Every Day Is Like Wednesday: James Robinson and Greg Hinkle's Airboy collection addresses the criticism of Airboy #2

You may recall that James Robinson and Greg Hinkle's extremely off-beat, kinda sorta-but-not really reboot of the Golden Age Airboy character for Image Comics received some pretty negative attention upon the release of its second issue, which repeatedly used the word "tranny" and had other problematic content that some found offensive. Here's a pretty decent summary of that problematic content that ran on Comics Alliance, which also links to James Robinson's own apology about the scene in question.

I originally read the series as it was serially published, but the other day I noticed a hardcover collection of the series on the shelf of my local library. Given that Robinson himself had expressed some regret over the scenes in Airboy #2, I was curious if Robinson and Image would take the opportunity that the publication of the collection offered to correct those scenes.

Some of the fixes would obviously be pretty easy, as they would only involve a bit of re-lettering of a few panels. The other concern that Charlotte Finn (and others) raised were more key to the story, and to address those concerns, an entire scene would need to be re-written and re-drawn. I don't really want to wade too deeply into the issue, as I found the use of the word "tranny" to be more problematic than the issues involved in the sex acts, but that is largely because of my reading of the story that the Robinson, Hinkle and Airboy characters are supposed to be somewhat repugnant (And, for better or worse, a Golden Age superhero would probably be bewildered, freaked out and disgusted to find himself in the type of "trap" Finn explained; maybe it's wrong to make excuses for the elderly, but I know I hold my sister and nieces to different standards of societal enlightenment than I hold my 91-and-a-half-year-old grandfather, who was born about the same time as Airboy).

Well, having checked out the collection, my curiosity has been satisfied: Lines of offending dialogue have been changed, but nothing has been redrawn. If you yourself are curious, below are the three changes I noticed in Airboy #2, the third of which I was surprised by, because it meant that Robinson realized that it wasn't just the word "tranny" that offended some readers.

I don't know if the changes will necessarily satisfy those who were offended, but they are interesting to see nonetheless.