While Marvel has been moving forward with more queer characters and storylines in its comics, DC has been trailing a little bit when it comes to LGBT representation. Thankfully, DC did have a gem in its roster thanks to Batwoman, a critically acclaimed series about an openly lesbian superheroine.
Unfortunately, JH Williams and W Haden Blackman, the writing team behind Batwoman, announced yesterday that they were resigning from the series. According to The Huffington Post, their decision came after DC banned them from writing a storyline that would have seen Kathy Kane (Batwoman’s alter ego) marry her long-time partner, Maggie Sawyer.
“In recent months, DC has asked us to alter or completely discard many long-standing storylines in ways that we feel compromise the character and the series,” they wrote. “We were told to ditch plans for Killer Croc’s origins; forced to drastically alter the original ending of our current arc, which would have defined Batwoman’s heroic future in bold new ways; and, most crushingly, prohibited from ever showing Kate and Maggie actually getting married. All of these editorial decisions came at the last minute, and always after a year or more of planning and plotting on our end.”
Williams and Blackman said they reached the decision to leave DC Comics because “the eleventh-hour nature of these changes left us frustrated and angry” and prevented them from “telling the best stories we can.”
In response, DC clarified its position to HuffPo, claiming that the decision to nix the story had nothing to do with Batwoman’s sexual orientation, which I guess means that they just really fucking hate letting their characters get married.
From a narrative position, this is pretty much poison for a good plotline. For whatever reason, they’re refusing to let their characters progress as actual people. Yes, superheroes tend to live on a dangerous edge where their entire lives exist in a constant state of dramatic flux, but you still have to treat them like human beings capable of personal growth.
And besides, you’re dealing with a superheroine living in a universe with shape-shifting Martians, bird women and a guy who can speak to fish. Marriage would have been the most normal thing you guys ever introduced into the canon.
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