wrong*.

Refusing to individualize. I know there are just *way* too many characters in some books (and I do seem to be giving Marvel most of my focus, and I apologize to any DC people who feel neglected), but that's not an excuse to write the characters generically. They generally have incredibly elaborate personal histories, most of which can be found in databases on the web if you don't particularly feel like buying the several hundred comics involved.