Fifteen ways to Sunday, I don’t get what Alex Ross meant if he didn’t mean that he didn’t care for the creative choice of a character coming out of the closet, but I’ll be happy to take the apology at face value. After all, I can buy into his desire to see the world frozen in amber where the Superfriends go up against the Legion of Doom and a crime against humaity is treating the original Space Ghost like a joke. In that context, worrying about how the original Green Lantern’s son spends his off time is dead on and not really “homophobic” so much as “traditionalist”. It’s amazing that WIzard, bastion of journalism that it is, would pick up on the comment and own it along with the years of homophobic jokes that it slyly interjects into its pieces. Mr. Ross gets to have his comments put under a microscope because they were published in a magazine that provided the homophobic context which amplified what he said no matter how innocuous he intended the comments to be.

I mean, did he just seriously compare changing a costume and losing sanity to sexual orientation? And why are those ok additions to a character’s identity but finally stating a sexual orientation is not? Seriously? How the hell is one supposed to interpret that? You want the Andy Mangels seal of apporval, good for you. I don’t know you and I can only judge you by the words you speak. At least the art is pretty.

I think this is an analogous situation to the cowpie John Kerry stepped in right before the election: it sounds as though he’s deriding the very people he’s going to bat for, but the true object of his derision becomes obvious upon re-reading. Its worst offense is that it’s just not phrased very well and leaves itself open to misinterpretation, thus giving ammo to those it was intended to snub and pissing off those it was meant to support.

I would not call this news.