Author: admin

In an unprecedented event on this column, I’m going to dial down the anger. Don’t worry, it’s just a brief fit and sure to pass soon.
Your not particularly humble columnist was recently exceedingly gratified to receive the following email from someone who wishes to be identified as an ‘independent comics publisher’. He had for me a request:
‘After reading your column of Joss Whedon, I was curious if you could be of some help to me by providing me with a list of cliches surrounding super-heroines in mainstream comics. I’m not looking for a critique of artistic styles, etc, because I feel that stuff is fairly obvious. What I’m looking for are the sort of things that you and your colleagues have noticed regarding flaws in characters like (1) Buffy, (2) Wonder Woman, (3) Batgirl/Barbara Gordon, etc. I’m in the midst of writing the female lead for my OGN and I’d like to only commit full-conscious acts of deliberate misogyny (joking), if any at all, so any observations, thoughts, or what have you on the above heroines or others like Supergirl and Ms. Marvel that come to mind would be greatly appreciated.’
‘Well, shucks,’ I thought. ‘How awesome is that? Who says that no one listens to angry girls?’ And after confirming it was okay to use his request for this column, I made a list.
How To Write An Original Female Lead Character In A Fashion That Doesn’t Drive Karen Crazy:
Bechdel’s Law: Important, Damnit:
1) Is she the only female character in your magnum opus?
Is her position within an ensemble cast ‘the girl’? As in, you have ‘geeky guy’, ‘strong guy’, ‘goofy guy’ and ‘the girl’? WARNING WARNING WARNING.
If you have only one female character, then it had better be airtight justified by the setting/plot, and she should be scrupulously backgrounded and fleshed out. And seriously, best not to do this at all. Throw some more female characters in there, preferably of different ethnicities, body shapes and ages, as appropriate. Don’t fall into the ‘default gender = man’ trap.
2) Does she talk to other women?
3) … about something other than a man?
Random selections from my personal experience over the last 24 hours shows women talking to each other about: comics; booze; the Israel/Lebanon crisis; travel plans; their neighbours’ kids; novel editing; RPGs; Ani DiFranco’s new album; anal sex; the vast number of people who write for public consumption who really can’t write; internet trolls; work; the weather; and Disneyland.
Basically, is she a real person? Real people talk about all sort of crap and a little off-hand dialogue goes a long way. Check out Birds of Prey, Alias and Ex Machina, where women talk to each other about men, but also, among other things, about food, their costumes, their jobs, art and politics.
Character Design:
4) What is she wearing?
Is it appropriate to the climate/society/personality/powers/financial circumstances/occupation of the wearer, or at least as appropriate as what the men around her are wearing? Is she wearing it for herself, or for her readers?
Supergirl wearing a frilly almost-skirt which magically never shows her underwear sewn for her by Ma Kent is character-assassinating fanservice. Power Girl’s famous boob window can be either ‘strong woman proud of her body’ or ‘LOOK BOYS BOOBIES’, depending on the artist, the writer, and the reader.
If you find yourself saying things like ‘But she just won’t be as sexy in cargo pants,’ stop and ask yourself a) why you think your female lead character must be sexy and b) whether this is a character design imperative for your male characters (and why not?).
5) Was she/is she going to be raped?
Many, many female characters in comics have been raped or sexually assaulted, often to provide motivation for male characters or to prove that her rapist is really, really evil, really! Because her rape is, oddly, all about him.
Rape is a tricky topic, since studies show something like one in four of women in the First World can describe being sexually assaulted, often by people they know. In developing nations, stats are harder to acquire (especially since in many cultures being raped outside marriage is proof of non-chastity and rape within marriage is perfectly legal) but it’s generally shown to be higher still. So a lot of women in the world have been raped, and it’s numerically realistic for at least one of your many female characters to be one of them.
But does the reader really need to know she’s been raped? Is it vital to the story? Not all of the character-building process needs to be explicit on the page.
If you must write about rape, and think you can handle this topic with sensitivity and a lack of sensationalism, proceed with extreme caution. Particularly avoid ‘this is the only reason she’s fighting/causing crime’ or ‘it’s not actually her reaction to the rape we’re concerned with, but that of her male romantic interest/colleagues/friends.’
Feminism In Comics:
6) If she objects to sexism, make sure it’s actually sexist.
I adore Carol Danvers from the tips of her blonde hair to the soles of her kicky black boots, but when Ms. Marvel was descending into an alcoholic mess, she dismissed objections to her increasing recklessness as ‘It’s just because I’m a girl!’ when actually it was because she was flying into battle drunk off her ass.
The fact that real sexism exists and might be an issue for female superheroes was neatly glossed over. Instead ‘Sexism!’ is clearly presented as Carol’s pitiful excuse for the negative response to her self-destructive behavior. This wonderfully diminished the impact of misogyny personal and institutional as a real, often insidious force that really impacts women.
7) ‘I hit boys!’ is not a strong feminist statement.
Buffy Summers how I loathe what was done to this character ended up forcing oral sex on a male character over his repeated verbal objections. To a musical sting. The writers, I am fairly certain, did not actually realise they had written a rape, particularly as this same character later attempted to rape Buffy, which was not treated as at all amusing.
See also: Men forcing demonic power into the First Slayer = metaphysical rape and utterly despicable. Buffy using Willow to force demonic power into possibly thousands of young women = empowering!
Women are entirely capable of stupid or evil decisions. But those decisions should be treated as such by the text, not lauded as a turning of the sexism tables.
8) Are misogynistic situations presented uncritically?
Does your creation perpetuate stereotypes and misogynistic tropes without thinking about them at all, or does it problematise them? Misogyny, like racism and homophobia, exists. There’s no reason it can’t make an appearance in your work, but it shouldn’t be endorsed by it.
In the Birds of Prey story ‘One Day; Well-Chosen’, Oracle and Black Canary engage in some slut-shaming of Huntress. Misogyny! Then they realise they screwed up and make amends. Misogyny criticised within the text!
9) If you’re a man, consider getting a female feminist pre-reader.
If you’re a guy, you have male privilege. This is not your fault. However, even if you’re a feminist, your privilege may well be blinding you to parts of your work that might be offensive or dumb. Why not ask a female feminist to read over your script? She isn’t every woman, or every feminist, but she might be able to spot something you missed.
If this sounds like a lot of effort to go to just to keep the feminists happy, remember it’s not about that. Presumably, you want to write the best damn comic you can. Realistic female characters = good characterisation. Good characterisation = good writing.
Finally: I am neither every woman nor every feminist. What do you think, dear readers? What character stereotypes piss you off? What have I missed? What have I got, in your opinion, plain wrong?

Following yet more reports of harassment at conventions, Girl-Wonder.org was moved to action. We are proud to launch the Con Anti-Harassment Project.
(Because conventions should be fun.)
The Con Anti-Harassment Project is a grass-roots campaign designed to help make cons safer for everyone. Our aims are to encourage fandom, geek community and other non-business conventions to establish, articulate and act upon anti-harassment policies, especially sexual harassment policies, and to encourage mutual respect among con-goers, guests and staff.
We offer a con database with contact information, template letters for writing to con organizers, policy tips for con organizers who want to establish such a policy, and a moderated safe-space forum available for those who want to discuss their experiences or accounts of harassment.
Conventions can’t completely eliminate harassment. They can be prepared to act upon it when it occurs, and send a clear message to harassers that they are not welcome.

John of Comics Oughta Be Fun helps out little stuffed bull Bully with a serious note:
Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: ‘These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, ’cause I wanted to see what her reaction was.’ This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.

1. One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.
2. On Friday, just before the show closed, this same woman was closing up her tables when a group of four men came to her booth, started taking photographs of her, telling her she was the ‘prettiest girl at the con.’ They they entered the booth, started hugging and kissing her and taking photographs of themselves doing so. She was confused and scared, but they left quickly after doing that.
3. Another friend of mine, a woman running her own booth: on Friday a man came to her booth and openly criticized her drawing ability and sense of design. Reports from others in the same section of the floor confirmed he’d targeted several women with the same sort of abuse and criticism.
   Quite simply, this behavior has got to stop at Comic-Con. It should never be a sort of place where anyone, man or woman, feels unsafe or attacked either verbally or physically in any shape or form. There are those, sadly, who get off on this sort of behavior and assault, whether it’s to professional booth models, cosplayers or costumed women, or women who are just there to work. This is not acceptable behavior under any circumstance, no matter what you look like or how you’re dressed, whether you are in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit or business casual for running your booth.
   On Saturday, the day after the second event I described above, I pulled out my convention book to investigate what you can do and who you can speak to after such an occurrence. On page two of the book there is a large grey box outlining ‘Convention Policies,’ which contain rules against smoking, live animals, wheeled handcarts, recording at video presentations, drawing or aiming your replica weapon, and giving your badge to others. There is nothing about attendee-to-attendee personal behavior.
   Page three of the book contains a ‘Where Is It?’ guide to specific Comic-Con events and services. There’s no general information room or desk listed, nor is there a contact location for security, so I go to the Guest Relations Desk. I speak to a volunteer manning the desk; she’s sympathetic to the situation but who doesn’t have a clear answer to my question: ‘What’s Comic-Con’s policy and method of dealing with complaints about harassment?’ She directs me to the nearest security guard, who is also sympathetic listening to my reports, but short of the women wanting to report the incidents with the names of their harassers, there’s little that can be done.
   ‘I understand that,’ I tell them both, ‘but what I’m asking is more hypothetical and informational: if there is a set Comic-Con policy on harassment and physical and verbal abuse on Con attendees and exhibitors, and if so, what’s the specific procedure by which someone should report it, and specifically where should they go?’ But this wasn’t a question either could answer.
   So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like ‘Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX.’
   The first step to preventing such harassment is giving its victims the knowledge that they can safely and swiftly report such instances to someone in authority. Having no published guideline, and indeed being unable to give a clear answer to questions about it, gives harassment and violence one more rep-tape loophole to hide behind.
   I enjoyed Comic-Con. I’m looking forward to coming back next year. So, in fact, are the two women whose experiences I’ve retold above. Aside from those instances, they had a good time at the show. But those instances of harassment shouldn’t have happened at all, and that they did under no clear-cut instructions about what to do sadly invites the continuation of such behavior, or even worse.
   I don’t understand why there’s no such written policy about what is not tolerated and what to do when this happens. Is there anyone at Comic-Con able to explain this? Does a similar written policy exist in the booklets for other conventions (SF, comics or otherwise) that could be used as a model? Can it be adapted or adapted, and enforced, for Comic-Con? As the leading event of the comics and pop culture world, Comic-Con should work to make everyone who attends feel comfortable and safe.
   Con harassment: it’s an ugly and disgusting reality that embarrasses the geek community and actively discourages participation.
   Recent examples:
   The Open Source Boob Project.
   KC describes being harassed at the Girl-Wonder.org/Cerise party at WisCon.
   Rachel talks about the ‘Free Hugs’ guy who tried to wheedle one after a ‘no’.
   Cheryl Lynn recounts the extra-special racism of sexual harassment.
   Delux_vivens likewise.
   Yaoi/yuri paddles, or, don’t fucking hit people.
   Basically, no one is entitled to touch other people’s boobs or butts or hair. No one is entitled to verbally harass or stalk people. No one is entitled to smack other people into performing sexual acts for their pleasure. It doesn’t matter how drunk/high/horny they are; there is no excuse. If it’s not consensual, it shouldn’t happen.
   You’d think that’d be obvious, but apparently not.
   And since it’s not, SDCC definitely needs to take further steps to address it.

Reviews (And Interviews) Week continues with an interview with Adam Gallardo, writer of 100 Girls.
100 Girls has an interesting and involved publishing history. Would you like to outline it?
AG: I think the term is ‘sordid.’ But here goes: 100 Girls was originally published online at Darkhorse.com. I was the Internet Content Editor and sort of abused my position to make that happen.
Todd (Demong, my cocreator) and I spoke with DH about publishing the comic and we were told that it would have to be a four issue mini-series, and we knew even then that we wanted to tell a bigger story than that.
We shopped it around and got a ‘no thanks’ from a few publishers and then these folks that Todd knew in Canada, Arcana Comics, asked if we’d like to do it with them. We said, ‘Yes, please.’ They published the original seven issue series and two collections.
Then someone at Simon and Schuster saw it (honestly, I’m not sure how or when) and asked if we’d be interested in doing a collection in one volume. Again, we said, ‘yes, please.’
That’s it.
It seems as if the S+S version is getting more attention than the previous collections.
AG: Yes, definitely. Arcana just cannot bring to bear the same marketing power that S&S can.
I realize that might sound like a slight against Arcana, which it is not. They have been great to work with and they’ve done everything in their power to get the book out there. The reality of the direct market, however, is that small publishers have a hard time.
Is 100 Girls in any way a reaction to the way girls and women are often treated in superhero comics?’
AG: It is. In mainstream comics anyway, it seems that women have only two roles to play: that of either vixen or victim. I remember looking around at other forms of pop culture and wondering why other mediums did a better job of portraying women. SF films especially does a good job. You’ve got Sarah Connor, Ripley, Buffy. I wanted that for 100 Girls. A strong, female character who resembled the women that I knew in my real life.
And another thing: I remember that one of my first, and only, dictates to Todd was, ‘do not make her sexy!’ I am so tired of seeing women, and even young girls, drawn as if by thirty-year-old men who hyper-sexualize anyone lacking a penis. I was so lucky to run across Todd because his reaction to all of my ranting was to say, ‘that’s how I feel.’
You’ve mentioned that one of the themes you were hoping to explore in 100 Girls is the idea of people making choices (and they seem to be generally choices made in horrific circumstances). Are you happy with how that plays out in the narrative?
AG: I am generally happy with how it plays out. There are things I would change if I could, which is probably true of any piece written on a more-or-less monthly deadline, but with that one aspect, yes, I’m happy.
And I should add that it’s definitely something we’ll see play out more in future storylines.
There’s a lot of graphic violence in the story, which is unusual for comics with teen superheroes (though less unusual for YA in general). What are you trying to do with that?
AG: That’s interesting since, right after your review went up, I saw another which called me to task for the amount of violence and Sylvia’s reaction to it.
I’m not sure how much I want to talk about this since it’s something I want to explore later in the comics. But I have no interest in writing a violent comic where the violence serves no purpose, or is glamorised, so I hope people wait to see what purpose it serves.
The putative bad guys in 100 Girls get almost equal footing with the protagonists. What’s the reasoning behind that choice?
AG: I think that if I didn’t give them lots of ‘screen time’ then I’d just be creating straw men for Sylvia to mow down, and if I did that, then the violence would have no weight. I wanted to write all of the characters as rounded as possible.
Plus, no one really wakes up in the morning, wringing their hands and cackling about the evil they’re going to perform that day. Everyone thinks they’re the good guy in their own story.
What can we hope to see in Book Two?
AG: Sylvia falling in with a pack of homeless kids and a big, blue monster! It will maybe be ready in time for next year’s Comic Con, but that might be stretching things. I have my son to take care of, Todd has animation work, and we’re trying to get another series off the ground, so it may be a bit later than that.
Will we get to see more of Sylvia’s mother?
AG: Do you mean her cellular donor or her adoptive mother? And either way, the answer is yes. Not in the next story line, but the one after that. I think it’s important to show Sylvia in a normal (or as normal as possible) setting to offset the weirdness of her powers and such.
I also want to explore a little bit what it must be like for the Boys to be what they are.
The possibility of a movie has been raised, as I understand it, more than once?
AG: This is the point where I lower my head and weep. Hollywood types, most of them very nice, well-meaning people, have been expressing interest in 100 Girls for going on five years now. And we’ve come very close a couple of times, but with no results.
Well, we can hope! Thanks for your time.
AG: Thank you!

I interrupt Review (And Interview) Week to point out two vital pieces of information.
One. It’s International Blog Against Racism Week (because speaking against racism helps).
This year’s theme is intersectionality, which is vitally important to feminism, (for reasons I have gone further into here) and yet is all too often ignored. Check out the community, grab an icon, make a post, read widely, link widely. Think. It’s good for the soul.
Two (and somewhat related). Girl-Wonder.org’s zine, having blithely tripped along a path of many twists and turns, has gone online. You can read the first issue of Spoiler Space online, or download it for your tree-killing pleasure.
In honour of the week, I especially recommend to you Wasart’s ‘A Gambit for Minority Characters’ and Rob Schmidt’s ‘The New, Improved Dawnstar’.

100 Girls
Adam Gallardo and Todd Demong
Simon Pulse, $9.99 USD

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when your particular brand of mad science involves cloning 100 girls with different superpowers and conditioning them to be weapons, you more or less deserve what happens when they wake up, find out, and get really, really angry.
The teenagers-constructed-to-be-weapons idea isn’t itself original, but 100 Girls has some interesting twists, which I don’t intend to spoil overmuch. In this first installment of what I hope will expand on the promise it shows, Sylvia Mark discovers her amazing acrobatic powers during a fight with a bully. Running away from her adopted parents, she’s accosted by some men in black, and takes them down with breathtaking ease.
Then her clone-sister turns up and says she can feel the others, out there.
After that, it gets interesting.

I’m not a huge fan of the art Demong’s caricature-style faces don’t really appeal to me but it’s certainly expressive, and the kinetic force of the fight scenes lifts right off the page. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of visible characters of color in this world a reasonably impressive detail when many of the main characters are cloned from the same white woman.
Gallarado and Demong don’t shy away from the implications of the world they’ve created: the girls’ solutions are not peaceful ones, and there’s blood a-plenty. But there’s also something beautiful about this vision of young women uniting against the military/industrial interests that literally lay claim to their bodies.
The characterisation is really the most endearing quality of the book. There’s no easy demonisation here the villains are people too, loving people who have nevertheless committed vile crimes. And despite what has been done to them, the girls are still teenagers, with all the triumphant recklessness that implies. My most favourite moment comes when the interestingly-grey Dr Carver confidently reels off a list of action items to take care of before the girls arrive after all, she says, it’ll take them at least 48 hours to formulate a plan to infiltrate the facility.
‘You might wanna rethink that 48 hours thing,’ Sylvia tells her from off-panel. ‘We decided that plans are for wussies.’
Fans of Gen-13 should find plenty to love in this book; fans of literally empowered young women making terrible choices from terrible options, likewise.

Shannon and Dean Hale are the authors of the fantastic fairy-tale remix Rapunzel’s Revenge (which I review here). Shannon has also written a number of works for young adult and adult readers, including Princess Academy, a Newbery Honor winner. I was delighted to take the chance to talk to Shannon about the writing of Rapunzel’s Revenge.
A foundation for much of your work is in the reworking and retelling of fairy tales and canonised texts. What is the appeal of these stories? What creative opportunities do they offer?
I’ve always loved fairy tales, but it’s the ones that irritate me the most that I find inspiring. ‘The Goose Girl’ was just too brief, too much unexplained, and my mind didn’t stop working over it, trying to solve the puzzles and problems it left me. ‘Maid Maleen’ was fantastic, but dealt briefly and unfairly with the maid character. Her story became Book of a Thousand Days. With both of those, I stayed pretty close to the skeleton of the original story.
With Rapunzel’s Revenge, the fun is taking a well-known fairy tale and unraveling it. The advantage of this instead of just writing an completely original story is the Grimms’ version is in constant dialog with ours, asking questions and creating complications that wouldn’t be there otherwise. It’s also satisfying on a personal level, because Rapunzel is to me the most irritating fairy tale of all time and I couldn’t let it stand without having a snarky thing or two to say about it.
Rapunzel’s Revenge is very much a Wild West themed fairytale, with all the romantic appeal of the frontier. What’s the source of this interest?
It all started with her hair. Dean and I wanted to combine our two passions: fairy tales and superhero comic books. Which fairy tale hero would make the coolest comic book superhero? Rapunzel was our conclusion. Because she used her hair as whip and lasso, going Old West was a natural leap. Besides, we wanted to use the visual format to its fullest, and the Western landscapes and themes are so iconic, so cinematic, so just plain fun we relished diving in head first. I did a lot of research on the Old Westnot the true history but Hollywood’s, hunting for archetypes we could play with. The prison break is a big onealso, the revenge plot, stranger comes to town and helps out the locals, man vs. wild nature, despot gets his/her comeuppance, enslaved folk break free, privileged youth is cast out of society only to return stronger and take over, etc. And things like cattle ranchers, bad sheriffs, friendly outcasts, troubled townsfolk, wandering entertainers, mines, railroads, settlers… We were shameless about cramming in as much as we possibly could in 144 illustrated pages.
Rapunzel makes short shrift of the blond, blue-eyed, square jawed adventurer who would have been her rescuer and love interest in earlier versions of the story. How did you come to include him?
Yes! We called him ‘Prince.’ This goes back to the whole Rapunzel-being-the-most-irritating-tale-of-all-time thing. In the original story, the Prince visits Rapunzel in her tower, but instead of bringing a rope or ladder, he just keeps coming back with arms full of ‘silk’ for her to weave into her own ladder. Doofus. She ended up having his love children, so I can guess what his real motivation was for continuing to visit and keeping her locked up. Scoundrel! Rogue! Sicko! We were tempted to cut the prince character out of our story altogether, but it was just too fun to give him a guest appearance, let Rapunzel see him for what he truly is, and have her own little revenge. That’s the name of the book, after all. Of course plot-wise, Rapunzel’s main revenge is against her kidnapper and captor, Mother Gothel. But in another sense, her revenge is also against her treatment in the original story. And that’s part of the fun in doing retellings!
There are a number of characters of colour in the story, from Rapunzel’s partner Jack to a sizeable proportion of side characters (good and bad) and background faces. Was this something you’d discussed in the creation process?
It was. When Dean and I wrote, we didn’t assign any of the characters race or ethnicity. But when we discussed the project with Nate (the artist), one of the things that was very important to us was that we represent the full spectrum of people in this land. Although Gothel’s Reach is mythical, it was inspired by the American Old West, which was very culturally diversesettlers from the east and Europe, African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics, Asians, etc. And on top of that, we added other mythical creatures and fairy tale folk. It seems like the stereotype Old West figure is the white cowboy, and I didn’t want the story to be so chalk full of white cowboys that it got boring. We left it up to Nate to assign the look to all the characters, and I think he did a fantastic job.
Of course beside the white cowboy, the other major figure in the Old West is the Indian. In our world, the equivalent of the Indians were the original settlers of that land. They would have already settled the choicest spots before immigrants came. So when the immigrants arrived from the Old World, instead of driving the original inhabitants out, they co-settled and those spots became the territory’s major cities. So most of the Indians of our world are urban city dwellers. Nate’s original sketch of Jack had him as a blond, but when we saw him, we all were unanimous that Jack should be this world’s equivalent of an American Indian. I love Jack. Nate is illustrating the sequel now, entitled Calamity Jack, that will give more of Jack’s back story and then continue the story from the end of Rapunzel’s Revenge. it’s an urban caper tale and maybe even bigger and badder than Rapunzel’s Revenge.
You have a four year old son, whose bedtime reading, according to your blog, becomes more and more exciting. What sort of comics do you hope will be available for him to read?
He already reads comics, of course! He likes DC Superfriends, Marvel Adventures: Avengers, Tiny Titans, Powerpuff Girls, Owly. Dean dusted off his Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham. While Max doesn’t read yet, I’ve noticed he’s much more likely to sit down with a comic book on his own and look through it than he is with a picture book.
It seems like for years the comics industry was so determined to be grown up, kids were forgotten. But with comics creators writing for their own kids now and traditional children’s book publishers getting into the game (like Bloomsbury) there’s plenty out there. Age appropriate books are so important, as are plenty of realistic and varied characters. I think it’s just as important (or perhaps more!) for boys to read books with female main characters as it is for girls. I would also be pleased if said girls got to wear pants on occasion.
Your other writing is solo work, but for Rapunzel’s Revenge you collaborated with your husband Dean and artist Nathan Hale (no relation). How did you work the collaboration process? Were there any really epic battles?
Shannon: The collaboration was surprisingly bloodless. We all agreed that I’m in charge and the boys are my contract workers. Right?
Dean: Yes, I am currently bloodless after the ordeal. Seriously, though, the contract worker thing is something Shannon and I discussed, and I was all behind being the toadie. Or the ‘Unseen Puppeteer,’ as I prefer to think of myself.
Shannon: Anyway, Dean and I discussed lots before writing, then I’d write the first draft, leaving holes if I thought he’d be great at filling them, which he was. He’d go through, changing stuff I wrote, and I’d go back, changing more stuff. At this point, we honestly can’t remember who wrote what, though there is an ongoing battle in which both of us claim the funny lines. Then Nate pretty much had free reign.

Rapunzel’s Revenge.
Written by Shannon and Dean Hale, illustrated by Nathan Hale (no relation).
Bloomsbury, $14.99 USD.

Rapunzel is the story of a young woman whose parents give her to a witch in return for lettuce. She is locked in a tower, eventually rescued by a prince attracted by her incredible beauty sometimes immediately, sometimes after a long period of suffering and is married to him.
Rapunzel’s Revenge is the story of a young woman stolen from her mother and raised by a witch. She is locked in a tower, rescues herself, partners up with a part-time thief and full-time wiseacre, organizes an uprising and through her bravery, intelligence, and compassion defeats the witch and restores freedom and growth to the land.
You can tell these stories apart because the first is a creepy tale about a woman lacking any agency and the second is an utter delight.
Rapunzel’s Revenge succeeds at everything: gorgeous, lush artwork; an imaginative and unashamedly but not polemic feminist take on the fairy tale; a beautifully-written script; a fictional setting that plays with all the best tropes of the Old West while acknowledging the actual ethnic composition of that West; endearing, flawed good guys; selfish, human bad guys; a controlling, horribly believable villain; and a heroine who takes care of business by using her hair to whip, lasso and acrobatically disable prison bars, evil-doers, and a huge freaking sea-serpent.
Oh, yes. The fantastic heroine has weaponised hair. Not since the days of Medusa of the Inhumans has anyone been so utterly badass with their lovely locks.
If you’re worried I’ve given the whole show away, trust me. I’ve only barely touched on the manifest marvels of Rapunzel’s Revenge.
You may dash off to your local bookstore, or, if you’re inclined to give Girl-Wonder.org monies, click through to the front page and order through our Amazon button. If you like this column, and the things it proposes as happy alterations to superhero comics, I damn-near guarantee that you will like this book.

Most of my favourite books are well-loved, which is to say they are all marked with dog-ears, chocolate stains, tears, diet coke, and there’s the occasional case of puffy page after a volume has fallen into bathwater.
However, I tend to be easier on my comic books, because they’re pretty (and hard to read in the tub). So why does my TPB of Birds of Prey: Sensei and Student have a dented corner and a torn cover?
Because I tossed it at the wall, that’s why.
Most sane people agree that Gail Simone is 17 kinds of awesome. The main arc of Sensei and Student is fantastic; it’s a tightly plotted story of family, friendship, obligation, betrayal and revenge in which every competent character (good, evil or amoral) also happens to be female.
But the single issue follow-up to that arc, “One Day, Well Chosen,” turns my stomach.
After some hectic adventuring, Oracle (Babs), Black Canary (Dinah) and Huntress (Helena) get together to clear some air. Naturally, you can’t have a group meeting without referring to the fact that Huntress once slept with Oracle’s ex.
Huntress: “About sleeping with Nightwing, Oracle. First, I didn’t know you and second, you weren’t together at the time, right?”
…
Oracle: “We’re not together anymore. You ever want to be part of a cheap, meaningless little one-night stand again… …be my guest.”
Oh, NICE, Babs! Aren’t you the queen bee? Canary tries to make peace after this fantastically nasty slur, only for Oracle to spill some beans:
Oracle: “Did she mention to you that she slept with Arsenal (Dinah’s foster son/younger brother/nephew/it’s complicated) recently?”
Canary: “What? Gee, Helena, maybe this would be easier if you’d just tell us who you haven’t done the freak dance with?”
Hang on ONE FUCKING MINUTE.
Huntress’ sex-life can be a matter of legitimate interest to Canary under two circumstances:
1) Huntress and Canary are having sex and Canary wishes to know about any less safe practices which might adversely affect her own health.
2) Given their line of work, it might be useful to know if Huntress had slept with a known villain who might come back for revenge. (Like, say, Ra’s Al Ghul, DINAH.)
Other than this, it’s none of her damn business.
At any rate, while it irritates me two of my favourite superheroines can be so stereptypically gossipy and judgmental about their collegue’s sex life, this isn’t actually the part which makes me ill. It is realistic for people to be unfair and nasty from time to time. Moreover, both Oracle and Canary realise they were horrifically unfair and make amends later in the story. This is awesome. This did not prompt book-hurling.
No. What sent that book sailing across the room is Josh.
Josh is a putrid youth who had blackmailed Huntress into promising a date with him in exchange for some information she needed for a mission. (This was not the brightest idea ever, but then Josh is not terribly bright. His date involves less dancing and dinner, and more being-thrown-around-rooftops and takeout Chinese.)
Josh, fanboy creep that he is, calls Huntress “baby-boots”, “sweet stuff” and other Miller bar-banter-esque charming names. He sees Huntress not as a person, but as a sexual status symbol. He clearly believes that her dating him, even under duress, makes him cool: “And my stupid roomate was … braggin’ when he dated a nurse.” “Any chance you could drive past my ex-girlfriend’s house a few times, ’til she sees us together?”
As Huntress observes, “There’s probably a good guy in you somewhere, but who could ever find him under all this pimp drivel?”
In the space of five pages, Josh propositions Huntress for sex three times. Each time, she scornfully declines. Their last moment of dialogue:
Josh: “So are we gonna…”
Huntress: “Magic eight-ball says outlook not good.”
The next time we see them:
Huntress: sitting up in bed, wearing a sheet and her mask. Beside her, an implicitly just as naked male body, clearly post-intimate encounter, almost certainly Josh.
Your wrathful columnist: “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BULLSHIT?”
Book: meets the wall at high velocity
Boys and girls, what do we learn from this Very Special Issue of BoP?
1) No doesn’t always mean no! You can be verbally disrespectful to your date and (by implication, all women) but as long as you’re persistent you might get lucky with the luscious target of your sweaty fanboy dreams!
2) The process of going from “No way in hell” to “Yeah, okay” requires so little attention that it can happen entirely off-panel for the sake of a cheap gag. (Punchline: Huntress is a slut! Hahaha!)
Unlike Babs and Dinah, I don’t require Helena to research the former significant others and intricate family trees of someone before she has sex with them. She can choose to sleep with someone because she wants an orgasm, or because she feels pity for the guy, or because she’s pissed off with her friends for slut-shaming her, and those choices all make sense in the context of this character.
But I want to see her make that choice. I don’t want to see her go from “I’m saying no” to “I already said yes” without any indication of why she changed her mind. I want to see a woman with agency, not a woman who, metatextually speaking, doesn’t get to choose.
Simone’s Birds of Prey run is, on the whole, beautifully written and strongly feminist. I’m not angry because Gail Simone sucks; I’m angry because she doesn’t, and we still get this please-persist-boys no-means-yes story.
I’m used to this stuff from other writers; I expect better from Simone. Usually, I get it.

Ayre Force
Adam Slutsky, Joseph Phillip Illidge and Shawn Martinbrough.
Bodog Entertainment.

My chief reaction to Ayre Force (which probably says much more about what else I have been reading and my reaction to that) is ‘Baudrillard would choke reading this. He would choke and he would die and that is awesome.’
Ayre Force is, more or less, the tale of a disparate group of people recruited to fight Mad Scientist founded environmental and animal abuses with grenades by savvy entreprenur/genius commander Calvin Ayre. The kicker is, Calvin Ayre is a real life person, who (at the time the comic was released) was the owner of real life company Bodog Entertainment. The rest of the cast of butt-kicking heroes are all Bodog employees real life poker players, musicians and mixed martial artists. According to the comic, these are their secret identities. REALLY they are eco-guerilla-fighters.
Hot DAMN you guys it’s so fucking hyperreal it hurts. Also, Bif Naked who-sings-that-song-I-like-from-the-Buffy-soundtrack shoots the hell out of things!
Ayre Force is obviously an attempt to get people to pay for one’s marketing, but having yourself written as a total badass has to be a lot of fun. If I had the money and opportunity to produce a comic where my friends and colleagues ran around blowing shit up and fighting supervillains*, I would totally do it, especially if part of the proceeds went to fighting the revolting trade in bear bile.
The plot doesn’t really matter there’s good science and bad science and the bad guy and his kids have the bad science and they! Must! Be! Stopped! With explosions! It is, however, endearingly representative almost exactly half the ‘characters’ are women, there are multiple ‘characters’ of colour (both good guys and bad) and multiple women of colour. It’s something so rare in most comics that it’s sadly remarkable in this one. Although a number of the women’s outfits are missing the protective fabric that I would really want to be there in the event of an armed infiltration, they aren’t posed in seductive fashion, and they are just as adept at kicking down doors and firing from speeding motorcycles as their male counterparts.
Sadly, not every non-sexist work is necessarily particularly good. Ayre Force isn’t terrible, but it’s an excellent example of how a book can be mediocre in script and artwork, yet still not offend one’s feminist sensibilities. For the latter I commend it! In addition to the aforementioned celebrity appeal, it also includes gunfights, gloriously bad dialogue (‘You want… some science? Here’s your damn science!!!’) and a man’s heart exploding out of his mouth, all things I appreciate.
Ayre Force is good, stupid fun and its stance on gender and race inclusion is a lot better than most things that fall into that category. It’s nowhere close to groundbreaking, but you could do much, much worse.

• Comment on this review here.
• In Girl Wonder: Alpha Q, Rachel would be Editrix, wielder of the fastest red pen in the west. Betty would be WebWatcher, utilizing the power of her cybernetic brain to monitor evildoers. Nenena would be Smackdown, able to disable an enemy with a single well-crafted modhat. And I would be Anger Management, using bolts of fury to destroy hegemonic structures.
  It pays to plan these things in advance.