Yearly Archives: 2012

Wonder Playmate

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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As NBC gears up for its new Wonder Woman series, the internet is abuzz with one burning question. What dastardly villain mugged our heroine with a casino? And does Adrianne Palicki get combat pay if that bustier ruptures and her cleavage assaults her noggin?
 

 
Okay, so those are two questions.

To be fair, NBC has also released pics of an updated (or possibly additional) costume, which isn’t quite as tragically latexy. Here are some action shots:
 


 

 
She looks so darned serious there…and brave! Looking at her face alone, you’d never realize the extent to which her boobs pose a danger to herself and others.

Oh for the days of Lynda Carter!
 

 
We miss your shapeless grandma-bottom bathing suit with the hint of camel-toe, Lynda!

Live-action super-hero costumes are often awful (I’m looking at you Styrofoam-muscle Batman), but Wonder Woman seems to bring out the worst in what I suppose, for the sake of brevity, we must call “fashion-designers.” What, in short, the-hell-is-wrong-with-these-people? Why, lord, why?

I actually have a theory. It’s all the fault of William Marston and Harry Peter.

For those not in the know, Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman. Harry Peter was the original artist on the series — hired by Marston himself. And their version of Wonder Woman looked like this:
 

 
Yes, that’s Wonder Woman with her hands tied behind her leaping backwards to attack a saber-tooth tiger. Which is fairly bad ass.

But the thing to focus on is what isn’t here. Specifically, there is not a whole lot of cleavage visible. Instead, Peter’s supple line dwells lovingly on those back muscles…and on WW’s super-butch shoulders. This was typical: even when the chest is visible in Peter’s drawings, he tends to focus interest on other areas:
 

 
Marston and Peter, in other words, put WW in that skimpy bustier so that they could look at her shoulders flexing, not so they could look down her front. Part of the problem with later iterations of Wonder Woman’s costume, then, has been a simple confusion of erotic focus. The costume wasn’t really designed for large amounts of cleavage. When you put a large amount of cleavage in there to propitiate our breast-obsessed culture, the results tend to be more silly than heroic.
 

 
Even putting aside the breasts, though, there would still be problems. Wonder Woman’s costume just was never imagined with real people in mind. You could argue that this was true for super-hero comics in general; drawings are different than living, breathing bodies, and Kirby clearly wasn’t thinking too hard about how an actor would look in Thing-face. But with Peter’s Wonder Woman…well, look at this, for example.
 

 
That doesn’t look like a drawing of a real woman. It looks like a stiff, posed picture of a doll.

And I think that really was the point. The rigidity and unreality of the drawings is not a bug; it’s a feature. Girls who read those early WW comics were encouraged to see themselves not just as the characters, but manipulating the characters, moving them about like toys. This is part of the pleasure of a sequence like the below, where Wonder Woman’s body is first duplicated (like a reproducible doll) and then inhabited by her friend, Etta Candy.
 

 
Etta and WW are both tied up in the picture above too, of course. Marston and Peter were obsessed with bondage. In their stories, WW often gets tied up every three panels or so. For Marston, this was linked to his odd ideas about feminism and submission; he believed women were superior to men because they were more comfortable with submission. Men, he felt, needed to learn submission from women. Wonder Woman was part of his effort to teach boys and girls the joys of “loving submission” to a wise matriarch.

So Marston was kind of a kook. But he was a kook whose kookiness dovetailed nicely with the interests of his audience. Sharon Marcus, in her book Between Women, noted that dominance and submission have long been an important part of literature for children, and particularly for girls. In the Victorian era, in particular, there were many books which featured “Fantasies of girls punishing dolls, and being punished by them appeared regularly in fiction for young readers.”

Whether Marston and Peter were deliberately referencing this type of story is unclear…but what is clear is that their comics worked with a similar dynamic. The frozen postures of the figures and the bondage themes are of a piece.
 

 
So, for example, the above picture shows the outcome of an Amazon game in which some women dress as deer so that their Amazon sisters can catch them, truss them up, put them on plates, and pretend to eat them. There’s certainly kink here…but it’s not especially focused on a stereotypical male appreciation of scantily-clad, realistically depicted female flesh. Rather, it’s embedded in a narrative of dominance, submission, and play. The kinky frisson is tied (as it were) to the artificiality of the doll-like poses.

Since Marston and Peter, lots of Wonder Woman artists have tried to rework the costume…to turn it into something that appeals to the typical erotics of older guys rather than to the B&D doll-playing interests of Marston and (Marcus suggests) young girls. As a result you get images like this, by, (I believe) Mike Deodato.
 

 
Wonder Woman’s costume was meant to be sexy. But it was meant to be sexy in a particular way and for particular kinks. Those kinks don’t map particularly well onto current mainstream interests or tastes. Efforts to make WW cater to those mainstream interests and tastes tend to be, at best, self-parodic. So if NBC’s costume looks ridiculous (and it does) it’s because they’re trying to squeeze a Playboy fantasy into a costume that was never meant to hold it.
 

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All posts in the series on post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman are here.

Who’s The Oldest Of Them All?

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This originally ran on Splice Today.
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“It’s important to know when you’re beaten, yes?” Lilly Collins sneers at Julia Roberts at the end of Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror. In theory, Collins is playing Snow White and Roberts the Evil Queen, but it’s hard not to read the line as the triumphant coup de grace of the next young thing celebrating the departure of the past-it has-been. Roberts, wrinkled and decrepit, duly retreats into her cloak, admits regretfully that “it was Snow White’s story all along” and disappears. Meanwhile, Snow White gets to perform a Bollywoodesque dance of triumph.

The victory is decisive, but Pyrrhic. As Elizabeth Greenwood points out in an excellent review at the Atlantic, “In any Snow White, the Queen is the real reason we watch.” Collins’ Snow is granted girl power spunkiness and several scenes of swashbuckling swordplay, but that can’t really obscure the fact that she’s a dull goody-goody nonentity—a very pretty face signifying the same bland goodness that a very pretty face always signifies.

Julia Roberts as the evil queen, on the other hand, has outgrown both the goodness and the blandness, and she seems sincerely, exuberantly relieved. No more does she have to simper and smile and charm as the plot whisks her efficiently towards some repulsive doofus like Richard Gere. Instead, she gets to leer at the bare chest of a young if doltish Prince, Armie Hammer (“so hairy” she absent-mindedly rhapsodizes). She indulges in rampant and elaborate bitchiness (commanding her long-suffering aged servant to imitate Snow White’s whining complaints). She behaves like a woman mature enough to really enjoy her own unpleasantness. When she is riding off to marry the Prince (her fifth wedding), she breaks into that amazing Julia Roberts smile, and muses, “No matter how many times I do this, I always get excited at my wedding day.” The apparently genuine delight in cynical artificiality virtually rewrites her whole oeuvre: how many times, after all, has Roberts been married onscreen (and off?) Suddenly, we can see her not as a chit moved about by the nauseatingly saccharine repetition of rom-coms, but as the manipulator of that repetition. Which makes her, not nauseatingly saccharine, but self-aware—and funny.

Now, aging isn’t all good. Mirror, Mirror shows the evil queen desperately trying to hold onto her youth, whether by using the magic of her mirror, spreading bird poop on her face, or cinching herself into her dress with the aid of an elaborate mechanical crank. But even these efforts are transformed by Roberts’ performance into occasions for barely contained malevolent joy. When, after much tightening, groaning, and muscle power, she finally gets into her undergarments, she declares, “Ha!  I knew I was the same size!” All the effort to imitate youth comes across as more satisfying, in its way, than youth itself. The evil queen appreciates her own beauty more than Snow White appreciates hers. After all, Snow White doesn’t have to work at it.

In her review, Greenwood points out that, though there are more roles for older actresses in Hollywood than there used to be, “the role of the young love interest still earns more for an actress in dollars and red-carpet caché.” When Snow White hands the poisoned apple back to the Queen at the film’s close and cruelly quips, “Age before beauty,” it’s a sneeringly sarcastic inversion of Hollywood’s pecking order.

Yet at the same time the film shows quite clearly that, in some sense, age really does come before beauty. If Julia Roberts has ever had a better role, I sure haven’t seen it. Freed from the responsibility of marrying the boring Prince and living happily ever after, she is finally able to embrace her comedy, anger, self-indulgence, and intelligence. I’d say that the evil queen was the role Roberts was born to play, except that it would be more accurate to say it was the role she got old to play. In this context, Snow White’s final outburst of uncharacteristic vindictiveness has an almost wistful edge to it. In telling the evil queen off, she manages, for just a second, to be as interesting and enjoyable a character as her step-mother. Perhaps, if Collins is lucky and stays around Hollywood, in 20 or 30 years she can get a part as rewarding as the evil queen. Till then, she has a lot of dreary sweet young things ahead of her. As Roberts must know, with some regret and some triumph, beauty comes before age.

Utilitarian Review 10/27/12

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On HU

Me on some unexpected facts about penises.

Me on Pretty Woman and hating Richard Gere rather than Julia Roberts.

Me on pulp and genius in Joe Sacco, and on whether that’s a good reason for comics journalism.

Richard Cook and I liveblog the last Presidential debate, and are depressed.

Jacob Canfield on the lazy criticism directed at Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra.

Ethan on the advantages of comics journalism.

Kailyn Kent on the unconvincing gimmickry of Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

Me on Clark Kent becoming a blogger and the virtues of mainstream comics pandering.

Sarah Horrocks on Druillet’s Salaambo.

Me on the different sizes of the Stepford Wives.

Vom Marlowe on Worsted, a webcomic about knitting.

Me on how atheists can be sexist assholes too.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

Bunch of pieces at Splice:

On undecided voters maybe not mattering.

On NPR being useless on the election.

On Marty Robbins and nice cowboys who shoot you.

On Richard Moudock, power, and rape.

 
Other Links

Craig Fischer on Building Stories.

Emma Woolley on being constantly harassed as a teen girl.

Mary Williams on the war on 12-year-old girls.
 
This Week’s Reading

Finished Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, started Ronald Firbank’s “Vainglory”, and am rereading Phillip Pullman’s Grimm Fairy Tales for a review.
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Below is a puggle, which is apparently what you call a baby echidna. Cute!

Skeptics and Believers United

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On Slate’s Double XX blog, Rebecca Watson yesterday put up a deeply depressing post about the sexism she’s faced in the skepticism/atheism community. At a skepticism conference some guy had asked her in an elevator to come back to his room for “coffee”. She later mentioned offhand in a public address that skeevy sexual pick-up lines are not necessarily best-practice for men who want to not be assholes. She was then, inevitably, deluged with hate mail from men telling her she was a bitch and that they didn’t need to be lectured about sexism by no bitch, duh, ’cause we’re smart and skeptical, yeah? (And if you think I’m being unfair to her interlocutors, just read the comments on her post.)

Anyway, Richard Dawkins weighed in with a post on a blog about the controversy. As you’d expect, he was thoughtful, even-handed, and eminently rational.

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

So Richard Dawkins is a giant flaming asshole. No one is especially surprised, I’d guess.

But what’s interesting I think is the way his assholish-ness is framed. Specifically, his misogyny — his sneering at women for acting as if harassment matters — is framed through and by his explicit antipathy towards the Muslim world. Violence against women abroad doesn’t raise his consciousness about violence against women at home. Rather, misogyny abroad (the fault of some other culture) becomes an excuse to dismiss misogyny at home (which may be less virulent, but is certainly something that is more his responsibility.)

Dawkins’ knee-jerk rhetorical recourse to the evil of Muslims to wipe clean his own sins reminded me again of the main reason that the new atheists creep me out. That reason being that the new atheism is an imperialist ideology. It’s marinated in US-Islam tension, weaponized by 9/11, and generally used as a justification for variously sneering at, bombing, and conquering peoples who it is convenient for us to view as irrational barbarians.

Dawkins’ comment also shows, with unusual clarity, why imperial adventures abroad are horrible for civil liberties at home. In an imperial power, the evil of your enemies is always infinitely more important than the evil at home. The injustice committed by those benighted religious backwards subhumans always trumps any possible injustice committed by you or me. Moral outrage is kept safely for the other, the opposition to whom guarantees one’s own immaculate virtue. Anyone who disagrees is a pampered whiner, who doesn’t realize how good (s)he has it. After all, are our rational bombs not the scourge of evil bearded menfolk everywhere? (And perhaps of the occasional woman in hijab as well, who is probably better off dead anyway?)

Of course, it’s not just atheists who are imperialists or anything. The Christian right, not to mention the Jewish right, have thrown their all behind our ongoing crusade of blood and self-righteousness. Dawkins likes to think those believing blowhards are his enemies – but his oleaginous condescension and brazen hypocrisy tells a different story. A bully who hits you on the orders of the hairy thunderer isn’t much different, after all, from a bully who hits you at the dictates of his own immaculate reason.
 

Tink, frog, and purl: Worsted for Wear

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I’m guessing Worsted for Wear isn’t a fav comic around here.  Not because it isn’t funny (it is), or because it’s poorly drawn (it’s not), or because it lacks or includes capes (it’s mostly capeless, with the occasional cape walk-on for fun), but because most folks hanging out in the hooded u aren’t big knitters.

But I am.

Knit! Purl! Knit, Knit, Slip Slip, Knit and Pass Slipped Stitches over (Double Centered Decrease, baby)!

Ahem.  Sorry.  I got overexcited for a moment there. Sock yarn lace patterns are as fine wine to me and I get a bit giddy.

So what am I talking about?

A web-comic about knitting.

Worsted for Wear is a well-drawn indie web comic by Josh and Rachel Anderson.  A friend of mine who’s into web-comics (but not knitting), sent me the link.  I was a little wary, because I don’t normally think of knitting as funny.  It’s something I do to relax, and if I’m knitting a sock someplace public, people are usually confused as to what I’m doing.  (Socks on two circs looks odd, if you’ve never seen it.)

But in a weak moment, I checked out WfW and laughed.  Short strip comics are a difficult form.  It’s hard to create enough story to pull off a funny punchline in just a few panels.

I approve of any comic that can make cthulu-hat jokes.

The art is good enough to make it easy to recognize them.  The stories are essentially warm rather than grim.  This is a light comedy, not a grim!dark tale of doom.  Makes a lovely change from the sad arty stuff I sometimes try to read.

The characters are a nice mix–Cam (the main character) has several friends who show up over time.  One of the early arcs is about how Marie, who knit the cthulu hat, adores horror movies.  She knits a baby blanket with an exploding head and eventually the knitting group goes over to her house for movie-knitting night:

The strip is titled “Stabbed Through the Red Heart.”  Red Heart is the name of a very inexpensive, acrylic yarn sold at big box stores.

Most of the stories are one or two strips, but some last longer.  One arc covers that perennial problem–knitting gifts for baby showers.  Cam’s forgotten to make a baby shower project for her sister, and she has to scramble to get one done in time.  It pokes gentle fun at those of who sometimes lose sight of deadlines–and how sometimes friends come through to help out.

The strip is delightfully geeky.  Not only do we get Cthulu hats, we also get that most famous of famous knitting projects, the Dr Who scarf.

Let me take a brief moment to talk about Dr Who scarves.  Who scarves use a pattern called ‘garter stitch’.  That’s using a simple knit stitch on each row and on both sides.  This creates a durable fabric that doesn’t curl at the edges.  (If you’ve ever cut the edges off a tee shirt and watched the edges curl up, that’s because the knit fabric used in most clothing is called ‘stockinette’.  It’s smooth one one side, but curls.)

The big challenge with Who scarves is getting the colors correct and the width of the stripes right.  If the idea of pausing frequently and peering worriedly at the TV is getting you down, do not fear!  There are plenty of places that have these details all worked out.  Try Witty Knitter.

Not sure how long to make it?  Check the scale drawing here.  Want color tips?  Witty Knitter used an OttLite and some pantone strips (yes, really) to get the most accurate color tips possible.  Never let it be said that knitting geeks do not go the full mile.

By the way, I recommend starting with Knit Picks harmony wood needles and some Cascade 220.  All the techniques you need to get going are available on knittinghelp.com.

OK, back to the comic review!

There’s a delightful run where Cam gets (mildly) offended by the crocheters, who have the audacity to meet in her knitting cafe.  Dun dun dun.  As a form of revenge, she cozies them (covers their stuff in knitted items–this is a Real Thing, by the way.  Some knitters have gone around and, say, knit bombed all the seats on a bus.)

In revenge, the crocheters do their own thing!  (Crocheters are know for making small, cute stuffies.)

Is this cheery little comic Great Art?

Oh who cares.  It’s got women who are shaped like actual women, it’s got funny and geeky happy couples, it’s got Star Wars and Dr Who jokes, it’s got small foibles I can relate to, and lovely art.

And for once, it shows the kind of lovely female friendship that I see all the time in the real world but that is too often missing from media:

Isn’t that a great panel?

Now go knit a scarf!  Or a woolly bobble hat!  When in doubt, tink!

Some Stepford Wives Are Bigger Than Others

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I saw the 1975 Stepford Wives last night. It was an slow, creepy, smartly made film. I was particularly struck by this:
 

 
The two main leads are off to the left there: Katharine Ross as Joanne and Paula Prentiss as Bobbie. You can tell them apart because Prentiss, at 5″10, is a full five inches taller than Ross at least. When they’re shot together, Prentiss often looks like a giant.
 

 
Of course, in real life, you see big people and short people together all the time. In movies, though, you (or at least I) rarely notice discrepancies like this when they aren’t directly related to the plot or power disparities. You might have a looming evil villain being monstrous, but the two best friends are usually cast (or at least placed) so you’re not always noticing that one of them is gigantic and the other is tiny.

So the height differential here really stands out…which is I think quite clever thematically. The film is about the erasure of difference; the women all become identical drones — and, moreover, they all become mere appendages of their husbands. It seems right, then, that the film emphasize what is being lost by accentuating the visual disparity between, and visual individuality of, the two women. It’s especially effective, too, in that second scene above, where Bobbie has been transformed into Robot Bobbie, so that her height is a kind of frightening, looming reminder of difference past — a nightmarish Brobdingnagian shell left behind after the insides have been vacuumed out.
 

Salammbo

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Philippe Druillet is one of those artists, like Moebius, who upon being exposed to his work immediately divides your life into a pre/post situation.  There’s the way you saw comics before Druillet and the way you saw them after.  And like Moebius, he is an artist who despite his work in comics, and hollywood–goes largely ignored by North American audiences above the age of growing up on Heavy Metal magazine.  The only book of his that is easily accessible is the brilliant coda to his Loane Sloane epic, Chaos.  That work sent me down a rabbit hole of works like Vuzz, La Nuit, the Lone Sloane series and others–but through them all there was one work that stood above all of the rest monolithic in it’s splendour.  And that work was his Salammbo trilogy.  Based on the novel by Flaubert which I have not read, written in a language I couldn’t understand–and yet it was the work from which I could not turn away.

In Salammbo, Druillet combines all of the techniques he had been using to that point in his artistic career to create something finally completely beyond the sum of its parts.  His work here reaches a plane on which a HR Giger or Beksinski painting might sit.  He has created in these ecstatic sublime future primitive tableaus a procession of almost religious holiness.  This is an all A-sides album.  Just banger after banger after banger.  He is so assured in every element of his composition that you can’t help but be held in rapture with his storytelling.  His coloring palette which to this point would at times overtake the images themselves–is now at one with them, without sacrificing any of their garish insanity.  A lot of these pages presage later work by Brendan McCarthy with their neon airbrushed quality.
 

 
The character designs of even basic background characters in Salammbo are stunning.  There are no cut corners here.    So when you see these epic battle scenes–the scale can only be described as positively apocalyptic.  The only modern comparison there is is James Stokoe’s work on Orc Stain.  But this is a scale even beyond that.  Where in Orc Stain a battle scene might involve hundreds flying around with giant beasts and crumbling buildings–with Druillet it’s hundreds of thousands, filling the page–almost threatening to explode it with their strange alien fashions until they finally fade off into the distance of the horizon.
 

 
And the detail is enough to make you want to quit ever trying to create comics.  Pure fuck you pages.  The amount of thought and storytelling Druillet puts into a simple headdress is enough to make you want to just go home.  Every dress, every helmet–seems to have it’s own mini-opera playing itself out in it’s designs.  Stories within stories within stories.  I can’t even imagine how large the originals for these pages had to have been.  Some of these pages hit you like murals, even if you are viewing them on a tiny mobile phone.
 

 
This is a comic which transcends its own language.  It is a work that in terms of wild imagination made manifest rivals the greatest universes sci-fi has created in any visual medium.  The cumulative effect of page after page of this is a testament to the insane rarefied air that this medium can exist in.  There is not another medium that can convey more processable information per square inch than the comics medium–and Druillet stretches that maxim to it’s zenith.  You could not hope to duplicate this work in any other medium without lessening it.

And the master here in just the bordering techniques that Druillet has become synonymous for is simply stunning.  Generally speaking when other artists have tried cutesy things with their borders–their achievement at best languishes on the shores of ignorable embellishments–but with Druillet the panel border IS the panel is the story is the image as the whole.  They make the pages mythological to take in.  It’s a technique he’s pulled from religious art practices–but in Salammbo he has finally sublimated that technique into his own language.  In Salammbo we have the revealing of the true Druillet speaking authoritatively in his own voice, beholden to none.  And he does this all…IN AN ADAPTION of someone else’s novel.  Which is kind of just showing off.
 

 
And while all of Druillet’s work is terrific and worth finding if you can–Salammbo is the one work that if I had to sell someone on Druillet, as being on par with Moebius in terms of significance in comics, Salammbo would be that comic.  Of course, as with Moebius, I’d take just about anything I can get at this point.  I know the comic industry isn’t like this cosmic juggernaut of making good things happen to good books–but it is hugely embarrassing that works such as this are not more easily accessible in the North American market.  Kevin Eastman and Heavy Metal Magazine seem like the only people who give a damn.  Which is messed up.  We need another Kevin Eastman to come in and push this stuff back into the fold.