Tag Archives: Young Avengers

#FireRickRemender?: Thinking Through Gender, Disproportionate Aging & Sexual Consent in Superhero Comics

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This is a slightly revised version of a post that originally published on The Middle Spaces.
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The recent #FireRickRemender controversy on Twitter and Tumblr brought to mind a topic that I have given some thought to in the past, but that mostly exists in the form of an evolving question that I do not quite have an answer to yet, nor that I can make any confident assertions about. In fact, even as I write this I am trying to think through the best way to articulate the question itself based on some general observations.

For those who are not familiar with the Captain America #22 controversy, I recommend you read this piece. I think it covers it well, but the short version is Sam Wilson—Falcon—has drunken sex with Jet Black Zola who at the beginning of the current series was just a little girl of undetermined age, but since has spent 10 or more years in another dimension where time moves faster. By her own admission, she is at least 23 years old when her sexual encounter with Falcon takes place—beyond the age of consent in most places that I know of.

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There are fans who feel that the ambiguity of her age and the involvement of alcohol in the hook-up suggest the possibility of statutory rape. In addition, Sam Wilson was drunk enough to not remember having sex at all, which means that he must have been clearly drunk enough that no one should be having sex with him if they care about clearly delineated consent. In other words, it is a problematic scene all the way around. (You can read the whole scene here and decide for yourself).

Still, it is not so problematic that I think the writer, Rick Remender should be fired (though I am not a fan of his work and will admit to having a dislike for the guy ever since his “hobo-piss” comment in regards to the reaction to the also controversial Havok “m-word” speech in Uncanny Avengers). The fact is that the age ambiguity—fostered in no small part in these particular issues by John Romita, Jr’s inability to draw children and young adults very well (his art has gotten decidedly worse since the 1980s)—has a long history in Marvel Comics.1

So here is the real question that arises for me from this kerfuffle: It is not about whether Rick Remender should be fired, but instead: How does the flow of time in superhero comics, with its sliding timescales, disproportionate aging, and alternate dimensions confuse and complicate issues of sex and consent in those long-running serials?

Here the thing: There is a pattern in superhero comics of young female characters disproportionately aging so as to make them sexually available for the adult male characters (and ostensibly for their straight male readers). Of course, the nebulous nature of the passage of time in serialized superhero comic books makes any exact determinations impossible, but there are certainly a few examples of transformations that allow for otherwise pre-teen or teen girls to suddenly be the age of consent.

magik4The most obvious example I can think of is Illyana Rasputin, aka Magik, of the New Mutants and later the X-Men. When she is kidnapped by Belasco, not only does he want to make her his bride, but as soon as she starts to get a little older she is depicted in her Darkchilde form mostly naked with a more developed body, little short shorts and a crop top, and with a come-hither look. When it comes to Ilyana, her arc from seven year old girl to New Mutant to X-Man is one that makes the subtext of uncontrollable dark magic and the dangers of female sexuality quite explicit. The whole Belasco’s bride thing makes it text, not sub-text. The way she is depicted now, after having reverted to her original age and then returned to her young adult form again, (dying and then returning), reinforces the possibilities opened up by her aging. She falls safely into the male gaze, from a position of taboo anticipation for her eventual desirability.

There seems to be a very gendered distinction in how characters are aged in superhero comics. While young Franklin Richards, for example, is temporarily aged in the 1990 “Days of Future Present” crossover event and later as a member of the ill-considered Fantastic Force, he is not depicted as hypersexualized in order to make him seem older and more mature. (He has battle armor he pulls from a pocket dimension for that).

Pre-teen and teen girls like Illyana, on the other hand, come pre-sexualized in the hypersexualized world of superhero comics. A young female character’s maturation seems to most often (if not always) be connected to her sexual availability.

The potentially problematic aging is not always immediate, however. For a character like Kitty Pryde, aging is simply disproportionate to the adult characters, allowing her to eventually “catch up” to the others, while they remain just about the same age. Kitty was introduced to X-Men as 13½ years old. Over the course of 34 years since her published introduction, she has been allowed to age about 10 years, while the other X-Men have not really aged much at all. I made the joke to someone on Twitter not long ago that aging in Marvel Comics allows for eventually every child character to be old enough to have consensual sex while the adult characters remain young enough to have it with them. Except, I guess it is really not all that much of a joke. It’s creepy.

Joss Whedon on his run of Astonishing X-Men wrote a great scene in which Kitty and Peter (aka Colossus) have had sex, and Wolverin acknowledges both the act and the attendant temporal discontinuities. The problem of pedophelia is avoided, since the beginning of the series makes a point of stating that Kitty is returning after a long absence. This indeterminate amount of time is elastic enough to absorb any qualms about Kitty’s youth in relation to Peter who always seemed old for his age. Suddenly, the distance between them seems not so great—certainly less than the nearly seven years when their romance began. For many readers drawn back to X-Men by Whedon’s run after a long absence, that elasticity of time is an especially important way to make the distinction between the Kitty of now and the Kitty of the simultaneously distant and not-too-distant past. Wolverine may quip “’bout time,” but really when else might their having sex really worked in terms of their ages?

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Another example of the weirdness of how time passes in the Marvel Universe is Julie Power, formerly of Power Pack. I have not read the issues of Runaways or Avengers Academy that she most recently appears in, but just from what I have read online and the panels I have found by doing a little searching, she has gone from a little 10-year-old girl to a sexually active 17-year old (or so) who wears a halter-top and is posed in erotic ways.

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To be clear, it is not that I think aging characters is a problem or that the depiction of sexuality is necessarily a problem—I wish aging were done more often. Rather, I think it is problematic how young female characters are aged especially in relation to male characters.

Another important example is Kate Bishop of the Young Avengers and Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye series. While she first appeared in comics on the verge of being 18 and the most recent Young Avengers series had her turning 21 (so she aged about 3 years in about 9 years real-world time), she not only moved from technically being a minor to being legal adult (whatever that means). Clint, however, has basically stayed the same age in that time (early 30s maybe?) What makes this such a great example is not the sexual component to their relationship, but that writer Matt Fraction had to explicitly address its possibility on his blog.

He wrote:

But i’ll say this: they’re not gonna fuck. [Kate] doesn’t want to fuck him and he doesn’t want to fuck her. It’s not going to happen. They never daydream about it. They don’t wonder about it. They won’t idly pass the time thinking what if. There is nothing sexual in their relationship. Flirtatious? At times. Sexy, even? To a point, maaaybe? I don’t even want to play with will they or won’t they. Because they won’t. So I’ll say, again, unequivocally, as long as I’m on this book, it’s not in the cards even remotely for either of them. I am interested in a love between these two that has nothing to do with sex or physical/sexual attraction. The dog won’t die and they won’t fuck. The end.

 

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Here’s the thing though, despite Fraction’s protests, the Hawkeye title plays with a lot of sexual tension between them. Sure, Hawkeye claims to not want to sleep with her, and she addresses it as creepy, but there is a lot of subtext that this article over at Comic Vine does a great job of illustrating. But even if that weren’t the case, the fact that Fraction felt the need to address it means that Kate reaching the age of legal consent immediately put her character within the realm of possibility for that to happen because unfortunately it seems like that is how disproportionate gendered aging in Marvel Comics seems to work. Let’s put it this way, while I believe Fraction when he claims “they won’t fuck,” I would not be in the least bit surprised if some other writer down the line makes it happen. She is certainly depicted as sexually active in Young Avengers. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, I just don’t trust comics to not make the leap from her doing the deed with similarly (though statically) aged Noh-Varr in his spaceship and doing it with Hawkeye or Iron Fist.

cassie-langSpeaking of Young Avengers, another example of disproportionate aging is Cassie Lang, aka Stature (a superhero name that might even be worse than Iron Patriot). Before she showed up in Young Avengers I am pretty sure she was last depicted as a sickly girl of about 9 years of age. I remember her from Avengers #223 (1982) which featured a great team-up of Ant-Man (her dad) and Hawkeye. But after being a kid for many years, she returned as a teenager of about 16 years old in 2005—ready to start a romance with Iron Lad (a young version of Kang) and later the young version of Vision built around Iron Lad’s brain patterns (it’s complicated). In Cassie’s case, however, despite the romance plot, there is no case of overt-sexualization. The gradual introduction of an older Cassie Lang avoids the discomfort of the suddenly sexually available character. Maybe she appeared in other books in-between at that younger age or an intermediate age, I don’t know. The thing I do know is that while she was closing in on 18 (until she was killed by Dr. Doom), her dad and other Avengers stayed the same age.

Green_Lantern_Vol_3_34I am not sure what this all means, except as another broad example of problematic depictions of women in superhero comics. The phenomenon seems to suggest that, when it comes to girls and women in superhero comics, age and maturity are overwhelmingly associated with sexual availability, and that is troubling. Disproportionate aging happens all over the genre—for example see Hal Jordan’s whitening hair in post-Crisis Green Lantern while Batman and Wonder Woman stayed about the same—but it seems that when it comes to young women, this pattern takes on a creepy and even potentially predatory cast. As such, I am not surprised that some folks took issue with the Falcon and Jet Black Zola sex scene. At first glance, it seemed like the edges of the veneer of consent and the social mores around sex and age that superhero comics frequently rub up against were being pierced through to reveal the bare truth about the role of women in superhero comics as foremost sexualized objects, whether they are little Cassie Lang, or even Aunt May.

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1. It could also be an issue in DC and other superhero comics, but as I am not as familiar with them I don’t feel comfortable making that claim. However, as if to supplement my exploration of this topic, on the same day that this piece was originally posted, Bleeding Cool posted an article revealing a plot-line in DC Comics’ Batman Beyond comic involving Barbara Gordon’s (aka Batgirl) miscarriage following being impregnated by Bruce Wayne (aka Batman), so I am by no means trying to let DC off the hook.

Long Comics, Quick Cuts: Time Dilation in Comics and Film

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I found this odd little book at CAKE a few weeks ago and I’ve been showing it to everybody. At first I was fixated on the colors — produced with a painstaking chromolithographic technique — but as I watched people unfold the concertina book and take in its panoramic form, I’ve been thinking more about the book’s format.

The book in question is Worse Things Happen at Sea by Kellie Strøm, part of Nobrow’s concertina book series1. Concertina books are pleated and unfold like an accordion; the panels can be read in individual segments, like any book, but also fold out to form an interconnected panorama of images. Highly prized by rare book collectors, illustrated concertina books depicting cityscapes or images of local life were popular souvenirs in the 19th and early 20th century.

Worse Things Happen tells the story of the conquest of the high seas, or rather the conquest by the high seas of sailors who would dare to test her. Each segment depicts another development in the history of seafaring vessels (a Viking longship, a Dutch man-of-war, an early submarine–could it be the Nautilus?, the giant steamship Kaiser Wilhelm II) being attacked by a monstrosity of nautical lore (Scylla and Charybdis, the Aspidochelone, a giant narwhal, the Kraken).

The book is 136cm long and 23cm tall, which means each side of the album, once unfolded, provides almost .33 square meters of surface area for artwork. For comparison, a double-page spread in a standard floppy comic is less than a tenth of a square meter (.091m²). The physicality of the concertina changes the nature of the reader’s relationship to it. Although a .33 square meter painting placed on a wall would not seem so big, the concertina book is something that the reader holds and unfolds with their own hands, which puts the viewer up close and makes it impossible to take in the entire image at once.

Instead, one naturally pans across the image, tracking like a camera on a dolly. The continuous nature of the image invites the reader to spend considerable time with it, observing both the detail within each fragment and the way the fragments flow into each other. Though ostensibly a single image, the concertina reads like a sequence of events. In other words, a comic. This got me thinking a bit about the nature of comics and how narrative, or more broadly the passage of time, is presented within them.

How does one convey the passage of time within a static medium? The principle technology for moving time forward in comics is the transition between panels.2 The panel is a static image and the gutter between panels is where motion in time and space can take place. The panel transition in comics serves the same function as the cut in film; the gutter, or cut, represents all that is left out.

In film, cuts compress the narrative. In comics, they can have the opposite effect. The more ‘cuts’ or panels there are per page, generally, the slower things are moving. Telling a story in a fast-paced style usually means using just three or four panels per page; a page with seven, eight or nine panels is slowing things down, focusing in on more details:3
 
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Filmmakers use cuts to compress or speed-up time, but they can also have ways of slowing time down. Slow motion invites the viewer to take in more action than would be visible to the naked eye, to see things that would otherwise be missed. In comics, an effect similar to slow motion video can be achieved by superimposing multiple images of a single subject within the same panel. This allows a single panel to convey a whole sequence of events; it is often used in superhero comics for a character who is faster and more agile than his opponents — how many times have we seen the Flash zooming or Spider-Man flipping through a single panel? A recent Jamie McKelvie page from Young Avengers combines the super-imposed image, the cutaway diagram, and the super-wide-shot to create a dense and complex action sequence within a single panel:
 
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It’s a gorgeous trick but it still runs up against the limits of the comics page. Only formalist experimentation can go further.

We’ve seen how a filmmaker can speed up time with jump cuts, and delay it with slow motion video. But one of the most radical things a filmmaker can do is allow time to pass naturally. Frequent quick cuts are so essential to the language of cinema that we notice their absence more than their presence. Long takes without cuts create psychological tension, emphasizing the relentlessness of time’s passing. A sequence like the final six minutes of True Detective‘s fourth episode, in which Matthew McConnaughey’s character Rust Cohle breaks into a stash house and then makes a daring escape, is effective because the camera, and thus the viewer, is never allowed to turn away from the action; as the shot continues unabated the sense of dread grows, to be relieved only by the final hard cut at the end.

Long takes like this are commonplace through the history of cinema, and there are whole films composed of single shots. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope famously takes place in a single apartment in what appears to be one long take, and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark features over 2,000 actors in a single 96-minute Steadicam shot that floats through the many rooms of St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum. In both cases, events unfold within the narrative world of the film in exactly the time it takes to view them. In a movie full of traditional cuts, two hours of screen time can equate to days, weeks or years of diegetic time. Without cuts, diegetic and non-diegetic time are perfectly in sync. Everything on the screen is happening “in real time,” 24-style.

In order to simulate the effect of a continuous tracking shot on the page, a cartoonist must eliminate the traditional borders between panels — but even then the amount of information that can be presented before cutting away is limited by the size of the page. Looking beyond the limitations of traditional rectangular page formats allows for some interesting time dilation possibilities.
 
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As shown above, an accordion-folded book radically increases the amount of horizontal space along which a narrative can be presented. The exaggerated linearity is not unlike a Greek frieze or a Medieval tapestry. The form has proven appropriate for presenting subjects which are both epic in scale and narrow in scope: recent entries in NoBrow’s concertina series have included a crowded musical festival scene, a madcap bicycle race, and the history of exploring. A concertina can be read like a traditional book, in which case each segment is like a double-page spread — but once unfolded, it becomes a spread that never ends. The increased surface area allows for a level of detail that can’t be achieved in any standard rectangular format.

But these concertinas do not achieve the psychological effect of a continuous film shot. Eliminating panel divisions merely means that the cartoonist has removed some of the guide rails. Instead of dictating the pace of events to the reader, the reader takes in the whole work at the pace of their choosing. The passage of time becomes totally subjective, as details are obsessed-over or over-looked according to the reader’s whim. It’s radically different from the experience of reading a traditional comic or a splash page, but it’s also nothing like viewing a long take in a film, because there is no defined point of view (ie, camera) and no defined frame rate.

The unlimited bandwidth of the internet provides opportunities to create sequential narratives that reach not just beyond the constraints of the standard comics page, but beyond those of any physical object. Worse Things Happen at Sea may contain a lot of visual information — 23×272 centimeters worth — but it is still constrained by its physical limitations as an object. A printed book that extended much further would be unwieldy, but the infinite scrolling of a web page has no such limitations.

The best example I’ve yet seen of a cartoonist taking advantage of a web page’s dimensions (or lack thereof) is Boulet’s “The Long Journey.” “The Long Journey” is a departure from the French cartoonist’s usual inky style, instead employing a pixelated look that draws attention to its utterly digital nature. Except for a short framing sequence at the beginning, the entire comic is one extremely long vertical panel, which is read by scrolling down the page. Words and images are placed such that the reader can take in everything without ever taking a finger off the scroll bar or the down arrow. The longer one scrolls, the more absorbing the images become, and Boulet’s narrative takes on additional layers of meaning as the reader approaches the metaphorical and literal bottom of the page.
 

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The length of the work is impressive. On a standard 14” computer screen the comic appears to be around 2,500cm in length — occupying nearly ten times the real estate of Worse Things Happen. And unlike a concertina book, “The Long Journey” can be measured in time as well as space. It takes a full two minutes to scroll through the entire comic (realistically, it takes twice that time if one reads all of the text). Thus the work combines features of the concertina (the panoramic flow of events without panel boundaries) and the long take (the point-of-view mediated by the camera, or screen, and the narrative pace dictated by the frame, or scroll, rate). It’s more like a film than any comic, and could even be described as a rudimentary form of animation. But it’s also much more like a comic than any animated film, emphasizing as it does the static nature of the images that contribute to the narrative whole.

Which returns me to my original contemplation of the concertina book — an object that is so obviously a comic, yet in many ways not. It exists at the edges, and it is only at the edges of a medium that we can most clearly see its defining features. Whether you consider a concertina a comic or an illustrated album or something in between, the contemplation of one, especially such a lavish one as Worse Things Happen, inspires a better understanding of the entire comics form.
 
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1.Concertina books are also called leporello, so named for the character from Don Giovanni and his comically long list of Giovanni’s sexual conquests.

2.I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here; this is all in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics

3.This insight, and the triptych of pages above which elaborate it, comes from Spawn and Batman artist Greg Capullo’s “Storytelling and Pacing” guide in Wizard’s old Basic Training feature; unfortunately I don’t have the specific issue to reference, though all of Capullo’s Basic Training columns are collected in a .pdf here.
 
 

The Kids Are Mediocre, Albeit Not Utterly Without Charm

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Earlier this week I wrote a post at the Atlantic where I talked about the game Desktop Dungeons and how its creators had discovered that, in order not to be sexist, they had to work really hard at it. The intention to be non-racist/non-sexist isn’t enough, because the default tropes used to imagine fantasy game settings and characters are racist and sexist. It takes imagination and effort to overcome that.

So Kieron Gillen and James McKelvie definitely deserve credit for the extent to which Young Avengers pushes back against decades of accumulated superhero whiteness and sexism. The team includes a gay couple (Wiccan and Hulkling), and a Hispanic child of a lesbian couple (Miss America),along with two other white guys (Marvel Boy and Kid Loki) and a white Hawkeye).

Perhaps more importantly than their numbers, the marginal characters aren’t treated as marginal or other or weird…and the decision not to treat them as marginal or other or weird is nicely linked to the supehero milieu. Hulkling is a green-skinned shapeshifter from another planet; Miss. America is a brown-skinned superhuman from another dimension. Hawkeye is sleeping with the alien Kree Marvel Boy, Wiccan is sleeping with the alien Skrull Hulkling. Amidst all the intricate incoherence of the Marvel multiverse (which Gillen and McKelvie gleefully toss about without much explanation for novices), a non-White superhero as the strongest member of the group or a gay romance as part of the proceedings hardly seems worth mentioning (except, in the later case, as a vehicle for the requisite quotient of intra-team melodrama.)
 

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So Gillen and McKevie set the worthy goal of not being sexist, racist assholes, and they followed through with intelligence and some subtlety. Thus, the comic is good. QED.

Alas, would that it were so. Not being racist and sexist is hard work, but there are other bits of making a worthwhile piece of art too, and as regards them Young Avengers is less successful. In particular, the artist Jamie McKelvie is, even in the context of crappy mainstream super-hero art, not really any good. His figure drawing is clumsy and haphazard; his poses are stiff when they’re not default; his faces are not particularly distinguishable. But where he is really abysmal is in his layouts, which are consistently confusing and cluttered. Especially in his fight sequences, it’s often almost impossible to figure out what’s happening — and there’s no visual panache (as in say Bill Sienkiewitz) to justify the incoherence. A Chris Ware inspired page is almost laughably incompetent, with tiny figures boucning around in an ugly floorplan that manages to be at one and the same time bulbous, blocky, and boring, the whole thing ringed by uninspired mainstream action sequences, the color scheme of which contrasts garishly with the wannabe-Ware floorplan pastels. Descriptions of the action are set off in a kind of map legend and keyed to numbers because diagrams are what the latest hip comics artists are doing and McKelvie would like to be up to date and hip with all his heart. It’s sort of sweet, if you cover your eyes and don’t look.
 

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Gillen is more competent than that; his dialogue is fun and snappy and pop-culture-aware in a way that seems, if not precisely true to teens, at least true to the sorts of things teens might read. When Kid Loki asks Ms. America why her former super-team broke up and she says, “Musical differences,” I snickered. Same when Hawkeye comments that she knew there was some world threatening catastrophe because Wiccan wasn’t answering his texts every 30 seconds. It’s not genius or anything, but it’s cute. If I can appreciate Taylor Swift, there’s no reason I can’t appreciate this too.

There’s some perhaps interesting thematic material as well, if you squint. We first meet Hulking when he’s shape-shifting in imitation of Spider-Man, hunting down bad-guys as Marvel’s most popular superhero. Later, Wiccan summons Hulking’s dead mother from another dimension…only it turns out to be a shape-shifting soul-eating demon. The other Young Avengers’ parents also end up coming back from the dead as evil glop. You could see the comic then, perhaps, as being about children turning themselves into their parents — or about the way that it’s not just parents who make their kids, but kids who make their parents. The evil parents and the clueless parents (adults can’t see the evil demon mommies) could be a version of the hippie “parents just don’t understand/anyone over 30 can’t be trusted” meme. But you could also see the bad/clueless parents as constructs or dreams — as make-believe parent kids want to/need to create in order to make their own lives. That’s underlined by the fact that the evil parents are the reason for the team coming and staying together; the threat is what makes the book diegetically possible.

Gillen doesn’t ultimately do all that much with this material though. There isn’t, for example, any real anxiety around the evil parents per se — dead moms and dads come back from the dead, but their kids don’t seem much traumatized, or even disturbed. They just trundle on through the by-the-numbers superhero battles, the only real emotional tension being the frustration caused by the fact that, based on McKelvie’s drawings, you can’t actually follow those superhero battles at all.

To some degree that’s fine; it’s a competent empty-headed superhero adventure with crappy art, and it doesn’t make much pretense to being anything else. But, inevitably, the mediocrity of the execution has implications for the treatment of gender/sexuality/race as well. McKelvie, for example, tends to draw the usual slim/hot female characters — he certainly doesn’t feel anything like Desktop Dungeons’ commitment to imagining women who don’t look they walked out of Cosmo. The full-length, blank-faced, hip-cocked, wait-let-me-stuff-this-cleavage-in-somehow Scarlet Witch is an especial low-point.
 

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In a similar vein, Gillen’s insistently shallow writing makes it hard for him to do much with his diverse cast other than have them there. As I said, part of the joy of the comic is that difference is simply treated as normal, so that green skin isn’t much different from brown skin. But while that’s refreshing, it also can feel like a cop out. Is Miss. America really even a Hispanic character, for example, when she’s an advanced human from another dimension who has never experienced prejudice? G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel deliberately explores what it would mean for a Muslim girl to gain superpowers in terms of her perception of herself and others perceptions of her. Such subtlety is utterly beyond Young Avengers.

So, basically, making art that isn’t mired in stereotypes is hard. And making art that’s good is hard. And those two things put together are even harder, not least because, to some not insignificant degree, you can’t do one without the other.