Best Take

on the Orson Scott Card/Superman controversy that I've seen so far, from Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress. The designated artist, Chris Sprouse, has withdrawn for what seem to be intelligent reasons:

“It took a lot of thought to come to this conclusion, but I’ve decided to step back as the artist on this story,” Sprouse said in a statement released Tuesday. “The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that’s something I wasn’t comfortable with."

Emphasis on "took away from the actual work." He's right on the nose with that one. Rosenberg's comment:

This strikes me as one of the best possible outcomes we could have hoped for in this case. I know a lot of people would have liked to see Card summarily dismissed, but that seems like a decision that could have made him a martyr for people who don’t actually understand how First Amendment rights function, and might have limited the incident to a one-off, requiring more organizing the next time a comics company hired Card to write a title. What Sprouse’s decision does is illustrate something more useful: a shift in the market that suggests Card isn’t a good choice to work with because his active work to ban equal marriage rights and to recriminalize homosexuality make it impossible for his work to stand alone as fiction.

I'm in agreement with Rosenberg's stance: I have no patience with those who were calling for DC to "fire" Card -- I mean, he was signed for two issues, FTLOP. "Fire" him? But Rosenberg picked up on the key point in Sprouse's statement, which I haven't seen from any other commentator (even me!): there's too much baggage for the story to be stand alone. People will be coming into this loaded for bear, and that's not what DC is after, I think. DC has been a little slow to pick up on the cultural shift regarding gay rights, but maybe they'll figure it out eventually.