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Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #1

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So I have threatened on a number of occasions to blog my way through the entire William Moulton Marston/H.G. Peter run on Wonder Woman. I still don’t know if I’m going to make good on that, but at least we’ll give it a try. Starting this week, I’ll try to post on one issue each Thursday without fail unless I have something better to do, pledging to stop only when I have reached Marston’s last issue or when I feel like it.

So both longtime readers may remember that I already have spilled a lot of electrons writing about Wonder Woman #1 (here, here, and here. Most bloggers might say, hey, I’ve covered this, let’s move on to 2. But those most bloggers are not neurotic-completist me. If I’m doing a series where I blog about every Wonder Woman issue, I’m going to start with #1, damn it. Bring on the cover!

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So…what’s to say that hasn’t been said? As I mentioned in the previous three posts, the first story in this issue is pretty amazing. This isn’t WW’s first appearance (she’d been appearing in Sensation Comics since 1941, the previous year) but for her own debut title Marston created what has become her more or less canonical origin (retold with some variations by George Perez in the 80s and by the WW animated movie, to name just two I’ve seen.) Compared to Superman or Batman or Spiderman, Wonder Woman’s origin is more complicated, and more unhinged by about a factor of five. Rocketed from a doomed planet? Pshaw. Parents murdered? Please. Bathed in radiation? Ha. How about created-out-of-clay-by-the-leader-of-a-race-of-loving-warrior-woman-and-then-brought-to-life-by-the-divine-will-of-Aphrodite?

That made out of clay bit still kills me, incidentally. It’s a genius fusion of Golden Age off-hand nonsense and Greek myth. It also has some surprising emotional resonances.

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Those three panels are really, to me, heart-breaking, though it’s so compressed you’ll miss it if you blink. Athena teaches Hippolyta how to sculpt, and what Hippolyta chooses to create is the image of a child. She wants a kid, in other words, but she can’t have one, and so she becomes obsessed with the image she has created. She prays, and a miracle occurs; the baby comes to life. With Peter’s art, the moment that Diana is “born” is ritualized; the mother and daughter both stiff, shown in the moment before they touch in a frozen tableau, rather than in the moment when they embrace. The whole sequence seems very poignant to me; it reminds me a little bit of the end of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, where Buddy’s family is magically resurrected — or of the end of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, with its unexplained resurrection. The power in all three moments is in having the heart’s desire granted, and in the recognition that the heart’s desire just doesn’t actually get granted in this way. Love demands miracles, and a creator granting a miracle to a creation is sometimes an act of love. That’s at least provisionally part of what the Christian faith is about (a connection both Morrison and Shakespeare make.) Marston’s vision is more pagan — and, perhaps coincidentally, more female.

In Morrison and Shakespeare, men pray for the resurrection of their wives/lovers, and their wish is granted. Here, though, a woman prays to have a child. That prayer is also linked explicitly to artistic creation. Often in various misogynist discourses, you get a contrast between the creation of the artist (done by men) and the creation of children (done by women). But Hippolyta is both artist and mother; the two roles aren’t separable. The love of artist for art object, and of mother for child, are commensurate rather than opposed. Aphrodite is god of both.

I think this does a few things. Most obviously, it emphasizes Hippolyta’s femininity. She may be a warrior queen and an artist, but she’s still a woman. In contrast, the Wonder Woman animated movie that came out this year ended by essentially reprimanding Hippolyta for turning her back on children and men and family; for not being feminine and loving enough. But for Marston, you don’t need men to have family, or even, it seems, children. Women can be sculptors and warriors and Aphrodite is still their patron.

Another aspect of this scene is that it makes a fairly clear analogy between Marston and Hippolyta. After all Marston, like Hippolyta, creates Diana; and brings her to life — and I don’t think it’s too much to say, especially considering that the character was based on Marston’s wife and their lover, that he brings her to life through his love. In general, most commentators (including myself) tend to see Marston’s investment in WW as, you know, sexual; revelatory of the kind of women he wants to be with, and of the way he wants to be with them. But the link with Hippolyta suggests that Marston’s interest seems not only romantic, but aspirational; he doesn’t just want the women he portrays; he wants to be them.

That’s fetishistic too, of course; male sexual fantasies about being women are pretty common — and probably have something to do with the cross-gender identification in exploitation flicks that Carol Clover talks about in “Men, Women and Chainsaws” (though Clover herself doesn’t really make this point.) Even if it is a fetish, though, Marston goes interesting places with it. If you see him as Hippolyta in this sequence, what he wants is to be creative, like women, and a creator of children, like women, and loving, like women. It’s an idealized view, clearly, which can be problematic – but it’s not an idealized view that seems especially limiting for women in the usual ways; Diana starts out on the pedestal, after all, but she gets off it fairly quickly. Hippolyta isn’t barred from masculine activities. Indeed, in many ways Marston seems to want to be a woman as a fantasy of being more, not less masculine — stronger, more competent, even more artistic in traditionally male ways. Marston’s comic, in other words, situates male and female readers in pretty much the same way; both are supposed to look on Wonder Woman and the Amazons as ideals to emulate (both are also supposed to look at Wonder Woman and the Amazons erotically, I think..but that’s a discussion for another day, maybe.)

I also think it’s worth pointing out how odd it is in a super-hero comic to have the kind of celebration of child-hood that Marston provides. I’m thinking of the two panels that follow the three above:

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The ostensible purpose, of course, is to show how strong and great Diana is — stronger than Hercules! Faster than mercury! Etc etc. But — not to be too gloppy — to a parent, every child is a wonder child. Diana is amazing, not just because she’s a super-hero, but because she’s a kid. Most male superheroes are all about being orphaned, outcast, alone, agonized, cut off by their powers and their origins. WW’s origin, on the contrary, is all about community; she has a hundred mothers who love her. If that sounds kitschy…well, yep. That second panel above in particular is both sublime and sublimely hokey. I love the elongated deer so outdistanced it doesn’t even get any motion lines, and the way it’s sleekness contrast with the frilly tree leaves above. The effect is strange, especially since the deer’s anatomy isn’t quite right; it looks like medieval drawings of horses where they didn’t have stop motion photography to show them how those creatures actually ran. At the same time, the outdoor scene, the stiffness, the indecently healthy child, all also suggest garage-sale art; something you’d find with “We love our happy home,” scrawled across it — if, you know, you’re happy home was an island populated by an all-female band of warriors.

One of the implications of this is that her story is all about security. Ground zero for her is a happy home. That’s not that unusual for girl’s fiction, I don’t think (Cardcaptor Sakura, for example, doesn’t have family angst; I don’t think Sailor Moon does either.) But in the world of comics, more geared to boys, it’s very odd, and writers tend not to know how to deal with it. (Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia is a particularly flagrant violation.)

As this suggests, the relative lack of angst in Diana’s origin is probably meant to appeal to girls to some degree. But I bet it’s also meant to appeal to, and probably to educate boys — to provide a different vision of heroism that didn’t involve clinging to outcast status and perpetrating bloody revenge.

I was reading an all ages Jeff Parker Marvel Avenger’s comic to my son recently. Giant-Girl (Janet Van Dyne) has run amok (one of those mind-control things) and the team goes to consult her father to see if he can help. Anyway, Dad starts explaining G-Girl’s origin, and at one point, Storm, I think, interrupts and says something like, “So then Giant Girl swore to avenge her mother’s death by fighting crime?” And the dad says “What? No, no. My wife’s fine. She’s away on a ski trip right now. Janet just likes to help people.” I think Marston would approve of that.
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All right; so next week we’ll go to number 2. And I’ll do my best to cover more than five panels.

Gaijin Love

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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:

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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:

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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.)

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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

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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.

You Still Can’t Wear the Venus Girdle, But Maybe You Can Hold It for a While

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In my last post on the Wonder Woman animated movie, I talked a little about how I felt the film wasn’t very comfortable with femininity. I was thinking about that a bit more, and it struck me again how very few female characters WW meets, and how much that tilts the movie. Basically, WW runs into a little girl who is being prevented from playing pirates, and the sexed up Etta Candy who is ickily dependent on men and on her own sex-kittenish charm. Neither of those two characters is on screen for any time at all, really. So what you’re left with is Amazons (who are tough and manly for the most part) and guys like Steve Trevor and Ares representing man’s world.

As I suggested in my earlier post, this isn’t the way things worked in Marston, where WW was always surrounded by female characters, both Amazon and human. But it also wasn’t true in what I think was probably the (distant) second best take on the WW character; Geoge Perez’s run on the series. I talked about some of my problems with that run here. But the one thing Perez really did right was to have lots of female characters. Etta Candy as a loyal, courageous, slightly older and still chunky military career woman; Julia, a late fiftiesish Greek scholar; her (Kitty Pryde-influenced) teenaged daughter Vanessa; Myra, the quite-but-not-entirely head of an advertising agency…they were all interesting, well-developed characers, with distinct personalities and (even more rarely for super-hero comics) body types.

What was especially nicely done was that Diana was, if anything, *more* interested in these woman than she was in Steve, or in men in general. And she found them interesting not only because they were sisters, or similar to her, but because they were *different.* There’s one line where she comments that Etta is as thick as two of her…but it’s not a dis, she’s fascinated. Perez doesn’t make Diana actually fall in love with any of the women (or with anybody, for that matter), but the excitement at strangeness she feels is a close analog, I think, to romantic excitement — the sense of difference, or unknowability, which is part of what makes love exciting.

You get just a touch of this in the movie, when Diana first sees the crying child and starts to talk about how there are no children on Paradise Island. But it’s pretty much dropped to focus instead on her relationship with Steve — indeed, the whole interaction with the girl seems more about getting Steve a couple of good quips and developing the Diana-is-disillusioned-with-man’s-world meme than it is about exploring Diana’s relationship with kids. Whereas, in Perez, Diana’s relationship with the teenaged Vanessa is a big part of the series — much bigger than her relationship with Steve Trevor, who is more of a marginal character.

Perez seems to have figured out something that the movie didn’t — which is that Wonder Woman goes to man’s world not for men, but for women. Steve Trevor always had a “well, there has to be a romantic interest” afterthought kind of feel; it was WW’s interactions with women that really had some oomph behind them for Marston.

Trina Robbins has an interesting article about WW in which she argues along similar lines:

Girls have needed, at least in their fantasy lives, a safe place to be with other girls, where they could express themselves without being threatened by boys. British girls’ magazines seem to have recognized this need. In my study of four British girls’ magazine annuals, from 1956, 1958, and 196325, I found comics in which the protagonists, usually students from all-girl schools, interacted with other girls, and any male in the stories is usually a villain. In a typical story from 1958, three school girls dress up as “The Silent Three,” in hooded robes and masks26, to help a younger girl whose dog has been stolen by a wicked man, who hopes to use the dog to retrieve a hidden paper that will lead to treasure.

In “Staunch Allies of the Swiss Skater,” from 1956, two British schoolgirls, vacationing in Switzerland, befriend a young Swiss ice skater, buying her a dress to wear for a skating contest. When the girl’s cruel uncle locks her up, forbidding her to enter the contest, they free the girl and find a paper proving he is an impostor, masquerading as her dead uncle “to steal the legacy her mother left her!” One of the contest judges knew the real uncle and would have recognized him. In the end, a British girl hugs the skater and says, “Your troubles are over, Odette dear. You’re free – free to skate!”

American girls’ comics from that period are very different. Instead of the sisterhood themes of the British comics, the American comic stories usually revolve around the theme of the eternal triangle — two girls, one of which is the protagonist, fighting over the Token Boyfriend. Patsy Walker and Hedy Wolfe fight over Buzz Baxter, Betty and Veronica fight over Archie Andrews, and so on. In the women’s community of Paradise Island, girls did not have to have boyfriends; they could be “free – free to skate!”, or free to be themselves and to interact with other girls.

Obviously, and as Robbins notes too, there are lesbian implications here if you want them. But whether or no, the decision in the movie was to make Diana’s most important relationship be with Steve — and Hippolyta’s most important relationship be with Ares actually — it’s because she is spurned by Ares in particular that she closes the Amazon’s off from men for 100s of years, as opposed to other versions of the story, where the personal betrayal (by Hercules, not Ares) is much less emphasized. Men just take up a lot more emotional space than seems warranted in a Wonder Woman story, basically. Perez figured out a better balance.

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Before I leave the wonder woman animated movie forever, I wanted to acknowledge this post at Comic Fodder. Ryan has a couple of thoughtful comments.

Noah Berlatsky live blogged his viewing of the Wonder Woman movie, which I think is kind of a bad idea. Going MST3K on any movie is pretty easy and gets you in the mode of “what can I make fun of” rather than any actual critical analysis of the darn thing. And in your riffing, you can wind up saying really stupid things about how people from the South must hate Abraham Lincoln.

After live blogging, he did post a fairly strong rebuttal to the movie, which i found far more readable, even if I don’t necessarily agree. But he DOES offer up a thoughtful sort of challenge to the filmmakers as per how they could have handled some of the sequences. I’m not sure he noted that the film was actually directed by, voice directed by (and had input from Simone)… all women. That’s not to say women can’t fall into the same traps as male directors, but it does make one pause when considering some of the accusations lobbed the way of the movie.

As far as the Steve Trevor thing: Overall, and on reflection, I think it was actually a nice move by the movie to have the main character be a southerner and not comment on it overtly. So…not my best moment. Apologies.

As far as the movie being made by women…I didn’t look up the creators names, though I assumed it might be a possibility.
Obviously, it’s somewhat problematic for a guy to go around telling women they’re not sufficiently feminist. But then, to go back and say “oh, it’s all right now that I know they’re women!” would be pretty condescending. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…so I might as well just stick with my original assessment: it still seems like a movie that raises its feminism mostly to cut it down, which is way too kind to its frat boy main character, which generally is dumb and even dishonest about gender issues, and which is quite uncomfortable with femininity.

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Other posts in which I explain why no one is as cool as Marston:
One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven and Eight, Nine.

Update: I’m starting a reread of all the Marston Wonder Womans; first one in the series is here.

I Don’t Care How Animated You Are, You Still Can’t Wear the Venus Girdle

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I just liveblogged my way through the WW animated film. If you want to see my thoughts as I went along, here’s the Update: First thread,second thread, third thread.

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Well, overall, the movie was about the level of bad I expected, I guess. I pretty much agree with everything in Chris’s review. The violence and sex seems calculated to go just so far and not farther in a way that ends up reading as smarmy and not much else. Exploitation can be fun if it’s either explored or used to push stories in odd directions. Here, though, it’s all controlled without much curiosity; the exploitation elements seem ladled out with a spoon, and the rest of the story doesn’t have enough thematic coherence or adventurousness to go anywhere. The twin goals (tell a typical Wonder Woman story; throw in (limited) gore and (limited) sex)) lead to paralysis rather than energetic frisson. As just a for instance, if you’re going to do WW exploitation, it seems like one of the more interesting ways would be to explore lesbian themes — but that would be R, and besides we’re not really willing to do that with a DC property — and so the only lesbian suggestion is done in the most banal way possible; set up as a sexual fantasy for Steve (who sees some Amazons cavorting in a pool) rather than as a real possible female alternative to dealing with man’s world. Thus, the only real love is love between men and women, which philosophically stacks the cards against Paradise Island as a viable community. The “moral” of the movie ends up being that Hippolyta must learn reach out to men in order to learn to love. In this (as in just about every other) way, the film is less adventurous than the source material; Marston did suggest implicit lesbianism in various ways, and while he had Diana fall in love with Steve, I don’t think he suggested that that love vitiated the Amazon’s community.

Indeed, when William Moulton Marston created WW, the whole point of the Amazons was that they were going to teach man’s world love — not vice versa. This, I think, points to the film’s central failure of imagination. The filmmakers just can’t figure out a way to admire femininity. They can admire women — but pretty much only insofar as the women are tough, violent, self-sufficient — masculine, in other words. You see this again and again throughout the film; the librarian is mocked for not being tough enough in the opening battle scene; then she gets brutally offed, essentially because she’s too girly to live. Wonder Woman herself taunts femininity at various points, mocking Ares for getting beaten by a girl, or teasing Steve for expressing his emotions like a girl. The end tries to walk this back a little, with Hippolyta rebuked for rejecting children and love — hallmarks of femininity. But the only way to get those back is supposed to be by opening themselves up to men.

Marston, on the other hand, had a vision of a femininity which was both strong and self-sufficient. For him, the Amazons weren’t unloving because they’d cut themselves off from men; on the contrary, cutting themselves off from the masculine was what made them embody love. In the film, being strong (masculine) precludes love (feminine); for Marston, being feminine is what creates strength (and submission and lots of bondage.)

The point here is that the movie’s vision of gender is just much, much more clearly designed of, by, and for men. The Amazons are essentially pictured *as* men. The reason their cool is their masculine attributes (kicking ass) and their problems are masculine problems — they’ve gone off into their cave, cutting themselves off from emotional attachments to be safe. The “message” could have been written by Robert Bly — trust your emotions! don’t be afraid to love! It’s focusing on male anxieties around castration and being tough and not wanting to be vulnerable.

In Marston, though, what’s glorified is not only strength, but female bonds…and, indeed, bonds in general. Marston’s emphasis on submission as a form of love and strength is decidedly kinky…but it also allows femininity to be something other than just opening yourself to a man. It can be opening yourself to a woman, for example. “Obedience to loving authority” (as he puts it) is, in Marston’s vision, not actually about patriarchy first, but about femininity first; after all, the loving authority doesn’t have to be male, and, in those old Wonder Woman comics, often isn’t. For Marston, femininity is an archetype that can exist entirely without reference to men.

A female community built around mutual submission and love is the ultimate source of strength in Marston’s world. For him, women are going to save man’s world. Whereas, for the filmmakers, the Amazons need men to save them.

Which is why the movie, with a kind of tedious inevitability, finds itself morphing into “Steve Trevor: The Animated Film.” Trevor gets a ton of screen time, and we actually learn more about his inner life than about Diana’s; it’s quite clear at the end why he kisses her, but it’s way less clear why she kisses him. The fact is, the filmmakers are more interested in the entirely pedestrian horniness and self-pity of this banal frat boy who find the girl of her dreams than they are in the journey of their putative star. In the end, her objections to man’s world are shown to be hollow feminist propaganda; all she really needs to cure her restlessness is a good man…or even a mediocre one.

Or, to put it more briefly: Marston’s Wonder Woman was a male fantasy that cared deeply about women and girls. And while that’s not ideal in every way, I would argue that this film is good evidence that a male fantasy which cares about women and girls is, overall, and in almost every way, better than a male fantasy that doesn’t.

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Update: Other posts in which I explain why no one is as cool as Marston:
One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven and Eight, Nine.

Update: And a follow up post on the animated movie vs. George Perez

Nana #15

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Just read through the 15th volume of Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and yes, I am still in love with the series. A few more or less random thoughts…some of which I may have said before, but what the hell:

1. One of the things I like most about the series is the way that it manages to be a soap opera and use lots of soap opera cliches — and yet, the way the series uses them is never, or rarely cliched. For example, volume 14 ended with Nana being confronted by a picture of Ren, her finacé hugging another woman (Reira). We know that nothing happened between Ren and Reira, but Nana doens’t..so, totally predictable set-up, right? Nana should go ballistic and be horribly upset and betrayed and there should be all this drama because of miscommunication. Except that isn’t what happens at all; Nana immediately realizes that the picture isn’t all that incriminating and that Ren wouldn’t cheat on her. She is upset, and there is some drama with Ren, but it’s more about the fissures that already exist in their relationship than it is with the photograph per se…and, in any case, their reconciliation occurs fairly quickly.

Basically, the point is that Yazawa seems to trust her characters to be interesting on their own terms. She certainly provides plenty of drama, but she never sacrifices her protagonists to the exigencies of plot. Nana doesn’t become stupid just because the story would be more conventionally exciting if she did. It’s pretty much the opposite of the way that Brian K. Vaughn proceeded in Y; The Last Man, in which the integrity of the characters is gleefully chucked over every available cliff-hanger.

2. I love the way that Yazawa let’s the focus of the story drift from character to character over the course of the story. Nana and Hachi are always more or less the most important characters. But as their lives alter and evolve, the most important supporting characters change a lot. In this volume, I was just noticing how central Takumi (Hachi’s fiance) has become, while Nobu (her former flame) has been pushed off to the sidelines. Meanwhile, Jun, Hachi’s friend, and a central character early on, has a walk-on appearance, and though it’s a very brief scene, you can feel the weight of their past — there’s a close-up where you can see Jun realize that Hachi has become a much stronger and more mature person — and seeing it through Jun’s eyes allows the reader (for whom the transformation has been more gradual) to recognize it too.

Again, the point here is Yazawa’s faith in her work and in her readers. She trusts that even if she drops characters or adds characters, the reader will stay with her. And, perhaps more importantly, she trusts that the story can change gradually and organically, without exclamation points. It’s just incredibly mature and confident story-telling.

3. On another note: this isn’t exactly a criticism, but…today I was talking to a friend who has toured with an act which started small, and then got quite big. And one of the big problems he encountered was with money. That is, when you start out small, nobody thinks much about how you’re going to split the dough, because there is none. But when you suddenly get big, the money becomes a huge issue — one that can sew a lot of bitterness, wreck friendships, and just generally create a lot of drama.

Nana is, of course, about two bands that make it big. And it’s a soap opera, so it thrives on drama. But…there’s virtually never any drama about money. The characters don’t argue about money. There’s no discussion of how they’ll split their takes. There’s an acknowledgment that they are earning money, certainly, but there’s never fighting about it. It’s weird.

A while back I talked about the odd way Nana deals with the band’s drug use and publicity. Most of that strangeness had to do with cultural differences, I think; Japanese bands have to be a lot more careful of their public image, especially around issues like drug use. It seems unlikely that cultural difference explains the problem here, though; I mean, I doubt that Japanese rock stars never quibble over money. Probably Yazawa just doesn’t think that money troubles are romantic or interesting — and possibly she thinks such mundane concerns are beneath her characters, who are all fairly self-consciously presented as artists. I don’t know…anyone out there have any insights? It doesn’t really bother me per se…it just seems odd.

How Come That Guy Looks LIke Everybody Else

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A few weeks back I posted about the first handful of issues of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. I’ve now read the whole thing (basically; I missed an issue in the middle, I think.)

There are spoilers here, so be warned if that’s a concern.

I don’t think my assessment of it really altered that much. I still found Pia Guerra’s art really bland and boring. Someone who could have delivered on the cheesecake that the book was obviously pretty eager to provide (supposed-to-be-sexy pirates, supposed-to-be-sexy ninjas, supposed-to-be-sexy quasi nuns, etc., etc.) would have added a lot to the story.

Still, if I read the whole thing, I obviously found something to enjoy. There are a lot of nice touches along the way; I liked Ampersand (the capuchin monkey) escaping the ninja by peeing in her face, for example. I liked the way that the escape from the cannibals in New Guinea was completely elided; you see one scene from it and then you cut away and only ever hear about it again in casual back-references. More importantly, Agent 355, the secret society ass-kicker who shepherds Yorick across the world and back, is a pretty great character. I’m not sol overall on Vaughn’s efforts at confronting gender, but 355 is certainly his best effort in that regard — she’s totally butch and tough, but every so often we get these femme accoutrements, like her knitting, or (right at the end) trading her gun away for a dress…or the fact that she has a long term unrequited crush on Yorick (the titular last man). The way she and Yorick grow closer over the five years they’re together is really nicely done; Agent 355 picks up on Yorick’s escape techniques; Yorick learns about fighting from her; both of them gain a shared past and an appreciation for each other’s tics and habits (for instance, Yorick knows that 355 sews when she’s feeling horny — a tidbit of information that takes on additional meaning when we learn that what she’s sewing is his going away present. And 355’s ambivalent relationship to her own violence — she starts out by being reticent, moves through being willing to shoot a young child (though Vaughn cheats here by having her gun misfire) and ends with her seeming to, at least potentially, try to renounce killing.

But though it has its moments, overall the series feels shallow and deeply untrustworthy. Mostly its the plot; the constant, gratuitous cliff-hangers, and the revved up action-drama just never end. At one point Alison Mann (a scientist who travels with Yorick and 355) curses about the fact that someone seems to be pointing at her every hour or so. It’s funny because it’s true; the action throughout the run all seems gratuitous, unmotivated, and ultimately tiresome. Vaughn wants to dish up action and danger every issue, but he doesn’t have the pulp smarts to tie them together in a compelling overarching narrative, nor to come up with really interesting opponents or situations. So you’re stuck with a lot of women pointing guns at each other for no particular reason and endless semi-ironic coincidences. There’s a moment where two astronauts attack each other for a couple of panels and then decide that, oh, yeah, they’re not really mad at each other at all. A lot of the comic feels like that; just action for action’s sake.

You can really see Vaughn’s pulp limitations in his villains, incidentally. They are all boring and cliched as fuck. We’ve got evil scientist, we’ve got crazed man-hating feminists, we’ve got nutso John Birch government hating psychos — who cares?

When he does try for depth or explanation, the results are often even worse. In explaining why all the men died, for example, we get an explanation based on pseudomystical Jungian gobbledygook tied to a series of soap opera revelations (with Dr. Mann playing the Luke Skywalker “oh, no, it’s my father!” role.) Character after character gets a very-special-backstory issue (you know the ones; kaleidoscope of images from their pasts show you the Key to Their Souls). The absolute worst of these — and it is very bad indeed — is that of Yorick himself. Some secret agent ties him up and offers him kinky S&M sex, then almost drowns him. But it’s all an intervention, you see, to help him overcome his death wish. Because he’s just that important that a secret society needs stage his elaborate sexual fantasies for him.

He is that important, of course. He’s the last man on earth! Vaughn talked in his recent TCJ interview about how Y started off as a kind of Penthouse fantasy — the story of the last guy on earth wandering around screwing willing, horny wenches. Vaughn was, of course, saying he had moved away from that, in particular by having Yorick be faithful (for the most part) to Beth, his girlfriend who he’s running across the world to find.

The thing is, though, that male continence in the face of plenty isn’t the opposite of a sexual fantasy. It’s a sexual fantasy, period. Having lots of opportunities to sleep with beautiful women and refusing is a fantasy of sexual and moral potency. The book, moreover, is Yorick’s story; all the men on earth are dead, but we’ve still got to hear about the quest for manhood of one self-absorbed guy. It’s like all the competition was killed just so that SNAG Yorick could get some “manly scars” and have the strength to not fall apart when his girlfriend dumps him. You can almost see the whole thing as Yorick’s apocalyptic rejection fantasy; Beth dumps him over the phone, and so he imagine a world where all the other men are dead (that’ll show her!) and he gets a long submerged romance with a super secret agent…who is tragically killed just before their relationships is consummated. 355’s murder at the hands of Alter, a really stupid Israeli villain, moments after she tells Yorick her real name, perfectly mirrors the manipulative moment at the beginning of the series when the apocalypse occurs right after Yorick asks his girlfriend to marry him. Yorick’s supposed to have grown up over the five years, but the series itself is in the same familiar masculine place, where it’s better to destroy the world than pledge your love.

Luckily for Yorick, the cards are stacked in his favor. He doesn’t have to do emotional intimacy. Instead, he can grow old as the wise, tragic figure, father of the world (via actual fatherhood, and through cloning) who never knew true love himself, dispensing crotchety knowledge to his younger selves. The last issue, which shows Yorick’s sad future and effectively mythologizes him, is a towering pile of monkey shit. The last page, with the word “Alas” scrawled over it, seems to sum up the series; it’s all about “poor Yorick,” a long rationale for a final sentimental male self-pity party.

Having said that…I certainly wish that mainstream comics looked more like this in general. I mean, for all its faults, this is competent genre literature, which reaches out effectively to a broad science-fiction/adventure audience. It’s weaknesses (sit-com repetition, easy sentimentality, cliched cliffhangers) feel more like those of television, say, than the insular clusterfuckery of super-hero comics. The art isn’t as good, but overall I liked this more than All Star Superman. If I’m going to read about the noblest man on earth, I’m happy to have it be somebody other than Clark Kent.