Recently, 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine have been doing a lot of work with female characters – in fact, since #300 of the Megazine, aside from Judge Dredd’s own strip, a two part Armitage, and a horror one-off, every strip has been centred around a female lead, and #300’s Dredd focused on his protégé Ami Beeny and Armitage was saved by his female partner.
This isn’t lasting, but neither does it seem to have been a deliberate attempt at a women-heavy run: it’s just how the strips came out.
One of the strips that deserves a mention is Hondo City Justice by Robbie Morrison and Neil Googe, the latest in Morrison’s stories centred around Hondo (the Japanese mega-city in Dredd’s world). The lead is an old character, Inspector-Judge Inaba, one of the few female Judges in Hondo. She’s mainly been shown as partner and ally to recurring character Shimura (a Judge turned ronin); or there was a focus on her being an outsider in the Judge force due to her gender; or she headlined comedy stories that usually revolved around, you guessed it, T&A gags. And that was pretty much it for her.
Hondo City Justice has been a game-changer for her though. While the strip isn’t the best thing Morrison’s ever done – the villains are a blatant riff on the X-Men and don’t really come off as impressive – there’s something it brings to the table that we’ve seen with Inaba before. She’s now got a cadet. It’s a super-powerful teenage girl psionic cadet, part of an intended next generation of super-Judges, but at the core of Cadet Junko Asahara is that she’s a naïve, young cadet.
And this is the interesting bit, because another writer might have taken the obvious approach and had Inaba become a maternal figure with Junko, or give them a sisterly relationship. After all, one’s a woman and the other’s a girl! What else will you do?
Well, Morrison decided he’d have Inaba as a Judge and Junko as a Cadet, like you’d expect from a male-centred Dredd spinoff. Inaba is now the senior figure here, presented from the start as a highly competent and courageous officer; Junko is presented from the start as fresh out of the academy, overly disciplined & eager to impress her mentor. Only one time do we get a big sis/little sis scene, and that’s a deliberate ruse to trick a potential enemy.
Inaba takes the sort of hardline school-of-hard-knocks approach you’d expect from any equivalent character, and possibly more so: when Junko freezes in battle and is about to killed, Inaba calmly neutralises the threat and immediately demands to know why her cadet froze. The cadet explains she recognised the enemy and isn’t sure what happened; she’s asked to do a mind-probe to find out what’s going on, and does so even though she admits it’s not her speciality.
Inaba doesn’t (openly) show fear for Junko or asks her if she’s alright, Junko isn’t breaking down, both women are getting on with the situation at hand and not letting themselves get distracted. And when it comes to the grand finale, with Junko being mentally controlled by the Professor X stand-in, Inaba snaps her out of it not by making an emotional appeal but by playing on her cadet’s judicial training and getting her to focus on arresting the enemy.
It’s almost like… like Morrison’s writing them as Judges first.
And of course that’s just what he’s doing. Which, in the year 2010, shouldn’t be something remarkable in comics, but it is.
We could do with some more dynamics like Inaba’s and Junko’s.
Young Justboys. I mean, Justice.
Based just on this pilot, I won’t be one of those returning viewers for long.
Warning: minor spoilers follow.
I loved the Young Justice comic. It’s one of my favorite series of all time. But it’s pretty clear that the cartoon is Young Justice in name only; the main cast retains only one member of the original team, and the light, playful tone of the comic is gone. They’ve traded Bart Allen (one of my all time favorite characters) for Wally West, and Tim Drake for Dick Grayson – though like the Dick Grayson of the Teen Titans cartoon, who was more like then-current Robin Tim than Dick, this Dick Grayson seems more like a less-sociopathic Damian Wayne (in one of Tim’s costumes) than Dick. Wonder Girl, Arrowette (another favorite), Secret, and Empress are all gone, replaced with the new Aqualad, Miss Martian, and “Artemis,” a female archer in a green costume. Superboy, the only member who remains constant, is being written with a completely different personality. So no, being a fan of Young Justice the comic book is no real reason to watch Young Justice the cartoon.
Once I realized that, I tried hard to evaluate the show on its own merits. I found the animation somewhat stiff and awkward – but was that because I was missing the grace of Bruce Timm’s extended DCAU designs, or the frenetic motion of Teen Titans? (In the show’s defense, the fight scenes were superb.) I was unimpressed by the cast, who seemed, again, stiff and awkward – but was that because every Batman who isn’t Kevin Conroy still sounds wrong to me, as does every speedster who isn’t Michael Rosenbaum? I didn’t really enjoy the show, but I don’t know if that’s because it’s not for me, or because I’m watching it and wanting it to be something that it’s not. I suspect the true answer is somewhere in the middle.
Here’s the thing: this episode was about young heroes being independent and striking out on their own. So why was it only male characters who got to make those decisions, while Miss Martian docilely accepted her assignment onto the team at the end (and wasn’t even permitted on the tour of Justice League headquarters in the beginning)? This isn’t the story of six teenagers forming their own team – it’s four boys forming a team, and a girl showing up at the end as eye candy. (Oh, of course she’s immediately ogled by all four boys. What else would she be there for?) I realize that the boys founded the team in the comic, but this is nothing like the comic, so why bother retaining that aspect?
And why were only the female characters considered replaceable in the first place? And why did we lose a girl and gain a boy? I applaud the decision to include a minority – and found Aqualad to be the most enjoyable character in the pilot – but couldn’t we have included Empress? Or Latina Aquagirl Lorena Marquez? Or both? Hell, if we can create a black Aqualad for the cartoon, why not a black Robin? Or Kid Flash? Or even Superboy? It’s not like the show is holding fast to the Robin/Impulse/Superboy dynamic of the comic, since we’ve already established that the first two are different characters entirely and the third might as well be. Was it really that important to retain three white male faces in the center of this six-person team? And throw in Roy Harper’s epic hissy fit – which could have been handled by any member of the actual team – and those twelve male Justice Leaguers? (And yes, as usual, John Stewart was the only minority. Unless you count Martian Manhunter and Red Tornado, which I do not.)
As I mentioned before, I did like Aqualad, and I thought the interaction between Superman and Superboy was done well. I’m interested to see just who Artemis is, and I would like to see more of Miss Martian. I’m going to give this show another chance. But I was disappointed in the pilot both as an adaptation of something I loved and as an original story, and left with a lot of angry questions. You better knock my socks off come January, Young Justice.