jmatonak | Entries tagged with comics

I think it's okay that Power Girl has big breasts.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy looking at breasts, but that's not why I think "Peej" is okay.

Women, including women with jobs as far away from the "sex work" industry as any person can get, sometimes have big breasts.

Power Girl's costume emphasizes her bust. That's questionable at best.
Many artists don't seem capable of drawing anything close to a human woman as they are actually found on the planet Earth. (This week, that's Michael Turner.) That sucks too.
Drawing a superheroine as a passive sex object would seem to defeat the whole purpose of having superheroines in the first place.

All that being said, the mere existence of a character's large breasts is not the problem. And no one has been claiming otherwise. So why I am bothering to write all this down?

I'm the guy all this is supposedly aimed at. I like looking at blonde women with large breasts. I am the fan who is theoretically being serviced here. And the cover to Justince League of America issue 10 does absolutely nothing for me. I'd like to see a cartoon of a flying woman that looks considerably more like an actual woman, thanks.

I'm not into whatever kind of mannequin fetish I would have to be into for that cover to work, I guess. And DC editorial has a much shakier grasp on the fundamentals of the nerd boy libido than they think they do. It's perfectly fine for Power Girl to have large breasts- as long as they look like actual person parts.

(Buffy Summers, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, used to play at being Power Girl as a kid. And she likes cheese.)

I like Buffy. That's not a surprise.
I like Buffy. That sort of is.

I took the comic home and played the theme song before I read it. I knew I was a dork before, but my gosh.

Joe Simon is still alive and able to comment on Captain America spoilers.

I better get another source on this.

Yep, all the online sources I can find agree: Joe Simon (October 10, 1913- ) is, as of this writing, still with us.

(He co-created Captain America and a number of other comics characters, if you didn't know. It would be like hearing from Joss Whedon in 2050.)

Can anyone provide me with a complete list of appearances by Stephanie Brown as Robin in Batman and associated comics? I tried the Spoiler Wikipedia page and didn't see one.

It's a bit stupid for the head of DC editorial to claim Stephanie was never really Robin when fans can point to a specific page in which Batman answers that specific question by telling her she was. I try not to be too much of a fanboy about these things, but sheesh.

I hate "continuity." It creates more problems than it solves.

And the girl Robin was an awesome idea, both times.

THe last time I was in my Friendly Local Comic Shop, I got into one of those grumpy "back in my day" conversations about how comic books are always late now.

( In my day, Wonder Woman comics came out every two months, like clockwork! And we liked it! )

Allow me to present a quote from the... fellow... behind Spider-Man: Reign.

( Read more... )

I think it's pretty clear that Lois Lane, written up to her best and not as a marriage-obsessed ninny, is honest and fearless. (Frankly, I believe the fearlessness is amply demonstrated by the amazing number of building collapses, floods and explosions Lois has been in- she's been through all that and she can still leave the house. I couldn't.)

"Honest and fearless" are the primary job prerequisites for being a Green Lantern. (For anyone reading this not into the whole comics thing, a Green Lantern is a space cop with a magic ring that can do anything, as long as it's colored green. It's a cool gig.)

All-Star Superman is all about doing material with a Silver Age flavor and a more modern sensibility. I think Lois deserves an issue in the style of her solo book, only with her doing more than running around trying to prove somebody is somebody else, if you see what I'm getting at. Tell me "Lois Lane, Green Lantern!" wouldn't have fit comfortably as a title from her own book back in the day.

You can't, can you?

(As a matter of fact... does anybody know if that was a story from the old Lois Lane comics? I probably ripped this off and forgot. I still want to see that issue of All-Star, though.)

(Thanks,

shadowlass.)

About fifteen seconds ago, somebody called Rima the Jungle Girl "the best comic hardly anyone remembers." I barely remember it, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. This is going to be personal and idiosyncratic.

Nestor Redondo did the art, which is superb. It's not really like anything else, to my eye- it comes closest to Neal Adams, but not very close. It struck me, the first time I saw it, as a kind of visual foreign language. There's an American comic-book "artistic tradition" that is exemplified by, let's say, Jack Kirby. That's my "native language" when it comes to reading comics. Rima seemed to come from somewhere else. When I thought the art was Joe Kubert, I was really impressed by his ability to be "bilingual."

(The art is a powerful argument in favor of cartooning as opposed to photorealism. There's plenty of detail, and it all hangs together and makes a nice "world"... that looks nothing like the real one.)

Ordinarily, I'd talk about the story first, but the plot and dialogue and what all seems to be much more forgettable than the art. Rima lives in the jungle with her grandfather. She was born there, she is part of it, and all the various denizens of the jungle do her bidding. The primary difference between Rima and characters like Mowgli or Tarzan is that Rima does not personally fight. The jungle protects her, and within it she is unassailable... but there is no scene comparable to Tarzan's fights with wild beasts. It's all very harmonious and lovey-dovey in the jungle until the wrong kind of people blunder in.

The "pacifist" aspects of Rima are not to my taste, but she is far from passive. She is always the motivator of events. The series begins with her rescuing a strapping young man, and continues as an odyssey into the outside world in search of Rima's origins. Both the rescue and the search are unquestionably Rima's idea, even when presented from some other character's point of view.

There is an enormous temptation for both the reader and the characters to view Rima as some kind of ethereal jungle spirit, and according to local legend, that's exactly what she is. But Rima herself is always quick to assert her personhood. She says in quite a few places that she is flesh and blood, just like anyone else. For me, that kind of sums up what the whole series is about: seeing the "exotic" from its own perspective.

Rima isn't even remotely a super-hero book. It's pretty good.

(She did make it on to one season of "Super Friends", though. I can't wrap my head around that one.)

I had a huge entry about comics, but I feel it was poorly written, and also huge.

Here are the bullet points.

1. I like female super-hero and super-villain characters.
2. Stop killing them, writers of super-hero comics.
3. If you don't want to write a character, you don't have to. They can be moved offstage in a non-fatal way.
4. It is perfectly okay to occasionally have a female super-hero who is peppy and quippy and doesn't take everything so damn seriously or angst about her place in the world on every page.
Spider-Man cracks jokes. Other heroes, even female ones, can crack jokes too.
6. I hereby threaten dire consequences if anyone tries to kill off Miss Martian from Teen Titans. Heads will roll. Oh yes.

Thank you, anonymous person who gave me some more paid LJ time. I think that gift entitles you to some intelligent and entertaining content, which I (sadly) will not be able to provide. Instead, you get this junk.

I am a heterosexual male. I mention this because I am about to tell you that I like romantic comedies, and some people in the past have derived a contradiction between these two facts.

I do believe that I will sit down for a mediocre story of "boy and girl meet cute" before I will knowingly watch a mediocre movie with flashy colors and explosions. Partially, actually, comics are to blame. Remember Superman? The character? An entire planet full of slightly stiff but well-meaning people blows up before the Superman story even gets started. There's an old Legion of Super-Heroes monster called the Sun-Eater, which is a giant cloud that does exactly what the name suggests. If you want sheer destructive spectacle, comics are hard to top. Movies today are coming close, which is one reason we're seeing so many comic-book movies, but they can't really rival the comics yet.

On the other hand, if you have a story centered on people, the edge goes the other way. It tilts even further the other way when you want to tell a story of people being intimate, because a still picture cannot capture the nuances of tone of voice or the subtle clues of movement. It can suggest those things, it can show us body language, and there have been some wonderful romantic stories in the comics- but the edge here goes to the recording of living, moving people.

I emphasize "romantic comedy" because this is the Hollywood shorthand for a happy ending to the romantic story. I can actually live without a happy ending. In the right mood, I can tolerate a story where everything doesn't work out in the end. What I despise is the ending where one of the partners dies. Love Story is the paradigm of this...

(How much do I love Lisa Simpson? "She's wooden and unpleasant, and no matter what he does, he's still Ryan O'Neal!")

... and good Christ. I mean, if you're going to throw everything out the window and go for the hacky ending, I'll skip the downer part, please. If you're going to depress me, show me something that's worth it.

The absolute best movie, for me, is one where there are human, intimate moments- which can be about hate or revenge just as well as romance- interspersed with violence, and with the intimacy and the violence all springing from a recognizable human situation. Like Kill Bill, only good. This is why Casino Royale (2006) may be one of the best movies ever made. Yeah, I said it.

That intimacy plus violence formula makes for some good comics, too, now that I think of it.

I've been reading a lot of commentary on comic books lately. I honestly forget why I started.

I might have been led there by stages from sites about World of Warcraft, because I remember checking out a site called "WoW Widows" that had a section on "women and the game", and I seem to have found myself looking at a lot of fangirl and feminist/comics blogs. Most of them are really good.

I have noticed a recurring thread of discussion that I'm not quite sure how to deal with. Many of the female comics readers whose writing I have read point out that they are looking for fantasy identification figures, and what male writers often provide are sex objects. I think Ragnell, a blogger who I will figure out how to link to if I can muster up the responsibility, said it like this: We want women we want to be, and what we get are women the writers would like to have.

Fair comment, and I imagine I would be cheesed off in a similar situation. Where this starts to make me anxious, as a wannabe writer, is this: competence is hot.

I'm not trying to be disingenuous here. I can see why a Power Girl story that boils down to "I have breasts! I can fly, and look, I hit some dude! Plus, breasts!", won't quite hack it. But there is a kind of projective element to the way I relate to fictional characters, and I think many other people are like me. If I see a woman character in a movie, TV show, or comic, I imagine what it might be like to be her, and I also imagine what it might be like to meet her. (This presupposes that I become invested in the fiction.) I start filling in details by elaborating on what I've been shown.

This is relevant because I think the kind of heroines that make for good fantasy-identification figures are the kind of characters I would crush out on. Assertiveness without arrogance, competence, and the audacity to try big things- the kinds of traits I look for in my own fantasy-identification figures- can be tremendously compelling in both real and fictional women.

Because of that, I find it impossible to draw a bright line between writing women as they would like to be and women I would like to have. Which is too bad. I'm not saying there even necessarily needs to be a sharp division between them, but ideally I should be able to write anybody.