I have seen a rather profound dissension among female comics creators to the point that a few of them have vowed to leave the industry altogether. I’m not writing this to argue against gender inequality, because it is rather boldfaced. What I am writing to try and parse out and understand is the nature of that inequality. During comics glory days just as many female readers could be seen traipsing about as males, but somewhere along the way, possibly the explosion of the popularity of more “male-oriented” stories concerning super-heroes and crime, but frankly, why can’t super-heroes and crime interest female readers? It seems to be adhered to our collective brains that the only thing that attracts female attention is romance . . . and that’s about it. During the 90’s, that well-forgotten bane on the credibility of comic books, strong female leads were over-abundant, in more ways than one. The meat extruded from the bone thin stories were injected, quite ubiquitously, into the chests and lips of the lead heroes. But I don’t particularly believe that the 94 FF cup sizes drove away potential female readers quite as fervently as the lack of story.

I’m not saying being female inherently ups the literary expectations (take a browse through the romance section of any library . . not exactly Jane Austin, but vastly more popular), but what I do think is that for potential new readers having weightless stories that literally revolve around those mammoth mammaries does not exactly scream “you will relate to this.” So, dispensing with that forgettable decade, why are so many female creators unsatisfied? I read often about unfair treatment on the business end of things, and I fully, and whole-heartedly believe them. I am not an insider, much less a female insider, so I won’t even attempt to delve into that matter (I’m sure entire books could be written).

I will pose this question, though: Will a random, new reader be more likely to pick up a book created by males, as opposed to females? Probability shows that, yes, because there are a hell of a lot more male creators out there, but what if the numbers were even? Should we start crediting the writers and artists in the academic fashion of initials only so the readers cannot distinguish gender? Wouldn’t this, in itself, show that there is still gender inequality in comics?

So-called “male-oriented” content is not to blame, because female interests are as wide and varying as male interests (whose to say that there aren’t female readers out there who look at Witchblade with the same power fantasies that male readers employ with Supes?), so “gearing” a book toward girls is just silly. I find it silly because I have often surmised when a book is indeed geared toward girls all that means is there is actual characterization and stories written on a personal level between the covers (just read any Minx title!). Why can’t this crazy gimmick be used universally? What does that say about what the industry thinks of boys (or men, as the case may be)? I guess dollars we spend answer for us here.

There are plenty of women out there who read comics. I would like to see more women making good comics, but so would a lot of other people who have taken up this torch long before me. The tides are turning with the stigma of comics being slowly, very slowly, lowered to reveal the brilliant potential of one of the greatest artistic mediums to originate in America. We have to understand, though, that it was a LONG time developing between cavemen drawing their hunting booty in the caves of Lascaux and Michaelangelo nearly blinding himself painting the Sistine Chapel. Give it time. Comics ain’t going anywhere (regardless of the doom sayers discussed in my last post). There is going to be some more evolving, and hopefully in the future we will not need inclusive university courses like “Women in Comics”. It’ll just be “Comics”, and that’ll be that.

I was once (and to some degree, still am) attracted to producing comics because I saw it as a sort of community of like-minded individuals producing work under the same medium. One scouring of the intellectual internet wasteland known as public message boards (ironic, innit?), however, have lead me to believe that the comics community is more destructive to itself than any congressional witch-hunt ever was. I read post after post, in a kind of sadomasochistic-by-way-of-train-wreck interest, of venom and bile being spit and slung in every direction. No one seems to be safe from the shrouded pulpit. Now, freedom of speech is another story, as the old saying goes, ” I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight for your right to say it.” Just the other week I was at Heroes Con and got an overwhelming sense of apathy from the majority of those in attendance, both behind the tables and walking the floor. What the hell happened to the joy of comics? Joe Quesada once said in an interview about his creator-owned project “Ash” that he’d rather see an issue of it rolled up and shoved into a back pocket than sealed-up and relegated to a longbox, coveted, but barely read, and certainly not enjoyed. Comics, are fighting tooth and nail to be taken seriously, but in this process the fun that used to permeate out of them in waves is becoming a victim of attrition. I say ‘attrition’ because it seems appropriate, but what has the other side lost, and, quite frankly, who is the other side? In short, there is no other side, the “demise” (as the doom-sayers across the interweb like to prophesy) is due to conflict from within, from the very people who claim to love them.

I imagine that the vast majority of the people who are spouting the death knell of the entire creative medium are folks who have tried, and failed, to reach there own vision of success under its fold. Hell hath no fury like wanna-be comics super-star scorned. I read a post from several years back that told people, not advised but told people, that if they want to do their own comics, don’t. This fellow, who will remain nameless because he deserves to remain nameless, I learned after some additional research is just a blow-hard curmudgeon of the first degree and deserved failure because of his lack of respect for anyone (the initial thread had to do with him lambasting The Pulse for “only” having his puff piece about his indy book on the front page for 11 days).

I truly believe that one of the possible futures for comics as an artistic/creative medium, along with perfect-bound “graphic novels”, is on the web (this is not news, but I agree with it all the same). One, to enjoy them it beats out even the 10 cent cover price for a copy of Famous Funnies by 10 cents, but it is also wide open. The only restriction is the imagination of the creator. Instant distribution is only one of the benefits. Right now, “web-comics” is a diminutive term that essentially equates to “not good enough to be printed”, and yes, there are TONS of crappy web comics, but that is a testament right there to the vitality of the method: it has become the new underground comix. Going against conventions, or bowing to them is not the decision of the suits running the show weighing everything against investment, but of the people actually creating the strips. You could do a hardcore porno comic, or a kid-friendly super-hero yarn and it’s entirely up to you. People like Danielle Corsetto have even earned a living off their web-comics, which proves it can be done, however anomalous it may be.

Now, I still LOVE print comics, and would lament them greatly should they ever become outmoded, but I also love creating comics and I have seen time and again, through the posts of public message boards, and on the long, haggard faces of lonely creators sitting behind their little booths, that when you turn your child-like passion into a potential business, you better have a damn good handle, and realistic view of the business world and all its pratfalls and caveats, or your enthusiasm will suffer and you too may end up a foul-tempered, anonymous blow-hard whose only medium of expression is tearing up-and-comers down from their clouds before they even have a chance to learn whether or not they have the legs to stand on without your peanut gallery whining.

My advise to creators out there (and to myself), because you don’t have to be published by Marvel to be a creator: create (the majority of Franz Kafka’s work was published in obscurity or after his death) and support and hold-up other creators as well. I would love to see that mythical community I so long for some day, but as it stands now, I just see hacks who couldn’t even hack it using these message boards, that are intended for the aforementioned “like-minded people” to exchange ideas and communicate, to drag everyone else down into the muck with them (the length of most of these people’s threads speaks for itself). Comics can be fun, sexy, dangerous, literary, trashy, whatever you want, just create them, support your fellow creators, and be grateful to the people who read it instead of complaining that you deserve Neil Gaiman’s, Alan Moore’s, and Warren Ellis’s readerships combined.

I try to stay on the positive side of comics, as is my entire point here, but sometimes you just gotta release that steam.
To paraphrase Alfred from “The Dark Knight”:

“Some men just like to watch the world burn.”

Dayjob and family life have usurped what would otherwise be CCdC time and comic time (I guess I do have my priorities in order sometimes), but I happened across this apropos episode of Studio 360, an outstanding show you can find on your local NPR station. As part of a look at American icons, Kurt Andersen explores Superman as both a character and an icon. I actually have only listened to the first several minutes of the show; I have a long drive coming up next week and am saving the rest for then.

At the link below you can listen online or download an mp3, or if you use iTunes you can search the iTunes store for “studio 360″ and download this and other episodes as a free podcast.

Studio 360: Superman

Regular readers may have spotted Adam’s piece back in March describing the Inkwell Awards, a new awards program championed by Bob Almond to recognize outstanding comic inkers. Here’s his piece:

http://www.comiccritique.com/columns/gcolSt503.html

All the envelopes have been cracked open — get some champagne (or a mug o’ green tea) and have a look at the winners:

http://www.inkwellawards.com/results.html

Deepak Chopra was always the one self-help prophet I wouldn’t speed past while channel-surfing, even before he and his son were spearheads of a kickin’ comicbook company. Chopra is the only one of these guys who puts his feel-good capital on the line to ask his followers to consider their role in world peace and not just their stake in personal peace-and-quiet, speaking, for instance, of the poisoning cycle of vengeance and the wellsprings of humanity that can overwhelm medieval hatred and high-tech kill-power right after 9/11, when he himself was automatically at risk of getting plugged by some yahoo who can’t tell a Hindu from a Wahhabist from a chainsaw sculpture.

Anyway, two recently-started Virgin comics (an addiction well-known to sufferers of my regular reviews on ComicCritique.com) helmed by Chopra are must-reading for any kind of fan. BUDDHA is the ambitious adaptation of Chopra’s novel on the legendary holy man, and is one of the best comics being produced today. The eloquent script adaptation by Joshua Dysart encapsulates crystalline truths with zero smugness, and the otherworldly (and, by turns, all-too-worldly) art by Harshvardhan Kadam is a rare achievement of sensory wonder without empty spectacle. This is a journey of enlightenment that will satisfy any fan of fantasy quests and cosmic adventure, with sparkling period detail and mythic texture. And it’s all the more enjoyable (and all the more impressive an accomplishment) for being based in reality — both seen and unseen. BEYOND, conceived by Chopra, written by Ron Marz and drawn by Edison George, is a contemporary thriller with BOURNE-style suspense but a subtext of uneasy global-trade relationships between American industry and an India balanced between ancient spiritual understandings and emerging material opportunities. Chopra’s concept of a topical yet page-turning tale is as strong here as his soul & sorcery balance is in BUDDHA, and Marz’s ear for extraordinary tensions among everyday people is keen, with intricate yet energized art from George. The contrast of stark earthly grit and supernatural discovery keeps the characters guessing while it gets readers thinking about many kinds of worlds to cross between.

One thing both these books are “beyond” is comparison; Virgin is making new genre categories as it fills them, and this was very clear with THE MEGAS, which followed the plots and perils in a parallel America colonized not by pilgrims and pioneers but by Medici-like aristocrats, and still royalist today. The scenario conceived by Jonathan Mostow was a plausible and involving alternate path for the country we became, and an interesting implied comment on the real-life Middle Eastern monarchies with which we share such a paradoxical bond. The book was well-written and not quite like anything else being published; it seems to have wrapped up at Issue 4, somewhat suddenly but with its broad potential intact. I’d like to think that if there’s any culprit it’s art which sometimes made it feel as if the thumbnails had been accidentally switched with the finished pages at presstime, and not some widespread fanboy distaste for geopolitical pulp; in any case THE MEGAS is too good a world to give up on.

One comic I’m glad I stuck with myself is PROJECT: KALKI, whose first issue was the kind of thriller which relies on scientific projections and sets up intricate intrigues but then keeps forgetting its own premises and breaking its own rules. First-issue preliminaries can be bumpy but often the epic that unfolds can be worth those birth pangs, and that’s the case with KALKI’s fascinating second issue, in which modern figures of science and capital (a “clone” of an Indian divinity and the still-living manifestation of a demon) restage an ancient conflict between opposing universal forces which is portrayed with a brilliant insight into the actual overlap and exchange between what the West tends to conceive of as simplistically consistent and distinct “good and evil.” There’s a grand, depressive poetry to Arjun Gaind’s writing, and artist Vivek Shinde is set to join John Paul Leon and Paul Azaceta in the pantheon of meaningful, moody gloom. The book details the probable end of the world, but there’s now one more good reason to hope it doesn’t happen too soon.

Speaking of change, DAN DARE may be the first fully Obama-era comic, with establishment believers fighting to restore competence and common sense from the feckless usurpers they look so much better than. That’s an undercurrent that’s hard to avoid as this sci-fi saga of silent coups and resurgent legends approaches the end of its first arc. People marvel at the restraint and honor of this comic given writer Garth Ennis’ often squalid oeuvre, but, after brilliantly cataloguing how bad we can be and how wrong things can go, he’s tackling the even tougher terrain of envisioning what just rule might look like.

Either way, you don’t need Dan Dare’s rayguns and spaceships to see a lot of the future of comics at Virgin.

My pick for this week is definitely Wanted, as in the comic, not the movie! I LOVE this book and highly recommend it. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Wanted is about a group of supervillains called The Fraternity. The Fraternity’s main objective is ridding the world of superheroes. The main characters~ Wesley Gibson (aka The Killer) and The Fox are hardcore assassins. I loved The Fox, she is one of the coolest, baddest female characters ever written. I really liked Mark Millar’s writing, and I’m totally a fan of J.G. Jones’ art. Wanted is really innovative, Mark Millar bases a lot of the characters on DC/Marvel characters. I have to admit, it’s kinda a dude’s book, but that doesn’t mean girls can’t like it! So, check it out!!!

Is there a franchise book in worse shape than Superman? From the late ’90s ’til recently I’d gotten used to the idea of the flagships existing to stay static and be riffed on, as in James Sturm and Guy Davis’ indie-licious “real-life Fantastic Four” tragedy, Unstable Molecules. But with the main FF, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman and Batman books all undergoing both commercial and artistic renaissances at the moment, I keep trying Superman, and, as Harvey Pekar might say, it’s a reliable disappointment.

From the drowsy phone-ins of Kurt Busiek (who as everyone knows can make superheroes literature, from books like Marvels and much of Astro City) to the cliché-ridden debut of a major comic-store manager in his post-Busiek one-shot (full disclosure: it’s a major comic store which majorly supports my own comic, though maybe not after this), to the debut of James Robinson in what is billed as an era-defining relaunch (though this book seems to have a new era several times a year), Superman defines bland in a way that commemorates the strip’s stereotype as a brand leader rather than honoring its historic status as the prototype of an artform.

I lasted about eight pages with Robinson’s pitiful hipness and post-Bendis sitcom/cell-phone dialogue, the state-of-the-art of nothing but a cutesy, sub-TV-show shorthand of characterization and superficial preference of patter over content. Okay, I read ahead a bit too, to see if anything interesting was being done with Jack Kirby’s obscure barbarian hero Atlas, rebooted here as some kind of mythic foe/disapproving elder for Supes. No such luck; just the usual psuedo-Arthurian trash talk and car-tossing. I’d hoped to see Atlas show up in the jaw-dropping current Wonder Woman arc, where Gail Simone is doing brilliant things with a catalogue of DC’s B-list ’70s sword & sorcery heroes, from Beowulf to Stalker to Claw, but it seems the gods of copyright renewal are fickle in their bestowals.

Anyway, there’s been no shortage of compelling Superman stories lately, from Morrison & Quitely’s modern folklore in All-Star to Cooke and Sale’s cosmic Frank Capra arc in Confidential to Simone & Byrne’s definitive yet criminally short-lived Action run to Dwayne McDuffie’s heartwarming fill-in on the same title. DC should start looking to these satellite books as its farm team. It’s easy to think of the little Comics Code symbol still hanging on in a cover corner as a kind of hex sign against creativity, but actually that hasn’t hurt most of the DC books I mentioned above; either way, it’s time for Superman to break the seal.

Meanwhile I’ve realized what’s wrong with the rebooted Hulk, which broke off from its own franchise at the conclusion of Greg Pak’s World War Hulk event so Pak and Fred Van Lente could carry on in Incredible Hulk’s numbering with the now much-more-happenin’ Incredible Hercules. Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness deliver endearing monster-movie suspense and spectacle, with many a Kirbyesque double-splash… and a narrative that advances by a few minutes every month, and there’s the problem: Kirby’s staging was panoramic, but his storytelling was never decompressed; Loeb and McGuinness get how he could open up but not what he could pack in. Many fanboys might describe somethin’ like Optic Nerve as “slow-moving,” but Hulk is one of many comics that’s slow-progressing, and I admit I don’t get why that’s better, or even how it’s what the Almighty Demographic wants; it ain’t videogames’ instant gratification that’s driving the demand for this (or, come to think of it, maybe it is, through the magic of overstimulation fatigue), but in any case my own attention span is drifting.

One book I’m parting more amicably with than expected is Marvel’s Squadron Supreme restart. I’d assumed this would be a revival in more ways than one, and of more things than should be brought back — the ’70s were full of artistic books that would get cancelled suddenly or relieved of their signature creators to be “repaired” by house-style hacks, and with Squadron it looked like we’d be getting the worst of both: a Watchmen-caliber run by prestige writer J. Michael Straczynsky disappeared without notice a few years back and now returned without fanfare in different hands. But it’s a full departure in an intriguing direction; instead of being Marvel’s perennial take on DC’s archetypes, this reads like a modern DC comic reinterpreting Marvel’s icons (which is true to the strip’s history, having originated as a prank between Roy Thomas and Denny O’Neil to do a then-forbidden Avengers/JLA crossover with stand-in characters in each other’s books, though only Roy went through with it). Howard Chaykin handles this idea with imagination and conveys the book’s tone of gloomy tension well; I’m just still not sure why JMS’ epic had to give way to this exercise.

A more recent tradition has me not giving up a book but, in a way, a book giving up me, with the rotation of writing team Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction off Immortal Iron Fist to go write Uncanny X-Men. With Iron Fist, Broob and Fraction took a second-tier, perennially-cancelled concept and landed it in every egghead AND fanboy commentator’s best-of-year column. Mythic and kickass. This earned the team a promotion to Uncanny, which I hope rewards them but I know does fans few favors; it’s pretty common these days to see offbeat creators do something unique with a property that needs it and then get bumped up to follow the rules of some franchise whose sales wouldn’t flag if they just let a cat walk across the keyboard. A pet peeve this team may prove the exception to, but I wanted to vent before it actually comes out like Chaykin’s Squadron and contradicts me with annoying facts.

And when the heck will non-ComicCritique writers be able to comment on this blog site? I know *I* could only take so much of my blather…

In honor of the kind of movie I usually see this time of year I subtitled Sex and the City “Fantastic Fortysomething,” since no superhero movie goes to such lengths to get its characters into costume. And in much the same way that modern comics can feel like the result not of narrative necessity but of role-play with the toys they largely exist to generate (What if we team up the Viking and the magician? Today let’s have the zombies fight the Martians!), this flick’s script feels not like it was composed at a laptop or workshopped with actors but blocked out with Barbie dolls — all premise and no plot or characterization (Today we’re in a wedding! Here we are at a Mexican resort!). Surely none of these characters have lives beyond what quirks of mannerism and scraps of career and homelife are necessary to set up a joke or drag the narrative forward (fussy Miranda’s on a short fuse ‘cuz she “has a job,” which we are often reminded of but never see her actually having to go to; a funny if, like most everything in this movie, unconscious inversion of the unknowable occupations of ’50s sitcom dads, which is perhaps the closest nod to feminism in this weirdly gown-and-fertility-fetishizing flick).

This franchise was never shy about getting laughs at its heroines’ expense, but one of the lines that reveals more than it means to comes when Miranda’s apartment-hunting in a mostly-Chinese neighborhood and exclaims that she needs to follow a “white guy with a kid” that she’s spotted. They never show him, but I’m pretty sure the white guy is Woody Allen on his way to meet Blair Brown. This movie takes place in the same urban-Pleasantville monoculture as Manhattan or Molly Dodd, and after genuinely-fabulous Jennifer Hudson comes and goes as Carrie’s assistant, it seems one of the movie’s main messages is that it’s more important to take back a cheating husband than to keep a black friend (don’t worry, I didn’t spoil which husband cheats). Indeed, another way this is really a comic-book movie is that so far no superhero flick has directly translated the comic medium’s tradition of caricature like this one, from the vaudevillian ticks of the, like, two gay guys in a whole movie about the fashion world to the token “mazeltov”s that remind you of Charlotte’s valor in marrying a Jew.

On long glassy-eyed stretches I’d find myself doing puzzles with the movie’s raw material — like guessing who paid more for product placement, Vivienne Westwood or Louis Vuitton, and figuring out the age-ranking of the leads by who was insecure enough to agree to how much of a nude scene. But of course, the actual sex is unsensationalized and incidental; the most pornographic scenes are all about puttin’ as much stuff as possible on, as in Sarah Jessica Parker’s two endless dress-up set pieces (one for when she’s cleaning out her closet, one for a Vogue photo-spread which presents itself with all the plausibility of the Green Goblin turning out to be Peter’s best friend’s dad, mystic coincidences being this movie’s other tie to the logic of a comic book).

From early on I was convinced I was watching one of the most fascinating surrealist movies ever made, but then I realized what it’s really like — the lurches from clueless dead-seriousness to knowing self-parody, the fevered riffs of every possible pun on a given dialogue motif, one of which is hilariously witty and the other 18 of which are all used too, resemble not a script but a notebook, as if the screenwriter died before shooting and his/her unshaped (and, at two-and-a-half hours, believe me, unedited) sheaf of lists and improvised drafts were translated directly to the screen; funny for a movie about a writer, but, come to think of it, very true to the tough-go-shopping work ethic of this one.

If the Sex and the City characters knew they were ridiculous, they’d be the B-52s, who I was reflecting on for more reasons than the comic-book coincidence of getting their latest disk for my birthday while I took the GF to this movie for hers (she, by the way, simply couldn’t stand it, while I was having the time of my life reveling in the most baffling hunk of anti-film since Ang Lee’s Hulk). Easily 10 years older than the SatC cast and exponentially hornier, the B’s are like an intrepid band of Sexual Revolution re-enacters, showing up after a 15-year coffee-break to deliver the album Madonna keeps thinking she’s making. Funplex could be the unofficial soundtrack to Sarah Jessica’s movie (”Faster, pussycat/Thrill! Thrill!/I’m at the mall on a diet pill”) and shows that, when franchises reboot, some silver ages are shinier than others. Tonight I’m off to see Hancock, which seems to have been judged the one chick-safe movie of its type by its presence among a bunch of trailers that made us think Sex and the City had already started. So come one, come all — how different could it be?