While the site isn’t new, Fanboy Productions’ fumetti, wherein toys act out parodies of superhero stories, get top marks for fannish laughs. Check out House of W, which is the best of the lot.
Warning: some adult language.
One reply
ending of House of W At an online comic forum, someone raised the issue of homophobia in the most recent story’s conclusion.
My response, for what it is worth, went like this:
I generally find homophobic jokes offensive. The "yeah, but we’re just kidding" homophobia that ran through Team America: World Police was one of several things that killed the film for me, despite the very promising opening. And, yeah, lots of online comic forums suffer from seriously homophobic humour.
In this case, however, it’s a "morning after" joke, playing on that realization that you perhaps did something the night before that you’re less comfortable with come light of day. The gay element makes it funnier because traditional comic book superheroes have such a macho mystique about them. Even when we see evidence to the contrary, we’re supposed to understand that they would never stray from the mainstream American ideal of "normal" masculinity, even though we all know that ideal is hopelessly blind to the complexity of real-life masculine identities, which include GLBT identities. (uh, minus the "l" Sort of how we’re not supposed to see homoerotic trends among, say, professional athletes, even in cases where they are obvious). When overused, this sort of humor becomes offensive. In this instance, I was willing to accept it. I didn’t go: "ha, ha, two men had sex," but rather, "ha ha, Spider-man and Hawkeye– who, despite being ‘out of the mainstream’ as superheroes go (a loser-turned-hero and a rebel), have been typed as clearly heterosexual so as not to upset any sexual insecurities among their original readership– ended up in bed together and, man, wouldn’t that be awkward for them, personally."
ending of House of W
At an online comic forum, someone raised the issue of homophobia in the most recent story’s conclusion.
My response, for what it is worth, went like this:
I generally find homophobic jokes offensive. The "yeah, but we’re just kidding" homophobia that ran through Team America: World Police was one of several things that killed the film for me, despite the very promising opening. And, yeah, lots of online comic forums suffer from seriously homophobic humour.
In this case, however, it’s a "morning after" joke, playing on that realization that you perhaps did something the night before that you’re less comfortable with come light of day. The gay element makes it funnier because traditional comic book superheroes have such a macho mystique about them. Even when we see evidence to the contrary, we’re supposed to understand that they would never stray from the mainstream American ideal of "normal" masculinity, even though we all know that ideal is hopelessly blind to the complexity of real-life masculine identities, which include GLBT identities. (uh, minus the "l" Sort of how we’re not supposed to see homoerotic trends among, say, professional athletes, even in cases where they are obvious). When overused, this sort of humor becomes offensive. In this instance, I was willing to accept it. I didn’t go: "ha, ha, two men had sex," but rather, "ha ha, Spider-man and Hawkeye– who, despite being ‘out of the mainstream’ as superheroes go (a loser-turned-hero and a rebel), have been typed as clearly heterosexual so as not to upset any sexual insecurities among their original readership– ended up in bed together and, man, wouldn’t that be awkward for them, personally."