Erratica Reduex

Case in point: Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Jean Grey (currently alive) out on the town, done by Nate Bellegarde:





Obviously the reason people want to kill mutants is their "mommy let me dress myself today" fashion sense.

The question arose recently on one of the lists I read, as what people think of the depiction of women in comics.  These two images say it all, I think:

Here's our boy, NAMOR!




And here's Marvel's brand new all girl  Superteam!  The...umm...err...vixens.  *sigh*




I think, all things being equal, that art depictions of men and women aren't equal in comics. The artwork tends to depict men as power objects, and women as sex objects. I also think things have actually gotten worse on the artwork front over the last couple of decades; when I showed my wife George Perez's Teen Titans, she was blown away by the effort of an artist that could actually hand draw women, albeit ones that had a strong element of cheesecake. Contrast that to the artists these days who are essentially tracing over porn images, or at the least are being heavily helped by image manipulation programs.  this is not merely a matter of simply bad and lazy artwork; it's artwork created specifically to portray women as sex objects, using quite frankly, rediculous poses.

Don't think the poses are ridiculous?  Heres an experiment: go stand before the mirror (or even better, your friends) and try on one of the poses of say, Photon, or Black Cat, orFirestar up there.  How do you feel?  Do you feel powerful, and confident?  Or does your back hurt too much from thrusting out your ass and hips?

There are exceptions of course- if a comic is stylized to a sufficient degree, the exaggerated forms can give a deliberately cartoonish impression (say, Powers or the Timmverse) . But most "realistic" artwork is being done by artists who not only never seem to have never seen a living woman naked, but have a vested interest in focusing attention on them as sex objects.


On the other hand, if the writing is unrealistic for women in mainstream comics, that's probably because the writing on all characters is generally, bad, compounded by the fact that writers can get shuffled around on a whim.  The violence melodrama and wish-fulfillment soap opera aspect of mainstream comics makes it hard to write realistic personalities, though at least the writers can look in the mirror and try to extrapolate from themselves when writing men.  Women and GLBT characters tend to be written as either pseudo-macho men (pointing out the absurdity of dialogue that somehow gets a pass when men say it), or really horrible pastiches of what the writer THINKS non-men are like.

There are some exceptions of course; I liked Runaways (at least the five volumes I've read of it), and Freakangels has interesting, well rounded depictins in both art and personality.  Finally, the web has some interesting examples of what can be done with female characters, such as:

Sidekick Girl: a comedy about a very competent and tough sidekick, assigned to babysit a popular and highly incompetent heroine, who pretty much has the stereotypical superheroine figure, and that's it.

Magellen: in a world with an abundance of supers, training facilities have been set up to make sure superbeings use their powers for good. The main character is an unpowered woman who is determined to pass the training, but there is a wide diversity of women- and an equally wide variety of body types. The dialogue is stiff, but it is an interesting comic.

Special School: an ensemble comedy about a school for supers, with a diversity of character types and sexual orientations.

Thunderstruck: while not called a supers comic, one sister can absorb and cast electricity, and the other is a super-athlete with a katana. If Elementals could be considered a supers comic, so can this one.

And well, those are just the superhero oriented webcomics.  If I wanted to draw on the wider range of webcomics for good portrayals of women, I'd have tons to choose from: Questionable Content, Gunnerkrigg Court, Alpha Shade, Angel Moxie, Dead Winter, Nahast: Land of Strife, Juathurr, Digger, The Zombie Hunters, A Girl and Her Fed, Under Lock and Key, Girls with Slingshots, Templar Arizona, Girl Genius, Undertow,  Fey Winds, Venus Envy, and the list goes on and on and on.

Honestly, if one wants to see good portrayals of female characters, the place to look isn't in mainstream comics, it's in webcomics.

So over on Comics Should be Good, the question has arisen over the decline of the internationally-themed group.  Using the Blackhawks as an example, the author notes it's a pretty simple concept; you have each character from a separate country.  In the case of the Blackhawls, it was all of the countries occupied by the Axis.  The author suggests that the stereotyping involved in those groups lead to their disappearence, except for a few international groups like The Authority.

As for me?

The inner cynic in my quietly points out that back in the day, it was probably easier to do an international team that was acceptable to american fan tastes: several white guys (and possibly one girl) from America or Europe, and one grotesque ethnic stereotype from a non-European country. Today one has to deal with the ever-increasing knowledge that a truly international team should really be mostly non-white; Even for hardcore comic fans it’s harder and harder to disguise the fact that America and Europe doesn’t comprise 90% of the world’s population. Of course the simple alternative would be to actually make a superteam that was largely non-white. Yeah, like THAT’S going to happen.

I mean, look at how far we’ve come: Original Blackhawk had several guys from America and Europe, and one Chinese guy. Contrast this to the international superteam Authority that was referenced above, which has…several white guys and gals from America and Europe…and one Chinese woman.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

That's right: in The Kids Aren't All Right, Vanity Fair reporter Christine Everhart conducted a series of interviews over the course of a year, revealing the man behind the mask. It's a quite insightful profile of the troubled mind of one of the most brilliant (or at least most famous)inventors of the age.

In reality, this is possibly one of the most brilliant fanfics I've ever seen, in that it actually DOES take the perspective of a Vanity Fair report; it fills in a lot of the psychology and history in the speculative manner that VF uses.

LiveJournal summary and commentary here

this is not-quite a game idea,thugh it could turn into one some time. It continues some of my thoughts about the superhero genre, and is based on this thread in rpg.net, which posited a realistic world with supers that go out of control, and in their fights, are completely out of control, doing the equivalent of a 9-11 weekly.

[QUOTE=Bailywolf;7650210]
Now, push the clock forward twenty years.

Society is broken, economies have collapsed. Major cities- what still stands- are the lairs of the superhumans and their protectorates. They rules like warlords, imposing what order they can. Or perhaps, they live off the survivors- raiding, flexing their muscles, ravaging.

Thoughts and ideas on something like this?[/QUOTE]


Something I've been toying with, based a little bit on the novel "Sunburst".

There is a secret, and there is a plan, and there is a bigger secret.

The secret, one only the most intelligent and aware supers are aware of, is this: the supers are dying out. There never were very many of them- a couple thousand at most- and now they number a mere tenth of what they were before the troubles. And fully half of the deaths have taken place in the last five years. Very simply, the supers are killing each other off faster than they can be replaced. Very few supers are realizing this even now- they are mostly too busy plotting against and killing each other to notice

The Plan: of course humanity is paralyzed before the might of the supers; governments are helpless, NGOs irrelevant, and the only real threat to a super is another super. The only place for a human is by a super's side, whispering to them "You ARE a god, you ARE a god."

Of course those minions are useful for more than comforting the paragons with the truth; they can be helpful by revealing when there's unrest in the realm, locating special resources, finding out when rivals are about to move, informing that the super's consort is having an affair with an ally, and that theres a doomsday weapon on an old tanker in the Pacific- shouldn't you seize it before that other group does? And after a while, when their master perishes in a fight in an oddly isolated area- often along with a couple more supers- the sycophants move along, to find another mortal god to whisper to.

The truth: the fact is, the real reason the supers are dying out, is that they really aren't all that smart- after all, when you have superpowers, intelligence falls by the wayside, replaced by a prolonged adolescence. More than that, there's something about super powers that creates a rigidity in thought- supers see things in binary black-and-white terms, they meet problems with force, and regard all of the world in terms of powers dominating other powers. Even the super-geniuses are something of idiot-savants, their vast intellects not extending to practical matters or social subtlety. Combined with the paranoia and poor impulse control that supers exhibit, these are weaknesses that can be exploited.

It took over a decade and many many deaths before humanity finally got things worked out so that supers could be manipulated into killing each other off in areas that aren't valuable. But now there is the fragile hope that within another decade, the superhumans will be extinct. The only question is, with civilization tottering on the brink as it is, will it be able to survive that long?