Tag Archives: Female Characters Roundtable

The Kathy Kane Syndrome: FCR 6

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It took Batman his whole life to become Batman. That’s the point of his story: to do what he does, you have to spend your whole life getting ready. But Kathy Kane became Batwoman because she felt like it. She used to be a circus performer and that was pretty much all the prep she needed. Maybe she had some refresher trampoline sessions and bouts of microscope study (“criminology”). But it wasn’t a lifetime’s training. The same with the new Kathy Kane-Batwoman. From what I saw, she chose the career on a lark and maybe took some kickboxing lessons.


Batgirl was a librarian who just decided she’d be a superhero. Catwoman at least was a jewel thief and trained to sneak in and out of buildings, but then Frank Miller made her a dominatrix. Wikipedia says Catwoman’s latest version has some gymnastics in her background and a sensei who teaches her martial arts; make him a hell of a sensei and maybe  you’ve got something. But it took a while for her to reach this point. In Batman Returns a secretary gets to become Catwoman just because she goes crazy. She’s able to jump from roof to roof, and this is right away, as a given of her new status.

Robins always get trained pretty hard. It isn’t enough that they have a circus background; they also get put thru the mill by Batman. The point of being Robin is that you’re trained this way, trained by the one fellow whose life is crimefighting. But then there’s a girl Robin and she doesn’t get trained so hard. I mean Carrie Kelly in The Dark Knight Returns. How much prep does she get before her first battle? Stephanie Brown, per Wikipedia, is another just-decides-to character. 

This pattern — boys, hard training vs. girls, no training — continues from decade to decade in the franchise, from comics to movies. Girls are always stuck into the Batman series as a gimmick. The first Kathy Kane was a beard, the new one is a hot-chick lesbian, but either way you get the idea.

I guess what surprises me is how the same rule keeps getting broken year after year. Setting aside all that Batman training is a pretty big gimme, bigger than deciding this person and that person also happened to survive Krypton. It’s more like deciding that superness had nothing to do with Krypton, that Supergirl could fly because she was perky. (To me, the equivalent to the lone-survivor tampering would be to decide that the Waynes’ murder wasn’t just a random act of criminality, that it involved some larger machination. Probably the Batman people have done this at some point or other.)

You Know What’s Good About the Watchmen Movie?

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As noted here, there are a few bright spots (scroll down). Another is this: Apollonia Vanova as Silhouette, specifically the bit in the credits sequence where she steps up to a girl and scoops her in for the great Times Square V-Day kiss.Watching Vanova’s five seconds, you get the idea she actually could beat up people for fun; she seems exactly like a piss-elegant, fighting superheroine.  She’s got a tiger’s stroll, like somebody in Doc Savage. 


 I thought Vanova might be a runway model just doing the sort of walk the trade calls for, but it says here she’s a mezzo soprano and sculptress and competes as a fitness model (which means working out but not getting bulky). What she wants on her tombstone: “She lived for art.”

UPDATE: edited because I didn’t like the original

Stan’s Babe-o-Dome, b (FCR addendum)

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I was writing about Stan Lee’s hot-chick covers of the 1940s and mentioned P. G. Wodehouse. I see some resemblances between the two fellows. They’re cheery and upbeat and they see their job as entertainment, pure and simple. In person Wodehouse was very shy; no one could call Stan shy, but he is fairly private. The Raphael-Spurgeon bio tells how, back in the 70s, Stan decided he would take the guys at Marvel out for drinks; once at the bar, Stan realized he had nothing to say to them and slipped away. The reason he took them out drinking was that he heard that Carmine Infantino would take the fellows at DC out to dinner once a week. I don’t think anyone would call Infantino especially charming, and Stan is especially charming. But Infantino liked being with the gang and Stan, from appearances, would much rather be with his wife and daughter and, these days, his grandkids.

Stan and Wodehouse also showed a certain difficulty in coming to grips with unpleasant facts. Mike Ploog tells a story of his Marvel days when he asked Stan for a raise and a regretful Stan explained how in the current economic climate, etc., and then Stan began showing pictures of his latest fancy sports car. Ploog made the obvious point that there was a degree of unfairness here, and an abashed Stan immediately saw he was right. I would guess that, for the brief moments that he looks back, Stan really wishes he had stuck up for Kirby about the art and that he hadn’t been so quick to bill himself as “creator” of all his Marvel co-creations. Wodehouse certainly wished he hadn’t made those broadcasts on Nazi radio, and my only excuse for bringing Nazis into this is that Wodehouse actually did make such broadcasts and they were as harmless as broadcasts on Nazi radio can be. But as actions go it was beyond dumb. It was unthinking, and the same (in a very different arena) for Stan’s complacency about how well he was making out when others at Marvel were not being treated nearly so well. 

Turning out happy, happy entertainment, entertainment as happy and carefree as a Wodehouse book or one of those babe covers, may require a certain temperament: not just good cheer but a sharp disconnect from reality. A decent tv sitcom is grittier than Wodehouse or Stan at his most Stan-ish. The problems get wrapped up, but at least they’re there. (Which isn’t to say Wodehouse is somehow inferior to How I Met Your Mother. Wodehouse is great. At what he does he is inferior to no one, and what he does is worthwhile. But it’s a very specialized stock in trade. Stan’s babe covers aren’t really so great, but whatever.)
This disconnect from reality, when I consider it, feels to me as if it were connected to the unsocialized aspect of Wodehouse’s and Stan’s personalities. That’s why I used the phrase “Babe-o-Dome” in the head, emphasis on “Dome.” The larkiness in their works makes you (or me, anyway) think of isolation just because it’s so air weight, so free of anything at all that might run counter to larkiness. Stan’s babes capture the one moment of joy you feel at the sight of a pretty girl. What a bright moment that is, and what a small moment it is compared to everything that comes after.  

FCR 4ish: do men with unisex names write better women?

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Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was one of the first “alternative” comics I read when I was a teenager getting tired of Marvel (I bought it after reading the preview in Cerebus). I picked up around the middle of “I Dream of You,” I think, so fairly early in the run. I followed the series faithfully all through high school, painted Katchoo on my graduation mortarboard (and got the photo published in the lettercol!), angsted and argued over the characters, and decided with my best friend that she was Katchoo (but taller) and I was Francine (but gayer).

In short, it was the perfect graphic addiction for the kind of teenage girl I was. Later, I grew up, started hanging out with comic snobs (you know, the kind of horrible people who write for The Comics Journal), and found out my SiP love was stupid and misguided and didn’t I know Moore stole everything he knew from Jaime Hernandez?

I have to confess, I never read any bros Hernandez until last year or so, when another comics snob (allright, so I’ll name-drop) lent me the whole run of those giant Love and Rockets phonebooks, two by two, over the space of a year. The comic snobs may have a point with the ripoff thing. Hopey is Katchoo but moreso, and Francine has Maggie’s daffiness, voluption, and super-heterosexuality-with-one-teeny-exception. Both storylines could be called an exercise in fanny, in that they’re well-realized women in a women’s world, created for straight male gratification (at least the creators themselves are clearly getting off on drawing so many and varied hot women). And no one could dispute that Hernandez has it all over Moore in terms of artwork.

But I don’t really know that Moore is just a poor man’s, or middlebrow girl’s, Hernandez. If I had to pin it down, I would say Locas (if that’s the term for the Jaime parts of L&R) is better fanny, but SiP is better chick-lit.

One of the notable things about SiP is that it always had a very large female following, and those women, going by the lettercols and my own experiences, were disproportionately the type who “didn’t read comics” except of course Archie when they were little. Even today, SiP will always be one of the first works mentioned in message board threads of “what comics can I get my girlfriend into?” (of course, responders almost never follow up with “what kind of books does she like to read?” as if women were, you know, individuals, with divergent tastes. But I digress.)

I’m too lazy to google, but I don’t recall that L&R comes up in those threads more often than most popular comics do (because anyone who knows a woman who’s liked a comic, or is a woman who’s liked a comic, will mention that comic, and the list inevitably and logically ends up all over the map). I think the height of L&R’s popularity was before my time, but by the time I was aware of it, its boosters were all Comics Journal reading types who want to educate me about Important Comics.

Now, I never would have read and loved L&R if not for those people, and I am a sucker for anything anyone tells me is Culturally Important. But we run an iconoclastic blog here, and suburban Archie-reading housewives will always win out over comics scholars, at least until Archie moms make up the majority of our readers. So why does Moore capture that demographic better than Hernandez?

Mostly because SiP is a straight-up soap opera, whereas Locas is only an homage to soap operas (of both the telenovelistic and professional-wrestling varieties) among other things. Maggie and Hopey have a semi-fraught relationship, where Hopey expresses frustration and jealousy over Maggie’s straight crushes and Maggie is hurt when Hopey viciously puts her down as a cover for her feelings of love. But those moments are very by-the-way, and usually played for laughs rather than drama. They do fall out and get back together occasionally, but it doesn’t really seem to matter why.

SiP was, what, fifteen years of will-they-won’t-they, while Maggie and Hopey’s sex life is more do-they-don’t-they, serving the cause of male titillation rather than suspense. You don’t ache for the women’s relationship to go to the next level, cause implicitly it has, and it was no biggie…. you just kinda hope Hernandez will get around to drawing the nitty-gritty. You want Katchoo and Francine to have sex because, the way the story’s set up, it will change everything.

Most importantly, SiP is both plot-driven and episodic in exactly the way TV soap operas are. The proportions of love triangles, scheming villainesses and flawed heroines and how they will all be changed forever drives every issue. This is great for getting a devoted, strongly identifying readership. But like soap operas, it gets really boring and repetitive and forced when it becomes clear that the creator is too attached to his characters to let them go. Which is why I quit reading years before, apparently, Francine and Katchoo Did It (and my sister insists that in her universe, SiP ended after “I Dream of You”).

Locas is a weaker soap opera, but ultimately a much more satisfying work to read straight through, because Hernandez doesn’t seem very invested in What Happens Next. He likes the locas, he likes their friends and surroundings, and he likes writing stories about them in all sorts of genres. He creates plot arcs, but he’ll nonchalantly scrap them (Maggie loves Rand Race, Hopey has a baby, etc.) when he gets bored of them, and may or may not revisit the continuity years later (note, of course, that I read all of the phonebooks of Locas together, one time, rather then following each issue over ten years like SiP, and this colours my readings). Background figures become stars and then fade out again, settings and tone drastically change around the characters.

On a superficial reading, it seems like Hernandez is just exploring whatever interests him, but what interests him ends up being more interesting than will-they-won’t-they, will-this-change-everything-forever. On the downside, the sheer virtuosity of Locas, and the people who recommended it to you in the first place, can give you the impression that there must be something else going on, something symbolic, or Literary. Maybe you’re supposed to be Learning Something from the characters, rather than lusting after them.

What a drag, man. Bring on the busty bisexuals in denial.

(disclaimer: i’m all strung out trying to finish drawing an issue, so please forgive all the hysterical italicizing and the Portentous Caps.)

Because We Needed A Woman — FCR 1c

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I’ve already posted a couple of entries to the female characters roundtable, so I should no doubt stop — but….

I’ve been thinking again about the Jeff Parker Marvel Adventures Avengers series — mostly because my son has me read them to him over and over and over. For those not in the know, this is an all-ages title, featuring an alternate Avengers meant for maximum marketability. Most of the major Marvel properties are on the team: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Storm, and Giant Girl.

I know what you’re saying…Giant who? Giant Girl is the only new character created for the team; in this reality, Janet Van Dyne, the wasp, decided that growing big would be a better way to fight crime than getting teeny. (Which does make a certain amount of sense.)

This is, as I said, an all-ages title; there’s no sex at all, precious little romance, and really little differentiation by gender at all. The women aren’t sexualized; their costumes are skin tight, but so are the guys’. Storm’s look seems somewhat toned down from the classic X-Men comics actually, and Giant-Girl’s costume is as nondescript as a skin-tight purple costume can be. Storm is co-leader along with Captain America. As far as gender dynamic go, you’d be hard pressed to find anything at all objectionable.

Except maybe that the women are kind of boring. Most of the other people on the team, after all, are there because they’re popular, and they’re popular because they’re entertaining. Wolverine is a cranky bad-ass; that’s entertaining. Spider-Man is a wise-cracking jokester (and surprisingly intelligent — he saves the day a very high-percentage of the time) — that’s entertaining. Hulk is super-strong and out of control — fun. Storm, on the other hand, is straight-laced and just sort of there. Giant-Girl doesn’t even really have as much personality as that (she seems touchy about her appearance on occasion, I guess.) If Wolverine’s the mean one, and Spider-Man’s the funny one, and Cap’s the moral-compass leader, Storm and Giant-Girl are the — well, they’re the women, right?

Admittedly, Iron Man is relatively unpersonable as well. And Parker does set up a kind of mother/child, straight-woman/goofball relationship between Storm and Hulk which is quite entertaining (especially when they switch brains, so you get to see Hulk try to call down lightning on his foes while Storm is running around atempting to uproot trees with her bare hands.) But it’s hard for me to imagine that any kid is going to read these things and come away saying, you know, I really want to be Giant Girl rather than Wolverine or Spider-Man or Hulk.

This is something of a perennial problem with super teams. The Fantastic Four: Johnny’s the hothead; Reed’s the super-genius; Ben’s the crusty strong man with a heart of gold — and Sue’s the woman. Or Grant Morrison’s Justice League — Flash and GL are the young, impetuous hotheads; Batman and Aquaman are the brooding bad boys; Superman’s the moral leader; J’onn is the thoughtful voice of reason — and Wonder Woman is the woman. It’s just hard to get beyond the tokenism.

(Not that it’s impossible. The X-Men have distinct female characters (including Storm, who has more of a personality in that title than in the Marvel Avengers.))

Anyway, my point is: Elektra. They should have put Elektra in the Marvel Avengers comic. You can’t go wrong with a ninja, right?

_______________

Also in this series: Tom talks about Stan Lee’s women of romance and Bill talks about perfect girlfriend’s in manga. Miriam is fighting valiantly against a ravenous deadline, but hopefully she’ll be posting later today as well.

Update: And here’s Miriam’s Post a cage match between Jaime Hernandez and Terry Moore.

The Perfect Girlfriend (FCR Next)

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One of the manga conventions that came up in discussing YKK was the Perfect Girlfriend. The first volume presents Alpha as the sort of single girl readers might desire, though later volumes might shoot me down. Either way, she fits the ideal: demure, bright, beautifully plain.

This type shows up enough in manga for males, often played for romcom laughs. Boy meets girl through wizardry, tear in reality, adminstrative fiat. They spend a lot of time together, and boy thinks to himself, “it’s almost like we’re a married couple” as his nose erupts with blood. Video Girl Ai, Oh My Goddess, etc etc… I think it’s an 80s/90s trend, though the teenage wish, “If only everyone else in the world were wiped out in a cosmic explosion, then she’d have to love me, or just have sex with me, I’m not picky,” that’s probably eternal.

The sexual dynamics are usually very 50s, the plots wish fulfillment. So the chief pleasure’s in seeing wishes unfulfilled as the genre’s twisted into new shapes. The strangest shape of all, and the preemptive last word, Minami’s Sweetheart (?????) appeared from 1985-87 in Garo and elsewhere. The first work by Shungiku Uchida (????), it hints that she would become a key feminist author of comics like We Are Reproducing and the autobiographical novel Father Fucker. In Dreamland Japan, Fred Schodt profiled her work and unconventional personal life– each of her children has a different father, none Uchida’s lover.

Minami’s Sweetheart, her first major work, takes the fantasy for what it’s worth, more or less. Minami’s a high school senior and nerd with a six-inch girlfriend.

They live together in his room “like a married couple,” he says, as his would-be wife’s mother-in-law yells at him to study harder. Chiyomi, his sweetheart and several years his junior, shrank for no good reason one day. Now he keeps her in a doll house by his bed, sneaks her food when his mom’s not looking, and takes baths with her. For vague reasons he keeps her a secret; I’m not sure if her family’s contacted Missing Persons.

Their interactions teeter between sweet nothings and adolescent drives. He cares for her, makes her clothes (including an Iowa State sweater, go Cyclones!) and at one point thinks of her as his kid. Then they get into an argument because her breasts are growing and she wants a bra. His fantasies of them as equals make do when he’s not fretting about the tactical impossibility of sex. When it gets really bad and everyone’s asleep, he sneaks in some “onanie,” the Japanese-via-German-via-Genesis 38:9 loanword for masturbation. His real trouble, though, is not his tiny girlfriend: it’s that he’s awful with the ladies. When faced with a much cooler couple who talk of marriage after graduation, he squirms. Back home, Chiyomi greets him cheerfully, far from the complications of a the adult world.

Its complications include his mother, always hidden behind a nagging word balloon, and Nomura, a sensual classmate who toys with him. By comparison, Chiyomi is his very own toy. In fact, he imagines her as a doll in an early nightmare, pulling her limb from limb. Later, he says “you’re my toy” while thinking out loud. She agrees, teasingly calling him a pervert.

This is a female character roundtable, and at first glance Chiyomi’s not much of a character. She’s quite two-dimensional, just as Minami would imagine her. And the trick is that he’s imagined by Uchida. Men often enough have trouble writing believable women; here Uchida writes an adolescent boy who’s kind of pathetic with great sympathy. She lets him create Chiyomi, a Perfect Girlfriend so perfect reading about her is almost viscerally painful– since I’m convinced she’s his elaborate way of avoiding real interactions with real women.

In the ending (yes, I’m ruining it for you), Minami ventures out into the world with his sweetheart. They hop the train for the hot springs. Chiyomi, happy and bright, peers out from his shirt pocket at the view. A series of older women wonder why this kid’s walking around talking to himself. After they climb a mountain, a car of young punks rounds the bend and knock him off the road. You can fill in the details. On the last page, some time later, he walks past a young mother with her kid, asking why her pet bird died. “Because it was small.”

I read somewhere that Uchida wept on drawing the last chapter. Reading the blog reviews and so forth, most people read it as a “Pure Love” story, which is how I guess the two TV versions played it. Others in the genre feature young lovers whose feelings stay pure forever thanks to the sweet embrace of tuberculosis, war, etc. The only tragedy in Minami’s Sweetheart is adulthood. Put away childish things, like a boy’s elaborate fantasy of a doll that’s his girlfriend. Still, you could read it as a magical romance, though what a strange one it is. The story’s strength is that Uchida never commits either way, never judges.

Dovetail: The name of Uchida’s first baby? Alpha.

***

Update: the critic Adam Stephanides drops by in the comments (scroll past all the Victorian lit), and notes his own fine review of Minami’s Sweetheart.

Stan Lee Presents: Welcome to the Babe-o-Dome (FCR part 2)

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Noah’s been conducting the FCR Roundtable by himself and doing a good job of it. My contribution is an extract taken from “Face It, Tiger,” a column I did for TCJ last year. It’s about Spider-Man’s Brand-New Day relaunch, including the cold-blooded decision that Mary Jane could no longer be part of the series as Mary Jane, wife and long-legged gal; now she has to be Jackpot, a superhero who has no claim on Peter but can swing around the rooftops with him.

The extract focuses on Mary Jane and her sad history, with attention to her roots in Stan’s Atlas humor comics. Before getting to the extract, which I promise is down below, I’m going to talk a bit more about the babe covers Stan dreamed up for Atlas. He loved them; coming up with those things suited him down to the ground.

Let’s start with an example (Atlastales.com guesses it was drawn by Ken Bald):

Venus

The covers are kind of sweet, in that the point is simply how swell various guys find the featured girl — outlandishly swell. The girls transport them the way Frankenstein’s monster scares hell out of Lou Costello. But the focus is different, in that Frankenstein’s monster is there an excuse for Costello to do his doubletakes — the real point of the scene — whereas the guys are there to underline how wonderful Venus is (or Millie or Hedy or whoever).
From what I’ve seen, and I have looked thru many piles of Golden Age comics, the “ga-ga” approach to teen humor was not too widespread. Lots of comic books featured pretty girls doing silly things, but usually the gag had nothing to do with how delirious they made the average joe feel. Usually the joke came from the girl getting jealous or skimping on her homework or possibly falling on her ass while she was out for a skate. That last cover has a panties flash because it’s for a Fox title and Fox was put on earth to make Atlas look like it had class. Al Feldstein worked on the series in question, called Junior, and did a series of odd covers that combined smirkiness with very stiff drawing. It was like seeing busty cigar store Indians wearing wigs and lipstick and getting molested by gusts of wind. Those sweaters got molded very tight but around inhumanly definite body parts; just the sweater folds looked like they could hurt you.
Junior
Stan, by contrast, seemed to operate on the idea that there was no such thing as sex. He wasn’t hinting at the forbidden; he didn’t have a clue about the forbidden. Consider:
Hedy of Hollywood 36
A given feminist might dislike Stan’s covers more or less or about the same as any other good-girl cover from the period. Stan’s approach wasn’t feminist, it was just Stan: candy colored, high spirited, and cut off from entire realms of pressing, everyday facts, such as the obvious followup to kissing a powerful older man who can give a gal a job. (Side note: Kind of surprising to see sandles on a 1940s Hollywood director, or any Hollywood director; didn’t realize that was ever part of the stereotype.) Stan took a boosterish approach to good-girlism. Everything was upside, no problems in sight. Betty and Veronica and Archie had problems, though trivial ones. Hedy and Millie and so on mainly provided an excuse for Stan to give a hip-hip-hoorah.
I hated the way Stan and Jack presented Sue Storm, and it’s rare that comic book sexism gets a rise out of me. But the childish way they made her act was really irritating. Millie and Venus and so on are also infantalized, but I don’t mind them. My guess at the reason: Sue was part of a working team, and her playing the fool provided an occasion for Reed to be the grave, authoritative man in charge. The scenes reminded me of the shoddy way men tried to con themselves into thinking they were manly (capable, authoritative, adult) by pretending that women were tit carriers with boop-a-doop brains. (I use the past tense, “tried,” because at that point the dodge had yet to be challenged  and therefore was more widespread; I don’t mean that it has died out.) But no one is an adult in those Stan covers. It’s a baby universe, as if someone had figured out a way to get swimsuit models and necking into a P. G. Wodehouse story. 
Mary Jane is the follow-up to the Stan Lee good girls of the 1940s. I think she’s great, the crown jewel of the collection. But she became progressively less great the longer she stuck around. You can pretend for a very brief while that the notion of a knockout girl who loves a good time has nothing to do with sex. But Mary Jane was around for more than a brief while, and therefore her problems began.
And now, from “Face It, Tiger”:

 I remember being a kid and seeing my first Spider-Man issues, and the presence of Mary Jane and J. Jonah Jameson made substantial, roughly equal contributions to my belief that these were the right stories to be reading. I was under 10 and we’re talking, mainly, about early ’70s reprints of the Lee-Romita, Lee-Ditko stuff from the 1960s, emphasis on Romita. That’s when JJJ and Mary Jane laid down their groove. They were civilians, but they had oomph, like Spider-Man did in fight scenes. Instead of being heroic, one was funny and the other was sexy, but they were human exclamation points, the way superheroes are. Which is to say that the Romita-Lee Mary Jane stood in relation to period romance/teen-humor heroines in the same way a Marvel fight scene stood in relation to Green Lantern fiddling with yellow trees or the Flash running about in tight little circles. She was designed for just as much impact as audience age permitted. Getting fancy, I’d say she celebrated the idea of impact, the fact that nowadays our fun-time media really had the freedom to work us over.

Mary Jane talked the way Stan Lee wrote captions. She was a perfect expression of Stan-ism: pizzazz as a way of life. If you’re into hero comics, her first appearance counts as a touchstone. I mean the panel everybody has seen, the one with Peter’s jaw hanging open and Mary Jane standing in the doorway. She says, “You just hit the jackpot.” After saying, “Face it, tiger,” because it was a one-two punch. The moment was just boy-meets-girl, no special effects, no powers. As far as I know, this is the only civilian touchstone in the entire superhero mythos. The point of Clark Kent is that he gets to change into Superman. The point of Peter Parker, at the moment shown in this panel, is that he gets to look at Mary Jane. She’s the show. J. Jonah Jameson is the only other civilian to pull that off, in his different way — the man does a hell of a turn. Whereas Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and Happy Hogan and Alfred and Pepper Potts are more like curios and familiar faces, tchotchkes bunched around the star. Maybe Superman is unimaginable without his guys, but that’s the only reason they matter. Look at Perry White. He may be indispensable, but he’s useless.

Stan Lee had been building up to Mary Jane for years, through all those teen-humor books he liked writing so much. He never did a lot of Simon-and-Kirby-style romance, the kind with moon-faced women pondering the hazards between them and married life. Stan wanted covers with a knockout girl blazing forth her power as a knockout. Men walked into each other, fish jumped into her boat, the football player wanted to tackle her. A dork bystander might be on hand as counterpoint, to radiate cluelessness. He’s looking at the screen, his buddy is looking at the girl usher. The dork: “Wotta production!” The buddy: “Ya can say that again!” The dork bystander didn’t know fun when he saw it, and that was the joke. You could just dive in and have a good time, grab a girl and do what comes naturally. But the poor fool wouldn’t; he would never catch on that life can be fun. (If you want to hear Stan speaking with disdain, catch him on DC. It’s the same principle at work.)

The big engine behind necking, and teen romance, and giddiness at the sight of a bombshell girl, is sex. Industry rules don’t allow any follow-up for that sort of thing. As a result Stan’s approach to romance works best for one-offs, like cover gags or Mary Jane’s doorway moment. Mary Jane emptied a full bolt of glory her first time out and then it was 40 years of decline. J. Jonah could stay funny because he had the full range of motion needed for his schtick; as seen recently, he can go all the way to heart attack. But if Mary Jane wasn’t going to have sex, there wasn’t much else for her to do. In the ’80s, Marvel stuck her with a TV-movie backstory that said her larking about was just a defense; she’d put it on because of her lousy father’s drinking. So everything specific to Mary Jane turned out to be an act. The reason, presumably, was that her schtick had worn a bit thin and she now needed explaining away. At this point, Mary Jane became the girlfriend, then the wife. She didn’t do badly in these roles, but no one can do especially well in them. She was on hand. She helped buck up the hero; she provided relationship tensions. But she didn’t do anything interesting. She dressed louder than the other superheroes’ wives/girlfriends. I guess she also had more spunk, for what that’s worth. Differences in spunk among this bunch get to be like IQ shadings at a high-price computer camp. All the girls have spunk, if they don’t go crazy.

The girls aren’t all that different from one another. Put them in a situation and they’ll say the same things. And of course, their job pretty much is to be put into situations, the terrible jams facing their boyfriends/husbands. In One More Day, the love interest speaks: “Peter? Is something —” Also: “Peter, what’s happening?” Resolute: “They’ll have to come through me first.” That’s Mary Jane — not much was left at the end. One More Day has a two-page spread intended as a grand summing up of her glory. (This is just as the demon Mephisto undoes her marriage to Peter in return for letting Aunt May live.) After 41 years of print existence, you’d think there’d be plenty of material, but apparently not. She and Peter ride a bike together, just like a Pepsi ad from the 1970s. MJ sits on a couch with Aunt May, and they’re watching TV. The only bit that shows character and flair is the survival from ’60s-era MJ. There she is, wearing a Romita-designed tinfoil dress and dancing on a table. Good for her! Her final words trail into the ether. You know what they are. “Face it, tiger,” they begin, and so on.

At least she’ll be around. Her costume is fancier than most girls’, and she says “Tiger” and “Pussycat.” So the markings have been preserved, even if now they’re stuck on a superbeing. But she isn’t what she was. The old Mary Jane had a power, and that was to whip men’s eyes about in a way that deeply impacted the nervous system and left the subject feeling happy and grateful. No wonder she always had to be so giddy (“With the brain of a mosquito,” in the unkind words of Not Brand Echh). It was because she made us giddy; she represented the principle of giddiness, all-out fun. She doesn’t have that role any more: She’s another cape with a slightly different line of patter. Mary Jane’s essential purpose was to be fun. Jackpot’s essential purpose is to be Mary Jane. It’s all a bit thin and derivative.