DC News Proves The Internet Is All About Hate

In the past week, two pieces of DC Comics-related news hit the Internet. One has generated hate at a level far beyond its content, and the other all but sank without a ripple, despite being a welcome sign of a major change to the oft-criticized old boys club at DC.

First, the hate: David Ayer, the director of the upcoming Suicide Squad movie, revealed the first official look at Jared Leto as the Joker, and the Internet lost its collective mind. The main offense seems to be that he is covered in tattoos (and has a grill on his teeth). To be fair, he is pasty white, has green hair, is wearing a purple glove and — most importantly — looks completely psychotic. So all the major Joker characteristic boxes are checked. But those tats are apparently like a waving flag to a rampaging bull for many people on the Internet.

How many rampagers, you ask? A Google search of “Jared Leto” mentions in just the last week yields 8.2 million hits. Those are from searchable sources, and doesn’t even come close to hitting all the Facebook and other difficult-to-search social media mentions.

Meanwhile, on April 23, DC announced a plan to create an entire new initiative to appeal to the girl-to-tween segment by repackaging a handful of female characters in a more cartoonish, child-friendly fashion. According to The Verge, this will not just be in comics, but will include “graphic novels, action figures, TV specials (but not a full animated series), online-only content, toys, and apparel.”

Care to guess how many hits the newly named “DC Super Hero Girls” news got in the same search? 11,400. That is .14 percent (not 14 percent, not 1.4 percent — .14 percent) of the amount of activity about the new Suicide Squad Joker. DC releases some very good news that shows it not only tacitly acknowledges it has a serious “boys-club” problem, but has planned out an active and deep strategy to fix it, and it basically goes nowhere. Meanwhile, the Jared Leto Joker picture alone (there is no actual news or announcement here, folks, just a single Twitter pic) generates horrible crap articles like this on Yahoo News.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the Jared Leto take on Joker. But for most of you expressing your outrage, you are missing another sign of a major sea change in the comic book industry that spawned that character whose interpretation you are hating on.