RO-mance

In the latest issue of The Last Generation, it's revealed that in an Alternate Universe where the Federation has been conquered by the Klingons, Ro Laren and Tasha Yar are lovers. These panels are pretty much all we get... but it's fun to imagine the possibilities which I guess is the whole point of the Star Trek Myriad Universe line.

Star Trek is so bogged down with continuity anyway you need an alternate Universe just to tell interesting story anymore it seems.

Also in this issue, Wesley goes nuts and gives himself a mohawk...



-Swinebread

There's Something About She-hulk

I've been thinking about Valerie D'Orazio's post about supporting women superhero comics and the related fallout to Josh's Tyler's anti-Female Superhero rant. In regards to Josh's post (and film in particular) all I'll really say is that Female superhero movies have generally sucked. They have been poorly written, poorly designed, and poorly produced. So I don't think laying the whole thing at the door of the Female superhero trope is really fair. When a Male superhero movie bombs we don't say the whole concept of the male superhero is dead, we just say "they" didn't get the character and made a bad movie. I submit that Hollywood in general doesn't know how to make a good female superhero film and certainly doesn't know how to attract a female crowd.

When it comes to comics I think there is somthing to the fanboys not buying into and simply not buying female superhero comics. But I'm not all fanboys... I'm just me and I can only speak to my personal habits.

As women heroes concern me, it would seem, superficially, that I'm not one that really supports the "girl characters" all that much other than drooling over the occasional stacked drawing but if I look closer a few things do pop out namely She-Hulk... and I guess, Red Sonja.

To be honest I wasn't totally into She-Hulk from the beginning. I found her interesting when I first encountered her in the Avengers but it wasn't until John Byrne got ahold of her that I became a fan of Jennifer Walters. I can't say I was a consistent fan but I always maintained a fondness for Shulkie since her FF days. As for Red Sonja I'll cop to some good old male horndogness, but I also really like the idea of a female warrior in the vain of Conan. In fact, the idea of Red Sonja has a lot of power for me because I'm still following the Dynamite Entertainment title despite the beef I've had with a lot of the plotting.

But is that really it? Is that all the stock I put in female characters? Well maybe when it comes to DC I think so. I've never been very compelled to pick up any of the gal books by the Distinguished Competition. A lot of this reflects my disinterest the DC Universe. The Marvel characters just always seemed richer, deeper and absolutely a lot cooler (not in the last several years though). Sadly marvel had less books featureing gal heroes in the 80s and so there wasn't much women stuff except for team books... and I sure did loves me some female heroes in my X-men (Storm, Shadowcat, etc). There's a few random mini-series in there too like firestar...

Outside of superheroes I've picked up Love and Rockets, and Strangers in Paradise...


...Uh, Strangers in Paradise? OK kiddies, this post has officially gone off the rails. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about here. So I'll just wrap up by saying when it comes down to it, I've thrown my lot in with She-Hulk for better or worse. She just has that certain something that other characters don't seem to have...


Green Skin?



-Swinebread

DC’s Super Feminine Mystique

My post Men are From Marvel and Women Are From DC, generated some interesting comments and fun discussion, imagine that. I came to one big conclusion about the femaleness of DC and the Maleness of Marvel… it all goes back to Wonder Women… …Duh. Think about it. Having a major female superhero thrive in and more importantly, survive the golden age of comics speaks volumes. Marvel/Timely, in truth, never had interesting women characters to begin with but the break between their 1940s supers and the 1960s Marvel Age cements my point.

The fact that Wonder Woman had her own successful title for decades gives the DC universe a possible womanish vibe even if her stories didn’t always depict females in the best light. The Amazon is a headliner. This fact combined with numerous other characters like Catwoman, Power Girl, Super-Girl, and Black Canary make a for a solid foundation that echoes down the years through the DC Universe. It seems obvious when you think about it but then I’m a man bred on Marvel Comics… 80’s Marvel Comics.

D0nnaT0ry had a good point in that a person’s universe of choice comes down to their gateway comic. The appeal of Wonder Woman and other DC heroines is obvious, so this must be the reason why girls have flocked to DC Comics. They have the female supers, so they have the female readers. Now this makes sense and could end the gender question right there but… the gateway comic doesn’t ring true for me personally as a man. If it did, I’d have been a DC Comics fan for most of my life. The first comic book I ever read was an issue of Green Lantern/Green Arrow, bought by my sister no less, and while I generally liked the characters it didn’t really fire my imagination. I also read some Justice League of America too and again it didn’t do much for me and these were male character dominated titles. Consequently, I didn’t really read comics extensively until years later. One day, out of boredom, I convinced my mother to buy me three, bagged together; marvel comics… and my addiction began. I’ve often wondered what would’ve happened if I had encountered an issue of Amazing Spiderman or The Avengers instead of Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Justice League. So I tend to think there is something a little more feminine to the DC Universe…

Now a thought experiment to test if DC is more female-like than Marvel would be to pick a masculine heavy genre that women generally don’t enjoy, like War Comics. If you do a little compare and contrast, I believe women would come down on the side of Sgt Rock rather than Nick Fury. I’m not discounting the fact that Rock was better written and drawn than Fury, which would make it more appealing to most folks including me, it's just that I have a feeling that women would be better entertained by DC's WWII comic over Marvel's version. Besides, which title had Mademoiselle Marie?

Wonder Woman gets to the heart of the matter to me. Having her front and center made DC unconsciously more diffused with a female ethos. But, and here is where we get to the Feminine Mystique aspect, DC super-heroines are saddled with pre-women’s lib baggage. Wonder Woman and friends were still struggling against the sexist themes of the golden age long after the successes of the sexual revolution at least that’s how I perceive it. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t attracted to DC Comics as much. Not because their comics were more feminine but because they were more 1950s feminine. Case in point, She-Hulk. I’ve always liked Shulkie and as I’ve said before, she’s a modern woman. I like female superheroes a lot, I think I just prefer ‘em post second-wave feminism. This is not say that Marvel was doing a great job with their female characters, far from it as the Wasp’s annoying prattle in the 1960s Avengers attests, but rather that Marvel simply had a more male centered universe even though, paradoxically, it was a more modern universe.

By the 1990s a lot of the gender issues I’m proposing about DC and Marvel had changed. Through retcons, modern storytelling, and the X-men Splitting into a plethora of titles with strong female characterizations the view has been blurred. Many younger readers have more choice to jump back and forth between the big 2 without much regard to gender or gender legacy. In other words, they’ve grown up with comics that are less defined by such issues. Again, I’m not necessarily saying the big 2 are doing a good job, I’m just saying they seem to have more freedom when it comes to expressing a masculine or a progressive feminine ethos rather than sticking to what was par for the course in the past. Whether they use this freedom, responsibly or creatively is a different issue.

What are your thoughts?

I ended the “Men are From Marvel” post with a Hillary and Obama political cartoon. So with that in mind I’ll end this post with them. Maybe the struggle in the Democratic Party is a fight between the Wonder Woman Generation (Hillary) and the She-Hulk Generation (Obama). It’s looking more and more like the She-Hulk generation is gonna win.

-Swinebread