Lettercolumn Classics: Cat Scratches

Welcome back to another installment of Lettercolumn Classics, our semi-irregular look at some of the more interesting and offbeat lettercolumns in comic history. Last time out, you may recall, we explored the strange debate in the pages of Sgt. Fury about the treatment of German soldiers in Marvel comics (check it out here). Today we take a look at another hot button issue: women in comics.

Or, specifically, women in comics in 1972. That's when new Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas came up with one of the riskiest, most innovative and most progressive initiatives in comics: a whole mini-line of comics featuring female characters and written and drawn by female creators with the idea of both expanding the role of women in the industry and drawing in girls and women who may not otherwise be reading comic books.

Sounds familiar? Yes, nearly 40 years later, the industry is still wrestling with these same issues -- check out the massive drag out internet fight in the comment section of this article, for instance -- so you can only imagine how groundbreaking this concept was back in 1972 when Thomas and Marvel unveiled Shanna the She-Devil, Night Nurse and The Cat to a skeptical fan community. Just how likely Shanna (a female Tarzan knockoff) and Night Nurse (essentially a soap opera, as I've discussed before) were to succeed is questionable, but if any of the titles had a fighting chance of making it, it was The Cat, which featured a classic Marvel-style origin of a woman named Greer Nelson who comes into possession of a costume that gives her superpowers. This was seemingly right in the wheelhouse for most superhero fans, except, of course for the fact that the main character wasn't a Spider-man type nerdy loner but instead a self-possessed, modern woman.

So how did the readers react? The lettercolumn tells the tale. Let's just say that not everyone was excited to embrace the idea of equality is the world of superheroes. Case in point, this typical exchange courtesy of The Cat #3:





And this was hardly the only letter expressing these feelings; here's another example from The Cat #4:






Of course, not everyone was unhappy with the idea of a liberated female superhero, but proving just how sticky the issue is, even supporters of the idea wrote in with complaints. And the reason should be no surprise to anyone: they were complaining about the unrealistic depiction of The Cat's body. Sound familiar?






The upshot of all this controversy? Well, unfortunately for Marvel and champions of comic book equality, it didn't translate into sales. Instead, all three titles in the female creator line were canceled after four issues. Shanna ended up becoming a supporting character in Ka-Zar, Night Nurse vanished into obscurity for decades and Greer Nelson, of course, was reborn as Tigra the Were-Woman, with the only negative side-effect being the fact that her character was completely re-written and has shifted to become the high-profile sex-kitten in all of comics. Not exactly what the creators of The Cat had in mind.

Lest you get the idea that all the letters were negative (they were actually split about 50-50), we'll leave you with this positive bit of commentary from a 15-year old boy who couldn't possibly have realized how ironic his words would later appear given his own adult self's less than stellar reputation when it comes to dealing with women in comics:





Tune in next time for another... Lettercolumn Classic!

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December Answers From the Vault part 1

Welcome back to this month's edition of Answers From the Vault. Yesterday we threw open the doors of knowledge to the general public and the result was a torrent of queries. The reading public has an insatiable appetite for information and we here at the Vault are happy to oblige that noble quest. So, after carefully winnowing down the literally quadrillions of questions we received yesterday, here are the answers to the select few that made the cut. Don't worry, though, if your question isn't answered today, we'll probably cover it tomorrow, because this batch was so big we had to split it into two parts!

So are you ready to get your brain enlarged?


Following up the occasionally heated discussion of how women are portrayed in comics, can you identify your favorite villainous female character in comics (in spite of criticisms to the way said character may have been drawn)? And how might said appearance attract or detract from the character herself (or does it at all?)? -- Chesley

Wow, Chesley, that's a mouthful. But we'll give it a go. Strong female supervillains are about as rare -- or even rarer -- than strong female superheroes. When you think of the pantheon of great supervillains, pretty much none of them are women. For instance, when IGN did their NCAA bracket-style battle of the super-villains a few years ago, only six of the 64 contestants were women and of those six, most of them weren't necessarily villains per se. It's an interesting point to note: very few women in comics are really allowed to be full-on evil. Most female supervillains have a softer, more sympathetic side to go along with more ambiguous motivations. This often ends up with the villain becoming a hero or anti-hero or at least someone who the main heroes sometimes identify with or team-up with.

You're not going to see that happen a whole lot with, say, Joker or Dr. Doom, but it happens all the time with female supervillains. Probably the most famous female supervillain is Catwoman, but she's hardly a villain. Heck, she's Batman's main love interest. The six so-called villains who did show on on the IGN list also included Dark Phoenix (deranged alter-ego for X-Man Jean Grey, thus only sort of a villain), Elektra (Daredevil's girlfriend and not really a villain) and the White Queen (sometimes a villain, sometimes a member of the X-Men). The only true villains on the list were Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, neither of whom are quite A-listers, though I guess Poison Ivy is fairly close. Other examples of this include some of the most prominent female villains at both Marvel and DC, such as the Enchantress (who teams up with Thor as often as she opposes him and is no longer considered a villain by most), Scarlet Witch (who was so popular and sympathetic when she debuted as a villain that Marvel quickly turned her into a hero) and Star Sapphire (usually Green Lantern's girlfriend, Carol Ferris).

So why aren't there more good (or, to be more precise, evil) female villains? I'm not entirely sure. I suspect it might have something to do with the traditionally male readership (and creator pool) and the assumptions and stereotypes that have come along with that. In some ways it's the flip side of the sexulization issue -- comics might have their heroines be overly sexed up, but they also don't want their women to be too mean, so many of the villains end up having softer, more sympathetic portrayals. In other words, the idea of femininity doesn't necessarily match well with being a supervillain. Perhaps because of this, relatively fewer female villains seem to be (consistently) depicted in an overtly sexual fashion compared to their heroic counterparts (Harley Quinn, Catwoman and Poison Ivy did get a mention in my essay, but Gotham Sirens treats them as protagonists rather than villains).

The only major female villain that comes to mind who has an overtly sexual nature is White Queen, but for her, I think it works because it fits in with her manipulative personality. She uses her sexuality as just another tool to control people, which makes it fitting, I think, for her to wear an altered dominatrix costume, because that's kind of her whole schtick; she just usually does it through telepathy and mind control rather than physically.

Anyway, I haven't technically answered your question because I'm not sure I have a favorite villainess in comics. There are some solid female villains who break some of the stereotypes I mentioned; DC's Cheetah is probably the best known of these, while Marvel also has Moonstone as an intelligent and mostly evil woman (though even she sometimes plays a good guy when it suits her). Another well done female villain was the Mist in James Robinson's Starman (more on Starman in a later answer). But a favorite? Hm. Well, Mystique would probably have been my choice back in the 80's when she was still a real villain, but nowadays she seems to just be Magneto's moll thanks to the X-Men films. Hela is great in Thor when they bother to use her, and Sin has been turned by Brubaker from a footnote into a legitimately evil and fun character. Giganta has promise. But my favorite female supervillain is probably Viper (aka Madame Hydra), in part because she is the one female supervillain that is crazier, deadlier and more downright evil than just about any other.


What about some Image coverage? How has the creation of that company and titles affected the big two and the industry in general if at all? -- Ben

Well, Ben, the answers to your questions actually go hand in hand. There isn't a lot of Image coverage on the Vault mainly because I don't like Image. I know that will come as a shock to some of you (as I know there are some ardent Image fans reading this) but it's true. That, in turn, means I don't know too much about what is going on in their books or with their characters. And one of the reasons I've never cared for Image is because I think the creation of the company had a negative impact on both the big two (especially Marvel) and comics in general.

Now, to be honest, a lot of the problems that came up because of the founding of Image were caused by Marvel, so there's plenty of blame to go around. But essentially, the creation of Image (and the hype that guilt up around the Image founders prior to their defection from Marvel) was the height of the speculation era. Millions of copies of books by hot artists were flying off the shelves, being bought up by speculators who figured they could sit on the books for awhile and then turn them around for a big profit on the secondary market. Because of these artificial sales figures, both Marvel and the artists began believing in an art first idea, where the storytelling was secondary to the kewl pictures. This was exemplified by Marvel's decision to dump Chris Claremont off of X-Men after nearly 20 years on the title that he had taken from nothing into the biggest book on the market, all because Marvel wanted to placate their new hot artist Jim Lee by giving him creative control. The big problem here is that a) most of these sales were to speculators, not fans, and thus weren't a fair assessment of what was actually popular or artistically successful and b) those new fans that were being brought in by the hype were receiving sub-par products because all the good writers had been dumped in order to let the artists write everything.

Now, there are plenty of artists who are fine writers, but as Marvel and DC chased the golden goose and began having all of their artists ape the Image style at the expense of story and storytelling, fans began fleeing in droves. The product just sucked. For a few years there in the early 90's it did seem that the industry as a whole would still be okay, because a counter movement began, with self-published books booming like never before, to the point where they actually were commanding a pretty large part of the marketplace (something like 15-20% at the peak if I remember correctly). This actually kind of mirrors the rise of grunge and alternative rock as an antidote to the processed pop and hair metal being put out by the major labels during that same time period. But then Marvel decided to buy out all the major distribution companies, which in effect shut out all their smaller "competitors", with the result that the entire market crashed and burned, Marvel went bankrupt and comics have never recovered. With no indie alternatives to the mainstream rubbish being put out by Marvel, Image and DC, fans just left comics entirely.

Obviously, not all of that can be laid at the door of Image, but some of it can, and more importantly, I've never enjoyed any of their titles. I read Spawn for awhile but that was more out of habit and a feeling of obligation than out of real enjoyment. Plus, the company rarely seemed to live up to it's own premise; it was supposed to be a haven for artists to control their own properties, but it seemed instead to only be a haven for the select few big names that had the box office clout already to get into Image's exclusive club.

And then a lot of the creators ended up farming out their titles to freelance employees anyway, like McFarlane with Spawn, meaning they hadn't created a revolution at all, they had just built their own version of Marvel. Sort of like the Pilgrims coming to America for "religious freedom" and then persecuting the Quakers for worshiping differently. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.

To be honest, for me, Image ended as an entity years ago even though they still put out books. After all, some of the founders ended up taking their titles to other places (Jim Lee's Wildstorm went to DC, for instance) for reasons that still escape me, meaning that the Image imprint seems to be little more than a distribution plot; there's no cohesion to the line, it's just a bunch of random, unconnected studios putting out whatever they want and slapping the Image logo on it. Which makes it even more difficult to review, because you are in effect talking about a bunch of separate companies. While Invincible is supposed to be one of the best hero books on the market, is it really fair to lump it in with Youngblood?

Tell you what, though. If Image ever does anything I like or that is newsworthy, I'll discuss it here.


Are there any decent super heroes that don't wear spandex and why don't more heroes realize that a pair of jeans can go a long way as far as durability goes. For that matter who are their tailors? -- Ben

Good question, Ben. To answer the last part first, the creation of superhero costumes has been handled a number of different ways over the years. Marvel in particular has highlighted the ways their costumes come about, with various explanations. For instance, most costumes are made from unstable molecules, invented by Reed Richards, which allows them to stretch and get burnt and whatever without just falling apart like normal fabrics. As for the design, different costumes have different designers. Some people got new costumes, for example, during Secret Wars thanks to an alien costume generator. On the lower tech side of things, Spider-man and Kitty Pryde were both shown in their early days struggling to hand-make their own costumes, while the Wasp's alter-ego of Janet Van Dyne is a noted designer in the Marvel universe and not only made all of her own costumes but frequently designed costumes for other heroes.

But I think you were more curious about the jeans thing. Well, there have been some notable heroes who wore their jeans into battle. One of my favorite Golden Age heroes, Crimebuster, had perhaps the simplest and most utilitarian costume in comics history, as his "costume" was actually his high school hockey jersey, except with a cape. Over the course of time he eventually even dumped most of that; in order to impress a girl, in Boy Comics #50 Crimebuster ended up ditching the cape and his hockey pants, meaning that for the rest of his long career, he fought crime wearing jeans and his hockey shirt, something that a number of rappers would later more famously emulate.

Another case of a hero duking it out in his denims is, of course, Luke Cage. It's not entirely clear in some of his early appearances whether his pants are jeans or spandex... or fleece... but that's mostly due to the presence of his giant buccaneer boots. These days, there's no doubt that Cage is wearing his jeans into battle; this cover from New Avengers #49, for instance, apparently shows Cage just as he's about to go out on patrol with his group of fellow gigolos.

But probably the best example of what you are looking for would be Jack Knight in Starman. Knight was the younger son of the original Golden Age Starman and was a bit of a black sheep. Rebelling against his father's superhero ways, and dismissing all that superhero stuff as juvenile nonsense, Jack was understandably out of place when he was suddenly forced by circumstance to become the new Starman. So he decided to keep true to his style and, rather than adopt the classic Starman red spandex, he got a pair of vintage flight goggles to shield his eyes when flying, threw on a leather jacket for warmth and protection against body blows, and fought crime just like that. His outfit was suitable for either crime fighting or catching the Smashing Pumpkins down at the local civic center. Fittingly, Jack ended up retiring for good after being active only a few short years, deciding to live a normal life rather than deal with the craziness of the superhero world. His protege, Stargirl, fights crime the old fashioned way: in colored pajamas. (By the way, Starman also was arguably the best superhero title of the 90's and is more than worth the time to read).


Tomorrow: The next batch of questions and answers. Aquaman! Mary Jane! What If?! And Brother Power the Geek! Be there!

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Women in Spandex

Last Saturday I attended the Boston Comic Con and had the pleasure of introducing one of my friends to the world of comic books. She doesn't read comics, she doesn't like comics and she doesn't know anything about comics, but thanks to the kindness of the artists and writers in attendance and especially to the creative energy that filled Artists Alley, my friend ended up having a very good time. All in all, it was a very successful trip.

With one small exception. Passing by the prints and posters arrayed along the walls in front of Artists Alley, we were confronted with picture after picture of scantily clad, huge breasted and impossibly proportioned women arranged in painful and sexually charged poses. Walking past, my friend commented that as a woman, it was sometimes difficult for her to look at comics.

Here's a dirty secret, though: as a man, it's often difficult for me to look at those pictures as well, because they don't just demean women, they demean the audience too. They don't just pander to the lowest common denominator, they actually lower that denominator even further by creating a locker room mentality that alienates fully half of the potential readership of the form. If fans of comics sometimes complain that their medium isn't taken seriously, I say, look around at what we are presenting to the world, because we've earned it.

Of course, complaints about how women are portrayed in comics are nothing new. Current Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone helped bring the issue to the forefront when she was still a fan back in the 90's with her website Women in Refrigerators, which explored the many ways that female characters in comics were often abused, murdered or otherwise traumatized as plot points for their more popular male counterparts. But though the website gained a lot of attention, to the point where the term "women in refrigerators" is now comics shorthand for negative treatment of women in comics, the actual content of the comics in question hasn't changed significantly in the years since. In part this is likely due to the simple fact that, as refrigerator death scene author Ron Marz himself argued with some validity, women aren't the main characters in most of these titles, meaning that as supporting characters they exist primarily to move the plot forward for the main characters, who are usually male.

However, my concern is less with how the characters are written (which is a whole different topic) but more with how they are drawn. Comics is at heart an inherently visual medium, and how women are drawn -- how they are portrayed on the page in the literal sense of the word -- in some ways carries a more immediate and visceral message than the words and actions taken by the characters within the stories. Even on this front, of course, there are some who argue that the unrealistic depiction of female superheroes is part of the form; the male characters, after all, are also exaggerated physically, so it stands to reason that the women would also be given idealized figures as well.

But while this may be true as far as the design of the characters, it does not address the way those characters are depicted in terms of the situations, poses and contexts which they are portrayed in. There's nothing wrong with having beautiful, attractive and fit women in comics, nor in drawing them well; mainstream superhero comics have been doing this for decades. Yet in recent years, artists and editors have begun overtly emphasizing sexuality on covers and in interior shots, not just for characters whose sexuality has long been a central part of their identity (such as Vampirella or Emma Frost), but for any and all female characters regardless of their personality within the stories themselves.

This sort of blanket sexualization has several negative effects. Firstly, it damages the character's credibility with the readers, both within the story and in the larger fan consciousness. Mockingbird, for instance, was at the center of one of the most famous stories about sexual and emotional abuse in the history of comics, yet how seriously are modern readers supposed to take her when she is now best known for gratuitous ass shots? Covers like this send the message that the company itself doesn't necessarily respect their own character -- and often they don't. While the writers of Avengers: the Initiative are trying to rehabilitate the character, for the last several years Tigra has been written pretty much as a punchline, dismissed for her sexuality both by writers and fans alike. Even Mary Jane Watson, who is a well respected fan favorite, has spent more and more time in recent years lounging around in lingerie for no apparent reason, a new attitude towards the character that was perhaps best represented by Marvel's infamous "Mary Jane Bending Over" statue, complete with coquettish grin and visible thong.

This undermining of the characters is only exacerbated when the companies package their female characters together for the sole purpose of showing off their T & A (see: this review of Gotham Sirens) or throw them together into a nominal "women's" title like Marvel Divas, which appropriates the settings and characterizations of Sex & The City and then undermines whatever (debatable) appeal this might have for women by packaging it as puerile fantasy.

This kind of ill-conceived fan-service is the second major negative effect that this kind of objectification has, because by pandering to the type of reader who enjoy this kind of thing, the publishers end up alienating those who do not. This becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, because when the only fans left are those who buy these kinds of comics, these kind of comics are the only ones that will sell. If you've devalued your female characters to the point where the only interest that remains in them is sexual, than that is the only kind of viable use left for those female characters.

This also means that in essence you are training new comic readers to expect their female characters to be sexualized. Leaving aside the impact that this may have on younger readers by normalizing these kinds of depictions of women, this has the predictable corollary of training young female readers what not to expect from comics: strong characters, reasonable representation or inclusive role models that they can become invested in as readers. And this is the third, and perhaps most important effect this kind of art has: it drives away potential female readers and creators.

This cannot be overstated. The medium of comics is inherently gender neutral. When I was growing up, I knew any number of girls who read comic strips -- collections of comics like Calvin & Hobbes or Bloom County. Yet none of them ended up making the jump to comic books. Why? Because of the reputation comics have as a boys only club.

Now, part of this no doubt is do the dominant and admittedly violent superhero genre. But much of it can also be attributed to the roles that female characters play within that genre -- not just as plot points or dead girlfriends in refrigerators, but as eye candy utilized by artists (and in some cases writers) for fan-service. Now why would any woman or young girl want to try any of these comics out? And what's true for readers seems even more true for creators. While Simone, who I mentioned earlier, has had success in the field, she is the exception rather than the rule. Historically and presently, mainstream comics have had very few women. Yet, efforts by women publishing in underground or independent comics have proven that there are plenty of women with the talent and skill to succeed in the medium. So why aren't there more female pros working in mainstream comics? Maybe because they don't want to. And why would they want to?

All this is not to suggest that there is no place for sexuality in comics, even in mainstream superhero comics. Of course there is. There are many female -- and male --characters who are sexual by nature and there's no reason to eliminate or downplay this. But by the same token, there are plenty of characters who aren't particularly sexual. There are plenty of female characters who are simply strong, or smart, or brave, or dumb, or cowardly, or weak, or beautiful, or ugly, or kind or evil or just simply boring. And that's the whole point: female characters should be given the same benefits as their male counterparts and be written -- and drawn -- as individual characters, rather than just as props in a sexual fantasy.

Because I think that's all any real comic reader wants: to read about compelling, unique and interesting characters. And once comics start giving us women who fit that description, maybe we'll start seeing more girls picking up comics, more women writing comics and more female fans able to attend comic conventions without being uncomfortable or embarrassed at they way the industry looks at them.

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