This Can’t Be College?

No seriously.  Consider this course, “San Diego State University will offer a course in spring 2027 that teaches students to examine comic books and graphic narratives through the lens of LGBTQ+ culture, identity, and politics.”  So, woke garbage piled on pop culture and this is a college course?  What is American education coming to?

There have been pop culture college courses for quite some time now.  When I was in school there were courses where you watched movies and talked about them.  They were easy courses – a way to pump up your hours and your GPA.  Since I was in school similar such courses have appeared around comic books.  They are not all fluffery.  Everybody needs a break now and then.  Besides, like moves, every now and then a comic emerges that is a genuine artwork.

The study of comics is also quite serious when it comes to the graphic arts.  Jack Kirby, certainly the most formative artist in comic history, and probably the best, endowed a chair at California State University, Northridge and they conduct quite serious studies in how to tell a story, visually, on a page.  They also are custodians of much of Kirby’s original works and occasionally hold exhibitions.  I attended one some years ago and ran into precisely the woke nonsense discussed above.

“The Thing,” real name Ben Grimm, of Fantastic Four fame is consider one of Kirby’s signature creations.  Grimm’s schtick has always been that despite his immense heroism he is ostracized by polite society because of how the accident that gave him is powers altered his appearance in a deeply unflattering fashion.  The stories have, at times, been deeply moving.  Everyone can relate to feeling like a square peg in a round hole, and feeling ugly.  Anyway, the exhibition I attended featured Kirby’s original pages in which Sue and Reed Richards had their first child and gave him the middle name “Benjamin.”  Talk about emotionally evocative.

The catalog for this exhibition was written with an agenda in mind.  When the page in question, where Grimm was introduce to his namesake “nephew” was discussed the author of the catalog talked, for at least a page, about Grimm as an analog for the homosexual.  I was aghast.  The comic was produced in the early 1960’s when homosexuality was barely acknowledged publicly.  Kirby was a happily married man with children.  He was a World War II veteran, and quite Jewish.  I have a great deal of confidence that homosexuality was very far from Kirby’s mind when he produced that comic as well as very far from the minds of the book’s editor and publisher.

Think what you will about the morality of homosexuality – but that is just bad academics.  Rather than asking the work what it is trying to tell you, you impose your agenda on the work.  Mortimer Adler is undoubtedly spinning in his grave.

In recent times many comics have been produced with a LGBTQ+ agenda in mind, some quite gringingly graphic.  There are books where many a classic character is retconned to be gay, again imposing a modern consideration on characters that are more than 100 years old in some cases.  Why not be true to the character and and if you want to deal with LGBTQ+ themes add a new character?  Or create a whole new universe?  That’s the beauty of fiction.

Look, if this SDSU course wants to examine comics written about and for an LGBTQ+ audience, so be it.  But I am really sick and tired of having their stuff piled on my beloved comics.  I mean after all, isn’t that a kind of “conversion therapy?”  And isn’t that supposed to be bad?  Just spare me.