season of the bitch

This post on girl power in comics, from Retconning My Brain, is a seriously awesome piece that made me want to read a lot of these books (Power Girl, Batgirl, etc.) more than I already did.

The original “Girl power,” a sugared-up, popified version of what Riot Grrl was, hit when I was in my last years of high school. The late 90s, which brought us post-communications deregulation prefab pop, but also at least sort of acknowledged that women wanted pop culture that was their own, and that there was more to it than fighting over a man on a soap opera. It brought us Xena and Buffy, too.

I’ve never been the type of feminist who is terribly bothered by the word “girl”–if prodded, I can even conjure up a defense of using it as a word that doesn’t contain the word “man,” although that’s really not any less useless to me than spelling woman with a y. At the ripe old age of almost-thirty, I still refer to myself as a girl and usually anyone else who is my age or younger. I’ve even been scolded for it by friends male and female. But I can’t really help it, and I wonder if the twin specters of Riot Grrl and Girl Power are to blame.

I was thinking about Girl Power, while I was writing my generally-happy reactions to the stories, and I remember learning about third wave feminism and discussing Girl Power in my class, and the positives and negatives. You had shows with strong (Xena) or complex (Ally McBeal) female leads, but they were wearing short short skirts (and some of them could have used a sandwich, ahem). You had the Spice Girls saying friends come first (in a way more empowering way than bros before hos, yo) but most of their popular songs were still about finding love or something. I think. I can’t actually admit in public to listening to the Spice Girls. You know.

So. Is the rash of “Girl” comics a revival of this kind of feminism-lite? There certainly has been a trend lately, especially with DC books, toward female leads. Batwoman, Batgirl, Gotham City Sirens (and yes, Marvel Divas) and many more that I’m probably missing because this just isn’t really my area of expertise. The pop universe doesn’t seem to be swinging that way in the dramatic fashion it did in the Spice Girls era, but we do have Twilight and other pop-culture phenomena that are aimed at girls bringing a new demographic to geek culture–check out Vaneta Rogers’ awesome piece on The Fangirl Invasion.

Either way, I have to agree with this statement, again from Retconning My Brain:

What it came down to for me this week was that it was nice to buy a bunch of comics that are led my female superheroes, who are super with or without their male counterparts, but don’t exist in a vacuum of femaleness or solely for the gaze of the male reader. They’re there to kick some ass and be super.

Amen to that.

Yeah, that’s not true at all, actually, but it neatly sums up the type of attitude I regularly hear and see in the comics world and the literature about comics–if by literature you mean articles and blog posts written 9 to 1 by men.

Anyway, Jennifer de Guzman wrote a post several months back that I just stumbled upon via this post on Amazon Princess (which I found via When Fangirls Attack), and it articulates something that I’ve never really thought about before, but makes perfect sense.

As I wrote in my reply, I am kind of astounded that some men don’t see why physical empowerment would clearly be attractive for women. I think it’s intriguing to note that women often like the hot women who kick ass as much, if not more, than men do. Here’s what I think is behind that: As women, we are nearly constantly aware of physical threats. And those threats often are of being violated sexually. When I used to go to campus for night classes and people warned me to “be careful,” what they are saying was, essentially, “avoid getting raped.”

Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened? What if all the rage you feel about women being victimized and brutalized could be channeled into pure, righteous ass-kicking? And, because you’re a woman, you could possibly do that ass-kicking without being seen as a testosterone Steven-Seagal-esque meathead. Ass-kicking fantasies for men are more about proving and retaining power, I think. For women, they’re about finding and asserting power when they’re not expected to have any.

This resonated with me on so many levels. I’ve taken kickboxing, krav maga and muay thai at different times in my life, and they always did make me feel more confident and yes, sexier, but I’ve always attributed that to feeling healthier and stronger. Maybe I thought a bit about the idea that I might be able to kick someone’s ass if they harassed me as a component, but only in a very general sense.

Yet Guzman’s point is that a superheroine can be sexy and because she can kick someone’s ass, she doesn’t have to apologize or fear for herself. There’s no need for the tradeoff–sexy woman needs powerful man–because she is both. Her sexuality is no longer something to be feared, but something she is free to display if she wants to without worry of repercussions.

In media for so many years, female characters were simple projections of what men wanted to see. Still, women gravitated toward certain characters, and as more women create comics (and movies and TV series and and and) we argued that yes, we do want superheroines. And maybe we do want them to be pretty.

Also, perhaps this explains why I was never one of those who was really bothered by superheroine costumes. Sure they’re unrealistic. But could they also be a gleeful middle finger to everyone who wants to tell a little girl that what she’s wearing is “inappropriate” or that bad things will happen to her if she dresses in a way that attracts male attention?

(Of course, we could debate about the rather narrow view of what is “sexy” that is still put forth by superheroines, but that’s another post.)

Those of you who read the first Phonogram trade and missed those thoroughly despicable yet compelling characters in the series’ second incarnation will be thrilled to know that “We Share Our Mother’s Health” is indeed the story of Emily Aster. A story of Emily Aster, really, because Emily strikes me as a woman with many, many stories. It’s part of her charm, if charm was something that she could be bothered to have.

I relate to her, though she’s nasty and frightened and working as hard as she can to keep up with something shallow and silly to leave behind the person she was, the person who hurt. I want to know just how Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie got into the head of a woman stuck trying to stay as pretty as the pretty young things around her, clinging to a rock’n'roll youth that she’s losing fast because she cannot relate to the adult world she’s supposed to be part of.

(Read on.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

According to my email from Planned Parenthood this morning, it’s National Condom Week. They sent out a link to their playlist of their favorite condom videos on YouTube, but I found something even better:

This is from Neil Gaiman’s “Death Talks About Life,” a PSA comic about HIV and condom use, from 1994. It’s out of print now, but was collected in Death: The High Cost of Living, which was one of the first comics I ever bought. Or you can read the whole thing at that link. (Also will soon be in an Absolute Death from Vertigo, so for those of you who are fangirls like me, rejoice!)

While I’m referencing holidays and comics writers, it is my duty to repost the sentiments of the wicked Warren Ellis:

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

I’m still recovering from driving home for the holidays, and am drowning a bit in things I need to get done, but I have a few things up at other places that I wanted to cross-post here in case anyone was interested.

My piece on Gaza, at GlobalComment, which took me far too long and far too much agonizing to write.

I’m an American Jew, and when I state that fact, I invite a wealth of assumptions, not all of them anti-Semitic in nature. Renee Martin recently addressed the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, so I don’t have to (though I would like to note that Modern Mitzvot has a very good point too).

Daniele Archibugi pointed out that upcoming elections in Israel and Palestine most likely have something to do with the timing and force of the Israeli attack. But being in the U.S., I have to see it through the lens of the election we just had, here, and one of the Republican party’s favorite anti-Obama attacks.

And on a slightly lighter note, I’ve found the definitive piece of Bush-era fiction, and it’s a comic.

I picked up DMZ #1 way back in 2005 and reviewed it for Best Shots (wow, I’ve been doing this way too long). Since then, I’ve read and dropped many other monthly comics, but DMZ has stayed on my pull list. I’ve given it as a gift, made my professors read it, and flogged it mercilessly on this very site.

But aside from being an excellent story, it’s a story that at its core is about all the major questions of the Bush era.

DMZ picks all of us up and drops us into the middle of a war zone. But Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (and some excellent guest artists) transfer that war back home, to a place we all know. New York City is the most familiar landscape in America even to people who haven’t been there, and it was the central point of the crises we’ve dealt with in the last eight years…

DMZ holds us all responsible for the failures of our government under Bush. No one gets a free pass. Each time you think you know who Wood is pointing the finger at, you find it twisting around to point squarely back at you.

I promise to write something for you guys soon. I miss you.

It’s my holiday break, and I’m celebrating it by working at the bike shop. In between battles with chains and grease, and catching up with friends, I haven’t had too much time for blogging or for the news–I’ve missed Maddow for two weeks straight and am sad about it!

I have been keeping up with the Blog@Newsarama, because, well, it’s my job, kids. Yesterday I wrote a post about webcomics that prompted a bunch of responses, so I thought I’d repost here and see if any of my regular readers have a favorite webcomic.

So I’ve been thinking about doing a weekly webcomic column here, but it occurred to me that I’m not actually that up on the webcomic scene. That said, I’ve got a few thoughts on the whole concept, as well as a couple of favorites.

I wrote below that print is dying, and I’m sticking by that assertion. However, to clarify, I would like to note that newspapers will be the first to go, and that magazines and books will be sticking around far longer. It just isn’t pleasant to read long articles or books on a computer screen, and I’ve only met one person who owned a Kindle–and that guy also had three cell phones and two laptops just in his bag.

Comics, I think, will maintain a print following for quite a while. The art looks better on paper, and comics fans tend to be the type of people who like the tangible items to collect. We’re pack rats. We see nothing wrong with buying all the single issues of a book, the trades, and then the fancy reissues when those come out, too.

Still, the Web has a place in the comics community, and not just as a place for talking about comics.

Webcomics seem to come in a couple of varieties (bear in mind that, as I noted above, I’m not really up on the webcomics world, and I’d love your input). There’s the comic strip, which seems to be taking over for newspaper comic strips the way Web sites are taking over for newspapers. Most of you are probably familiar with them, and some of your favorite print comic creators do webcomic strips too–I happen to love Becky Cloonan’s Comic Attacks.

These are bite-size comics that don’t tie into a longer narrative, and can be consumed quickly, like an mp3 or a blog post. Many media critics, Warren Ellis among them, have noted that the Web is a place for short bits of information. Ellis called it “burst culture.” Webcomics like this fit perfectly into that picture. » Read the rest of this entry «

My review is up at BUST.

I wanted to go dancing earlier today, after shoving off the weight of term papers on weightier subjects, and then I read this comic, and now I REALLY want to go dancing.

I didn’t read the first Phonogram but I read (and BUST-ed) Suburban Glamour and got a super-comics-crush on Jamie McKelvie’s sugar-candy-sweet art. But The Singles Club is even more of a love letter to pop music, dancing, and being a young, sassy girl in a club with just enough confidence in yourself and your moves that, well, it’s just a little bit magic…

This issue is set in a club with just three rules: 1. No Boy Singers, 2. You Must Dance, and 3. No Magic. Anyone who’s ever been to a dance club can guess that the third rule isn’t going to last very long, especially once you’ve met Penny B., a ‘phonomancer’ (read it and it’ll make sense) with super-sweet hair (that’s her on the cover above) and a bubbly smile and a love for dancing that comes through even in still images–no hipster shuffle for her, but all-out rock that doesn’t care what the uber-cool DJs think of her.

As usual, read the whole damn thing.

I love comics. I always love comics, but sometimes I have a day that reminds me just how much I love comics. That was totally redundant, but I don’t care. A little bit of joy goes a long damn way.

are here. This one’s for matttbastard, violet and pidomon.

So as you may or may not know, I’ve become addicted to Rachel Maddow. Not watching her yet? Here’s a taste:

In any case, though I love Rachel (and to a lesser extent, Olbermann), I must admit that this ain’t journalism and it isn’t a step forward for the journalistic profession as such.

It’s punditry, of course, just like FOX News. The dangerous thing about it, just like the dangerous thing about the blogosphere, is that it leads you to think everyone is thinking like you.

I watch Rachel for the laughs, and because she is in fact quite bright and backs up her sources. Because she’s a young, smart, liberal woman who’s an out lesbian with her own prime-time news commentary show, and that makes me happy.

I don’t believe in “objective” journalism. I believe in transparency. I believe that it’s impossible to hide your opinion, to pretend that you don’t have a horse in the race. If you’re a human being, you’re going to have an opinion, you’re going to be swayed one way or another. It’s just not possible. And thus I think that it’s better to be out in the open about it.

Still, I get my news from NPR, which of any American news outlet seems to come the closest to the “objective” ideal. That doesn’t mean they don’t call out bullshit when they see it–listen to the hilarity when actual lipstick was applied to an actual pig. Even objectivity doesn’t mean some sort of mythic balance between two sides.

It should mean finding the truth.

Anyway, I appreciate Rachel Maddow because she usually has backup for her sources, and her opinions are clearly that–opinions.

My dream media landscape would include much more public funding for NPR and PBS, enough to make them truly competitive news sources. Because not-for-profit news is the only way we’re going to get truly disinterested (at least financially–the reporters and producers will always be human and thus never truly disinterested) news. Then MSNBC and FOX and whoever else wants to get into the game can put out whatever kind of news and commentary they want, because there would be something to check it against.

Of course, the calls of liberal bias on NPR wouldn’t stop, not when Republicans have found it such an effective campaign strategy. But a recent study (Kull, Ramsay and Lewis, “Misperceptions, The Media, and the Iraq War”) found that NPR and PBS consumers had the fewest misperceptions about the Iraq war–and that having those misperceptions contributed to the likelihood of supporting the war, and of voting for Bush.

Anyway, that’s my dream.

Most of you regular readers know that I’m working on my master’s in journalism. Yet very little of what I do currently is actually journalism. I blog. I write op-eds for Global Comment. I write about comic books, movies, and pop music. Very little of that is real journalism. I suppose that when I do an actual interview with a comics writer (like this one) that might count, but I don’t really flatter myself that it has a huge effect on the world.

Not to denigrate the impact of art–I think art and music, literature and film can have a huge impact on the world, and it’s one of the reasons that I return over and over again to writing fiction. Willow Wilson’s AIR and Brian Wood’s DMZ, Warren Ellis’s BLACK SUMMER and Alan Moore’s V FOR VENDETTA and WATCHMEN all could conceivably change people’s minds about political issues, and for that comics are as valid as any other format. But when I’m writing about them? At best I’m a critic, at worst a glorified fangirl.

I’d love to do real journalism when I get out of school. Love to go write for one of the heavy magazines and do long, in-depth investigative pieces that require months of work at a time.

But it ain’t what I do now.

And it ain’t what Rachel Maddow is doing, either. Or Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity or Brit Hume. At least not most of the time.

I just realized that I haven’t updated. I’ve been working on this and that, writing school stuff and writing for other places, so I guess I just felt like I’d updated more recently than I have.

It’s a busy, busy week this week. My sister’s birthday is today, so I’m taking her out for dinner tonight, and then getting a good night’s sleep because it’ll be my last until Sunday.

Most importantly, tomorrow night is DEBATE NIGHT. I will be purchasing more cheap champagne and live-twittering. Going to see if I can change my Twitter widget to update in the main blog area instead of in my sidebar, so those of you who don’t stay up to watch the hilarity can read it all the next day.

Apparently, the format of the debate is going to favor Palin–no follow-up questions. I’ve elaborated several times as to why I think that this will also help Biden–he’s got to answer the damn question, and won’t have much time to snark at Palin. She, on the other hand, will be able to make her own self look, well, clueless.

I stood up for the woman in the beginning–certainly not for her policies, but at least for her not being as dumb as people wanted to think. But as time has gone on, while I still don’t think she’s dumb, she certainly has proven herself to be willfully uninformed. I still won’t compare her to the much-maligned Dan Quayle. We’ve got another one much closer: George W. Bush.

Remember Bush sneering at a journalist translating languages for him? Or his many mispronunciations or confusions of foreign officials (I seem to remember a story about Prime Minister Poutine? Oh, ye gods.) Remember Bush defining the word “Sovereignty” as “it’s sovereign”?

This kind of arrogant, oppressive ignorance seems to be fading from popularity, as Obama’s poll numbers seem to indicate. One of the things I do like about Obama is his tendency, from all reports, to sit back and listen when other people are talking, and to be willing to learn. Now, since by all accounts Palin is cramming for her debate like a high schooler for the SATs, one would assume that she’ll have learned something by then. After all, I spent 3 hours Monday morning boning up on my economic policy and all I had was Google and a friendly debate through IM. (I don’t have a solution to the problem, but I like the one Bernie Sanders proposed–surprise, surprise.)

Point being, if she wanted to learn this stuff,  it’s out there. She’s clearly not a stupid woman–she managed to get elected governor of Alaska without a dynasty behind her to shoehorn her into the seat. But she certainly didn’t count on being quizzed on federal-level policy this soon into her career, and it is pretty sad that even as a governor of a state she didn’t find it necessary to learn it.

Anyway, I’m honing my snark for tomorrow night. Until then, if you miss me, you can check out my Paul Newman piece, my first debate piece, my bailout piece, etc. at GlobalComment (plus read Renee’s stuff there, she’s excellent) and a bit of lighter fare: Janes in Love review at BUST and Black Summer review at Newsarama. And a bunch of junk on Tumblr.