There are a lot of times I read things and they just make no sense to me or if they do make any kind of sense the words can ring hollow. There is a whole corner of the blogoverse built up around the slights women have to suffer in the world of comics. Aside from the original Women in Refrigerators it is rare I see something I can actually feel is on the money (thank you Gail Simone for one of the most spot on observations made by someone in quite some time).
This is because if you approach a situation with a bunch of preconceived notions you are most likely going to find your suspicions verified. I vaguely remember something I read or heard once about scientific exploration and theory being based around a postulation. The postulation is the starting point and then the experiment itself is just a proof of that postulation.
Sometimes there is feminist rant that has validity but other times it just rings hollow.
Val D’Orazio built a career out of it (feminist rant ringing hollow) - first with the revisionist history autobiographical piece ‘Goodbye to Comcis’ (known by that polished histrionic phrase - Comics Broke My Vagina) but there are others who jump on the bandwagon as well. D’Orazio lost me totally when she dismissed a host of creators on her blog in one fell swoop by stating her gender lacked a Grant Morrison or Alan Moore. She was rewarded for her insult by being designated the President of Friends of Lulu.
Such is the skewed universe we live in where people can’t apologize enough.
I digress though.
Ragnell is someone whose blog I read with regularity because she is an equal opportunity offender. She doesn’t fit nicely into the box of feminist bloggers who write about comics. She wrote something recently about a Star Sapphire outfit, another in a series of revealing costumes for a female character and while she wrote about it with all the righteous rage she could muster I just thought it somewhat funny.
I mean, have you looked at costumes for superheros in the comics? Even the male characters are basically nudes with lines drawn in so I was a little stumped by this one. Somehow the very same people today who rant about these things would have been ready to go after a whole host of Renaissance artists I think.
But there was one line she wrote recently that I really liked. I liked it because with some creative editing and just by moving a period you make a sentence so much more interesting. Just because it takes that whole lunacy of the pretend world of comics, this world that comics fans seem to take way, way too seriously and it turns that on it’s head in a way you would never see. Here it is:
The actual paragraph (or sentence) runs below but I liked just pulling that out for a second because in the way too serious world of comic fandom that one sentence has the potential to cause the most God-awful sh**storm imaginable. The sentence actually reads:
And the whole post is this long thing about Rogue and some kind of revisionist history thing where she is supposed to have had a relationship with the character Sentry...
Just like this funeral special didn’t say that Cyclops and Johnny Storm were fucking gossips who should shut their fucking yaps or that Rogue was more upset about recent X-men events than about this guy we never saw her meet.
Who really gives a f***!
But I just liked pulling that one sentence out of the paragraph for a second because 1) It’s something that never would have occurred to me and 2) That one sentence alone could be an A-Bomb going off in the Marvel Universe.
And if people want to write about how angry things in comics make them, they can but, at the end of the day it’s just much ado about nothing.
Why?
Well two reasons actually.
One - Publishers print what sells, they are motivated purely and simply by the glorious dollar and how much money they can make so if they can make it by perpetuating some kind of libidinous, teenage fantasy they will for as long as the dollars keep coming in.
Two - Get off your ass and produce. Produce, produce and produce some more. Anne Rice doesn’t seem to have much of a problem writing things that sell by the bushel nor does J. K. Rowling and if either of them don’t then why is it we don’t have that in comics?
Publishers are about money, are women or girls a big part of the comics reading audience? If not, is it any surprise publishers aren’t producing more material for that market? This gets into a whole chicken and the egg argument but still it’s not as if there isn’t opportunity or there hasn’t been opportunity and there are a great deal of women creators out there or is it just a matter of everything being measured only by what goes on in the land of the superhero and is that really a good yardstick to measure everything by?
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