Well, this is disappointing.

In case you don’t follow comic books, Kate Kane (AKA Batwoman) proposed marriage to her partner, detective Maggie Sawyer. She was, after some back and forth over several issues, accepted.

This was good, since (as I’ve talked about before), I think marriage is a generally underrepresented in genre fiction (in all media). I thought this was going to be an interesting development.

But now, this.

(In brief, the editors said Maggie and Kate could not get married, and the writers quit the book in protest. This was apparently just the last in a series of editorial decisions that they disagreed with.)

There are, or seem to be, various elements involved here.

The general immediate reaction, not surprisingly, has been that this is an edtorial reaction against the idea of gay marriage, which may well have been a factor, but there is also a general idea in comics (and in television and in movies….) that stories get boring when characters get married.

(I always think this must be a comment on the marriages of the people making this decision. 🙂 )

But there’s something else, which now comes into play, and I’ve already seen one article which said, joking but not joking, that Maggie Sawyer should stay away from refrigerators.

Because, given where the characters are now, just having the wedding not happen (no matter who is writing the book) doesn’t work. So, it seems that one possibility is that Maggie Sawyer will end up dead, so that Batwoman can suffer (as many male comic book characters have suffered when their spouses and partners have ended up in refrigerators).

The last issue with the current writers is #26, so that will be my last issue also, unless all the publicity turns this around. That could happen – Gail Simone (the writer who first identified the “women in refrigerators” trope) was fired off Batgirl* last year, and then very quickly reinstated.

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* Batgirl and Batwoman are two different characters. I wrote about Gail Simone here (#4).