Paperless Dolls

Rather than do anything productive, I've been goofing around on dollmaker/dress-up games. Someone on Tumblr linked this fairy tale shrug girl, and I've been on that dolldivine site all week creating people. I also like the elemental ones, but I was a bit disappointed with their superhero maker.



Other sites have superhero makers, but none so far have had the variety and interface that the Fairy Tale one on Dolldivine has. (I did make a nice girl speedster with this one, though.)



(Yeah, that second one is totally an AU design for a female Quicksilver.) Even the weaker ones are pretty addictive, though. Has anyone seen any really good superhero dollmakers out there?

Women in the Warriors

Today a coworker got us all to watch The Warriors, a 1979 film about a New York street gang. (It seems they're doing a remake, set in Los Angeles, and he wanted us to understand why he was so pissed off about the location change.) The gang itself was all male, as were most of their enemies, but I was really struck by the main plot points that involved women in the movie. Each encounter is just such a perfect example of how women are treated by macho all-male communities.

And yeah, I'm gonna spoil the shit out of this if you haven't seen it before. Also, there's a lot of sexual assault threats in the movie and I don't get too detailed with those but if you find that triggering you should consider this a warning.

There's four major portrayals of women in the movie. The first we meet is a disc jockey who passes encoded information to street gangs during her radio show. The most powerful gang in the city, the Gramercy Riffs, have set up a network of gangs that are aligned with them. The Warriors are in that network, but they've been framed for murdering the leader of the Riffs. Through this woman, the Riffs tell their entire network that the Warriors are the perpetrators, where they are, and that they want them dead. Throughout the movie she cuts in and tells the network where they were last seen and who they fought. We only ever see her mouth, but her voice is the voice of the universe aligning against our heroes. She's a powerful, removed, anonymous celebrity.

The second is Mercy, who follows and eventually joins the Warriors. She was initially involved with another gang--the Orphans (who are not part of the network and not trying to kill them), and purposefully turns a peaceful situation into a confrontation between the Orphans and the Warriors. For this, Ajax--the biggest, strongest member of the gang--seizes her from behind and threatens to rape her. The gangleader Swan tells him to let her go, then grabs her and threatens to have the entire gang rape her. Then the Orphans show and the Warriors avoid a major fight by blowing up a car. Duly impressed by the explosion as well as her own capture and their threats, she goes with them and somehow ends up following them the entire way to Coney Island despite Swan telling her he doesn't like her or approve of her way of life. Naturally, she and Swan end up together.

Okay, I actually rather liked Mercy. She actually gets to be a person, stands up for herself, takes as many stupid risks as the boys, and ends up arming herself for the final confrontation. She's the girl who joins the male clique. And while they do have good reason not to like or trust her, they still attack and threaten her. She suffers threats and insults based on her gender, but if she's persistent, sticks around and proves she has the same values and macho toughness as the men she gets to be a fixture. (But she doesn't get a vest. That's significant to me.)

The third and fourth women are both Odyssey-style traps, our Circe and our Sirens, I suppose, even though our Circe is the dispenser of justice.

At the beginning of the movie, we see scenes of the gang on the subway spliced with them exchanging exposition in pairs. Here we meet Ajax (played by James Remar) who immediately establishes himself as a homophobic asshole. He says something about hopefully meeting and bedding strange women during their trip to Gramercy, and when the other member suggests they have more important concerns he uses a gay slur. It's his go-to insult, and it along with his attitude towards women and his challenging Swan for leadership make me figure we're suppose to hate him and hope he dies first. (He does not die first, and there is a point in the movie where I actually blurted out "You killed the wrong one.")

Ajax, however, is the best fighter of the group (barring probably Cleon at the beginning) and gets a really great line and fight scene. Thing is, he knows he's a great fighter and he thinks that as the most manly man in the group he should get leadership and wimmiz. Lots of wimmiz, whenever he wants them. He's the strongest and the fiercest but gets taken down by his own entitlement and his disregard for other people's boundaries. Passing through a park they walk by a woman on a park bench. Ajax wants to go back and pick her up, the others want to move on. He separates from the group and sits next to the woman, who flirts with him.

Flirting wasn't enough for Ajax, though, and he moves on to sexual assault. She struggles and tells him at least twice to stop, then she handcuffs him to the bench, jumps away and shows him her badge. Then she whistles for a police car. Ajax, of course, starts ranting and trying to break free and actually pulls the bench towards her when the uniformed officers arrive.

And he won't calm down, so they whack him with a nightstick.

It is immensely satisfying to watch.

Ahem... Disappointing as it was not to see further police brutality against this character (All the cops in this movie seemed to be decent hardworking people removed from the plot who didn't escalate any of the encounters themselves), I was pretty happy to see that the homophobia and misogyny were leading to this guy's downfall.

The policewoman is obviously our Circe analogue, but she's also the unknown woman. And even to Swan and Co, she's not spoken about as a person. The argument is whether Ajax can stay and claim her as a conquest, or if it's more important to move along to the next station. If Swan or the others feel rape is wrong, they are prevented from admitting it by their bullshit macho code. The unknown woman is just a piece of meat on a park bench, and that attitude takes Ajax off the board.

And last we have the all-girl gang. This was easy to see coming, because they were grouped and posed just like a gang, and all wearing a matching article of clothing just like the other gangs.

Of course our heroes follow them home, hoping to get laid. That's where things get weird. The camera lingers on a female character dressed in blue overalls (rather than the tye-dyed T-shirt so I think that meant she had a leadership position) and smoking. It travels around the room and points out images of women posed in masculine poses, moving in masculine ways. As time passes, two of the women start to dance together very suggestively. When asked what the girls call themselves, one of them answers "the Lizzies."

I think at this point we can abandon the sub and safely call it text.

Either way, all of the lesbian implications and masculine posture are framed as warning signs. You get the intense feeling (and only one of the Warriors, Rembrandt, seems to get this) that something is wrong, that these guys are not going to have a relaxing night of sex, smoking and sandwich service. In fact, you get the feeling that the "dudes" they said were up in the Bronx don't really exist, and that someone's going to do something OH GOD SHE LOCKED THE DOOR AND THERE'S THE KNIFE. Yeah, that's a lesbian gang that wants to kill you RUN! RUN!

Lucky for our heroes, the girl with the gun is a shitty shot and they escape with their lives. I will give the Lizzies this, though. Out of all the casualties in the movie? The cops were the biggest danger to the Warriors. The Gramercy Riffs, who are super-intensely-tough-and-scary took out their leader Cleon, but after that no gang touches them with the exception of the Lizzies managing to cut poor Rembrandt. This makes them the most effective antagonistic gang after the Riffs.

But out of all the women in the movie, I found the Lizzies scene the most intense reveal about how a group of men might view women. Because here is a group of very like-minded women that have formed a community of their own, and it is portrayed as very suspicious and very dangerous. There are lesbian overtones all over the place, and the atmosphere is a dreamy haze of welcome that just stands to be ripped away when the women surround and destroy the men.

And that was when I looked back at the movie and saw Fandom, the military, the technical communities wrapped into one hypercompressed macho unit called the Warriors, acting out my life and the lives of my peers on the screen with gangland violence. But I like stuff like that, so it made the movie instantly much cooler to me.

Well, that and a cop smacking Ajax with a nightstick. Man, he deserved that.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

So... Does anyone remember this post where I ranted about the Perez reboot taking Wonder Woman off the JLA founder's list?

As a result, Wonder Woman was younger, less experienced, and less wordly than her former contemporaries. Again, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but it sure as hell does to me. Seniority is a huge deal where I work. These men were her colleagues before, and now, when she had been an equal when it came to age, experience and wisdom, she was now behind the curve. She went from looking to them as friends and co-workers to looking at them as examples and possible mentors. When they were veteran heroes she was a rookie. She was originally meant as an inspiration specifically to women, but now, when she came on the scene, it was littered with female heroes anyway. Her own sidekick, Donna Troy, had been recast at the beginning of the timeline and was, as Wonder Girl, more experienced than Wonder Woman when she first arrived.

And why? So that Diana, originally conceived as a teacher could be recast as an innocent setting her first feet on Man's Shores and learning the harsh lessons of life. They couldn't do it like Batman: Year One or Man of Steel and write her origin in a miniseries set at the beginning of the timeline. No, they put her at the beginning of Crisis so that we would watch her new life unfold in real-time. They rewrote her supporting cast to fit. Where she'd been a mentor and friend of a group of young girls, she was now surrounded by older women (Julia Kapetalis, the new Etta Candy, Myndi Mayner) who were there to guide and mentor her. She'd previously had a love interest, an adorable Navy pilot with a cute butt she followed all the way from Themiscyra, a man with old-fashioned ideas about womanhood who found Wonder woman strangely intriguing. She used to roll her eyes at him, try to subtly teach him lessons, and save him from danger when he got in over his head. Now, he was aged over twenty years ahead of her, and instead of a cute guy she wanted to come around to her way of thinking she had an older man to act as a father figure and guide her in this new world because she was now so fucking young and naive.

Or any of the other posts where my point is that as the most recognizable independent female superhero in the genre she should be the equal of Superman and Batman in experience, status, and ability and treated with the same respect?

If not, go read those. That way you'll know why I'm so pissed off at this.

And I'm going to remain pissed off until they X-men: Omega out this fucking reboot and restore her to the same experience level as Superman and Batman. Because they've shoe-horned her in as the doe-eyed novice of the Trinity once already.

My evening.

Today I got a couple backlogged shipments of comics, which brings me actually up to this week's order. Yay!

This will combine with the last month's backlog and another greatly anticipated reading acquisition for one glorious binge-reading session...



...on some other night. I have responsibilities.



It's all so deeply depressing.

How do I not own this?

I just found out this trade existed:



So it has the Magneto War, which is the storyline where Joseph kicks it, as well as my personal Magneto Rex which is just this crazy Magneto, Rogue and Quicksilver story and a must-have for any connoisseur of 90s superhero soap or Rogue awesomeness. It is sadly discontinued, but fortunately just about everything in it is available online if you're up for dealing with Marvel's confusing digital strategy. I'm just amazed it's out there and I never saw it. Those storylines are two of my favorite rereads in X-men comics.

This new knowledge of my own fallibility brings another question to mind: Have they ever collected Dark Seduction, the Magneto in Genosha-focused storyline that involves Polaris and Quicksilver, in trade paperback? That one isn't up in digital comics, and unlike Magneto War and Magneto Rex I wasn't able to read it when it first came out.

Happy Birthday, Kalinara!

So, today is Kalinara's birthday, and I've been racking my head for a gift.

Maybe she'd like a Guy Gardner: Warrior figurine?



Hmm... doesn't look to be for sale. Ooo, how about an ice sculpture?



Naw, that might get dusty. Maybe I should be more creative. Set up an event, like a visit from a relative who hasn't lived nearby for a while.



That could backfire. Back to traditional gifts. Umm... Everybody likes guns?



On second thought, that looks complicated.

Hmm... OH! I know! She just got a new cat. I'll get her a kitty bed, just like...



Or not.


Y'know what? Think I'll buy her some ice cream next time we get together. Yeah. That's it.

In Defense of Peter Bishop

If you're not caught up on this week's Fringe episode, "Concentrate and Ask Again", don't read any further. Spoilers for the series up until the end of that episode.



There are two things that bug me about this Altlivia fallout.

One, remember back when there was a story with the Chameleon in Spider-Man, and it looked like he pretended to be Peter and slept with his roommate? And how we had a big discussion on rape and consent as a result.

Well, this is the same situation. Peter slept with Altlivia, but his consent was based on the thought that this was HIS Olivia, a woman he trusted implicently and had grown to love over the past two years. Peter didn't really give consent.

The writers, especially in the last episode, have chosen to not explore this at all. In fact, rather than treat this as a violation they have chosen to treat it as a romance and actually set it up so that they can not treat this as a violation or else an entire universe will die.

And maybe I'm in the wrong part of fandom, but few fans seem to have remarked on this at all. I mean, I even saw a few posts discussing that what happened to Olivia was a form of rape, that then go on to talk about what a self-absorbed jerk Peter is. What the hell, fans? If this were Peternate and Olivia (or a show with Patricia and Oliver?) they'd be screaming to high heaven from every blog but instead we're going to constantly talk about how Peter should have known better? Come on, fandom.

And speaking of whether or not he should have noticed, I think people are being really unfair to Peter there too.

The thing about Peter is that he's a social person, which actually puts him in the unique position of being the one to fall for this hardest. Why? Because you don't really get to understand people as well as he does without observing them and altering your judgments based on how they act differently in certain situations. He's not someone to go "Oh, this is weird behavior, she must be an imposter." He's someone to go "Oh, that's weird. Either something's going or this is something new I learned about them. What's different for this person that's causing this?"

It looks like he's stupid for not knowing what with everything that's going on, but this guy is still getting used to the weirdness. It's just not human nature to seek out parallel universes and shape-shifters as an explanation for every time someone does something different or unepected. Human beings are not consistent creatures, and they do alter their behavior from time to time.

It's second nature for Peter to observe people, take all their normal behavior PLUS the odd behavior into account when he makes judgments, and con the crap out of them based on that. Even though he knows there's shapeshifters and alternate universes out there, this is a guy who made his living based on his skill at dealing with people for the vast majority of his. The only way he can do that is to watch people, and accept what they do as part of their personalitiesAnything new with Olivia he had to rationalize away BECAUSE he's spent his entire life paying attention to people and has seen them change this way before.

His rationalization? "This is how she acts in a romantic relationship." He's never seen her in one before, let alone been in one with her. And That's not something that a couple years and conscious knowledge of weirdness will erase. And all his life this guy has had to adjust his impressions--not challenge--when someone acts differently.

Even in the setting, we're asking way too much of Peter to expect him to have figured this out earlier than he did. It's one thing for Olivia to be upset, she's got a ton to be upset about. But as awesome as she is and much as we identify with her, we're not Olivia. We didn't just come back from that shit to land into this shit. Give Peter a break, all right. Dude still hasn't worked out his issues with Walter yet.

This amuses me.

The other day Variety listed some actresses up for "the femme lead" in Superman, and specifically stated it wasn't Lois Lane.

It sounded suspiciously like a boneheaded idea of trying a romance story with Superman and some other woman.

This caused some angst for people who went "Wait.. That can't be right. What female character would be BIGGER than Lois Lane in this? Is she even gonna be IN it?" The only idea that made sense to me was that it might be a villainess (or they made a mistake, and it was just a female lead but not The Female Lead).

I'm gonna go ahead and do my "I was right" dance now at the newest rumors. Not only is it a villainess, but revealing the identity of the villainess these 3 actresses are up for seems to contradict some of the statements Snyder has said about the film. (Yeah, this is as big a rumor too but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than letting Lana fricking Lang lead a Superman movie.)

And the one who leaked it also went out of their way to say "Lois Lane will be in the film."

Does anyone else think this got into Variety, too many people went "NOOO" and they suddenly went "Oh shit, we gotta correct this one... but with some deniability so we won't spoil it"?

Place your bets, folks

By way of Let's Be Friends Again comes this bit of Brightest Day:



Well, Roy Harper is back on drugs, Wonder Woman's mother died in flames, Aquaman is short a hand and according to Chris Haley, they're planning to do Eclipso vs the DCU again. (And don't get smug, Marvel, what with offing a member of the Fantastic Four and taking us to a dystopian timeline where the X-men never existed.) So now's the time to speculate on what's next in the Brightest Day Event. Is it...

1) Wonder Woman loses her friend in a very special issue.

2) A Big Time Demon calls the crummiest villains in the universe together to offer them new power.

3) The Justice League finds that having wiped the memory of an enemy was a bad idea.

4) Hal Jordan hosts Parallax and/or the Spectre again.

5) The Flash is put on trial for murder. (ETA: Oops, they just did this one.)

6) Dark Seid versus the Legion of Super-Heroes.

7) Guy Gardner goes into a coma, and comes out with the mentality of a 14-year-old boy.

8) Supergirl sprouts wings of flame.

9) The skies turn red and a mysterious white nothingness advances menacingly on our heroes.

10) This issue: Superman DIES.

So far this year is a bit surreal

I returned from escorting the locksmith to find someone had left a NATO medal on my desk with a certificate. (My name is on the certificate, and it appears to be in French.)


I discovered that after seven years I could still explain the difference between Pulse Amplitude Modulation, Pulse Duration Modulation and Pulse Code Modulation. (I need a whiteboard and a flashlight, though.)

I put this thought out there, and am confident it will seep into someone's fanfiction and/or fanart soon.

I became one of those nerds who answers college assignments with nerdy stuff, despite having promised myself I wouldn't. Not only that, it was discussing the meaning of the term "canon", a word that makes me cringe.

I learned that the car that shares my last name has this slogan:


I learned that I am genuinely more radical than the sexual assault response coordinator on base. Also, I'm told by a coworker who attended an Army-sponsored women's rights meeting while deployed that I am WAY more radical than they were. (Among bloggers I'm pretty moderate, but in the military looks like I'm as far left as will enter a recruiter's office.)

I saw an officer give a briefing...

That last one was the same day I explained the modulation differences to a room with three Airmen and a smartass new NCO. I was constantly worrying that my communication skills would fail me and I'd be unable to properly answer the question, I'd look like an idiot, and they would conclude that I (and, by extension, all other women) knew nothing about the actual job and that that was why I was always filing stuff. I'm not great at getting my point across with my voice, I prefer writing it out. I actually managed it, though, and helped them out.

A few hours later, we all went to a mandatory briefing where they put on a video on drunk driving. We all shrugged, because driving drunk is widely considered to be the stupidest thing you can do while in the military. It causes the whole base to get in trouble, basically, and it is easy to avoid with the support network we've set up. Then he stressed that the next speaker was entire voluntary, and had suggested this himself. And I watched an officer, a man in leadership position walk to the front of his unit, in front of all of his subordinates, and calmly, smoothly tell everyone he'd done the stupidest thing you can do while in the military.

And I'd been nervous about forgetting modulation techniques I hadn't discussed in half a decade.

Rumors

There is a bad Wonder Woman TV pilot script floating around, and pretty much everything on it sounds like a checklist of "Things that will annoy Wonder Woman fans." I feel safe in ignoring this as a prank or a journalist reading the absolute worst possible interpretation of events at the moment. Even if it's real, scripts go through a shit-ton of changes before they show up on screen.

I think it's just that we've seen so much horrible shit in her comic and horrible idiocy suggested by Hollywood about her that we'll believe anything as long as it's bad enough. I expect heavy drinking on premier night, but I'm not breaking out the whiskey yet.

As long as I'm wishing for things...

I've realized recently that if Marvel were to write a comic just for me it would be an ongoing series starring Magneto and focusing on how he relates to his family. You could set stories where he's a good guy and a bad guy, because he certainly switches, is horrifying or sympathetic, and where he fights the X-men or helps them, but the main draw for me would be a promise of seeing the family ("the family" is to be referred to with Ron Howard's voice because I've watched too much Arrested Development). ALL of his children and grandchildren (even Luna now that she's got funky mind powers) qualify as super-heroes, and he is a Big Time super-villain. If you do not find that interesting, I don't understand you.

Right now in Children's Crusade, the main thing that keeps me picking it up (other than desperate hope that Wanda will do something) is watching Tommy, Pietro, and Magneto all try to out-smartass each other. (Billy and Wanda should join in once they've finished laying out the exposition.)



Marvel could easily pick this up after this series ends, and we'll have two sets of twins plus Grandpa. You already have some serious dramatic potential there, with the two sets of twins trying to become a full family again, and Magneto trying to be an X-man still. While he's trying to do the hero thing, he's also trying to rebuild those bridges now that he's got a couple of stepping stones put down again.

Bring Lorna back from space with the boyfriend, and you have another set of characters to enfold into the family. Polaris and Magneto is already a compelling interaction, Polaris plus the twins (and new twins) after House of M is so fascinating to me that I can't understand why Marvel wants to let this lie.

And while Magneto would be the central character, this would be an excuse to showcase how the family interacts with each other. We could get my Pietro-Lorna teamup here, Wanda and Lorna doing sister stuff (and fighting evil), Wanda and her children, Lorna and her niece and nephews...etc...

Along the way, natural storylines would bring in Crystal and Luna, Hulkling, the Kaplan family, the Shepherd family, Rogue and Professor X for an issue or a few arcs. Tommy could get a little robot girlfriend. Magneto could try to manipulate Pietro into dating a human or mutant woman. (I think he'd leave Wanda alone since even down to the basic "I make bad things happen" power she's not someone wise to mess with, and she's already had two mutant children.) Ideally they'd find excuses to bring back the old Vision (not the dumb emotionless one, or the admittedly nice baby one, but the Vision who married Wanda), Astra, Joseph, and--for me the Holy Grail of potential Magneto stories--Magda.

Marvel, I promise you that unless you put an absolutely DIRE creative team on it I would buy the hell out of this.

Today's Grant Morrison's birthday, so I will blog on his writing.

Now, if you've looked at any other post on this blog you can probably tell that I am a HUGE fan of Grant Morrison and multi-level narrative themes. I have a ridiculously short attention span, so the pacing and the denseness of his stories really appeals to me, as well as the fact that I can read them any number of times and see new things each time. I adore wall to wall weird and screwing with the timing in a story. I'll often let his books pile up issue by issue on my table until I get an entire storyline and can read it all in one burst, then reread it.

Favorites of mine? I read trades of the Invisibles and Doom Patrol like I was addicted. I will never ever get tired of Flex Mentallo or Kill Your Boyfriend. Right now his Batman stuff is the only DC I'm reading regularly. I got into DC as a teenager with his JLA and have been unable to look at the X-men franchise the same since he left the book. Seven Soldiers is just a treasure trove, and contains two of the three best superhero miniseries I have ever read.

He's actually responsible for getting me to enjoy Wonder Woman, Superman, and Jean Grey. Not because I think he was someone who finally found a new use for those characters, but because they really shined under his compressed style. At his pacing, he has to really dig into a character and find a way to get across their core and their overarcing lessons at that speed. There's a lot of room for error there, there are some characters I don't really like how he handles them and others I ONLY like when he writes them but sometimes he presents them at an angle that enriches other portrayals for me. With those three characters, they clicked for me under Morrison. After reading his JLA, I suddenly found myself interested in and just enjoying appearances by Superman and Wonder Woman, two characters I'd previously written off. And his Jean Grey in New X-men actually got me to look back at previous issues that had her in them with fresh eyes. She's one of my favorites now, and I'm super-pissed they left her dead at the end of his run. (Not that he killed her, though. The story was too enjoyable and I think the existence of Future Jean made it all the more temporary.)

The three favorite superhero miniseries I've ever read were written by this guy: Seven Soldiers: The Bulleteer (compelling themes about the youth/beauty standard for women and the sexualization of superheroines, plus the refrigerator fight), Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight (coming of age story with Mabinogion King Arthur and super-science setting), and Flex Mentallo (which remains the most quotable love letter to superhero stories I've ever seen.) If you've ever taken a recommendation from me on anything, take my recommendation of those three stories.

I'm still complaining about this one.

Even today, I can't get over the number of people who want to see Wonder Woman end up with Superman or Batman. I mean, I can handle a little flirting, a story with a date now and then, but I think that pushing either one as the major romance in her life minimizes Wonder Woman as an independent character. It reduces her to a prize for one of the DCU's great Alpha Males, and hurts her standing as a franchise. She becomes an accessory to one of them.

So it really irks me, not just to see so many fans who love this, but to see how often it seeps into the comics and their media tie-ins. In particular, it pisses me off when it becomes a focus in her own book, as her crush on Superman in the Perez run or even Rucka pulling that shit with Batman in Blackest Night: Wonder Woman. She is her own character, she deserves her own love interest but writers can't seem to get them to stick.

And this is DC's fault, because they aged and married off the guy who was meant to be her Lois Lane. Rather than rehabilitate him like they did Lois, and modernize him for the new era it seems they decided just not to use him anymore. The logic was that it was sexist for her to fall for the first man she ever saw. So they made the first man she ever saw into a fatherly mentor, and decided it would be better if her first romantic interest in a man was to be attracted to Superman. Because being attracted to a man that DC will never allow her to outshine is somehow less sexist than the original dynamic of her being attracted to a normal man who is equally turned on by her saving his ass all the time.



It's the dumbest thing they did when they rebooted Wonder Woman, and potentially the dumbest thing they've done in her history. (Even when they killed him off it was better because he had still existed, and they could always bring him back.) They simply haven't been able to recover. Every love interest they've introduced (Micah, Michael, Rama, Trevor, Io, Nemesis) that survives the writer who introduced them gets ignored by the next writer. None of them seem to take. In the meantime, tons of fans argue over whether Batman or Superman suit her better because so few people have seen that she was originally created with a love interest as part of her supporting cast.

Honestly, if they can get anything out of this Flashpoint and JMS reboot shit, it should be that they can bring back Steve Trevor revamped to suit her modern trappings, as a viable love interest. He lasted 45 years, after all. No one else can seem to stick around beyond the next writer.

He has no right to look this good.

I'd briefly considered ordering the Age of X: Alpha book this week simply because the Magneto costume design is so beautiful looking, and I am a sucker for Magneto. Still, the initial marketing campaign was very off-putting so instead O decided to slot that money towards a Chaykin-written Magneto one-shot. It is currently in the mail, but in the meantime @#$% Yeah Magneto has started posted some of the artwork and already I'm feeling good about my purchase. Check out this splash:



That is Magneto rocking the suit and trenchcoat look after he clears customs with a stolen identity. I'm told this is set when he first gets to the US, after the falling out with Xavier. Now, if I remember my X-men timing properly means that right now Xavier is scoping out Scott so it's within the past fifteen years. Magneto was a teenager in WWII, so he's coming up on 90 right now. That gorgeous man in that picture is around 75 years old.

Not only that, there's panels of him on a date with a much younger woman. I like this, because I'm particularly enamored of Magneto in a romantic setting. My reasons for this are complicated, though.

You know those terrible romance novels where there's an infamous bad guy who is a perfect gentleman to the heroine, so she falls for him? Not really the bodice rippers, mind you, but one of those where the guy treats her like fine porcelain but engages in violent behavior against every other character. It's this weird safe fantasy in love stories where the heroine is special enough that she is immune to the man's violent tendencies or he's somehow redeemed because sexism/chivalry keeps him from acting violently towards a woman.

Magneto romance stories use that setup, but his history acknowledges how completely removed from reality this feeling of safety is. Yeah, there's people like Rogue that he ended it with a bittersweet parting (I remember one where he told his life story in pillow talk to some girl he picked up on the beach and far as I know he just left, betcha this girl in this one-shot ends up okay too) but this guy has had some very bad breakups. Magda wisely realized that someone with that much power who is prone to paranoia and fits of rage is bound to lose it and hurt a loved one (like, y'know, their son) so she left. She leaves the children because she expects him to be so mad he'll kill her and take them. It's heavily implied that Lorna's mother was killed in a plane crash caused by Magneto. He attacks Astra on sight. Hell, even that bromance he had with Xavier ended on a really sour note.

And because they've done this, they've established that he is a bad guy who does bad things even to people he loves, they have a lot of flexibility when it comes to Magneto stories. They can explore his soft side and humanize him without erasing or trivializing his violent side because Magneto is such a huge, established and well-known villain that there's no point in trying to explain away his past or sweep it under the rug. It's there, and the writer has to accept that this is Magneto and he's been a pretty awful person. In the meantime, he's had enough softening and humanizing stories by this point that they don't come off as weird or insincere. Sure Vision and the Scarlet Witch #4 was probably weird when it first came out, but by now we all know just how complex this guy is. He can be the grand world-threatening villain without losing our sympathy, and he can be the melancholy, remorseful father without losing his threatening presence.

Ultimately, this what makes him such a compelling villain. His origin and subsequent actions, all of the alternate universes where he's a good guy, all the side-switching, his love life and his attitude towards his children all mean he has our sympathy. Not only that, we can relate to him. We can see ourselves in the shoes of this guy who just randomly has all of this power and ability but has given into his rage and pessimism to end up being exactly the kind of person who caused all of his pain. We can see him as a cautionary tale, someone to pity, someone to root for and someone to fear.

And we can look at a splash page like that, of him full of hope and cheer having stolen his friend's identity and illegally entered the country, and know that he's going to become a major supervillain but still smile at how happy and roguish he is, and how great he looks in the suit.

Team-up I'd Like to See

Polaris and Quicksilver

Right now, Mike Carey's hinting that there'll be Polaris and Magneto interaction this year and I do want to read that but I've seen those two together already. I really want to see her interacting with the twins, especially after House of M. That sort of story should completely change their dynamic.

Of course, the big character dynamic with the twins was set up in a lackluster way by Chuck Austen in Uncanny X-men. Prior to that, I don't remember her really dealing with Wanda (I'm trying to put together the issues of Exiles where AU Wanda and Lorna were together) but she's had a lot of contact with Pietro. They were on X-Factor together, and later they both worked in Genosha for Magneto. Sadly, I think he left before she found out they were related because Austen has her dropping the news on them after her initial post-Genosha breakdown, during the build-up to that dreadful Wedding storyline that I hope Wanda wipes from reality in Avengers: Children's Crusade #5. It bugs me a bit that we didn't see a significant team-up between Pietro and Lorna during that.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the sisters together, but Pietro and Lorna were on a superhero team together before they found out they were related. They worked closely for a while, and I want to see how this discovery affected this. Not only that, Quicksilver is an extremely family-oriented character, and Polaris has a running plot about trying to discover her true self. These characters should want to have a relationship and talk about this revelation, how it's affected them, and just generally about the family.

Lorna is the innocent member of the family in the House of M family fight fall-out, but she was also pulled into the family substantially for the first time by the twins during this. Having been present at the climax in HoM#7 she should remember Wandaworld, her father's fit, and have some words for both the twins and Magneto. That's a mess of emotions on her end. There's huge dramatic potential here and honestly, the best time to do it is during this period between Secret Invasion and Children's Crusade while Pietro is sane but miserably alone and disconnected from his family. (When Wanda gets back, Pietro won't be nearly so starved for sisterly approval.)

Sadly, Brevoort's formspring answers suggest there is no interest in developing this in the Avengers books, and the X-books for years have focused on Magneto and Polaris over her relationship with either twin. I have my fingers crossed Peter David will do something in X-Factor, though.

I for one can't wait for Amazon Princess Blush

On Youtube, Temptalia has a two-part review of the Wonder Woman MAC cosmetics line packaging. (Via Lulubonza)

This stuff has been all over Tumblr and honestly I keep getting more excited for it. Using Wonder Woman to sell makeup is actually a really great idea and I am shocked that we don't see this more often.

I know, I know, I should be on about false patriarchal beauty shit but I'm not really anti-makeup. It's like fashion, the industry is problematic and the pressure to conform is ridiculous but for a lot of women this is an art form. We wear our creativity.

Besides that, one of the big problems we have with getting a decent Wonder Woman story is the assumption that she is a character made to appeal to the men, a part of a boy's genre in a boy's medium that should be packaged and marketed for the straight male gaze above all else. This idea is what makes people cringe at the idea of a kid-friendly Wonder Woman cartoon for little girls, or cutting down on the horrible sexualization in her art, or just really putting some effort into a female-friendly take on Wonder Woman.

Cosmetics and fashion are forms of self-expression overwhelmingly dominated by and marketed to women. Wonder Woman being used to sell cosmetics is THE concession in the "Who does Wonder Woman appeal to?" argument. This is DC admitting that Wonder Woman is character designed to appeal to women. I want some of this makeup, but if I don't manage to get any of the limited items I can take some solace in that it sold that much better than expected, and that we have such a successful example of the Wonder Woman brings in women's money rule to throw at DC.

Besides, check out the names of the items.

Sidebar Addition: The Paper Mirror

The other link I added to my sidebar besides the infamous Rule is a piece by Cathy Leamy called the Paper Mirror. That this is so unknown and unreferenced is absolutely criminally. I'm not sure where she got the title, but I really think the phrase "Paper Mirror" should be in regular use when we discuss diversity in comics. It describes exactly what many of us have been trying to say in letters and message board conversations and thirteen-paragraph blogposts.

Sidebar Addition: The Rule

Over at the top of my sidebar I added a link to the Rule from Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For. The Bechdel Test is downright mainstream by now, and I see tons of people explain and use it as a conversation opener without ever linking this comic.

Go read it if you never have. I'll wait.

I'm always a bit irritated to see people use the test without linking the comic, not because I feel credit isn't properly given--the cartoonist's name is the test name--but because it's a weaker way to get the point across. See, as good a conversation starter as the Bechdel Test might be, it pales in comparison to the comic itself. The comic itself is not effective because it sets down some sort of litmus test or even a way to analyze movies for the futures. It's effective because it puts forth in a simple punchline Hollywood's pathetic limitations when it comes to women. You react just like the characters. You laugh at the joke, then you sigh because it's true. No blog post with bullet points can get this kind of disappointment across as well as the second to the last panel.

More Poor Marketing

Young Justice preview clip from DC Women Kicking Ass.



While I didn't take to the boys in the pilot, I had some hope I'd like Miss Martian. Sadly, I haven't had a chance to see the second episode and from it's promo added to this one I'm not sure why. I mean, look at this. They are on a "stealth mission." Martians have telepathy, invisibility, intangibility, and shapeshifting. They are sneak-machines. Miss Martian has all of these cool powers she can use in a scene like this.

They decide, instead of showing us how cool her abilities are, to take a second to tell us she likes Superboy's ears. In the last promo, Kid Flash talked about how attractive she was. This is clearly the most interesting part of the character to the writers. When given thirty seconds to showcase their team, they decide twice to focus on Miss Martian's romantic aspect. I've seen one image of her flying and maybe having blown something up, and that is only after they spent more time having Kid Flash talk about how hot she is.

So, with all the powers that a Martian has, which is everything Superman has plus telepathy and shapshifting... the coolest thing they think Miss Martian does is crush on Superboy.

This promo, and the other one, send a pretty clear message that this character is boring as shit and I shouldn't a half hour on the off chance that I might like her.

"But Raaaaagnell! You shouldn't judge a TV show by it's advertising!" Well, why the fuck not? This is what THEY think is the most enticing footage from the next episode, why should I assume there's anything different in the rest?