I’ve been fulminating about Mary Jane Watson in my last couple of posts, so I was delighted to get my issue of TCJ #291 and find Tom Crippen fulminating too. I particularly enjoyed this passage:

The big engine behind necking, and teen romance, and giddiness at the sight of a bombshell girl, is sex. Industry rules don’t allow any follow-up on that sort of thing. As a result Stan’s approach to romance works best for one-offs, like cover-gags or Mary Jane’s doorway moment [her first appearance, where she opens the door and tells Peter Parker, “That’s right, Tiger. You’ve just hit the jackpot!” Or some such.] Mary Jane emptied a full bolt of glory her first time out and then it was 40 years of decline….if Mary Jane wasn’t going to have sex, there wasn’t much else for her to do. In the 80s, Marvel stuck her with a TV-movie backstory that said her larking about was just a defense; she’d put it on because of her lousy father’s drinking. So everything specific to Mary Jane turned out to be an act. The reason, presumably, was that her schtick had worn a bit thin and she now needed explaining away. At this point, Mary Jane became the girlfriend, then the wife. She didn’t do badly in these roles, but no one can do especially well in them. She was on hand. She helped buck up the hero; she provided relationship tensions. But she didn’t do anything interesting. She dressed louder than the other superheroes’ wives/girlfriends. I guess she also had more spunk, for what that’s worth. Differences in spunk among this bunch get to be like IQ shadings at a high-price computer camp. All the girls have spunk, if they don’t go crazy.

Crippen still has more affection for Mary Jane than I do, though. He sees her first appearance as a quintessence of Stan Lee pizzazz; a fizzy, energetic bombshell. To me, it just seems like tired cliché. Pin-ups by Dan DeCarlo or Jack Cole have a lot more visceral oomph, and while their female characters aren’t exactly fonts of wisdom, they don’t actually talk in a way that makes you worry that their brains have been hoovered out and replaced with the fusty jock-straps of aging hucksters. I don’t know…maybe it’s because I’m particularly down on the hippie thing this decade, but Stan’s Mary Jane seems like a particularly vacuous and hypocritical creation.

Anyway, that’s it on this topic for me. Cross my heart, tiger.

In response to my last post, my brother writes:

As for MJ’s and Spidey’s inconsistency over the years…I see your point here, except for the notion that these characters are ONLY corporate properties shamelessly manipulated and put-upon by their writers/artists, who care not a whit about them. Although this is “work-for-hire” and one might expect that attitude from creators towards characters, I think that this is, in fact, rarely the case in the comics themselves. Most Marvel/DC “hacks” do care about the characters, want to keep them somewhat consistent (except insofar as periodic reboots attempt to update them for today’s kids, etc.) and want them to be meaningful, to appeal to readers, etc. They may fail…contradict each other…etc…but your implication that there is a practiced cynicism towards the characters in the creative process is doubtful.

I see where Eric’s coming from, but the point really isn’t cynicism or lack thereof. I like/respect fan fiction and what it’s about. The problem is that DC/Marvel isn’t open source; it’s corporate controlled. That means that instead of having lots of fans doing whatever weird things they want in their own little worlds (Spider-Man/Daredevil slash, for example) you’ve got (for the most part) the same insular group of drooling fanboys trying to relive their youth…but make it cool by adding sex! and rock and roll! and…and…and revamping the continuity! Whoo-hoo!

Fan fiction in manga contexts is generally about expanding on ideas or finding new stuff or tracking down private obsessions — the stuff good art is about, in other words. Mainstream titles, on the other hand, tend to be about a death duel between nostalgia, boredom, and a kind of giggling desire to desecrate one’s own idols in an effort to show that one is smarter than the childhood that one is clearly still clinging to.

Not that everyone who writes this stuff is horrible, but the whole exercise just has a stink of death and futility about it. The Mary Jane doll thing is a case in point; the outrage really seemed to be not so much that anyone would do this, as that…”This Is Official! How dare Marvel desecrate her!” I mean, who the hell cares what this moribund corporation does with a character that really wasn’t all that interesting to begin with? If you see something interesting in her, make up your own stories about her. But for goodness sakes can’t we stop worrying about what the corporate powers that be think we should be thinking about these characters? The best thing that could happen to the super-hero genre is for copyright to be abolished. Till that happens, though, I guess it’ll just continue to be powered by empty astonishment, hollow outrage, and plodding genuflection before a continuity that was always idiotic to begin with.

As I’ve mentioned before, my son is obsessed with Spider-Man, and I’ve gotten a couple of the Essential volumes to read to him. We just got volume 2, actually, which is fairly entertaining as these things go — not something I want to read all of, but it doesn’t make me want to stab my eyes out the way reading the Lee-Kirby X-Men does, or any of the Justice League stuff from the 30s.

Anyway, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the original strips with Mary Jane…and man is she an embarrassment. Stan Lee is always preposterous when he tries to get down with the youth, or when he pretends he’s ever spoken to a woman. Mary Jane, who hits on both of these writing weaknesses, reads like some sort of refugee from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, if, you know, the characters in that movie had their personalities replaced by middle-aged marketing copy-writers, rather than by plants. “C’mon Petey — let your hair down! They’re playing our song!” “Those crazy thread [that’s the Rhino’s costume, folks] break me up!” “It’s a real happening, man!” “It’s Spidey! Oh isn’t he the dreamiest!” “Don’t trip daddy-o! I’ll baffle that baddy with my bralessness while you skidoo!”

All right, I made that last one up. But you get the idea; she’s supposed to be free and spontaneous and exciting, but she sounds like…well, like some middle-aged guys idea of what a blow-up fantasy hippie might be.

It’s not exactly a news flash that Stan Lee’s hand with the female characters is somewhat thumb-fingered. But I couldn’t help thinking as I was reading this about the Mary Jane statue controversy of a year or so back. For those of you who missed it, some guy made a fairly ugly statue showing Mary Jane carrying Peter Parker’s laundry and discovering his Spider-man suit. Various feminist fans of Mary Jane went ape-shit about how icky it was to sexualize this character in this way.

And yes, for those of you who were paying attention, I said “feminist fans of Mary Jane.” Unlike Dirk Deppey, I actually like Andrea Dworkin, and think that the way male sexuality is expressed in this culture actually does have something to do with the oppression of woman (Dirk summons the spectre of gay porn as a refutation of the possibility that sexual desire can have inherently sexist content — as if gay porn somehow transcends gender assumptions about femininity and masculinity, or as if gay men can’t be sexist in ways linked to their own sexuality and desire. Though none of this makes anti-porn laws a good idea — but I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah….) So I’m sympathetic to the argument that the statue’s conflates of sexiness and domesticity is sexist — not horribly sexist, not surprisingly sexist, not the most sexist thing I’ve seen in, say, the last 48 hours, but still — sexist.

But what’s baffling, especially in light of these early Mary Jane comics, is that — you know, Mary Jane was always a sexist caricature. She’s probably more sexist in Stan Lee’s writing, in fact, than she is in the statue. I guess you could argue about whether the subtext of free-wheeling easy lay is more or less sexist than the subtext of fetishized domesticity…in any event, though, you’re not talking about a character who’s an icon of female independence.

So what gives with the outrage? If you’re the sort of person who’s going to find Mary Jane sexist, why weren’t you disillusioned with her a long time ago? I mean, even if some other writers have made her more of an independent woman, there is this history of the character being a preposterous brain-dead male fantasy. Surely, were you a feminist, this might give you pause before you pledged her your undying loyalty.

Of course, virtually everybody who reads mainstream comics has an emotional committment to some character or other who, over the course of their career, is completely emotionally, logically, and morally incoherent. That’s the way corporate properties work. The problem here isn’t that these feminists are hysterical, but that the genre of super-hero comics is. The thing about a corporate property is that it has no core; or, more crassly, no brand consistency. Mary Jane has been used by so many (often indifferent) people for so many (often completely idiotic) purposes, that there’s nothing there anymore.

Dirk excoriated the critics of the statue for their “inflated sense of entitlement.” But why shouldn’t fans expect creators to care at least as much about their creations as the fans do? Of course, in super-hero comics, that’s quite often not the case . The original creators have gone on to other projects long ago; the corporate-owned piece of property that’s left behind gets stomped on and spindled and twisted every which way for the stupidest of reasons, or for none. To fall in love with a character in a mainstream title is to be, inevitably, betrayed. When this happens, there tend to be howls of outrage (“Peter Parker’s not a clone!” “Mary Jane wouldn’t do that!”) which are both justified (the choices being made are, in these cases, almost uniformly lousy) and kind of ridiculous. Of course Mary Jane is treated with off-hand sexist contempt. All of these characters are treated with off-hand contempt. They’re corporate thralls, just like their creators — there to be abused and sneered at. The saddest thing about Mary Jane isn’t that that statue of her was sexist, or that she was sexist to begin with, but that there hasn’t ever been a consistent enough vision of her to make her really sexist, or really not sexist, or really anything. She’s just this hollow shell, beyond defilement and beyond contempt.
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And speaking of pointless defilement and the hold of corporate entities on the infantile imagination — I’m making my first attempts to teach my son to read. He knows a few words (cat, dog, go), but we really made huge strides when I taught him to read “poop.” Suddently we had all sorts of amusing narratives (“Cat poop on bat,” “rat poop on hat.”) Best of all, though, was the first super-hero story he has ever read unaided — “Hulk poop on X-Men”.

A short story by me, published by the good folks at PoorMojo’s.

Explanation of why one is busy are generally not especially interesting, but in case folks are wondering what on earth has happened to me — I’ve been getting somewhat more freelance work, which is good for the finances but bad for the blogging….

I haven’t been blogging much (or at all) because I’ve been kind of swamped with other projects. Primary among them is an art show featuring the artwork of me and my friend and collaborator Bert Stabler. The opening is at the Finch Gallery tomorrow and Saturday, 6-11 PM: read all about it here

I also have an essay about the art of Ryan Christian and Neil Whitacre in the latest Comics Journal.

And there are a bunch of things I’m working on that haven’t quite come out yet. So blogging will continue to be light for a bit. My apologies to both of my regular readers…..

I’ve got two pieces in the Chicago Reader this week:

a longer essay about Ariel Schrag’s Potential

a blurb about Grandmaster Flash’s memoir

Apologies for the light posting recently. I’ve been kind of swamped, and probably will continue to be for a little bit. But more blogging is in the offing….

I just saw the two halves of Grindhouse. Robert Rodriguez’s bit is pretty lame; instead of a tribute to exploitation films, it comes off as just another comedy-action thriller, though without (quite) the smarts of Charlie’s Angels. It’s all tongue-in-cheek gorey special effects, boring, supposedly ironic revelations (the random dirtball hero is some sort of incredible martial arts, gunman guy. The evil zombified ex-husband comes back at the end. The little boy who was warned not to play with guns kills himself with the gun accidentally…but only offscreen, because the film is just that chickenshit.) It’s not horrible; just another interchangeable bit of Hollywood product, where the line between the thing and the pastiche of the thing has been crossed so many times already it might as well not exist.

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, on the other hand, is a brilliant movie. The surprise twist in the middle is actually shocking (and is why I’m going to try to be a little circumspect to avoid spoilers.) The violence is brutal and not at all chickenshit. It’s also really rare to see a male director take such care with so many different female characters; the movie really ends up being about female friendships, both as a network that gives women’s lives depth and meaning when the worst happens, and as a protective bond as well. I think that Tarantino also manages to celebrate female violence without fetishizing it, something that is very rarely done (and wasn’t done, for example, in Kill Bill.) If there’s a sexual charge in the second half of the film, it’s one the women feel on their own behalf; they get to enjoy their own violence, rather than having their violence tied into a parade of nudity and phallic symbols (as in, say “Ginger,” or even “Buffy” in a lot of ways.)

I mean, Death Proof is obviously exploitative, and self-consciously crap. But it’s also really heartfelt. The instant before one character dies, when we can see she knows what’s going to happen, and she registers sadness which seems as much for her friends as herself, is really moving. Of all Tarantino’s movies, this is the one that I think most shows Jack Hill’s influence, which is (and which Tarantino would take as) very high praise.

Update: I was poking around online, and it looks like Death Proof was more or less critically panned. I wonder if part of the reason is the genre. Though there isn’t an actual rape, and though payback is administered by a second group of girls related only structurally to the first, the movie is really a rape-revenge film. And if there’s one genre critics tend to loathe, it’s rape-revenge films. Maybe the most critically despised film of all time is “I Spit On Your Grave,” a movie Ebert made famous with his loathing. Carol Clover in her study “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” speculates that movies about celebrating castration freak male critics right the fuck out, and that seems like a fairly safe bet. In this case, too, I wonder if people were thrown by how thoroughly Tarantino focuses here on female concerns. A ton of the movie is devoted to women talking about their relationships, with men and with each other. One of the funniest laugh-lines in the film involves an issue of Italian Vogue, a joke I got because, you know, I married a woman, but I certainly wouldn’t have known what the hell they were talking about otherwise. It seems possible that a lot of reviewers were hoping for Enter the Dragon or Godfather and instead ended up with what looked to them like Waiting to Exhale.

I didn’t see Waiting to Exhale myself, though I did skim the book, and, at least to my (admittedly male) sensibility, Death Proof is way better. One of the most interesting things about it is the way it seems to be thinking about male and female genre conventions. The girls in the first half of the movie are, the script is at pains to tell us, almost completely unfamiliar with male genre conventions (specifically with car chase movies.) They’re less butch than their counterparts in the second half — and this lack of butchness is linked both to their vulnerability and to their age. Part of getting older, more settled, and more comfortable in your skin for women, Tarantino seems to suggest, is becoming more butch, or at least having more access to a masculine side, and its potential for violence. This neatly inverts the usual girl coming of age story, with a tomboy childhood being left behind for a fully feminine adulthood. (I’d be really curious to see what Judith Halberstam, author of “Female Masculinity,” would say about this movie.)

One thing there isn’t in Tarantino’s movie is any suggestion of lesbianism. (There is a lesbian relationship in Rodriguez’s film, but the movie assiduously avoids dealing with it.) It’s an interesting omission since exploitation films were, as near as I can tell, pretty thoroughly obsessed with lesbian themes. On the other hand, Tarantino also avoids the “final girl” slasher sterotype; victims are not chosen on the basis of their sexual activity (everyone is pretty much sexually active) and, even more importantly, survival is about relationships, *not* individual bravery or resilience. The movie also, and adamently, rejects sadism (or, at least, sadism by men). Kurt Russell is certainly charming and compelling as the evil Stuntman Mike, but the movie spends much, much more time telling you about the girls — their ambitions, their hopes, their relationships. I don’t see how you could really be rooting for him at any point. You do feel a little sympathy for him when the tables are turned, perhaps…though even then, he kind of turns into a snivelling crybaby…no going out with glory for him.

Anyway, after Kill Bill 2, which was something of a disappointment, this really restores my faith in Tarantino. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out — go forth and rent it at once.