Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Diana Sue

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In comments a couple days back I was encouraged to check out Bluefall’s series on Wonder Woman When Wondy Was Awesome. I didn’t read the whole thing, I must admit, but I poked about a bit here and there, and did read through her post on the book League of One, which I read and reviewed earlier myself here.

Bluefall’s certainly an entertaining writer and an attentive reader. She makes a strong (though to me, not convincing) case for League of One being something other than a complete piece of crap. For example, she has a nice point about WW’s attentiveness to relationships:

Diana’s plans, on the other hand, rely entirely on the League’s greatest strength, on her assumption that her friends will look out for each other. She’s able to defeat J’onn and Kyle because they trust her; she gets Clark out of the picture by forcing him to rescue their friends. She’s able to launch the League into space in the first place because she knows they’ll be okay. He plan succeeds because she sees things in terms of relationships and reactions, rather than individual physical traits.

For me, unfortunately, this is largely vitiated by the fact that all the relationships in the book are both unbelievable and vapid; it’s not especially impressive to be able to parse interpersonal dynamics when all your interpersonal dynamics basically consist of bland corporate boy scouts declaring allegiance to one another (except for Batman, who, you know, is dark because he uses reverse psychology.) Not even bluefall’s quixotic insistence on referring to them all by their first names can convince me that these badly painted figurines have any inner lives not imposed by front office dictat. Still, I guess the book should get points for the earnestness with which it attempts to move the corpses about in a lifelike manner.

What I mainly took away from reading these posts is that bluefall really likes Wonder Woman (or “Diana”.) That’s a big part of how she reacts to WW comics, it looks like. That is, she knows she likes WW, and she judges the comics to some extent on how well they live up to her image of what Wonder Woman should be. For instance, in talking about John Byrne’s run, she commented that she liked the way that Byrne made Diana as powerful as she should be relative to other characters in the DC universe.

I think this is maybe part of the reason some of my posts have rubbed some WW fans the wrong way. Because, the thing is, I really couldn’t give a pile of kangaroo-horse poop (to cite a creature indigenous to Paradise Island in Marston’s run) about whether WW is as powerful as she should be, or about whether she’s as noble as she should be, or whether she behaves in character, or out of character, or is depowered and dressed in white, or whatever. I love the original Marston/Peter run, which I think is one of the few truly idiosyncratic works of art to come out of the super-hero genre. And it’s fun to see other creators try (and largely fail) to deal with the bizarre thing Marston and Peter created. But I don’t care if creators get her “right” except insofar as they tell a story that seems worth reading. If you can tell a good story making WW able to push planets around, that’s fine; if you can tell a good story making her only slightly stronger than Etta Candy, that’s fine too (Marston probably did both of those things at some point.) If you want to make her impulsive and eager to hit people and that works, cool; if you want to make her preach peace and love and you can get that to work, more power to you (I suspect Marston did both of those things as well.) I don’t like most of the WW stories I’ve read by folks other than Marston because they’re boring and dumb, not because WW isn’t sufficiently noble or iconic or whatever. In short, I’m not a fan in the usual sense; at least not of the character.

I don’t necessarily have anything against fans…or even against fan fiction, which is where this kind of investment in a character abstracted from a particular story tends to lead. I haven’t read a ton of fan fiction, but there is some of it I like quite a bit. Some of it I really don’t want to look at, but that’s just personal preference, not an aesthetic line in the sand.

Still, I think super-hero comics do run into a problem with the fan-base…that problem being that there isn’t in fact a canon. The WW bluefall likes isn’t the Marston/Peter WW, which is old and embarrassing and weird. It’s not really the Silver Age WW either, which was embarrassing in different ways; nor is it really the modern day WW, who, after all, bluefall tends to judge against an ideal, and often to find wanting (the swimsuit, for example, would be ditched if bluefall had her way.) And I think that’s all fairly typical; the ideal WW that fans enthuse about is…an ideal; it’s not an actual character or version of the character, but rather some platonic vision of the way the character would be if the perfect writer wrote her, or, I guess, if she were real.

The thing is, when you unmoor the character from any actual creative team, you drift into one of two problems. On the one hand, you end up with stories written by folks who don’t care about the character and don’t really have any idea what to do with her…and WW has certainly had that happen to her over the years. On the other hand, though, you can also end up with stories that are just devoted to showing how wonderful the character is…and WW has had her share of those, too. In fact, that seems to be the whole point of “League of One”; it’s aggrandizing fan scruff for WW fans who want to be assured that WW is just the awesomest there is. See, she beats the whole Justice League! And she beats a big bad dragon because she’s so much purer than everyone, even Superman! She’s so good and brave and awesome, just like WW should be! (Bluefall does object slightly because the script intimates that Superman could actually beat WW in a fair fight, which bluefall feels is wrong because, I guess, nobody can beat WW, damn it. But since WW beats Superman by trickery anyway, bluefall is willing to let it pass.)

In short, with no agreed upon canon,there’s a strong tendency for the character to drift towards that bane of fan-fiction, the Mary Sue. Wikipedia has a good definition:

Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as “Mary Sues” is that they are too ostentatious for the audience’s taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the “Mary Sue” character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an “author’s pet”.

Mary Sues are, as I said, usually created by fans…but everyone writing WW is pretty much just a fan at this point, the original creators being long, long gone and their concept in most respects abandoned. In any case, there’s a self-conscious reiteration of, well, wonderfulness in League of One that is extremely tiresome, and which is a consistent though less discussed aspect of super-hero decadence. At its core, League of One isn’t all that different from Marvel Zombies. The second is characterized by desperate desecration, the first by desperate consecration. But both are more interested in the act of burnishing/befouling the icon than they are with telling a story. (Which, come to think of it, is what I said about All Star Superman, now that I think about it. And, of course, I was right then too!)
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Incidentally, this post is part of a series on WW’s post-Marston iterations. The entire series is called Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle and you can see all the relevant posts here.

Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part 3

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This is the third in our roundtable on Kyoko Okazaki’s classic 90s mana Helter Skelter. Bill’s appreciative opening discussion is here; Tom’s enthusiastic post is here. Which leaves me being the sole irritating voice of cantankerousness (unless Miriam, up tomorrow, also has a more skeptical take.)

I should first say that as we were working this roundtable out, Bill commented a couple of times that he’s not as familiar with the background and intellectual milieu of Okazaki and her manga as he likes to be when he writes about an artist. That kind of cracked me up…because, good lord does Bill know more what he’s talking about here (or just in general really) than I do. I’ve read some manga at this point, and I’m definitely fascinated with Japan and its history but…the state of feminism and/or the fashion industry and/or body image in Japan in the 90s? I mean, I know nothing.

Not that I’ve let that stop me before. And, having expressed all those caveats, I do have to say that even though I don’t know the world that Kyoko Okazaki is coming out of, the manga she’s written is awfully familiar. Admittedly, it’s not much like other shojo stories I’ve read — it’s not girly or sweet or frilly; there’s little interest in clothing design (kind of ironic (and probably intentionally so) for a comic about fashion); there isn’t a lot of patterning or intense detail work. Instead, Okazaki draws outlines filled with mostly white space — it looks like the inks for a color comic book, rather than the fully realized art for a black and white one. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of width variation either, though (as Bill notes) the lines are certainly mobile, especially when she renders faces. Overall the effect if of energy and expression surrounding a blank; the world she creates seems more like a mask placed atop a hollow. I can’t say her style transports me, exactly — the lack of contrast and variation ends up being a little monotonous and prevents anything from really popping…though when it does it can be striking:

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That’s a creepy image; the elegant line follows the frankly sexual contour, but also frankly flat; those lips look like they crawled onto her face and died. She captures a repulsion at artifice and beauty; a sense of a gorgeous surface covering decay. So…yeah, I definitely appreciate her skill, and the care with which she has matched her visual style with her themes.

(Part of the reason her work looks so different from shojo is, a commenter notes, because it’s not shojo, but josei. See what I mean about not knowing what I’m talking about?)

Unfortunately, as I said, while the art is distinctive, the themes themselves, and how she handles them narratively, aren’t nearly as idiosyncratic. Basically, this is pretty much divasploitation (to coin a phrase), all about admiring/deploring/getting off on the personal idiosyncracies, tragedies and sexual peccadilloes of a fabulous larger-than-life female icon. It reads like Valley of the Dolls, or a Paul Verhoeven film — shocked disapprobation concealing a knowing leer, and vice versa, in a gleeful orgy of camp hypocrisy. On the one hand, the manga wants to satirize the shallow celebrity culture of beauty and fame, suggesting that the model agencies use the glands of children (an old sci-fi staple) to transform ugly girls into perfect starlets…until the treatment fades and outer decay starts to mirror inner corruption. And yet, even as it gestures at exploding the beauty myth, it revels in it; Ririko (the main character, pictured above) is in fact, fantastically attractive with an otherworldly beauty that allows her to virtually mesmerize those around her. On the strength of her mystical attractiveness, she seduces her (seemingly straight) make-up artist Hada-chan and Hada’s boyfriend both, using them for sado-masochistic thrills and eventually sending them off to toss acid on the face of a romantic rival. Ririko keeps saying that these acts of despotic eroticism are pleasureless or boring…but surely these disavowals serve only to intensify the verisimilitude of the S&M for the reader’s voyeuristic consumption. The whole thing just seems tawdry and overdetermined — the manga fashionista equivalent of an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.”

Bill argues that Helter Skelter’s jaded take on celebrity was unusual in Japan, and that the exposure of the corrupt underbelly of the fashion industry was at the time a feminist statement. That may well be, but…the book is very, very hard to read as a feminist statement in our cultural context. It’s true that Ririko is a powerful woman of a sort…but she’s corrupt and cruel, and moreover, her body is actually falling apart form the plastic surgery. The horror movie imagery, and Ririko’s monstrous fascination and cruelty, ties the book, in my mind at least, to horror movies like Carrie, with their not-especially-feminist anxieties about female bodies and female power.

Not that Ririko (or Carrie, for that matter) is wholly unsympathetic; her backstory is sad, and you can see why she wanted to be rich and famous. But object of pity isn’t any more liberating than object of (even admiringly pleasurable) loathing. Moreover, the moral center of the manga is a man — a police detective who is trying to shut down the evil plastic surgeon. The detective is smart and determined and he sacrifices his career to end the surgery; he is presented as admirable and clever; certainly nobody in the manga ever makes any explict case that he’s a creepy shithead. And yet, to this reader, at least, a creepy shithead is what he manifestly appears to be; he essentially stalks Ririko, muttering about their deep connection and past lives and blah-blah-blah; his efforts to shut down the clinic doom the women who need repeated treatments to keep from decaying. The book, though, as I said, seems firmly on his side; the tragedy of the abandoned, decaying women is presented as one of those things, or maybe even their fault. Certainly, the crime is never laid at his doorstep; he’s just the good patriarch, out doing his duty by saving women from themselves…or, you know, not saving them. Who really cares? He made his superiors angry at him, damn it. What more do you want from him?

If I encountered this in the U.S., in other words, I’d assume it was technically accomplished, intellectually shaky, duplicitous exploitation schlock, using “big issues” as a cover for titillating sleaze and gore, and hypocritcally sneering at the marginalized groups it fetishizes. Not as good as I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45, better than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Basic Instinct. I’m willing to accept on Bill’s say-so that in context it was a pioneering auteurish blow for feminism — but I don’t think that’s how it translates.

Wonder Woman’s Costume

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There’s an interesting discussion about Wonder Woman’s swimsuit here by Parsimonia (who I think is Maddy) and Bluefall, both of whom have commented here recently.

My take, FWIW, is that the suit is indeed silly, though it makes perfect sense in the context of the Marston/Peter run. (And Harry Peter’s virtually the only one who has ever drawn it in a matter that made it seem both natural and not hideously unflattering.)

Wonder Woman Is Not a Tease

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In this post I talked about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory and compared it to the original Marston run. In particular I quibbled with Moore’s comment that the original WW was “coy but suggestive.”

A couple folks in comments argued that the original WW was in fact coy. Eric B. says

while they ARE certainly about bondage and the sexual thrill of S & M, they never explicitly give us that, but rather come up with a number of ways to show “sexual bondage” without actually showing them.

Guy Smiley adds

It’s hero-jeopardy in an action adventure. That’s coy compared to, “I want to tie you up, Wonder Woman, because it’s a hot, yummy turn-on for you, me and the old weirdo who writes us! Grrrrowl!”

Both of these comments miss the point, I think. The books are explicit. Marston is a bondage fetishist and he’s serving up bondage. If you asked Marston whether he would rather get off by looking at pictures of people who are naked and not tied up, or people who are clothed and tied up, I am quite quite sure he would tell you clothed and tied up, every time. If you asked Marsten whether he would rather show look at pictures of people clothed and tied up or pictures of people naked and having sex, I’m willing to bet he would say he would rather look at pictures of people who are clothed and tied up. If you asked him whether he would rather look at people who are naked and tied up or read an elaborate narrative about bondage and dominence which narratively requires the characters to be clothed — well, narrative fantasy is really, really important to masochists. I think WW is Marston’s erotic fantasy…not something like his erotic fantasy, not pointing to or suggesting an erotic fantasy, but his erotic fantasy, period. There’s no feeling of something held back in the WW comics; no sense that the real sensual pleasures are being deferred to heighten tension or for censorship reasons. The obsessive reiteration of a fetish isn’t coy or disingenuous. It’s a really different mindset to say with Moore, in the one case, “I’m going to cutely suggest situations which I find sexually stimulating, but hold something back” and, in the other, with Marston, to say, “I’m going to fill a book by obsessively repeating the situations– the very ones — that I find sexually stimulating.”

I think my commenters and Moore, are somewhat thrown off by the fact that they don’t share the fetish. As it happens, I don’t share the fetish either — but Marston is clear both in his other statements and in the book itself about what his intentions are.

I guess you could say, well, *Marston* may not be coy, but the reader will perceive it as coy or suggestive. I still don’t see it, though. “Coy” is about being in control — which is certainly an important aspect of Moore’s art. Obsession is about not being in control; about submitting. Marston’s WW feels obsessive in its repetition, its outlandishness, its monomania, and its philosophical integration, it doesn’t feel like he’s placing this stuff out there to tantalize *you*. It feels like he’s caught up in it; like he can’t stop and doesn’t want to. In the way he blatantly, obsessively puts his fetishes out there, he’s much more like R. Crumb than he is like Moore’s Cobweb.

Update: In other-people-who-disagree-with-me news, Bluefall has an impassioned post about the coolness of truth and how I denigrated same when I said that WW’s lasso of truth was better when it was a lasso of control. I guess in response I’d say there are truths and truths, and that the psychotherapeutic new-agey self-actualizing that seems to carry the day in WW mythos doesn’t, to my mind, have the kind of power that Bluefall claims for it.

Also — and this was my point in the original post to a great extent — it seems like any self-knowledge worth its salt would be a self-knowledge that would allow you to figure out that, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m wearing a swimsuit and bondage gear…maybe I should put some clothes on.”

Relatedly, Bluefall seems outraged that people think that WW is a ridiculous character; she sneers at those who say “”this character fails” or “she shouldn’t be popular” like that’s actually going to make her fail or stop being popular,”

But…she can be a failure aesthetically even if some people like her…I mean, some people like anything, even Tom Petty. And moreover, she’s not especially popular. Sure, there’s a small fanbase, but it’s not big even by the standards of comic-book super-heroes. She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.

To the vast majority of people, WW isn’t even on the radar. If she is on the radar, she’s a joke. And those people are right. The character is preposterous — gloriously so, I would argue, but still. I guess that may be an uncomfortable truth to face for some…but embrace it! It will set you free, or tie you up, or something.

America’s Constantly Regenerating Hymen

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Matthew J. Costello
Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America

I was thinking of trying to write about this book for the Reader…but as it turned out, it was too boring to finish. Basically, it’s one of those “super-heroes show how America has changed” riffs. In this case, Costello looks at Iron Man and Captain America comic-books from the sixties to the present. At the beginning, when Marvel was young and peppy, the Cold War gave us all a common enemy and a consensual American identity based on capitalism and virtue and assurances that good was good and evil was evil. Over time, though, we all figured out that America wasn’t maybe so good, and identity politics took hold and we didn’t know who we were anymore and then there was a Civil War in the Marvel Universe and Captain America got shot.

All of which seems to miss the main point, which is that super-hero comics didn’t change because America got all conflicted. They changed because the demographics shifted. The folks reading Captain America comic books in the 60s were probably 10-16, somewhere in there. The folks reading Captain America comics now are more like 25-35. If the stories are more complicated, or the morality is less black and white, it probably has a lot more to do with the fact that the readership is older than with any historical shift in American identity.

I mean, I agree that superhero comics have gone to shit more or less, but that’s an issue of genre and demographics, not a sign of cultural decay. We didn’t kill Captain America because we’re less unified than our parents. We killed him because we’re middle-aged and bored.