It’s a meeting of titans, Prince Philip and Simon Cowell. They’re both pissy, slender men with a lot of money and little patience. But one of them is royalty and the other feels he’s been disrespected. In fact he reports that the prince called him a “sponger.” Buckingham Palace responds that the prince categorically denies it: “He has said he does not know enough about Mr. Cowell to make any sort of comment.”
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Conservatives Are Funny
They really are. The right, or large portions of it, has a great sense of humor. But it’s a humor that’s directed outward. They don’t laugh at themselves, they laugh at others, and very well they do it.
Stan’s Babe-o-Dome, b (FCR addendum)
I was writing about Stan Lee’s hot-chick covers of the 1940s and mentioned P. G. Wodehouse. I see some resemblances between the two fellows. They’re cheery and upbeat and they see their job as entertainment, pure and simple. In person Wodehouse was very shy; no one could call Stan shy, but he is fairly private. The Raphael-Spurgeon bio tells how, back in the 70s, Stan decided he would take the guys at Marvel out for drinks; once at the bar, Stan realized he had nothing to say to them and slipped away. The reason he took them out drinking was that he heard that Carmine Infantino would take the fellows at DC out to dinner once a week. I don’t think anyone would call Infantino especially charming, and Stan is especially charming. But Infantino liked being with the gang and Stan, from appearances, would much rather be with his wife and daughter and, these days, his grandkids.
The Keys to the Batmobile
Zhinxy is threatening to review the entire Knighfall saga. Don’t know if she’ll manage it…but I hope so because, because….
Everybody will run in different directions when I snap this rod. Whoever finds and captures the flag first will get first crack with the pieces of said rod at the giant, looming paper-rose cowl pinata pictured above my head, while the others sing a song of their choosing.
Should the flag-finder NOT break the pinata and scatter the goodies inside – Which include the keys to the Batmobile, passwords to the Bat-Computer, and no Smarties, on my honor – We go in order of How Many Times You’ve Been In The Cave. Should NONE break the pinata, the next goer will be determined in a round-Robin paper-rock-scissors battle…
It’s even funnier with the picture. So click over there why don’t you?
FCR 4ish: do men with unisex names write better women?
Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was one of the first “alternative” comics I read when I was a teenager getting tired of Marvel (I bought it after reading the preview in Cerebus). I picked up around the middle of “I Dream of You,” I think, so fairly early in the run. I followed the series faithfully all through high school, painted Katchoo on my graduation mortarboard (and got the photo published in the lettercol!), angsted and argued over the characters, and decided with my best friend that she was Katchoo (but taller) and I was Francine (but gayer).
In short, it was the perfect graphic addiction for the kind of teenage girl I was. Later, I grew up, started hanging out with comic snobs (you know, the kind of horrible people who write for The Comics Journal), and found out my SiP love was stupid and misguided and didn’t I know Moore stole everything he knew from Jaime Hernandez?
I have to confess, I never read any bros Hernandez until last year or so, when another comics snob (allright, so I’ll name-drop) lent me the whole run of those giant Love and Rockets phonebooks, two by two, over the space of a year. The comic snobs may have a point with the ripoff thing. Hopey is Katchoo but moreso, and Francine has Maggie’s daffiness, voluption, and super-heterosexuality-with-one-teeny-exception. Both storylines could be called an exercise in fanny, in that they’re well-realized women in a women’s world, created for straight male gratification (at least the creators themselves are clearly getting off on drawing so many and varied hot women). And no one could dispute that Hernandez has it all over Moore in terms of artwork.
But I don’t really know that Moore is just a poor man’s, or middlebrow girl’s, Hernandez. If I had to pin it down, I would say Locas (if that’s the term for the Jaime parts of L&R) is better fanny, but SiP is better chick-lit.
One of the notable things about SiP is that it always had a very large female following, and those women, going by the lettercols and my own experiences, were disproportionately the type who “didn’t read comics” except of course Archie when they were little. Even today, SiP will always be one of the first works mentioned in message board threads of “what comics can I get my girlfriend into?” (of course, responders almost never follow up with “what kind of books does she like to read?” as if women were, you know, individuals, with divergent tastes. But I digress.)
I’m too lazy to google, but I don’t recall that L&R comes up in those threads more often than most popular comics do (because anyone who knows a woman who’s liked a comic, or is a woman who’s liked a comic, will mention that comic, and the list inevitably and logically ends up all over the map). I think the height of L&R’s popularity was before my time, but by the time I was aware of it, its boosters were all Comics Journal reading types who want to educate me about Important Comics.
Now, I never would have read and loved L&R if not for those people, and I am a sucker for anything anyone tells me is Culturally Important. But we run an iconoclastic blog here, and suburban Archie-reading housewives will always win out over comics scholars, at least until Archie moms make up the majority of our readers. So why does Moore capture that demographic better than Hernandez?
Mostly because SiP is a straight-up soap opera, whereas Locas is only an homage to soap operas (of both the telenovelistic and professional-wrestling varieties) among other things. Maggie and Hopey have a semi-fraught relationship, where Hopey expresses frustration and jealousy over Maggie’s straight crushes and Maggie is hurt when Hopey viciously puts her down as a cover for her feelings of love. But those moments are very by-the-way, and usually played for laughs rather than drama. They do fall out and get back together occasionally, but it doesn’t really seem to matter why.
SiP was, what, fifteen years of will-they-won’t-they, while Maggie and Hopey’s sex life is more do-they-don’t-they, serving the cause of male titillation rather than suspense. You don’t ache for the women’s relationship to go to the next level, cause implicitly it has, and it was no biggie…. you just kinda hope Hernandez will get around to drawing the nitty-gritty. You want Katchoo and Francine to have sex because, the way the story’s set up, it will change everything.
Most importantly, SiP is both plot-driven and episodic in exactly the way TV soap operas are. The proportions of love triangles, scheming villainesses and flawed heroines and how they will all be changed forever drives every issue. This is great for getting a devoted, strongly identifying readership. But like soap operas, it gets really boring and repetitive and forced when it becomes clear that the creator is too attached to his characters to let them go. Which is why I quit reading years before, apparently, Francine and Katchoo Did It (and my sister insists that in her universe, SiP ended after “I Dream of You”).
Locas is a weaker soap opera, but ultimately a much more satisfying work to read straight through, because Hernandez doesn’t seem very invested in What Happens Next. He likes the locas, he likes their friends and surroundings, and he likes writing stories about them in all sorts of genres. He creates plot arcs, but he’ll nonchalantly scrap them (Maggie loves Rand Race, Hopey has a baby, etc.) when he gets bored of them, and may or may not revisit the continuity years later (note, of course, that I read all of the phonebooks of Locas together, one time, rather then following each issue over ten years like SiP, and this colours my readings). Background figures become stars and then fade out again, settings and tone drastically change around the characters.
On a superficial reading, it seems like Hernandez is just exploring whatever interests him, but what interests him ends up being more interesting than will-they-won’t-they, will-this-change-everything-forever. On the downside, the sheer virtuosity of Locas, and the people who recommended it to you in the first place, can give you the impression that there must be something else going on, something symbolic, or Literary. Maybe you’re supposed to be Learning Something from the characters, rather than lusting after them.
What a drag, man. Bring on the busty bisexuals in denial.
(disclaimer: i’m all strung out trying to finish drawing an issue, so please forgive all the hysterical italicizing and the Portentous Caps.)
Because We Needed A Woman — FCR 1c
I’ve already posted a couple of entries to the female characters roundtable, so I should no doubt stop — but….
I’ve been thinking again about the Jeff Parker Marvel Adventures Avengers series — mostly because my son has me read them to him over and over and over. For those not in the know, this is an all-ages title, featuring an alternate Avengers meant for maximum marketability. Most of the major Marvel properties are on the team: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Storm, and Giant Girl.
I know what you’re saying…Giant who? Giant Girl is the only new character created for the team; in this reality, Janet Van Dyne, the wasp, decided that growing big would be a better way to fight crime than getting teeny. (Which does make a certain amount of sense.)
This is, as I said, an all-ages title; there’s no sex at all, precious little romance, and really little differentiation by gender at all. The women aren’t sexualized; their costumes are skin tight, but so are the guys’. Storm’s look seems somewhat toned down from the classic X-Men comics actually, and Giant-Girl’s costume is as nondescript as a skin-tight purple costume can be. Storm is co-leader along with Captain America. As far as gender dynamic go, you’d be hard pressed to find anything at all objectionable.
Except maybe that the women are kind of boring. Most of the other people on the team, after all, are there because they’re popular, and they’re popular because they’re entertaining. Wolverine is a cranky bad-ass; that’s entertaining. Spider-Man is a wise-cracking jokester (and surprisingly intelligent — he saves the day a very high-percentage of the time) — that’s entertaining. Hulk is super-strong and out of control — fun. Storm, on the other hand, is straight-laced and just sort of there. Giant-Girl doesn’t even really have as much personality as that (she seems touchy about her appearance on occasion, I guess.) If Wolverine’s the mean one, and Spider-Man’s the funny one, and Cap’s the moral-compass leader, Storm and Giant-Girl are the — well, they’re the women, right?
Admittedly, Iron Man is relatively unpersonable as well. And Parker does set up a kind of mother/child, straight-woman/goofball relationship between Storm and Hulk which is quite entertaining (especially when they switch brains, so you get to see Hulk try to call down lightning on his foes while Storm is running around atempting to uproot trees with her bare hands.) But it’s hard for me to imagine that any kid is going to read these things and come away saying, you know, I really want to be Giant Girl rather than Wolverine or Spider-Man or Hulk.
This is something of a perennial problem with super teams. The Fantastic Four: Johnny’s the hothead; Reed’s the super-genius; Ben’s the crusty strong man with a heart of gold — and Sue’s the woman. Or Grant Morrison’s Justice League — Flash and GL are the young, impetuous hotheads; Batman and Aquaman are the brooding bad boys; Superman’s the moral leader; J’onn is the thoughtful voice of reason — and Wonder Woman is the woman. It’s just hard to get beyond the tokenism.
(Not that it’s impossible. The X-Men have distinct female characters (including Storm, who has more of a personality in that title than in the Marvel Avengers.))
Anyway, my point is: Elektra. They should have put Elektra in the Marvel Avengers comic. You can’t go wrong with a ninja, right?
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Also in this series: Tom talks about Stan Lee’s women of romance and Bill talks about perfect girlfriend’s in manga. Miriam is fighting valiantly against a ravenous deadline, but hopefully she’ll be posting later today as well.
Update: And here’s Miriam’s Post a cage match between Jaime Hernandez and Terry Moore.
Cultural Difference
The American press tends to get the small things right and the big things wrong. The British press just makes shit up.