Welcome to the new GWOG! It will be updated each Monday by a member of the Gworg Board of Directors, on a rotating schedule whose particulars are a closely-guarded secret. I have the honour of the first post of the new regime.
Like lots of fans, I’ve been enjoying the new BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD animated series. It’s campy and fun without being overly knowing or self-referential, accessible to everyone while still being clever. One problem keeps hitting me, though: the lack of female superheroes*.
If you’ve never seen it, there are two notable features of the show’s set-up. First, the few minutes before the title sequence are usually used for a mini-adventure unrelated to the main episode (although they are sometimes used to set up the episode’s backstory, or to further the overarching plot of the season). Second, and most fundamentally, the theme of the show is team-ups. Batman is never alone, always coming together with at least one fellow hero to beat up baddies.
Which makes it quite striking that no female hero has had the full BatB team-up treatment, a one-on-one team-up with Bats in the main episode. Only once has a woman – Black Canary – been in such a team-up, and that was in a pre-title sequence. Every other super-heroine appearance has been alongside other male supers. So far** only five female superheroes have put in an appearance in their professional capacity, and only three have appeared more than once. Let’s go through them – spoilers abound past this point.
Katana has made three appearances as one-third of the Outsiders (with Black Lightning and Metamorpho). Katana is, as you’d expect, Japanese, and carries a lot of stereotypes – she wears a schoolgirl uniform, her powers are skills with katana and shuriken (she has a magic sword in the comics, but it’s not put in an appearance yet in the cartoon), and in her first episode, “Enter the Outsiders!”, she’s silent, speaking only to tell her fellow Outsiders how to perform a sort of super-CPR on an incapacitated Wildcat. Her silence means the other two get more limelight, and she remains quiet during a pre-title sequence with the Outsiders being trained by Batman. This is somewhat made up for by “Inside the Outsiders!”, in which Psycho Pirate has trapped the three in nightmares, and Batman has to save them. Each of the Outsiders gets some meaty psychological stuff, but only Katana gets backstory – the death of her sensei in her native Japan. She speaks a lot during her dream sequence (in a strong Japanese accent which she didn’t have in her first appearance) and we learn that her silence is in honour of her master, so at least it’s a stereotype they’ve taken the trouble to justify. In the end, most of Katana’s character is defined by her ethnicity, and she can be crowded out by the other Outsiders quite easily, but she’s still good to watch and they do seem intent on doing something interesting with her team.
Which is more, really, than can be said for Huntress, probably this show’s greatest disappointment for me as I’m a big fan of hers. Huntress gets two main-episode appearances, one as part of a big ensemble in “Death Race to Oblivion!” where she’s rather overshadowed by Green Arrow, Guy Gardner and Plastic Man, and one alongside Blue Beetle in “Night of the Huntress!”***. Huntress’s whole thing in this episode is “sexpot” – her tooling-up sequence mostly consists of her letting her hair down and applying lipstick, and the main thrust of this episode is Jaime’s crush on sexy Helena. She flirts constantly, with lots of double-entendres. The writers just don’t seem to see much of her character beyond her sexiness (she’s also somewhat more violent, although Batman doesn’t seem to be bothered by this).
Black Canary is another favourite of mine, and the best woman in the series. She’s the only female hero to get a straight team-up in a pre-title beatdown on Solomon Grundy. There are still wrong notes in her portrayal, though – her unrequited love for Batman feels a bit forced and uninteresting. In one of her episodes, the musical “Mayhem of the Music Meister!”, she’s largely passive, apparently under the Music Meister’s mind-control for most of the episode, and though her Canary Cry saves the day Batman has to goad her into using it. Her best episode is “The Golden Age of Justice!”, in which she and Batman are still being treated like sidekicks by an ageing Justice League (of the Flash, Doctor Mid-Nite, Wildcat, Hawkman and Hourman). It’s another ensemble episode, but most of the spotlight is on Canary and she swings the climactic fight. Best of all, nothing is made of her Bat-crush.
Two other heroines have minor appearances – Fire cameos in a Plastic Man pre-title adventure, and one of the Metal Men, Platinum, is really a Metal Woman – but that’s it for woman as heroes in BatB. And over thirty-four episodes, that’s not great.
Part of the underlying problem is revealed by looking at the treatment of women as wives. In the pre-title sequence to “Last Bat on Earth!”, Batman and Mister Miracle escape a death-trap for charity, following which Big Barda hectors Miracle for not cleaning out the garage – Batman chuckles and tells him, “That’s one trap you can’t get out of”. In “Aquaman’s Outrageous Adventure!”, Aquaman’s wife insists that he take her and their son on a vacation rather than fight evildoers. In “Long Arm of the Law!”, Plastic Man’s wife Ramona insists on him watching the baby rather than going out and fighting crime. It’s a time-honoured position for the wives of male superheroes, from Mystery Men to The Incredibles – a dogmatic insistence that their husband give up that silly crimefighting and concentrate on his family. It’s all part of the general stereotype that men put their time and effort into Big Important Projects, whereas women are concerned above all else with their homes and children.
It’s also a genre problem. BatB is trying to recapture an element of light-hearted, old-fashioned fun. Like a cargo cult, they do it by replicating elements from the original purveyors of that fun. And when you do that without some discretion, you replicate the flaws of what you’re making an homage to. With luck, they’ll learn to take what they need from the past and leave behind the unnecessary baggage.
*Which is not to say that this is BatB’s only problem; it’s just the problem I’m talking about here.
**I’m up to episode 34, “Sidekicks Assemble!” – but from the episode list, I don’t think there’s been an uptick in female representation in the episodes I haven’t seen yet. There is apparently a Birds of Prey episode coming up, which should be fun.
***My least favourite episode so far, I think. Not only is it ill-treatment of Huntress, there’s also the awful Mrs. Man-face as a villain.
The Convention That Ate My Brain
San Diego Comicon 2010 officially ended yesterday at 5pm. A cheer went up, as it has every year that I’ve attended. The hoards shuffle out, the displays get dismantled, and the city starts counting down to the airport exodus over the next few days. And all the professionals give a collective sigh of relief that another year has been successfully survived.
On a personal level, the show is always overwhelming. I work at my companies booth, so I don’t really get to enjoy it from a fan level. I don’t get to go to panels unless I’m on them, the parties are places to see people and discuss projects, and most meals are sporadic or business/catching up/con related. You kind of live off of stress, sugar, and caffeine for 5 days. Sleep deprivation makes you loopy, the walking and standing make your feet angry, and you get really sick of hearing your own voice. Usually right before you lose it and start to croak.
Sharing a space with something like 200K people is pretty much the definition of sensory overload. Getting from one end of the convention center to the other is a lot like fighting a mob sometimes, only they don’t have pitchforks, they have light saber replicas, giant bags with CHUCK or FRINGE or SUPERMAN on them, and poster tubes full of lead. You have to avoid stepping on little kids who look dazed and awed by the spectacle, and avoid getting shoulder checked by a Predator or a Klingon who doesn’t have any peripheral vision due to carefully applied prosthetics. Groups of steampunkers, carefully coiffed, will float by on amusingly anachronistic running sneakers, as zombies playfully gnaw on smiling attendees, and superheroes pose for glamour shots.
If I could describe SDCC in one made up word it would be: intensely-uber-pop-culture-whoa.
Every year I hear similar complaints about the con, usually about the size, the lines, the various fans, and the way comics are supposedly being squeezed out. From my perspective, as someone who works for an independent publisher, I really can’t say that I share the view of the latter. We were insanely busy all weekend. Every fan I talked to was a comic book reader, of all kinds of books, and were just happy to be there and share the experience and love of the medium with other fans and creators.
There’s no denying the influence of Hollywood, nor the way many panels and events sometimes have only the most tenuous connection to comics. Sometimes as little as the cast on such and such show has someone on it who likes a comic a book. But that’s pop culture. It’s grown into this enormous megalith that encompasses so many genres and mediums, there’s no real way to contain it. And maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe what we should be doing is looking for ways to connect it, just like we connect with each other, over the shared geekiness of the collective experience. SDCC is not the be all, end all of comics, and the fact that it has such a hodge podge of celebrity and creativity and fandom coming together seems like an opportunity to really celebrate all of it. How inclusive the love of stories, which I think is what’s at the root of all of this, really is.
But maybe I’m just being really optimistic because I met Brian and Wendy Froud and fulfilled a childhood dream to thank them for Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and being amazing artists. I geek out over art I love in a big way. About the only thing that could have made the show better is if I could have met Brian Henson and thanked him for Farscape, or somehow found a time machine and thanked Tolkien for writing about Middle Earth and Jim Henson for muppets.
This year was a lot of fun for me, both professionally and personally. I feel very encouraged about our industry and what I took away from it is that there’s room for everyone here. Comics aren’t being ignored, they’re being embraced. All kinds of comics from all kinds of creators and publishers. There’s a lot of great stuff out there and people are taking notice. And as a story lover, that’s incredibly gratifying and exciting to see.
Still, I’ll be really happy when I can finally take a nap.