Mar
Diversity Without Pity #6 | Archer
[responsivevoice_button voice=”UK English Female” buttontext=”Listen to Post”]
A few years ago, Rodney Williams, AIGA Fellow hosted a Salon about diversity and inclusion. He talked about the importance of diversity, but getting beyond the typical parameters of race, gender, age, and sexual orientation. He encouraged us to also think about nationality, physical or mental disability, religious, and political affiliations. These are the things that add to the sharing of ideas, perspectives, and interests. With that spirit in mind, DWP highlights the FX animated series Archer.
Archer, the hit FX show about a super-spy agency and entering its sixth season this month. The show is known for it’s TV-MA content and star voice work of H. Jon Benjamin and Aisha Tyler among others. Archer is also special in how it depicts diverse characters, three of which are featured:
Lana Kane
Lana Kane is an agent, and Sterling Archer’s ex-girlfriend. The past five seasons have revealed that she was discovered by Malory Kane (more on her later), at an anti–fur protest. Lana threw red paint on Malory’s fur coat, and Malory was so impressed by Lana’s nerve, she hired her on the spot. As the sole African American woman on the show, she carries the most complexity, as she is also Sterling Archer’s main love interest.
Ray Gillette
As the openly gay man of the agency, Ray is trained in advanced weaponry and Krav Maga. On more than one occasion, Ray has been wheelchair-bound. Then he’s received bionic legs. We’ve seen him disabled, abled, and back again, with no care or pity to his condition.
Malory Archer
Malory Archer, agency CEO and the Norma to Sterling Archer’s Norman Bates. As Sterling’s mother and boss, she has no qualms about her sexual history, nor should she. As an older woman, she drinks, has casual sexual affairs, and comes up with strategies Hillary Clinton can only dream of.
It’s also important that these characters are depicted as behaving pretty badly.
Actually, they’re awful. They’re selfish, insensitive, hostile, and obnoxious. But they still have a right to be black, gay, liberal, conservative; older, a woman, or disabled.
Illustrations of Archer
Archer’s illustrative technique is heavily influenced by comic books of the 1960s, also known as The Silver Age of comics. That era, known for its heavy emphasis on thick black lines, continues to be a reference point for artists today.
This artwork has become a go-to technique to evoke a time when the artwork was very flat, but the goal was to make the action sequences dynamic, even as a still. This illustrative style is used from Roy Lichtenstein to Archer to now-defunct Adult Swim series Assy McGee. The animations are first drawn in Adobe Illustrator, then animated in layers in Adobe After Effects. Note how body animations hinge at the joints and the neck, rendering a marionette doll- effect.
Some will never enjoy Archer, regardless of its diversity because they find the content objectively offensive and tasteless. For some, the negative images of women, black people, immigrants, gay people, seniors, and the disabled, hardly make up for diverse characters or great illustrations. If you are offended by this show, you have that right. I believe that no one has a right to tell someone else what they don’t get to be offended about.
However, like Mara Brock-Akil, I do not believe in negative images or positive images, as those labels deny us our full humanity. Sterling, Malory, Lana, Ray, Cheryl, Pam, Cyril, and Krieger are awful to themselves and awful to one another. But that doesn’t define them entirely. They’ve shown their capacity to help a main character through cancer, survive several death threats, and even have a baby. What also defines them is how they grate one another and still manage to work together, regardless of what we think.
Diversity Without Pity is a blog series from IDSL, highlighting media that uses smart design, and considers the diversity of it’s casting without selling the viewer or consumer, short. Select images courtesy of FX and Silver Age Comics.