Comics are known for pushing boundaries and operating outside of the realm of reality, to the point where even the most casual readers know better than to bat an eye at some of the wild stuff writers come up with for the page.
But apparently, that common sense goes out the window when a comic puts forward something that clashes with the right-wing agenda.
Conservatives’ current show of outrage (well, one of them, at least) is aimed at DC, after a recent issue of The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing, involved the titular villain getting “pregnant.”
Superheroine Zatanna cursed the Joker with a spell ensuring “no one else will ever have your baby” — which resulted in him facing a rapid pregnancy the next day and vomiting up a mud baby.
Transphobic readers immediately started throwing around the phrase they use to describe everything they don’t like these days, denouncing DC’s “woke agenda” for having a man get pregnant.
In reality, there’s no agenda going on here other than one in which the writers tell a wacky story in line with the tone of this particular comic series, and not that out of the ordinary for comics in general over the years. The Joker, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, is still a cisgender man, this isn’t pregnancy as we know it in reality, and there was no moral story to be found.
But acknowledging these truths doesn’t fit the agenda of the people actually pushing one here — bigots who only thrive on finding something to rage against.
Ultimately, the pearl-clutching in this particular instance is so impressively out of touch with reality that it’s impossible not to find it hysterical.
Fox News, of course, devoted air time to the story, as well as writing it up on their own site. Despite the sensationalized clickbait headline, the latter explained what actually went down in the comic — though it also noted that cursing the Joker with a pregnancy he could not get rid of was a “surprisingly disturbing” outcome of his interaction with Zatanna. A man getting “pregnant” potentially bringing conservatives closer to realizing forcing a complete pregnancy on someone is bad, actually, is the cherry on top of this nonsensical meltdown.
