"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Monday, September 20, 2021

Young adult writer creating Jewish comic star draws influence from a propagandist

It appears the new young-adult comic produced by DC starring a Jewish protagonist I'd mentioned earlier has some pretty bad influences by ways of its author. As reported by the Jerusalem Post:
But what makes Whistle unique is that her origin story is centered around her Jewish identity. Willow Zimmerman is a social justice activist who volunteers at a local pet shelter and lives with her single mother, an adjunct Jewish studies professor, in Down River, a Gotham City neighborhood modeled after the Lower East Side. That means it comes with a long Jewish history, making Judaism canonical in Gotham more than eight decades after Bob Kane and Bill Finger, two Bronx Jews, created the Dark Knight.
The part about social justice is already worrisome enough, due to how it's little more than an allusion to blatant leftism. But here's the big eyebrow raiser:
For Whistle herself, Lockhart drew inspiration from a different trailblazer at DC’s rival: Kamala Khan, the Muslim Ms. Marvel introduced in 2013.

“I love Ms. Marvel and was definitely inspired by the way [author] G. Willow Wilson engaged with questions of heroism and the superheroic body through the lens of Kamala’s Muslim identity,”
Lockhart said. “I thought about it a lot while I was writing Whistle.”
Well, this is certainly telling. She considers a propaganda vehicle for the Religion of Peace the best place to draw inspiration from? Pretty shameful alright. And the biggest irony?
Like Lockhart herself, Willow is secular. Her visit to Gotham’s synagogue is for meditation purposes.

“I knew I would tell the most truthful and nuanced story if I wrote from my own identity and from the community I’m in,” Lockhart said on her decision not to make the character strictly observant. “My heroine engages with her Jewishness in much the same way that I do.”
Considering where the young-adult writer draws inspiration from, this is almost hilarious, and makes too little sense. She takes "inspiration" from a different book with religious themes for propaganda, yet she herself is secular, and builds her own story that way? In doing so, she makes it sound like she considers her community's founding religion worthless in comparison to what the Muslim Ms. Marvel is built on. And this is why the whole young-adult industry has become such a toxic wasteland. If any novel is sold and marketed along those lines today, that should be reason enough to avoid it. The same goes for any comics/graphic novels marketed the same way. Based on what the above author buys into, that's why her resume is decidedly worth avoiding too.

And "meditation purposes"? What a joke. It's clear DC's only doing this to virtue-signal, one more reason to stay away from something like this.

No comments: