Joss Whedon’s Next Project

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Dear Joss,

Hey, I’m a big fan, seen all your stuff, love it all (except maybe season one of Dollhouse, though the unaired pilot was brilliant). So I’m embarrassed to confess I only streamed Cabin in the Woods on Amazon recently, and I have to say, yes, totally brilliant too. So much so I was thinking, since you’re Mr. Marvel now, why not a mash-up? I know, you’re way way too busy with Avengers 2 and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D to draft another script. So I’ve gone ahead and done it for you:

Cabin in the Superhero Origin Story

Open with a shot of a corporate building and pan down to an entrance sign, “Zarathustra Technologies,” with a yellow school bus parked in front. A guide leads a high school group through the complex as a nerdy kid peels away to investigate a temptingly open lab door: “Arachnid Gene Modification.” As he studies the array of weird, glowing spiders, one descends on a thread and bites him. He slaps it, but too late, he’s already pale and sweaty. Spider arms rip through his sides as he transforms into an enormous, harry spider. It stands there a moment, screeching in confusion, before rows of hidden machine guns pivot from the walls and blast it into twitching pulp.

Cut to Control Room monitor of same image. Three TECHS frown down at the mess as they argue: “Told you the DNA sequencing was off,” “You always say the DNA sequencing is off,” “So next time maybe listen,” etc.

Roll credits as we travel down the row of screens, each monitoring a different room in the complex with a different nerd suffering a different transformative accident: a shelf of chemicals tipping over, a slippery walkway above a vat of toxic waste, a massive machine whirring out of control, a metal door sealing shut beside a countdown clock, etc. The TECHS press buttons, sip coffee, and record data from the staged mayhem, while continuing to banter.

“Okay,” one asks, “who we got next?”

A new bus pulls up and exiting jocks and cheerleader types jostle aside the newest NERD. One of the techs is reading his file in a voice over, revealing their improbable depth of knowledge and so long-term monitoring and manipulation. He’s not a great candidate though, just barely made the cut, but what the hell. He enters the building last.

A female tour GUIDE in Clark Kentish glasses (she’s cute but bumbling) is describing an antique gamma cannon, now a harmless lobby display. Only wait, why did that light start glowing when she bumped against that button? It charges up as she strolls unknowingly in front of the massive barrel. The NERD, the only one aware of the impending disaster, shoves through the jocks and cheerleaders to push the GUIDE to safety as he’s soaked in a roar of distorted green light.

He stands there, shocked, but when nothing else happens, the crowd of teens cracks up. The TECHS, however, applaud (“Nobody ever saves the girl anymore!”) before readouts indicate no change in NERD’s gamma levels. Damn it! They must have fired a dud. GUIDE thanks him as she climbs to her feet and adjusts her glasses. They shake hands in an awkward moment of mutual romantic dizziness—interrupted by one of the TECHS talking through the bluetooth in her ear to keep the tour moving before they get bottlenecked.

The Arachnid room is ready for a reboot. GUIDE fumbles through her lines, distracted when she sees NERD lured by the open door. She’s torn between protecting him and doing her job. “Don’t!” she calls. “Don’t, um, stay behind too long. We’re stopping in the cafeteria next.” Jocks and cheerleaders cheer as the tour moves on and NERD enters the lab.

This time we see the TECHS orchestrating everything and the difficulty of lowering a spider on a puppet string. They miss twice before the spider grabs his arm. They applaud when he slaps it away, then freeze, waiting for the reaction. Except nothing happens. Readout scans show zero change. He must have slapped it away before it bit him. Man, this kid is lucky! When NERD catches up to the tour, GUIDE squeaks with surprise and pleasure, nearly hugging him then awkwardly stopping herself.

Meanwhile, someone very important in a black suit arrives in the Control Room. The TECHS snap to and give a progress report on the Zarathustra Project, which we glean is a secret, internationally funded R&D program designed to produce a Homo Superior, a literal Superman.  BLACKSUIT is highly agitated at the lack of progress, watching as the TECHS narrate two, simultaneous events on the monitors.

A nerd is lead into the basement where a walkway “breaks” by remote control, dropping him into toxic sludge. Another nerd is lured into a lab where a shelving unit tips onto him as he stands on an exposed wire. The BLACKSUIT is thrilled, until TECHS report that the kid is dead. “Dead? What happened?” “We dropped a shelf of chemicals on him.” “While electrocuting him.” “It tends to kill people.” “98%.” “You have survivors then?” “Well, ‘survivor’ is a strong word.” “And not so much with the present tense really.” Discussion escalates until a TECH notices the other kid climbing out of the sludge—which, hey this looks promising. His vitals are stable, and, wow, the toxins are bonding to his cells. The kid slumps onto the walkway as his arm turns into a new swamp-like substance. The TECHS are cheering! Except, uh oh, the readouts. His arm is dripping away. They watch as he melts into a brackish puddle.

BLACKSUIT is hysterical with disappointment. TECHS try to calm him down, explaining this is how it works everyday here. “But today,” BLACKSUIT blurts, “is not every day! Today is surprise inspection day!” This hardly seems like news to the TECHS, since BLACKSUIT is there already. “No,” he continues, “not me. The Watcher is coming down.” This cracks up the TECHS. “The Watcher? Coming down from, what, his Fortress of Solitude on the moon? He’s going to visit us puny humans?” Actually. Yes. BLACKSUIT received a moon transmission this morning. TECHS are stunned. “The Watcher hasn’t come down to earth in decades, not since , since—” “1938. When we agreed to begin the Zarathustra Project or face his wrath. And today he wants results.” All look at the monitors. They’re blank except for GUIDE and her one remaining tour group.

GUIDE is explaining something, when she steps away to respond to her bluetooth. “The Venom Room? That’s crazy—we haven’t even finished preliminary—” She flinches from the shout in her ear, then tells the group they’ll need to take a little unscheduled break, please make your way back down to the cafeteria again. Everybody but NERD, who she leads down a restricted corridor. He looks nervous, especially when they end up alone in a dim lab—is she making a pass at him? She pockets her glasses and walks toward him sexily, but then stumbles on something. She puts the glasses back on, but tries to keep up the sexy thing—while behind his back a strange oily substance crawls from a centrifuge the TECHS have just switched off and unlocked. GUIDE continues to distract NERD as she watches it over his shoulder. Her lips approach his as the black goo nears his back.

But as it is about to engulf him, she can’t do it, and shoves him to safety. The substance strikes her hand, congealing around it. TECHS are cursing, “What the hell is she doing?” But then NERD dives full force at the black goo, until it releases her hand and swirls around him instead, coating him and slithering into his mouth and nostrils. BLACKSUIT nods. “Wow. She’s good. We could use her in ops.” “Nah,” says a TECH, “total klutz.” NERD is now lost in a black blob as TECHS study readouts. The symbiont is acclimating to the host. GUIDE stares, horrified at what she has done. Excitement builds in the Control Room—until the black goo pours from his body, inert. GUIDE rushes to his side, but can’t embrace him because he’s vomiting out the black remains. TECHS argue about what went wrong (“Told you it wasn’t stable!” “You always say it isn’t stable!”), until BLACKSUIT cuts them off. It doesn’t matter. He’s just received official word on his cell: The Watcher is on his way.

NERD and GUIDE have found a table in the cafeteria. He’s picking off the last of the black goop as she sits down with a tray, nearly dropping everything. She laughs. “I don’t know what it is about you, but I swear I go weak in the knees when I’m near you.”

Romantic interlude continues while behind them a new high school group arrives in the lobby. Another guide runs through the gamma cannon routine, only this time no one notices the warning light, so she just stands there waiting to be rescued. TECHS wait too, someone’s finger on the fire button. The guide gives up and moves on as a couple of goof-offs play with the cannon. When one sticks his face into the barrel, TECHS fire it. He staggers back as the group laughs. They stop laughing when his skin turns green and his muscles rip through his clothes.  He’s turning into an incredible . . . BOOM! He explodes across the lobby.

More cursing in the Control Room. “Well, at least we know the cannon is working.” A TECH blinks, realizing something: “But that means—” She’s cut off by shouts that the Watcher is in radar range, he’s descending!

Outside a spaceship drops through the clouds to hover above the Zarathustra building.

GUIDE and NERD are talking at their table when she looks up, alarmed.

The ceiling of the Control Room peels back in the glow of a tractor beam as the WATCHER levitates through the opening. He’s pretty much Marlon Brando in his white Jor-El costume from the 1978 Superman.

GUIDE jumps up from the cafeteria table, leaving NERD as she shouts: “Sorry, gotta go!”

The WATCHER addresses the Control Room in pompous, alien-Brando speak. He is done waiting. The time for Earth to produce a specimen worthy of propagation is upon them. Report your results! TECHS and BLACKSUIT whisper-argue among themselves, until BLACKSUIT steps forward. “Although we have made tremendous progress, I am afraid that we have not yet achieved—”

WATCHER cuts him off. He’s not talking to the humans. He’s talking to the figure stepping into the Control Room behind them. It’s GUIDE. There’s no longer any klutziness to her. She discards her glasses and emits a cocoon of light. When the light recedes, she’s a Superwoman, complete with regal red cape. She reports: “Father, the humans have failed to evolve. I regret to report that I have encountered no genetically adequate mates on this planet.” WATCHER: “Then they have given us no choice.”

WATCHER looks up, and his ship begins to emit a column of light that penetrates the building. BLACKSUIT rushes forward, begging for more time, pleading to spare humanity—they can still produce a Superman! WATCHER smiles. He agrees. The cosmic rays bombarding the building will do exactly that. Sure enough, BLACKSUIT and TECHS are transforming: one’s skin begins to blister; another’s bones bend under his weight; a third shimmers in an invisible force field; the fourth grows orange and craggy. The transformations continue until a TECH self-immolates in a ball of flame; another oozes across the floor in an elastic puddle; the third claws at her face, unable to breathe through the invisible field; and BLACKSUIT expands into a giant orange rock.

BLACKSUIT’s body grows so big it crashes through the floor, smashing down level by level until landing on a cafeteria table as NERD jumps out of the way. WATCHER floats down afterwards, not bothering to pause over the transformations taking place. Each floor has its own flavor: X-men mutations, 50s scifi monsters, horror classics, etc. GUIDE follows him, but she looks upset at all the suffering.

When they arrive at the bottom, NERD is staring up at them, confused and horrified but not . . . transforming. WATCHER cocks his head. He asks his daughter why this one is immune to the rays, but she can only grin with relief that NERD is okay. Red rays shoots from the WATCHER’s eyes, allowing us to see NERD’s internal organs, his skeleton, even close-ups of his DNA. WATCHER raises a hand and the ship rays stop. The writhing bodies on each floor relax and begin to return to their human states. WATCHER is smiling now too. He has found a worthy mate for his daughter. The NERD is a spontaneous mutation, a being higher on the evolution scale than the mere humans that produced him.

NERD is trying to take this all in—the cute GUIDE is really a Superwoman from another planet whose father wants them to have babies together—when WATCHER gives the planetary extermination order.

Wait, what?

GUIDE explains: “Your planet has produced its superman, you. The rest are superfluous.”

“But you can’t!” NERD grabs her arm, and her knees go weak. Literally. She can’t stand. She’s collapsing. WATCHER looks alarmed for the first time. The NERD’s mutation doesn’t just make him immune; he’s kryptonite to them. And so he must be destroyed!

GUIDE shouts no! as her father turns his eye rays into lasers, blasting through tables and rubble as NERD leaps out of the way. Eventually NERD is downed and cornered and WATCHER steps up for the kill. GUIDE tries to stop him, but she’s too weak. He squints and his laser beams strike NERD in the chest. Nothing happens. He’s impervious to this too. WATCHER blinks, intensifying the rays, as NERD stands and walks toward him through the beams. They grapple, excess laser radiation flashing, until NERD grabs WATCHER’s head and forces him to shoot his eye rays straight up through the openings in the floors, straight up to the ship, which explodes. WATCHER collapses.

NERD pulls GUIDE out of the rubble, but can she really be redeemed after okaying the extermination of the human race? Maybe he finds her dying, her body no longer super after being exposed to him, and they kiss during her final breath. WATCHER should stagger to his feet behind them, bloodied and clearly no longer so super either, and just as he’s about to crack NERD’s head open with a piece of debris, BLACKSUIT clobbers him. Remember BLACKSUIT was the big orange rock that fell through the floors, and so he’s normal again, though almost naked in rags.

Should GUIDE and NERD have a happy ending? That’s your call. Seriously. Call me. I can dash out the rest of the dialogue and have this ready for production by, when are you free, 2019? You think J. J. Abrams is too busy to direct? We should talk about that too. I’m sitting by my phone right now.

Sincerely,

Chris

The Avengers (2012) Director Joss Whedon on set

Carnet D’Racisme entre les Animaux

Are comic books really not for kids anymore if their pretenses at intellectualism are taking shape as the miasma of rhetoric excusing the straightforward use of crude racist stereotypes by white male cartoonists as satirical and over the heads of the rest of (x) unsophisticated rubes.  And hey, is the racist iconography in question even really a known quantity, or something the cartoonist deliberately inserted to provoke reader (x)’s assumption that it is exactly what it looks like, dummy (x).

I’ve used sarcasm to draw your inference that I meant the opposite of the words I just typed (I am very sophisticated).  Ugly, stereotyped, demeaning images of non-white people are racist.  As Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr has pointed out specifically, sambo art’s past prevalence (or onmi-presence) in society was a deliberate social tool to shape dominant white attitudes about black people with the specific goal of dehumanizing and politically repressing them, which is exactly what happened (continues to happen).  The lines on paper, the blots of ink, when arranged in this way traces a current of malice from history to the artist’s hand today.  Even though it’s fashionable in some circles to affect a veneer of cash-and-carry general repulsiveness as a shield against any specific allegation of consciously doing ill with ink on paper, degrading racist cartoons do hurt people.
 

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This is supposed to be funny under the assumption that this is scenario is alien to white Westerners.  It is not because it is not.

How we cartoon people is important, even if we’re cartooning people as animals. I’ve written previously (before I was officially HU’s correspondent on Furries) about the furry detective comic Blacksad and transposing human racial attributes onto a setting with anthropomorphic animals. Blacksad is not an example of a lucid and well-measured application of this trope. In fact, it’s a disaster. In contrast to Blacksad’s racialized concept of speciation, I remember reading the cartoonist Dana Simpson mentioning in a response to a reader question that using funny animals was a way to avoid racial prejudice in a reader as a barrier to empathizing with each character. Cute animals are just cute animals.  The pitfall here is that without context, characters in this setting can sometimes be read as white by default. Still, some funny animal cartoonists elect to take the route of no thought or consideration and draw the same offensive stereotypes, but now it’s a cat. This is an old idea. Look at Mickey, here.
 

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The Mouse’s features mirror those of his companion, though it’s clear that Mickey is supposed to read as white, in blackface, and his purpose in this cartoon is to humiliate his black counterparts.  Of course these cartoons have been buried as an embarrassing fart of less-enlightened history. I can’t help compare the racist Mickey Mouse pictures to their contemporaries from the old Fleischer Studios, where black music and performance were showcased; rotoscoping technology turning the magnificent Cab Calloway into a spooky ghost in Snow White.  Bimbo the dog shares Mickey’s white/black distribution of shade, but less of the minstrel attribution.

When I was studying comics at the SCAD campus in Lacoste, France, and later goofing around in Spain, I discovered that cartoonists were still drawing funny animals this way.  In Madrid, a sambo holding a saxophone at a jaunty angle spray-painted on the wall with the text “jazz club,” etc etc etc.  I was shocked and puzzled at the ubiquitous caricature of non-white people I saw in the comics shops in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre and Angouleme that only the boldest and self-consciously controversial American artists would think of rendering.  In my extreme naivete, I just didn’t… mention…. how weird it was, at the time.  In Apt, I even picked up second-hand copies of two of Jean Leguay (aka Jano’s) travelogues, Carnet D’Afrique and his collaboration with fellow cartoonists Dodo and Ben Radis, Bonjour les Indes. Inside, Jano’s uproarious, chaotic, sensational, grotesque drawings show an exaggerated portrait of the places the French cartoonists is fond of visiting.
 

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From Bonjour les Indes.

While often poking fun at clueless white tourists, the book generally portrays Indian people  as dirty, simple, venal, self-interested and exotically dangerous, mostly for comedic effect.

His characters are ducks, dog-things, sometimes vaguely bovine creatures with generally blank features, skin like pitch and painted red lips, their individual qualities, background, social status differentiated primarily by costume. It’s a jarring tableau, the post-imperial plundering of faux-quotidian details for broad, sometimes brutal comedy intertwined with mundane, naturalistic, documented daily life that we Americans omit from our envisioning of the world when we reflexively chide ourselves for our “first world problems.” Jano’s travelogues sometimes humanize overlooked experiences while simultaneously reveling in images, exoticism and racist stereotypes meant to dehumanize them.  We see people in markets, at the cinema, on a train, buying a guitar, and on the last plate of Carnet D’Afrique, a comic beheading with a sword.  Jano has an eye for detail, but too often he misuses it.  Instead of highlighting the richness and variety of the lives of his subjects, he instead focuses on sordidness, a cheap thrill here, an ugly little chuckle there, which diminishes them.  Gallows humor is a wonderful thing, but artists should keep in mind who erects the gallows and who swings from them.

Reading these books, I can’t really find a reason why Jano draws the people in his travelogues as anthropomorphic animals instead of humans.  What thought went into the creation of these images other than “this will look cool?”    My great fear, especially writing my own funny animal comic, is that there really is no right way to translate human culture into a world of differentiated animal species that isn’t glib, clumsy and married to racist narratives. Are animal people inherently cruder and cheaper and less dignified than people-people?  Was that the whole purpose of the funny animals’ creation?  Does drawing a racist image as a dog deflect from the awfulness of the image, or does it enhance what is already a purposeful dehumanization?  If furry art is, as I think it is, or ought to be, an imaginative space, furry artists have to consider the historical backdrop in which funny animals have been used and misused to represent people, and do better.  Much, much better than’s been done before.
 

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For god’s sake at least better than this.  Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.
 

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Utilitarian Review 9/21/13

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on how SPX blows her mind.

Me on why Harry Potter isn’t very good (it’s all about quidditch.)

Isaac Butler on perceiving race.

Alex Buchet continues his series on the prehistory of the superhero, this time focusing on Holmes and Wells.

RM Rhodes argues that SPX has something for everyone, unlike the mainstream.

Osvaldo Oyola on queer silence and a radical ending for the Killing Joke.

Me on the Joker’s wife, and also no how the Killing Joke is sanctimonious pulp crap.

Chris Gavaler on the superheroine dress code and how the mainstream is (slowly) becoming less sexist.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

For my first ever piece at Salon, I talk about Ender’s Game and making genocide a sacrament.

At the Atlantic I argue that the NYT Book Review should just embrace its identity as a lit fic fanzine.

At the Atlantic I talk about the documentary the Revolutionaries and why right-wing ideologues in Texas are only part of a broader problem with education.

At Splice Today I talk about how racists who think Indians are Arabs aren’t actually confused (just racist.

 
Other Links

David Brothers on how racists-react-to-things posts are themselves racist.

Feminists pretend Playboy cares about consent.

on why focusing on confessions of white privilege are counter-productive.
 

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The Artist As Troll

This ran first on Splice Today.
_________

“For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinctions between author and public…begins…to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert — even if not on a subject, but only on the post he occupies — he gains access to authorship…. It is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word…that its salvation is being prepared.”

Reading that quote above, you could almost think it was yet another over-carbonated paean to the wonders of the internet — some pseudo-academic talking-head ranting on about how blogs are going to bring about the egalitarian millennium. Everyone’s an expert, everyone’s an author, everyone’s got the keys to the kingdom and, hey look, they’re all running through the pearly gates with words dribbling from their gums and bytes blasting from their backsides.

And yep, that’s precisely what the quote is about. It’s just that the vision of a thousand points of blather is a little hoarier than you might expect. Specifically, the above was written by none other than Walter Benjamin all the way back in 1934. The essay was called “The Author as Producer,” and here’s what it looked like originally:

“For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinctions between author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois press, begins in the Soviet press to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert — even if not on a subject, but only on the post he occupies — he gains access to authorship…. It is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word — the newspaper —that its salvation is being prepared.”

Yes, Virginia, 80 years ago Benjamin was touting the newspaper — or at least the Stalinist newspaper — as a truly democratic voice. Newspapers were the bright new genre that would allow the people to take an active role in their culture and cease to be the stoned recipient drones of capitalist trash. The press (or “at any rate” as Benjamin says “the Soviet Russian press”) is changing everything; it “revises the distinction between author and reader.” The means of production are now in the hands of all, and the revolution is sure to follow.

One wonders what the Frankfurt School would have thought of the new day that has now dawned. If Benjamin’s beloved Brecht encouraged audiences to think critically about the artist’s work, surely blogs, twitter, and comments threads encourage the audience to come up on stage, beat the actors bloody and shit on their remains while screaming racial epithets sprinkled with smiley icons. If Benjamin truly believed, as he claimed, that the best art, the most valuable art, the art with the highest “technical quality” was that art which succeeded in “promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production” — well, you’d think he must be right now leaping from his grave in joy and wonder, scurrying over to the nearest internet café, and greedily scrolling through the latest 4chan flame war , all the while muttering to himself, “Lolz! Lolz! The revolution will be Rickrolled!”

The idea that the people will save culture has an almost irresistible fascination for leftists. On the one hand, you have Frankfurt school dyspeptics who think corporate crap has blinded us all. On the other, you’ve got cultural studies pollyanna’s claiming that fans of Ameircan Idol creatively repurpose the show as a site of resistance to hegemony. But whether sad or cheery the dream is the same: some day the masses will rise up and write better novels their own damn selves.

Now the people are here, though, and…well, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly, lots and lots of folks who could never have gotten their voices out before are able to do so now. The result could not exactly be characterized as an increase in art’s “technical quality,” though, nor as a socialist utopia. Capitalist desires have not been shucked; instead, they’ve metastasized. Given the means of production, as it turns out, people mostly want to scream fire in a crowded messageboard, talk about their furry fetishes, or check the weather.

The point isn’t that the people are innately frivolous or deluded — in fact, there’s tons of political discussion online, and the Iranian uprising showed quite clearly that access to communications technology can have potentially liberating effects. But hedge as you will, the democratization of the literati cannot be said to have created a world in which socialism is ascendant, or in which there is an overwhelming majority of speech exhibiting what Benjamin refers to as the “correct political tendency.” It’s almost as if the rallying cry “every man a genius!” is as much a call to debased polymorphous revels as to fraternal salvation. Benjamin himself, from that perspective, starts to look decidedly libidinal, sensuously spitting his half-baked theories through his mustache and out into the ether, a troll in love with trolling long before his time.
 
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Superheroine Dress Code

“We just happen to show a little more skin when we get to the ladies,” says Image Comics artist Todd McFarlane, explaining that the portrayal of women as sex objects in comics is a natural byproduct of the genre’s generally exaggerated style. “As much as we stereotype the women, we also do it with the guys. They are all beautiful. So we actually stereotype both sexes.”

McFarlane was trying to plug the PBS documentary Superheroes: The Never Ending Battle (it starts October 8), but his comments, and those of Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar trivializing rape (“I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy”), pissed off plenty of fans. Garth Ennis combines the two approaches—rape and lady skin—in The Boys when his Superman stand-in Homelander compels newcomer Starlight to give him and his teammates blowjobs before taking a Sharpie to her costume and drawing in navel-deep cleavage: “New costume concept for you. They want something a bit more photogenic.”

McFarlane co-founded Image in the 90s, The Boys premiered in 2006, Kick-Ass in 2008, so that might be the problem. These Cro-Magnons are behind the times. Todd thinks he’s just obeying the testosterone-driven norms that give him no choice but to draw scantily clad, super-breasted, Barbie-legged uber-women. But if that’s true, why is the comic book population of anatomically impossible porn gals in decline?

A friend of mine, Carolyn Cocca, spent her summer staring at T&A. She studied 14,599 comic book panels, adding a checkmark to her tallies only if a particular tit or ass cheek “was just about to fall out.” She didn’t count mere cleavage or skintight curves unless they included a panel-dominating breast “larger than a woman’s head.” The results? “Female characters,” she reports, “were portrayed in more panels and less likely to be objectified in the early 2010s than they were in the mid-2000s or mid-1990s in the same titles.” Carolyn is also chair of Politics, Economics & Law at SUNY’s Old Westbury College, so her expertise in quantitative analysis is larger than Todd, Mark, and Garth’s breast-sized heads combined.

Professor Cocca’s not alone in critiquing the absurd poses male artist inflict on their female subjects. The internet is busting out with parodies of McFarland inhabitants:

Alexander Salazar asks what if male superheroes were drawn like female superheroes with some very bare-chested and shorts-bulging results.

Kelly Turnbull refashions the entire Justice League in Wonder Woman style.

Steve Niles has similar fun with the Avengers.

Multiple artists take aim at Hawkeye.

Michael Lee Lunsford dares the impossible by drawing superheroines fully clothed.

John Raptor’s “reality”-based superheroine includes “practical underwear” and “legs like tree trunks.”

Ami Angelwings’s Escher Girls documents a disturbing range of anatomical impossibilities.

The list goes on, and for good reason. Though Carolyn’s sample shows a decrease in objectification, practically all of the comics she looked at show at least some. “Had I counted each depiction of cleavage or of extraordinary shapeliness in spandex or of focus on clothed curves,” she explains, “this number would have been almost exactly the same as the number of panels depicting women.”

If you’re wondering how things got so far out of proportion, you need to travel back to the Dark Age of the late 80s. This was a primitive time, when the dictates of the Comics Code still ruled the multiverse. As far as “Costume,” it decreed “Females shall be drawn realistically without undue emphasis on any physical quality.” That’s what the Comics Authority had been saying since 1954, only with the phrase “undue emphasis on” swapping out “exaggeration of” in 1971. It wasn’t much of a reboot, which might explain why the 1989 revision stripped off so much more. Under the new heading “ATTIRE AND SEXUALITY,” the update declared: “Costumes in a comic book will be considered to be acceptable if they fall within the scope of contemporary styles and fashions.”

Doesn’t sound very revolutionary till you see Wonder Woman in a 1994 thong. In his defense, artist Mike Deodato Jr. said he preferred drawing monsters anyway.

WW thong

The superheroine bikini cut deepened again in the 2000s as the Code teetered toward collapse. Marvel dropped it in 2001. Image never had it. Either way, we’re looking at plenty of T&A for Carolyn’s tally sheets during the two decade range. Arguably, this was the multiverse before the cleavage-confining Code trussed up the free market. Breast abounded in the early 50s, enough to alarm the U.S. Senate into holding hearings and the industry to impose self-censorship.

But lest you think this is a plug for big government regulation, the current superheroine fashion trend suggests the post-Code market could be growing out of its prurient adolescence all on its own. The new changes aren’t being imposed from above but grown from below. Welcome to 21st century grassroots feminism.

Though there’s still reason to show a little skin. “Reality”-based runner Camille Herron was the first female finisher in an Oklahoma marathon last year—a feat all the more impressive since she was wearing a full-body Spider-Man suit at the time. She also beat the previous Guinness Book record holder for a women’s marathon run in a superhero costume by twenty minutes. Imagine how fast she’d be in shorts.

Camille Herron

My daughter’s running role model, 23-year-old Alexi Pappas, wins races in a Spider-Man singlet. And yet she, like any professional female runner, just happens to wear the equivalent of a bikini bottom below it.

Alexi Pappas in Spider-Man singlet

Why? I have no idea. But I don’t see male runners at my daughter’s meets in anything as revealing. You can call them all beautiful, but the female-half of her high school track team races in skintight short shorts. They’re apparently regulation-sized and yet also a violation of the school’s dress code—which means her half of the team can’t practice in the uniforms they compete in.

I bought her a Flash t-shirt for her sixteenth birthday, “fitted” because she stopped wearing baggy tops in middle school. Except now wishes she hadn’t given them all to Goodwill. Forget fashion, she says, they’re perfect for running.

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The Joker And The Joker’s Wife

Prompted by Osvaldo Oyola’s essay earlier this week, I moved about six boxes of clothes and a paper cutter out of the closet in order to get at my comics collection and reread Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke.

And no, it wasn’t really worth it. The comic was a disappointment when I first read it upon its release in 1988, and 25 years later it continues to underwhelm. The Joker’s sad sack origin hasn’t gotten any less pro forma melodrama with the passage of time, while the visual rhymes and formal density that served Moore so well in Watchmen here simply inflate a standard genre exercise in good guy/bad guy pulp doppelganger Manicheanism with gratuitous pomposity, robbing it of charm without adding any weight. The sexualized crippling/rape of Barbara Gordon is, as Osvaldo says, a low point, but it’s also of a piece. Extra violence, extra sex, extra unpleasantness, extra formal trickery and the odd leaden bit of wordplay; it’s all there to desperately claim significance via special pleading, rather than by actually writing a thoughtful story. Bang, Pow, Batgirl shot through the spine, comics not just, etc.
 

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There was one pleasant surprise, though; Brian Bolland’s art. I’d always thought of him and Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons as more or less interchangeable, but in fact Bolland’s work is a lot more fun to look at. His faces have a nice plasticity and solidity; a realism shading into cartoonish grotesque which fits the Joker nicely — and suggests the throwaway EC comics horror dreck hiding beneath Moore’s high-falutin’ script. In some sense, it makes you wonder whether the problem with The Killing Joke is that Bolland is too good, his enthusiastic mastery pulling Moore by the collar into a farrago of pulp, just like those grossly offensive dwarves pull Gordon onto the train to view a cornucopia of sadistic incest torture porn. Much of Moore’s career has been a sometimes winning, sometimes losing struggle with genre, and in this case genre appears to have teamed up with Bolland to strip him naked and kick his sorry ass. Then he rose up with his hands on his head, giggling maniacally and burbling about how cool it would be to have Boland draw circus freaks and sexual assault — all for profound philosophical reasons, of course.

Be that as it may, Boland adds significantly to the weirdest, most disturbing moment of the comic.
 

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That’s the Joker in his sad sack pre-Joker days, talking to his pregnant wife about how he’s once again failed to get a gig as a comedian. He makes some bitter, crude remark about how girls on the street can make more money than him — and his loving, long-suffering, nurturing wife cracks up. She finds bitter allusions to prostitutes funny, and tells him he’s good in the sack as she reaches for him with a bizarrely exaggerated clown grin.

On the one hand, the grin is there to supply the transition to the laughing clown in the next panel. But it also makes the wife the ur-Joker — the one who finds (her husband’s) suffering and (female) degradation funny, and the one with the demon’s grin. Boland really sells that too; I didn’t remember the dialogue here at all, but that feral, toothy, malevolent smile stayed with me across the decades. Pre-Joker’s hollow, confused look in the mirror is also perfect — he doesn’t look like a man being comforted by his wife. He looks like the terrified victim who suddenly realizes the evil spirit has possessed his love one, and is about to devour him. Osvaldo notes Joker’s queerness — I think that queerness is here presented, specifically, as transvestism. The Joker is taking the place of his wife, or his wife (who we later learn dies in a freak accident) is possessing him.

That sequence seems like a tell; a quick conflation of sex, femininity and terror which suggests that the assault on Barbara Gordon isn’t an accidental, unnecessary indiscretion, but rather a condensation of the book’s central obsessions. In the panel before she’s shot, Barbara too wears that weird Joker grin, her hand extended as Joker’s wife’s hand was extended, the coffee-cup echoing the pencil cup in the other image. Thus Joker is both his wife and the murderer of his wife; the sexualized, uncanny woman brings upon herself vengeance for her wrongness. As in Junji Ito’s Tomie stories, the female ensorcels men, and what she ensorcels them to do is murder her.
 

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Ito’s stories present his horror and lust — or his horror of lust, or his lust for horror — without apology. Not so Moore, who wants us to believe that he didn’t really want to show us those pictures of Barbara Gordon, or that he doesn’t really enjoy all those gruesome rictus grins on the corpses, or that he didn’t really want to off the Joker’s wife. Moore’s rooting for sanity and Gordon and Batman and reconciliation and rehabilitation along with the rest of us, right? The real killing joke, maybe, is that it doesn’t matter whether Batman kills the Joker, or Batman kisses the Joker. The structure and the end aren’t important. Instead, what matters here are those women grinning and asking for sex and death, the genre pleasures that make us smile.
 

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