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.