Sometimes you can kind of see both sides of an issue but still think that one side is kind of obnoxious about how they go about expressing their distaste. Don’t worry, Uncle Benty isn’t going to chastise you for your opinion. He is, however, going to tell you how it was when he was a kid, so it’s going to be one of those articles.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to talk about comics with other people, there was no Internet. Your exposure to opinions other than your own were limited to the other kids on the playground, if you happened to be lucky enough to have a circle of friends that gave a crap about comics. If none of your “friends” read comics, well, you were screwed. I lived in Screwedlandia for quite a while. My comic reading was a singular, solitary thing. Oddly enough, that was just how I liked it, or even preferred it. Later, when I ran across a couple people who read comics, we didn’t sit about dissecting the latest goings-on of our favorite heroes. We acknowledged our mutual comic-reading with a nod and a “very good, sir” and we did it with our upper lips as stiff as boards. 
Being stuck in this insular world with yours being the only opinion you heard meant a certain level of disconnect with the larger audience out there. I’m aware that there was such a thing as fan clubs and weird mailing lists where perfect strangers reached out to each other anonymously to talk about comics. The one time I had a letter published in a comic (where they would publish your address and everything) I quickly received a letter from a fan club that wanted me to join. I’m sure they reached out to anyone that happened to have a letter published in a comic, so I know many others received such a letter.
I mean, there was a president of the fan club and a member list and everything.
I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever seen in my entire life. Talk about comics with perfect strangers I would never meet? Gab on and on with other kids/people my age/like-minded people?
How bizarre. That would never catch on.
Back then in these desperate times when a phone was strictly for calling people and there was, in fact, absolutely no app for this that or any other thing, the “local comic shop” was a spinner rack at the local mini-mart.
If you were lucky, there was a bookstore that happened to have two spinner racks.
Two spinner racks. Two.
Nirvana.
The only step past that was an entire magazine shelf dedicated to comic books. The first time I saw one of those, with all those bright shiny covers bursting with color I wanted to dive in sideways like I was Scrooge McDuck.
The only place you could read opinions about comics given by perfect strangers were in the aforementioned letters pages in the backs of those comics. But I barely skimmed those. I mean, I know exactly what a No-Prize was, but I had no real interest in reading real people’s opinions — be they good or bad — about the comics I was reading.
It’s only been since the Internet where I was truly exposed to the unbelievable amount of sheer OPINION on every minute thing that happens in a comic book — often months before the actual happening happens.
When I was a kid we learned about the new happenings as soon as we plucked that comic off the spinner rack, dagnabberit. We also shined shoes for a penny and sold papers on the street corner by shouting at people.
I remember when a black man stepped into Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor. But it wasn’t a matter of “Oh great, Iron Man’s black now; Marvel’s pandering again.” It was just “Tony Stark is drunk off his ass and Rhodey needs to step in and be Iron Man for a while.”
It just happened. No fanfare, no big announcement, no trumpets blaring. Was somebody somewhere rolling their eyes and calling it “pandering,” maybe searching somewhere for a “submit” button to feverishly pound? No doubt. But for me, there was just a new adventure, a new story. What was going to happen next?
Not too long after that, there was a new Captain Marvel in town, and she was a black woman. Was that pandering? She got an entire annual (that’s King-Size, donchuknow) to cement her story in place; surely that was Marvel’s way of convincing us that it was okay that a black woman was taking a white male’s place. Pandering!
Pandering?
No, it wasn’t. Because it was a damn good story with a strongly-written character, and that’s all that was important. I doubt any of this was even “news.” I know Spider-man changing to his all-black costume made headlines, but Iron Man being black? Barely a sneeze. It was just a different issue. Same with Green Lantern. A black man took up the Green Lantern mantle and the world didn’t cave in. 
Comics survived, in other words.
Plus … it was a good story. These were good stories, and they were read in the immediacy of the moment. There was no time to spend getting riled up about it. There was no press release, no build up, no preening. It just happened.
Is that the difference? Because the characters that have been criticized as pandering nowadays are just as well written. We’ve got a well-written female Thor, a well-written black Captain America, a well-written Muslim … yet all of these have been criticized as pandering. Maybe it’s the build up that allows everyone to get a nice bowl full of anger ready before they’ve even read the stories.
Mmmmm … Angrios.
When I was a kid, if I had read these stories as just another issue in a long string of issues, without the hype and the Internet, it would have just been a different story.
“Oh, the Falcon is Captain America now. Let’s see how that goes.”
“Oh, Thor’s a woman now. Okay, let’s see who that goes.”
“Shatterstar and Rictor are making the gay together? Does Shatterstar’s penis glow also?”
So I guess I’m wondering if the Internet is killing our ability to judge a story just on the merits of the story itself. A bad story is a bad story, and a bad idea won’t last long. But a good idea mixed with a good story? That’s where the magic happens, if we’re open to it, and aren’t so quick to fire the pandercannon at anything that slightly bumps up against our expectations.
It’s not “pandering” when you’re telling a story for the world. It’s “broadening.” None of the changes are going to last, especially for the A-listers, but that doesn’t mean that some good stories can’t come out of the temporary broadening. It might do some good, open some eyes, expand some viewpoints.
Maybe a generation later the question won’t be “is it pandering?” but “is it a good story?”
That’s all I care about, anyway.