I won’t pretend that anyone on this blog hasn’t read David’s post on Darwyn Cooke’s remarks about what it would take for him to jump back into mainstream comics.  The first sentence out of his mouth is this:

“I want them to stop catering to the perverted needs of forty-five year old men.”

He elaborates, citing the sex, violence, and general unwholesome behavior seen in mainstream comics continuity.  There are ninety-seven comments on the post, each with their take on how Mister Cooke’s words can be taken.  I think he expressed himself clearly and concisely, but I’m still not sure if I agree with him.

I don’t think I have any problem with people catering to the needs, perverted or not, of forty-five year old men.  In fact, I think some of the problem with comics is the fact that the big companies still cling to the notion that they don’t sell sex.  Through the nineties and the early two thousands we saw Wonder Woman’s costume creep up her butt cheeks until they were hanging out like Christmas ornaments with a ribbon between them, and why?  Because there was mainstream respectability to be maintained.  Evil Mary Marvel was the Woman of a Thousand Strategic Shadows for while, because DC comics doesn’t do porn.  Meanwhile Shield agents at Marvel are wandering around nude and painted blue, because if you have Victoria Hand and Maria Hill and Steve Rogers, you’re not going to waste them, but Marvel characters also don’t appear in porn.

In many ways, this seems like the worst of two worlds.  Mainstream continuity and art are hijacked by the need to make things as violent, suggestive, and sexually explicit as possible.  Meanwhile, those sexually explicit stories are constrained due to a need for the One Established Character not to push certain boundaries.  The result is a comic that seems to be walking an unpleasant line.  They put in as much as they can to serve those with, ah, less than literary needs, without alienating other fans.  Meanwhile they scale down as much of the sex and violence as they can without alienating the loyal pervs who make Rule 34 so well represented in comics.  It’s a stripper with pasties, a nude scene with a bad body double – it seems to satisfy no one.

Sometimes I wish that comics would finally take the plunge that they hint at with so many hardcore alternate universe versions of characters.  If there’s so much money in satisfying the perverted needs of forty-five year old men (and for that matter, forty-five year old women, and eighteen year old boys and teenage girls who would undoubtedly read about a teenage Batman who sparkles) then maybe it’s time to do it.  There isn’t any doubt that it would be lucrative, and taking away the constraints of the continuity and the increasingly nebulous age ratings system might give those artists who want to pursue a more violent, sexual, or obscenity-laden direction the freedom to write really good stories.  Meanwhile regular continuity can stop trying to split the difference between hardcore and all-ages stories. 

I realize that this won’t happen.  Big companies, owned by bigger companies, have images of these icons to maintain, and pornography, extreme violence, and obscenity don’t fit those images.  It may even be wrong-headed.  Movies have ratings for extreme violence, but that doesn’t mean that the violence level that’s considered appropriate for younger kids isn’t being pushed.  And it’s not like the availability of porn has meant that movies and books are more likely to showcase serious artistic endeavors.  At the same time, this system seems to be satisfying nobody.  Maybe it’s time for a change.

About The Losers DVD from Netflix.

Twenty minutes of previews that I can neither fast forward through nor skip and then the main menu doesn’t have any chapter selections?  When did that become a thing?  I noticed that on two separate Matt Damon movies.  When did people become too cheap to include even a chapter selection option on their DVDs?  This is a travesty!  What ever happened to standards.  We switched to DVDs so we didn’t have to watch all that crap to get to the part where they play “Don’t Stop Believing.”

I can’t believe I have to watch an entire episode of 30 Rock in order to wait through the previews on a DVD.  I hate the future.

So many times, when I read Secret Six, I wonder why on earth I’m reading that kind of book.  This is not a slam of Secret Six, which has a devoted following and has been a consistently good book.  It’s just that, from the start, it’s been the kind of book that just isn’t for me.  It’s got torture, murder, despair, tragedy, and a bunch of people being mean to each other for kicks.  Every single story arc has the Six turning on each other in some way or another.  It never, ever fails.  I should not be liking it.

And yet I do.  Part of it is the creative stories and the constant quips, courtesy of Gail Simone.  The book is also loaded with multi-dimensional, smart, fun, and different female characters.  Pretty much all of them manage the difficult trick, in fiction, of being female but acting human.  No dumb blondes, no mindless seductresses, no personality-less token tough girls, just a bunch of nutty characters, just like the men.

Most of all, though, I like Secret Six because it’s a team book in which the team very clearly cares about each other.  And I like it because it’s not a generic ‘caring’ the way most team books do it.  The Six don’t get along, they don’t understand each other, and they don’t understand reality outside of their insane world.  They do, however, want to make each other happy, and when they try, it leads to wonderful moments.  One of those moments is in Secret Six #25. 

Black Alice is a teenage girl who can steal anyone’s powers by looking into their eyes.  One day she used her powers on her father.  Shortly afterwards, her father got cancer.  She joins the Six to make money in order to treat him, even though she’s clearly out of her depth.

Floyd Lawton is Deadshot, a member of the Six, and a character who was obviously created back when Floyd was a common name.  He, along with the rest of the Six, hears about this in one of the issues.  Not much is made of this.  In issue #25, he goes to Alice’s father’s doctor, and threatens him with a gun until the man tells him all about the case.  When the doctor confirms that Alice was probably the cause of her father’s cancer, Floyd picks up the phone and tells the doctor that he will call Alice and tell her that he knows what caused the cancer and it definitely wasn’t her.  He will also tell her that everything is going to be okay.

There is at least on thing practically wrong with this plan.  Morally, there are many things wrong with it, depending on your particular moral compass.  The point, though, is that Deadshot sees the girl suffering, decides to help, and does it in a crazy way.  David and I have talked before about really good relationships between people who antagonize each other but also love each other – Cassandra and David Cain would be one of those.  The unimaginative writer writes them as at each other’s throats until such time as one of them is about to do something too brutal, at which point they suddenly stop because they care so much about each other.  Secret Six does it right.  It shows a bunch of relationships in which people who are imperfect, trying to help each other in imperfect ways.  It gives you both a warm feeling inside and a better understanding and appreciation for the characters.  I really wish there was more of it, but I love what I’ve got.

So Batman has a son conceived under unfortunate continuity circumstances.  And this son becomes Robin while displaying no interest in justice, goodness, or preserving life.  He’s an eight year old who kills people, and throws in some attempted murder of the hero’s family.

He provides a permanent tie to one of the most annoying families in comics: a father who is always causing trouble for no reason while trying to achieve his goal of nobody knows, and a daughter whose one goal in life seems to be proving Freud right about that whole ‘penis envy’ theory.

Meanwhile the kid is shown, at eight or ten, to be better at everything than everyone.  Occasionally he provides some flashes of amusement, because he’s rude about it.  However, mostly he’s a more violent, more angry, more disrespectful version of Batman.

Really not my cup of tea, but at least he was a cup of some sort of boiling liquid and that proved useful last month when he was thrown in the face of The Joker.  Finally, finally, finally, the guy who can mow down anything and feel good while doing so started something I’ve been hoping was going to happen for years.

Finally!  Finally, in Batman and Robin #13, Damian did something I can approve of.  And don’t tell me that the Bat universe would be poorer for losing The Joker.  Go ahead and tell me about one good Joker story from the last twenty years.

But he’s Damian, and his primary purpose for existing seems to be bugging me, so I was not surprised to see the preview for Batman and Robin #14.

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A little while ago, I posted an entry about my decision to temporarily drop the Birds of Prey comic, due to a cliffhanger plot element.  Last month, after an epic separation of one issue, I jumped right back on board, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next issue due to a different cliffhanger.  At scans_daily, and in conversations with other comics people, I noticed that many people felt the same.

Tastes differ, and what makes me sit up and take notice of a comic is going to make another person throw it across the room.  But the conversations got me thinking about how cliffhangers work, and what separates the good from the bad.

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Three November covers and three words to describe each of them.

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A new year, a new team, a newly-shifted love interest.

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I’m back, baby.  Shrugging off what I have to say was the hurtful realization that 4thletter had its best month ever when I wasn’t blogging for it (I can only assume that you all kept coming because I was still in the podcasts), I am back, and a month behind in my Batgirl recaps.  Let’s start catching up right now.

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I think that, over the last few years, I’ve had the same emotional journey with Oliver Queen as most of his love interests did.  It added a little meta to the experience of reading.  I went from being charmed, to really enjoying the fun, to wishing he hadn’t just done that, to wondering why he kept doing that, and finally it came time to toss his ring on the floor and stride out.

I was pretty much done with the book, despite remarking to David that the funny, magical forest in the middle and Green Arrow as a direct Robin Hood metaphor was right up my alley until I saw the last page of Green Arrow #1.

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This is a difficult entry for me to word, because a supposition has been set down by feminists about why women are portrayed as victims, and I don’t disagree with it.  Not one bit.  At the same time, I have some thoughts that I hope will broaden the understanding of why women are the victims in fiction, but that I think could also be used as an excuse.  So I’m trying to make my point clear, without any confusion.

It’s pretty obvious that in fiction, especially in horror or action genre’s, women are sent in to be captured, to scream and be horrified, to look pitiful when they’re being used as a bargaining chip, and in many cases to die.  They’re the victims who wring the most drama from the situation, and they engage the audience’s sympathy more than men do when they’re put in peril.  Some people argue that this decision to endanger women shows that women are considered more valuable than men.  If a guy’s life is on the line, the audience doesn’t care as much.  That argument never worked for me.  If a female character’s most valuable when being a hung over an abyss, female characters aren’t in a good position.  The feminist argument is that women are most often put in the action genre to be prizes and plot points, and because there is something in people that thrills to see women in danger.

Like I said, I don’t disagree with that.

I think, however, that women in danger is compelling because of the way that those women can behave.  Any horror movie trailer will include the blood-curdling shrieks of women.  They’ll scream, cry, beg for their lives.  They’ll whimper when they’re afraid.  They’ll rock back and forth in shock.  They’ll go through a massive range of emotions.

And, more often than not, at the end of that horror movie, the woman will pull herself together, beat the hell out of the villain, and walk away.  (There are exceptions.  Some modern horror movies like to kill off everyone, but they suck.  They do.)

Men in horror movies, or action movies, or comics, or fiction, don’t tend to do the same.  Don’t get me wrong.  I think that actual men in danger would react every bit as emotionally as women do.  No one’s whimper-proof.  It’s just that audiences don’t accept it the same way that they do women.

A woman can be a screaming, quivering wreck and still be tough as nails a few scenes later.  If a man does the same thing, shrieking and begging and going to pieces, its rare that his character is given the same respect, even if he does overcome his weaknesses and become the hero.  Women are given the full range of human emotion.  Men are tough guy stereotypes.  It’s no wonder that women in peril are more interesting to watch.

I’ve always thought that what modern men need most is a ‘women’s movement’ of their own.  The women’s movement made it acceptable for women to not only retain the ‘feminine’ traits that they were always allowed to express, but also pick up any and all masculine traits as well.  They can grovel in the dirt *and* grind their enemies into the dust.  Men, on the other hand, have relatively circumscribed behavior.  Although they do tend to have more power, and get more respect, when they show masculine emotions, when they step away from traditionally masculine traits, they get a tidal wave of disapproval.  It’s an effective carrot and stick strategy, and unless there’s a line of defense for men who men who step outside the masculine sphere, it will continue to limit men’s behavior both in fiction and in life.

Before anyone says that the continued use of women as victims is some kind of sign of female empowerment, or of female dominance, lets remember one more time what we’re talking about.  Screaming, begging, weeping, shaking, and breaking down are signs of weakness.  There’s no question that they’re understandable, but comic books and action movies are power fantasies.  Like women being ‘valued’ as long as they’re being threatened, women having the freedom to be weak is a sign of the social order.  I remember a few years ago, Marvel published a comic in which a female hero was brutalized on camera, for the entertainment of a bunch of villains.  The woman screamed and fought ineffectually, and the film ended to general approval.  Marvel said that the comic was intended to be horrifying and to sicken the readers, not to glorify female suffering.  I believe that that was true.

I also believe that Captain America wouldn’t be in a scene like that.  Or Tony Stark.  They might be beat up on camera, but they wouldn’t be in a scene like *that*.  Screaming, begging, weeping, coming apart, being beaten down as they try to fight – this is not something male heroes do.  At least, not male heroes who will continue to be marketable.  Yes, in general women get a fuller range of expression, but it’s important to remember that they get that range of expression in order to be allowed to behave in ways that would be too degrading, humiliating, and ruinous for male characters.  Being skewered on a hook to tug the audience’s heartstrings is not a sign of social equality.  Especially not when they’re alone out there.