JYD Still <3 Hela (Despite what I talked about yesterday)

It's not all doom and gloom costume wise. Yesterday a picture was painted that suggested newer reinterpretations of costumes were all about the sexualisation of the character. Not true. Have a look at this picture from Yoshida and Tocchini's pretty interesting Thor: Son of Asgard.

Nice. The skirt thing is intersting and
there may only be the one set of hat antlers
but I think that works. The leather is also suitable
for both battling other Aesir and working on Naglfar.

See? This shows that a costume can be redesigned without being pointlessly sexified and still remain not only sensible for the character, but also awesome. We all win.

(Of course, the issue in which this appears is a retelling of one of Hela's earliest appearances that completely reverses what is awesome about Sif, another female character from the Thor cast, so we can't celebrate it too much. - Captioning John)

*sigh*

Nice costume though.

Hey there Captioning John, can you help us out with something that shows us the awesome of Hela without being tainted by anything negative at all?

Sure, I think I've got something in the bag here. Hmm, would sir like to see something in Simonson?

Oh, lay it on me!

Allow me to present the Queen of the Dead ripping Thor's face off.

And that's why she rules 2 of the 9 realms. You know the only other person who gets 2? Odin. If we had someone like Hela as head of state instead of Liz, I'd be a staunch monarchist.

Thought Provoking Stuff

I read several comic blogs. I enjoy it almost as much as reading comics. I do. And on rare occassions I enjoy it more. Today is one of those times. Before I get to what I want to talk about I just want to give you all a link to something that Kalinara wrote about the Greatest Green Lantern of all. Pretty, Fizzy Paradise is a fantastic blog that features on my Rolodex of Awesome over to the right there so take some time and go read. Even you non-comic chaps should go look if only for the fact that it's very well written. Now I place comic blogs into one four categories. These aren't entirely definitive and all of the blogs I read do stray into other categories but this is my loose classification system.

1) Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin. A category of it's own. Reading comic blogs without reading MSPR would be like studying Maths but without algebra. I don't know if he was the first or not but as far as I'm concerned, he's been retconned into being the first.

2) The Big Monkey Crew. Straight forwardly enough this category includes the guys who do the Big Monkey Podcast: Scip, Devon, Jon, Jon and Ben. They're like an Avengers or Justice League type blogging team.

3) The Awesome. These are the ones that that don't really fit into any of the other categories and as I said previosuly, all the blogs I read stray into awesome many times but I generally fit blogs like The ISB, Polite Dissent and Dave's Long Box.

4) Feminism. And this is where we find Pretty, Fizzy Paradise, Written World and Ami Angelwings' Super Cute Rants Of DOOOM XD for example. People who know me are no doubt familiar with my love/hate relationship with feminism (love the subject, hated my lecturers*) so it's not particularly surprising that I read and enjoy them.

Y'see, the category 4 blogs are just as entertaining as 1 through 3 but they also raise serious points that need addressing. It's good to excercise your mind once in a while and these blogs and bloggers seem to have taken to heart the lessons that all comics teach us every issue. (Well, most comics. OK, some comics.) Fighting the good fight. Righting wrongs. Standing up for principles. They inspire and educate.

Which neatly brings me on to what I really want to talk about tonight. Ami recently wrote an interesting guest column about the hypersexualisation of superheroines, making specific reference to the unbalanced sexiness of costumes. Something we can't deny happens at all. Now, this got me thinking and actually inspired me to see if I can contribute anything equally thought-provoking to the interweb.

It turns out I can't.

But what I can do is say that yeah, superheroines are annoyingly hypersexualised and what sucks the most about that is that it's got worse over time. You'd think that as society has progressed things would have become much better in this respect. Wrong. And I'll show you this in the only way that we can here at This Sentence No Verb: with everyone's favourite minor Thor villain.

JYD Loves Hela (But not always her costume choices)

First off we'll start with a base. Now I'm not going to go all Kirby on you and throw out some Journey Into Mystery panel because that'd be too obvious and we've already seen enough of the Kirby style with the usual Hela posts. Here's Hela as she appeared during Simonson's Thor run.

Simonson and Buscema's The Mighty Thor Vol 1 #374

Clearly Kirby inspired we've got the classic death Goddess look with the cool hat, mad cape and black and green armour/bodysuit. This costume looks cool but I wouldn't say that it's sexualised. That's the costume of someone who's going kick your head in. Straight forward armour type stuff for the torso, leggings and boots with greaves. This is both practical and fashionable and is in fact what Hela should always look like. Some people have different ideas though. Let's jump forward to more recent comics.

Jurgens and JRjr's Thor Vol 2 #2

Right. Here the costume is in fact closer to the original Kirby look but there are one or two things that suggest things are changing. The costume itself isn't that bad but there seems to be more emphasis on the skintight spandex and less on the mad cape. I can live with that though, that's just an aesthetic choice. After all, it's not mandated that the main focus of her costume should be her freaking magical cape that makes her so phenomenally powerful. Ahem. I love JRjr's stuff, really I do but here Hela is starting to look a little...off. It can get worse though. Ready for a jump?

Rodi and Ribic's Loki #1

Whoa! This miniseries was great and the art is top quality but...dude! That's quite a departure! Good news is that we have the big cape back along with a Simonson style cowl but is a bustier and thigh length boot combination really a good choice for someone who spends 50% of her time in the frozen, snowy wasteland of Niffelheim? I don't care that her cloak grants her near immortality and immunity to poisons, diseases and conventional injury - she's going to get a chiil. Also, is that much bare skin sensible when you've got a hectic shipbuilding schedule to keep? Sure, it's made out of fingernails but there's got to be buckets of tar involved in any maritime construction. What we have here is utterly pointless sexualisation of a character. How has putting Hela in that get up added to the story? Would the narrative have suffered if she was in the Kirby costume? Showing us Hela's cleavage is just pandering to this notion that all women in comics have to look sexy for the fanboys. Thing is though, there has been worse. Steel yourselves for this one.

Oeming, Berman and Divito's Thor Vol 2 #84

Dude, not cool. DNC. Land now people. Land now. This is so shockingly upsetting that I don't know where to begin. Cape and Hat are there which is what we want to see but don't think you can fool us by going for a "Hey, it's nearly the same as the Kirby look with the black on top of the green!" vibe. We can see through the ploy (And I'm surprised that we can't see through the costume. Only one step away.) and we're not impressed. Again we have a bustier type affair so emphasis is focussed on breasts which is highlighted further by that weird strip of material that connects the torso to the...dog collar. I think that the worst thing though is that the black-on-green stuff looks like a thong, stockings and suspenders. Did Volla take the cloak down to the launderette and stop off on the way back at Ann Summers to pick up some...extras for the boss? I know that it is convention that in superhero fiction underwear is often worn on the outside but I didn't think it applied to that type of underwear. You'd expect someone to be dressed like that in Yes Mistress magazine - not in a comic. By doing things like that you're putting style over substance. Objectifying Hela does not make her "edgy" or "modernised" it just means you're not giving your female characters any kind of depth. They've just been reduced to eye candy.

Y'know, I was going to actually mention that there is something good in that panel from my point of view, and that's the clear referencing of the Hand of Glory but thinking about it, that just makes it worse. By giving us a look at one of Hela's obscure powers it shows that you know the character and just can't be bothered to use her properly.

Obviously I'm coming at this from my own fanboy entitlement perspective - if you do things like this to characters I love then I'm going to pick up on it. Thing is, you can apply this to any female character - Wonder Woman, Black Cat, Supergirl or whoever. Dial it back people. Characters in comics are there to be heroic or villainous regardless of gender and this should be the main concern. Don't sacrifice quality at the altar of the male gaze. If hypersexualisation doesn't serve the character or narrative then just don't do it.

Just don't.



*Also Vagina dentata in relation to Jaws. Jaws is not my subconscious fear of castration but my very conscious fear of massive sharks that would eat me.

God Bless Captain America

Word. Yet another entirely inadequate opening. Starting things like this is always the hardest. Let's just get right to it, as the actress said to the bishop.

Ouch. That was spectacularly weak.

Ok, so if you actually listened to me and started reading Jon Carey's Facedown In The Gutters then you'd know that we're about to come to the end of the Top Ten Marvel and DC characters as voted for by readers of FITG. It's been a long ride and the tensions has really been getting to me with this one. We only have the top two from each list to go now and I'm pretty sure that I know who these 4 people are going to be. For the Marvel side we've yet to see Spider-Man or Captain America and for DC it's Batman and Robin. And it's got me worried.

I think it's pretty cool that Batman and Robin are still to come and what would be even more awesome would be if Tim Drake got placed higher than Bruce Wayne. It won't be that surprising if he doesn't but I'm holding out for a little miracle of taste. What I'm worrying about is "What if Spider-Man beats Captain America?"

Now I'm a Spidey-Fan. Always have been and always will be no matter how many Clone Sagas or Sins Past we get. But Cap should win. Now, a lot of people who don't read comics don't "get" Captain America. They see him as a ridiculous symbol of that United States flag-saluting-we're-number-one-brash-tourist-gun-toting- insanity brand of patriotism that so many people around the world find so frightening. He's not. Captain America is all the things about America that people love, be they big or small. He's Mark Twain and Cheers, liberating Europe and BBQ sauce, big melting pot, boundless enthusiasm and a written constitution. And most importantly of all, the thing that sums up why Captain America represents all that is great about the US is very straightforward and it's amazing that more people don't pick up on it straight away - he carries a shield, not a sword. Captain America saves lives.

That makes me want to salute too.

A little bit ranty there, I know, but it gets to me sometimes. I get tired of hearing people knock Captain America purely on the basis of the name. This isn't directed at anyone who reads this, it's more about people I work with who either know nothing or just a little bit about comics and say things like "You like Captain America?! I've never liked the idea of Captain America." These people don't get the idea of Captain America and they're a little bit racist to boot with their non-stop "Yanks are stupid, the English are so much better" rants. You all know the sort.

The thing is though, if these xenophobic chumps were attacked by Nazis or supervillains then Cap would still come and save them because that's who he is. Me? I'd probably just leave them to it but I'd like to think that maybe I'd try and save them regardless of my distaste because I think that there's a little of Steve Rogers in everyone around the world. It's the part of us that always strives for us to better ourselves and stand up for what's right. That's what we should do. That's a hero.




That's Captain America.

JYD <3 Mrs Reyes

And stepping up to the plate for DC, here's their entirely awesome yet criminally undervalued character showing that comics can move us emotionally:


Don't get me wrong, Jaime is wonderful and a top notch superhero but his mum rocks not only my world but the world of anybody with, y'know, emotions.