Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Gaijin Love

Posted on by

I’ve mentioned before Matt Thorn’s great article about why characters in Japanese manga are not, in fact, meant to represent, or even to suggest, Westerners, despite those round eyes.

Japan, however, is not and never has been a European-dominated society. The Japanese are not Other within their own borders, and therefore drawn (or painted or sculpted) representations of, by and for Japanese do not, as a rule, include stereotyped racial markers. A circle with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth is, by default, Japanese.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Japanese readers should have no trouble accepting the stylized characters in manga, with their small jaws, all but nonexistent noses, and famously enormous eyes as “Japanese.” Unless the characters are clearly identified as foreign, Japanese readers see them as Japanese, and it would never occur to most readers that they might be otherwise, regardless of whether non-Japanese observers think the characters look Japanese or not.

… the notion that the Japanese harbor an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the White West seems to me based on the largely unconscious assumption that non-Western peoples envy the West, and more specifically on the American fantasy that everyone in the world naturally wants to be American. Of course, the scholars and intellectuals who note such tendencies in Japan do not applaud it; on the contrary, they cluck their tongues and wring their hands and wish loudly that the Japanese would shun the temptations of the West and remain true to and proud of their heritage. But the eagerness with which they seek out evidence of a desire to be “white,” and the stubbornness with which they ignore evidence to the contrary, suggests to me that their apprehension of social reality is heavily filtered through an unintended ethnocentrism.

Matt points out, among other things, that the characters in the comic are stylized; they don’t look all that much like people of any ethnicity. Definitely read the whole thing if you haven’t already. I found it very convincing.

And yet….well, look at this:

Photobucket

That’s the cover of Japanese Vogue from January, purchased on ebay by my fashion-magazine-obsessed-significant other. Probably the first thing you’ll notice in the picture above is that the woman is clutching her crotch. After that, though, you might observe that she’s not Japanese. Furthermore:

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

All the covers from Japanese Vogue I found seem to feature Westerners. Most of the interior pictures do too.

(And for those wondering, no, all foreign issues of Vogue don’t feature Western models. Indian Vogue is mostly devoted to Bollywood, for example.)

Photobucket

Obviously, none of this refutes Matt’s argument about manga. And Japan (as my significant other pointed out) is something of a mecca for magazines; there are far more per capita than there are in the U.S., and the vast majority of them feature Japanese models. Maybe Vogue just uses Western models because it has overseas connections, and it helps it stand out on the shelves? Still, it’s hard not to conclude that there’s some suggestion here that the Japanese are taking beauty standards and beauty cues from Western models. It seems, anyway, a little more thoroughgoing than the Western fetishization of Asian women, which definitely exists, but probably wouldn’t be indulged quite so exclusively in an entire mainstream publication.

I don’t know. Anybody have other thoughts? Like maybe Bill, or somebody else who, unlike me, actually knows something about Japan?

Update: Pallas in comments points me to this fascinating link by W. David Marx about Japanese fashion magazines. Here’s part of what he says:

High-end fashion magazines, on the other hand, mostly feature clothing from European houses and luxury brands, pegging the center of legitimacy in the West. In order to ensure that the presentation harks back to the larger Eurocentric fashion world, magazines like Spur or Ginza — almost without exception — use non-Japanese and mostly Caucasian models. This prevents Japanese female readers from self-association, but that’s the point. Like the old Groucho Marx quote, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” Japanese high-fashion fans do not want to see the clothes they desire on real-life Japanese people. There may be a tad bit of self-effacement in this sentiment, but it generally questions more elite Japanese consumers’ feelings about their own locale. The fantasy, therefore, requires a staff of non-Japanese models.

ViVi and Glamorous‘ overwhelming use of half-Japanese and three-quarters-Japanese models like Fujii Rina, Hasegawa Jun, and Iwahori Seri begs a more pointed question: what does race mean when it’s not a pure reflection of either here nor there? These magazines are not targeting some massive half-Japanese readership, nor do these models look foreign enough to recenter the magazine atmosphere outside of Japan.

Herein lies lingering issues of perceived racial inferiority. I’ve been told numerous times in Japan that “clothes look better on foreigners,” by which they mean “white or black people.” This is not objectively true (nor subjectively true, in my view), but editors have long used half-Japanese models on this principle to bridge the gap between Japanese self-association and cool “foreign” fashion. A half-Japanese model looks “foreign” enough to enhance the image of the clothing, but close enough to the reader to send a message of commonality. Things are changing, however. Male fashion magazine Popeye previously used only half-Japanese models but moved to more foreigners once readers voiced less need for racial similarity in considering the clothing.

So that would be at least a qualified vote for some level of “lingering issues of racial inferiority.” Though, again, that doesn’t mean that such lingering issues are reflected in manga iconography, necessarily.

Update 2: I just wanted to point out as well: Matt says that Japan “never has been a European dominated society.” That’s not true, if Europe includes America. Post-war Japan was absolutely American dominated. It was occupied; it’s government was restructured; cultural changes were handed down by fiat; etc. etc. Admittedly, that all took a relatively brief amount of time compared to the experience of a long-time colonial possession like, say, India. Still, it was pretty important, and had long-term consequences, both structural and, I would assume, psychological. To say that Japan was never under Western domination is not a supportable statement, I don’t think.

Update: And I’ve got a follow up post here

Eternal Appetite

Posted on by

This review originally ran in the Comics Journal.

Little Sammy Sneeze
Winsor McCay
Sunday Press

If you were a Freudian, you’d have to wonder when Winsor McCay was weaned. Indeed, his work is so obsessively and predictably orally fixated that you almost wonder if maybe he wasn’t. In each episode, his longest running strip, The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend featured a nightmare brought about by culinary overindulgence. And Little Sammy Sneeze stars a taciturn little boy with multi-colored neckerchiefs whose mouth yawns open to the size of his entire head before it emits an “ah-choo!” powerful enough to knock down small buildings.

Psychologically, an oral fixation indicates arrested development — an inability to take on adult responsibilities and characteristics. Whatever McCay’s own psychological profile, he certainly used the idea of oral obsessions to justify a world in which characters don’t, in fact, learn or change or, indeed, even exist in anything but the most notional way. In none of the strips in Peter Maresca’s new collection of all the Sunday Little Sammy Sneeze strips does the title character ever make an articulate noise. Instead, each strip follows the same pattern. In the first Sammy says “um,” with his mouth closed. In the second he says “Eee Aaa,” with his mouth slightly open. In the third he says, “Aah Aww,” with his mouth open wide. In the fourth he says “Kah” with his mouth gaping like some sort of bloated underwater fish. In the fifth he says “Chow,” and the force of his sneeze causes disaster and mayhem — either he hopelessly scatters the chits in a poker game, or startles the lions in a circus act, or sends Thanksgiving dinner flying into his grandfather’s beard. And in the sixth and last panel, he wears a blank expression as he is removed, often with a kick in the pants, from the scene of destruction.

The adults who surround Sammy are barely more sentient than he is. It’s true that they talk — but so repetitively that their words seem little more meaningful than Sammy’s grunts. In one paradigmatic sequence, two Italian immigrants speak in a nearly impenetrable patois, reiterating again and again how great America is and how “Da Italio man maka no troub he maka no troub for no one. Every ahbody say Italio man maka great excite in dese countries. I don see. I don see it.” The racism doesn’t extend to WASP characters, of course, but the aphasiac repetition does; if a McCay character says in the first panel that she’s afraid of falling on the ice, then you can be sure she’ll say the same thing in the second. And the third. And the fourth. Really, Sammy’s adults might as well be in a Peanuts TV special — “waah waah waah waah waah, waah waah waah waah waah.”

These strips are, in other words, little more than the same slapstick cliché, endlessly repeated. Next to this, even Beetle Bailey starts to look positively inventive. At least Mort Walker had three or four gags. No wonder that, in the introduction to the volume, Thierry Smolderen suggests, rather nervously, that McCay is putting us on, that it’s a “parody” which “chuckles at the absurdity of…doing the same thing ad nauseum.” McCay’s strip, you see, isn’t mindlessly repetitive; it’s making fun of mindless repetitiveness! Thank goodness! He’s a jaded intellectual, just like us!

McCay probably did enjoy doing the same thing over and over. Whether that enjoyment is adequately characterized by a distancing concept like “parody,” though, is another question entirely. Instead, the pleasure of McCay’s work seems more like that of a small child, who wants his parent to make that face again for the millionth time. It’s excessive and infantile, linked, not to a sense of irony, but a sense of wonder. As G. K. Chesterton says in Orthodoxy.

“children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

There is certainly something godlike about McCay’s artwork. Sammy Sneeze doesn’t try for the sumptuous fantasy of “Little Nemo”; still, the level of detail when McCay renders for example, a grocery store interior, is jaw-dropping. In the first panel, towers of individual cans and products are shown with a flawless clarity that makes the scene seem more real than life. It’s a tour-de-force in itself — and then McCay repeats it in the second panel, with everything the same except the positions of the customers. And then he repeats it again…and again…and then, with the explosive sneeze, throws everything into a chaos so crisply rendered it still somehow looks like order.

McCay is obviously one of a kind, but his particular take on cartooning is also a product of his era. The Little Sammy Sneeze panels, drawn in 1904-1905, look very much like cells for animation — and, of course, McCay would create his own animated shorts a few years later. Sammy also harks backwards to some of the early experiments in film, especially Edison’s 1894 Kinetoscope five-second film Fred Ott’s Sneeze, which, like the title says, shows one of Edison’s assistants, Fred Ott, taking snuff and sneezing. (A still from this film is reproduced in this volume’s introduction, though the caption erroneously identifies Fred Ott as “Ed Ott”.)

This collection generously allows us to see how McCay compared to some of his print peers as well. The book includes examples of two contemporary strips, The Woozlebeasts by John Prentiss Benson and The Upside-Downs by Gustave Verbeck. Visually, neither of these is much like Sammy Sneeze . In place of McCay’s vivid detail and art nouveau sense of still composition, Benson’s and Verbeck draw more on a tradition of cartoonish caricature. Benson’s drawings of fantastic beasts, in particular, hark back to Tenniel’s Alice illustrations. Verbeck is also influenced by children’s illustration. His drawings are deceptively simple; they look sketchy and rough…until you turn them over and realize that upside-down, they show a completely different picture.

Despite these differences, all three illustrators, do have something in common. Their visual orientation is essentially infantile, in the Freudian sense. They’re pre-Oedipal, the pleasures they offer have little, if anything to do with the symbolic system…which is to say, they don’t much care about narrative or character. In Sammy Sneeze the fun is in watching how each elegantly complicated panel differs from the last, and in the comforting repetition; in The Upside-Downs it’s in the ingeniousness of the illustration; in The Woozlebeasts it’s the delight of the nonsense creatures, who are described in fairly rudimentary limericks. The stories that are provided are simple and subordinate — in the Upside-Downs, in particular, you get the feeling that Verbeck doodled first and then built the story around whatever random thing he decided he could turn on its head. In none of these is there development, either of story or joke. Instead, the strips provide a kind of optical orality. They’re eye candy.

Fred Ott’s Sneeze used to be eye candy too; when the film process was just beginning, anything moving on the screen was a source of amazement. Now, of course, what interest it has is historical. Neither can comics these days survive solely on visual wonder; for the most part, you really do need to make some concessions to plot and genre if you want people to look at your work. Nonetheless, some elements of comics’ infancy survive. Linda Williams, in her study of pornography entitled Hard Core, points out that both Fred Ott’s Sneeze and porn share a common focus on biological ejaculations. Similarly, I think that the emphasis on surface pleasures in McCay and his contemporaries has a later analogue in the cheesecake-inspired drawings of Los Bros Hernandez, and even in the fetish art of R. Crumb or Michael Manning. McCay’s eye candy approach also has an echo in shojo and yaoi (where narrative coherence can takes a distant second to flowery compositional bliss), and in Fort Thunder.

Of course, the comics faction that has most embraced McCay is not shojo or Paper Rad or porn, but art comics. Which is a bit strange, because, as far as I can tell, the aesthetic goals of McCay couldn’t be more different than those of, say, Art Spiegelman. It’s true that Chris Ware has (brilliantly) borrowed a lot of McCay’s style, but this only emphasizes how completely different they are as artists. For Ware, visual repetition is not a source of delight, but of existential monotony — effortless creativity is transformed into labored wasteland.

I don’t blame Ware for the cannibalization of McCay’s corpse — artists take bits and pieces of whatever they can from wherever they can, and they certainly don’t have any obligation to remain true to someone else’s vision. Still, it’s too bad that (to return to Oedipus) the success of the son has so thoroughly obliterated the memory of the father. Which is to say that critics writing about Winsor McCay seem indecently eager to turn him into Chris Ware.

In this regard, the worst sinner in the volume is Jeet Heer. Heer provides an introduction for McCay’s Hungry Henrietta, a black-and-white strip produced at the same time as Little Sammy Sneeze (many of the Henrietta strips are reproduced here on the reverse side of the Sammy strips which ran on the same day.)

The early Henrietta strips start out with her as a baby, being fussed over by grotesquely cavorting adults — at the end of each episode, she is offered a bottle, which she drinks with a single tear trickling from her eye. Over the course of later strips, Henrietta ages, and her appetite develops apace — each episode now focuses on her consuming vast quantities of some foodstuff or other, with the last panel generally featuring her fast asleep in peaceful and bloated contentment. Heer’s interpretation of this is as follows:

“…while overzealous adults are eager to assuage Henrietta’s anxiety, they themselves are the cause of her worries…. By being overprotective, they turn her into a nervous nelly, always whimpering and needing cookies to calm her nerves…. Eventually, Henrietta becomes a slave to her stomach.”

So for Heer, Hungry Henrietta is about the tragedy of eating disorder; it’s a kind of after-school special.

If this argument is to make any sense, you have to assume that (A) McCay has some passing interest in psychological realism, and that (B) McCay believes that being a slave to your stomach is a bad thing. I don’t think that there is any evidence that either of these things is true. On the contrary, the whole point of Henrietta, it seems to me, is not that she experiences some sort of vaguely Oedipal narrative development, but that she doesn’t. She gets older, but the joke is she stays exactly the same. In those early strips, she isn’t driven to eat by the insensitive adults around her; the adults are insensitive and grotesque, from her perspective — because they won’t let her eat. She isn’t sad in those last panels where the tear slides down her face. She’s crying, yes, but she’s calming down — the tear is the last sign of her fading discontent. Anxiety doesn’t make her eat; on the contrary, it’s the fact that she’s hungry which makes her anxious (until she fills up, of course!)

In other words, McCay simply didn’t do literary psychodrama, no matter how much Heer and other arts comics scholars might wish that he did. Rather, Henrietta eats the way that McCay draws; with a simple and tireless delight.

A Link for Your Garden?

Posted on by

Tim O’Neil has an entertaining discussion of Kingdom Come, explaining why having villains kill people is bad for heroes (and for the people killed too, presumably). Plus O’Neil explains what the hell is up with Carnage. I was wondering.

Michael May looks to be blogging his way through every appearance of Wonder Woman in Sensation Comics starting here and continuing here. I’m still thinking about blogging through the Wonder Woman run, maybe starting this week? We’ll see….

q99 talks about why she hates misogyny in Wonder Woman comics.

I found the WW links above through When Fangirls Attack which is under new management, and so back to having regular posting.

And because there is a world out there outside of comics, no really:

Ross Douthat argues for fewer prisons and more police as a way for conservatives to reach out to black voters. I’m all for fewer prisons, but I’d suggest fewer police as well. But I guess that just means I’m Oberlin-educated….

My wife’s new favorite fashion snark blog. And yes, I think it’s pretty entertaining as well.

Sex and the Sensitive New Age Guy

Posted on by

Tom recently sent me an email asking me to explain why I hate contemporary literature and why I care about sexism. Not sure anyone else is interested, and confessional literature is always dicey, but since I’ve had a special request:

As far as contemporary literature goes, I’ve explained myself more or less here and here. For a while there I was trying to be a poet and reading a lot of poetry, which gave my hatred for the contemporary literary scene bite and drive. These days I pretty much just avoid it, which makes me happier, but means I don’t have quite the same impetus to write at length about it.

For the sexism; I don’t know that I am actually any more interested in, or opposed to, sexism than your average everyday liberal, Oberlin educated SNAG. My mom worked full time; my dad, as a professor, had more flexible hours, so he was more or less the primary caregiver. Both of them always made it clear that this arrangement was fine, and that sexism of any sort was wrong. I remember standing up to a couple teachers in high school when they made some cracks about girls not being as smart as guys. The other boys in class were aghast, but I was definitely thinking, “You can’t say that about my mom!” I don’t know…that’s one of the things I’ve done that I’m definitely proud of, but though I’d like to line up those data points and end up with “Noah Berlatsky: Champion of Women’s Equality!” I don’t think it would necessarily wash.

As Tom noted, I do write a fair bit about sexism and feminism. That has something to do with my liberal politics, certainly, but it also has a lot to do with my interest in…well, me. In my experience, at least, feminists tend to have the most interesting things to say about masculinity, just as black writers tend to have the most interesting things to say about race and whiteness. If you look at my two longest pieces on sexuality (here and here, they both use feminist theory to talk about masculinity — especially about masculine sexuality, and the relationship between masculinity and desire. Both are me trying to figure out why I get pleasure (of various kinds) from certain genres, and trying to figure out how that plugs into various social and political concerns. (This is true of the Wonder Woman blogging as well; I think my next essay for comixology will make that more clear.)

The above is something of a psychological explanation, and is perhaps unduly demeaning (as psychological explanations tend to be.) I could also explain my interest from a more ineffable aesthetic perspective, I guess; much of my favorite artwork and writing deals with gender and sexuality, and trying to understand it or interact with it has led me to write or think a lot about those topics.

I mean, I don’t want to disavow any political commitment. Obviously, I hope when I write about or use feminism that I’m doing something to advance the cause — perhaps by revealing some of the ways sexism works or how sexuality and sexism can be tied together or teased apart in our imaginations. But I guess I feel like women — or anyone really — would do well to mistrust men who claim to be leading the fight or to be acting out of especially altruistic motives. Sex and gender ulimately interest me because, like most people, I’m interested in sex, and, like everybody, I have a gender.

So that’s my best effort at a response. If it seems self-indulgent or tedious…well, I would encourage you all to blame Tom.

The Keys to the Batmobile

Posted on by

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?

Because We Needed A Woman — FCR 1c

Posted on by

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?

_______________

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.

Moore Girls (Female Characters Roundtable 1b)

Posted on by

After I wrote this post about Laurie Juspeczyk, I got to thinking about Alan Moore and female characters more generally. And it occurred to me — is there a male writer in any genre out there who has written about such a diversity of female characters, and with such thoughtfulness, as Moore has? From army grunts to policewomen to monster-lovers to cavewomen to spies to cab drivers to mystic saviors… I’m sure there are people out there who have a comparable record, but examples don’t exactly leap to mind. (Jack Hill, maybe…though his career was so short he didn’t really get a chance to compile a comparable record. Charles Schulz in his way, perhaps.)

It would be one thing if it were just the main characters — Halo Jones, Laurie, Abby, the women in From Hell, Promethea, Evie, and on and on. But the thing about Moore is that more often than not he’s got a whole cast of female characters in each work. Virtually every character in Halo Jones is a woman; you can only see Laurie as the token women in Watchmen if you ignore her mother, and Joey, and Joey’s girlfriend, and the Comedian’s Vietnamese girlfriend, and the Silhouette. Top 10 has a ton of major female characters, from lesbian cops on the prowl to conservative Christian cops to the main baddy of the original series. Even “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” — there’s Lois, but there’s also Lana, who actually gets to sacrifice herself to save Superman, a nice, and even moving reversal.

Not that every female character is brilliant, and he’s perfectly capable of stumbling over the odd misogynist trope or stereotype. Shooting Batgirl in the stomach to add to her dad’s angst was a low point, (and one Moore has since expressed regret about, I believe.) And the more erotic stuff he’s done in recent years hasn’t worked out especially well; Mina Harker could have been a lot more interesting if Moore hadn’t gotten obsessed with having her screw and screw and screw…and the less said about Lost Girls maybe the better. But when you look at his work as a whole, you really get the sense of someone who respects and cares about women. He doesn’t idealize them, he doesn’t turn them into guys, he doesn’t constantly point out how clever he’s being in treating them like people (as Brian K. Vaughn is prone to do.) Instead, he just has all these really interesting, complicated, fallible people, who can surprise you and themselves (as the bitter, tough-as-nails Sally does in loving Eddie Blake, for example, or as the noble Halo Jones does in coldly murdering her lover.)

Of course, women write intelligent, rounded male characters all the time, so it is somewhat grading on a curve, I know. But with that caveat, I’ll admit it; I find Moore’s willingness and ability to not write women like idiots kind of inspiring. It’s like he’s single-handedly trying to prove that American (and or British, I guess) comics by men don’t have to be synonymous with misogynist douchebaggery. Maybe he doesn’t always succeed, but, as a guy who spends way too much time thinking about comics, I really appreciate the effort.

Update: Several folks in comments point out that my sweeping condemnations are too sweeping, citing the Hernandez Brothers, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison as other male writers who have created a range of interesting female characters. I’ll accept that..