Okay, firstly I never said Wonder Woman was a man with ta-tas. (It was funny the first time you said it, but I can’t let you keep misrepresenting my position.) I said, as a female superhero archetype, there’s nothing particularly feminine about her other than her tas-tas and heels. Everything else unique to her femininity gets regulated to her origins, her Rogues Gallery, or gets glossed over in some future Elseworlds tale but never dealt with in the here and now.
Even if I did take my definition of power from feminist literature (which I didn’t, but only because I didn’t think to look there, thanks!) it doesn’t make it wrong. Actually this little theory of power in superhero comics is mostly one I’ve made up all by my lonesome in accordance with my studies, inasfar as I’m aware. I did borrow some terms, like “coercion.”
Power, in the social sciences, is described as three separate types stemming from three separate sources: coercion (the actual use or threat of force), authority (deference based on formal and informal heirachial structure) and influence (persuasion through logic or emotional appeal). Power is based on the level of organization, available resources and sheer numbers. The more you have from each source, generally the more powerful you are. Weakness in any source of power undermines your overall strength. All power fantasies, male and female, stem from these six aspects but typically differ from which ones they emphasize. Broadly, men’s power fantasies are coercive, women’s are influential… both covet so-called male authority (in say, corporate business and national politics) although women’s authority (in the home, K-12 public schools, religious matters, grassroots political organization and some industries, like nursing) is almost exclusively unchallenged.
You can further delineate superhero power by pointing out the character differences in a meek and conscientious Spider-Man versus a brooding and berzerker Wolverine… but in the end, they both exert their power because they either threaten to kick the crap out of someone or actually kick the crap out of someone.
Now, someone else – like Captain America – can be said to be coercive (his shield is a weapon, yes?) and authoritative because of his proven leadership of the Avengers, allegience with military authority and iconic stature as America’s vanguard super-soldier. Also, when he barks orders you listen – a form of authority and influence as well.
Someone not impressed with his jingoism might not find him as influential as say, Wonder Woman, whose persuasive and influential powers include the ability to make men tell the truth, even when they don’t want to! That kind of power is not as overt as super-strength or a healing factor. It’s more subtle. It’s very female. When Wonder Woman, Jean Grey, Saturn Girl, Sue Richards, Lois Lane, Hawkgirl, She-Hulk, Promethea and the Wasp aren’t busy busting heads (in accordance with the male superhero power fantasies), they’re often diffusing situations through reasoning and emotional appeals (offhand only the Dark Pheonix and Jean Grey are the exception here… and both ended up dying. Huh.) When superhero women are in authority, they’re usually second in authority. Coercive power always dominates.
That’s also a good point. Teams like the X-Men tend to be good for female characters since male readers are drawn to the male characters and the female characters get occasional chances to shine (not the ideal situation, but better than female characters being relegated to supporting characters in a male hero’s book). On the other hand, female characters are almost always designated a type of “mothering” role within the team and almost never hold leadership positions.
Again I’ll point to Peter David as someone who was able to handle female characters well in this regard in the woefully cancelled Young Justice, a team that was predominantly female at one time (also something that rarely happens). That book was also responsible for Wonder Girl being a far more interesting character than Wonder Woman for a while.
I’m talking about way back when at the dawn of the age of comics. It’s something I actually read in a history of manga one (can’t remember the book tho’). The US started using color as a selling point and all the companies started following suit. Because the color is relatively expensive, American comics aren’t very long where as Japanese comics, being in black and white, can have a lot more material for the same price. And supposedly this affected the storylines too. The color lent itself to stories with brightly colored superheros where the less flashy black and white Japanese comics focused more on story telling.
One big diffference is that most of the comics which appeal to women in Japan (and in manga form here) are written and drawn by women. Getting more women writers involved in the comics industry would probably help.
I don’t think even that explanation makes my redaction way off, but let’s say at least that the question is not really whether she’s a man with boobs, but whether she’s female in a sense that young girl can identify with. Obviously, Gloria Steinem identified with her, so there is at least one counter-example, but if someone told me that girls in general don’t, I’d believe it.
Power, in comic books, is the ability to shoot chain lightning out of your ears. This has buggerall to do with the criteria you’re discussing. The people reading this stuff are dreaming of how cool it would be to crap napalm, not set up a hegemony.
Bringing this back to the gender issue, when Storm barks orders, you suppose her not to be a woman then?
Oh, sure. Everybody knows women are from Venus, whereas Men are from Mars. We’ll relegate to women all things that are subtle and emotional, and to men all things that are direct and rational, and then we can spend years wondering why so many people have gender identity issues.
If they were first in authority, they would be dismissed as not female enough.
shy guy wrote:
Like Wolverine. Constantly stuck baby-sitting some Kitty Pride or Jubilee. Always mousing up his big hair and growing out his nails, and when the kids are in trouble, he’s the first one to run to rescue them. And have you noticed how often he ends up naked? Purely exploitative. I bet they’d treat him differently if he were a man.
Well, Wolverine is kind of an odd case. Firstly, it’s just part of his “loner with a heart of gold” schtick. Secondly, it has at least something to do with the fact that the girls who hang around him just happen to be attractive and around the same age as the target audience for the comics. This is really a different scenario than gets applied to female members of teams like Sue Storm, Donna Troy, and even Jean Grey at times - characters who are often described as the “heart” or “soul” of their respective teams.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is limiting.
I agree with Askia on the assessment of powers. Female characters are often given nonphysical powers; when they are given physical powers (super-strength, super-speed, etc.), they’re almost always of a lesser degree than their male peers. That’s why you end up with things like Wonder Woman’s coersion and truth-telling abilities, all the Marvel telepaths (Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Psylocke, etc.), Saturn Girl, Invisible Woman and her forcefields, Scarlet Witch and her hex, Zatanna, Storm, etc…
By contrast, most of the female heroes I can think of off the top of my head with physical powers are just female versions of male heroes - Supergirl, Power Girl, She-Hulk, the various Spider-Women, Jessie Quick.
There are, of course, exceptions (Wonder Girl, Rogue, Warbird), but there’s definitely a trend that supports Askia’s view.
Also, tremorviolet, I agree that a move to black and white (or at least cheaper, less-flashy color) would be a smart move for American comics, as would more pages per issue. Of course, I think that in general American publishers should be persuing manga-like strategies as vigorously as possible. Marvel is doing this, more and more, but they run into just the problem you stated: their digest-size books are often half the size of a manga volume and just as expensive.
When I worked in an American comic book store, I read almost all of the comics. Of the American comics there were 2 or 3 series that interested me enough that I read beyond a few issues. Neil Gaiman’s works were one. American comics just don’t appeal to me.
On the other hand, I love a lot of manga and I have many female friends who are fans of it too. It used to be that when you went to anime conventions, it was almost all guys. Now it’s at least 50% if not more female. All of my favorite manga are done by female artists. I can’t even think of a professional female American comic artist that I’ve read.
And you know what’s funny? Most of my favorite comics have no notable female characters at all. They are about guys.
Of course, this leaves out Professor X, who would be a significant counter-point to the point you’re making.
Here are some examples that I think are good for discussion:
Silver Sable – She is tough, highly skilled in combat and mercenary. She offends everyone she meets with her with her greed and lack of empathy. Yet, she does have her sympathies, as in Amazing Spider-Man 279, when she takes vengeance for a child who is left motherless as she herself once was. In ASM 280 we see that she cannot be written off as being ‘a dike’ or being ‘frigid’ as a woman like her is liable to be stereotyped – she was on a romantic liason with a man, having a good time, but cut it short when business came up. She is not entirely selfish either, as we see in Web of Spider-Man 50, when she is seen working to save her country Symkaria from bankruptcy. But overall, she’s a mean, cold bitch who uses physical power and brutal will to get her way.
Elektra – She started out under Daredevil’s shadow, as his lover and enemy, but has come into her own. She is an assassin for hire, but not entirely without personal ethics. She’s strong and quick and broody, a killer, not a nurturer, haunted by the loss of her father who, by naming his daughter Elektra in the Marvel universe was kind of asking for it.
Dakota North – The heroine of a the late, lamented title. It ran something like six issues. She was smart and tough, cosmopolitan. She had a little brother playing a role more often played by a little sister – a silly little chit who gets in trouble and needs to be rescued. She had to contend with an ex-lover who was basically a stalker, and wanted her to be more vulnerable, more emotionally manipulable than she was – more of what he expected from a woman.
Sun Girl/Moon Girl – Written circa 1948 and marketed to girls, judging by the ads for panty hose and reducing cream, these comic feature heroines who never stop whipping ass long enough to pander to anybody’s stereotype of women, yet the artwork expresses a lot of femininity which could be described as delicate in spite of the aforesaid relentless ass whipping. Nobody in the comics question either the heroine’s femininity or their power.
Tank Girl – I don’t know much about her, but I’m sure somebody here must. Is she just a female version of a male character, or does her gender matter?
Johnny Angel. You’re going to lose me as a debating partner P.D.Q. if you continue to challenge my ideas, then completely dismiss my responses out of hand as “buggerall to do with… the ability to shoot lightning out your ears.” You come off smug and rude. The whole “Men are for Mars, Women are from Venus” comment completely misrepresents and oversimplifies everything I was saying.
You were right about Professor X being a counterpoint. As Marvel’s premier telepath his power is supremely influential, but it has also a coercive aspect (he can fire off psychic bolts) and his power as an authority figure is absolute among mutants.
When Storm barks orders as head of the X-Men, she’s exerting authority in a leadership position that’s predominately and historically a male role. And yeah it in some superficial ways it does make her look more “manly”: notice how Chris Claremont had to butch her up after she ousted Cyclops by de-emphasizing her femininity, whacking off her waist-long white hair into a mohawk and affecting an 80s black leather punk dress and matching attitude. Contrast this with The Authority’s Jenny Sparks, who’s hardened, take no shit attitude comes off more as a result of one hundred year’s hard living than paying to some inverted female stereotype. Also of note are Swift’s deadliness and the Engineer’s intuitively effective use of her nano-tech. Even Quantum Jenny looks pretty deadly.
Can I point out one common feature of the female superheroes you and I have listed? Excepting Moon Girl/Sun Girl, whom I know nothing about, they aren’t really superheroes. The rest of them are anti-heroes or mercenaries who deliberately don’t follow superhero conventions (The Authority especially isn’t a superhero group: it’s a bunch of super-fascists who dress like heroes but make everybody nervous.) It also explains why rough and ready Wolverine has all these teenaged girl sidekicks soothing his killer instincts. Whenever he’s solo, he acts more like an anti-hero – would be moreso if Joe Quesada hadn’t instituted his dumb no smoking policy.
Shy guy, you’re on the money with all the other heroines you mentioned, although I disagree somewhat with Sue Richards. Invisible Woman’s original powers were completely passive; it was the refinement of them to include forcefield projections that made her, at first, capably defensive and later a potent coercive force and THE most powerful person on her team in terms of sheer power. (It took John Byrne’s re-imagining to make her realize that potential.) Still, she is mostly used in the supportive/defensive/mothering role.
Exactly. The quote in the OP mentioned sports and music as scenes that attract hot women. Newsflash, many athletes and musicians are hot. And even ugly musicians can be considered attractive and sexy. Hot girls are attracted to hot guys.
Another point–how does one get into comics, anyway? Because your friends have them when you’re a kid? Because you happen to wander into a comic store? Well, none of my little girlfriends read comics. And as others have said, girls and women aren’t too likely to feel welcome in the average comic book store.
When I was in college, some male friends of mine were into comics, and through them I read a few, and liked them. But these guys were “collectors,” and they were super-picky abouty how I touched the comics, lest I damage them. That’s not a criticism of them, but an explanation of why I didn’t get into reading the comics regularly. It was just too stressful. But the point is that I was only introduced to comics at all by a combination of the “being introduced by friends” and the “hot guys” factor. Well, only one of thse guys was “hot,” but the other two were reasonably attractive. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have been hanging out with them.
And an anecdote–My best friend actually posed for a comic book drawing. A friend of hers is a comic artist. Now, my best friend has an absolute knockout body. Tiny waist, slim hips, super-long legs, etc. She’s always had to beat guys off with a stick. She’s modeled, too. Her bra size is a 36B, but even guys who like bigger breasts think she’s perfect. Naturally, the scene she posed for was a rape scene. And when she saw the finished drawing, she was highly amused to see how the artist had exaggerated her figure. Not only did he make her even more wasp-waisted and long-legged, but he added HUMONGOUS BULBOUS BREASTS to her chest. Even a woman who is considered “perfect” in real life wasn’t good enough for a comic book.
He might be, but I don’t really think so. If anything, I think he just demonstrates how women in comics aren’t really allowed to dominate even in the areas usually relegated to them.
That is, even though heroines tend to be granted non-physical powers like telepathy, the most powerful telepath in the Marvel universe is still male. Likewise, the strongest (Hulk), most capable leader (Captain America), smartest (Mr. Fantastic), etc. are all male.
But that’s not marketing to “hot girls”. That’s marketing to girls in general, including the “hot” ones. Which is exactly what I said before.
*Well, if Hundin wants to attract negative attention from women, he should carry on with this “we need hot girls!” business. It won’t make women (hot or not) buy more comics, though.
I do know girls who read comics, they’re my sisters. We all read comic books on long family drives: Little Lulu, Audrey and Melvin, Sad Sack, Sugar and Spike, Baby Huey, etc. Maybe the problem is that girls aren’t into the superhero genre that’s are so prevalent today?
You know, you used to be able to get comics at the grocery stores. That’s where I started reading 'em. Things like Archie and the Scrooge McDuck three-packs and, of course, the comic magazines like Mad and Cracked. I don’t see those anymore, do they still exist?
In something like fifth grade, I talked my parents into getting me a hard cover compilation of Hal Foster’s adaptation of E. R. Borroughs’ [url=http://www.electro-comicsonline.com/art_store/jpegs/hogrth21.jpgTarzan that I had seen at our local indie bookstore. (mmmm, hot naked Tarzan) Shortly after that, I found a stash of Peter Parker: Spetacular Spiderman at a used bookstore and was addicted. I thought Peter was cute and funny and I think I liked the stories about his problems more than the fighting.
I fell outta the comics mode for a number of years before I ran across a copy of The Watchmen at a local bookstore and was blown away by the intricate plot. So I investigated comics for a while but nothing else really comes close to the Watchmen. At the time, there comics section was a part of the main bookstore and easy to browse. When they moved the comics part to a seperate but adjacent location (so you couldn’t just “accidentally” wander over), I stopped browsing.
My next comics revival was the discovery of manga on the web. I love the stories (I read a genre of women’s comics which are mostly romances) and order most of my manga directly from Japan online. Occasionally, I’ll buy a translation of a manga I already have at Borders, if it’s available.
Anyway, my point is to illustrate how one girl got into comics and that, at no time, did it involve comic stores. I’ve always been put off by the comic store attitude and dislike shopping at them so I don’t. All my comic discoveries have been accidental at other locations.
Good, so some progress is being made. It is here also–our largest chain (Indigo/Chapters) is beginning to stock a small selection of graphic novels, trade paperbacks, and manga too. But it tends to put all of them, regardless of subject matter, into the Science Fiction/Fantasy section.
You reminded me of something else though: why can’t comic shops organize themselves like any other bookstore? In a regular bookstore, I see sections for fiction works–Mystery, Science Fiction, Romance, and so on. But comics shops always seem to organize by publisher: DC, Marvel, Vertigo, etc. This only adds to the “you have to be an member of the club to understand it” mentality, I think, and does little to let people (both men and women) know where to find things that they might find appealing.
Regular bookstores are not organized by publisher. CD shops are not organized by record label. DVD shops do not organize movies by studio or production company. If comic publishers want to get their product out to as many people as possible, perhaps the comic shops should organize their stock as other outlets of pop culture do: by subject matter instead of by publisher.
That the content needs to change is a given. What about hot guys? Where do comics’ boy toys come from? Can we make characters that appeal to more women, like sweet, quirky Yorick, The Last Man? Is Keanu Reeves as a kinder, gentler Sting substitute in Constantine the way to go? Was DC right to make Superman hunkier and with long hair in the 90s?
Some reators as famous personalities attract female fans – mostly writers moreso than artists. But the writers with the biggest female fan bases tend to be writers who do sizeable quality work outside of the superhero ghetto: your Neil Gaimans, your Alan Moores, your Vaughns, Los Hermanos Hernandez and many of the independent writer/artists like the Akiko guy, Jeff Smith, Paul Chadwick, Frank Miller (more for Martha Washinton or n’Sin City than 300, I’d imagine). Mark Waid has a reasonably-sized female following. So does Sergio Aragones, if Mark Evanier’s anectdotes are to be believed. Still damned few of these guys are what you might call hunks, although some are reasonably cute – they might be able to ull off the ol’ don’t repel 'em and dazzle 'em with your wit schtick folks like the science fiction people tend to pull with their female fans.
Isn’t American comics roughly analogous to speculative fiction in terms of male creators/female audience members? Isn’t comics split the same way – men gravitating towards hard science fiction and women to fantasy worls? It can’t be just sexist generalization on my part.
I think one thing that drew females into Trekdom is the fact that Kirk and Spock were reasonably sexy characters, Spock being the infinitely more preferred of the two. Maybe comics’ icons need to be tweaked a bit.
With the possible exception of some of the Humanoids reprints (which I have heard about but have not read) where is the hard science fiction in comics? I’d gladly read some if I could find it. Some of Warren Ellis’ work comes close, and he has a relatively large female fanbase.
Ok, it wasn’t Hal Foster, it was Burne Hogarth. Here’s a sample. Amazing artwork and I see the book (Tarzan of the Apes is out of print (I still have mine tho). Mmmm…
Anyway, Askia, has a good point: character designs need to change along with content. Girls love reading about cute boys but they don’t wanna see big, muscle guys. Look at the manga boys, they’re usually more on the waifish side. I think that’s why I originally liked Peter Parker too, he wasn’t some overly muscled goon.
Actually, this criticism is dead-on, but let me try it again with the asshole factor turned way down:
You are equivocating. You take some pains to lay out a theory of power, but it is one that has nothing to do with the meaning of the word ‘power’ as it is used in comic books. The power that comic readers fantasize about are these super-human and extraordinary abilities that superheroes have. You are working with a definition of power that can be used to model social structures and human interactions in the real world, but has nothing to do with the powers that ‘superheroes’ are described as having, and that comic readers fantasize about.
You can analyze the comic world by this model of power you’ve constructed, as you’ve done in part already, but in doing so you are not responding to my use of the term, and you hazzard conflating the two different senses of the term.
The closest your elaborate discussion comes to having anything to do with the meaning of ‘power’ in a comic book context is the issue of coercion. I rejected the relevance of ‘coercion’ when you first mentioned it because of its normative load. You came back with a definition of coercive power that is value neutral, and that buys you something, except that I still don’t accept the use of ‘coercion’ as value-neutral. ‘Force,’ which is part of your definition of coercion, is more like it. Both Spider-Man and Dr. Doom use force, for purposes of vastly different moral value. If that’s all you mean, then we are not at odds here.
But, and this seems likely to be the sticking point, while I bristle at assigning moral value to ‘coercion’ or ‘force,’ I am appalled to see such concepts assigned a gender. You continually assign gender to abstract concepts. You say that influence is feminine, that authority is masculine, subtlety is feminine, oversion is masculine. These gender-based bifurcations are baseless and insulting to both genders. You say that it’s an oversimplification to compare your littany of gender stereotypes to “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” but oversimplification is precisely what I’m charging you with. Assigning abstract concepts to genders is reductive in principle and misleading in practice. Your version differs in detail but not in kind to the fallacy of John Gray. Where he would say:
All women are X or, all X is female
You say:
All women are Y or, all Y is female
And by the way, if Wonder Woman is using a power to force a man to tell the truth when he doesn’t want to, that’s coercion. It may not involve physical force, but feminsts have struggled for years to push a notion of coercion that does not involve physical force, for obvious reasons. Not all coercion is physical, and there’s reason to suppose that most of it really is psychological. Catherine McKinnon has been famously pilloried for suggesting that all heterosexual sex is rape, because, well, that’s pretty much exactly what she said, but what she meant was that in conditions of power differential (this being power in the sense that you were using) ‘consent’ becomes a highly problematic notion. Wonder Woman’s truth-extracting power (in the comic book sense) happens to be a power (in your sociological sense) of coercion. So, what gender is it then? That’s rhetorical, of course, because I insist that it is no gender in particular.
It happened at one point, after the death of Cyclops’ sister, that some of the mutants began to wonder how they would even know if their loyalty to Fess X was due to some psychic manipulation on his part. He is so powerful that there is never any way of knowing for sure. So, is his social power physical, psychological or emotional and is it influential or coercive? And now try to assign gender to it.
My point is that it’s only male historically, not intrinsically.
But do they challenge your sense of what it means to be a woman? If they don’t cry at the end of Steel Magnolias, can we sign them up for Selective Service? Whoops, there’s me being a smartass again. What I mean is, can they be who they are without having to justify calling themselves women? Because that seems like the challenge you present for Wonder Woman. My psycic intuition tells me that you will accuse me of misunderstanding you again, so let me ask for a specific clarification. Of the things you list as concerns endemic to women – pregnancy, periods, rape, neuroses, ect. – which are really sine qua non of womanhood?
These are strong female characters, but I fear that you would doubt their femininity for all the reasons they are considered strong. Tell me why I’m wrong.
The few women I know who read comics did so for the same reasons that men are dismissed for reading comics with female heroes – because Wolverine is imminently fuckable. I personally don’t see anything wrong with that. But there’s always somebody who will pop up and say, “Girls don’t think that way. Girls don’t have sexual fantasies about absurdly built figments printed on cheap paper.” In at least a couple of cases, I have observed that girls do. Thus my theory about how to bring more girls into comics – don’t just try to make female characters they can identify with, but make male characters they’d like to fuck.
But the world can’t get over what I like to think of the Loveline Syndrome. Loveline was a show on MTV in which men would call up and talk about how they liked to fuck, and this guy Adam Corolla would laugh and say, “Yeah, you know, we guys like the fucking.” And then a woman would call up and say, “I like to fuck” and this Dr. Drew would say, “Seek counseling immediately. We need to get to the bottom of why you think you enjoy sex. Stay on the phone, somebody is coming by to put you in a straight jacket, and we’ll find out what psychosexual childhood trauma has led you to believe that sex is fun, you poor girl. Call your lawyer, we’re putting your father up on charges.”
shy guy wrote:
I claim that it’s because when they do, they are accused of not being women at all. And I don’t think that’s fair.
tremorviolet wrote:
With the sliced covers, yes indeed. And the Richie Rich digests at the El stations. That’s what got me started. They still have the Archie digests at the grocery store, but I suspect that the collector mania that begane over a decade ago made it less profitable to sell comics with torn covers just to get rid of them.
I think Wolverine is more popular with girls that Spider-Man. Peter’s just too nice a guy, I guess.
Non-gender threatening? The cyborg from Terminator, IMO, represents a “man’s” (as in lumberjack, manly man) inability to adequately cope where machines make him obsolete at doing standard guy things. Especially as seen by the male during the '80s (I don’t think the book has anything specific about it, but the book *All Consuming Images * is a great way to get started thinking of this).
The Alien Queen is very strongly protrayed as a dominant female. I won’t get into the feminist theory I read in college about this film, but there’s a whole host of female symbolism in the film that the males (and Vasquez is a male in all but sex) are trying to tame.
IMO, the biggest problem with comics are comic book stores. While I’ve moved to a better grade of stores, the ones I used to go (and some I pop into now and then) to were discouraging, if not openly hostile to women. Women were either treated like idiots or ignored in most cases which, combined with the fact that most comic books suck, really turns someone off of trying to start reading, even if they do happen to find a store that isn’t so “misogyinistic.”
The second biggest problem is the montly pamphlet format, but that’s another matter entirely.
