Won’t Anybody Think of the Pants: Wonder Woman’s New Look

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Last time I talked about comics, I trashed a JMS-written comic and some poorly drawn pants, and while I had intended to follow up with a post about my visual reading habits, I had to interrupt that post with another–this one also about a JMS comic and some poorly drawn pants (since that went over so well last time).  This time the post is brought to you courtesy of my mom.

Yeah, my aging mom, who mostly uses the internet to surf YouTube for James Taylor videos and Yo Yo Ma concert tickets, not to mention quack remedies for her aging kids’ various ailments, called me into her room in a quiet sort of disgruntled fury in order to explain to me (the comics ‘expert’ in our family) all about Wonder Woman’s new look.

“She’s so un-American!”

I had no idea my mom even knew who Wonder Woman is.  Much less that she would care about her look, no matter how much the big corporate yahoos could screw it up.  I figured they ditched her vambraces or whatever, maybe recolored her panties again, and sighed.  “Yeah, OK, mom.”  But she was really upset, so I went to check it out.

And my jaw dropped.

“She looks like some kind of Eastern European vampire!” my mom wailed.  “What happened to her?  She looks like a villain!  And kind of like a Spider Man.”

My mom, god bless her, was right.  She does look like some kind of Eastern European vampire, and the shirt has that weird Spidey-thing going on. It’s got some kind of nearly spider-line contour coloring. (There is no need to tell me that the lines are to emphasize her boobs; I am not interested in such trifles.  It’s possible to draw generous chests without added contour lines, and if nice looking boobs were the point, they wouldn’t have replaced a freaking battle corset with some kind of tank top.)

In the interview piece linked above:  “It’s a look designed to be taken seriously as a warrior, in partial answer to the many female fans over the years who’ve asked, ‘how does she fight in that thing without all her parts falling out?'” said incoming series writer J. Michael Straczynski.

And look, I’m sorry, but no.  No and no and no.  She’s not going to be taken seriously in a pair of indigo-blue-black leggings if she’s still wearing a freaking lycra Spidey top and a goddamn tiara!  If she was going to be ‘taken seriously as a warrior’, she’d need to be wearing fugly urban cargo pants in shades of gray and with all her metal enameled to unshininess. Also: newsflash!  Indigo-blue-black leggings have been out since the 80s.

These comics are about capes (yes, yes, she doesn’t have a cape, but you know what I mean).  These are people who fight in their underpants. That’s just how it is.  Questioning the underpants leads either to a rejection of underpants for more civilian garb (in which case, give her real warrior clothing or give her real civilian clothing, ie American blue jeans) or to accepting the trope, in which case, at least keep the parts of her outfit that are HER.

Where are the shiny red boots that kick so hard?  Where are the tap pants with stars?  Where is her American flag of freedom theme?  For the first time in my life, I’m with Fox news: this is an un-American change for our girl, and I don’t like it one bit.  Yes, she’s an Amazon, but she’s here in America, fighting for freedom and good, and she’s the chief female superhero who stands on her own and is not a sidekick of any kind.  She’s not a OtherCape-girl, or OtherCape-Woman, she’s her own hero in her own right and part of that is being American.  I may not always like my country’s politics, but I quite like that we happen to have an Amazon princess who fights space kangaroos, thank you very much and I don’t want her watered down.

Neither, apparently, do most of Newsarama’s readers, who at the time of this column, have mostly voted that they hate the new look (41%, versus 12% that they love it).

You know what gets me the most?  (I’m sure you’re all dying to know.)  When I was a little girl, I used to have one of those cheesy kids’ Wonder Woman outfits, and so did my best friend, and we would twirl around and around until we were dizzy, shouting “Nunununununun…Wonder WOMAN!” and then strike a pose.  We used some ancient garden rope for our lassos of truth and we used to fight bad guys and we used to have a great time being the Power For Good in the World.  And I just cannot imagine that little-girl-me buying a pair of black legging and a boring 80s style jacket (reminiscent of those terrible MembersOnly jackets) and red tank top and doing anything like that.  No.  Just no.  Which is a shame.  Cause twirling around and being a kid and thinking those thoughts just seem part of the whole point of the capes genre.

Call me old and cranky, but I want my old Wonder Woman back, dammit.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: First Thing We Do, Let’s Burn All the Interviews

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Jeet Heer has a post up about Why We Need Criticism. His basic premise, as near as I can tell, is that criticism is just people talking about art — so whether or not we “need” criticism, we’re unlikely to get away from it.

I don’t have any problem with that per se, but…well, look at this:

If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different. (my emphasis

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it. A second post privileges the criticism of artists even more strongly when Jeet says “you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books”.

I don’t deny that artist interviews can be interesting and valuable. And some artists, like James Baldwin and T.S. Eliot, were first rate critics as well. But…looking to interviews and artists for criticism is like looking to critics for art. It’s not totally crazy, but it’s not the best strategy either.

Criticism is a genre of writing. It’s a craft and an art, with its own history and its own integrity as a discipline. That doesn’t mean it has to be professionalized — on the contrary, I’d prefer that it weren’t. But it does mean that to write criticism, it does help to be interested in criticism, just as to write comics it helps to be interested in comics. When Gary Groth conducts a long interview in which he nails down where artist x was and who he worked with for every month of his life over the past four decades — that’s great and worthwhile work, but the result is not exactly criticism as criticism is generally understood. When Alan Moore makes some off the cuff remarks about Steve Ditko, that’s cool and Alan Moore is an insightful guy — but it’s not the same as an actual essay with an actual thesis which actually attempts to engage with a critical tradition.

So…who cares anyway? If folks wants to read interviews instead of criticism, where’s the harm exactly? If Jeet thinks people will get more from a Comics Journal interview than form one of his own essays, why should I kick?

Well, two reasons. The first has to do with this, again from Jeet:

“The simple fact is that because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics, infected as it is with fannish boosterism and journalistic glibness, the interview form has been the crucial venue for comics criticism and comics history. ”

For Jeet, then, interviews fill a critical gap. Comics journalism is so bad that we need interviews to save us.

Unfortunately, Jeet has this exactly bass ackward. It isn’t interviews that are saving us from critical poverty. It’s the fetishization of interviews that has led us into this critical difficulty to begin with. Critical comicdom is obsessed with interviews not because there’s nothing else, but because, historically, critical comicdom comes out of the fanzines. The reliance on interviews as critical touchstones is the result of “fannish boosterism” — and it’s also a cause, as critics scuttle around gathering up pearls of wisdom from the horse’s mouth rather than kicking the horse in the teeth, prying off the skull, and making out of it a thing of horror or beauty or ridicule of their own. And as for “journalistic glibness” — substituting five or ten sentence sound bytes by famous artists for an “analytic essay” seems to me to fit the bill.

And the second reason that substituting artists for critics is not ideal is that, besides being bad for criticism, it’s not especially good for art. One of the things criticism does is open up the conversation, both directly, by making artists communicate with people who have different interests and backgrounds, and indirectly, because ideally critics are connected to other critical communities, which are connected to other artistic communities. If you are always turning inward to have artists interpret themselves for an rapturous audience, you end up with a closed circuit — a world in which R. Crumb is not just a talented cartoonist, but a major Biblical scholar; a world in which a shelf full of books about, say, Buddhist ink painting won’t teach you as much about art history (or about the right art history?) as a few hours listening to Gary Panter.

I’m not saying that people should respect criticism. Criticism, like art, deserves not respect, but unremitting hostility. The real problem with Jeet’s discussion is not that he elevates art over criticism, but that he allows his fannish enthusiasm to cast a nostalgic glamour over both. Unless art and criticism are separated, it’s impossible to hate either with sufficient malice. Clubby amity is for interviews; what we really need from criticism and art is more and higher quality loathing.

Update: In reply to some comments below, I have a follow-up post here.

Strange Windows: The Adventures of Tintin in Otherland, Part 4

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After three installments criticising Hergé for rampant racism and xenophobia, I uneasily picture his ghost appearing before me, with a quizzical smile.

« So, » says the ghost, « you’ve really dragged me through the mud, eh ? But what about yourself, Alex? Are you a racist?”

“No!” I answer. ”No, but…”

New York, Washington Square Park. I loiter around a chess game – I’m a rotten player, but I enjoy it as a spectator sport. Somebody grabs my arm—a muscular young Black man. I tense up with a fight-or-flight boost of adrenaline…

“You want a game?” he asks.

He didn’t want to mug me, he wanted to play chess.

Many another middle-class, middle-aged White man can attest to such embarrassing moments, where — despite professed liberalism– racist instincts seem to kick in at the worst times. It’s good that our conscious selves master our subconscious. The fact is, for one of my generation (I was born in 1954), urban African-Americans were synonymous with danger; an unofficial apartheid divided the city; and despite the fact that I was never hurt or even threatened by a Black man (the few times I was mugged were by Whites), I had internalised this detestable racist prejudice, one that went unspoken

Yet, would I have reacted the same had the incident occurred in Paris? I doubt it.

I was born to a French father and an American mother, growing up bi-cultural in America with long stays in France, where I now live. Like many bi-culturals, I have something of a split personality: there’s an American Alex and a French Alex.

French Alex has no doubt internalised quite different prejudices towards Black people. Consider this poster for a chocolate drink known to all French kids:

That soldier is a Tirailleur Sénégalais, one of hundreds of thousands of colonial soldiers sent to the front in World War One. Note his joyful laugh, over his exclamation “Y’a bon!”, which can roughly be translated as “Sho’nuff good!” The slogan is still heard as a racist taunt.

This was the French cliché of the Black man: a merry, childlike creature eager to serve his master. And I wonder if somewhere deep in my subconscious, that stereotype shamefully thrives.

(The image itself is still used:)

This is the context in which we should consider Tintin au Congo, and Hergé’s various racist lapses: they won’t in themselves convert a kid to racism, but they will confirm the mentally and morally lazy stereotypes that pervade every culture. And it’s hard to underestimate the ubiquity of Tintin in Europe. So, the librarians who remove Tintin au Congo to the adult stacks are doing their duty.

Myself, I got a bit of a jolt reading Tintin en Amérique. Even as an eight-year-old, I knew this America was just a comic fantasy:

…and no American I knew was remotely like the greed-crazed, thuggish citizens depicted therein.

I was, for once, at the sharp end of Hergés stick.

So, Tintin to the incinerator?

No. Other powerful and positive forces of Hergé’s approach to the Other are the attraction and wonder of foreign lands, foreign people. How many youths have set out to explore the world inspired by Tintin? And aren’t the values embodied by the plucky little reporter worthwhile ones—courage, loyalty, justice?

Besides which, the Tintin albums are simply wonderful yarns, crammed with suspense, comedy that is often uproarious, lovely art. They are about as fun as comics can get.

As for Chang, the young student who opened Hergé’s eyes to Chinese civilisation, he returned to Shanghai in 1936 to open a drawing school, which he managed for thirty years. He was purged by the Cultural Revolution, in which he suffered badly. Hergé never stopped trying to help him, and finally was able to bring him back to Belgium in 1981. The two friends were speechless at their reunion, 44 years after their separation.

 

Herge and Chang in 1931…

 

…Chang and Herge in 1981.

Let’s conclude where we started four chapters ago : with Tintin au Congo.

How do Africans feel about it?

It is, in fact, a perennial seller in Francophone Africa. Hergé was delighted that it was serialised in 1969 in the prestigious African Zaïre magazine.

That may sound like another depressing example of internalising one’s oppression…but not so fast. Here’s what Zaïre had to say about the strip:

“If certain caricatures of the Congolese people in Tintin au Congo make White people laugh, they also made the Congolese readers laugh because they found plenty to mock in the White man who saw them that way!”

In other words, they are laughing at, not with, the whites.

Three examples of African appropriation of Hergé’s imagery:

 

Sculpture from Kinshasha, Zaire

 

Kinshasha street mural

From  Benin: Tintin, Congolese, and a missionary.
All Tintin art and images copyright Moulinsart

The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.

A Short Walk through the Unifactor: Jim Woodring, Frank and Weathercraft

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The Unifactor. A world born of the intellect, hallucinations and waking dreams of its author. An expanse which might just as well be called the Unimind, a pantheistic unshifting wonderland of the soul; instinctive in its creation and consistent in its mythology.

We first catch sight of one of its substrates in the stained glass window of a mansion or temple Frank has been assigned to clean.

Continue reading →

Overthinking Things 7/5/10

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My elementary school library was a paradise. I don’t remember much about it, other than that when I was there, I was left alone to do what I like best – read. I don’t remember whether there were other people in the library, but my sense was that I was alone. The librarian is, in my memory, an amorphous shape, watching me kindly without interfering. It was quiet oasis, full of my best friends, books.

In the stacks, in the back left corner of the first row was the pile.

Three Musketeers

Robin Hood

Jungle Book

…and dozens more Classics Illustrated comics.

This huge pile of classic comics were my key into a kingdom of literature in which I still maintain a summer home. It was through these brightly colored, “Boy’s Own”-type stories that I was moved to read some of the best – and some of the worst – American and British Literature had to offer.

I devoured these comics. I spent every moment I could in that library and when I had read and re-read every comic in that pile, I turned to the rest of the stacks and started to read the books synopsized in those comics. This was an act whose fruit was born when I was in high school and realized that I was the only one in my class who had heard of, much less already read, everything we covered in Freshman literature. (Except John Knowle’s A Separate Peace which I still am angry and resentful about being made to read.)

Classics Illustrated had it all – characters and plots that had stood the test of time, psychological drama, rollicking adventures, the kind of insight on the human condition I was never going to find in Walter Farley’s horse series.

Crime and Punishment as a comic? Hell yes. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? It was *made* to be a comic book. In fact, if Robert Louis Stevenson was alive now, I wager he would be a famous comic writer. (Okay, probably not, but it’s a fun thought.)

In my comic collection I still retain several Classics Illustrated, and while I don’t take them out and read them anymore, I would feel that a piece of my history was gone if I didn’t have them safely tucked away. When I started to seriously collect comics as an adult, these were among the first I added to my collection. Not the holes in the candy-store bought Fantastic Four arc with the reverse-time traveling aliens, (the first story arc I ever really followed…and then immediately regretted it, as it progressively devolved into badly written suck and which I barely remember now, thank you god) but stories that have been seminal for me since those days many years ago.

I suppose that my only regret now is that so few books about or by women were represented. Okay, Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, yes. But, how much of my later intolerance for Jane Austen can be attributed to the fact that there was no Pride and Prejudice in that pile? And yes, I will admit that nothing (NOTHING!) will ever make Wuthering Heights into a good book in my opinion, I now can’t help but wonder if I would have enjoyed a very pretty Heathcliff and Katherine in comic form. These do exist as Classics Illustrated, by the way, they just weren’t in that particular pile in that library, at that moment.

And now, as I sit here thinking over the moment in Ivanhoe when the Unfettered Knight shows up and I said to my 11-year old self, “well, duh, that’s obviously King Richard,” I’m wondering where the hell the Classics Illustrated version of Well of Loneliness is? C’mon folks, Tale of Genji is a story of a pretty boy, his clothes and the women he treats like shit, then Well of Loneliness is perfect for a Classic comic. It’s the story of a woman, her clothes and the woman she treats like shit.

Classics Illustrated aren’t gone, by the way. This isn’t some mopey pining for a lost piece of my childhood. I don’t do that. Classics Illustrated still exists and now include more stories by and about women. They are still an awesome way to introduce a young person to great literature and to comics.

And now I think I’ll contact my old elementary school and ask if I can buy them a collection of the darn things. There’s an eight-year old out there who needs them.

Punching Hitler Since 1941: The History of Captain America in Covers

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Happy Fourth of July! Let’s celebrate the holiday with America’s most patriotic hero.

1940s

Cover by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (1941)


Cover by Al Avison (1942)


Cover by Syd Shores (1944)


Cover by [I have no idea] (1948)


Cover by Martin Nodell (1949)

1950s

Cover by John Romita, Sr. (1954)

After several failed re-launches, Atlas Comics (later Marvel) canceled Captain America with issue 78.

1960s


Cover by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman (1964)


Cover by Jack Kirby (1965)


Cover by Jack Kirby and Syd Shores (1968)

Captain America returns … and co-opts the numbering of the canceled Tales of Suspense comic.

Cover by Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia (1968)


Cover by Gene Colan, Joe Sinnott, and John Romita, Sr. (1969)


Cover by Gene Colan and Joe Sinnott (1969)

1970s


Cover by Marie Severin and Joe Sinnott (1970)


Cover by Marie Severin, Herb Trimpe, and John Romita, Sr. (1971)

Renamed to Captain America and The Falcon with issue 134.

Cover by John Romita, Sr. (1973)


Cover by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia (1974)

Captain America briefly lost his faith in America and became Nomad after discovering that President Nixon was the leader of a terrorist organization called the Secret Empire (and before you ask, no, I’m not making that up).

Cover by Jack Kirby (1976)


Cover by Sal Buscema (1978)

Poor Falcon lost his title billing in issue 223.

1980s

Cover by Frank Miller and Bob McLeod (1980)

Now THAT’S how you start off the 80’s…

Cover by Mike Zeck and John Beatty (1982)


Cover by Bob Budiansky and Joe Sinnott (1984)


Cover by Mike Zeck and Klaus Janson (1987)


Cover by Kieron Dwyer and Al Milgrom (1989)


Cover by John Buscema and Tom Palmer (1989)

1990s

Cover by Ron Lim (1990)


Cover by Rik Levins and Danny Bulanadi (1992)


Cover by Dave Hoover (1994)

Captain America was canceled with issue 454, which led to the Heroes Reborn relaunch…

Cover by Rob Liefeld (1996)

That was followed quickly by the Heroes Return relaunch…

Cover by Ron Garney (1998)

2000s

And the book was relaunched again…

Cover by John Cassaday (2002)

And the book was relaunched again…

Cover by Steve Epting (2004)

And the book was relaunched again…

Cover by Alex Ross (2009)

Gluey Tart: Kiss Your Hair

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Duo Brand, 801 Media, 2010

I don’t understand how a story about a hair fetishist (and a book named for same) could go so far wrong. Seriously. The first story in this book is about two servants at an estate where everyone is hired for their long, beautiful hair. One of the servants does very naughty things with the master – wink wink, nudge nudge. Delighted as I was by this premise (and that would be very delighted indeed), my reaction to the actual story can be summarized thus: Meh. There were long-haired pretty boys, sex, romance – but not enough detail in any area to sell it. The art isn’t quite good enough to stand on its own, either.

But I did not despair, because I had not actually bought the book for the hair fetish story. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about the hair fetish story. Or the second story, whatever that was about. (I couldn’t tell you, literally to save my life, and I’m too lazy to get up and walk into the next room to pick up the book. Ditto stories three and four.) No, I cared about the guys on the cover, and they were in the fifth story, “Escape.” That’s the one I had my hopes pinned on.

My standards aren’t usually so low that four out of five stories in a compilation can suck and I’m just fine with that. (There was a sixth story too; don’t remember that one either.) This was a special case. It’s a Weiss Kreuz thing.

I’ve written about my Weiss Kreuz situation before, recently and less so. I have a major, major thing about two of the characters in that anime, which is insanely bad. Really – however bad you’re thinking it is, badify it about 75 percent, and we might be in the ballpark. It’s almost one of those so-bad-its-good things. Almost. Which is like jumping from the roof of one building to another and almost landing. We are not concerned about the shocking lack of quality offered by Weiss Kreuz, however. We are concerned with – me. Me, me, me. Me and my bizarre fixation with Aya and Yohji.

Because the guys on the front of this book (hey, we’re talking about the book again!) look like Aya and Yohji from Weiss Kreuz, who just happen to be my OTP (one true pair, fanfic-speak for the two fellows upon whom I have affixed the majority of my unhealthy erotic attention). I saw the cover and didn’t really care about anything else. Aya is an intense, redheaded, sword-wielding assassin. He often wears a long, swishy burgundy leather coat and a sort of S&M turtleneck with a leather strap that buckles across his throat. Yohji is an impossibly tall, lanky, world-weary blond who kills people by strangling them with a measure of wire he flips out across vastly improbable distances, from his watch. (God is in the details, people.) Yes, I hoped the story about those characters (not-Aya and not-Yohji, I mean) would be good, but such is my depravity that I was in fact willing to spend $15 or whatever it was (see above re. poor memory/too lazy to go look at book) just to have an image that looks like these characters but is slightly better drawn. I cannot defend this. Obviously, I am mad.

So, that fifth story. Not much happens, and it’s not entirely coherent, but it does not suck, at least not too much, and I do remember it. Huzzah! (We like to keep the bar low for celebrating our wins here, chez Kinukitty.) The sort-of redhead (the cover is murky and undecided as to his hair color, but I am morally certain it is red, based on the “because I insist” principle) is an assassin who is injured and shows up at a safe house run by a tall lanky blond. And, what do you know! The redhead and the blond were friends in high school! And apparently the redhead became an assassin to avenge some injury inflicted on the blond. All that is a bit lightly told and sparse on details, much like party mix is always mostly peanuts, hardly any cashews. I always wonder, in cases like this, if the author simply miscalculated about how many clues to leave for the reader – maybe in her efforts to avoid banging us over the head with unnecessary back story, she unwittingly left us with less a rich tapestry and more a moth-eaten sweater. Or maybe she just didn’t feel like fleshing out the details. I don’t really have any theories, but I do remember thinking the other stories suffered from a similar feeling of not being fully imagined. Whatever they were about.

Anyway, the initially grim assassin perks up under the care of the tall, lanky blond, who is sad to see his old friend go. And, basically just like that, the two wind up at the airport, flying off into the sunset together. You think I’m skipping over a lot of story there, but I assure you I am not. It’s a sweet ending, really. And sort of a sweet story, to the extent that there’s any story there. The important thing is that there are several images that look very Aya/Yohji to me, and because I am a simple creature, I am happy.

I don’t actually know anything about Duo Brand. Who is it? Is it a person? A collective? A person who houses a multitude, like the Borg? Whoever it/they is/are, I can’t help wondering if the hive mind is aware of and perhaps likes Weiss Kreuz, particularly Aya and Yohji. Because Crimson Wind? Redhead with a sword, with a tall, lanky blond. Shards of Affection? Murky redhead with a sword and a long, swirling burgundy coat with a sort of blond (his hair is white, which is of course almost the same thing). Isle of Forbidden Love? Well, not a redhead, but a lithe young thing in pigtails, a kimono, and geta, his legs wrapped around the hips of a blond pointing a gun – so I’m willing to ignore the lack of red hair and generally unassassinly air (Kinukitty is somewhat catholic in her kinks). Do I have all these titles? Yes, I do. Am I ashamed of myself? I would be, if I were familiar with this thing you call shame. Did I really just buy them because they remind me of Aya and Yoji? Er, yes. Shut up.

So, Kiss Your Hair. I don’t think so. Unless you need that picture of the Aya-like eyes. And I would support you in that.

EXCITING UPDATE! (July 4, 11:39 a.m., CDT)

I was doing the laundry and found Isle of Forbidden Love (don’t ask), and guess what! Pig-tail guy does have murky red hair! And a sword! My excitement cannot be contained.

That is all.