women in comics, sort of
I realized while skimming through my icons just now that I only have three (out of 100+) that primarily feature female characters. Wow. Um... this isn't something I was ever conscious of doing. For the record, the three are this Mrs. Landingham one, one with Molly Grue holding Amalthea/Unicorn and crying, and one with Evey from V for Vendetta in the center - there are another couple with Evey in them, but V is more prominent. Also there's one with Mulder and Scully in equal proportions. What is wrong with my icon selection? Bad self! I need some CJ Cregg and Aeryn Sun up in here. >:/
Warning: the following post contains links to TV Tropes. Click them at your own risk.
Anyway, this Comics Alliance post finally articulated to me a lot of my own thoughts about why I don't always find sexualized women in fiction to be synonymous with sexually liberated women IRL. I mean, that should be an obvious distinction, right? But only in this stage of my life am I really coming to realize just how contentious a relationship I have had with the portrayal of women in media. I used to defend the fact that I only related to male characters, and even went through a long, confused stretch of time when I thought I might not be entirely cisgender, when I thought maybe I was "supposed" to have been a man because I found adventure more exciting than romance. And then, IDK, finally enough evidence culminated right in front of my face for me to have an under-the-radar "epiphany" of sorts where I came to comfortably accept that gender is functionally irrelevant to the interests, attitudes and opinions of a human being, except for the things society makes that human being internalize. Academically I knew this already? But it has only been shockingly recently that I've realized that I spent my childhood internalizing SO MUCH dismissiveness towards women. Not really misogyny, not really bullying, not really active denigration... just absence. Women were so incredibly underrepresented, unrepresented or misrepresented in so much of the fiction I consumed as a child. And I mean fantastic, classic fiction that I wouldn't trade for anything! I mean, Lord of the Rings. Who can you kid? No one. It's a sausage fest. The Hobbit is even more so, and that's the one I really grew up on. I absolutely related to Bilbo Baggins. I'll never speak an ill word of him, or of Edmund Pevensie or Will Stanton or Christopher Chant or Arthur Penhaligon. But I never realized until lately that I internalized the absence of women so thoroughly that I often found it alarming and annoying when a female character showed up in certain stories, because they were liable to throw a (usually romantic, shallow, frivolous, or based in "mars/venus language barrier" miscommunication) wrench in the story and make it unenjoyable. This was, I think, a large part of why I avoided non-genre YA fiction. (I still have this problem with characters like Cersei Lannister, and I feel bad about it? but that doesn't stop me from hating her ever-living guts. But that's a subject for a different post.)
Just because a woman in fiction exercises her sexuality does not automatically make her a progressive figure who helps debunk the denial of female sexual agency held over from a repressive past. The male gaze is in full effect in the sort of images Hudson talks about in the link above, and I can't agree with her more completely that I feel skeeved out and in need of a shower just thinking about attempting to find something emotionally relateable in these brainwashed, bloated, contortionist female meat sacks. These are unreal female figures performing sexually for an intended audience of (immature) straight men.
Of course the assumption that they are shallow enough to be turned on by these images offends men as well - I know plenty who fall in the "offended" category - but men don't suffer socially because of these images the way women do. While inflato-boob Starfire flinging her wet hair with an apparently broken spine may reinforce an erroneous image of a male reader as a pimply 15-year-old only interested in comics as jackoff material, what it does to women is reinforce the confines of the space they are "allowed" to occupy fictionally. The writers are male, the publishers are male, the artists are male, the target demographic is male, and all of those men have a million avenues of alternate fictional representation they can pursue that acknowledge their bodies and values in a way that tells them that their bodies and values are awesome superhero material. A woman can pursue those avenues, too, and I used to not understand why that wasn't enough. I mean, I would watch a Batman movie and feel all the same Joker-punching, stuff-exploding, badass acrobatic dramatic action awesomeness as the guy sitting next to me. I would want to be Batman. Everyone wants to be Batman at some point! But, as obvious as it is to so many people, it just wasn't obvious to me why the question, "Why can't it be Batwoman?" was one that needed to be asked.
I used to imagine Batman as he is and think to myself, "What difference would it make? He doesn't need to have the same plumbing as me for me to relate to him, because he's an interesting and complex character. Why can't people stop trying to fix things that aren't broken?" Now I try to imagine Batwoman and I think, "What difference would it make? None. If you subtract the penis, add breasts and ovaries and change nothing else, it makes no difference. And that is the point."
There is an assumed premise that "he" is default and "she" is a specific subset of the default that must be defined independently. That's what it took me so long to question, so long to realize was hurting me. I had internalized this assumed premise. No one had ever told it to me; it just happened to be the only context within which all the fiction I consumed made sense. It isn't that Batman needs to be changed; he's just fine as he is. The only reason to ask the question, the only reason to try to see the alternate versions, is to make the effort to understand that there is no essential difference. "She"ness doesn't have to be defined as a specific subset of "he"ness. Batman doesn't have to explain, verbally or visually, that he is a man and how he relates to the world because of that. Hypothetical, perfect-world, impossible-cultural-vacuum Batwoman doesn't have to explain, verbally or visually, that she is a woman and how she relates to the world because of that.
This is a realization that is both incredibly exciting and super boring to come to, because I feel like about a billion other people have reached this conclusion already and while I'm basking in the glow of paradigm shift they're tapping their watches and pointing at the next big idea I'm too slow to reach.
So, back to the argument about art, specifically... In a world of true equality, where all fictional characters are well-rounded human beings and all social and cultural viewpoints are given a reasonable level of consideration and respect in all forms of media, I wouldn't object to a female comic book character being drawn clothed in two strings and a napkin. Because, in that impossible world, it wouldn't have any particular social resonance and it wouldn't affect the depth of the character on her own merits. But that idea of a world is laughable at best and, at worst, dangerous to spend too much time focusing on when there are still so many problems of the here and now to try to fix. Like the reduction of women to their reproductive organs, or the dismissal of female emotional complexity by means of "chivalrous" gender essentialism. I don't want to get so carried away by one epiphany event horizon that I neglect to consider the billions of people who haven't gotten there yet. So I suppose that this is me, finally truly grokking feminism and its dilemmas.
But as far as specifics, the Comics Alliance article made me start thinking about the series/titles that I like and still occasionally read. I'm not going to go too much into Marvel titles, because TBH I came into Marvel through the very specific avenue of the Steve Rogers/Tony Stark slash fan community - and I wouldn't change that for anything. I've put a tentative toe into the waters of other comics communities and what I found there made me beat a hasty retreat. What the people over at cap_ironman do is not just wear the slash goggles and drool over hot guys (though there is some of that, and I'm not above joining in); the Cap/Tony community is full of articulate, intelligent, respectful, ludicrously creative people who create a large output of high-quality fanworks and spend a lot of their time having discussions of issues, storylines, art and characters. During Women's History Month last year they did long character manifesto posts for all of Steve and Tony's ex-girlfriends and other major women in the Cap, Iron Man and Avengers titles. I love that comm and even though a lot of its focus is on two men, it rarely if ever falls into the common trap of "hating the competition." They're fully aware that their 'ship is non-canon wish-fulfillment, so they do generally applaud a well-written female character stepping in to provide relationship and/or professional/team drama in the canon.
So I want to take a look at The Authority, slow-clap Warren Ellis a little bit and and note some reasons why I'm excited about the new Stormwatch by Paul Cornell.
Seriously, if you haven't done it yet, go read that Comics Alliance post. Hudson talks about the introduction of Selina Kyle in her own title over the span of two pages. On the first page, we see three stacked horizontal panels featuring almost the exact same drawing of Selina's generous boobs repeated three times, costume half-on, red, strapless, physics-defying bra on display. Her head isn't even cut off in a way that makes it seem like the artist was going for a mysterious reveal; her chin is visible in each panel, making it look exactly like an unfunny sitcom-jokey sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink scene: "the guy's aiming the camera the wrong way, who can blame him, look at that rack *laugh track*". Then she doesn't bother to finish putting her costume on, so her one red-bra'd boob is hanging out through a whole lot of acrobatics that I would damn well want some support for. And we get a loving close-up of her vinyl-clad ass with her legs spread out wide before we see her face.
Now, I can understand the cinematic and dramatic value of letting the audience know a little bit about a character before they fully show up. Another character briefly monologues internally about them, or we see their actions briefly before we see their faces or hear their dialogue - that's fine. I actually love that, even though it verges on cliche at times. The face-reveal can be a powerful tool for giving a character an impactful first impression. Humans attach a lot of value to a face; we anthropomorphize parts of the face more often than any other part of the body. We don't have sorrowful elbows, but we see cruelty in lips, happiness in cheeks, worry in foreheads and souls in eyes. Western superhero comic art aspires to that sort of nuance in facial expression but doesn't always get there, so a lot of the time some sort of introduction to the personality of the character before we see their face and start forming impressions is really helpful.
So let's look at a few instances of character introduction from Stormwatch and The Authority!
Bendix talks a little bit about Jenny, how powerful she is and how idealistic she is - this is lent extra complexity because Bendix ends up being a major villian, of the well-intentioned extremist variety. We see the sort of place Jenny likes, the sort of life she lives, and we get a whole lot of an idea about who she is before we lay eyes on this slight, blonde, flat-chested woman who seems overwhelmed in her own panels by other bar patrons - until she gets serious, that is. Also, she gets some of the best introductory dialogue ever. And it's true, she never wears a spandex body condom. Ellis really likes to write women wearing men's wear.
Jenny Sparks
Christine Trelane
Christine Trelane, aka Synergy, has the power to "unlock" and max out other people's powers. Christine occasionally fights in the field but mostly she wears comfortable clothes and administrates. Her recent redesign apparently thinks that administrators wear boobtacular body armor:
But, you know, at least it is body armor that seems capable of protecting the body. And the apocalypse had happened at that point, so it would be dangerous to go around in slacks and silk vests all the time. I'm pretty OK with this.
Ellis didn't create the character of Shen Li-Min, aka Swift, but he made her way more interesting. She's the woman on the left (see also some more of Jenny's men's wear stylings):
Swift was so gangsta back in the day. She is one of the most tragically wasted characters in comics. Writers who refuse to think creatively about superpower applications have been shunting her to the background ever since she first appeared. :/
Swift has always worn skintight outfits, but with her I rarely minded because it made some practical sense. She has to have backless outfits for her wings to emerge from, and since she relies so much on speed, she needs to be aerodynamic. That means no bulky or flappy bits on her costume. (That trench coat only lasted a couple of issues, I think.) But she always had decent boob support and she always wore leggings, until the most recent batch of redesigns:
Um? Ok. Well. There are some almost Liefeld-bad feet in that picture. And she looks sort of derpy. And her shorts(?) look a little diaper-ish. And her foot and wrist thingies are utterly pointless.
I'm sorry, what? This is just... I can't even. Thanks for that, Barrionuevo. Usually his art is ok, but whaaaaaat.
Anyway. End of costume design tangent; back to Jenny's intro.
Jenny Sparks is Warren Ellis' pet character in a lot of ways, imbued with his ideal of "cool" - near-nihilistic cynicism mashed up with intense idealism. Spider Jerusalem embodied this a little more caustically, but Jenny is interestingly sentimental for an Ellis character. All of his Stormwatch/Authority members are, actually. Ellis comes across as not being nearly as misanthropic as he wants to be or thinks he is, and that is one of the reasons his Authority characters stand out to me (and also the main thing about them that other writers consistently flub, because it's subtle and unusual). Jenny, Jack, Apollo, Midnighter, Angie - they all share a certain joyousness about their powers, a certain wonder at the things they have the privilege of being able to do and see. Ellis rarely writes any of them as particularly brooding, except sometimes Jenny. Other writers often pick up on things like "Midnighter is an expy of Batman" and immediately leap to the conclusion that he has to act exactly like Batman, with all the associated brooding and social dysfunctionality. Ellis' Midnighter is happy, which throws people for a loop.
Psycho ax-murderer happy, sometimes, but he is happy.
Anyway, the point is, all of these things are things we can pick up from just a few panels introducing Jenny as a character. I can't even begin to compare this with this month's Catwoman intro. They aren't even on the same plane of storytelling reality. How about we compare it to the intro of Midnighter in this month's relaunched Stormwatch? That way we won't be drawing a comparison across several decades, or even across several degrees of ideological complexity. The Midnighter intro in Stormwatch #1 and the Selina Kyle intro in Catwoman #1 are both trying to introduce a character who wears a lot of skintight black leather as being badass, competent, quick and athletic. Purely physical traits. They're not really trying to tell us something deep and meaningful about these characters as people yet. So let's look:
Well... it's also two pages, and it also mostly consists of stacked horizontal panels. But where for Selina's entire first page, each panel focuses on her boobs, in Mids' first page, each panel focuses on his hands - coming from out of nowhere to punk everybody before they've even seen him. So... think about the possibility of Selina's page with the focus in each panel being on her hands. That could be really cool, actually. One panel already shows her pulling on a glove - maybe if the rest of her were already dressed, that would seem competent and suave and still very sexy, rather than faux-fumbling, porn-posing, "oh I'm so silly, clumsy me can't get dressed, let me just pull on this glove for the very obvious 'camera'".
So. I know which title I'll be reading. I'm perfectly happy to read stories about Midnighter and Apollo, and I don't think there's any need for them to change. But the fact that overwhelming boob-focus makes this instance of Catwoman an ineffective, uninteresting character still makes me angry, frustrated and sad.
The Authority (the original run, anyway) is a case of something that was successful at being an over-the-top commentary on the state of superhero storytelling at the time it was published, but that has since become almost quaint in the way it uses ultra-violence to comment on how supers might interact with a world as politically fucked-up as ours in a realistic way. The "ultra" of the violence in The Authority has long since been surpassed by titles far more mainstream than Authority was at its prime. It is still an effective commentary - but often on topics other than the meaningless violence and decompressed artistic style it made its name with. (For an update on that sort of commentary, see Ellis's "Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.")
One of my absolute favorite understated moments of visual commentary (and yes, it's completely intentional) is this:
In that very early run, the women had the inexplicably indestructible costumes, while the men, especially Apollo, tended to get increasingly exposed by conveniently-placed rips. It's like Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest, except it's not only hilariously self-aware, it's also gender-flipped. Apollo is basically the walking cheesecake of The Authority. His powers amount to a standard Flying Brick, so he doesn't really contribute to strategy or planning. He just hits things, blows things up, sets things on fire and gets naked. It's pretty fantastic.
A few other notes: when Ellis was writing Stormwatch, he split it up into specialized teams (e.g. Stormwatch Black, which did covert ops, comprised Jenny Sparks, Swift and Jack Hawksmoor). I dearly love that Stormwatch Red, the team of heavy-hitters and tanks who were the last resort for just-short-of-cosmic-sized dustups, was made up of three women: Fahrenheit (self-explanatory, I think), Flint (a female Luke Cage with some extra Flying Brick powers), and Rose Tattoo (weapons/wetworks expert). Flint and Fahrenheit usually had decent (and remarkably indestructible) costumes, and while Rose Tattoo showed a lot of skin, all of that skin was tattooed, so she was really visually interesting and you tended to forget how naked she was.
Another Ellis nod to the ridiulousness of superhero costumes, as well as the double standard of men's and women's costumes, delivered via the stoic Russian energy-absorber Winter:
So I've talked about Jenny Sparks and Swift already - what about the other two primary women of The Authority? (I'm not counting the brief and possibly non-canon time Rose Tattoo was on the team, sorry.) Jenny Quantum (the reincarnation of Jenny Sparks) appeared as a baby in the Millar/Quitely run that followed the Ellis/Hitch original. TBH I despise the Millar/Quitely run; the cons overwhelm the pros, although there are a couple of pros buried at the bottom under the piles of offensive shit. One of said pros is that at least infant!Jenny Q is introduced and survives until some different writers can do more interesting things with her. Namely, Ed Brubaker - who takes her from five years old and a member of a happy nuclear family unit with Apollo and Midnighter (married, with Jenny their legally adopted daughter), up through eight years old and living with single-dad Apollo after some plot phlebotinum makes Midnighter leave home. Jenny Q then gets one of the most interesting sleight-of-hand phases of character development of any comic character I've ever seen.
Jenny Q is "the spirit of the twenty-first century"; as a century baby, she both shapes and is shaped by the zeitgeist of her time. Jenny is a legacy character, so previous Jennys have included Jenny Steam, Jenny Crusade, Jenny Stone, Jenny Fire, etc. Their powers, as such, always reflect some affinity with whatever is the driving force of change and progress during their time period. Quantum, as you might guess, is more powerful than all the previous Jennys - because the driving forces of technological change and scientific discovery are so much more advanced now than they ever were. As Jenny Q notes, "kids growing up too fast" is also part of her zeitgeist. So she does: in a classic moment of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, she half-wishes and half-accidentally forces herself to age from 8 to 14. She proceeds to start smoking and swearing, horrifies her dads, and eventually steps in as the team leader. She also follows in Jenny Sparks' tradition of masculine clothing - t-shirts, jeans (often baggy), sometimes suspenders, and a ubiquitous leather jacket.
And how can you not love that the spirit of the twenty-first century is Chinese and has two dads?
I'm going to wrap this post up soon - I just wanted to mention one other character. Yeah. You know who. Angela Spica - The Engineer.
You know what? She's naked.
Angie is what I mean when I say that if a character is well-written and well-rounded, given development and personality and interesting plotlines and a significant functional role in the story, I don't care if they walk around in two strings and a napkin. Angie is a Tony Stark-ish self-made superhero, except without a lot of the psychological issues. She grew up reading the in-universe equivalent of superhero comics, worked in nanotech research for most of her life, and when she finally made an amazing breakthrough in her research she just said, "Fuck it, I want to be a superhero." So she replaced her blood with nine pints of liquid machinery and the rest was history. Angie is pretty much universally boss. She is competent, efficient, smart, funny, playful, nice, the real kind of sexually liberated, and comfortable with walking around naked in a non-sexualized way. Basically, I can say about Angie what I can rarely say about female superheroes: I want to be her when I grow up.
Her "costume" is a thin second skin of nanites. Honestly, I would rather have her powers and walk around naked than have any of the other ludicrously ineffective sets of "armor" that pass for female hero costumes. Considering that Angie can make her nanite skin be or do anything, she is functionally like a Green Lantern in terms of power set. Given a creative enough writer, she can do some truly ridiculous and badass shit. But even without getting too creative, I want a "costume" that can go instantly from the above picture to this in a fight:
I don't care that Hitch is notorious for tracing from porn. Probably a lot of Angie's poses are traced from porn. But if they are then at least they're traced from an actual woman's body - and Angie's breasts obey gravity to a degree far greater than a lot of other female heroes. Also I love that her hair is electrical cable dreadlocks that can wire into anything. And all of this:
And, as far as trying to make a point about the right way to write a woman in comics, I'll just leave this post at that.
Warning: the following post contains links to TV Tropes. Click them at your own risk.
Anyway, this Comics Alliance post finally articulated to me a lot of my own thoughts about why I don't always find sexualized women in fiction to be synonymous with sexually liberated women IRL. I mean, that should be an obvious distinction, right? But only in this stage of my life am I really coming to realize just how contentious a relationship I have had with the portrayal of women in media. I used to defend the fact that I only related to male characters, and even went through a long, confused stretch of time when I thought I might not be entirely cisgender, when I thought maybe I was "supposed" to have been a man because I found adventure more exciting than romance. And then, IDK, finally enough evidence culminated right in front of my face for me to have an under-the-radar "epiphany" of sorts where I came to comfortably accept that gender is functionally irrelevant to the interests, attitudes and opinions of a human being, except for the things society makes that human being internalize. Academically I knew this already? But it has only been shockingly recently that I've realized that I spent my childhood internalizing SO MUCH dismissiveness towards women. Not really misogyny, not really bullying, not really active denigration... just absence. Women were so incredibly underrepresented, unrepresented or misrepresented in so much of the fiction I consumed as a child. And I mean fantastic, classic fiction that I wouldn't trade for anything! I mean, Lord of the Rings. Who can you kid? No one. It's a sausage fest. The Hobbit is even more so, and that's the one I really grew up on. I absolutely related to Bilbo Baggins. I'll never speak an ill word of him, or of Edmund Pevensie or Will Stanton or Christopher Chant or Arthur Penhaligon. But I never realized until lately that I internalized the absence of women so thoroughly that I often found it alarming and annoying when a female character showed up in certain stories, because they were liable to throw a (usually romantic, shallow, frivolous, or based in "mars/venus language barrier" miscommunication) wrench in the story and make it unenjoyable. This was, I think, a large part of why I avoided non-genre YA fiction. (I still have this problem with characters like Cersei Lannister, and I feel bad about it? but that doesn't stop me from hating her ever-living guts. But that's a subject for a different post.)
Just because a woman in fiction exercises her sexuality does not automatically make her a progressive figure who helps debunk the denial of female sexual agency held over from a repressive past. The male gaze is in full effect in the sort of images Hudson talks about in the link above, and I can't agree with her more completely that I feel skeeved out and in need of a shower just thinking about attempting to find something emotionally relateable in these brainwashed, bloated, contortionist female meat sacks. These are unreal female figures performing sexually for an intended audience of (immature) straight men.
Of course the assumption that they are shallow enough to be turned on by these images offends men as well - I know plenty who fall in the "offended" category - but men don't suffer socially because of these images the way women do. While inflato-boob Starfire flinging her wet hair with an apparently broken spine may reinforce an erroneous image of a male reader as a pimply 15-year-old only interested in comics as jackoff material, what it does to women is reinforce the confines of the space they are "allowed" to occupy fictionally. The writers are male, the publishers are male, the artists are male, the target demographic is male, and all of those men have a million avenues of alternate fictional representation they can pursue that acknowledge their bodies and values in a way that tells them that their bodies and values are awesome superhero material. A woman can pursue those avenues, too, and I used to not understand why that wasn't enough. I mean, I would watch a Batman movie and feel all the same Joker-punching, stuff-exploding, badass acrobatic dramatic action awesomeness as the guy sitting next to me. I would want to be Batman. Everyone wants to be Batman at some point! But, as obvious as it is to so many people, it just wasn't obvious to me why the question, "Why can't it be Batwoman?" was one that needed to be asked.
I used to imagine Batman as he is and think to myself, "What difference would it make? He doesn't need to have the same plumbing as me for me to relate to him, because he's an interesting and complex character. Why can't people stop trying to fix things that aren't broken?" Now I try to imagine Batwoman and I think, "What difference would it make? None. If you subtract the penis, add breasts and ovaries and change nothing else, it makes no difference. And that is the point."
There is an assumed premise that "he" is default and "she" is a specific subset of the default that must be defined independently. That's what it took me so long to question, so long to realize was hurting me. I had internalized this assumed premise. No one had ever told it to me; it just happened to be the only context within which all the fiction I consumed made sense. It isn't that Batman needs to be changed; he's just fine as he is. The only reason to ask the question, the only reason to try to see the alternate versions, is to make the effort to understand that there is no essential difference. "She"ness doesn't have to be defined as a specific subset of "he"ness. Batman doesn't have to explain, verbally or visually, that he is a man and how he relates to the world because of that. Hypothetical, perfect-world, impossible-cultural-vacuum Batwoman doesn't have to explain, verbally or visually, that she is a woman and how she relates to the world because of that.
This is a realization that is both incredibly exciting and super boring to come to, because I feel like about a billion other people have reached this conclusion already and while I'm basking in the glow of paradigm shift they're tapping their watches and pointing at the next big idea I'm too slow to reach.
So, back to the argument about art, specifically... In a world of true equality, where all fictional characters are well-rounded human beings and all social and cultural viewpoints are given a reasonable level of consideration and respect in all forms of media, I wouldn't object to a female comic book character being drawn clothed in two strings and a napkin. Because, in that impossible world, it wouldn't have any particular social resonance and it wouldn't affect the depth of the character on her own merits. But that idea of a world is laughable at best and, at worst, dangerous to spend too much time focusing on when there are still so many problems of the here and now to try to fix. Like the reduction of women to their reproductive organs, or the dismissal of female emotional complexity by means of "chivalrous" gender essentialism. I don't want to get so carried away by one epiphany event horizon that I neglect to consider the billions of people who haven't gotten there yet. So I suppose that this is me, finally truly grokking feminism and its dilemmas.
But as far as specifics, the Comics Alliance article made me start thinking about the series/titles that I like and still occasionally read. I'm not going to go too much into Marvel titles, because TBH I came into Marvel through the very specific avenue of the Steve Rogers/Tony Stark slash fan community - and I wouldn't change that for anything. I've put a tentative toe into the waters of other comics communities and what I found there made me beat a hasty retreat. What the people over at cap_ironman do is not just wear the slash goggles and drool over hot guys (though there is some of that, and I'm not above joining in); the Cap/Tony community is full of articulate, intelligent, respectful, ludicrously creative people who create a large output of high-quality fanworks and spend a lot of their time having discussions of issues, storylines, art and characters. During Women's History Month last year they did long character manifesto posts for all of Steve and Tony's ex-girlfriends and other major women in the Cap, Iron Man and Avengers titles. I love that comm and even though a lot of its focus is on two men, it rarely if ever falls into the common trap of "hating the competition." They're fully aware that their 'ship is non-canon wish-fulfillment, so they do generally applaud a well-written female character stepping in to provide relationship and/or professional/team drama in the canon.
So I want to take a look at The Authority, slow-clap Warren Ellis a little bit and and note some reasons why I'm excited about the new Stormwatch by Paul Cornell.
Seriously, if you haven't done it yet, go read that Comics Alliance post. Hudson talks about the introduction of Selina Kyle in her own title over the span of two pages. On the first page, we see three stacked horizontal panels featuring almost the exact same drawing of Selina's generous boobs repeated three times, costume half-on, red, strapless, physics-defying bra on display. Her head isn't even cut off in a way that makes it seem like the artist was going for a mysterious reveal; her chin is visible in each panel, making it look exactly like an unfunny sitcom-jokey sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink scene: "the guy's aiming the camera the wrong way, who can blame him, look at that rack *laugh track*". Then she doesn't bother to finish putting her costume on, so her one red-bra'd boob is hanging out through a whole lot of acrobatics that I would damn well want some support for. And we get a loving close-up of her vinyl-clad ass with her legs spread out wide before we see her face.
Now, I can understand the cinematic and dramatic value of letting the audience know a little bit about a character before they fully show up. Another character briefly monologues internally about them, or we see their actions briefly before we see their faces or hear their dialogue - that's fine. I actually love that, even though it verges on cliche at times. The face-reveal can be a powerful tool for giving a character an impactful first impression. Humans attach a lot of value to a face; we anthropomorphize parts of the face more often than any other part of the body. We don't have sorrowful elbows, but we see cruelty in lips, happiness in cheeks, worry in foreheads and souls in eyes. Western superhero comic art aspires to that sort of nuance in facial expression but doesn't always get there, so a lot of the time some sort of introduction to the personality of the character before we see their face and start forming impressions is really helpful.
So let's look at a few instances of character introduction from Stormwatch and The Authority!
Bendix talks a little bit about Jenny, how powerful she is and how idealistic she is - this is lent extra complexity because Bendix ends up being a major villian, of the well-intentioned extremist variety. We see the sort of place Jenny likes, the sort of life she lives, and we get a whole lot of an idea about who she is before we lay eyes on this slight, blonde, flat-chested woman who seems overwhelmed in her own panels by other bar patrons - until she gets serious, that is. Also, she gets some of the best introductory dialogue ever. And it's true, she never wears a spandex body condom. Ellis really likes to write women wearing men's wear.
Jenny Sparks
Christine Trelane
Christine Trelane, aka Synergy, has the power to "unlock" and max out other people's powers. Christine occasionally fights in the field but mostly she wears comfortable clothes and administrates. Her recent redesign apparently thinks that administrators wear boobtacular body armor:
But, you know, at least it is body armor that seems capable of protecting the body. And the apocalypse had happened at that point, so it would be dangerous to go around in slacks and silk vests all the time. I'm pretty OK with this.
Ellis didn't create the character of Shen Li-Min, aka Swift, but he made her way more interesting. She's the woman on the left (see also some more of Jenny's men's wear stylings):
Swift was so gangsta back in the day. She is one of the most tragically wasted characters in comics. Writers who refuse to think creatively about superpower applications have been shunting her to the background ever since she first appeared. :/
Swift has always worn skintight outfits, but with her I rarely minded because it made some practical sense. She has to have backless outfits for her wings to emerge from, and since she relies so much on speed, she needs to be aerodynamic. That means no bulky or flappy bits on her costume. (That trench coat only lasted a couple of issues, I think.) But she always had decent boob support and she always wore leggings, until the most recent batch of redesigns:
Um? Ok. Well. There are some almost Liefeld-bad feet in that picture. And she looks sort of derpy. And her shorts(?) look a little diaper-ish. And her foot and wrist thingies are utterly pointless.
I'm sorry, what? This is just... I can't even. Thanks for that, Barrionuevo. Usually his art is ok, but whaaaaaat.
Anyway. End of costume design tangent; back to Jenny's intro.
Jenny Sparks is Warren Ellis' pet character in a lot of ways, imbued with his ideal of "cool" - near-nihilistic cynicism mashed up with intense idealism. Spider Jerusalem embodied this a little more caustically, but Jenny is interestingly sentimental for an Ellis character. All of his Stormwatch/Authority members are, actually. Ellis comes across as not being nearly as misanthropic as he wants to be or thinks he is, and that is one of the reasons his Authority characters stand out to me (and also the main thing about them that other writers consistently flub, because it's subtle and unusual). Jenny, Jack, Apollo, Midnighter, Angie - they all share a certain joyousness about their powers, a certain wonder at the things they have the privilege of being able to do and see. Ellis rarely writes any of them as particularly brooding, except sometimes Jenny. Other writers often pick up on things like "Midnighter is an expy of Batman" and immediately leap to the conclusion that he has to act exactly like Batman, with all the associated brooding and social dysfunctionality. Ellis' Midnighter is happy, which throws people for a loop.
Psycho ax-murderer happy, sometimes, but he is happy.
Anyway, the point is, all of these things are things we can pick up from just a few panels introducing Jenny as a character. I can't even begin to compare this with this month's Catwoman intro. They aren't even on the same plane of storytelling reality. How about we compare it to the intro of Midnighter in this month's relaunched Stormwatch? That way we won't be drawing a comparison across several decades, or even across several degrees of ideological complexity. The Midnighter intro in Stormwatch #1 and the Selina Kyle intro in Catwoman #1 are both trying to introduce a character who wears a lot of skintight black leather as being badass, competent, quick and athletic. Purely physical traits. They're not really trying to tell us something deep and meaningful about these characters as people yet. So let's look:
Well... it's also two pages, and it also mostly consists of stacked horizontal panels. But where for Selina's entire first page, each panel focuses on her boobs, in Mids' first page, each panel focuses on his hands - coming from out of nowhere to punk everybody before they've even seen him. So... think about the possibility of Selina's page with the focus in each panel being on her hands. That could be really cool, actually. One panel already shows her pulling on a glove - maybe if the rest of her were already dressed, that would seem competent and suave and still very sexy, rather than faux-fumbling, porn-posing, "oh I'm so silly, clumsy me can't get dressed, let me just pull on this glove for the very obvious 'camera'".
So. I know which title I'll be reading. I'm perfectly happy to read stories about Midnighter and Apollo, and I don't think there's any need for them to change. But the fact that overwhelming boob-focus makes this instance of Catwoman an ineffective, uninteresting character still makes me angry, frustrated and sad.
The Authority (the original run, anyway) is a case of something that was successful at being an over-the-top commentary on the state of superhero storytelling at the time it was published, but that has since become almost quaint in the way it uses ultra-violence to comment on how supers might interact with a world as politically fucked-up as ours in a realistic way. The "ultra" of the violence in The Authority has long since been surpassed by titles far more mainstream than Authority was at its prime. It is still an effective commentary - but often on topics other than the meaningless violence and decompressed artistic style it made its name with. (For an update on that sort of commentary, see Ellis's "Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.")
One of my absolute favorite understated moments of visual commentary (and yes, it's completely intentional) is this:
In that very early run, the women had the inexplicably indestructible costumes, while the men, especially Apollo, tended to get increasingly exposed by conveniently-placed rips. It's like Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest, except it's not only hilariously self-aware, it's also gender-flipped. Apollo is basically the walking cheesecake of The Authority. His powers amount to a standard Flying Brick, so he doesn't really contribute to strategy or planning. He just hits things, blows things up, sets things on fire and gets naked. It's pretty fantastic.
A few other notes: when Ellis was writing Stormwatch, he split it up into specialized teams (e.g. Stormwatch Black, which did covert ops, comprised Jenny Sparks, Swift and Jack Hawksmoor). I dearly love that Stormwatch Red, the team of heavy-hitters and tanks who were the last resort for just-short-of-cosmic-sized dustups, was made up of three women: Fahrenheit (self-explanatory, I think), Flint (a female Luke Cage with some extra Flying Brick powers), and Rose Tattoo (weapons/wetworks expert). Flint and Fahrenheit usually had decent (and remarkably indestructible) costumes, and while Rose Tattoo showed a lot of skin, all of that skin was tattooed, so she was really visually interesting and you tended to forget how naked she was.
Another Ellis nod to the ridiulousness of superhero costumes, as well as the double standard of men's and women's costumes, delivered via the stoic Russian energy-absorber Winter:
So I've talked about Jenny Sparks and Swift already - what about the other two primary women of The Authority? (I'm not counting the brief and possibly non-canon time Rose Tattoo was on the team, sorry.) Jenny Quantum (the reincarnation of Jenny Sparks) appeared as a baby in the Millar/Quitely run that followed the Ellis/Hitch original. TBH I despise the Millar/Quitely run; the cons overwhelm the pros, although there are a couple of pros buried at the bottom under the piles of offensive shit. One of said pros is that at least infant!Jenny Q is introduced and survives until some different writers can do more interesting things with her. Namely, Ed Brubaker - who takes her from five years old and a member of a happy nuclear family unit with Apollo and Midnighter (married, with Jenny their legally adopted daughter), up through eight years old and living with single-dad Apollo after some plot phlebotinum makes Midnighter leave home. Jenny Q then gets one of the most interesting sleight-of-hand phases of character development of any comic character I've ever seen.
Jenny Q is "the spirit of the twenty-first century"; as a century baby, she both shapes and is shaped by the zeitgeist of her time. Jenny is a legacy character, so previous Jennys have included Jenny Steam, Jenny Crusade, Jenny Stone, Jenny Fire, etc. Their powers, as such, always reflect some affinity with whatever is the driving force of change and progress during their time period. Quantum, as you might guess, is more powerful than all the previous Jennys - because the driving forces of technological change and scientific discovery are so much more advanced now than they ever were. As Jenny Q notes, "kids growing up too fast" is also part of her zeitgeist. So she does: in a classic moment of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, she half-wishes and half-accidentally forces herself to age from 8 to 14. She proceeds to start smoking and swearing, horrifies her dads, and eventually steps in as the team leader. She also follows in Jenny Sparks' tradition of masculine clothing - t-shirts, jeans (often baggy), sometimes suspenders, and a ubiquitous leather jacket.
And how can you not love that the spirit of the twenty-first century is Chinese and has two dads?
I'm going to wrap this post up soon - I just wanted to mention one other character. Yeah. You know who. Angela Spica - The Engineer.
You know what? She's naked.
Angie is what I mean when I say that if a character is well-written and well-rounded, given development and personality and interesting plotlines and a significant functional role in the story, I don't care if they walk around in two strings and a napkin. Angie is a Tony Stark-ish self-made superhero, except without a lot of the psychological issues. She grew up reading the in-universe equivalent of superhero comics, worked in nanotech research for most of her life, and when she finally made an amazing breakthrough in her research she just said, "Fuck it, I want to be a superhero." So she replaced her blood with nine pints of liquid machinery and the rest was history. Angie is pretty much universally boss. She is competent, efficient, smart, funny, playful, nice, the real kind of sexually liberated, and comfortable with walking around naked in a non-sexualized way. Basically, I can say about Angie what I can rarely say about female superheroes: I want to be her when I grow up.
Her "costume" is a thin second skin of nanites. Honestly, I would rather have her powers and walk around naked than have any of the other ludicrously ineffective sets of "armor" that pass for female hero costumes. Considering that Angie can make her nanite skin be or do anything, she is functionally like a Green Lantern in terms of power set. Given a creative enough writer, she can do some truly ridiculous and badass shit. But even without getting too creative, I want a "costume" that can go instantly from the above picture to this in a fight:
I don't care that Hitch is notorious for tracing from porn. Probably a lot of Angie's poses are traced from porn. But if they are then at least they're traced from an actual woman's body - and Angie's breasts obey gravity to a degree far greater than a lot of other female heroes. Also I love that her hair is electrical cable dreadlocks that can wire into anything. And all of this:
And, as far as trying to make a point about the right way to write a woman in comics, I'll just leave this post at that.