It was something that came from nowhere, really.
Last week, bloggers started in on it and ran, and then, impossibly, the story made its way to The New York Post Fox News, MSNBC and other outlets. And it was about comics – kinda.
It's Sideshow's Mary Jane statue, based on a design by Adam Hughes. The statue was announced and made available for pre-order, with a release date of the third quarter. Like many of Sideshow's collectibles, it was a limited edition, with an unspecified number being produced.
The issue about it – take your pick: opinions ranged from outrage to seeing it as no big deal, and everything in between, with the majority (or at least the majority talking about it) leaning towards outrage.
And then things got weird – the bloggers fire over the statue was enough to catch the attention of major media…well, The New York Post, Fox News, MSNBC and others, who reported with their own spins which ranged from close to representative of fan outrage to downright embarrassing (MSNBC called in Feedback, winner of Who Wants to be a Superhero as an "expert." Warning – wear your anti-stupid helmet when you watch the MSNBC video clip – otherwise, you'll get a welt from banging your head on your desk.)
Why was this news at all? After all, if you've been collecting comics for any length of time, you've seen worse – you've probably even seen worse with the aforementioned Mary Jane Watson. Well, more than anything else, think news cycle. Were the major media outlets worried about a Mary Jane statue designed and manufactured for a small cohort of hardcore Spider-Man fans? Nope. Spider-Man 3 had opened, was doing pretty darn well, and anything with a Spider-Man image on it was likely to pull in eyeballs and viewers…even if you were then going to trot out a costumed adult as some kind of "expert."
That's not to say that those critical of the statue's points weren't valid. For some, the statue was an overt sexualization of a comic book character (who, to be fair, has spent the bulk of her four-plus decades in comics as a sex symbol of some kind or another), while for others, it was a degradation of a female in comics. And to some…well, they just saw it wrong.
How so?
Originally, one of the views of the statue that took hold was that it showed Mary Jane physically washing Peter Parker's laundry, which served as a foundation of a litany of complaints and assumptions. As others have since pointed out, that's not what's going on, given, for one, Sideshow's description of the statue on their website:
The Mary Jane Comiquette was designed by artist Adam Hughes, who's critically acclaimed realistic illustration meets "good-girl" pin-up style art has made him one of the comic book industry's most sought after artists and a perennial fan favorite. The consummate "girl next door," Mary Jane discovers that her superhero husband has slipped some of his laundry into the mix, but she's not looking too displeased about Peter's naughty little transgression.
Once voice that hasn't been heard from in all of this – even in the major media reportage – designer Adam Hughes. We spoke with Hughes about the first statue in the series, the White Queen, and caught up with him to talk about the response to the Mary Jane statue.
Newsarama: Did the furor about the statue come as a surprise to you?
Adam Hughes: Yeah, pretty much. There are always people who don't go for that sort of thing, and there's nobody amongst us who has a 100% approval rating with consumers and the public, so normally, it's just a matter of if people don't like your stuff, they don't have to buy it. But yeah, this is one of those times where a brushfire has turned into an entire state aflame, I guess. I'd been trying to keep an eye on it, but…wow.
NRAMA: Let's go back to your concept of the piece, when you designed it and sketched it out. On your side of things, what is the piece about? Obviously, various interpretations have been taken and run with…
AH: Yeah, I think that when people started looking at the statue, some started getting the wrong idea, and a lot of other people springboarded off of that. Whether that's our fault or somebody else's, who knows? If I thought that my idea could have been misconstrued, I would've thrown a few more things in there so you could tell exactly what's going on.
My idea was pretty simple, I thought – classic Mary Jane, from the days when Peter and MJ were boyfriend and girlfriend, and she's found his Spider-Man costume in the laundry basket. It's the weird little secret that couples have from each other that gets discovered. For me, the gag was that this was the moment when Mary Jane found out that her boyfriend is Spider-Man. She's not doing his laundry, because I don't know anybody that does laundry in a basket on a table. Even if you don't have a washing machine, you'd do the laundry in the sink. This was MJ spotting something in the basket, pulling it out, and doing the "What's this?" with a look back to Peter over her shoulder.
NRAMA: Still – why this pose and this look?
AH: Well, Mary Jane isn't a superhero, so you can't really do anything with her that's not some version of her just standing there. On top of that, they've already done a fantastic statue of her first appearance of "Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!" So – with that gone, what do you do with her? My thought was to do something that hearkens back to the good old days of the Brown and Bigelow pinup calendars, which is why I put her in the straight-leg bent over pose. It was supposed to be her pulling the shirt out of the laundry basket with a knowing look over her shoulder. Somebody also made a big deal that she was conspicuously not wearing her wedding ring. It's the iconic look, not the current status, which changes daily. Mary Jane, for the majority of her life as a character, was Peter Parker's girlfriends. Mary Jane's life as Mrs. Peter Parker has been the minority of her years. I was going for the iconic look, the iconic era MJ.
Also, if it was Mary Jane doing the laundry, there would've been suds everywhere, and I would've done a better job of doing it, so there would be no question – that would be Mary Jane doing the laundry. I thought it was a kind of cute, funny, "discovery" moment with a classic pin-up feel. That's pretty much all I was shooting for. Yeah, she's sexy, yeah, she's dressed like a sexy chick…but look at her history – that's how she's been portrayed for years, even when she's not doing chores. Mary Jane is a bit of a bimbo. She's been a supermodel and a dancer, an actress and a model…so I gave her a cute, sexy moment.
If you misinterpret that, at the ground level, then you've got an escalating series of perceived "affronts" and it's not helping anybody, I don't think.
NRAMA: But still, this isn't the first time your art has received this kind of attention, but this is probably the loudest it's been in…what…ever?
AH: It's the loudest and probably the meanest. To be honest, I've had more than a few feminists come up to me at conventions, and, without exception, the conversations always go something like this: a woman will come up and tell me that, as a feminist, they're usually appalled by the way women are portrayed in comics, but there's something about the way I do them that's not offensive, and I thank them.
I think that people have gotten so used to being offended and getting their Irish up over perceived affronts and transgressions to their group or their gender, or whatever. I think we're at a place and time where some people look for it, even when it's not there.
This is probably going to open up a whole other can of worms, but it's something like using the "n-word." Even when I'm sitting and having a discussion about how horrible that word is, I can't even use that word in a clinical discussion about how horrible it is. I have to say, "n-word" instead. But Dave Chappelle can use it all day long, and nobody gets offended. So – is it actually an offensive word, or is the context offensive? Is it offensive when it's used by a racist individual as a slur?
NRAMA: Care to dig yourself out of that hole? How does that relate to the Mary Jane statue?
AH: Well, that's how I end up looking at this – is it really a sexist or misogynistic act if it wasn't intended that way on the part of the people doing it? If you perceive something that way, but it wasn't meant to be that way, and it's not sending people back to the stone age, is it really a sexist or misogynistic thing that's going on, or are you seeing something that's either not there, or that the artist never intended to be there?
NRAMA: So what's the proper resolution to that?
AH: Good question. Do you just sit and say, "Well, you're entitled to your opinion, thank you very much for your concern," or do you change the way you act? So that you basically are creating work in order so it's not perceived as being something by a certain segment of the audience?
There was a story about an aide to the Mayor of Washington, D.C. a few years back who used the word "niggardly" to describe a budget, and people didn't understand the word, only heard what they wanted, and he was forced to issue an apology and ultimately resign for a perceived insult that he never came close to making. It had nothing to do with African Americans or anything racist, but he had to apologize, and ultimately resign because of the perception of the word. And there have been other times that has happened as well. An virtually all cases, you had an educated individual having to apologize - or worse – for using a word that was a little too expensive for the average person to pick up on. Rather than try to find perhaps what the word meant, the easiest way out was to take offense, and protest against the perceived insult, even when it didn't exist.
I just feel that we're getting into dangerous territory. We're a country that loves to be offended, litigate and sue people. I've had people who've had their complaints about my work before, and that's fine – please don't buy it if it bothers you.
NRAMA: There has also been a line of criticism over the statue and its perceived sexual nature. I believe one comment was that Mary Jane was shown in a pose of "sexual availability…"
AH: Well, she's bending over. Pin-up girls do that. But by that argument – if we take bending over to be a sign of sexual availability, every woman who bends over to pick up something should be chastised, while any woman who eats an ice cream cone or banana in public should have it smacked out of their hand because it's far too suggestive, and people will be hurt if they see it.
But seriously, as for that comment, I think that, if you're trying to make an argument, whether if it's legitimate or not, you try to come up with as many possible things that back up your argument. I think the whole "sexual availability" claim comes from trying to back up the argument that this is the most awful thing to hit mankind since the Holocaust.
In the end, you know, we idealize things for entertainment value, women as much as men – in comics and everywhere else. Marriages aren't usually as funny in real life as they are on television. It's not really how it is, but it sure is funny and entertaining to exaggerate for effect. I sort of thought that's what I was doing all along.
NRAMA: Getting back to the reaction, what were your thoughts when it moved from a tempest in the blog teacup to mainstream media?
AH: My first thought was: aren't there other things that Fox News, The New York Post and MSNBC have to worry about? But then, a few years back, when Walt Simonson had Wonder Woman cut her hair so that she could disguise herself, and I was still doing covers for the series, I was on the news talking about Wonder Woman's haircut. I mean – Wonder Woman's haircut. That was around the same time the US invaded Iraq, and people wanted to talk to me about Wonder Woman's haircut.
I understand that there will always be the man bites dog aspect to journalism and the news companies think that people want to hear about the offbeat stuff since we live in a time where car bombs going off are daily events and people are dulled to the same horror of life in the news every day. For all I know, major news sources wanted to run with this because Spider-Man 3 came out recently. For five minutes, everybody – or at least a lot of people flipping by their channel or surfing by their website will remember the name "Mary Jane Watson," and would know what the story was about.
When you have 24/7 news and online sites that have to fill their news stories hourly, you have to fill the hours. If we were back to three networks with only morning and evening news, I'm thinking this wouldn't have passed muster for a news story. Edward R. Murrow has been dead long enough so it's been forgotten, so now, the rule is, if you can spin a mediocre story into an interesting story, it helps your revenue and sales.
But to be clear, I do take this seriously, but in my opinion, it's a non-issue. There are actual, genuine examples of what myself and Sideshow has been accused of.
NRAMA: Has this response led to any changes in your design or release plans?
AH: We're not changing any of our plans on the subsequent statues, but we've gone through and looked at the other designs to see if we're doing something that could be misconstrued as sexist or misogynistic.
NRAMA: But isn't that a slippery slope? Isn't that in a way going back toward self-censorship in order not to offend a segment of the audience who the product's not aimed at who are going to be offended by a thousand differing degrees?
AH: It's not self-censorship, but rather, we're flirting with self-awareness. Self-censorship would be us looking at the plans for Aunt May cleaning Uncle Ben's toilet in a teddy for the next statute, and then change that to her doing something assertive, and not doing chores. It's self-awareness if we look at the designs and see something on the next statue that could possibly bring about the same amount of negative attention from the same people, so that we can prepare for the possible repercussions, whether legitimate or otherwise.
NRAMA: But not change the design?
AH: No. It doesn't hurt to be prepared, though. The Boy Scouts have been doing it for years, and they're still here. The next one doesn't seem to have anything that's out of the norm, and the next ones…I wouldn't want to change anything anyway – as I said, that would be self-censorship. It would be like the politician who apologized for using an obscure, non offensive word. It would be apologizing just to smooth things over, and would be going through the motions on our part. We're just looking to be prepared.
Regardless of opinion on the statue, the attention seems to have paid off for Sideshow - Sideshow is not taking any further pre-orders for the statue, as the entire production run is sold out.
