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

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.

To Say Nothing of the Dog: Beach Reading for Meta-Historians

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last by Connie Willis, narrated by Steven Crossley. (An affordable version is available for sale at Audible.)
Obligatory note: We’ve been down baby down over here at HU for a little bit, so I’m running a review of a book rather than a comic, for technical reasons. Apologies! I hope everyone enjoys reading this instead, and I’ll be returning to visual storytelling comicness forthwith.

This is not a comic. I admit this upfront. It is, however, one of the most interesting and fun things I’ve read in a long time. I say read, but that’s not true either. I listened to it, in fact, via my Audible account.

This is the story of Ned Henry, a historian at Oxford in the future, who is trying to find the Bishop’s Bird Stump, an ugly vase, in order to complete the details of the restoration of Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed in the Blitz. Lady Shrapnell, a very powerful and wealthy woman, has dragooned Ned Henry into searching for the Bishop’s Bird Stump as part of this restoration and he has spent most of his recent weeks visiting jumble sales and church fetes.

While searching for the Bishop’s Bird Stump in the smoking Cathedral ruins, Ned becomes time-lagged, an illness which causes difficulty hearing, mental confusion, and mawkish sentimentality.

You see, historians in 2057 can travel to the past to investigate history if they follow certain rules. They must travel in clothes that fit into the time period. They must travel using the Net, a time machine, with certain co-ordinates and computer settings. They must not meet themselves, or interfere with history, or take anything back with them to the present, lest it interfere with the space time continuum and cause an incongruity. A parachronistic incongruity, in fact.

Well, Ned’s yanked back to Oxford of 2057 for being addled and sentimental and the nurse who examines him decides that what he needs is two weeks bedrest. Which will be impossible to get with Lady Shrapnell breathing down his neck. So Mr. Dunworthy, Ned’s superior, sends him to the Victorian era to recover.

And do a simple little job.

Which Ned can’t remember because of the time-lag. He also can’t understand what people are saying, but that’s partly because people in Victorian England can be quite confusing. The reader isn’t sure what Ned is supposed to do either. So here Ned is, on Oxford Railway station in Victorian England in June, outfitted in a boating blazer and a handlebar mustache, with the fate of the world depending on him.

He ends up sailing down the river with an Oxford Don who quotes Herodotus, a lovesick undergraduate who quotes Tennyson, and a bulldog.

It’s delightful.

The interesting bit, besides the river boating and the bulldog and the great writing, is that this quiet gentle story is a combination of period mystery, romance, and the exploration of chaos theory, personal responsibility, the causes of history, and physics. And it does this with church jumble sales, spoiled cats, Victorian sprirtualism, tea drinking, croquet, and well, bulldogs.

There are no explosions, unless you count a brief scene during the Blitz, no real violence, and a lot of quiet country scenes. It might sound boring, but it’s lively and interesting and fun. The nature of history and causation are explored–when are events or actions significant? How do people affect history? Is it natural forces and populations or is it character that shapes events? Which actions are significant? Who is the important person? And which is the important date–and can we tell that from inside the event?

That sounds very dry, but it’s told very much through travel on a boat down the Thames, an old fashioned Victorian spirtualism table-turning seance, sight seeing of church architecture, and other delightful scenes. I enjoyed it very much. Highly recommended.

Rocks fall, everybody dies: Asterios Polyp

This comic made me cranky.  I thoroughly enjoyed the art, which has a clean open feeling and lovely line work, and thought the story was sweet and rather sad, if a bit rote, and then….

I read the ending. 

‘Rocks fall, everybody dies’ is a phrase sometimes used in manga circles to describe a long running manga that the artist, for some reason (usually boredom) hates and cannot figure out how to end.  So they put the characters somewhere, dump a bunch of boulders on them, and there’s your insta ending. 

This comic took a story about small character changes and growth and slammed a big artistic fist down on it.  I’m sure I’m supposed to think Deep and Meaningful thoughts about why it’s an asteriod and whether Asterios is related to asteroid and whether personal changes have any effect compared to outside forces, but the story is not strong enough.  I don’t care anymore.  The artist took a boring subject that was drawn beautifully and poured a big can of paint on it (or insert your artistic edginess metaphor here).  I no longer care because the weird ending just made the whole story immaterial. I’m sure someone, somewhere, could make it an interesting artistic statement, but this is not that comic. 

And yeah, I appreciated, vaguely, the double layers everywhere.  The man with confidence who dreams but never creates, the woman who builds but has no confidence, the two forms of design, the car, all of it, but I don’t care anymore.  Not in a hateful way, but just in a bored way.  Ah well.
_______________
Update by Noah: The whole Asterios Polyp roundtable is here.

Why do I do this to myself? the Brave & the Bold #33

Wonder*Woman, Zatanna, and Batgirl

J. Michael Straczynski & Cliff Chang

It looked good on the stand in the Borders, I swear.  Three female superheroes, linked arm in arm, strolling over a bunch of fallen villains (including a monkey with a ray gun!).  How could I go wrong?

Well, to start off with, Wonder Woman makes yellow light explode out a man’s pants, and not in a good way.

First, I couldn’t tell which direction the yellow stream is even supposed to be going.  And what’s with the old duffer’s flying trucker cap?  Isn’t it enough to be disrobing one person per panel with unfortunately pee-yellow light explosions?

Grand Ballroom, this way to the yellow pants!  It’s like a Dr Suess, except not funny.

Anyway.  Zantanna pops by via a mirror and tells Wonder Woman she wants a ladies night out.  No, I’m not kidding.  Eight minutes later we watch Batgirl capture some purse-snatchers.  Purse-snatchers!  The cover promised me monkeys with ray-guns, dammit!

As Batgirl leaves the scene, we get this:

I stared at this page and tried to figure out what the heck is happening.  Finally, I decided that her bike flies between panel 4 and 5, although I don’t know why.  Apparently so we can see Wonder Woman hanging onto the middle of the bike?  I don’t even know.  Where the hell is my armed monkey, dammit?

Zantanna and Wonder Woman convince Batgirl that even supes need to relax or the stress puts them off their game.  They need to go dancing to relax!  I’m not making this up.  By now, I have resigned myself to never seeing the ray-guy monkey and to reading lame jokes about shoes, and in that respect, I am not disappointed.  Alas.

When the get to the club, Batgirl doesn’t dance, because her shoes are too tight, but she doesn’t want them magicked because her dad bought them for her.  Aw.  Or something.  Besides, no one asked her dance!

Whereupon the handsome fella below gets hit in the back of the head with a pink paintball and the action resumes and the monkey appears and–!  But no.  I’m afraid not.

Instead, as you can see, there’s some pathetic hipster dancing with a guy who might as well be wearing gold disco chains.  Blah, blah, blah dancing.  Blah, blah, blah girls eating fries in a diner.  Blah, blah, blah heartwarming talk about Batgirl’s dear old dad.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?  When Wonder Woman starts talking about “her people” the Greeks and how they used oracles as a kind of pretechnology super-computer for getting intel, I just wanted this stupid comic over.  I wasn’t getting my monkey, I wasn’t getting girl-group fighting, I got a comic book with family scrapbooking and a cheap plot twist at the end that made me roll my eyes.  You know it’s bad when the most interesting thing in the comic is an ad that appears to be for puffer-fish.

Senses Abound: Comics and Art, Theory and Bullshit

In which our fair blogger talks a bit about her critical theory and new critical approaches.

It’s been a nicely theory laden past couple of weeks here at HU, and I’ve enjoyed seeing Noah and Caro argue Lacan and Freud and Foucault.  Suat has his own lenses with which to approach comics: he’s always got some wonderful, surprising old comic art to reference and post in relation to whatever we’re peering at.  Richard has a rich and interesting knowledge of capes and artists and writers and storylines.  And our collaborators and columnists will no doubt have their own ways of thinking or talking about art.

And then there’s me, wandering around being snobby about manga art and sticking my tongue out at Clowes and rolling my eyes at Alan Moore and generally being, I suspect, a bit odd.

In watching the different critics talk about their work as critics, I’ve been thinking about my own stance and my own influences.  I’m familiar with some of the modern critical thinkers like Lacan and Freud, but I don’t particularly find them interesting.  I don’t find the old critical thinkers like Aristotle all that interesting either.  To me, they’re one voice, and to be honest, these single voices are too….  I’m not sure what.

Dull?  Un-interactive?  Non-collaborative?

Maybe if I was able to argue with Caro and Noah about Lacan, he’d become more interesting, but since Lacan makes my eyes glaze and I end up saying things like “‘m awake, really, just resting my eyes there for a second, um what?”  it wouldn’t be a very interesting conversation.

But what has occurred to me, over time, is that while I don’t have that conversation, I am still busy having critical conversations.  And these other critical conversations seem both omnipresent and invisible (isn’t everyone having these conversations right now?  No?  What do you mean no?)

And these conversations inform everything I write and very much inform how I approach the art in question.  So I’m going to talk a bit about the critics I’m wandering around soaked in and what that means for me as a comics blogger and then I’m going to talk about a new project.  Ahem.

So these conversations that I’m having, that I participate and read and revel in, come in a variety of forms but are in general created over at the great morass of feminine critical art thought that is LiveJournal.  Fandom, yes, I’m talking about fandom.  There’s a whole weird, complicated set of social rules, mores, and activities in fandom but at the moment, we’re having several interesting conversations, as one does at a big party, and it helps to think of the critical thought as something of a salon and a collaborative effort.

Instead of an icon like Lacan, I think of broad topics with a twisting path of conversational threads, often centered around either wank or a communal discussion of a notable issue.  So it’s, say, the Gabaldon Wank this past week, and in that wank, we’ve been talking about fanfic versus profic, how art is created (ie, not in a vacuum), authorial rights, porn, BDSM in published works, why gay characters always have to be evil/sadistic/die/fuck the opposite sex, and whether Marion Zimmer Bradley got screwed over by fanfic (answer: no).

Now, I understand that every community has conversations like this, and it seems as though of some of these topics are discussed via forums or blogs in comics, but one of the most notable aspects of the fandom I run in is two things: One, there’s a lot of private conversations (locked, so, like private parties) where people refine their ideas amongst friends and can talk more freely and two, there’s a lot of effort put into truly collaborative linked, meta works so that the conversation can be read as a whole.

There are individual people who gather links and then post them to create a new conversation (with or without their own take), there are communities whose sole purpose is to find interesting critical posts and wrangle the links together (like MetaFandom), there are communities where the links are wrangled and then new conversations take place (like Unfunny Business or FandomWank), there are wikis, and on and on.  It’s all based on the idea that many people are having a group discussion and that the group discussion itself is worthy of note, and that anyone may join in at any time and be of interest.

This is not to portray fandom as a nice place, because it isn’t.  It’s kind of like getting a lot of sharks together and tossing in a penguin to play with.  Manga critics: not nice people!

But this is a very much a difference from, well, the folks who run things round these here parts.  I remember reading the “welcome” post from the head honcho here, Gary Groth,  (who I’d never heard of) and being shocked at the rudeness and also the lack of buy-in, to use an annoying business term.  He doesn’t think the web provides useful or interesting criticism.  And he said so in his welcoming post to his new online critics!

Odd.

In my neck of the woods, you never know who will be the next awesome commentator or the coolest writer or the worst troll.  Could be anyone (there was an infamous incident of a TV producer getting banned once, fer instance).  Conversations of note aren’t just a few of the same people talking, but tend to get metafandomed and then spread like wild fire until posts reach many hundreds of comments and the poster has to take a valium and go offline for a few days (not a joke, and I have seen this happen several times).    Sharks, like I said.  Also manga critics: still not nice.

It leads to some fascinating theory.  You can read posts like How to Suppress Discussion of Racism which was brought about by fandom discussions of various artistic works.  That’s easily recognizable as theory and criticism.

But there are other aspects to the weird world of fandom.  One aspect that I love is that nothing is sacred.  Fandom writers write about, work with, and criticize everything.  TV fans talk about comics, comic fans talk about audio books, book fans talk about commercials, real person fans talk about music, it’s all mashed up and spun around and shaken not stirred.  And it makes for some, well, pretty weird art.

Because, like its approach to critical theory, fandom thinks pretty much anyone can play in the sandbox and use whatsoever tools they’ve got lying around to create art.  Want to read one of  the best takes on a gay relationship between two characters on a TV show?  Read about them as GirlScout cookies in a multi-media piece here.  Not work safe.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Not safe for work gay cookie porn.  It’s got over nine-hundred comments and it’s really, really good.  Trust me!

But that’s the thing about fandom.  You can love TV today and comics tomorrow.  Or love comics and then love TV.  You can use your powers as a lawyer or as a sculptor or, god save us, a knitter.  Podcasts.  Videos.  Audiobooks.  Comics.  Novels.  Poems.  Theories.  Archives.  Charity auctions. Social networking code.  Anything and everything rolled into one big, gooey pile of confusion and collaboration.

I suspect that most of the critical comics world doesn’t know about fandom’s take on comics (manga or American) because fandom is so damn messy, and wading through a thousand and one posts on Adam Lambert’s hair or Rape Culture 101 doesn’t appeal to them, or feels irrelevant or uninteresting.  Fandom blogs are a lot less single-focus than comics blogs seem to be.  My own blog, while sometimes discussing modern class theory as shown in fantasy and SF, is currently discussing nail polish.

Just as a for instance.

But the mismash of media makes for a lot of interesting art.  It means that feelings, themes, plots, and characters are re-interpreted and re-invented time and again by many people in many ways.  Art that started out as a TV show becomes a written and drawn comic.  Comics become stories.  Novels spur audiobooks.  And comics, including modern American mainstream comics, become perfume.

Oh yes.  Perfume.  Officially licensed , commercially sold perfume.

This is not like that wretched Spiderman lip gloss crap.  (GROSS, people.  GROSS.  Do. not. want.)  That was an attempt by The Powers That Be to commercialize a product that would appeal to girls just in order to make some random bucks.  Hint: speaking as a girl, if you can’t match MAC’s lipglass, I ain’t touching it, and I’m sure as heck not putting anything associated with Spidey’s goo near my lips. Ew.

No, what I’m talking about is a re-imagining of the comic, the characters, through a different sense entirely.  What is Hellboy as a scent, rather than a visual image or written story?

Which is the question I shall be addressing in my upcoming posts.  What is the Hellboy character as a scent?  What is the comic?  How are they related, and when the scent is realized, what emotions does it evoke?  How successful are such imaginings?

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab‘s perfumes are well known in fandom circles and are usually referred to as BPAL.  They’re a small perfumer, working in tiny batches, handmixed, and without a major in-person retail outfit.  The scents themselves have quite a fandom following on their own, but one of the most fascinating aspects of BPAL is the way that they explore imagery, ideas, and characters through scents.  For a long time, they have had a series of perfumes that evoke places, Shakespearean characters, Lovecraftian horrors, Alice in Wonderland, and deities.  They have also explored art pieces as scents, as in the Salon series.  (There was also a limited edition floating world series, but it’s gone now.)

When I mentioned the idea of this series to Noah, he seemed startled, but encouraged me to proceed.  “Truly bizarre”, in his words.  I think it’s a bit difficult to startle Noah and I’m quite pleased to have managed it.  In my world, switching from medium to medium is quite common, and can result in some truly spectacular art.  Or some truly eye searing horrors, such as the infamous Care Bear BDSM story (which I would like to forget thankyousoverymuch).

What this means is that I will be exploring comics and scent.  Comics re-imagined in a new sense, literally, from the visual and verbal to the sensory input of the nose.  Hellboy.  Witchblade.  Neil Gaiman’s works.  Boom Studios.  Sachs and Violens.

I don’t know all of these comics, so I’ll be reading them and smelling them at the same time.  I’m curious, as some of the folks around here have no doubt actually read all of the comics in question, if anyone has favorite characters whose scents they’d like to see reviewed or explored.  Are there characters you think I’d find particularly intriguing?  Is anyone already familiar with these scents and have a favorite?  Is BPAL completely new to you?  Have you experienced comics in a different medium yourself that you’d recommend I check out (such as, I don’t know, the comic fandom version of cookie porn?) as I go through this exploration of re-imagining?

Or, you know, do you now need a valium and a lie down after finding out about the Care Bear thing?

Bran Doll

Ryo Takagi

Sometimes I just want a nice, fluffy romantic comedy.  This is the manga one-shot equivalent of an ice cream cone.  Sweet, delightful, and summery.

The story takes place in the mythical kingdom of Vera Morgan, ruled over by King Chanel.  There’s also a Burberry kingdom, by the way, and a court doctor named Louvuitton.

It stars one Fen Dytri:

Fen aced the civil servant exam and is hand picked by the king to serve on the SDF force.  Which turns out to be The Special Doll Force.  The title is not a typo for Brain Doll, oh no.  It really is Bran Doll.  The Special Doll Force retrieves truly fugly handmade dolls on behalf of the king.  Naturally, Fen thought he was going to be doing something Important and Meaningful with his civil service career, but instead…

Fen ends up working with the king and a couple of SDF members to fetch back the weirdo looking dolls:

Since this is a romantic comedy, plenty of wacky hijinks ensue, and the poor hero ends up getting handed over for marriage, falls off a cliff, talks to a possessed doll, is bitten on the ear, foils a plot, and finds twoo luv.  Which is how romantic comedies ought to go, really.

There isn’t anything particularly genre-breaking here, and this isn’t a deep story.  But it doesn’t need to be.  The tale involves an endearing reason for the dolls and the efforts gone to find them, an exploration of trust, the meaning of love, and learning to rely on others.

It’s a stellar example of its type.  The art is lovely.  For the more serious scenes, the characters are drawn in a more realistic style, and for emotive effect, the artist switches to an endearing and very effective chibi style.  She draws the dolls in a strange, childlike scratchy scrawl that she uses for doll owners as well.  It’s a great comedic technique.  At one point, she draws a character’s fantasy of how a plot will go–and the scratchy, silly, child-style perfectly mimics the immaturity of the character’s vision.

My favorite manga are generally long, dramatic series that explore themes, build up complicated and rich visual imagery, and show character growth over many volumes.  But after being bogged down by life and the utter confusion that was Nuts Peck, I just wanted something funny.  A story that I could pick up, read, and enjoy without any need to feel like I’d have to invest a couple hundred dollars before I got the eventual payoff.  A nice, satisfying one shot.  This delivered very nicely indeed.  Highly recommended.

Junjo Romantic: Vol. 1

Shungiku Nakamura

Blu

The art is completely weird.  The story is a bit stock.  The characters are dumb but sweet or arrogant and brilliant.  The writing is strange, especially in later volumes.  The sex is not that hot.

And yet this is one of my favorite comics of all time.

I often wonder, when I kick back and reread a volume, whether this was drawn in ball point in spiral notebooks or what.  Because–well, look:

or:

Weird, eh?  I mean, the perspective is completely batty.  (Perspective, you might say, what perspective?)

And yet….

Look at this depiction of arrogance.  It’s so clear, so vibrant.

I find it charming.

For me, the appeal of this comic is its utter shamelessness.  I once read a how-to book about manga that said that Manga is love, and how true it is here.  This is a book with a lot of emotion packed in around some fairly stock skeletons of plot and character.  A young man (Misaki) is trying to get into college, but his exam scores suck, so he gets a tutor.  Said tutor (Usami), a friend of his brother’s, is brilliant and wealthy and arrogant.  They fall in love and have adventures.  The end.  (Well, not really the end, because it’s in 9 volumes and counting, but my point remains.)

The big twist of the series is that the older lover, Usami, is a famous author.  He’s brilliant and writes award winning books.  He’s also crazy as a fruitbat, in that special writer way, which means in his case, his bedroom is full of plush toys and trains and a dinosaur in a wee helmet.  (Really!)  He also, as a hobby, writes boys love novels, which he populates with his real-life crushes.

This allows the author to write some meta, sure, but it mostly allows her to indulge in a variety of hilarious and classic scenarios.  Selections from Usami’s novels are written by various BL novelists and included, like so:

I’m not going to try to convince anyone to get over their distaste of the art to engage in the story.  The art is one of those styles that is very much love it or leave it, I think.  For me, I love it.  What it lacks in realism, it makes up for in expressive charm.  The story itself is fun, but nothing radical, at least in the first volume.   The story starts with Misaki and Usami figuring out how to work together for the sake of Takahiro, Misaki’s brother and Usami’s unrequited love.  It’s romance, pure and simple, with some smut and some humor.  I won’t tell you differently.  But sometimes, romance with smut and humor is exactly what’s wanted.

As a companion to Junjo Romantica, the volume contains another story, Junjo Egoist, which I liked in its first installments, but found disappointing as the run continued.  Since Blu titles are usually shrinkwrapped, be forewarned that fully half of the volume’s pages are Junjo Egoist.