I'm sort of a new reader -- the first comic I ever saw/touched/read was BoP. I recently read (on the internet, so, a FACT I'm sure) that one of BC's lines "hetero to the BONE" was originally "75% hetero" & it was changed by editorial. It made me curious, h
The editors are blameless on this one, to be honest. It was a really good editor, and not her fault at all.
I had a scene where Talia was sort of just being Talia and the men around her were just agog at her remarkable beauty. And I have Black Canary say something to the effect of how, speaking as someone who was 70% heterosexual, she could stay focused on her task.
No one objected at DC, no one was mad about it that I recall, but it was what we call ‘placeholder dialog,’ meaning that it would be worked out later to get the exact wording right.
I didn’t like the wording I had, it seemed a bit clumsy, and it also felt like an odd time to bring up the possibility of Dinah being bi. So I changed it to another bit of dialog that had the rhythm I wanted.
Which was something about how Dinah was heterosexual to the bone. Right rhythm, wrong sentiment. So that bit of dialog, I revised back immediately to the previous line.
Now, we always, always had a deal where I would get a last look at the lettered proof before sending it to the printer. When I got the proof, it still had the ‘to the bone’ line. So, no big deal, happens all the time, I put the correction in along with other corrections.
But for the only time that I remember in the entire run of the series (it’s happened on other books), the version that got printed was the version BEFORE the final fixes. So I was pretty mortified. Not only did it not show Dinah as bi, it in canon did the exact opposite. My heart sank. If you read the issue, you can see some other errors, this is because the uncorrected penultimate version is the one that went out.
Now, I had a way to fix this, I thought, I had a nifty little plan that worked to explain her comment, but then she was taken out of the book.
I do not believe the editor took that remark out, she is herself a gay woman, a strong advocate for lgbtq rights and characters in comics, and a trusted editor who doesn’t treat creators that way. It just happened that the wrong file went to the printer.
It sucks, but comics are produced by the ticking of a time bomb and sometimes mistakes get made.
Not sure where it got round that this was the editor’s fault, I am positive it wasn’t.
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