Adding Incompetence to Insult

Posted on by

This originally appeared on Comixology.
______________

I’ve been following the When Fangirls Attack linkblog (Update: sadly largely defunct now.) recently. Among other things, it’s a good way to find out what moronic cheesecake schlock the big two have served up this week. I think there have been at least three prime slices of said cheesecake since I’ve been following the blog with some regularity, namely:


Cover of Blackest Night.

 


Cover of Marvel Divas

 


JLA: Cry for Justice

And, what the hell, here’s a blast from the past or two as well.

 

 

The thing is, I have no problem with cheesecake. I even like cheesecake. Anita the Swedish Nymphet? Japanese Vogue? Michael Manning’s fetish porn? Sure; I vote for all of those. Or for the classic pin-up art of Dan DeCarlo:

 
Or Jack Cole:
 

 
Or even Larry Elmore’s trashy fantasy illustration:
 

 
Yet, despite my general appreciation for the form (in various senses), I find super-heroine cheesecake irritating and often borderline offensive. Why is that?

I think there are a couple of reasons. In the first place, super-heroines are, you know, heroes. They’re supposed to have stuff to do, crime to fight, justice to uphold, and so forth. For Dan DeCarlo and Jack Cole, the woman are just there to stare at; they’re hot, hot hot. That’s the whole raison d’etre; there’s no effort to pretend that you care what these women think, or how they act, or whether they defeat the villain without falling out of their tops and being exposed to the vastness of space.

I guess there’s a school of thought which would argue that turning women into objects like this is bad. And (despite the strong demurral of a couple of my lesbian friends) I do think there’s something to that. But, on the other hand, if you’re going to have pictures of sexy women, and the pictures of sexy women are why you’re there, maybe it makes more sense to just admit that, and not disingenuously pretend that you’re interested in what’s going on in their heads. If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

The second thing is that, if you must make your adventurer into a fetish object, it seems like the least you could do is make her tough. That outfit that Larry Elmore’s fantasy warrior is wearing above is clearly ridiculous, and not a whole lot more practical than Star Sapphire’s get-up. But, at the same time, Elmore’s warrior looks badass. She’s got a giant sword and she looks thoroughly pissed off. She’d cheerfully castrate you without a second thought. And that’s the way to go: if you’re going to do action-hero cheesecake, then bring on the masochism: get off both on how hot the action hero is, and on how thoroughly she can beat you black and blue. It’s feministsploitation; not feminism exactly, but a fetishization of feminism, and it makes some sense at least to the degree that the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

This sometimes works for super-heroine cheesecake too (Frank Miller’s Catwoman is an example). But more often, you get images like those above, where Star Sapphire’s costume makes her look vulnerable, not tough…or the Marvel Divas cover, where everybody but Hellcat is making with the bedroom eyes, and the only threat is that Black Cat’s costume may pinch so tightly that she actually pops apart at the waist, causing everything from the torso up to go swooshing about like a deflating balloon.

Which brings us to the last and perhaps most important point. Super-heroine cheesecake is often offensive just because it’s so thoroughly incompetent. Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous. For the Marvel Divas cover, the artist couldn’t even come up with more than one body type – and he can’t even draw the one he’s got. As I already intimated, Black Cat’s top and bottom look horribly mismatched; similarly, Hellcat seems to have borrowed her breasts from Giant Girl. All of them look like toys, not people. And that Justice League cover starring Supergirl’s chest…why would you even do that? How is it sexy to have a disembodied bosom flapping about your foreground? And as if that’s not bad enough, as Katie Moody says in comments on the Beat; the artist seems to have accidentally left out our heroine’s ribcage. Or maybe it’s deliberate; did Supergirl lose her skeletal structure during one of the post-Crisis reboots? I must admit I haven’t been following the continuity that closely….

In any case, the point is, you look at drawings by DeCarlo or Jack Cole or yes, even Larry Elmore and they get the proportions minimally right (Elmore’s barbarian’s breasts are big, but not that big); they select flattering clothes (DeCarlo’s dress with its va-va-voom horizontal stripes); they take the time to figure out fluid poses (Cole’s sophisticated lady arranged in classic curves upon the couch.) In short, the artists seem to care about women enough to have looked at one or two of them at some point.

Not that I’d argue that good art can’t be sexist; craft and talent aren’t everything, or even necessarily all that much, in these matters. But they are something. Even if you’re pandering, doing a professional job of it implies a certain minimal level of respect not only towards your audience, but towards your subject as well. You look at super-heroine cheesecake, and you get a sense of a boys’ locker-room cluelessness so intense that it is indistinguishable from disdain. Honest sensuality in these circumstances would be a relief. Sexism may be bad, but incompetent sexism is just intolerable.

50 thoughts on “Adding Incompetence to Insult”

  1. In reality, no one looks good in skin tight outfits such as Speedos, even the ones who think they do…which is why films about superheroes tend to make the costumes variations on body armor. The examples shown indicate that the artists have never taken life model drawing or even ever seen a woman naked, except perhaps for their fuzzy memories of their nursing, which might explain the bosoms’ relative scale. Too bad that in mainstream comics the male characters have no genitalia, at least there might have been something they could’ve gotten right, they could simply look inside their own pants…on the other hand, maybe that’s a good thing.

  2. “The examples shown indicate that the artists have never taken life model drawing or even ever seen a woman naked, except perhaps for their fuzzy memories of their nursing, which might explain the bosoms’ relative scale.”

    That’s really an inspired bit of contempt, that is. Good show.

  3. I don’t have much to add. The portrayal of sexuality in comics is usually pretty dismal, as it is in most media. When you add poorly rendered anatomy and skimpy costumes to the mix things go downhill fast.
    There are some bright spots… Amanda Conner does better cheesecake than the material usually deserves, and Adam Hughes has the craft to do it right (though he often goes the easy route and slaps Audrey Hepburn’s face on Sofia Vergara’s body).
    The state of objectification in the US stands in pretty stark contrast to what they’ve been doing in Europe for years, and it’s step backward even from Americans like Frazetta, Thorne, and Corben, who can at least mix armor and cleavage to good effect. I’m not even going to get into Japan where they’ve developed a dizzying array of variations on aggressive sexy.
    So I’m going to declare this, the 26th of February, North American Comics’ “Sputnik Moment.” We’re coddling a degenerate class of perverts, and making our children soft. We need to catch up with the aggressive funding of anatomy courses and trips to the beach for our young artists. If we wait we’ll be left behind, as we have been in so many other areas.

  5. Hey Jacob. That’s a really clear, dead on article, which kind of depresses the hell out of me. Mostly because it’s ridiculous that that stuff should have to be pointed out with tons of illustrations no less. The idea that someone would actually argue that men and women superheroes are treated the same…argh.

  6. I read a lot of Comicsalliance, and I can tell you that a visit to their comics section is pretty much the most depressing possible thing. They post something pretty reasonable, like “Greg Land’s art is often sexist,” and then the comments are entirely “men are just as objectified” and “when will these feminist posts stop and when can we get comics news again?” I’m learning not to read the comments.

  7. I don’t have any stats on any of this, but just based on the gals and guys I know and see, for the most part, the former prefer wearing more revealing clothing than the latter. Superheroes just kind of replicate that tendency in a more exaggerated manner. The men who walk around in cutoffs or with their shirt open to the navel or in half shirts tend to be gay or aging rockers.

    As for idealization in the genre, it’s largely a product of what the men behind the comics think of as the ideal shape for both genders. I knew this pro-bodybuilder who summarized the aesthetics of his profession as basically being uncontaminated by the influence of any female perspective. There’s probably some message in there about where the look of superheroes is coming from.

  8. I don’t have any stats on this either, but just looking round my office, everyone, regardless of gender, is pretty covered up. Maybe some of them (men and women alike) enjoy skimpy outfits at home for various reasons, but they wouldn’t dream of wearing them in a professional environment

    And that’s surely the point? People dress appropriately for the situation. The issue with superheros in bikini-esque costumes isn’t that they’re in bikinis and real people don’t wear bikinis, it’s that they are gratuitously in bikinis. The costumes are inappropriate and implausible to the context, making their only real justification the ridiculously deformed expectations of ridiculously over grown children.

    Which is sort of understandable, so long as you admit that it’s all a big masturbatory fantasy and don’t then hold them up as role-model examples of strong independent female superheroes.

    But Jack Cole is excellent.

  9. A strong independent female superhero isn’t just as masturbatory a fantasy as her male’s counterpart (bikini or no bikini)? The problem for me is superheroes: male or female it doesn’t matter. The genre is childish and violent. I see no improvement if the fascistic one being judge and executioner is a well-clad female instead of a male.

  10. Yeah, Charles, what Ben said. And, as Kelly Thompson said, it’s not just the clothes. It’s the poses and the body types. Superhero men are hyperathletic; superhero women have body types based on models, not athletes.

    Of course you’re right that it’s because no women read the things. But no women read the things because they’re sexist and aimed exclusively at men. It is possible to have action/adventure fair that isn’t quite so entirely uninterested in and unable to attract a female audience (television and film do it.) Superhero comics suck so thoroughly in part because their audience is incredibly insular, which is in no small part because it’s completely divorced from any effort to even pretend to adopt a female perspective.

    Domingos; I see where you’re coming from, but I think you’re being a little deaf to the ways genre and gender intersect. Fascism was and is hyperbolically and self-consciously male. The objectification of women in these comics is part and parcel of the obsession with the powerful law-giver. The early wonder woman comics which were explicitly feminist were also explicitly (and confusingly, but still) pacifist, and focused on reformation and mercy rather than justice. Similarly, Alan Moore, who is at least conflictedly feminist, is also one of the few people who has (conflictedly, but still) made a point of critiquing fascism in his comics in a fairly systematic way.

    In other words, if comics were to change enough to allow better representations of female superheroes, they’d also be changed in other ways, because gender is one of the basic categories by which genre and ideology is organized.

  11. Though I can’t get condemnatorily exercised, neither am I much a fan of cheesecake; it’s silly, trivial stuff much less interesting than, say, carnival sideshow posters.

    And, even in those classic bits of cheesecake depicted, why do DeCarlo’s and Cole’s “beauties” look so coldly arrogant, inhuman? (Bettie Page was such a delight because she was clearly having fun as she posed.)

    I’m reminded of the contrast between the touchingly uncertain, vulnerable adolescent in this great Norman Rockwell painting…

    http://0.tqn.com/d/arthistory/1/0/u/1/1/Norman-Rockwell-Girl-at-Mirror-1954.jpg

    …and the haughty, plasticized, expressionless “ideal” in the magazine she was sadly wishing to emulate.

    I’d rather have Dan Clowes’ Ugly Girls any day: http://singleape.com/stuff/ug.html . And definitely prefer the woman behind the desk in the DeCarlo cartoon. (Sez the fratboy: “You must be a fag, then!”)

    And for warrior women, who can compare with Lucy Lawless’ Xena ( http://www.knife-depot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/xena.jpg , http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080618/xena_l.jpg [be still, my heart!]), who really looked like she could fight, was believably attired?

    Re the truly atrocious modern superheroines depicted, it’s an unfortunate yet predictable effect of the ramping-up-of-everything we see in modern “culture.” Guys don’t just want to date models, they want supermodels; a man can’t simply be in shape, he’s got to be “cut,” have “ripped abs”; the spectacle of cinematic fare like Ben-Hur becomes, with heapin’ helpins’ of crack and steroids added, the utterly brainless, emotionally empty — with only simulacra of emotions involved — hyperkinetics of Transformers III…

    Speaking of that street drug, Alan Moore regretted with Watchmen (along with Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns) having started the “grim n’ gritty” trend; which (darnit, can’t find the quote) then as he put it, “progressed” as if on cocaine, and then crack, to ever escalating levels…

    ——————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …Superhero men are hyperathletic; superhero women have body types based on models, not athletes.
    ——————————-

    And, the women are constantly striking bimbo-type poses (“Check out my _____!”), rather than acting forcefully…

    —————————–
    …Alan Moore, who is at least conflictedly feminist, is also one of the few people who has (conflictedly, but still) made a point of critiquing fascism in his comics in a fairly systematic way…
    —————————–

    Is Moore “conflicted,” or just not simplistic? Aware that things aren’t as cut-and-dry as the ideologues of left and right would have it?

  12. I think Moore’s relationship to feminism is complicated and not entirely positive…and I think he’d admit that. I’m pretty sure he thinks the Killing Joke was a mistake on partially feminist grounds, for example.

  13. It certainly is unpleasant when a strong, independent character ends up shot, crippled and humiliated.

    (Apparently it’s no biggie when Commissioner Gordon is rendered helpless, left naked, emotionally tortured by being shown nude photos of his wounded daughter; he’s just a man, after all.)

    The thing is, though, was Moore using this as a dramatist, showing a heinous action with a woman for a victim (which authors/filmmakers know will get more of a horrified reaction from their intended audience)?

    (Is it “not feminist” to show a woman as a victim in any way, even if the act is depicted as horrific?)

    Or, was he saying it was a good thing that this uppity broad was put in her place?

    As for Moore’s critism of fascism, as V’s great speech — naturally left out of the movie — puts it:

    —————————-
    In fact, let us not mince words… the management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me to be nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workplace with dangerous and unproven machines. All you had to say was “No.” You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company.
    —————————–

    Heavens, is Moore’s character saying that the noble, pure-hearted People, so beloved by the Left (“Power to the people!”) are to blame for the countless string of tyrannies that have made of human history such a charnelhouse?

  14. Killing Joke epitomized the treatment of female heroines; they get shot, depowered, assaulted and abused, all in the interest of providing trauma/motivation for male characters. Barbara is crippled not as part of her own story, but as a way to make a really bad day for Gordon, and to show character development for Batman. That’s the way these things always work. And, of course, the Commissioner recovers and goes back to being his old self, while Barbara’s shooting alters her character for decades.

    There’s also the fact that DC editorial, when asked whether it was okay to have her shot, reportedly responded by saying, “Sure. Cripple the bitch.”

    The left has a long tradition of mistrusting the public, just like the right does. Not without reason.

  15. ——————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Killing Joke epitomized the treatment of female heroines; they get shot, depowered, assaulted and abused, all in the interest of providing trauma/motivation for male characters. Barbara is crippled not as part of her own story, but as a way to make a really bad day for Gordon, and to show character development for Batman. That’s the way these things always work.
    —————–

    The thing is, was there already a long-standing tradition in comics of this kind of thing, that Moore as a comics geek would certainly be aware of?

    Or, as in that “grim n’ gritty” business he helped originate being taken and run into the ground by other, more sensationalistic and exploitative hands, did comics writers take The Killing Joke (a continued bestseller; described as “influential” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Killing_Joke ) as a template to simply “provid[e] trauma/motivation for male characters”? Leading to appalling stuff like that “woman in a refrigerator” story, ten years later?

    —————–
    There’s also the fact that DC editorial, when asked whether it was okay to have her shot, reportedly responded by saying, “Sure. Cripple the bitch.”
    ——————

    Does that atrocious response then indicate that was Moore’s own attitude?

    If anything, his comics are filled with complex, richly realized female characters.

  16. Yes, the tradition predates Moore in comics and out of it. In comics it’s called Women in Refrigerators. There’s been tons of commentary about it.

    Also, just because you’re the first to do something doesn’t mean you have no responsibility for it. On the contrary.

    Moore’s attitude towards women have been complicated. Definitely feminist, but not only feminist. He’s very fond of rape narratives, for example, in a way that’s perhaps not entirely ideal in every circumstance.

    I love Moore; I thin he’s very attuned to and thoughtful about women’s issues. But not everything’s perfect and (as he’s often said) Killing Joke is definitely one work that had a lot of problems.

  17. Usually, when Moore discusses his discontent with Killing Joke, he doesn’t explicitly discuss the anti-feminist implications. Often, he says that it’s just a “Batman/Joker story” that tells us more about Batman and Joker, but which has no “real life” implications or insights. In all of his work, he is usually interested in making comments on “real life” issues (sociological, political, philosophical, what have you)…and he largely felt that Killing Joke failed to do that in any significant way. He always praises the Bolland art though… Anyway, if he has expressed misgivings about the crippling of Barbara Gordon and it’s role in the psychological development of Bats/Gordon, I can’t recall… Of course, my memory ain’t what it once was.

  18. From part 2 of Daniel Whiston’s “The Craft” interview: http://mouches-d-eau.blogspot.com/2008/07/craft.html

    “And, it needs to be about something. There needs to be some theme. Theme – that would be the solar centre, that would be the soul – you know, the book’s gotta have a heart. That is its emotional content, whether it does resonate, emotionally, so it’s gotta have a soul. The soul is the theme, it’s what it’s about. Is it about something that’s big, or important enough? Amongst my own work, The Killing Joke where Batman versus The Joker. Yeah, there’s loads of emotion layered on there. It’s quite clever. The plot works, on a material level. But it’s not about anything, it’s not about anything of human importance, it’s about Batman and The Joker and you’re never gonna meet anybody like Batman and The Joker. It’s of no use to you as a human being. It’s one of the works – there’s some very good things about it, but it’s lacking something, and it’s lacking soul. It’s not got the thematic drive that say Watchmen has, which I was doing at the same time. That was my big mistake. I was doing Dark Knight – I was doing The Killing Joke at the same time as I was doing Watchmen .”

  19. Of course, perhaps crippling Barbara Gordon without really exploring or thinking about how that affects HER could be seen as part of the soulless quality of the book.

  20. Last one…here’s the one place I found where Moore expresses regret for the Barbara Gordon shooting. It’s from an interview in Wizard, by Mike Cotton (2004). (I forgot I annotated all of these interviews…so I didn’t actually have to remember anything).

    “I asked DC if they had any problem with me crippling Barbara Gordon – who was Batgirl at the time – and if I remember, I spoke to Len Wein, who was our editor on the project … [He] said, ‘Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.’ It was probably one of the areas should’ve reined me in, but they didn’t.”

    He discusses Killing Joke at some length in this interview, which is relatively rare in the interview-ography. (There’s a fairly lengthy discussion about it in the George Khoury book too).

    Cotton, Mike. “Last Call.” Wizard 147 (January 2004): 57-68.

  21. Yeah; the fact that it’s about Batman vs. the Joker is the reason Barbara’s story gets relegated to the margins, isn’t it? She’s just a pawn in this supposedly archetypal battle (which actually just involves more or less idiotic corporate properties.) I think her treatment definitely has more than a little to do with the book’s lack of soul.

  23. Noah: good points, all…

    I’ve never read Wonder Woman, so, I can’t discuss it.

    You said: “Fascism was and is hyperbolically and self-consciously male.” Do I need to add: and so are 99 % of all superhero stories. I don’t deny the possibility of a comic like the one that you describe above (I’ve nothing against Moore’s superhero stories either), but let’s not be essentialists here: women can, and have been, as fascists as men. I really see no improvement in a powerful superheroine killing machine (and she may even be wearing a burka as far as I’m concerned).

  24. Women can be violent and fascistic, certainly. But women have not (for many reasons, including sexism) been as prevalent in military roles as men, and again for many reason (including sexism) their relationship to and interpolation into violent genre fantasies is quite different than men’s. As a result, genre fare that takes women at all seriously as characters and/or consumers tends to be quite different from genre fare that doesn’t. Superhero comics would be a lot different if they were less masculine. And one of the ways they might well be less different is through being less fascistic, because the fascism and the sexism are thoroughly intertwined (see Frank Miller).

    So I agree that just substituting more women heroes, or less sexualized women heroes, wouldn’t make the stories less fascistic. But my point is that having more women heroes, and less sexualized women heroes, isn’t going to happen without other changes also occurring — changes in who reads the comics, who creates them, and the stories they’re trying to tell. And I think those changes would also affect the fascism that you dislike.

  25. Killing Joke isn’t very worth discussing because it was just a badly written and badly intentioned book. I don’t even care a whit for the art because it is at the service of crap. I don’t have a problem with Corben because his male characters are just as absurdly proportioned as his women. All of his people, male and female, have ugly, pulpy heads, partly because of his practice of drawing from little clay or sculpy models. But I don’t mind and he can do some great bits of storytelling. And, at least his drawings have genitalia, which is more than most American artists seem to have the courage to do. WTF, what century is this?

  26. I don’t know, Ben, superheroes don’t really punch a time clock. There’s no one enforcing a dress code. What kind of outfit is practical for a god going into battle? I’d probably go nude with all that power, just because I could.

  28. As I said before: great points all, Noah. I completely agree with your comment above.

    I don’t dislike the fascism in superhero stories (using the word loosely, of course) for PC reasons only. Aesthetics play a role also. It’s my usual: form is content; aesthetics are ethics mantra. In the end I object to the childish Manicheism of the situations, the cardboard characters, etc… etc… At least Alan Moore goes a bit beyond all that…

  29. Noah: “You’ve been reading too much watchmen, Charles.”

    Dr. Manhattan does the only rational thing a demi-god, a super-human, would do: he forgets all about us… Maybe I’ll start believing in god, after all… It’s just that “my” god has better things to do than to care about us stupid humans and irrelevant animals living in this tiny corner of the universe…

  30. Oh, sure, I get that. Fletcher Hanks is way more fascist than most supehero comics, but is better for it, since it has the courage of its convictions and so ends up seeming more honest, not to mention funnier and weirder (the same is true of Frank Miller, actually.)

  31. Not that it was noticed but I defended Corben because Nate mentioned him above….”Gore” has often often held up as a sexist and this goes back to Bill Griffith’s attack on him in John Benson’s panels. Funny that a bunch of hippie underground cartoonists who almost to a man did some of the most sexist comics ever, went to such pains to disassociate themselves from someone whose work actually struck me as being far less sexist than his contemporaries.

  33. Maybe I’ll have to check it out, then, Charles…

    James: Griffith’s attack had nothing to do with sexism or lack of it thereof… Griffith thought, quite rightly, methinks, that adolescent wet dreams had no place among underground comics. It’s the same reasoning behind my dislike of strong superheroines. Superficial changes (in Corben’s case: nakedness) do nothing to improve on mainstream crap.

  34. —————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Yes, the tradition predates Moore in comics and out of it. In comics it’s called Women in Refrigerators. There’s been tons of commentary about it.
    —————————-

    A few lines above I mentioned how The Killing Joke led to “…appalling stuff like that “woman in a refrigerator” story, ten years later…”

    Another noxious example was this Mike Grell 1987 Green Arrow story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Arrow:_The_Longbow_Hunters ; and the infamous “crucified woman” image came from this 1989 GA issue: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Green_Arrow_Vol_2_17 . At least these took place around the same time (published a year before and after) The Killing Joke; so maybe somethin’ nasty was in the air at the time…

    —————————-
    Also, just because you’re the first to do something doesn’t mean you have no responsibility for it. On the contrary.
    —————————-

    But, do you have the responsibility (much less control over) what more sensationalistic people will do with the idea?

    For certain, there’s a hoary trope of “hero driven to violent retribution over the killing of his loved ones.” Off hand, in cowboy movies. Nevada Smith (“A trio of outlaws…robs, tortures and brutally kills the white father and Indian mother of young Max Sand. Max (Steve McQueen) sets out to avenge their death”) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (“Josey Wales, a peaceful Missouri farmer, is driven to revenge by the brutal murder of his wife and son by a band of pro-Union Jayhawkers”); Gladiator used this to provide added motivation for the hero’s vengeance.

    Since the vast majority of heroes are male, therefore it’s predictable that the “top victim” to set the plot in motion would be a woman…

    ——————————
    Moore’s attitude towards women have been complicated. Definitely feminist, but not only feminist.
    ——————————

    “Not only feminist”; the horror!

    ——————————-
    He’s very fond of rape narratives, for example, in a way that’s perhaps not entirely ideal in every circumstance.
    ——————————-

    And Agatha Christie is infinitely more fond of murder narratives. Does the fact a writer uses a theme every so often automatically reflect badly on the writer?

    Far more telling would be how a creator deals with these themes. Do they glamorize the brutality, show the victim asking for it or enjoying it? Or do they show it as harsh, ugly, brutal?

    ——————————-
    I love Moore; I thin he’s very attuned to and thoughtful about women’s issues. But not everything’s perfect and (as he’s often said) Killing Joke is definitely one work that had a lot of problems.
    ——————————–

    Moore himself said as much, in the Wikipedia entry cited earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Killing_Joke

    ———————————
    Yeah; the fact that it’s about Batman vs. the Joker is the reason Barbara’s story gets relegated to the margins, isn’t it? She’s just a pawn in this supposedly archetypal battle (which actually just involves more or less idiotic corporate properties.) I think her treatment definitely has more than a little to do with the book’s lack of soul.
    ———————————

    True, true…

    ——————————–
    Jones, one of the Jones boys says:

    “Super-heroine cheesecake is often offensive just because it’s so thoroughly incompetent.”

    …and such small portions!
    ———————————

    Oh, my. You’re going to Feminist Hell for that!

    ———————————
    James says:

    Not that it was noticed but I defended Corben because Nate mentioned him above….”Gore” has often often held up as a sexist and this goes back to Bill Griffith’s attack on him in John Benson’s panels. Funny that a bunch of hippie underground cartoonists who almost to a man did some of the most sexist comics ever, went to such pains to disassociate themselves from someone whose work actually struck me as being far less sexist than his contemporaries.
    ———————————-

    True! And by taking pains to “expose” male characters as well as female ones, make the males equally overdeveloped, he then ended up being asked if he was gay…

    ———————————–
    Charles Reece says:

    Domingos, you’d probably like Warren Ellis’ Supergod.
    ————————————

    I did! Insanely creepy stuff…

  35. Mike, Killing Joke is extremely sensationalistic. People who came after didn’t distort Moore’s work by using sensational and often misogynist violence. That was in the work to begin with.

    As for Agatha Christie…as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the politics of cozies have their problems. Moore’s use of and fascination with rape is perhaps analagous to Christie’s use of and fascination with murder, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t criticize one or both of them. They’re both sensationalist genre fiction, invested in violence. They’re both thoughtful about that investment to some extent…but sometimes more than others, I’d argue, and not always in a way that’s entirely successful (aesthetically, morally, or what have you.)

  36. Mike: “[…] by taking pains to “expose” male characters as well as female ones, make the males equally overdeveloped, he[Corben] then ended up being asked if he was gay…”

    People could have also asked him if he was 12…

  37. To clarify, I mentioned the people I mentioned not because I find their portrayals of women mature, but because they’re reflexive and deliberately rendered. There are all sorts of problems with reflexivity, especially if it doesn’t challenge whatever its being reflexive about. But it’s a step up from the norm. This says more about the low bar North American comics has set for itself as anything, which is I guess the point Domingos is making.

  38. It’s not just in Corbens’ characters’ physicality, though I think that men who are frightened of pictures of penises are pretty gay whether they know it or not. The work Corben does for the mainstream reflects the worldview of his writers and editors. I’m really thinking of his earlier underground sf work, extra-Warren and pre-Den. Um, not his horror stuff as much, but his own sf writing and some stories by Jan Strnad have more depth than anything he has done since. Some of them go well beyond the label of “wet dreams”, they are ecological and political statements done on a high level in the comics form that still resonate. Check “When Worlds Collide” and think of the world we live in where a presidential candidate’s anti-constitutional platform is to reintegrate church with state.

  41. James: “The work Corben does for the mainstream reflects the worldview of his writers and editors.”

    Which, when he published his wet dreams at Fantagor Press, was himself?

  43. As Corben himself put it in a response to an interview which was responsible for his in the future avoiding being interviewed:

    ————————-
    …I feel the images in my work do not specifically suggest what you infer. For instance, a drawing might show a hugely muscled male nude. This in itself is not deviant; however, the viewer projects some of his own feelings onto the drawing. He might view the art and say it shows “hidden homosexual or S&M tendencies.” A simple interpretation would be that the image shows a heroic idealism developed to such an extreme degree as to be slightly satirical and tongue-in-cheek. This is in fact [my] intent…
    ————————–
    Emphasis added; from http://www.muuta.net/Ints/IntCorbHM54.html#Answer

    Den was skillfully made, but utterly uninteresting story-wise; Corben’s underground work was far more interesting and varied. In plenty of those stories he even more blatantly satirized the musclebound heroes/voluptuous babes schtick he routinely used.

    For instance, in “How Howie Made It in the Real World”: http://www.raggedclaws.com/home/2010/12/15/look-here-read-how-howie-made-it-in-the-real-world-by-richard-corben/ (From Slow Death #2, Dec. ’72)

    Also, in the definitely not work-safe “Mangle, Robot Mangler” (Slow Death #4, 1972):

    Pages 3, 2, and 1 (read from the bottom to the top) at http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/slow-death?before=1318679517

    Pages 4, 5 and 6 at http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/slow-death?before=1318845021

    In “For the Love of a Daemon” (cover art at http://comixjoint.com/fantagor4.html ), the muscled barbarian “hero” is a braggart, a lout…

    “Twilight of the Dogs” shows the few free humans resisting an alien invasion a starved, ragged lot; while those who have eagerly become the pets and human attack-dogs of the aliens look like…well, the stereotypical Corben heroes and heroines.

    Pages 3, 2, and 1: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/richard-corben?before=1326428395

    [Sorry, there’s a gap here]

    Pages 10, 9, and 8: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/twilight-of-the-dogs

    Among these and others there is hardly the humorless idealizing and pandering of “wet dreams”-type stuff; one reason Corben never made it as a superhero comics artist (thank Gawd) is that he pushes muscularity to the point of grotesqueness, near-absurdity.

    To look at the moronic, utterly serious “superhero porn” posted in Noah’s article above and then Corben’s work is to see significantly divergent attitudes. The former is total pandering to a moronic, immature audience, who can’t even begin to see the idiocy in what they drool over.

  44. Thanks for the butressing, Mike. I don’t begrudge Corben the regular employment of drawing tons of mainstream comics, but the work is often much less interesting that what he did back in the day. He doesn’t do his own coloring and I really miss his wonky lettering. Of his more recent efforts, I can only point to a few that stick with me: the awesome “Makoma” in Hellboy (I don’t care much for his other strictly horror collaborations with Mignola); “The House on the Borderland”, a frenzied GN for Vertigo; the story he did about Conan’s father in the Dark Horse series where Jose Villarrubia actually “got” how to color Corben; and “Punisher: The End” with Garth Ennis, inexplicably one of his all-time best post-apocalyptic stories.

  45. Yes, I’ve enjoyed “Makoma,” “The House on the Borderland” (though wished they’d skipped the “intended to appeal to younger readers” framing sequence), and that “Punisher: The End” tale.

    Regarding the last, one of Corben’s interesting touches was how some of the guards that the Punisher guns down (on his way to getting to the enclave of the last survivors of the Ruling Class), rather than brutes or sneering villains, were drawn as hapless youths; barely understanding what was going on as they went down in a hail of lead.

    BTW, I think one of the factors pushing Corben towards hypermuscularity and ultracurvaceousness in his characters was his preference for a sculptural approach in his renderings. (He’s even done sculptures of some of his characters, the better to study lighting effects.) And asked why so many of his characters were hairless, he said, “hair destroys form.”

    (Must find that “Conan’s father” tale…)

  46. I believe that Corben actually makes clay models of his characters and draws from them directly, that’s why his heads are so pulpy-looking. It seems like he’s been using some of them for years, the same sculptures pop up in various stories.
    The entire Conan’s Dad story is interspersed in the collection Conan: Cimmeria (volume 7) from Dark Horse. I went off Conan many, many years ago but I really like the way Corben handled this, and the way Jose colored it. The rest of the book is more-standard, really overdone digitally painted stuff.

  47. Thanks for the info!

    I don’t believe there’s a comic artist (a well-known one, at least) who’s technically experimented as much as Corben. His earliest undergrounds were, as I recall, simply drawn in pen and ink, and a joy they were to behold.

    He went on to do work in airbrush; tonally-graded coloring achieved via hand-rendered separations (rather than the old pre-computer approach of photographing a fully-painted original through a series of filters), even did at least one or two stories for Warren photographing those clay models (with a little added enhancement, like adding motion-blur, with computers or airbrush). Then, trying computer rendering. (He’s even done animated films…)

    http://www.spectrumfantasticart.com/full_content.php?article_id=1055&full=yes&pbr=1

    Some more corben: http://fantagor.tumblr.com/

    I don’t remember some of these oldies, but his strengths are evident: figures have the lively distortion, expressiveness of cartooning, yet are sculpturally solid. Compositions are strong, lucid; environments and architecture are nicely imagined…

    Actually, the more tightly-rendered, less cartoony “Neverwhere” and “Den 1” covers above to me come off the worse, in comparison. (Yet, which would the fanboys find far more cool? You get one guess…)

  48. Charles Reece said:

    “I don’t have any stats on any of this, but just based on the gals and guys I know and see, for the most part, the former prefer wearing more revealing clothing than the latter. Superheroes just kind of replicate that tendency in a more exaggerated manner. The men who walk around in cutoffs or with their shirt open to the navel or in half shirts tend to be gay or aging rockers.”

    Here’s a rare place where Charles and I agree. Kelly Thompson (was she mentioned here or somewhere else? already forgotten) regarded the greater proportion of covered-up men as some vile conspiracy to subject only female characters to the evil “male gaze” or something of that sort.

    But what if the superhero artists are simply reflecting their social mores?

    Try to imagine what the dance-scene from THE GAY DIVORCEE would look like if Ginger was all covered-up and Fred was the one in the low-cut gown.

    You may need something strong to drink after you’ve done so, but that won’t be my fault.

Comments are closed.