Wolverine Can’t Keep Up With the Fans
April 29th, 2011 by Esther Inglis-Arkell |So apparently there was some Wolverine storyline in which evil demons got into Wolverine’s brain and members of his team had to get transported into a physical representation of his mind in order to kill the demons and free him. Hilarity ensues, including the following scene:
This scene made it over to scans_daily, where people reacted thusly:
…That’s it? Those are his deepest, most secret, rawest sexual fantasies?
Jeez. 13-year-old fangirls publicly come up with far dirtier stuff than that all the time.
Well, I’m not sure about the exact age, but it’s true. I don’t even read Marvel, but I know that doesn’t scratch the surface of what is out there written by women. Reading it I have to say I rolled my eyes a little, but then I had to look at my reaction.
One major thing about this scene is, it’s a woman looking at it. And the woman’s response is, “I must die this instant.”
That moment brought me back to, I kid you not, The Devil Wears Prada. Yes, I saw that movie. In the movie, Anne Hathaway (the soon-to-be Catwoman), plays a serious journalism student who goes and gets a job at a fashion magazine, and is roundly mocked by Fashion People. The running gag is this: She’s fat. Any of you can google a picture of Anne Hathaway right now. Even for an actress, she’s very slender. And the people making the various fat jabs were fatter than her. They weren’t objectively fat. They were also slender. But they were fatter than Anne Hathaway.
There had to be someone who noticed this somewhere between script and screen, and you think these lines would have been re-written, just the same way a movie filled with jokes about a character’s blue eyes would change the line if the actor playing the character had brown eyes. But no one changed the lines. So a theater full of people, presumably none of them blind, saw several actresses look at a visibly skinnier actress and call her fat. The jokes made no sense, and yet they stayed in the movie. Why? Because they were Fashion People and she was Regular Jane, and so she had to be fatter than they were – even if the entire audience’s eyes were telling them that she wasn’t.
This is what that scene feels like. It’s pretty much beyond dispute that the ladies like the weird, or know the weird, or at the very least expect weirder than that from Wolverine. I don’t read Marvel so this lady might be particularly restrained. (Although, if she is, why is she looking in a door marked ‘sexual fantasies’?) It just seems like that has to be her reaction. Wolverine is the hard-bitten hero who’s been everywhere, done everything, no-nonsense, man of the world. He’s the guy with the Dark Side. The animalistic member of the X-Men. He has to have fantasies that shock people, no matter what. So she’s shocked. Otherwise Wolverine’s identity doesn’t work.
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Or maybe it was because she saw herself in Wolverine’s sexual fantasies and did not care for the idea? 😉
It would have worked a lot better if they had just shown her looking in the door, then her reaction, skipping that poorly drawn panel with all the ladies. That way, we could have used our own imagination to fill in the blanks…but no, the artist apparently thinks he’s a cheesecake whiz and gave us that.
The most disturbing thing in that room was Squirrel Girl. She’s what, 15?
Then again, Wolverine always did like ’em young…
I’m not sure what age SG is supposed to be, but didn’t Bendis make her and Logan being a past couple canon in a recent Avengers book?
Maybe Logan’s not as hard boiled and rough as we’d like to think? I know in my (purely anecdotal) experience, a girl I went out with who had all the signs of a “wild night” ended up being rather ordinary, while in another experience, the goodie-goodie preacher’s daughter had me doing things I never thought of before (and been afraid to bring up since).
As far as the panel goes, I agree with Johnny. I think they should have left it to our imagination… After all, I know what I would picture in Logan’s Sexual Fantasies room, and it sure isn’t fit to print (probably even under the MAX imprint).
Another thought:
What if that was just Logan’s “Foreplay Room”, and the real depravity was behind a door in that room? I find it hard to believe he’s got a “Sexual Fantasies” room that doesn’t have a Jean Grey look-alike in it.
Emma Frost first showed up wearing a bondage corset, panties, and fur coat. It’s hard to believe that much would shock her.
That’s Emma looking into that door right? Wouldn’t she find it more bothersome if a figment of her wasn’t in that room of any straight guy’s mind? With the image presented, I can’t help but feel her actual reaction should be, “Well, that’s kind of vanilla.”
This is broadly the problem with the depiction of sex in comics: the writers do not think things the whole way through.
This characters all have long, long histories that are (essentially) asexual. Those histories imply sexual attitudes. As David noted, there is nothing in that room that would even mildly perturb Emma Frost based on what we know of her. A better image to generate that reaction would be one image of Jean Grey after another.
I don’t get the problem so much. Of course there are two issues people have: Disappointment in portrayed perversion & confusion over the lady’s apparently inordinate reaction
I have no idea who dat lady, but I’m guessing she sees herself in there and doesn’t want to be part of that fantasy, regardless of how lame/tame.
As for the scene itself, it’s a pretty crappy fantasy if it starts off with everybody in media res coitus. Anticipation is titillation. Dude gotta at least pretend he’s there to fix the cable.
C’mon you *know* his fantasy reply to “Get in here you dirty little boy” was something like “But I’m just here to lay some pipe, ma’am”
First, I haven’t seen the movie in question, but isn’t it possible that the running joke of Anne Hathaway being called fat is precisely that she *isn’t* fat, and that’s just the fashion industry being awful? In much the same way as millions of perfectly healthy and even slender women across the country are tricked into believing they’re fat because they can’t fit into size 0 jeans?
Second, I read that scene to mean that Emma was basically just disgusted by the fact that the room was filled with her and other people she knew? I think the content of the sexual fantasy would be far, far less important than just the fact that someone you know has filled their head with sexual thoughts of you. (Which is ironic because this is Emma Frost, but still works.)
Third, Squirrel Girl has aged a bit in recent years. She is currently drawn to be somewhere in her early 20s.
@Tim O’Neil: Yeah, what I got that Emma was weirded out by Wolverine, who she has never, ever liked at all, having sex fantasies of any kind about her. I know that if somehow I found out that a coworker I disdained was imagining me like that, I would find it creepy.
Then again, knowing scans daily (unless it’s changed since the livejournal days) they were probably pretty disappointed by the fact that Daken wasn’t in there.
“It would have worked a lot better if they had just shown her looking in the door, then her reaction, skipping that poorly drawn panel with all the ladies.”
I agree with this sentiment entirely; the ideal would have been something like her opening the door, staring silently for one panel, staring silently with greater dismay for another panel, and then finally closing the door and walking away without ever speaking of this again.
But, hey, if they were really set on conveying just how messed up in the head Wolverine is, they could always have just done something like this. You know? Just to screw with us.
Is that actually Emma wandering around? From the armour and blades, I wondered if it wasn’t actually Magik or someone.
@Tim O’Neil: Sadly, no. In the movie they talk about how she can’t fit sample sizes, even when she can, and have her say she’s a size 8 while everyone else is a size 4. In the movie she’s actually supposed to be not fat, but ‘too fat for fashion’. Meanwhile, she’s the thinnest on screen.
To all else:
And wait – that’s Emma? The telepath who used to be a supervillain in a bondage-themed club and spent her life reading everyone’s mind? How is that room even a *surprise* for her?
Why is Jessica Jones there? And in costume? Does Wolverine even know her?
Once again the comments are on point. I think that this scene played out like a bad horror movie scene. Simply by showing it, the impact was lessened once we saw who was in the room… However, if the figures were “shadowed” our imaginations would have run crazy with this question: “Who was in that room that could make a gal like Emma shocked?”
@Anthony J. Rand: They’ve been on the New Avengers together forever. Plus when they first met back in the Pulse, he tried to drunkenly hit on her. She told him she had a boyfriend, leading to him smirking and jokingly asking who this boyfriend was. Once she said Luke Cage, Wolverine went stone faced and put that idea to bed.
I really think you’re misreading it.
Emma doesn’t seemed shocked to me, she is mortified that smelly, hairy Wolverine is fantasizing about HER.
“Kill me now” is being used in the embarrassed sense. “Whyyyy did I say that, kill me now.”
@Blankzilla: I suppose you could be right. It could just be that she’s featured.
I have to ask, though, do you really think, if it’s Emma, she wouldn’t know? I mean, I just read a comic where she reads a stranger’s mind and gets his pin number in about three seconds.
His Personal Identification Number number?
Sorry, sorry. Pet peeve…
Honestly, I think Emma would be more insulted if she *wasn’t* in there. She can A) read men’s minds, and B) first appeared in a corset and panties. She teaches teenage boys while wearing leather hot pants. I assume she’s comfortable being fantasized about.
Although I am quite disturbed by Squirrel Girl’s giant breasts.
I’m surprised Psychic Projection Emma is wearing something sensible.
Maybe she’s shocked over the banality of Logan’s fantasy? I agree that no redheads=not a complete sex fantasy when it comes to Logan. Mystique doesn’t count.
Johnny B.: you’ve got to lay the blame on Jason Aaron, not Daniel Acuna. Artists work from a full script these days, so I’m sure Aaron described exactly what’s shown there to the artist.
Yes, Squirrel Girl’s F-cups are disturbing.
The Squirrel Girl/Wolverine thing was a cheap shot by Bendis to needle Slott, and Aaron’s making it CANON? Come on!
@Dan Coyle: Bendis is a bigger wheel than both Slott and Aaron. Why wouldn’t it be canon?
Besides, the joke is that Squirrel Girl is a bigger deal than she should be. She beats Thanos and Dr. Doom and has at one point broken Logan’s heart.
How shocking! He fantasizes about friends, Co-workers & Exs! I’ve never heard of such a thing! Marvel better put the breaks on this kind of risque writing before they get in trouble!!!!
Heh, someone should photoshop in a substitution featuring one of the old scenes from Logan’s subconscious where there’s a fanged tree nursing a litter of radiators.
WTF what was that ever about anyway?
This discussion is pretty dead by now, but: Why Spiral?