Standard-Issue Links with Standard-Issue Lateness

First up, an apology last week’s linkpost incorrectly attributed a blog post by S.E. Smith to their blogmate Sady Doyle. It’s been corrected, and I’m sorry for the error.
Second up, a plug Girl Wonder tumblr No More Invisible Girls is looking for self-identifying female comics fans to tell us their stories.
And finally, our links:
-Fantasy fans in particular may appreciate this tumblr of Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor. They’ll be adding sci-fi ones too soon.
-Hurricane Irene failed to dissuade many women from reading comics in public.
-Some great stuff at Sequential Tart lately, in particular this piece on the opportunity represented by the DC reboot and this Barbara Gordon retrospective.
-Speaking of my personal favourite member of the Bat-Family, the New York Post has previews of BATGIRL #1!

Yes, Actually, I Do

By now the company-wide relaunch of all of DC’s titles shouldn’t be news to anyone in comics fandom, nor should the fact that with the reshuffling around of talent, DC has gone from women making up 12% of their credited creators to 1%. This has, understandably, raised a lot of concerns with fans, several of whom male and female broached those concerns at last week’s San Diego Comic Con, where they were met with deflection, jokes from male creators, and a bewildering amount of hostility from Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, who demanded to know who they should have hired.
And here’s the thing: several popular female creators were approached to take part in the relaunch, like Kelly Sue DeConnick, Marjorie M. Liu, and Rebekah Isaacs. Probably more were approached or submitted pitches that we haven’t heard about. Maybe a lot more. So yeah, I don’t entirely blame DiDio for being frustrated, if he tried to get female talent, was unable to for various reasons, and is now being taken to task for it.
But 2 women to 105 men is a pretty hefty imbalance. And I doubt 103 women were approached and turned DC down.
I’ve been reading a lot about this and the comment I keep seeing is ‘What do you want, a quota?’ People critiquing the hiring decisions are quick to deny that they want a quota and instead offer lists of female writers and artists they’d like to see in the relaunch: ‘No, I don’t want a quota, but how about Amanda Conner?’
I’ll say it: I want a quota.
This is not to say that I want DC to grab the first ten women who walk by the office and give them jobs writing and drawing comics. And I’m aware that DC doesn’t hire people who haven’t already established themselves in some way, and with good reason. Top publishers don’t take unsolicited talent. (Despite Grant Morrison’s implication that you can simply ‘send in your stuff’ to DC and be considered.)
I’m also aware that there are far more men working in the comic book industry than women. And I would assume that there are more men trying to break into the comic book industry than women, though of course it’s nearly impossible to know the stats on that. So if there’s one writing job and 9 out of 10 of the people gunning for it are male, odds are it’s going to go to a dude.
But it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. The reason there are more men trying to break into comics is because comics are still perceived as being Not For Girls. Because the industry is already male-dominated. Because the comics are mostly about (straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied) men. Because the industry markets itself to men. So women consume manga and independent comics and webcomics, and the superhero comic book industry ignores that audience and its potential revenue.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t women trying to break into superhero comics. It just means that there are fewer women trying to break into superhero comics, because they’ve been told so often by the marketing tactics, by the covers, by the stories from the industry, by being mocked and dismissed at conventions that superhero comics are Not For Girls.
But as Laura Hudson points out beautifully, a more diverse stable of creators leads to better comics. Plus, simply by appealing to women who, you know, make up half of the world DC has the opportunity to nearly double their revenue. Twice as much money! Who doesn’t want that?
If DC wants to rectify their skewed gender ratio even a little, they need to start by mining that small pool of aspiring women more heavily than the larger pool of male creators. Again, I’m not saying DC should hire women at random or compromise their standards. But here’s a thought: why not open up a month-long call for submissions from female writers and artists who’d like to break into the industry but haven’t quite gotten there yet? Female artists can send in portfolios; female writers, pitches and scripts. Sure, you’ll have to wade through a lot of dross, but that’s what interns are for!
I’m not suggesting putting an untried artist on Detective Comics right off the (forgive me) bat. Just let her get her foot in the door. Hire female artists as inkers as a stepping stone to them becoming pencillers. Give female writers one-shots and miniseries as trial runs, or backup strips. Give women who don’t necessarily write or draw in the house style a chance, as Marvel did with Girl Comics.
And if you do that, if you open that door for women and tell them that you want to see what they can do and if you look at what they can do in good faith, with the intention of finding creators to hire among them you can easily bump that 1% up to 5%. Or 10%. Would I love to see 50% of the creative credits on DC’s titles taken by women? Of course. But even 10%, aggressively sought after, would make a difference to the market, and be an enormous show of goodwill to fans everywhere who are concerned about the current gender ratio.
Dan DiDio was asked if DC was committed to hiring more women. He didn’t exactly answer the question (‘I’m committed to hiring the absolute best writers and artists.’), but if the answer is yes, then they should show that commitment by actually hiring more women.
And if the answer is no, then they should say so, and we can all stop wasting our time.

Link Sandwiches

A slow week for links here at Gworg HQ. Here’s what we’ve got:
-Racialicious asks Are DC’s POC Titles Already in Danger?
-Clearly what DC needs is Strong Female Characters. And Kate Beaton provides, like whoa. See also all the fanart.
-And some interesting thoughts on marriage in comics from Sequential Tart.

Double Decker Linkspam

Girl Wonder apologises for the lack of a link roundup last week, due to ‘human error’, which I think is the standard term for ‘I fucked up’. To make up for it, here’s a bumper crop of links:
-Friends of Lulu is officially finished as a group. Here’s an enlightening interview with interim director Kynn Bartlett about what went wrong.
-How much has changed in the past ten years?
-An oldie but a goodie: Privilege 101.
-Richard Dawkins: just not getting it.
-The problem with publishing explained via dogs and Smurfs.
-The Dwayne McDuffie tribute Comic-Con International wouldn’t print.
-got sexism?
-Shortpacked on the DC Reboot.
-From the horse’s mouth: Spoiler was set up to die from the start. (also featuring our own Karen Healey!)

One More Insult

It’s this week’s links, and the big story is DC’s explicit confirmation that the ‘target audience’ for their giant relaunch is ‘men age 18 to 34″. You’ll hear much more from Girl Wonder on this we are still co-ordinating our response, but this is exactly the sort of problem we face in mainstream comics today. A round-up of good responses:
-thegeekifiedgirl drops some stats and backs them up with a solid argument.
-It’s interesting to look at which books CBR’s readers are actually interested in buying.
-… and Johanna at Comics Worth Reading’s personal take on the new titles from earlier this month also merit a read.
-Maid of Might highlights the fact that this relaunch (like most other relaunches?) was allegedly meant to bring in new readers rather than the same-old gradually shrinking group DC had been catering to for years. She and DC Women Kicking Ass both remember getting male friends and partners into comics.
More on this issue soon. In the mean-time, keep sending in your suggestions for links!

Getcher Hot Links

Prepare yourself for this week’s links:
-A Girls Read Comics roundtable on the DC Reboot, with some great discussion of what this means for DC’s alleged commitment to diversity (spoiler: they don’t seem that committed to diversity).
-… and via that link, this great video of Dwayne McDuffie talking about audience reactions to black writers and characters in the comics.
-A particularly illuminating example of the lengths comic artists feel they need to go to in order to put both T and A on the cover.

Return of the Revenge of the Bride of Gwog

Gwog rises once more from the deep! With our new Board in place, we are returning Gwog to its old status of a weekly roundup of Links Of Interest, with ad hoc guest posts by the mysterious Directors. If you have any links you want us to publicise, or anything else you’d like to contribute to Gwog, send it to us: [email protected]. Our operators are waiting for your call.
This week’s links, first the comics-related:

  • Colin Smith’s detailed and engaging essay on FLASHPOINT #1.
  • More FLASHPOINT fail: DC should really consider how this shit looks.
  • Laura Hudson, Blair Butler, Heidi MacDonald and Jill Pantozzi form a roundtable on the ‘Geek Girl Phenomenon’.
    And the non-comics:
  • A pair of insightful posts by ginmar on rape culture and the myth of false rape accusations.
  • The reprehensible decision by the equally reprehensible New York Post to publicise an alleged rape victim’s alleged HIV+ status.
  • An Open Letter to Nice Guys of the World.

OUT/THERE no 3: On 2000ad late January/February 2011

By Colin Smith
1.
This is my third guest column on the matter of how sex and gender is being represented in 2000ad, and it’s been by far the hardest to write. For after having written two pieces in a row bemoaning, with a gathering sense of disappointment and frustration, the comic book’s lack of apparent concern where the 51% of the population that’s female is concerned, I find the past five week’s worth of progs have brought nothing that even vaguely improves the situation.
After awhile, even the most optimistic reader is surely forced to concede that no matter how vital the matter of sex and gender is beyond of pages of Tharg’s weekly ‘award-winning SF anthology’, within its covers it’s usually of very little apparent importance at all. 2000ad, we might conclude, is a boy’s comic that’s mostly for ageing blokes who really aren’t concerned with any kind of social agenda beyond who hits who and with what.
And if wasn’t for the commercial shortsightedness of this, and for the limitations it places on the type of stories which can be told, and for the lack of artistic ambition it displays, and, most importantly, for the moral disengagement that it marks, why, who could be in the slightest bit concerned with much, if not of course all, of what’s been shown, and what’s not been shown, in 2000ad over the past three months?
2.
There’s such a marked and consistent editorial and creative indifference as to what surely are seriously important ethical issues where the politics of sex and gender are concerned, that 2000ad’s moral inertia seems to quite defeat any meaningful attempt to want to debate with its pages and to hope for more inclusive fare ahead. Don’t notice it, put up with it, or just go away and give up, ‘Tharg the mighty, Alien Editor extraordinaire’, seems to be saying to anyone tired of this relentless apathy towards women within the comic’s pages, because I’m not changing and we’re not changing and you’re just waffling on, repeating yourself over and over and over again.
You’re no fun, implies the Mighty Tharg, so confident, so cocksure, and, to a degree, he may well be right. It’s certainly no fun writing this time after time.
3.
Of course, female readers can certainly enjoy the adventures of male characters in largely male environments presenting what are mostly traditional male gender characteristics. And I’ve no doubt that 2000ad has hundreds of loyal female readers who find the relative lack of female characters and the regular absence of feminist-minded thinking in the comic book to be a negligible barrier to their entertainment. And yet, I wonder what a woman or a man who isn’t just concerned with reading about a male-centric view of the world new to 2000ad would think of what’s been presented to us in the pages of this month’s comics? In the 5 chapters of ‘Ampney Crucis’ from prog 1718 to 1722, for example, there was but one minor female character on show, who did nothing but cry, pray for her life and then, in hope of saving herself, gun down those around her in the hope of prolonging her existence. Yet of those men surrounding her, and for all their various virtues and weaknesses, not a tear is shown being shed, regardless of what side of the good/evil divide they fall upon. In essence, the blokes make this world, and the women weep and conform in order to find their place and perhaps save their lives.
The oddest thing about this is that the creators of this strip clearly aren’t thinking about what they’re presenting in terms of sex and gender. For it’s impossible to imagine how a more representative spread of men and women would have negatively affected the strip, and so it’s impossible to imagine why women should be so thin on the ground there, and so notably absent where the key roles are concerned. After all, it can’t be a question of the creators wanting to reflect the gender bias of the era that Crucis is set in, because if historical veracity was so important to them, they’d hardly be presenting us with a post World War One tale so full of demons and super-science in the first place.
Why is ‘Ampney Cruscis Investigates’ so thinly populated by anyone who isn’t a man then? Who wouldn’t want to produce stories that were as much about women as men? Who’d want to limit their work by limiting the options for the members of the cast that they can play with?
Who’d want to write about blokes and pretty much nothing but blokes, peppered with a few female whiners and victims and enablers, especially when their work will eventually be collected as a trade paperback and placed before the public as an example of a genre piece so unintentionally regressive that it makes even US TV franchise cop shows appear to stand as revolutionary texts in the gender wars by comparison?
4.
Similarly, ‘Necrophim’ stars just one recognisably female figure amongst a cast of many, many tiresomely treacherous creatures. Why there’s just one female to be seen on that side of the curtain is never explained, but there lurks the awkward suspicion that she’s been intended as some kind of radical statement. After all, who’d place a single female character in a strip and not realise that that fact constituted a statement in itself anyway?
But what statement is it that’s being made in ‘Necrophim’ where women are concerned? Perhaps we’re being shown the other side of equality, in that women are just as capable of being dastardly as men? Perhaps. But then, the new Queen of Hell is so often defined with reference to her previous role as a ‘scabbed whore’, and presented as a coldly manipulative and calculating creature, which leaves the only woman in this strip feeling uncomfortably close to that old male stereotype of the woman with the icy heart who uses sex and deceit to attain power. And it’s impossible not to look at the panels of the newly enthroned Cythea at the tales end, and not believe that those poses have been lifted from porn magazines, which leaves everything feeling utterly confused and rather insulting.
There is, however, a terrible lurking sense that there may be an attempt at irony at play in ‘Shakara’. Given that it’s impossible to believe that anyone in 2011 would unthinkingly knowingly present us with Eva, the strip’s sometimes-narrator and sidekick, with her mutilated face mounted on an often-barely clothed porn-star’s body, is it possible that this is a joke aimed at comic book sexism? It’s a supposition that’s far more pleasing than the more obvious conclusion, which is that no one noticed what they were doing. For Eva, presented at the tale’s beginning as a violently able freedom fighter, is swiftly reduced to the role of sidekick to an obviously masculine super-warrior, and her most prominent role is to be so distractingly and devastatingly attractive that she can inspire alien males to assume she’s a prostitute. Yes, Eva’s major contribution this past month has been to distract utterly extra-terrestrial creatures with her huge breasts, waspish waist and massively shapely, if conspicuously scarred, thighs, the mere presence of which can trigger barely uncontrollable lust and the suggestion of illicit financial transactions. She possesses, it appears, the power of super-prostitution. Well, how fantastic that all that flesh can be so such a powerful sexual lure to quite unearthly creatures, and how grand that Eva’s role is to make the males of the galaxy so excited that they can’t concentrate on their jobs. She may be a rebel, she may be a scientist, she may be a warrior, but when it comes down to it, she contributes the most by crossing those extravagant legs and baring much of that even more extravagant chest. Flirting and semi-nudity is how this female protagonist serves the cause, and even as a gag, if such it is, it’s wearying and unpleasant.
Why do Eva and Cythea have to be presented as sex objects in the way that they are at all? Do female characters have to be presented as playing the role of prostitute or mythological sex demon, whether ironically or not? There are ways, after all, of presenting sexuality, and indeed a predatory sexuality, that don’t so apparently draw off of the specific repertoire of pornography, and the general one of casual sexism too. And if this is irony, what’s it’s being ironic about? Even when Eva is mostly clothed, those huge breasts remain mostly uncovered, and even in this future so distant that other recognisably human beings aren’t anywhere to be seen at all, it’s Eva whose compassionate eyes well with tears for Shakara’s welfare.
Why, if humanity hasn’t survived, its gender roles have.
5.
But of all this month’s individual chapters, the most telling, if hardly the most offensive, might be ‘Kingdom’ Part 9. In it, we have one Gene, a humanoid mutant dog, as our lead character, a huge hulk-like creature who doesn’t really look like a dog at all, or indeed a human being. Strangely enough, Clara, the similarly-mutated female dog-person he’s been twinned with, does look human, and, with the exception of a rather mutedly canine nose, she’s quite the stereotypically fetching pseudo-human female too, with thin hips, taut abs, large breasts, and a cutely-unkempt blonde hair-style too. And to compliment her traditional physical gender characteristics, Clara brings with her the habit of being a plot-complicating hostage and, compared to Gene-Dog, something of whiner too. She may be a useful sidekick in a firefight, but let’s not pretend this is anything other than a slightly less objectionable variation on one of the traditional roles that women have usually played in boy’s comics, for, so far, she’s little if anything more than an excuse for Gene to feel angst-ridden and alpha-male aggressive.
But let’s put aside the fact that ‘Kingdom’ is an incredibly over-familiar, gender-insensitive and dull narrative. Instead, why don’t we consider how the last panel of ‘Kingdom’ in prog 1722 is, in the context of this run of issues, simply insensitive. In it, the General, the tale’s antagonist, declares to our hulking hero that he’s going to kill all of his canine prisoners, and states that he’s going to start with that ‘bitch’ of Gene’s. Now, the meaning of the phrase is no doubt meant to mark the General as a villain, but it serves in context as being yet another example of female characters such as Clara being insulted for, essentially, not being men. The word ‘bitch’ here does indeed help point out that the General is something of a monster, but does that point have to be established by using such language to insultingly describe yet another subsidiary female character who’s already spent weeks of our time being helpless and serving as an excuse for the male lead to get really, really, really desperate and angry? For if it were just one strip in any single issue of 2000ad which was struggling and failing to be kind and respectful in its gender politics, then the General might say anything at all. He is, after, the bad guy here. But when the likes of everything we’ve discussed above is also present in any particular week’s issue, that word ‘bitch’ passes in the wider context from being a symbol of villainy to yet an unnecessary example of creative and editorial cack-handedness.
Why does gender and sexuality have to be used as an insult at all where female characters are concerned? Male characters don’t seem to have any such problem across any span of strips you might care to mention in 2000ad. They’re never portrayed as having been rent-boys, demonic or not, or as turning alien heads by playing any such role. They’re never placed in strips which are nearly entirely populated by women, and treated as if their place is to get captured, undressed, or, at best, to support a big strong female hero. They’re never brainwashed into marrying and being raped by demi-alien monsters, as in ABC Warriors, or threatened with rape, as in Savage. Men are, well; they’re men, aren’t they, and the fact of simply being male isn’t of itself used even as a common basis for villain’s insults.
Now, perhaps next week will find us reading of how all this by-the-numbers sexism has been a cleverly-established, ironic set-up in the plot. Perhaps our female dog-soldier will emerge absolutely in charge of her own destiny, free of any need to rely on big Gene’s calmness and muscular arms, far more than just a hostage and sidekick.
But if so, it’ll come after more than three months of mostly-standard fare male-centrism in 2000ad, and two months of ‘Kingdom’ itself, and that’s too long a time for a strip which is consumed in weekly doses in the context of this so-often banally regressive comic book.
6.
Ultimately, as we’ve discussed before, and as I promise not to prattle on about at any length here, this problem of sexism, unconscious although I’ve no doubt it is, is one that reflects particularly poorly on this comic book’s editorial office. Worse yet, it’s a policy of inattention that ends up reflecting unfairly on the comic book’s creators too. In a magazine where gender was more carefully and kindly attended to, the presence of a single strip such as ‘Judge Dredd: Served Cold’ could play out its course with its lack of female characters passing largely unnoticed. If 2000 ad wanted to present a male-heavy strip that’s both homage to Thirties gangster movies and CSI-like TV detective shows with no female leads on show, as in the latest Judge Dredd story, then why not? The fact that the machismo of a great deal of the characters on show in ‘Served Cold’ serves them particularly badly could even be read as a challenge to traditional constructions of the masculine hero. A strip that’s largely empty of female characters can still be, after all, a profoundly anti-sexist statement.
But in the end, ‘Judge Dredd: Served Cold’ is, when read in the company of its fellows, just another story where the antagonists and protagonists are nearly all male. Certainly, every major role in the story is occupied by men. Now, there might be a point to this, to women being reduced to one-panel displays of competency by female Judges and various brief cameos of women presented in one way or another as victims of a highly sexualised and sexist culture. But when that is what’s so often being presented elsewhere, any possibility for irony, again, collapses. There’s no space for subtly where sex and gender is concerned in 2000ad at the moment, if subtly if what the creators of ‘Served Cold’ are providing. And if ‘Served Cold’ is to a greater or lesser degree about how male mule-headedness creates and perpetuates mayhem, then its placement in February’s 2000ad has quite undermined its purpose.
If, on the other hand, it’s just a story of blokes shooting blokes, as it well might be, then why would anyone want to do that, in this time, in this climate, in this particular situation?
7.
The creators and editorial staff involved in these past 5 progs have all produced work that presents admirable, if not sappily minded and unbearably perfect, representations of women in the past, I’m sure. (A few of the writers and artists are unfamiliar to me, but I’m happy to assume the very best here.) But to commission and then publish as a block all of the work discussed above, and to do so for week after week after week, merely causes everyone involved to look bad, to a greater or lesser degree, be they editors, creators, readers or the brand of the comic book as a whole.
Even the consumer must surely start to feel somewhat grubby and alienated after awhile, or so I’d sincerely hope. Certainly, I feel that way.
But the important thing really isn’t whether good professionals, or indeed a much loved comic book, look bad or not. What counts is whether the work is, in context, clearly on the side of the relatively powerless against the relatively powerful or not.
That’s the litmus test, and for yet another month, it’s a test that 2000ad has once again failed.
8.
It’s now been more than a year since I first started writing about sex and gender and 2000ad, and I think that I’ve not only said everything that I have to say on the subject, but said it so many times than even I’m tired of hearing it. And so, I think it’s time for me to put the subject, and the comic as a whole, to one side, though individual serials will undoubtedly yet catch my attention. For there’s no debate to contribute to that I can perceive on this matter of sex and gender in 2000ad outside of a tiny group of folks, and I regret sincerely that I’ve lacked the skill and insight to inspire one. But I can’t see what good I might even be doing myself by writing what I have on this topic. So it goes.
But there we go. My job here is done, because I couldn’t contribute anything at all to the job at hand.
Colin Smith will continue writing about comic books at http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/

OUT/THERE 2: Snapshots from the Gender Wars in 2000 AD this month

A guest column by Colin Smith of Too Busy Thinking About My Comics

1.
I can’t say that I’ve any grasp clear grasp of what ‘Shakara: Avenger’ is about. We’re three episodes into the strip’s run by now, and to this reader new to ‘Shakara’, who’s bemused and somewhat alienated by the fact that each new chapter appears to be describing a different property, it all seems more trouble than it’s worth. Certainly, ‘Shakara’ is yet another example of a 2000ad strip which has apparently been produced for an established hardcore of readers rather than with an eye upon a less knowledgeable and genre-dedicated audience.
Chapter three seems to star one ‘Eva Procopio’, a character described in this week’s prog as an ‘Anti-hierarchy terrorist’, whatever that might be; it certainly sounds as she’s a rebellious protagonist who’s very much in possession of a noble cause. She has a face which appears to be hideously mutilated, though it may well be that she’s an alien whose species have evolved to look like Donatella Versace immediately after a further bout of plastic surgery, an experience which has removed her nose but left some very broad stitches still in place. Or perhaps she’s been tortured, or perhaps her appearance is a deliberate and controlled lifestyle choice rather than an accidental botch-up. Who knows, if all they have is these three dense chapters to go by? Perhaps I missed the key information after I mislaid my will to read on. As I’ve tried to intimate, it’s a hard strip to be able to engage with, which means that it’s a hard strip to want to engage with.
But, though I can tell you little of her character, or purpose, I can report that she is built like a surgically-enhanced porn star, and that she wears a tight, cut off, stripy t-shirt which strongly accentuates her ferociously large and yet pertly upward-turning, breasts, while leaving her midriff and much of her thighs apparently quite naked .Her legs are wrapped in the same material as her breasts are, and these leggings rather suspiciously terminate just where a pair of suspenders hired along with a party nurse uniform would. And between the bottom of her breasts and the top of these leggings, where an earlier age might have imagined a need for modesty? Why, nothing except the very skimpiest of strips of material, super-string thin and yet insubstantial enough to make a thong appear to be an artifact from the age of Victorian overdressing.
Why?
2.
The final chapter of ‘Slaine: Mercenary’ could almost have been created as a classroom aid for a Media Studies lesson on the contents and priorities of boy’s comics. Out of a total of 12 pages at hand, 10 are given over to an extended and largely plotless brawl between a gang of sportsmad barbarians. Severed heads are kicked into the air, as they have been for what seems like months now, our hero transforms into a fearsome monster, and whatever logic had remained in the story collapses into convenience. It all passes without providing any good or even partially convincing reason why the reader should’ve paid for all this unreconstructed mayhem, or at least it does if the same reader should happen to be one who doesn’t find the sight of very big men hurting each other time after time after time to be particularly interesting in itself.
Yet there is a sombre if not particularly moving ending to the tale, with the reader being presented with a full page closing splash of poor lonesome Slaine staring into a snowstorm, having had his offer of a shall we say? relationship rejected by Raven, a Celtic maiden saved from decapitation by our exceedingly manly hero. Oh, that sad, lonely, wordless barbarian man carrying his very big axe. 10 pages of violence, 1 page of desperate self-pity: can you see what I mean about a Media Studies teaching aid?
And that rejection of Slaine by Raven, which is quite literally crushed into less than half of a single page, is the only substantial emotional moment that we’re provided with in this whole story. To the credit of Mr Mills, his script does have Nest turn down her uncouth saviour’s offer, which leaves her retaining a measure of dignity and autonomy where other tales might follow tradition and have her safely and admiringly tucked up under the hero’s arm. But it’s such a shame that such a potentially moving scene is over after just one row and four tiny panels of it having begun. Elsewhere in the chapter, where the obviously more important business of repetitious violence is concerned, there’s a maximum of 6 panels to be found on each page. In essence, scenes of gratuitous slaughter take up more than 80% of this chapter, and the conversation between Slaine and Raven about the rest of their lives takes up about 3% of panel-time.
It’s the perfect example of how relatively unimportant recognisable human emotions beyond bloodlust, greed and fear are in ‘Slaine’. And that’s why the strip is, for anyone largely uninterested in muscular hairy men constantly hitting each other, extremely tedious. It’s not because the text is largely empty of women that this is so, though it surely doesn’t help, but, rather, because the work itself is largely absent of the kind of emotional meaning that might snare a reader who wants something more than weeks and weeks of Murderball to read about. And I suspect that the first point, namely the absence of women, is rather closely related to the second, namely the absence of emotional meaning beyond machismo and manly despair. Because if the focus is on men being manly to men in a violent fashion, then the possibility for stories which evoke more thoughtful and moving responses than ‘ugh!’ and ‘argh!’ must surely recede from the consciousness of all involved. Perhaps remembering that women do after all make up a greater percentage of the human race than men might allow creators to recall that there are other possibilities for stories which might compliment all that violence and all the laughing about violence too.
Just because ‘Slaine’ exists in the genre that it does doesn’t mean that it’s a strip that’s not capable of being more in part touching, and thought provoking, and, as a consequence, interesting and moving. And I can’t help but believe that placing Slaine into a world that contains more recognisable human beings of all and any genders might just make the strip into something that’s more than one big, seemingly endless, wearisome throwdown.
3.
‘Kingdom’ is a strip which does co-star a strong and able female protagonist, one Clara Bow. She’s handy in a fight, which is a plus, and she’s fully dressed, which is another, though she’s ultimately reliant, it seems, upon her male and dogly companion, and given to fearful despair rather than stoicism when faced with death, which, for the only female protagonist in this week’s 2000ad not dressed as a porn star, is a shame. For if that same role were to have been given to a male character in ‘Slaine’, for example, the lack of emotional restraint and the desire for a cuddle at their end would have been a marker more of weakness than character, and so it is for Clara too.
But it ought to said that if we’re just taking a snapshot of some of the gender roles present in this month’s 2000ad, then ‘Kingdom’ is a somewhat more progressive strip than most. And if it were surrounded by other features which recognised the fundamental issues of social justice more readily, and which as a consequence had more fully clothed women placed as protagonists in their narratives, then no one could blink an eye at Clara’s role in ‘Kingdom’. Instead, Clara could be an example of a human being with individual strengths and weakness rather than a role model. But since she’s alone in performing as a female heroic lead in the pages of 2000ad, the fact that she’s not as brave as her male companion when death seems to be calling stands against her character, and seems to say that woman, when the worst arrives, need reassurance and holding far more than men do.
And so, Clara Bow seems rather unremarkable and unimpressive as a female heroic lead. That’s a doubly unfortunate business, because she also appears to be quite unremarkable as an individual too. In three episodes, there’s been little sign of any recognisable personality attached to her actions beyond the broadest of responses to her companion and their mutual adventure. She’s not really a person, or even a two-dimensional comic-book character. She’s at best a type. And ‘Kingdom’ as a whole reads as if it were the preliminary storyboards for an initial conference concerning a proposal for a computer game. For in common with so much in 2000ad these past few months, ‘Kingdom’ doesn’t read as if it’s a story about people, but rather as if it’s a tale about fighting, and different levels of challenge, and enemies, and action. So far, it’s a quest game in two-dimensional form, and it’s hard to see why anyone would want to produce a strip which is so unconcerned with people while so apparently happy to place before the reader the most familiar of plots and the least interesting and moving of challenges.
And because ‘Kingdom’ is so flat, and so unconcerned so far with anything other than the conventions of the genre it inhabits, it doesn’t really matter what gender its leads belong to. For the characters it gives us don’t convince either as people or as metaphors for particular human characteristics except in the very broadest of terms. We’re now 15 pages into the story, and we’re 3 chapters down, and if this were television, or the movies, or a novel, I suspect that someone with an editorial responsibility might have recommended giving the audience something to associate their emotions with beyond a succession of running-chasing-fighting-looking-around-running-chasing-fighting.
If 2000 ad truly wants to provide an alternative to what editor Matt Smith implied was the male-centric product of Mark Millar’s ‘Clint’, then it needs to do something more than present men and women as cut from fundamentally the same grey cloth while being put into service as one-dimensional game-pieces. In certain strips it does just that, such as in ‘The Chief Judge’s Speech’ in the Christmas special, where the reader was given an adventure story, and political satire, and social comment, and a loathing for the powers-that-be, and a series of good long belly laughs too. In fact, so grounded in a recognisably human situation was ‘The Chief Judge’s Speech’ that it almost didn’t matter that it was a story lacking even one substantial role for a single recognisably female character at all. It was a story that was strong on the business of what it is to inhabit a corrupt society at a time of debased celebration, and so it’s perfectly understandable that the specific issue of gender might not be a priority. After all, short stories using established characters can’t possibly attend to every social dilemma that might be considered important. The problem of a lack of meaning exists not when a strip has attended to one human, social problem rather than another, but when creators engage with no human problems at all except for those tenuously concerned with laser guns and monsters and their like.
And so, when matters of social justice and human interaction aren’t a priority, the old male-centric narratives seem to re-emerge unchallenged, because, in truth, they far too rarely have been challenged, and so they’ve never been truly put to bed.
What is ‘Kingdom’ about beyond the most standard-issue of adventure yarns, and why should the reader care?
4.
In ‘Necrophim’, as best as I can understand, for it’s another strip which has apparently been written without an excess of care for the reader who’s new to its world and its key players and events, there is but a single female character, a succubus, who uses her sexual powers and her utter ruthlessness in an attempt to attain her will. Beyond her scheming presence, ‘Necrophim’ appears to stand quite empty of any other female characters at all. Still, in terms of the presence of significant speaking roles held by women, this does put ‘Necrophim’ ahead of quite 50% of the stories in 2000ad’s 100 page Christmas special, but that’s the smallest of mercies.
To have but a single woman in ‘Necrophim’, and to associate her with the role of the evil sexual seductress come to power, and to then provide no-one else of her gender as a point of contrast even where the business of wickedness is concerned, is surely more than just a touch insensitive, and surely a mark of a lack of ambition where the whole matter of sex and gender is concerned.
Did no one notice there was but one woman in the whole of ‘Necrophim’? Did no-one care?

OUT/THERE: Sex & Gender In This Month In 2000 AD & Judge Dredd Megazine

And things were going so well.
We weren’t halfway through September and there were strong women to be found everywhere in both 2000 ad and The Megazine. Lily Mackenzie, Judge Anderson and Judge Inaba were headlining characters in the latter, while Rowan Morrigan was the lead in ‘Age Of Wolf’ in the former. Elsewhere in both comics, female characters were occupying substantial support roles, as in ‘Low-Life’ and ‘Nikolai Dante’, and carrying the protagonist’s responsibilities in short stories such as ‘A Judge’s First Duty’.
It may or may not have been a deliberate policy on the part of Tharg’s staff, but editor Matt Smith certainly recognised an opportunity to use the matter of gender to score points off of Mark Millar’s newly minted ‘Clint’, a new monthly aimed squarely at an audience of utterly unreconstructed adolescent blokes. 2000 ad and the Megazine were apparently, he announced, welcoming comic books for right-thinking women as much as long-reading fan-males everywhere.
It wasn’t entirely true, of course, but there were undeniably positive aspects to the strips being published at that time where representations of gender were concerned. The women were brave and strong, comfortable with authority and secure in their own worth. They weren’t reliant on men saving the day, trying to prove themselves to daddy, or running away from their destiny as housewives and mothers. Most importantly, they weren’t functioning solely, or even significantly, as sex objects.
Things were undoubtedly looking up, and yet there was a still a very real sense that the most difficult challenges were still ahead. Of all of the female characters on show, only the splendidly self-possessed and decidedly life-worn Judge Thora, the fearsomely matriarchal Madame Dante and the stern Judge Leland weren’t notably youthful, slim-hipped and alluring. The idea that a woman’s body might be represented as something other than fatless, hairless, boy-hipped, and beautifully symmetrical clearly hadn’t taken hold across the range of creators, although in places even characters which appeared to have been designed merely to be alluring revealed unexpected qualities. Simon Fraser’s ‘Lily Mackenzie’, for example, began in the Megazine with a series of stories that strayed at times towards cheesecake, and yet, over the passing months, the eponymous heroine was revealed to be bright, determined, and more than capable of looking after herself; her looks quickly and thankfully ceased to define her. And Boo Cook’s artwork for Judge Anderson at times showed the heroine originally modelled on a 30-something Debbie Harry aging gracefully into someone still beautiful, but at times stoically mature. If the reader still wasn’t being given women whose appearance reflected even the breadth of types that a typical TV soap might offer, there was without doubt some significant movement forward.
It hasn’t lasted. Strips starring female characters have been blinking out of sight since October and their replacements have been far less representative of anything other than blokes. 2000 ad carried not a single strip starring a female lead in November, and, most worrying, those women who have appeared in the comic have been often confined to some very traditional roles indeed. In prog 1713, for example, there are women as youthful lures, clothes-makers, old lovers, and beguiling if vengeful ghosts. Considered in isolation, none of these various characters can be considered as offensive in the slightest way, and many were examples of impressive work. But when the presence of women in a comic-book exists only as a string of slight and stereotypical roles, then it’s the cumulative effect which counts.
This week’s 2000 ad brings us little relief either. No female leads at all. An apparently helpless girl-woman about to be executed in ‘Slaine’ before the anti-hero’s gaze. And in both ‘SinisterDexter’ and ‘Dandridge’, women act as beautiful dispatchers while the men engage in the business of daring deeds and grand explosions. These women are bright and impressive and powerful, but it’s still the men who do the fighting and dominate the majority of the panel-time, while the women serve behind the lines. As said above, this doesn’t make these characters offensive in the slightest way, but what it does do is highlight the pressing need for 2000 ad to be carrying more female leads in its more recent pages.
It’s a shame to find a year closing in such a fashion when in places it’s been producing such promising fare. Perhaps it might be more productive to end with a mention of some of those characters which have to a greater or less degree both defied the prevailing comic-book stereotypes of women while standing as entertaining characters in their own right. And so, in no particular order, may I present to you my votes for Women Of The Year in 2000ad and the Megazine;

  1. Judge Thora, from ‘Low-Life’ by Rob Williams and D’israeli
    It took me a while to warm to Judge Thora as a character, mainly because Mr William’s script for ‘Low-Life’ was based on the assumption that all his readers would be familiar with the characters at hand, and this reader wasn’t. Yet, like a champion who’s stumbled out of the starting gate and yet raced past the finish line well ahead of the field, ‘Low-Life’ soon established its pedigree and justified its form. In Judge Thora, writer Mr Williams presented us with a portrait of a woman obsessed with staring hard choices straight in the eye while being egotistical and determined enough to betray most every principle and colleague she had in doing so. It’s the type of role which comic-book fictions rarely grant to women, and at every stage of their story, Mr Williams and Mr D’Israeli ensured that their depiction of Thora was both quite individual and entirely free of traditionally sexist tropes. Chief of the undercover ‘Wally Squad’ in the ‘Low-Life’, and so responsible for policing one of the roughest slums in the future city of Mega-City One, Thora could never be mistaken for a standard-issue, deeply-caring matriarch. Looking as old and worn and yet indomitable as the neighbourhood she felt she represented, Thora was neither mother, lover, victim or child, and her assassination at the end of ‘Low-Life’ was a source of some considerable regret to this reader. Yet so strong was her character, and so significant the menace she’d presented, that her murder never felt like that traditionally dealt out to uppity women. Thora was shot because she was too formidable and corrupt to be allowed to live, and that’s a very different matter indeed.
  2. Lily Mackenzie, by Simon Fraser
    I’d never have imagined presenting Lily as a character worthy of the reader’s attention and respect after her first few appearances, as discussed above. But as the months have passed, Mr Fraser has achieved a remarkable feat, in that he’s confounded initial presumptions through the gently-paced establishing of Lily as a bright, intelligent and determined lead for his strip. A highly-competent young woman searching for her lost brother in a mundane outer-space setting, Lily’s adventures are distinguished by a focus on the everyday practicalities of surviving a future entirely free of alien monsters and ray guns. And from the scenes in which Lily expresses her joyful and practical command of the biological sciences on the surface of Charybdis, to those in which she reluctantly uses her army brat’s skill with a gun to defend friend and family from a fearsome assault, Mr Fraser’s work has established his heroine as an individual and not a type, as a well-rounded character and not merely a pleasant and attractive lead, and that’s a process well worthy of respect.
  3. June Akiwara, from ‘Damnation Station’ by Al Ewing, Simon Davis and Boo Cook
    One of the advantages of the presence of women who occupy the space usually dominated by male heroes is that other female characters can be shown in more traditional roles without seeming to argue that being, for example, a wife and mother is all that a woman can ever be. Yet even considering that, the arc of June Akiwara’s life, from her cheerful and competent first appearance to her final scene as the slaughtered victim of a ‘terrorist’ attack, might in the hands of a less able writer than Al Ewing seem hopelessly retrograde. A mother traumatised by the loss of her child, and vulnerable to despair and self-harm if she suspects she’s hurt anyone else she’s responsible for, June might once have seemed to represent the fate of women who try to rise above their traditional place in life. But in ’Damnation Station’, she stands not for female weakness, but for the misdirection of humanity’s empathy, for the way in which we damage ourselves and others by unthinkingly serving causes which exploit rather than assist our fellows. In Al Ewing’s tale of humanity fighting on the wrong side in a galactic war, all of June’s attempts to serve with competency and care are doomed to fall woefully short despite her very best efforts because she’s simply serving the wrong cause. In such a context, June’s collapse from apparently-competent legionnaire to drug-dulled, broken-hearted victim of a terrorist attack stands not as an example of fundamental feminine weakness, but of what happens to human beings when they’re perverted into serving apparently-laudable, but entirely-corrupt leaders. In a sense, for the utter corruption of the moral order in ‘Damnation Station’ to be fully established, the most decent and wounded of all the characters there had to be shown being obliterated, and that was June Akiwara. Bad things happen to ordinary folks unwittingly serving anti-social ends, Damnation Station argues, and it’s a point that couldn’t be so movingly established without such a genuinely tragic loss.
    It’s notable, however, that two of my three choices for ‘Female Character Of The Year’ ended up dead in 2010. Let’s hope for better times, and where appropriate, longer lives, for the women of 2000 ad and the Megazine in 2011.