That cover gives me the willies.

I wince whenever I see the April Catwoman cover. (No, I'm not reposting it on my blog. Go look at the link.) It's not normal Adam Hughes eyerolling at the exploitation here. It actually unnerves me to the point I can't really make a judgment on whether it's sexist or not. There's something disturbing there I think would bug me if it were two men. That picture is in the middle of the point where she pulls the lip away with her teeth. Gross. And the color scheme. Blues and blacks versus yellows and browns with red in the middle. I immediately focus on the red when I see it. And it looks like she's eating part of Cheetah's face.

It's a horror cover. It has a worse effect than a Zombie cover on me. 'd examine it in depth but I'd have to stare at the damned thing and I don't like looking at it.

I find it so weird that it's the violence that bothers me with this one. I mean, I'm a Geoff Johns fan. People ripped in half? No problem. Impaled heroes? I'll keep reading. Catwoman biting Cheetah's lower lip? I have to avert my eyes and find another website. Maybe it reminds me of cannibalism or something like that.

Either way, this cover getting reposted around the community is not going to be fun for me.

Raise a glass to Heath Ledger

Patrick Verona was based on one of the biggest jerks Shakespeare wrote, but Heath Ledger played him and I liked him. I'm still willing to watch 10 Things I Hate About You (a movie in which nothing supernatural happened) multiple times.



I'm still looking forward to The Dark Knight, but it's going to be sad.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Aaron Lopresti to replace the Dodsons on Wonder Woman.

NRAMA: What are your views on Wonder Woman - what is she to you? She seems to have this continuum of meaning and everyone has one or two places upon it that resonate with them...

AL: For me she is the perfect embodiment of what it means to be a super hero, male or female. In some ways she is like Superman or Captain America (when he was alive). She is a character that has character and it makes her stand head and shoulders above the rest of female
super hero community.

Most importantly, I don't feel I am drawing sexually exploitive material when I am working on Wonder Woman. Somehow she seems to be above all of that. At least in my mind.

I'd make a joke about him having his work cut out for him, but honestly so long the costume manages to cover her butt and her breasts most fans'll be impressed with his restraint.

And guess what, it does.



And there's muscle definition.

I'm grumpy to see the Dodsons leave, though. I grumbled when they announced them because Harley Quinn was so cheesecakey, but I was really surprised and pleased with the actual work.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

I've gotten to enjoy historical holidays like Martin Luther King Day a lot more since I started blogging. There's really not much on TV or elsewhere that we haven't already seen before, but when you hit the blogfeeds on a day like today you can come up with some substance relevant to the occasion. Even blogs like this one, that don't get political beyond four-color commentary (though Kleefeld's managed to dig up two biographical comic books on Dr. King.) will have a few personal thoughts, or a link or a quote. Among the quoting and posting of "I Have a Dream" there's usually some stuff that you don't see in HS history class or that you don't remember. Last year was the first year I'd ever read "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", for example.

This year I found (through this blog) this 1996 article by Ronald Turner about the way the "I Have a Dream" speech gets misused to spread the idea that Dr. King was and claim that attempts to address racially-based injustice are acting against his legacy because they call attention to race.

Black Canary

Pictures of Alaina Huffman in costume as Black Canary in an upcoming Smallville episode. (Via)



I really like how her costume came out. Not only does the actress look the part (I always figured on Black Canary as a petite woman with a tough expression), they kept the fishnets and the basic design, so she's recognizable as the comic book character. They went with short hair rather than a long wig that would get torn off during a fight, or long hair that an enemy could grab at in a street-level fight.

The makeup mask is interesting idea. If she has some quick way to smear it on like a spray or something like a solid rouge applicator (one of those big old-fashioned round bars that you could just smear circles on your cheeks with), it makes for a good quick change and won't fall off. But makeup like that doesn't seem to obscure the face very well. I suppose you could say it's a distraction. Between it and the fishnets and the dark alley no one is going to be able to properly describe her.

She must have to carry wipes to clean it off.

Booster Gold #6

Okay, that was very fun. I like that they did and still kept everything intact. This will come back to bite the characters in the ass, though. I'm pretty sure that the mystery guy -- the one of the three who had the tech for everything to be possible -- will be revealed to be a bad guy in the near future.

Friday Night Fights

Round 3:

Well, this could be interesting.

Hmm..

Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures are negotiating with the estate of legendary SF author E.E. "Doc" Smith for film rights to Smith's seminal Lensman novels, Al Trestrail, Smith's grandson and manager of his estate, told SCI FI Wire.

On a scale of 1-20, how pissed off do you guys think the final product would make me?

Public Service Announcement

Far be it for me to denigrate another member of the online comics community, but there are some things that just look strange and should be pointed out. I freely and fully admit that I've reacted to other fan complaints by asking incredulously if the other fan has actually read the work in question (or if they indeed know how to), and I don't see it as a question that off-limits when you find your interpretation of a work (and the tropes of the genre) to be remarkably different from another fan's reading.

However...

But really. From whence comes your indignation, internet? Have you never read a Wonder Woman comic? Ever?

If you ask that question (even rhetorically) and the first post you link is by someone who has written the comic book in question, you look stupid.

Just for future reference.

And it doesn't help that Greg Rucka shoots down your main point in the comments of that first link.

Good News!

The Wonder Woman direct-to-DVD animated movie is being cast:

Well, no firm release date, but the voice of Wonder Woman will be provided by Keri (Waitresws, MI: III) Russell, according to TV Guide’s Michael Ausiello. According to Ausiello, Russell is in “advanced talks” for the role in the animated feature, which is tentatively slated for a late ’08, early ’09 release. Russell was a favorite choice by many fans for the lead role in a live action Wonder Woman movie before said potential movie sank beneath the waves.

According to the original information Newsarama received in August, the Wonder Woman animated feature will be rated PG-13, and is described as follows:

On the mystical island of Themyscria, a proud and fierce warrior race of Amazons have raised a daughter of untold beauty, grace and strength – Princess Diana. When and army fighter pilot, Steve Trevor crash-lands on the island, the rebellious and headstrong Diana defies Amazonian law by accompanying Trevor back to civilization. Meanwhile, Ares (the god of War) has escaped his imprisonment at the hands of the Amazonians and has decided to exact his revenge using the mystical “Hand of Rage,” an ancient artifact with the power to raise armies from the dead and infuse them with a thirst for blood. Ares intends to start a world war that will not only last for centuries – but will wipe out every living being on the planet, starting with the Amazons! It is up to Princess Diana to save her people and the world – by using her gifts and becoming the ultimate Wonder Woman!

Russell will be the second actress to portray DC’s Amazonian princess in the company’s direct-to-DVD features, as Lucy Lawless is providing the character’s voice in JLA: The New Frontier, due for release on February 26th.

Well, I'm going to try and be optimistic about this one. I liked Superman: Doomsday.

They... umm... They misspelled Themiscyra in the press release.

"Hand of Rage" sounds pretty cool, though.

I need a distraction

(This'll be my seventh post, counting all three blogs, on this subject, but by now I'm pissed off. For the record, I wouldn't be posting so much if I hadn't made that resolution to post once a day.)

I was doing so well until I remember that artist who got a C&D notice over Batman. Then rage at the double-standards for male and female characters combined with rage at the fact that a lone artist gets bullied by WB goons but a big magazine like Playboy can get away whatever the fuck they want to really unsettle me for the whole night.

Fucking DC.

And the thing that kills me is once I chased Levitz down after a con panel to ask why Swamp Thing couldn't be in both DCU books and Vertigo books, just with different continuity, and he told me that he wanted to keep the all-ages books separate from adult books, so they try and keep the characters in their own imprints.

That's right, he wants to keep all-ages characters like their iconic superheroes separate from mature readers material.

But apparently it's okay for an all-ages character to be on the cover of Playboy.

Damn, I'm fuming.

Two more points on that WW cover.

(Continuing from my thoughts here and here)

1) For people who think I'm giving Playboy too much credit, Greg Rucka gives them more:

And, for those of you who consider such things, take a look at the banner on the Ms. cover. "Wonder Woman for President."

Do you really think it's a coincidence that Playboy chose this year, the issue for the month containing "Tsunami Tuesday," to run this particular pictorial? Do you really?

(ETA: But that's not the main point of this post. I'm not sure I can give Playboy so much credit for forethought. Still, another coincidence for the list has me trying to shake the crazy thoughts out of my head: the article is "Sex in America" and has a poll on voter sex lives and the upcoming election.)

2) DC has long complained that Wonder Woman just doesn't sell as well as it should.

Well, the original target audience for Wonder Woman was little girls. And here I'm about to have some commenter who has never read the Golden Age Wonder Woman stories pop up and tell me that she was created as kink material. Well, I've read the archives. I've read the interviews. Marston was kind of a nut (he was clearly turned on by female supremacy), but made her to draw in female readers. Check out the archives, guys. Read some of that old Marston stuff before you condemn him as nothing more than a creepy fetishist. He didn't have his bondage kink interfere with the ability of the reader to see her as inspiring, heroic, or strong. It wasn't humiliation and degradation. He wrote fun goofy adventure stories and rope tricks. He uses getting tied up a lot, but her main weapon was a lasso not a gun or a sword. It doesn't stop readers from seeing Wonder Woman as someone they want to be. He wrote a hero first.

The current target audience for Wonder Woman is not little girls. It's not even women. It's so hard to convince a lot of female readers to pick her up because a lot of people just think the character is nothing but kink material (I know a lot of feminists who question her credentials as a feminist character, and go back to that), and always has been. And stuff like this cover perpetuate that myth.

Problem with that is that the character's iconic traits demand that she be more than fetish material, so writing her that way just doesn't work. So people who go to her book for fetish material very likely put it back down too.

Basically what she has is a small core of highly dedicated fans who have loved her forever and were introduced through the television show, or their mother, or accident, or through a highly dedicated fan who went out of their way to show she wasn't just fetish material. While people outside of that small group of fans just write her off and resist reading her.

I have to wonder, does DC have any idea that this (stuff like that cover) is why they have trouble getting people to take her seriously? Why they have trouble getting women to read Wonder Woman, a character made for them?

If they're smart, they'll put their foot down and try and reclaim that image. Pink Raygun (NSFW) asked if we'd see a model as Batman in the same sort of thing. The answer's no. You won't see Batman in paint on the cover of Playgirl because DC protects their copyright to Batman, and goes out of their way to stop sexualized images of Batman. The character is money to them, they want to control how the public receives him.

Well, Playboy is considerably higher profile than the linked watercolor artist. But we don't see thing one from DC Comics about this cover.

If Warner Bros had any brains they'd realize they had the iconic female superhero in their company, and do something to prevent the public from randomly writing her off as someone's fetish.

Is it okay this time because Playboy is "Tasteful" (which could mean a) it's okay when it's done to women, b) it's okay because it's heterosexual, or c) it's okay because they have lots of money and have been around a while) do they just not give a damn about Wonder Woman?

ETA: More from Rucka

They won't. Playboy had to have permission to use the character, which means that, at the least, it was approved by Warner Bros., and at the worst, it was approved by WB and DC.

In that case:

Paul Levitz, Publisher
DC Comics
1700 Broadway
New York, NY 10019

Reason #256 the I enjoy time travel stories

I've been watching episodes of JLU this weekend, and I finally got to see the Once and Future Thing, where there's a time shift and John is replaced by Hal for a couple of scenes.

It's a really cool bit, because Hal steps right into the plot, and answers everyone's stares with "Another time shift. I'm Hal Jordan, I'm up to speed. Carry on." John doesn't miss a beat when he comes back. They're so natural about it.

They did this with Kyle and Hal in JLA/Avengers, too. I think I've seen it in a few other JLA stories. There's some sort of DCU law where for the purposes of a time travel story, any Green Lantern can replace any other Green Lantern, and they won't be fazed or confused by this.

I swear I've seen this in almost every time travel story where a Green Lantern appears. We can only hope the entire GLC never gets together during a time travel story, because the readers wouldn't be able to follow the scene with everyone changing positions. I imagine the characters would laugh it off, though. (It's all fun and games until someone get replaced with a Parallaxed version of themselves, after all.)

They try to do this with other characters, but it works best with Lanterns for the variety. I mean, you have 4 Earth-based Lanterns running around as it is. They've all been with the JLA at once point or another, and given the trouble with Earth it's reasonable to assume that any version of the JLA would have dealings with the local Lantern. Even going before Hal you have Abin Sur (and if you screw up the timeline enough, Donna Parker or Carol Ferris would work) and after Kyle there would be any future Lantern idea you could come up with. You can just randomly throw an alien in there from either way.

Anyway, there's not much point to this post. It's just a fun trait of time travel stories.

Responding to Cheryl Lynn

"Arrgh! I would have never seen this wack crap if not for you guys!"

Speaking only for my part, I would have let it go a little while and linked it in a normal WFA post but I needed a column and four people emailed me links. (Now I two days' worth of material spanning three blogs out of this. Go me!)

Anyway, answering your question:

Two, is this really a big deal? I've guess I've seen enough ridiculous beefcake pictorials of men dressed as pseudo-superheroes that seeing the gender flipped this time around doesn't bother me. Think this doesn't happen to Superman and Batman? You just haven't been visiting the right sites.

No, that's not it.

See, the big deal isn't that she's "dressed" as WW. The thing's in the article. I know, no one reads Playboy articles but Pink Raygun scanned it so we all saw it.

The writer is calling a reality-TV-Queen the "modern-day Lynda Carter" without listing a single heroic role or action. This is just more of the mixing of feminine symbols up. I mean, you said it yourself:

The material should be kept separate though. Wonder Woman can't be all things to all people in the same book, comic or magazine. And DC shouldn't be seen as sanctioning all things either. That's where the trouble starts. Keep your fetish material out of my adventure comic. It's not like chocolate and peanut butter. They don't taste good together.

By listing a bunch of reality TV shows and calling her the "modern-day Lynda Carter" because they painted her into a WW costume, they presented the adventure story as fetish material.

A heroic and strong symbol is considered the same thing as a sex symbol, not because strength and heroism is sexy but because her appearance is sexy. It's related to what's going on in comics, I think, where the heroines are considered to be sexy first and heroic second -- because the guys writing the comics are like the person who wrote the Playboy article. They can't see beyond the sexy. They don't realize that there's a heroic aspect to the appeal of the character.

Zhinxy may have the best analogy:

Wonder Woman porn is fine in my book. Maybe even more than fine, from time to time. But that write-up feels a bit like… taking pictures in the “naughty nun” vein and then claiming you’re celebrating virtue?

I figure sex culture is okay as long as it doesn't try to be higher than itself. If it was just a Wonder Woman spread with some talk about her being hot, that'd be one thing. And if it was a superheroine spread where she was fighting bad guys in various costumes and/or she was an actress who typically played asskickers, and the whole thing was about how sexy that was, that would also just be one thing. I could go about my existence not acknowledging what was on the cover of or inside any issue of Playboy.

But it's not. It's the muddling you mentioned. They aren't putting out porn and saying "Here is porn. It has a girl dressed as Wonder Woman in it." They're saying "Here is Wonder Woman. She is porn."

Instead of presenting our hero as fetish material as the comics sometimes often do, they went and presented their fetish material as our hero.

It's a fine difference, but it's there and I think reasoning and writing about it now will help pin down the problems when adventure comics and fetish material collide elsewhere.

Friday Night Fights

(Is it just me or does Wonder Woman spend a lot of time fighting doppelgangers?)


Submitted for the weekly tournament.

What a way to start the day.

Damn, I just got three links about that Playboy cover with the painted Wonder Woman model. (NSFW, but that's the first link I got sent.)

It's not even the cover that bugs me (people will always fetishize everything) as much as the phrase "champion of truth, justice, and American sensuality" and the calling a reality-TV Queen the modern day equivalent of 70s role-model for little girls Lynda Carter.

At first I thought I didn't have the energy (especially given how crazy sexist and racist the election news has been over the past week) to rant properly at the moment, and was just going to link but.. then I got going. (And I'd had another post I ended up scrapping because this derailed my train fo thought.) I'm proud of myself. I didn't swear.

Two doses of Kyle this week.

Green Lantern Corps #20 was a weird experience when you take last issue into account. Last issue was like turning onto the freeway and finding the speed and direction of the rest of the traffic, and this issue was like making a U-turn in the middle of that freeway. I mean, he completely indicated last issue what Kyle and Guy were going to do with themselves, and then changed his mind in the first few pages here and went for a totally different setup. A bit disconcerting (though I prefer this setup for Kyle).

Countdown #16 was pretty cool. I really like this series when they focus almost completely on the Kyle/Donna/Jason storyline, and actually move it forward. It's fun and the ending makes me anxious for next week. This storyline was mildly amusing at parts when they did the specials (and I still found it the most interesting one), but it really got going once they got to Earth-51. I've already been amazed by how much I like Donna here. I've just realized that I've been liking Jason too, which is a weird feeling. He annoyed the shit out of me up until this week with the exception of the Gotham By Gaslight special. I'm glad I followed it this far.

It still puzzles me.

I've been reading the cross-community blogathon about the whole Spider-man thing, and I swore I wouldn't post on it but I broke that rule two days ago and I may as well get this one off my chest.

Admittedly, as a DC fan I'm probably more accepting of soft reboots, so I can get over the reset button and the regression. The problem is that I will never, ever understand what Marvel was thinking with Mephisto.

I mean, okay, so you don't like the marriage, you want to go back to fanland and you're too chickenshit to do a divorce (that's a rant for another day). That's one thing (). There are ways to do it without killing your character's moral standing.


There's The Scarlet Witch!, for one.

I mean, this character was ruined for a reason, right? Her powers were vague and unwieldy as a protagonist, so they made her crazy. That way she's available for use as a crossover villain and/or cheesy plot-device to make whatever the hell they want happen?

Ever since Peter took off the mask in Civil WAr I've been expecting her to pop up and fix everything. (It's not like anyone remembers what happened to her after House of M, anyway.)

Why the hell didn't they just do that? Have Peter or MJ personally piss her off.

*Sigh*

Stupid Marvel.

19th FSF Carnival!

Karen Healey has the 19th Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans up at Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed).

She did a great job and there's a ton of reading there. Check it out at your leisure.

Looking for a host for the 20th issue. Please contact me if interested.

This bothers me.

And it's not just that Mark Waid's leaving the Flash:

And at this moment in time, I just ... in terms of superhero work, I feel frozen. I kind of... I feel like I'm momentarily out of step with what fandom wants because I don't get it. The same voices that are screaming that we gave Flash a wife and kids and family, because they say that's not what Flash is, are the same people who are screaming that they've broken up Mary Jane and Peter Parker. "How dare you take his family away!" I'm like, wait! Wait! What? Which way is it? So... growth and change good... or growth and change bad?

Hmmm. I've noticed that too. Of course, I'm a fan who thinks married with children works for Wally myself but yeah, I've seen this.

He's not taking into account (and this worries me that other writers might not take this into account either) that different characters have different stories that fit them, different books have different themes to them, and different companies have sincerely different feels. Add to that, different fans have different expectations for the characters. So these contradicting fan tastes aren't really so contradicting.

I've noticed people (and myself) annoyed that Quesada's anti-marriage for Spiderman but he was perfectly fine with Black Panther and Storm together. Well, we're being a bit unfair to him there. Spiderman and Black Panther (and Storm, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest he didn't give Storm two thoughts here. She's been really underused in the comics during Quesada's reign) are totally different characters. The same stories are not going to be told about these two characters. Fans expect different characters in the two books. Writers write different characters in the two books. The story goes in different directions.

You might disagree with those directions (and in the case of Quesada's choices there I do, early and often), but I don't see the inconsistency in expecting different things from different characters. I would hope that writers and editors would like to tell different stories with different characters, and would understand that marriage might not fit a certain character very well but that same character would suitably have to deal with their own biological children anyway, or guardianship of a niece or nephew. They'd understand that other characters would settle down and do the nuclear family thing (I think it suits the Flash very well), and other characters would settle into marriage and be married for a long time before starting a family. And, of course, there are still others who wouldn't think of children, or marriage at all.

I mean, the last thing we want is writers writing every character the same, what would be the point of reading more than one book?

Really, though, with the fan complaints it's all a matter of how fans take change. The Spidermarriage was status quo for twenty years, and that Wally's only had children (I don't think as many people are complaining that he's married as they are complaining about the twins) for a few storylines now. Spiderman changed by going backwards (which in my opinion, if you want it and you probably do because you're reading this blog, was kind of a shitty direction), Flash changed by going forwards (and in my opinion, that's a pretty good idea). Fans who have been reading the status quo for a while saw change and reacted. And in some cases they reacted badly. This makes perfect sense insomuch as the behavior of people makes perfect sense.

For me -- it just really bugs me that Mark Waid, the guy who wrote the definitive Wally West, talked about the Park-Wests and the Watson-Parkers as though they were the same couple. That just seems wrong.