So I am a person who likes a few comics.
I have for a long time. I don’t talk about it much, though. I’m not an enormous fan of them, and since I’m the sort that likes my continuity to be, well, continuous, I tend to be somewhat aggravated by things that “serious” comics fans let go with a few whines.
I’m not real picky — to me, it doesn’t matter if the heroes are owned by a particular company or not — these days, the very large entertainment conglomerates own everything anyway.
DC launched their New 52 reset. Hearing the news made me take a look at a few things that were of interest to me. THings like the number of “Wildstorm” characters that were suddenly part of the DC universe, but not quite the same as they were when Jim Lee ran it as part of the Image deal in the last heyday of the 90′s.
Jim Lee being Publisher — now that was interesting enough, and didn’t bode well for the feelings I had toward the project overall.
Don’t get me wrong — I like his work ok. But he has a very stylized method of portraying people, and it is best used with a good story, since in my mind, Lee is not really the best writer and decidedly not one of the great creators out there.
But like several of his former Image partners, he’s one seriously canny business dude. As an artist, though, he shouldn’t be the one in charge.
And that particular misgiving of mine about his body of work seriously shows up in the New 52 issues any time a woman is portrayed in the issues I’ve seen.
Now, I “get” the whole sex sells thing. I understand that while yes, the very young are readers, they are not going to be the people who read most of the comics that are sold today.
Because they don’t have money and to be perfectly honest, the basic comics that people remember fondly of bygone days are nothing like the comics we find today. They are much darker in tone, more violent, and, these days, even more sexually charged.
Not so much on the guy side of things, though. But very much on the gal side of things. Men are portrayed as, basically, hulking brutes with lantern jaws and short cropped hair and all that kind of stuff.
Blame a few of the most popular writers out there. Watchmen. The Dark Knight Returns. Sandman.
Those sold very well, and they continue to sell well, all things considered. The market people may be thinking of might be preteens, but the actual market being sold to is males 13 to 25, with an eye to the stereotypical person that shows up at Comic Con every year.
Those are the people comics are written for — the ones who will shell out 3 bucks for 13 pages of hypersexualized mindless dreamery.
They are competing with games these days, and movies. Which might strike some people as odd since most of the movies that get talked about anymore seem to be about the comic heroes and villains that come from such.
Which is not to say that women aren’t part of that market, really. They are. Women are actually very much into comics, but they aren’t who is being sold to.
They were, and have been, for years. THe comics become “specialty” types. The US isn’t as segmented and rigidly defined as, say, manga, but it does have its genres.
I was hoping, personally, that since the comics I like generally get kicked to the curb after a few issues, that perhaps one of them would be decent in this reboot.
So I went out and I got the new Wonder Woman. Supergirl. Batman. Batman, the Dark Knight. Action COmics. Detective Comics. Superman. Justice League. Voodoo. Grifter.
I like my computer stuff and my gadgets and all that. So I did digital copies.
I wasted a chunk of change, I think.
Catwoman was horrible. I understand that part of the reason she always sells well is that she has hot covers and all that. But this catwoman is supposed to be something like her previous incarnations.
And she is. As seen through the eyes of some idiot who has no clue what basic psychology means. THis is someone who was raised on wet dreams and Michael Bay movies, I think — where women are window dressing at best, and worn out old useless husks of former window dressing most commonly.
I can’t imagine what they’ve done to Batwoman, Batgirl, and other bat-females. It does not bode well.
Supes, who’s rebirth here is pretty much a response to legal challenges filed and court decisions handed down and similar stuff with the estate of his creators, gets off pretty darn well. But Perez, who writes Superman, is actually pretty damn good about that kind of thing.
Action COmics is still too soon to tell.
Perez is up there with the guys (in this case, pretty much all of them) who I think actually do a decent job of telling a story that is illustrated. Which is the sort of stuff I like to see in comics.
All too often I get a bunch of panels that a story is then cobbled together to tell a story around. Pretty pictures, if I’m lucky.
Catwoman I was not so lucky in — and yet there is a vague attempt to tell a story there.
In fact, I think the Supes family probably gets better treatment than poor bats does.
Perez. Starlin. Byrne. Claremont.
I had special hopes for Wonder Woman. Her and Supergirl I’ve liked since I was in single digits myself, reading old Supe’s comics left over from my uncle’s stash of them.
I loved the way Donner did Superman. I didn’t expect that to hold true here, mind you — but that kind of underlying respect for the source material is apparent in the Supe’s line.
Not so much in the Bat’s line. Too soon to tell in the Wonder Woman line, who seems to have been demoted. I kinda like that, though.
I liked some of the Image stuff. But DC has filled that spot in a grab for dollars. Only its no longer just found on the covers and in idiocies like “swimsuit specials”. Now its in every panel, of every page. And Voodoo — who was always an interesting character but was essentially there just to have a bit of mixed race flava for the swimsuit special from my POV — is nothing but pure horseshit of the sort that makes little boys wank hard in their bedrooms.
Little boys being a term used loosely here.
All in all I picked up 11 comics.
I’m not likely to pick up many more of them. Aside from the expense, which I can admittedly ill afford, there is a lack of enthusiasm for me. Granted, I’m well outside the target demographic. And yes, ending sexism in comics is decidedly not something on the minds of the publishers and the people who do the artwork here.
But I would be lying if I didn’t say that they turned me off because they handled women not merely badly, but with comes across as an extra special attempt at misogyny on an order unlike pretty much anything I’ve ever seen.
And I’ve seen some pretty wild shit in my day.
The problem, though, isn’t the misogyny.
Its that they turned me off. I *want* to like comics. I could figure out a way to purchase one or two a month, even at the unimaginably obscene prices they are charging for digital copies (come on, people, really? It costs you 3 bucks to make a book, I can understand, but to sell a file?).
I don’t particularly like the X-men. I’m not a fan of most of the mainline Marvel stuff. I honestly prefer the movies to the comics there. I was turned off of them by the latest greatest end of the whole fucking mutant deal that happened long after the first round of latest greatest mutant ending disasters that fucked with the timestream and retconned the order of the universe and that was all long before someone decided they had too many mutants running around and killed everyone off or whatever it was.
I remember a point in time when the core of the New X-men all dies to save the universe and were brought back to life but rendered invisible to any and all cameras. By a Goddess.
I liked the characters, mind you. It was the stories and the way they just seemed to have to get bigger and meaner and less and less about being heroes and so forth and so on.
Because I really, really like the idea of Heroes.
Not the rage of Anti-Heroes we tend to get stuck with. But actual heroes. Heroism is something exceedingly rare in Comics to my jaundiced and cynical eye.
See the earlier citations of certain books and writers whom I blame for the destruction of heroes.
I’ll also note that I have a hard time writing heroines. ’Cause I always immediately associate it with drugs and women, which is never a good thing.
We need more heroines, though. I would love to see a strong, sex positive heroine. Unfortunately, sex positive to most of the comic book artists and writers these days seems to mean she likes to get freaky while she’s kicking ass in clothing that by most probably would be banned in public places.
Because, well, we do live in a society that says we need to avoid being raped, not one that says we shouldn’t rape.
So maybe I’ll have to take up the challenge and write me a comic book that does that.
Problem is, I can’t draw worth a damn, and who’s going to be a comic where the cover doesn’t show ample cleavage?
