Jun. 17th, 2009

There are 1000 things I should be doing instead of this but it is the time of day where I've given up and am hopped up on cold medicine. So! First of all, some terms:
  • Penny Arcade is a ten-year-old web comic about two men (Gabe and Tycho are their characters/aliases/whatever) who play video games that I'm actually rather fond of; it's periodically crass, periodically brilliant, and occasionally surreal. It would probably make more sense if I played many contemporary video games, but most of the time it's comprehensible, and it's actually often funny. (This is as distinct from the lesbian performance artist Penny Arcade, who used to have pennyarcade.com. I don't know much about her other than that Make/Shift magazine has reviewed her poorly and said she was offensive to trans men.) It's usually three times a week, and it's been going for 10 years, so at 52 weeks per year that's more than a thousand comics.
  • Alison Bechdel is probably best known for Dykes to Watch Out For but has also done a number of other comic projects, including "Fun Home," which I really need to read, and probably some other non-comic projects that I'm not familiar with.
  • The Bechdel test is a litmus test traditionally applied to film: At any point in the film, do two women speak with each other about something other than a man?
  • Cold medicine should not need explanation. But just in case.
Recently, Penny Arcade decided to run three different concept comics to suggest alternate projects they might do: Lookouts, Automata, and Jim Darkmagic. [0] All of these look interesting, and Lookouts seems like it could be downright hilarious. Normally, I don't think about gender in Penny Arcade; I've been reading it for a long time and the main characters are male and that's never bothered me. In these three comics, though, there's one female character, who is accidentally burned and frozen to death on stage as part of a magic trick. I was like: Hold up, did they just propose three new ideas with no women except someone who gets murdered to further the plot? I mean, I accept that Penny Arcade is occasionally homophobic [1] and doesn't have many female characters, but I was sort of hoping the new concept comics would feature women. Why? Well, no good reason, admittedly. But the new comics totally fail the Bechdel test.

This got me to thinking. Would the whole ten years of comic archives pass the Bechdel test at all? gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender MUSHROOM MUSHROOM )

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