I’m horning in a bit on Noah’s Wonder Woman action. In comments to the last post, Maddy pointed out that WW would be a natural for a stranger-in-a-strange-land approach to sexism.

… she is coming from a place where she is loved and adored by all, where she has never been a second-class citizen, where she has never faced discrimination or bigotry. Then she enters the “real world”, where there are all those things …

Whereas it might take twenty or so years of life for me to become aware of things like sexism and misogyny, Wonder Woman would be able to recognize it instantly. So if we’re looking at her from a what-does-she-bring-to-feminism point of view, I think she’s very useful in that …

So, if anybody knows, I’m wondering if WW has ever been used in that way, either as an outsider commenting on sexism or an outsider simply commenting on our society as a whole. It’s such a common device that I’d be kind of surprised if it didn’t show up at some point in her career.

What’s the prevailing view of him among comic book fans? My guess is that his stuff has the same sort of standing as Family Guy: it’s popular and its audience includes a lot of comics geeks, but smarter comic geeks (or comic geeks who think they’re smart) look down on it.

I haven’t seen Snyder’s first two films, only Watchmen, and have seen only bits of a couple of Family Guy episodes. So I don’t claim that either Snyder or Family Guy ought to be run into the ground as a matter of principle. I’m just checking to see if my guess as to Snyder’s reputation is correct.

(A joke I saw in a Family Guy episode and have always loved: a talking dog in a bar says, “Hey, whose leg do you have to hump to get a drink around here?”)

The Inkwell Bookstore links here on occasion; as it turns out they’ve got a very enjoyable blog themselves, about various booky things and Amazon evil (bookstore Amazon, I mean; not Wonder Woman Amazon.)

Tim O’Neil has a hysterical post about how lame Barry Allan is.

Entertaining post and comments about Marvel’s Marvel Divas disaster over at Robot 6.

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.

post about Brian Azzarello by Tucker Stone.