Tag Archives: feminism

Muck Encrusted…: Power, Gender, Jeans: An Ode To Abby Cable

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As any reader of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing can tell you, there’s little doubt that the emotional core of the series is Abigail Arcane Cable, initially Swampy’s friend, later his paramour, and still later, his common-law wife. Moore’s greatest coup in the series was in turning Abby into what is probably the greatest female character in the history of mainstream superhero comics. Admittedly, the competition isn’t much to write home about, but Abby (and Moore) clear the bar with room to spare. It’s easy to forget that Abby was initially the Bavarian niece of a mad scientist who wanted to steal Swampy’s body for the purposes of immortality (yes, that hoary old trope). For this reason, Abby could easily have been repurposed as “traumatized in youth,” as “stranger in a strange land,” or even as “exotic sexual object” without necessarily betraying her history. Moore does none of the above. Despite being faced with a variety of horrors (demons, monsters, monkey kings, werewolves, super-powered alcoholic husbands possessed by the spirit of her insane uncle), Abby is never reduced to a “damsel in distress” that the hero rescues in episode after episode, nor is she (like the typical female superhero) depicted as a balloon-breasted, spandex-clinging object for the male reader’s masturbatory viewing pleasure. Instead, Abby is a smart, brave, resourceful woman who is more interested in helping others than in “being saved,” and whose beauty and sexuality are only a part of her intellectual and emotional arsenal. She also usually wears jeans.

Abby does her share of screaming and running (more the latter) in the early episodes and is “rescued from hell” in Swamp Thing Annual #2 (the template for Sandman and a variety of other Vertigo series). However, from the very beginning it is clear that she is never present just to be rescued. In issue #26, Abby identifies a monstrous threat to Elysium Lawns, the home for autistic children at which she works, and heads off to help because “they need somebody tonight.” Her husband’s leering reply and her scorn for it, indicate early on that Abby is not to be seen as mere object for the male gaze.

Instead, this scene makes her the “hero” of the episode, even if she must finally bring Swampy, Etrigan the Demon, and Paul, the autistic child, into play in order to conquer the threat. The story itself is pretty stupid, bringing out the worst of horror clichés (“I will show you your deepest fears!”) and ends with a whimper, not a bang. Abby’s role, however, sets the stage for her importance to the rest of the series, and Moore’s commitment to woman characters who aren’t just window-dressing.

As previous posters have mentioned, not all of Moore’s attempts at feminism “work,” with the werewolf issue (#40) being a particularly egregious example of overwriting and overmoralizing. The depiction of a woman confined, domesticated, and objectified by male society (and who wreaks her revenge by transforming into a werewolf at “that time of month”) strains even the most good-hearted of liberal sympathies. The inevitable suicide by the werewolf doesn’t help either, following as it does, a string of literary/cultural representations that suggest that the best way “out” of a patriarchal society is not social change, or even a display of female strength, but a resignation in death. “The Curse” is definitively not as well written as novels like Virginia Woolf’s “The Voyage Out” (not quite a suicide, but close enough) or Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” and its conclusive “message,” coming from a bunch of men producing a superhero comic, is even more disheartening. As someone in the letters column noted, even the medium of self-inflicted death is irredeemably dumb, since no grocery store would be idiotic enough to display its sharp knives with the points facing out (would they).

Still, Moore is nothing if not willing to correct his mistakes (or to return to his favorite themes), and his return to explicitly feminist motifs in issue #54 is one of my favorites. In “The Flowers of Romance,” marginal characters Liz Tremayne and Dennis Barclay return after a three year absence in the issues following Swampy’s “death.” Liz and Dennis were friends of the Cables in the Marty Pasko run on the series, and in the time since readers last saw them, Dennis has used their supposed pursuit by the Sunderland Corporation to make Liz, a previously dynamic and professional woman, completely dependent upon him. If there’s any horror in this series, it’s in this story. With Swamp Thing dead and no monsters or demons in sight, the issue depicts Liz’s psychological rape. Dennis convinces Liz not to use electronic equipment for fear of electrocution, to wear towels as underwear, to stand up in the bathtub for fear of drowning, etc.

Fear is used as manipulation in the story as it is by Norsefire in V for Vendetta in order to establish the fascist state. Here, though, the fear is personal and the depiction of an abusive relationship is harrowing long before Dennis even makes his appearance in the story. In this case, the gendered political message arises out of a single relationship, affirming the feminist mantra that “the personal is political.” Like the men of “The Curse,” Dennis mentally cripples, domesticates, and imprisons a woman—but here the theme feels less like a hectoring prose-poem and more like an adventure story with cunning insight into personal psychology and social practice. Here also, the woman is saved not by resignation, but by individual agency (when she finds the courage to turn on the television and to leave Dennis to find Abby) and by another woman: Abby. Abby, herself traumatized by Swampy’s death (depicted beautifully in a pair of wordless pages) takes Liz in and protects her from Dennis, who follows her in an attempt to bring her back under his control, or wreak revenge. Dennis is armed and clearly insane, but Abby keeps her head and manages to lure him into the swamps, where he is ultimately consumed by alligators.

The result is, without a doubt, and with some degree of cliché, female “empowerment,” as Liz begins a slow ascent back to her previous self (mostly accomplished in Rick Veitch’s run on the series), and Abby begins to move on with her life.

Abby’s resiliency, combined with the focus on the strength of the female community in resisting masculine power, reminds the reader that Abby cannot merely be defined as “Swamp Thing’s girlfriend.” Rather, her identity exceeds that role and has the capacity to redefine itself. Since everyone involved (reader, writer, artist) knows very well that Swamp Thing will return, Moore certainly had the option of having Abby wallow in misery for the requisite number of issues until the hero’s return. The fact that she begins to “bounce back” only a month after Swampy’s death suggests that Abby may, in fact, be the hero of the book, the personality around whom Swampy revolves, rather than the reverse. Another high point is in the following month’s episode, devoted to Swampy’s funeral in Gotham. Batman invites Abby to make a public statement, perhaps even to “condemn us for our lack of understanding,” but Abby’s impulse is to keep her private love private, not to flex her muscles, or her “rights,” but to mourn in her own way.

After Swampy’s very public, and ultimately futile expression of his own feelings, Abby’s quiet moment of mourning presents a stark contrast, and a display of inner strength (if not of public power) that exceeds Swampy’s. In the first month of their separation, Swampy comes much closer to madness and “giving up” than Abby herself ever does, going so far as to create a “vegetable Abby” (and an entire hallucinatory supporting world) in order to cope with his loss (in issue #56).

Abby’s centrality and resiliency is never meant to minimize the intensity of the connection between the two characters. It does, however, begin to put Swampy’s own “heroic” status into question. The entire final year of the series gets its power, immediacy, and impact from the love between Abby and Swampy, but that very relationship begins to take on some troubling ambivalence. “Outed” in the tabloid press as being a vegetable-lover, Abby is arrested and brought to Gotham City, providing the set-piece for one of the coolest “battles,” and the finest art, in Moore’s run. John Totleben’s solo effort in the double-sized #53 is the piece de résistance of Swamp Thing illustration and of Moore’s overactive imagination. Popping out ideas for Swamp Thing’s vegetable powers faster and with more frequency than a nuclear-fueled pez dispenser, Moore reveals Swampy’s power to flood the air with aphrodisiacs and hallucinogens, to grow in the human intestinal tract, to occupy multiple bodies simultaneously (not safe for Batman), and to become a huge redwood Swamp Thing, thanks to the Gotham botanical garden.

All of these “tricks” are exercised in the pursuit of Abby’s peaceful return, linking the most “public” and superheroic of the series’ moments to its most personal. The series is at its worst when pitting cosmic evil vs. cosmic good (as in the similarly double-sized issue #50), but it is at its best when focusing on the most personal emotions. Swamp Thing #53 is about that most banal of story ideas, “the power of love,” but that idea is exhibited in startling (and troubling) new ways, when an entire city is transformed into a jungle and redwood-Swampy towers over it. Moore’s typical critique of and aversion to “power” is here put under pressure by the celebration of love (and particularly love and sex unconstrained by social norms). In the end, though, the critique of power stands, and Swampy’s increasing (near omnipotent) strength ultimately undermines his love more than his love justifies the exhibition of that power. As in Watchmen and Miracleman, the exercise of power is not here a “good thing.” Instead, Moore warns (as he often does) of the tendency to mistake power for morality, to assert one’s personal beliefs/ideals in order to “save” others and, in so doing, to deprive them of freedom and agency. It is true, that Swampy fights against an arbitrary and unfair institutional power, but his efforts to overcome it materialize as a carbon copy of its faults, not as an alternative ideology. Swampy flexes his muscles and tries to show who has the bigger (redwood) dick, rather than proposing a communal compromise, or a mutually acceptable solution.

Swampy’s reveling in his newfound strength is punished, almost immediately, by the D.D.I. (some sort of shadowy government agency with a connection to the remains of the Sunderland Corporation) and Lex Luthor, but it is initially difficult for the reader not to sympathize with him, since his display seems connected to the hippy values the series evinces elsewhere, even in the same issue. Even as Swampy asserts his own personal needs over and against the community of Gotham, that community seems to respond powerfully and positively, with Gotham’s dormant “flower-children” embracing Swampy and his values of “love,” “nature,” and “community.”

Since these values are also the series’ (and represented most iconically by the Abby/Alec connection), it’s a tough pill to swallow when Swampy is killed/banished at the moment of reunification.

It is equally troubling, if for opposite reasons, when the couple’s second reunion (Swampy’s return to Earth in #63) is delayed by a series of “revenge murders” of the DDI operatives on Swampy’s part. In “Loose Ends (Reprise),” even the title indicates that Swampy is repeating the atrocities committed by DDI/Sunderland, not escaping them. Back in Moore’s first issue, entitled “Loose Ends,” Sunderland cleaned up the titular hanging threads of Marty Pasko’s run on the series by pursuing and killing Swampy and his friends. Now, with power on his side, Swampy does the same to the DDI operatives. The series spends its final year exploring and emphasizing the importance of the (stereotypically feminine) values of love and community at the expense of the (stereotypically masculine) values of power and violence, but it is a lesson that Swampy himself doesn’t seem to learn. His first move on his return to Earth is another ostentatious display of power, similar to the one that got him “killed” in the first place. Mowing through the DDI/Sunderland killers before he even lets Abby know of his return, he places power/violence chronologically and ideologically before love, even as Abby is drawing strength from her newfound community of friends and associates (Liz Tremayne, Chester “tuber head” Williams, etc.)

Moore’s run on the series soon concludes with a “domestic paradise” with Swampy withdrawing from the world and constructing a “lime tree bower” for his lady love. Still, on re-browsing (and re-thinking) it is questionable whether or not his return is to her benefit. After all, Dennis Barclay constructed a “domestic paradise” for Liz, similarly enforced by his superior power and his professed love. Swampy’s heart seems to be in the right place in the final issue, but his means of getting there is on a pile of corpses. Given Moore’s critique of power elsewhere (even and especially supposedly benevolent power, like that displayed by Miracleman and Ozymandius), it seems unlikely that we are meant to view issue #64’s “domestic bliss” as a clear and pure “happy ending.” Swampy makes a vow to “withdraw” from human affairs, “to know and to never do”—for to assert his power, even for others’ benefit, would be to remove human agency and responsibility, as he finally acknowledges. Only one page after making this promise to himself, however, Swampy’s continuing hubris is evident. When Abby reminds Swampy that “they don’t build dream-homes” in the middle of the Swamp, Alec replies, “Perhaps they don’t…I did not intend to ask them,” constructing a “castle” for this muck-encrusted king and his consort. Swampy “does” without asking, without consulting anyone (including Abby herself). He continues to assert an almost incomprehensible power without considering the possible consequences. Swampy’s exercise of power hardly seems on the same level as the petty and repulsive brand applied by Dennis back in issue #54, but in the impulse to close Abby off from the broader world and to become her universe, he repeats Dennis’ basic ideology.

The happy ending is then plagued by the undercurrent of violence and power seen in the previous episode (and in the greening of Gotham). Thanks to the careful construction of Abby Cable over a period of almost four years, however, it is difficult to worry about her. She’ll take care of herself.

 

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Update by Noah: You can read the entire Swamp Thing roundtable here.

In which Caro reads The Bun Field, muses on gender and metaphor and remembers how hard it is to write short

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This is the first of a series of posts about art comics by women, combining reviews with critical attention to whether it matters that women wrote them. Bear with me through a little awkwardness; it’s been awhile since I’ve stretched these muscles.

In her response to last week’s “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago” thread, Erica Friedman gave an insightful and succinct summary of a theme that’s run through a number of recent HU posts: “Men represent men’s stories,” she said, “and set that as societal norm, so any women looking to rise in the field will have to write/draw those stories too or be relegated to an inferior ‘girl’s’ position.”

Hold that thought for a few paragraphs, will you, please?

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Finnish artist Amanda Vähäm?ki’s The Bun Field (Campo di Baba) got a decent amount of attention from critics when it came out in English translation last summer (June 2009). If you haven’t read it, Bart Beaty gave the following summary of the action in his review of the original Italian publication :

Campo de Baba is not much of a story, and it is probably not even a story at all in the classic sense of the word. A young man (sic) awakes from a dream — or does he? At breakfast he is confronted by a blob-like creature. He goes for a drive with a bear. He trades teeth with a dog. He is winked at by an apple. With a tractor, he slaughters a field. He disappears.

Most reviews of the English-language version follow Beaty’s lead and read it as a lushly drawn extended dream sequence that makes no particular attempt at specific meaning. Other critics, like Popmatters’ Sara Cole, go a little further and claim the book represents the “lived experience of a child,” the vulnerability and confusion, how nightmarish the adult world seems. But even Cole says it “lack(s) a coherent narrative.”

To the book’s credit and in defense of the reviewers, part of Vähäm?ki’s achievement is that the book satisfies equally well either way…

…but the incoherence is vastly overstated.

Up through the title scene, it works just fine to read The Bun Field using one or the other of these two interpretations. But the panels with the younger child on the bicycle don’t fit very well with those readings.

The younger child leaves our heroine crying and rides her bike back into the setting of the original sequence (with Donald duck and the brontosaurus).

Original sequence (second panel in book)

 This time, though, from the perspective of the younger child, this setting is not ominous and foreboding; the child is not vulnerable, and the world is not surreal.

To make the narrative coherent, we have to account for that shift in perspective.

There’s a double meaning in the title of this book that admittedly is a little weak in translation. The baba of the original title is an Italian pastry shaped like the buns in the bun field, but it’s also the way a baby says “baby.” In English, you’ve got to come up with “bun in the oven” before it starts to hang together.

A Google search for “Finnish bun metaphor” adds an additional image: “eating a dry bun” is something like “a hard pill to swallow.”

The coherence of the narrative – the scene in the bun field – hinges on this cluster of metaphors: the bun is a symbol for early childhood, plowing the field destroys (eats up) the buns, the loss of childhood innocence is “a hard pill to swallow” but an inescapable part of growing up.

The moment in childhood that the book’s narrative represents marks the collision of the affectionate, imagination-rich world of the young child, where animals drive cars and talk, with the colder, crueler, more violent adult world that the older child is becoming aware of – an awareness symbolized by the acquisition of the canine incisor.

That’s why the trigger for the sobbing is not her realizing that she’s killing the buns, but the younger child telling her she could “come home,” that “everybody was waiting” for her.


In the initial readings, the tears were trauma from the inescapable nightmare, or guilt and impotence over this “murder” she was forced to commit, and the younger child was an anomaly. Here they are tears of grief over the loss of that innocent perspective of childhood, over the fact that she really can’t return home to that beautiful place where the younger child still lives with the smiling dinosaur.

That’s a pretty coherent narrative, really. It’s a fully symbolic narrative, it isn’t transparently obvious or even particularly readily accessible, and I make no claims that it’s the only possible coherent narrative in the book – but it is coherent. What it isn’t, as Bart Beaty points out, is a “story.”

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Erica commented that “men write men’s stories.” The obvious corollary to this, which came up in other comments and threads, is that women write women’s stories. Erica’s point, though, is that both women and men end up writing men’s stories, men because they’re interested and women because they have to. But if this book isn’t a story, then it can’t really be a man’s story or a woman’s story in any obvious way.

I thought it might be helpful to see a piece of writing that was more obviously a “man’s” take on these themes – the casual cruelty of the grown-up world and the lack of control that naïve children have over their interaction with that world. I asked my well-read-in-comics friend Christopher Keels for an example (Thanks, Chris!), and while nothing set in early childhood came to mind, one selection stood out as a useful contrast. Josh Simmons’ Wholesome, from Kramer’s Ergot 4, also features a world-wise dog and the broad themes of cruelty and vulnerability/control, but the dominant emotion in Wholesome is anger.

Anger is aggressive and grief is passive, so in the most reductive, Pythagorean-opposites type of gender analysis I could say that based on these associations, Vähäm?ki’s book is feminine and Simmons’ story masculine. The comparison with Simmons certainly makes Vähäm?ki’s book feel more feminine than it does on its own, but there isn’t an equivalency. Simmons’ book feels more masculine than Vähäm?ki’s does feminine.

But Erica’s point is that women have to either mime male voices or accept a lower standing, and while it’s debatable whether the feminine perspective is important for reading this book, I can’t find a reading where Vähäm?ki’s miming an explicitly male voice. She privileges neither women nor men – we all experience childhood innocence and we all experience cruelty and grief. The main character is so neutral that Bart Beaty actually got the gender wrong (the English translation identifies her as a girl in the bar scene.)

“Stories” tend to work by invoking ideas and actions and relationships that are deeply embedded within a culture; stories have histories of their own independent of the specific manifestation of them in any given book. In many ways, “story” performs the same function in plot-driven fiction (like most genre) that “metaphor” performs in The Bun Field – it’s the thing that you have to recognize in order to tie the whole thing together and make it make sense.

So thinking about Erica’s point in light of Vähäm?ki’s work raises the question of whether metaphor takes on gender characteristics in the same way that story does – do “women’s metaphors” and “men’s metaphors” exist and work in the same way that men and women’s stories do? I think you have to answer that to determine whether any difference is made by the fact that The Bun Field was written by a woman.

It isn’t really a question that can be answered for myself by reading one book, though. I’ll just have to read some more art comics by women.

Next up: Renee French

 

Gender and Cartooning in Chicago

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Despite Alison Bechdel, despite Marjane Satrapi, despite manga, women are still in many ways marginalized in American comics. And if you are a marginalized group, there are generally two ways to go about advancing your lot. You can work towards integration. Or you can work towards establishing your own institutions. Martin or Malcolm, Betty Friedan or Shulamith Firestone, the questions remain the same. Do you want to be given access to the institutions? Or do you want to change them? These two positions aren’t always or necessarily opposed, of course — some people may have voted for Barack Obama both because it marked an important moment in integration, some may have voted for him because they hoped he would change the country, and a lot of people probably voted for him for both reasons. Still the goals don’t always dovetail so nicely; often you have to pick which to prioritize, and how.

These issues were the subtext of much of the discussion at a panel on “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago,” which I attended in April. The panel was organized by Anne Elizabeth Moore (former editor of The Comics Journal and Punk Planet) and featured cartoonists Nicole Hollander (Sylvia) and Dewayne Slightweight (The Kinship Structure of Ferns, I Want to Know the Habits of Other Girls.) Each of them had thought about the problems of being a women in a male dominated field, and each had come to somewhat different conclusions about how to best advance their careers and their art.

Dewayne Slightweight (who is an acquaintance of mine) is not widely known, but he’s a remarkable young artist. Though he’s female, he identifies as genderqueer, and prefers to be referred to by the male pronoun. As this suggests, Slightweight’s thought a good bit about identity; his work is very consciously focused on exploring and building, as he put it, “feminist or queer or anti-capitalist community.” His comic The Kinship Structure of Ferns attempts “to make an art that communicates a new form of kinship” built around “love, hope, desire, and friendship.” Slightweight argued that “hierarchical capitalist culture privileges sight,” by, for example, saying, “I know what a woman looks like,” or “I know what a terrorist looks like.” So in his work, Slightweight tries to complicate looking by turning his comics into performances; he will project them on a screen and dance and sing in front of them, contrasting his body with drawn bodies and with music. He includes a CD of musical accompaniment with each comic as well, the effect of which is pleasantly disorienting. As you read and listen along, words and phrases pop out and repeat in odd, out of sync ways, breaking linear progress up into effervescent bubbles of sound and meaning.

Slightweight’s focus on separate communities and non-hierarchical experience is mirrored in his career. All of his work is self-published; most of it is not sold, but traded with friends in the underground rock and queer arts communities of which he is a part. When asked about his take on current cartooning or mass culture, Slightweight said that he had not bought a book or comic or record in something like three years. Partially this is because he makes virtually no money; he said he walks during the winter rather than taking the bus in order to save up the funds to put out his comics, and he mentioned that one of his main sources of support is food stamps. In addition, though Slightweight noted that he isn’t part of the comics scene, mainstream or alternative, because he doesn’t want to be. “I don’t need to pay attention to what dude is the up and rising star,” he pointed out. Nor does he need to worry about sexism or discrimination, since the underground community of which he is a part has lots of women, and lots of queers, and lots of feminist men. “A grouping of women and queers is not a ghetto — it’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

Slightweight, then, is committed to a separatist rather than an integrationist model of feminist culture; when asked if he would be more interested in the mainstream if it included more interesting, feminist-friendly work, his answer was essentially, “no.” For Slightweight, the very existence of the mainstream is the problem; he argued that the point of feminism was to decentralize power. “You have as much right to talk back to culture as culture has to talk to you,” he said. The point, then, for Slightweight, is not for marginalized groups to step into positions of power, but for them to speak from where they are, and so break down a hierarchy which insists on privileging certain creators or certain voices.

Nicole Hollander, the creator of the strip Sylvia, began her career as a comics professional when women were even more underrepresented in the industry than they are now. She is also a newspaper political and strip cartoonist, segments of comicdom that are perhaps the least gender-integrated. (Anne Elizabeth Moore pointed out that there had been only one female editorial cartoonist in the United States — before she was fired in the recent economic bloodletting.) It is no surprise, then, that Hollander spent a good part of her discussion talking about the barriers she had faced as a woman to mainstream success.

Hollander began her career illustrating articles for The Spokeswoman, a feminist, political magazine. After receiving some interest from book publishers, and inspired in part by Doonesbury, she tried to syndicate Sylvia — at which point she ran up against something that looked rather like sexism. One syndicate executive told her that her strip was “deep, but narrow” — narrow, presumably, because it didn’t have any men in it.

Faced with mainstream disinterest, Hollander turned to DIY. She worked to syndicate herself, phoning up newspapers on her own behalf. Though she made some sales, being a woman was a disadvantage here too — newspaper editors would often tell her, as she put it, “We have Cathy already. One woman is quite enough, thank you.” Nonetheless, she managed to land the strip at one paper and another, and to cobble together book deals, performance opportunities, and a certain amount of fame, if not exactly a fortune.

Hollander discussed not only the lack of opportunities for, but also the lack of representation of, women on the comics page. “Men want to write about men,” she noted, and pointed out that there would only be more strips for women when there were more women creators with access to the comics page. As it stands now, Hollander said, girls don’t generally think of becoming cartoonists. She herself, she said, had not been interested in comics as a girl; as a child she had liked the Phantom and Broom Hilda, but as an adolescent, comics had offered her nothing.

All of this might suggest that Hollander sounded bitter…but that wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary, she pointed out that in her experience it was her male colleagues who often complained about low pay or that they could not make a living at cartooning. As for herself, she noted, “I wish I had more money…but I feel very happy in my career. I’ve been able to say everything I wanted to say. I was able to say “vibrator” in one strip. I was able to say “orgasm”” At another point she added, “I could be Sylvia. I could be tough.” Thus, though Hollander would have liked more mainstream success, she also has appreciated the freedom which came with being on the margins.

In contrast to both Slightweight and Hollander, Anne Elizabeth Moore is somebody who follows the comics industry closely. She is in the process of conducting a series of interviews with female comics professionals, and she seems to know just about everybody there is to know. She said that for her it was very important to try to accrue mainstream power in order to promote people like Slightweight and Hollander, “whose work should be everywhere!” as she said. At the same time, she noted, when you participate in the mainstream, you end up “subverting rather than changing.”

Though Moore seemed to be at least provisionally interested in working with the mainstream, she also argued for a need for more female institutions. In response to a question from the audience about the lack of female representation in Kramer’s Ergot, and Sammy Harkham’s reportedly snotty defense of same, Moore suggested that there was a need for more (or even one) female comics anthology.

The final statement of the evening came from a Korean-born woman in the audience. She noted that growing up in Korea, she had constantly read comics by women, for women. She very rarely read any comics by men, because they were overly violent, because they focused on male characters, and because, with so many comics written by women, she didn’t have to, so why would she? In Korea, in other words, comics for women are their own separate genre and have their own audience — but that separate institutional framework is so large and so strong that it is, in fact, effectively of the mainstream. The women added that when she got to America, it was a shock to realize that women here weren’t drawing, writing, or reading comics in large numbers. “It made me really sad,” she said.

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This essay first appeared in The Comics Journal. Since it appeared, Sylvia has been cancelled in the Chicago Tribune, it’s home paper. The Chicago Reader has the story, as well as info about what you can do if you would like to try to get the decision changed.

Update Jan 2014: Dewayne Slightweight now goes by the name Lee Relvas.

Hey, You’ve Got Your Feminism In My Michael Chabon! Barf.

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Shaenon Garrity has a post about the comics-related aspects of Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay. She points out that the main characters in the novel invented every comics innovation worth inventing because they were just that cool, according to Chabon. Then she notes:

Also, just to put on my irritable-feminist hat for the day, I’ve noticed a tendency in fiction where these superhuman feats of intellect and inspiration are only considered plausible in male characters. While Joe and Sammy come up with every brilliant innovation in the history of American comic books, their lady Rosa Saks gets to be… the second-best artist of romance comics. Sure, in real life there weren’t many women during that period drawing great comic books, but neither were there any men who simultaneously combined all the best qualities of Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Will Eisner in their prime. Why must our ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy characters be confined to fanfiction.net?

I sympathize with the feminist critique. But I think you might want to be careful what you wish for. After all, Kavalier and Clay is in fact aimed at recuperating and/or glorifying a (arguably) minority group already. And speaking as a POJ (Person of Jew), I have to say that the gratuitous, oleaginous ethnic boosting in which Chabon engages is so viscerally nauseating that I fervently wish he’d just ignored my people altogether. Oh…oh, their so…ethnic! And their pasts are so colorful! Their genius…it is so distinctively Jewish — and therefore so American! How I love my country and the cute little mensches who inhabit it!

My point is, having Michael Chabon take up your cause is just not necessarily the thing for which to wish. You’re better off with the fan-fic folk taking care of your wish-fulfillment fantasies, Shaenon. They write better.