You Got to See This

Via Memeorandum and Wonkette, a 13-year-old named Jonathan Krohn addresses CPAC. It's incredible. The kid is exactly like Al Franken imitating a wingnut blowhard, but miniaturized way down. He's got all the authoritative hems and haws and the body language, but the bridge of his nose is such a tiny distance over the microphone. 

Huffington Post has an interview. "I got into politics when I was eight years old. Six years now. And I got involved because I started listening to talk radio. ... Bill Bennett really became an idol for me. I listened to him every morning from 6 to 9 for, oh, years."

UPDATE:  If he's 13, why was he 8 six years ago? Fuck.

UPDATE:  I think this is him with Malkin. He's got good body language.

Eagle Eyes (OOCWVG 8)

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven.
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So yesterday I started talking about the first issue of Wonder Woman, then got distracted by Darwyn Cooke and Ms. and so forth. But we'll try again.

So one surprising thing about WW #1 is that, in Moulton's telling, WW's mission actually makes sense.

As I've mentioned before in this series one of the perennial problems with Wonder Woman is that her mission to man's world is always really stupid. Has she come here to lead us to peace? To be an international UN do-gooder? To hit lots of bad guys and flirt with Superman? Any way you look at it, none of it quite rings true.

But in Moulton's telling, her mission is pretty straightforward, as Aphrodite explains.




Wonder Woman is going to man's world to help America win World War 2. That neatly resolves the peace/battle contradiction; the forces for war are the Axis; they must be defeated to restore peace, so an Amazon will journey to the homefront to restore love and amity by slugging evildoers. Niebuhr would be pleased.

This, of course, also resolves the difficulty of WW's costume. If she comes from the back-end of the mythologicalverse, why is she wearing the stars and stripes? Well, logically enough, because she represents America not as the embodiment of national ideals, but as the embodiment of international and even universal ones. World War II was probably the one time in history where this could actually make sense; there was really a case to be made that America (whatever its own sins) was, at that time, the last best hope for civilization and peace.

Since that moment, of course, it's been a lot harder to argue that the interests of America and the world align -- but WW has been stuck with that costume. Not sure how Moulton handled it after the war ended (I'll have to look into that) but other creators have had difficulties. George Perez did some sort of utterly ridiculous retcon, if I remember precisely, where Steve Trevor's mother had come to paradise....you know what, forget it. The point is you end up on the one hand, with moments like this from Phil Jimenez, which egregiously beg the question:



Please Keep Your Eyes Off the Eagles


Or with efforts like this, from the Playboy shoot



Please Keep Your Eyes On the Stars

Playboy actually used these Wonder Woman photos to illustrate an essay on "American Sensuality" or some such. Not sure how sensual that image above is supposed to be exactly; it really looks more jokey or parodic than sexy; Fallon's intense "I'm fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way" is pretty thoroughly contradicted by the (literally) painted-on costume, which is even more silly-looking in real-life than on the page. In fact, it seems likely that that's the point; Playboy isn't using Wonder Woman to make fun of feminism; rather they're using trite misogyny to poke fun at America in a bland, we-lived-through-the-60s kind of way. For Moulton, a woman was the perfect representative of the U.S., since he saw the U.S. as engaged in a fight for peace. For Playboy, a sexy woman wearing the flag is just the level of edgy irony they're looking for; they can claim a sort of jokey yes we do, no we don't pride in America. It's all more or less predicated on the idea that a woman being strong or representing America is in itself funny-quaint-snicker-worthy.

[Update: Matthew argues out in comments that this isn't part of the Playboy body paint shoot; it's just Tiffany Fallon wearing a Wonder Woman costume. I think that's right; it was used to illustrate this article about Fallon and Playboy. I'm not sure if it was in the original mag or not, though obviously it's somewhat related. More evidence for the ongoing "Noah doesn't know what he's talking about" thesis, though.]

Playboy isn't alone though. Jimenez also tries to distance WW and America, as do most recent takes on the character. One of the (many) problems with Greg Rucka's Hiketeia is that its all about WW's Greek heritage and mythological connections, and she's talking to the furies and agonizing about ancient ritual — and she's wearing star-spangled underoos. It's hard to maintain the profundity...unless, like Moulton, you are willing to link the U.S. to the mythological, and happen to live at a historical moment when doing so was at least somewhat defensible.

It's interesting that Captain America has kept his close ties with Americanism, while WW has spent much of her career trying to avoid the implications of her costume. Probably it's partly because Cap has a much less complicated narrative (he fights Nazis because he loves America, as opposed to because he loves peace.) I wonder if it's also because, or related to, some difficulty in imagining, or figuring out what to do with, female patriotism. It's also interesting that the (relatively) politically engaged Denny O'Neill is the one who took WW out of the stars and stripes. I mean, there are a lot of reasons to ditch that costume, but...did he dislike the patriotic connotations?

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Anyway, more next week, hopefully; magic lassos and why Moulton's characterization of Diana is still the best....

Update: Last Wonder Woman post here.

i warned you this day would come

... in the first post I made here. My long-ass con season has just started up again, meaning I'm gonna be at Wondercon in San Francisco this weekend, Artists Alley table 38, and everybody should come see me. It will be my first con as an internet snarkblogger, so it would be neat if someone came over and live-trolled me.

Also, you should click on my website in the sidebar, because it has been totally revamped and filled with new art, new information, and new financial instruments.

To tie it all together, I'm debuting a drawn essay at Wondercon, which you may also see and purchase at the website, and which I talked about here earlier.

Jack Hill at Reader

I have an essay about the new book about Jack HIll up at the Reader.

Hill’s female characters are both psychosexual props and real people. Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, in an early stage of pregnancy, is an asset to The Swinging Cheerleaders both for the exploitation value of her massive breasts and for the incredibly winning, innocent-yet-skeptical way she watches as her klutzy boyfriend prepares dinner and then drops it on his pants. Hill’s vacillations between humor and sleaze, between affection for his characters and gratuitous abuse of them, are what make his movies such vertiginous romps—unexpected, delightful, and disturbing in a way that a straightforward gorefest, or for that matter, a mainstream movie, could never be. That’s why I’ll take The Big Doll House and The Swinging Cheerleaders over anything by Kubrick, Coppola, or Scorcese.

Wonder Woman #1 (OOCWVG Part 7)

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six .

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So I already expressed my growing enthusiasm for the original Charles Moulton/Harry G. Peter Wonder Woman comics. I haven't read a ton of them, though, so I decided to start at the beginning with Wonder Woman #1, from 1942 (and yes, I know that Wonder Woman started a couple years earlier in Sensation Comics...but this is what I could get my hands on.)

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was, holy shit, comics were really long back in the day. 64 pages, pretty small panels, lots of text, four full Wonder Woman stories, plus a story about Florence Nightingale, plus a short prose story about something or other plus some random funnies, all for a dime. Even taking inflation into account, that's some value for money.

Of the four WW stories, three of them are...a little disappointing. Artist Harry Peter doesn't seem to have quite hit his stride yet; his layouts and stylization aren't as adventurous as his best work. The stories are all also set on the home front, with WW fighting Axis spies and essentially normal folk, so there's less opportunity for some of the nuttier visuals (mystic fires leaping out of typewriters, attacking Seal Men, that sort of thing.) Instead, we're treated to busloads of racial caricatures (not surprising) and an equal number of ungulates (which did take me somewhat aback.) And, of course, there's bondage too.



Ungulate


Ungulate



Racist Caricature



Ungulate with Racist Caricature



Playful Underage Bondage



Ungulate Role-Play



More Ungulate Role-Play


Looking at these, I've gotta say; even if it's not his absolute best work, I still love Harry Peter's art. That (obviously completely morally reprehensible) panel of the evil Burmese doing their unholy rituals while WW watches through the mask eyeholes, with the overlapping circles, the bizarre twisted faces, and the lovely colors...or the scribbly line-work on the elephant, with that misshapen shadow under it... or the weirdly stiff bondage children drawings, with the aggressive use of blank space; --those are all just beautiful drawings.

Another thing you notice on reading thorugh these; I've seen some commentary on the implied lesbianism on Paradise Island, but has anyone commented on WW's relationship with Etta Candy. It is...strangely intense. Obviously, Etta's oral fixation (she's always eating or begging to eat candy. That's her character. All of it.) seems suggestive. And I don't think Steve Trevor ever got to ride on Wonder Woman's back like that. Or to put his face in her backside — it's Etta who is the hindquarters in that elephant costume (in the previous panel, WW comments "I've never dressed up as an elephant before!" As if someone would have assumed that she had.)

So...maybe I was underselling these stories. They're pretty insane. But, for all their virtues, they pale in comparison to the first story in the issue, which I think is now one of my favorite comics stories ever. It's just a delight.

I mentioned before that George Perez's first issue was, by a fair margin, my favorite part of his run. I hadn't realized the extent to which he'd cribbed it from this story. Most of the major plot points come from Moulton; the Amazons are created by the Gods to teach love and be stronger than men. Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons is given a girdle which makes her invincible; Ares (who hates love and women), sends Hercules to fight Hippolyta; he fails, but uses treachery to get her girdle from her and then he and his men conquer them. But the Gods come to the aid of the Amazons, and show them the path to an island where they can live in peace. Hippolyta, inspired by the gods, crafts a image of clay which comes to life as Diana. Eventually the Amazons need to choose a champion to go to man's world; after a series of contests, Diana wins, much to her mother's chagrin, and so heads off to man's world as Wonder Woman.

It's a great story; as I noted in my discussion of Perez, it has a lot of the inevitability and — especially in Moulton's telling — a lot of the weirdness of the actual Greek myths. Perez played the tale for drama and pathos; the Amazons are explicitly raped in his version, for example. Moulton's tone is lighter -- he's writing for a younger audience — but the submerged violence is still there, just distanced and ritualized. It comes across as iconic rather than as soap opera.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Moulton/Peter and Perez, though...or, actually, between Moulton/Peter and any later WW writer I've seen — is that Mouton and his artist are willing to just go ahead and hate men. It's refreshing, both because you don't see enough of that sort of thing in popular culture, damn it...and because it just makes so much sense for the story. No amount of whining about man's world or man's evil or whatever is going to be as effective as a good, vicious, scurrilous caricature:



There personified is the extreme feminist vision of ravaging masculinity; dumb, animalistic muscle-bound, wiedling a giant penis-substitute which, in Peter's rendering, is bigger than Hercules' entire body. (And again, what kick-ass drawings these are. I love the crazy motion lines, which are solid enough to actually stop connoting motion and end up as a still design element. And I love the way the stiffness of Hippolyta's arm contrasts with the curves of her blowing dress. Her anatomy is deliberately out of whack, too; the legs and the torso couldn't actually meet, I don't think, which makes her look broken, like her sword.)

Making Hercules (and also the masculine God Ares) so thoroughly repugnant allows Moulton's Amazons a coherence they never really got to have again.  There's still not a logical philosophy, but there is a myythological one.  Moulton is a real gender essentialist; he believes in the idea of a male archtype and a female archetype. As a result, the exact philosophical content of the Amazonian code (do they represent love? do they represent strength in battle?) can be resolved by that appeal to essentialism. An Amazon bashing Hercules is different than Hercules bashing an Amazon because men and women are different, and their acts are disproportionate.  (This is, in fact, true, I think; at least percentage wise, for example, men murder women for quite different reasons than women murder men.)  The Amazons represent love — in comparison to men, which means that when they fight they fight for love, and when men love, they love as a strategem of battle (when Hercules loses the fight, he tricks Hippolyta by, as he puts it, making love to her.) Amazon strength, likewise, is a mystical offshoot of the power of love; the Venus Girdle, which means love, is their strength. And it's weakness, too, since it's her love or lust for Hercules which allows him to trick her out of the girdle, and so capture her.

Moulton, in other words, believes in what he's doing.  He's kind of a crank, basically.  And if you're not a crank, it's hard to take the character seriously...which is why Darwyn Cooke's frank satire from the New Frontier JLA annual, with very cartoony art by J. Bone, is about the best take on Wonder Woman I've seen outside of Moulton:



(Thanks to Bryan for tipping me off to this story, by the by.)

Cooke's actually interpreting the character correctly: Moulton believes that love is best expressed by having a dominating woman with a perfect figure and a swimsuit beat the tar out of you. That's funny; Cooke gets it -- and he goes on in the story to make fun of WW's supposed connection to feminism (she roughs up the guys at the Playboy Club, to the amusement of an undercover Gloria Steinem.)

However, when Cooke tries a more sober take on the character in the first story of the annual (with art by Cooke himself, I believe) we get this:




She's all about overcoming anger and conflict with love, and bringing men together...which means that in this here adventure comic, Superman and Batman get to have the big cool fight where they smack the snot out of each other, and WW has to be the peacemaker and talk about how happy she is to have her story be boring and subordinate. On the next pages she burbles along happily about how much darkness and pain there is in the Batman's soul, and how "Kal" is to be the "savior" of them all. Fucking gag me.

So yeah, Moulton's a crank, but maybe you still, even now, in fucking 2008, need to be a crank to be willing to do this:



That's a funny panel too...but it's funny at the guy's expense. Hercules is a bumbling oaf who gets beaten down; Hippolyta's the hero -- and still feminine (her power comes form Aphrodite, after all.) For Cooke, Wonder Woman is either strong and beating people up (in which case she's a masculinized hypocrite and therefore amusing) or she's standing around pacifically helping her men (in which case she's feminine and boring.) Moulton doesn't have to make that choice; his women are feminine even if they're bashing the hell out of some brute (there's even a nipple lurking in that first panel, if you look close.) Indeed, the women can do the bashing because they are feminine.

Cooke gets tripped up on the pacifist/violence dichotomy, but it's just as easy to bump over the feminist/erotic one. George Perez, for example, made Hippolyta's defeat more traumatic and realistic, and in doing so seemed to be trying to put across a a sincere feminist message about the evils of violence and rape. But Perez couldn't resist the exploitation imagery, somewhat undercutting his stance:



It's hard to take an anti-rape message seriously when it's draped in classic cheesecake imagery; if sexualized violence is bad, you probably shouldn't be sexualizing your violence.

Or here's a third way WW can trip you up:



I talked about this cover a bit earlier in the week Thinking about it more, I think that maybe what's really messed up about this image isn't that the eroticism undercuts the feminism (as with the Perez cover), but rather that the use of dominance imagery is very confused. The artist has made WW into a giant. Presumably this is to make her seem powerful and important. But making her into a rampaging Brobdingnagian doesn't project authority (Wonder Woman for President!) Instead, it makes her grotesque...and, I think, along with that swimsuit, serves to sexualize her. Chaging scale this way emphasizes WW's body and the manipulation of it...which is why "Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman" for example, has, and is meant to have, an erotic charge. Ms. is trying to show a woman in control, but instead they get sexualized, deformed femininity — femininity that is sexualized because it is deformed, and deformed because it is sexualized. (Again, when Moulton and Peter show Hippolyta beating up Hercules, he's the sexualized monster, not her.)

On the other hand, there's this:



This panel is about women gaining power through a connection with each other.  At the same time, this is, and is meant to be, a sensual image; Hippolyta's stiffness as she is bound, the intimacy between the two women, the fact that their outfits show a fair bit of skin, etc.  In Moulton, though, there's no contradiction; eroticism, strength, and submission all make sense together, because they are all linked to femininity.  Bondage is made a metaphor, or a stand in, for close, (eroticized) female bonds, and so for feminist community.

I'm not saying that Moulton's take on women is impregnable (if that's really the word I want.) Obviously, you could critique as misogynist or just ridiculous the idea that feminine bonding is either (A) innately erotic, or (B) somehow akin to bondage. But, whether you like what he has to say or not, he's aesthetically coherent; the eroticism and the bondage don't work against his feminist vision; they're integrated into it, creating a frisson of desire and devotion and political hope that's both unique and sublime.

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...and this post is really spinning out of control, lengthwise.  I've got more to say about Wonder Woman 1 (what is Diana's real mission anyway, for example?  And what is the lasso really supposed to do?)...but I'll have to put it off for at least a short while.  In the meantime, I'd recommend checking out Miriam's post about why Rogue is a better feminist icon than Wonder Woman and Bill's post about, among other things, whose fault it is that people keep writing WW stories.

Update: More on Wonder Woman 1 here.

many can wear the big 80s bomber jacket

[The following rant/reminiscence was prompted by Noah's set of posts on Wonder Woman as a flawed feminist icon]

I collected most or all of the George Perez run of Wonder Woman when I was a bit younger than Vanessa, Wonder Woman’s adolescent pal. I was into it, especially the young-adult-lit stuff, like the Very Special Issue about teen depression and suicide. But seeing as how that was the first (as well as last) iteration of the character I experienced, I can’t say that Wonder Woman got me young enough to be my feminist superhero icon.

As I've mentioned, the mid-80s X books were really the foundation of my superhero (and beyond, if we’re being honest) worldview. There were plenty of well-rounded (by 80s Marvel standards) women in the New Mutants… I consciously identified with Rahne, the meek, pious good girl, but secretly identified with Illyana, because she was so full of rage for no real reason. But ultimately, I think my childhood feminist hero was Rogue.

Her power was, if she had contact with someone else’s skin, they would be knocked unconscious and she would get all their memories and powers. I guess it’s about the power and the loss of control and the terrifying vulnerability inherent in sex, or intimacy of any kind. Who can say what will be unleashed when you touch another person? I think, even as a little kid, I understood that awesome dread.

And the fact that Rogue had to protect herself against intimacy all the time, what did that mean? For one, it meant that technically, her costume was more in line with a man’s costume, skintight but covering head-to-toe, than swimwear/lingerie, like Wonder Woman. Her biggest fashion statement was an oversized brown leather jacket. It signaled both her toughness and her need to shield herself (and maybe as a kid growing up with religiously dictated dress codes, the consciously covering up felt like my reality).

It meant that no one ever ever got to touch her without her permission, or they’d be sorry. And you could say, being as she was created and written by men, that it’s all about straight male fantasies and fears, vagina dentata or whatever, but really. Think of how powerful that statement is for a little kid, who has no power over whether people she doesn’t know will muss her hair or pick her up or worse (I was never molested myself, but I really hated it when adults would be overfamiliar with me. But as a child, especially a female child, there was nothing I could do about it). Not even to mention all the fun when I grew up, where it would have been nifty if random-ass guys who groped me could have instantly fallen into a coma. How’s that for bodily integrity.

It also meant that all her romances were unrequited romances. Which is nice for kids, who know all about wanting, but have no reason yet to be modeling, you know, the actual identity compromises and icky sex stuff of settling down with a prince. That might just have been me, though.

It undoubtedly says something about my current female/feminist identity that the icon I think about is not all Girl! Power! Tough As A Boy! Her great powers were even greater vulnerabilities, and they were centred on her female body. Maybe a lot of the lesson of Rogue was the same lesson I’d pick up in other consciousness-raising works like Cerebus and From Hell: as a woman, you just can’t win.

Nana 13-14: Economic Catastrophe Edition

I originally wrote this for another publication, which went belly up before they released an issue. Sad but true....
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Nana, Ai Yazawa’s rock-and-roll manga soap-opera , has a fairly simple premise — two young women, both named Nana, head to Tokyo to seek their fortunes. The narrative quickly accelerates, though, with an ever-expanding cast of characters, all portrayed with a dizzying intensity and depth.

Which is to say that, though you definitely don’t want to start reading Nana with volume #13, you definitely do want to start reading now now now so you can get to #13. This far into the series, every relationship has layer upon layer of meaning, with every new detail causing the committed fan to flap and sputter spasmodically. For example, in #14, we learn that rock-solid, reliable Yasu engages in the occasional indiscretion — and we know him so well that we (like his bandmates) are left (literally, in my case) with our jaws hanging open. Yasu…it can’t be! There…there must be some explanation! Surely, surely, it will all be explained in the next volume….!

Or, a little more subtly: it’s been clear for some time that Nana Osaki, the tough rock star, has an intense (albeit nominally platonic) crush on the ditzy Nana (“Hachi”) Komatsu. And it’s also been clear that Hachi’s often-cruel-but-never-heartless fiancé Takumi treats Nana O. as, to some extent, a rival. But in issue #13, for the first time, we see, in a flashback, that Takumi actually consciously knows how Nana feels about Hachi — a revelation which makes him seem both sweeter (he touchingly reassures Hachi that she and Nana will remain friends) and more cold-hearted (because if he knows how much the two women mean to each other, why is he such a dick to Nana?)

Did I mention that the art is amazing? Stylish clothes, beautiful poses, and faces so expressive they’ll tear your heart out. Nana’s stricken expression at the end of volume #14, her body stiffened in shock, contrasting pitifully with her cheery giant-heart-over-the-bustier jacket, while Yasu sits beside her his face drawn in sympathy…. That — that — right there! is reason enough to start reading at #1, and keep reading until the sad, sad day when Yazawa decides to stop writing them.

New Favorite Quote

Just found this at the top of Talking Points Memo.  Jim Cramer, cable tv's excitable money man, says of bank nationalization:

We must take the debate out of the hands of the dreamer academics, and into the hands of practical business people, no matter how much we despise them for getting us into this fix in the first place.

The thought is kind of beautiful, in its way. 

It's! So! Super!

A while back I talked about All-Star Superman and why I thought the first 8 issues or so weren't as great as they were cracked up to be. Several folks argued that I'd be more impressed if I finished the series.

So I just reread issues 1 to 12 and...eh. It's not terrible or anything, certainly. I appreciated Frank Quitely's art more this time around than I have in the past. The series has a nice, bright, striking color palette, and I like the clarity of the linework and layout; there's a touch of Winsor McCay there, I think. I still find his figure drawings and faces off-putting; his women in particular often look like uncomfortably slender fetish mannequins, and facial expressions seem rubbery and oddly unexpressive. But as far as mainstream art these days go, this is about as good as it gets, I think.

The story is fine too...Morrison keeps things humming along; there's no shortage of nutsy throwaway ideas — using a gravity gun to warp time; descendents of dinosaurs living underneath the earth; Jimmy Olsen dressing in Kryptonian garb for a lark; underworlds, overworlds, shrunken super-doctors — it's all good. And, of course, there's Superman's approaching cell-death hanging over the series, giving it weight and pathos.

Except...man, how much do I care about these folks at all? Jimmy Olsen for example; he's hip, he's incredibly resourceful, he's got this sixth sense which warns him of danger, he's got his signal watch — he's just so cool! And, well, irritating. Same with the endlessly chattering Lois who won't believe Clark is Superman; or with Superman himself, always rushing off to save someone or other, constantly forgiving everybody; or with, say, Lex's gratuitously fetish-goth-garbed niece. Everything's just. So. Awesome! and. Inventive! and Cool! "No one but me can save the world Lois! My cells are converting to pure energy, pure information. And I only have moments to save the world." Tum ta tum! You feel like you need to utter a little inspirational horn bleat after every panel; it's all characters making preposterously pompous little speeches and the racing off to be heroic. Everything feels like it's at maximum volume.

Morrison's always written like that. In stuff like Doom Patrol or even the Filth, I always felt it was thrown off tongue in cheek; making fun of the immensity of super-hero stuff, and often undercutting it with pratfalls or ridiculousness (like the silly Brotherhood of Dada, for example.) But as he's moved into more mainstreamy work, that deflation has gotten lost. And...it's not that he's not clever. It's not that he doesn't have good ideas. It's not even that there aren't touching moments. I just hate the feeling that he's tapping me on the shoulder every page yelling in my ear, "This is soooo great! This is Superman, booooy! Go! Go! Go!"

I've said this before, but...it totally vitiates everything that's best about Silver-Age storytelling when you try to tell a story capturing the brilliant innocence of silver-age storytelling. Because a lot of what was fun in those Silver-Age stories was that they were really off-hand and not at all pretentious. Sure, a Silver Age story might have Bizarro in one panel and evolved dinosaurs in the next and then an intelligent sun on the next page...but that would just be the story. There wouldn't be the winking about, wow, this is so cool. I felt like Alan Moore handled it better in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" by slowing the pacing down and being somewhat more bloody minded; trying to think how the silver age stuff might work out if you looked at it from an older perspective. It was an homage to the era, not an attempt to recreate it. Morrison though seems to be trying to go back in time through sheer puffery and volume and frantic pacing. And I think it's significant that Moore's message was that the world doesn't need Superman (which is, as it happens, true), whereas Morrison's message is that we do need Superman watching over us forever, at least as a kind of beautiful ideal. Which is basic fanboy aggrandizement — and also not true, even if you bellow it.

Also, the end? I really thought, from all the foreshadowing and what people had said about the series that, you know, he dies. But he doesn't quite. They still think he might come back. It just seems...I don't know. It seems kind of lame, really, with all the build up.

Again, I didn't hate the book. It's entertaining. There are a lot of wonderful moments (Clark Kent bumbling around while interviewing Lex Luther is lovely; reminded me of the Chris Reeves Superman movie, which I still think was pretty great.) And of course, it's hard to resist Luthor's eyes checking out the superpackage:



I know everybody goes on about the freshness of the series, the way it rejuvenated the character, and on and on. But it feels really decadent to me; definitely part of the zeitgeist, rather than an answer or alternative to it. I'd way, way, way rather read this than Marvel Zombies...but I don't necessarily think they're different in kind.

Is the War Over?

We were talking about another series of theme posts and I suggested "Are Comics Respected Yet?" It seemed like an obvious choice since, as I read the world, comics are now just starting to be respected and therefore find themselves in a touchy in-between state like that of blacks in 1965. A lot of ignorant goodwill is directed their way in a fashion that can be a bit galling. And for every ounce of ignorant goodwill they also encounter at least an ounce of open hostility.

Or so I thought. But, going by my co-bloggers' response, I might be behind the times. Beacuse they were indifferent to the idea, which suggests that the status of comics is way more secure than I thought.

So is that the case?

And why did comics have such a tough time getting this far? My theory is that public literacy has been a hard-won battle pushed along by shaming techniques similar to toilet training. Not that I have any data on the question.

If anyone wants to comment, I'll note here that I realize comics have always had better status in Japan and France than they do in the US.   

Copyright Insurgency

One of Noah's Wonder Woman posts elicited this comment from Cole Moore Odell:

...it shouldn't be controversial that some characters simply don't work, or they don't work past the idiosyncratic spark of their original creators. There's nothing wrong with limited shelf life. Yet this simple reality is warped by trademark holders who have unlimited interest in making money off of limited concepts, and by readers who refuse to let ideas go, even in the face of continued creative failure. ... the same can be said for most superheroes. Most popular culture, really.

Reading the WW essays, I got the sense of an original vision both odd and personal; later attempts at the character, not so much. But it has enough cachet that people want to keep trying their own version. It could just be positioning ("the first female superhero"). Readers who won't let go, I think, shouldn't be faulted. They see untapped potential. (The Cubs could win the World Series; it's not the fans' fault for buying tickets.)

And the corporation's a facilitator, never an author, no matter what the law says. The law's the most interesting thing here, I think. Totally arbitrary and usually absurd, Odell's right that it warps reality.

Without going into a laundry list of Boggsian aburdity, I'll point to the English scrum over Lost Girls. Moore & Gebbie used Peter Pan characters still under copyright in the UK & EU. The hospital that owned the rights objected, so M&G waited to publish there until the copyright expired. An amicable solution, but still:

Why on earth does a hospital own Peter Pan?

(Yes, I know there are reasons. I could have my reasons to leave my fortune to a dog.)

So, my big question: at what point can a work be said to have reasonably escaped its author and been taken over by the culture? It makes less sense to say one person hospital owns & controls Peter Pan than it does to say Peter Pan's just out there somewhere. I think this question especially important to comics works, which rely more on "characters and situations," as at least one comics copyright has it, than on any particular story. Certainly, the superhero genre's founded on the character more than the situation.

(Uninteresting side note: yes, lots of money is involved. So? Granite mining is a cutthroat industry.)

Finally, this is silly:

-Image (C) Tom Bell, sourced at Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license

Screw you, Sonny Bono's ghost. Say I want to make creative use of the culture I'm in, works speaking in the language I grew up with. For a lot of people, pop's the only language they have. And that language is owned & operated by companies. So I'm left with parody, the collective unconscious of the 1860s, or the lawless Mississippi kids who didn't know they couldn't remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Better than the original in every way, you can only see it through pirate versions as a legit release is a legal tangle.)

In film criticism, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson started the practice of using film stills without asking permission because studios routinely asked crazy fees for reprint rights. Now everyone reprints stills without permission, so a murky legal precedent's set even if no case has been tried.

So, shouldn't organized fan-unrest be able to destroy copyright? "24-Hour WW Fanfic Comic Day." Or cosplay sit-ins, I don't know. It might be worth it just to have thousands of people dressed as Amazons, going about their business. Maybe Moulton's ghost would be pleased, if not as much for "24-Hour Hogtie Day."

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, Part 6 (Ms./Playboy)

Well, obviously, I've gotten completely obsessed with Wonder Woman. If you're just checking in, you can find the rest of my posts on this subject here: One Two Three Four Five.

So far the basic thesis I've been arguing is that the original Moulton/Peter Wonder Woman was a very odd and original creation, and that nobody else has ever really figured out a way to use the character that isn't ridiculous or offensive or boring or all three.
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I'm going to take a slight turn here. I want to talk a little about Wonder Woman's status as a feminist icon, and how that does or doesn't really seem to make sense.

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I was aware that WW is generally thought of as a kind of feminist hero; an embodiment of strong, independent, heroic womanhood. I didn't realize, though, that Gloria Steinem had actually put WW on the cover of the first issue of Ms. in 1972.



Steinem also wrote an essay about how strong and powerful Wonder Woman was, and about...well here's a quote (taken from this very entertaining post on Comic Coverage:

“Looking back now at these Wonder Woman stories from the forties, I am amazed by the strength of their feminist message…Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women’s culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream.” -- Gloria Steinem

Anyway, because WW is supposed to symbolize feminism and female power, there was something of an outcry when this hit the stands, early in 2008







That's Tiffany Fallon nude, with a Wonder Woman suit painted on her.

Greg Rucka, Wonder Woman writer, said "I'd rather have my daughter see this [the Ms. cover] than ever see that [the Playboy cover.]"  And he added "Bastards all.  You've no idea the damage you've done.  No idea at all." 

I agree. The cover is a desecration. It goes against everything Charles Moulton believed; everything he stood for. How on earth could Playboy put Wonder Woman on the cover, and not have her tied up?

Slightly more seriously, I do have to wonder how, or what kind of, damage this sort of thing really does. In the first place...you really probably wouldn't show Playboy to little kids anyway, would you?  And in the second, how is this out of sync with Wonder Woman's image (other than that it's not bondage, I mean?) WW's costume is pretty thoroughly sexualized to begin with. I guess you could argue that WW is about her strength and heroism, not her shallow physical charms -- but that's just not true. In fact, shallow physical charms are one of her super-powers. This is from the first issue of WW:



Note all the stuff about Aphrodite? WW's beauty is, like her strength or her speed, a divine gift (from the God of Love, no less). This has been pretty consistent down through the years, too; she's still got super-beauty in George Perez's reboot, for example, and even the dragon notices she's hot in League of One.


Valerie D'Orazio makes more or less the same point:

As for me, like I said, I wasn't surprised by the Playboy thing. It was a cheap shot by the magazine, to be sure. But I would be far more outraged if this happened to Batgirl or Supergirl. To me, Batgirl was always the true feminist superheroine -- smart, independent, and under-sexualized. Supergirl was the virginal innocent -- originally portrayed as your own kid sister or cousin.

But, Wonder Woman was created by a dude with really strong and weird opinions about women & sex -- he referred to women's vaginas as their "love parts" -- and all that baggage couldn't help but taint that character. Adventurous, resourceful Batgirl is the superheroine I wanted to be. Wonder Woman was half-naked. ....Which is not to say that WW can't be/has not been redeemed and made into a character that women and girls can truly look up to. But I will finally believe this when she's no longer drawn by cheesecake artists. I'll believe it when she's no longer half-naked.

And yet...though I agree with the argument up to a point, I think D'Orazio's missing something. After all, Ms. Magazine didn't put Batgirl on the cover. And that's in part because nobody except hardcore comics geeks like D'Orazio gives a rats ass about Batgirl. Wonder Woman has more name recognition; she's got more appeal. In fact, there's some evidence that Tiffany Fallon is painted to look like Wonder Woman not solely because some guy thought "Wonder Woman is hot" but because, you know, Tiffany Fallon really likes Wonder Woman. As she says:

I'm obsessed with Wonder Woman. I grew up and I had the Wonder Woman Underoos, when Underoos first came out. And I was always a big fan of the show and Lynda Carter. And the older I got, the more I would get these comments like, "My god, you look like Lynda Carter in that picture!" And it doesn't happen all the time, but I just grew to appreciate her and the character and the campiness of the project. I was Wonder Woman at one of the Playboy Mansion parties, and I just started getting all these comments, like, "My god! You would make a great Wonder Woman!" And I'm like, "You know, I would!" [Laughs]. And so I just have fun with it. And I heard they were starting to make a movie about it, and so I was like, "You know… Stranger things have happened in my life!" You never know. But that would be something I'd be really proud to be a part of.

In other words, WW's on the Playboy cover for the same reason she's on the Ms. cover — because girls like her.

Just because women, or some women, or a woman likes something doesn't necessarily make it feminist or liberating, of course. Pictures of super-thin models are quite popular with girls of all age; does that mean they're necessarily liberatory? Or is the popularity arguably, from a feminist perspective, perhaps a problem? 

Tania Modeleski in her second wave manifesto Feminism Without Women has a great little bit of snark where she points out that often cultural critics fall into a mode of thinking that goes something like: "I am progressive. I like Dynasty. Therefore, Dynasty must be progressive." I think there's more than a little of this going on with Gloria Steinem's decision to put WW on the cover of Ms. I mean, your pilot issue of your feminist magazine, you put a young aggressively sexualized women in a swimsuit on your cover -- a women who, moreover, is tricked out in bondage gear (that lasso doesn't go away)? Yes...sub/domme for President! Especially if she's been created and, even in this instance, drawn by a man!

(And, of course, the same goes for Fallon and the Playboy cover -- she made have had input into the image, and the PR may have talked about how accomplished and wonderful she is, but that doesn't mean that it's especially empowering for women as a whole to have this image out there.

Though I've gotta say...there seemed to be a fair number of people who were shocked, shocked, shocked that Fallon would dare compare herself to Lynda Carter. I mean...Lynda Carter! I like Lynda Carter fine and all...but she's a minor celebrity. Fallon's a minor celebrity. It's not like Fallon compared herself to Gloria Steinem or something.

Where was I? Oh yeah...)

Still, the question remains...granted that she's a problematic feminist icon, why do girls like WW? Is it just because they're all victims of false consciousness and propaganda and can't tell that she's an erotic tool of the patriarchal oppressor? Or what?

There are a bunch of reasons that girls might like Wonder Woman I think.

1. One of her powers is super-beauty. Girls are into being pretty. You can argue about whether this is cultural or biological (I lean towards the former) and about whether its unfortunate or not, but it is indisputably true

2. She's got lots of strong female friendships and relationships. That's not especially true for, say, Batgirl (except in more recent incarnations) but it's always been true of Wonder Woman. (Trina Robbins talks about this here, in an essay I may discuss more at some point....)

3. She's the star. Batgirl is Batman's assistant; Supergirl is a secondary Superman; Storm's part of a team, etc. etc., but Wonder Woman in those 40s adventures was the focus of the narrative. And that leads us to:

4. Moulton really did go out of his way to preach self-confidence and self-reliance to women. Say what you will about him, but he thought women were strong and that they should have confidence in themselves. He shows WW and other women beating the tar out of men, outwitting men, and generally overthrowing their oppressors (after being tied up, of course.)

5. She's a princess.

6. She's a princess. Duh.

All of the above can be summed up by saying that Moulton's Wonder Woman really, truly, gratuitously, and effectively pandered to girls in a way very few other American super-hero comics have. Girls have traditionally liked Wonder Woman because it was marketed to them by someone who actually knew what he was doing.

Of course, Moulton was also pandering to his own fetishes. The genius of the character, if you want to call it that, is the way that she plugs into fetishes for men and women a the same time — whether it's her beauty, or her relationships with other women, or her sub/dom/sub/dom flip-flopping. The story functions both as genre literature for girls and as "fanny" genre literature for guys. As a result, both the Ms. cover and the Playboy cover are logical places for the character to end up.

So where does that leave WW as a feminist icon? Well, about the same place it leaves her as stroke material, I guess. Because while it makes sense to use her in Ms. in some sense, Gloria Steinem still, still looks like kind of a doofus for putting her on the cover. And while Fallon certainly looks hot in those Playboy photographs, the magazine couldn't resist puffing her as a champion of truth, justice and American Sensuality", which is just dumb. And, it must be said again, it's pretty lame to do a porn shoot based on a kid's comic book and manage to be less kinky than the source material.

I guess we're back at the thesis for this whole series of posts, which is that using Moulton's character for your own purposes tends not to work very well (aesthetically I mean -- commercially is something else, of course.) Putting WW on the cover made Playboy and Ms. look naive and clueless. You mess with the Amazon, you take your lumps.

Update: Fixed chronology error....

Update: the sage continues, with more on the Ms. cover, among other burblings...

How I Learned to Love the Wall

“…society secretly wants crime…and gains definite satisfaction from the present mishandling of it.” Photojournalist Susan Madden Lankford quotes this line from Karl Menninger in her book Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time, but she seems oblivious to the irony. Here, after all, is a giant coffee-table book filled with photographs and interviews with women in the Las Colinas jail in San Diego. Reading these women’s stories of drug use, molestation, neglect, prostitution, single-motherhood, and more drug-use; looking at into their weary faces — why would we do these things if there were not a “definite satisfaction” involved? As we flip through the pages, surely we are intended to feel not so much a guilty pleasure as a pleasurable guilt. Clearly the book is more upscale than, say Judge Judy, but with its fascinated voyeurism and its constant finger-wagging, is it really different in kind?

The target of the righteous indignation is, of course, somewhat different. Lankford is less interested in personal than in societal guilt. “How have we failed so many women?” she wonders. The answers she comes up with are familiar ones — basically, society doesn’t do enough to make sure that children are not neglected. The book is sprinkled with pull quotes from “Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D.” who rather gratuitously explains that being abused as a child tends to leave you fucked up. The conclusion is that these women need more attention – from parents, from society, from us.

Perhaps that’s true. But I can’t help thinking that maybe they could do with not more scrutiny, but less. Most of the women in Las Colinas are there on drug or prostitution charges. If drugs and prostitution were legalized, they would be…not happy, not healthy, but not, for the most part, in jail.

Lankford, of course, argues that the women actually enjoy jail on some level; she speculates that confined women secrete oxytocin, a calming hormone associated with sex and birth which may “make jail time more tolerable” and even “encourage recidivism”. It’s a telling foray into pseudoscientific balderdash. After all, if even the inmates derive subliminally sexualized pleasures from jail-life, can we be blamed for doing so as well?

Hey, Bartender! I Think You Kids Are Great

The comics hook is that I borrowed the title from an old Doonesbury, one dating to the distant era when the sight of a long-haired bartender at an old fogies function was worth a few gags. 

I spend a lot of time at the Cafe Depot and the Second Cup, two chain coffee shops with outlets here in Montreal. My message today: the kids working behind the counter are great. They're hard working, cheerful, unflappable. They make shit, something like $8.50 an hour. The tips are worse. I'm one of the biggest tippers they've got, and I give them peanuts.

The schmucks get up at 5 in the morning, trudge thru Montreal snow and ice, clean toilets, deal with clowns counting out pennies to pay for a cup of coffee. Then the kids go off to study or play in their rock bands or whatever. I don't know how they do it all; I wouldn't have the energy. 

In the '90s I worked at a newspaper in New York where kids the same age made $25 an hour and spent most of their time sitting around. And boy, did they bitch when there was something to do. (Yeah, Krajick, I mean you.) Maybe Montreal is better than New York, maybe constant work is better than idleness. Maybe, my favorite theory, the world is on an upward trajectory and the latest generation is the product of better child rearing than previous ones. Maybe not. But it's nice to have something nice that you can take for granted. And now that I have written this post, that's what I''m going to go back to doing.

One caveat: the pretty girls treat me like I've got a disease. But what else is new? 

Frontier Nursing Service

Marie Bartlett’s The Frontier Nursing Service takes a potentially fascinating topic and makes it — well, not exactly deathly dull, but not especially interesting either. The book focuses, as the title says, on the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), a midwifery and nursing service established in the Appalachias in eastern Kentucky. In the 1920s the region was rural, isolated, and subject to some of the highest maternal death rates in the country. The FNS, under the leadership of Mary Breckenridge,rode in to save the day — literally. Nurse-midwives saddled horses and traipsed up and down pathless mountains to, as they said, “catch” babies. The care, subsidized by charitable donations, was virtually free, and it dramatically improved survival rates of both mothers and children in the region.

Midwifery remains an intensely controversial profession in the United States. Homebirths are only barely legal in many states, including Illinois. Moreover, the entire U.S. medical system is in a rolling crisis, providing ever more impersonal, ever more ineffective care at ever more exorbitant prices to ever fewer people. A study of the FNS — a group of midwives committed to cheap, effective midwifery and public health for all at rock-bottom rates — seems, therefore, like it should have something to say to a number of contemporary debates.

Unfortunately, Bartlett is more interested in hagiography than in analysis. She talks a great deal about how wonderful the FNS nurses were, and about the spirit and vision of their leader Mary Breckinridge. She relates many warm anecdotes, and discusses at length the personalities and quirks of various nurses — she mentions at least three times, for instance, that one of the nurses had the interesting nickname of “Thumper.” But ultimately all the feel-good high-mindedness just starts to feel gratingly saccharine — like a book-length public-service announcement.

It’s a truism that you can’t understand the present without understanding the past, but people tend to miss the fact that the inverse is true as well. The FNS had a vision of health care which has been abandoned. They are, in many ways, historical failures. Bartlett leeches their story of much of its drama when she pretends that we have honored, or have the right to honor, their memory.

Good Point

My mom and Joe Klein both like this essay Zadie Smith did about Obama. I just skimmed it and it seemed ok by me, but the one bit that stood out was the following:

 It's amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment.

Which is nice to hear: I'm not the only one. In general, I suspect that the great passions attached to public issues boil down, on a person-by-person basis, to quite tiny little feelings that cling like lint to our tiny egos. Will I look silly? How can I feel important? What's Johnny over there doing? Is Sally looking this way? See Mary McCarthy's "My Confession," if you can find it.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, Part 5 (League Of One)

This is my umpty-umpth post about Wonder Woman. Umpty tumpty umpty umph.

Anyway, I just read "League of One." As you may or may not know, it's basically a fantasy/super-hero cross-genre hybrid. WW is hanging out with cutesy wood-nymphs and mermaids on Themyscira when she hears a prophecy that the JLA will be killed by the last dragon, who has just risen form its sleep somewhere off in Europe. So WW decides to beat up all the other members of the league, take on the mantle of the league her own self, and go fight the dragon and die bravely, thus saving her comrades. She fights the dragon and wins and drowns, but then she's given artificial respiration by Superman so she comes back to life. The prophecy is fulfilled...and yet Wonder Woman is still alive! Thank goodness!

Or maybe not so much. This book really demonstrated in startling and new ways why this character is just impossible. I mean, Wonder Woman is supposed to be a hero for girls, right? So putting her in a fantasy adventure, complete with fairy sprites and cute gnomes and sacrificing for your friends and one-alone-against-the-dragon...it seems perfect doens't it? If you can't use her in a story like this, what story can you use her in?

And yet, everything goes horribly wrong. Let's take it one by one, I guess:

1. Sacrificing for your friends — This is an absolute iron trope of girls adventure fiction. Boys (like Spider-Man, for example) are always fighting for folks who don't like them very much -- oh the nobility! oh the self-pity! etc. Girls have nobility and self-pity too, but it tends to be spent not on random strangers, but on people with whom they have a bond (think Buffy or Cardcaptor Sakura.) So, okay, Wonder Woman is sacrificing herself for the JLA. Great! Except...well, they're all guys. And she isn't allowed to have any real romantic tension with any of them. The JLA is this weird boy's club; she can burble on about how much she loves and admires the Flash or Green Lantern or whatever, but the emotional connection isn't real. The pseudo-sublimated-romance with Superman is too distanced and unacknowledged to serve as a source of emotional resonance either. The whole thing ends up seeming stupid and clueless. This panel pretty much sums it up:






That's a monument with the names of all the leaguers on it, by the way. Later WW knocks the top off it, leaving only her own name. You always castrate those you love...I guess. Or those you are supposed to love because of the bizarre exigencies of corporate continuity. Or whatever.

If you're telling a fantasy story, incidentally, the heroine is supposed to get the guy in the end. And...yeah, artificial respiration with the big boy scout that is Superman doesn't count.


2. Brave girl triumphs thorugh inner-resources and purity she didn't know she possessed — The way this is supposed to work is, you get a normal everyday girl, see, and she discovers she's got a special destiny, and she goes and overcomes amazing odds through her exemplary bravery and courage.

The problem here is that...well, Diana isn't a normal everyday girl. She's super-powered. And she's been doing this sort of thing forever. And it's really pretty darn unclear why she should find *this* particular challenge especially frightening. The super-hero tropes just make the whole thing dumb; I mean, she's Wonder Woman. We know she's all pure and light and goodness and super strong. Fantasy stories are supposed to be Bildungsroman...but there's no building here.

Also, did I mention there's an obligatory Diana-ties-herself-in-her-magic-lasso-to-force-herself-to-be-truthful scene? In other words, she's not an ordinary girl with whom you can identify; she's a weird bondage freak.

Not that there's anything wrong with weird bondage freaks. At all. It just doesn't work with the fantasy tropes, is all I'm saying.


3. painted fantasy art — I don't want to be rude or anything, but sometimes....well. Ahem.

DON'T PAINT THE FUCKING SUPER-HEROES!!!!

Just don't do it, okay? Unless you're Bill Sienkiewitz and want to do the expressionist thing. But the Alex Ross realism; please stop. You don't want to make your super-heroes look realistic. It looks dumb. Especially Wonder Woman. In the swimsuit. Really; the more realistic you make her, the more I'm looking at her saying, "Damn! She looks like she must really be cold!" (That's always what I think when I see those Lynda Carter shows too, incidentally.)


Please God, can I exchange this for an electric blanket?




A detailed, painterly dragon looks nifty; a detailed, painterly Green Lantern looks like someone has left the world's biggest action figure lying around the watchtower.


Love Among the Collectibles



Admittedly, it's not all terrible. The scene where Wonder Woman gets rid of Superman is clever and even moving -- Superman sees the tears in her eyes before she starts to beat the snot out of him. Plus there are vulture reaction shots, which I appreciate. And then the playful sequence where Diana's mermaid friend grabs her and magically gives her a fish tail could almost come from Moulton; it's got a weird lesbian tinge that he'd appreciate anyway. And I like the gnomes. They fit in the fantasy setting. They're likable and flawed, and bad things happen to them, and you care. But then you go back to the super-heroes and Batman's using elementary reverse psychology because he's such a fucking genius and Superman's beating his breast because he's been betrayed,..and who gives a shit? They're invulnerable and pure and boring and you can't tell any story with them that's worth a damn.

At least, no story that doesn't feature...Seal Men!








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So...this is probably the last WW post for at least a bit. I'll weigh in on Greg Rucka's take on the character at some point, and hopefully Gail Simone's too...and maybe on the TV series. But there will be a pause.  (I think I promised that before; but I really mean it this time.)

Update: Okay, so I'm not ready to review the Hikawhatsis, but you should read this.

Update 2: Okay, I lied, and there's yet another Wonder Woman post up; this one about Ms. Magazine and Playboy.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, Part 4 (Perez)

This is my fourth post on Wonder Woman this week; for the earlier ones see one, two, three.

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Way back when I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and not filled to my ears with congealed bile, bitterness, and general cantankeousness, George Perez was pretty much my favorite comics artist. As a result, I bought the first couple years of his late eighties Wonder Woman reboot.

Time passed, and with all the filling up with bile and what-not...well, anyway, I haven't read or much thought of either George Perez or his run on Wonder Woman in a long, long time. But since I was writing about Wonder Woman, I thought I'd disentomb the back issues from the fossilized long boxes, redistributing large piles of lint and small piles of cats.

So, now that I've reread these things for the first time in at least a decade, what's the verdict?

First, and somewhat inevitably, I have to admit that Perez is no longer one of my favorite artists. Not that I think he's bad, by any means. He's obviously quite technically gifted, and he has an especial gift for faces. I actually remembered the sequence below, where Diana first does her bullets and bracelets thing, and I still think it's pretty great, with a lot of the expressive charm that I appreciate in good shojo:



As is evident even in that little sequence above, Perez draws women with real sensuality and grace. His layouts are interesting and varied too. He's a good artist; when his stuff is put in front of me, I like looking at it, which puts him head and shoulder, and, hell, waist above the vast majority of mainstream artists working today. But... compared to super-hero artists who really thrill me, like Jim Aparo or Nick Cardy or Neal Adams, or, for that matter, Mike Sekowsky in his WW run, or Harry Peter, Perez seems — well, kind of bland, I guess. His drawing is good, but not great; and his design sense always seems more utilitarian than inspired. For example, look at his wraparound cover for the first issue of WW.




This is supposed to be a tour de'force; lots of stuff happening, the whole issue shown in a single two page image. But basically it just sort of falls into a layout no-man's land -- not supremely detailed enough to be ravishing, not decisive enough in its use of space to be striking. There's nothing wrong with any individual piece of it, or with the overall effect, even, but there's nothing about it that makes me look at it and say "holy shit!"



Look, for example, at the (barely there) drapery on the mostly-nude Hippolyta kneeling before hercules on the left side of page. That cloth should cling and curve to her body...but it doesn't. It just kind of sits there. Again, there's nothing wrong with it, it's not bad...it's just not great.

All right, now that I've won that argument with my 17-year-old-self....

I'd actually remembered the first issue story as being pretty good...and it is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Greg Potter's dialogue is overcarbonated in the mighty Marvel manner, but without the nudgy jocosity that made Stan Lee's scripts tolerable (random selection: "But even into Paradise there can one day come a serpent!" groan. Still, you can see that Perez and Potter brought a lot of love and a lot of thought to the character. In particular, Perez and Potter went to town on the mythological background. There is, of course, lots of name-dropping deities and showing off erudition (Ares and Aphrodite are married! Isn't that cool!) But there's also several moments when all their reading actually allows them to approximate the tone and some of the power of actual myth. The sequence where Hippolyta and the Amazons are betrayed and raped by Hercules and his men has a brutal, tragic inevitability — a sense of smart, noble people entwined in betrayal and bloodshed by their own weaknesses. Similarly, Wonder Woman's creation is both strange and poetic. The Amazons in this telling are the souls of women who were murdered by men, reincarnated by the Gods. Hippolyta (presumably the spirit of the cave-woman with whom the comic opens, though, in a very nice touch, this is never spelled out) was pregnant when she was murdered by her husband, and Diana is that unborn child's spirit, infused into a body of clay that Hippolyta molds by the sea. It sounds complicated and kind of goofy I guess, but it's done quietly and it's really moving — as is the excitement of the immortal Amazons at the chance they now all have to help raise a child. ( Actually, this is somethng I probably appreciated less when I first read the book. I didn't have a kid of my own then.)

Overall, then, I would say that this was easily the best take on Wonder Woman after Moulton. I would say that except for one thing. Wonder Woman isn't in the comic. The story is all about Hippolyta and the Amazons. Diana shows up in the last pages, but she doesn't become Wonder Woman till the last page. And, alas, that last page is ridiculous. That swimsuit with the pneumatic bustier and the star-spangled bottoms...all the mythological verisimilitude Potter and Perez have put so much effort into is just sacrificed on the altar of an old dead guy's anachronistic fetish-wear.

And that's kind of it. The rest of the series never really recovers from the fact that it has to focus on Diana. Sure, Potter and Perez do what they can to salvage the situation. They ditch the invisible plane, for example; this Wonder Woman can just fly under her own power. And they do their best to untangle the Steve Trevor/Diana Prince mess. In canon, WW pretty much becmae Diana Prince in order to attract Steve/not intimidate him; she was slumming for love. This is obviously fairly icky and not especially empowering — especially as Steve has over the years vacillated between being a rank fool and a manipulative asshole.



Steve Trevor, Fool; by Moulton and Harry Peter




Steve Trevor, Dick, by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru

So, anyway, Potter and Perez just got rid of the Diana Prince identity altogether, and relegated Trevor to being an older uncle figure. Indeed, in the series itself, Diana has, through the whole first two years, exactly zero (0) romantic interests. (I think she had an abortive date with Superman in John Byrne's miniseries at this time. Some ideas are so obvious they're brilliant. And then, some ideas are so obvious they're just fucking stupid. The Superman/Wonder Woman pairing is one of the latter (now Wonder Woman/Martian Manhunter on the other hand...or Wonder Woman/Black Canary....))

Where was I? Oh, right. Perez and Potter tried to rejigger the character to make her less ridiculous. And they had some success. The supporting cast, in particular — which is almost entirely female — is interesting and vared; there's a scholar of ancient Greece, her daughter, a publicist, Steve Trevor, a (much-much-revised) Etta Candy; they all are fairly interesting and personable. I wouldn't mind just reading about them and what they're up to and how they related to Diana, how she adjust to living in a new world -- stuff like that.

But, alas, we're in a super-hero comic. And that means there have to be villains and super-battles and high-minded diatribes and everything bigger than life. And, man, it's stupid. By the third comic or so, the whole — oh, no, I've been defeated, what shall I do, wait I'll use my magic lasso! — has already become an over-used cliche. And when she's not suddenly remembering how to use her main fucking weapon, Diana's always thinking deep thoughts like "how strange these mortals are! I have much to learn from their courage and beauty!" Or some such. She's the Silver Surfer, only with (slightly) more clothes.

Part of the problem is just mid-level super-hero storytelling, and a desperate dearth of interesting bad guys — Ares, the main villian of villains, just gives up when he realizes that his plan to destroy the earth will...cause the destruction of the earth. Part of the problem, though, is though they've fiddled with the character, they're still saddled with Moulton's creation. And while they avoid (at least for the most part) the bondage, they are stuck with some of his other preconceptions

The core of Perez's story (scripted after the first few issues, and somewhat unfortunately, by Len Wein) is Diana's mission as an emissary from Paradise Island, bringing alien knowledge, educating man's world. But this mission is completely incoherent. What does Diana have to teach? If it's peace, she should probably stop hitting people. If it's how to be a strong woman...isn't that a little condescending? Especially since she's being written by men? Who keep drawing her in a one-piece? (Perhaps the message is that boned corsettes can do wonders.)

Basically, the problem with the series is that it wants to be an adventure series and it wants to have a message. But Moulton's message (women are strong...because they are tied up!) won't do -- and yet they can't quite abandon it either. So the series wanders on, mostly as a pro-forma super-hero book, but with half-digested pretensions. It can't loosen up enough to be goofy, but it can't spit out any words of wisdom which make sense. The series certainly has some nice moments — the sad death of Mindi Mayer, reprinted in the Greatest Wonder Woman stories, is touching. But it's also really irritating; in a story about a woman's sad suicide and about (presumably) female relationships, why is the narration in the head of a male detective drooling over Diana's charms? For the most part, though, the stories aren't either touching or irritating; they're just tedious. I can't believe I got this for two whole years. This time through, I couldn't hack that many. I made it through ten, and that's all. Back to the longbox for you, WW.

Update: All right, several folks in comments have goaded me to try Greg Rucka's run...so I'll give that a shot and report back...maybe next week? We'll see how the schedule is....

Update 2: ...and fixed embarrassing naming error. Duh.

Update 3: And part 5.

Surrrrrrrreal

So I doze off and miss the first 15 minutes of the UK game. Surreal. And Meeks only has 10 points. Surreal.

Real weirdness: at halftime, I decide to catch up on the WW by typing in the title of this site.

Only I leave off the S: http://hoodedutilitarian.blogpot.com/

At first I thought we'd been hacked. By the Lord. Now I'm wondering whether Google really is all-powerful. Don't they buy all the typos?

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, part 3 (O'Neill/Sekowsky)

Here and here I argued that Wonder Woman is a the result of a particular idiosyncratic, fetishistic vision. Charles Moulton was more like R. Crumb than he was like Jerry Siegel or Lee/Ditko. As a result, Wonder Woman as icon is essentially a decades long disaster; she's particular, not universal, and every effort to prove otherwise makes both the perpetrator and the character look ridiculous.
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So...I'll stand by the argument that, outside of Moulton's work, there aren't any Wonder Woman stories that I've seen which I'd call "great" or even "really good." There are a couple of takes, though, that are at least relatively unobjectionable. I thought I'd take a post to look at some of them, and talk about why they manage to do better than some of their peers.

(And just to get this out of the way: no, I haven't read the current Gail Simone run on the Wonder Woman title. I'm willing to give it a go if anyone'll vouch for it...though, jeez, the internets are not exactly abuzz with news of the series...is she even still on the title? Oh well...anyway...)

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First off..the love it/hate it Denny O;Neill/Mike Sekowsky run, where Diana gets to wear a full suit of clothes in exchange for losing all her powers (doesn't sound like such a bad deal, really.) There's one of these stories in the Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told (from before she changed her outfit and lost her powers)...and reading it through the first time I was fairly appalled. Even after reading the Kanigher stories, it's hard to believe how dumb, dumb, dumb Diana is in this outing. It's like someone popped her head open and scooped her brain out with a mellon-baller. First of all, she lets some random lech crawl all over her at some random party...and then it's Steve who bashes his head in, not her. Then Steve cheats on her, and tells her...and she doesn't notice! Then she's forced to testify against him in court, is obviously broken up about it...and Steve whines and bitches and tells her she betrayed him...and she just sort of sits there and takes it and feels bad. And then she goes undercover and gets dressed up in fab hippie clothing...and all of a sudden she realizes that she's good looking! I mean, okay, many lovely women have body issues...but she's been running around in her underwear for 20 years at this point! The idea that a change to sexier clothes is going to reinvent her self image seems...confused.

But after the initial shock wore off, I started to see some of the appeal of O'Neil's approach. In the first place, Mike Sekowsky's art is fantastic.



Really dramatic, off-kilter page compositions, with figures occasionally breaking out of the panels; beautiful giant-eyed faces emoting, almost art nouveau clothing deisgns — it would make me think of manga, if the trippy, psychedelic colors weren't so central. I don't think I like it more than Harry Peter's original art for the series, but these are the only WW visuals I've seen that are even in the same ballpark. (And, no, alas, George Perez is nowhere near the artist that Peter or Sekowsky are...I'll discuss him a bit more below.)



So, yeah...great art can salvage a lot. And even the story...I mean, the story isn't good. It's dumb and insulting; the gestures at hipness are just embarrassing, the gestures at feminine psychology are ludicrous; the whole thing makes you wonder if O'Neill ever met an actual hippie, or an actual woman...or an actual human being for that matter.

But all that aside...you do sort of have to admire the way he's managed to get around the pitfalls of writing a Wonder Woman story. Because, while this is not good, it's not good in a Denny O'Neill way. The problems here aren't really the problems Moulton has bequeathed his heirs. Their isn't any bondage nonsense bizarrely tripping things up. There isn't the snickering frat-boy snickering at the character's sexuality. There isn't the desperate confusion over setting -- where the hell does Wonder Woman even make sense? — that is often a problem. O'Neill avoids all that by pretty much ignoring it. His Wonder Woman isn't Wonder Woman at all, really — yes, she still has the character design (though he got rid of even that a couple issues down the road.) But he treats her pretty much as if she's just some random chick. I think this panel sums it up:






There she is, at a cocktail party, looking off semi-vacuously as the men talk, the way any woman might in a dumb romance comic. There's nothing wonderful about her; she's just some random dame who accidentally put on the wrong duds this morning. Similarly, even though WW spends most of the comic investigating a mystery, and even though she has this magic lasso which supposedly makes people tell her the truth, she never uses it to further her investigation. Magic truth-making lassos? No way; you can't tell a story and make sense of that! Not unless you're Charles Moulton, anyway. O'Neill isn't, knows he isn't, and wants as little part of the mystic clap-trap as he can get away with.

Of course, at some point, you've got to ask...if you don't want to write about Wonder Woman, if you have not interest in Wonder Woman, if, in fact, you've realized that it isn't really possible to write Wonder Woman — why not just get a new character to put in your mediocre, misogynist story with the great art? Why call it Wonder Woman at all? But such are the whims of marketing.

I do think, though, that this is pretty much the only way a great Wonder Woman story will ever get written, if one ever does. Somebody will come along, say, right, I'm going to create a completely new character, put the name "Wonder Woman" on her, and tell a story that doesn't have anything to do with the character's origin, not to speak of her 60 plus years of history. If a great writer did that...well, the story would have at least a chance of being great. Alan Moore's Promethea is I guess the hypothetical that almost/coulda/shoulda been, except that he didn't call it Wonder Woman, and it turned into a lame-ass treaty on the Kabbala half-way through. So we're stuck with O'Neill's effort instead, which isn't great, or even necessarily good, but of which is, at least, his own failure. And lord knows, reading those Kanigher/Andru stories, he could have done a lot worse.
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Update: and here's a discussion of George Perez's run...

Update 2: And part 5.

Jack Hill at Vertigo

Well, not quite alas, but Kristy Valenti has an article up wishing for the day.

When I recently came across comics writer (and Muppet screenplay scribe) Brian Lynch's anecdote about how one Big Two company pitched a "lesploitation" detective series to him, I thought: "that would actually be pretty awesome … if that was a film written and directed by Jack Hill."