DC Comics Writer Chuck Dixon Claims His Conservative Politics Lost Him Jobs in Comics

TheMarySue.com:

Chuck Dixon has not only written a lot of Batman comics, he was heavily involved in my favorite era of the character, in which the state of Batman’s relationships with his various surrogate family members and friends held just as much weight as his triumph over his foes. And while Gail Simone is more closely associated with the Birds of Prey, Dixon was the first to popularize the all-female superhero team in a way that wasn’t primarily for the male gaze. From his most popular and longstanding work in the DC Universe alone, you would not immediately guess Dixon is an outspoken social conservative.

This weekend, Dixon and artist Paul Rivoche (whose graphic novel adaptation of a popular conservative reading of the Great Depression hit shelves in the last month) published a post on the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion section bemoaning the predominantly liberal bias of modern comics (as they see it). The piece also claims Dixon’s career dried up once he started to voice his political views in the workplace, and calls for conservative creators of all stripes to take up the torch and catch up to the left wing in their dominance of the market. I think.

The essay also has a healthy dose of the “won’t somebody think of the children” argument, claiming we should eliminate politics from superhero comics because they are aimed at impressionable minds.

Our fear is that today’s young comic-book readers are being ill-served by a medium that often presents heroes as morally compromised or no different from the criminals they battle. With the rise of moral relativism, “truth, justice and the American way” have lost their meaning.

I can agree with Dixon on the fact that kids are ill-served by the superhero medium. Take, for example, DC offering an issue full of gore and violence for Free Comic Book Day, the most kid-oriented date on the comics publishing calendar. Superhero comics simply aren’t targeted at children any more (much to the annoyance to a number of geek parents I know, who’d really like to be able to share a Superman comic written within the last year with their tiny offspring), and they haven’t been since before Dixon started working on them.

Dixon and Rivoche acknowledge this when they talk about the rise in anti-hero comics of the nineties and the subsequent effect of that change on classic characters like Batman and Superman. Conveniently, they do this without mentioning the contributions of Frank Miller, another very outspoken right-wing comics pro, to the beginnings of that trend with his work on The Dark Knight Returns, and lay the source of all this “moral relativism” at the feet of liberal politics. Dixon claims that this bend towards liberal politics in comics lost him jobs:

[In the 1990s, Chuck Dixon] expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.

This description raises more questions than it answers. Millions of people live with AIDS every day. What is so political about their lives that a frank and honest depiction of their disease can not be made appropriate for children? Except, of course, that AIDS has long been associated, sometimes exclusively, with the gay community, and we all know that Superman can romance Lois Lane as much as he wants, and Bruce Wayne can date every socialite in Gotham, but homosexual relationships are inappropriate for children. Ultimately, at the end of the piece, Dixon and Rivoche’s call is not for less political subjects in comics to make them more kid friendly, but for more, different politics in comics. “We hope conservatives,” they say, “free-marketeers and, yes, free-speech liberals will join us. It’s time to take back comics.”

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