I’ve already posted a couple of entries to the female characters roundtable, so I should no doubt stop — but….
I’ve been thinking again about the Jeff Parker Marvel Adventures Avengers series — mostly because my son has me read them to him over and over and over. For those not in the know, this is an all-ages title, featuring an alternate Avengers meant for maximum marketability. Most of the major Marvel properties are on the team: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Storm, and Giant Girl.
I know what you’re saying…Giant who? Giant Girl is the only new character created for the team; in this reality, Janet Van Dyne, the wasp, decided that growing big would be a better way to fight crime than getting teeny. (Which does make a certain amount of sense.)
This is, as I said, an all-ages title; there’s no sex at all, precious little romance, and really little differentiation by gender at all. The women aren’t sexualized; their costumes are skin tight, but so are the guys’. Storm’s look seems somewhat toned down from the classic X-Men comics actually, and Giant-Girl’s costume is as nondescript as a skin-tight purple costume can be. Storm is co-leader along with Captain America. As far as gender dynamic go, you’d be hard pressed to find anything at all objectionable.
Except maybe that the women are kind of boring. Most of the other people on the team, after all, are there because they’re popular, and they’re popular because they’re entertaining. Wolverine is a cranky bad-ass; that’s entertaining. Spider-Man is a wise-cracking jokester (and surprisingly intelligent — he saves the day a very high-percentage of the time) — that’s entertaining. Hulk is super-strong and out of control — fun. Storm, on the other hand, is straight-laced and just sort of there. Giant-Girl doesn’t even really have as much personality as that (she seems touchy about her appearance on occasion, I guess.) If Wolverine’s the mean one, and Spider-Man’s the funny one, and Cap’s the moral-compass leader, Storm and Giant-Girl are the — well, they’re the women, right?
Admittedly, Iron Man is relatively unpersonable as well. And Parker does set up a kind of mother/child, straight-woman/goofball relationship between Storm and Hulk which is quite entertaining (especially when they switch brains, so you get to see Hulk try to call down lightning on his foes while Storm is running around atempting to uproot trees with her bare hands.) But it’s hard for me to imagine that any kid is going to read these things and come away saying, you know, I really want to be Giant Girl rather than Wolverine or Spider-Man or Hulk.
This is something of a perennial problem with super teams. The Fantastic Four: Johnny’s the hothead; Reed’s the super-genius; Ben’s the crusty strong man with a heart of gold — and Sue’s the woman. Or Grant Morrison’s Justice League — Flash and GL are the young, impetuous hotheads; Batman and Aquaman are the brooding bad boys; Superman’s the moral leader; J’onn is the thoughtful voice of reason — and Wonder Woman is the woman. It’s just hard to get beyond the tokenism.
(Not that it’s impossible. The X-Men have distinct female characters (including Storm, who has more of a personality in that title than in the Marvel Avengers.))
Anyway, my point is: Elektra. They should have put Elektra in the Marvel Avengers comic. You can’t go wrong with a ninja, right?
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Also in this series: Tom talks about Stan Lee’s women of romance and Bill talks about perfect girlfriend’s in manga. Miriam is fighting valiantly against a ravenous deadline, but hopefully she’ll be posting later today as well.
Update: And here’s Miriam’s Post a cage match between Jaime Hernandez and Terry Moore.
Looks like I’m playing the role of Grant Morrison fan/apologist again.
Apparently Morrison has a problem with writing Wonder Woman in general. Her role in Final Crisis was incredibly marginalized as well, especially compared to the rest of the A-list superheroes, who all got a bunch of cool big moments, or even side characters like Tawky Tawny and Frankenstein (one could easily make the argument that FC is a rather sexist work). He’s freely admitted to not “getting” the character and finding her a little fake, as stated in this interview:
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/010928-Grant-Final-Crisis.html
“I wondered about that myself. I love what Gail Simone (especially) and other writers have done to empower the Wonder Woman concept but I must admit I’ve always sensed something slightly bogus and troubling at its heart. When I dug into the roots of the character I found an uneasy melange of girl power, bondage and disturbed sexuality that has never been adequately dealt with or fully processed out to my mind. I’ve always felt there was something oddly artificial about Wonder Woman, something not like a woman at all.”
Yeah; I’ve talked at perhaps tedious length on this blog about what a weird character she is. I don’t necessarily think that anyone but Marston should ever have written.
I think calling her “fake” is rather odd though. I mean…they’re super-heroes. They’re all rather stupid when you get down to it. I think the problem people tend to have with WW is actually that’s she’s too genuine or personal, rather than that she’s more artificial than, say Tawky Tawny.
The tokenism in Morrison’s JLA was more than a little dumb, since it’s not like DC is lacking in famous heroines. But Morrison was all about Silver Age revivalism in those days, so JLA only used Wonder Woman, at least at first.
I’m pretty sure he added a few more ladies later, but I can’t remember any of them. Honestly, all those C-listers blur together for me.
Noah: I’m not going to speak for the guy, but I’m guessing Morrison’s claim of Wonder Woman’s artifice stems from the character being created by a man who imprinted his own personal fetishes onto the character. But hell, you know all this already, I’m just repeating points you’ve already dealt with in your articles.
Richard: Well, define “famous”. What heroines do they really have that stack up to the Big Seven? Batgirl? Power Girl? Black Canary? Zatanna?
He added Huntress and Big Barda to the line-up later on, and Oracle helped out in his final storyline. Barda never did anything outside of fight some grunts as far as I recall, but Huntress did essentially save the future of the entire universe in DC One Million. So there’s that.
I don’t know that Aquaman or the Martian Manhunter are especially famous/popular. I mean, I see the historical reasons they ended up there, but those reasons aren’t quite the same as fame or stature, necessarily.
Huntress did save the universe, though she kind of did it without having a whole lot of other characterization to speak of.
Jeff Parker’s Sue Storm is actually quite entertaining, I should have noted. She gets to be mostly steady but a little irascible on occasion; sort of the team leader with infrequent but not all that infrequent moments of pique. It’s nicely done overall.
I’d say Aquaman is quite (in)famous, largely from his cartoon appearances, although you’re right about the Manhunter, whose main shtick always seems to have been being that guy who’s always on the Justice League (except when he’s not). I would argue none of the members of Morrison’s JLA got a lot of characterization outside of maybe Kyle, but I’m not going to pretend any of the female characters played significant roles.
But, like you said, this is all part of a larger issue of tokenism. I think there’s a certain self-perpetuating factor to it: Superhero team comics tend to be more fannish than solo comics, because they’re often just about collections of characters that the writers already like. So they give their favorite characters all the big storylines and all the cool moments… and these characters will generally be male. Then the next generation of writers takes over, and since they were all raised on the comics of the previous generation, they’ll have the same fondness for the same (male) characters, and will thus also focus on those characters.
The comments about the Marvel Adventures: Avengers titles are right on, I think, but it’s worth pointing out that Parker writes the women in Agents of Atlas — Namora and Venus — with considerably more depth and sophistication. (It’s been fun to see other Marvel writers like Fred Van Lente in Incredible Hercules pick up on and further develop his version of Namora.) Of course, those are “his” characters (even if they belong to Marvel) in a way that Storm and Giant-Girl arguably are not, so he’s got a little more room to maneuver.
I think calling her “fake” is rather odd though. I mean…they’re super-heroes. They’re all rather stupid when you get down to it.
Yes, the ever-present fact when dealing with superheroes.
My view on WW’s fakeness is that the company treats her as being very important when actually not too many people care about her. She’s part of the Big Three, but big she ain’t, not in the terms by which s-hero status is treated for everyone else. She’s like Chiang kai-shek being talked up by Roosevelt as a world leader when China was a basketcase.
Aquaman and Martian Manhunter are allowed to hang around, but they’re part of the Steady Seven, not a Big Three.
Yes; she’s definitely supposed to be somehow iconic without actually being all that popular.
My view on WW’s fakeness is that the company treats her as being very important when actually not too many people care about her.
Really? Not too many people care?
I’d say AT LEAST 32K care. That is the number according to the most recent numbers provided by Marc-Oliver Frisch.
Given that ASM is now selling under 60K per issue, 32K isn’t anything to sneeze at. In fact, that is right around what Nightwing sells per issue.
I guess not too many people must care about Nightwing either. I guess not too many people must care about the Legion of Superheroes since its numbers were even lower than Wonder Woman’s at the time of its cancellation.
I would say that, yes, nobody cares about Nightwing, and even fewer people care about the Legion of Superheroes. The vast majority of people don’t even know who the Legion of Superheroes are.
It’s not about the comics. Nobody reads mainstream comics. 32,000 people as far as mass media goes; that’s a joke. Superman and Batman and yes, Spider-Man are big, fat, media properties because they can sell shit — movies, tv shows, toys, underwear — to an audience that actually registers on Time-Warner’s balance sheet. Wonder Woman can’t, and doesn’t.
There’s occasionally a pretense that Wonder Woman is the equal of Superman and Batman in terms of iconic status and popular profile. In part it’s an effort to pretend that there’s a substantial female audience for DC comics, I think. But whatever the reason for the pretense, it simply isn’t true.