Hilarious.

Don't know how I got there, but I found my way onto this Tumblr and there beheld something truly awesome:

This Avengers cover mock-up.


It originally came from Comics Alliance, concocted by blogger Chris Sims and artist Kelly Callen.


In case you can't see it, the image shows seven Avengers --- Captain America, Thor, Nick Fury, the Incredible Hulk, Hawkeye, Iron Man, and a black-gloved redhead I think is Black Widow (hard to tell since we're just seeing the top of her head, from behind) --- all holding the worst possible gift someone could ever give them. Cap's got a pair of pink socks covered with swastikas; Fury (who has one eye) has a 3-D movie and a pair of 3-D glasses, which he is holding up to his single eye; the Hulk has a chemistry set; Iron Man has a book on running a successful business by his old enemy and competitor Obadiah Stane; Hawkeye (an archer) has a box of bullets; the Russian Black Widow has a DVD of "Rocky IV"; and Thor has a copy of Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion*.


Captain America's speech bubbles say, "ONE OF US is responsible for these horrible gifts! And nobody's leaving until I FIND OUT WHO!"


I love the look on Thor's face.


*This is especially funny because, not only is the book an argument that gods in general don't exist, but Thor in particular is one of the author's favorite examples of gods no one believes in anymore. (See this video for a collection of clips where he refers to Thor in this way.)

Women in Comics

Comics fan Elliott Brown recently posted a short article on Change.org criticizing DC Comics for putting its "New 52" universe-wide reboot almost exclusively in the hands of male writers and artists:

The number of women working for DC has been hovering around 10% for years -- similar to their adversary company, Marvel. But this September, DC will be rebooting its universe and giving its characters (and creative teams) an overhaul. Many of the characters that will be erased are female, which in and of itself is a tragedy, but in addition to that, what few female creators DC has employed will also be cut from the team. Only 2 out of 100-odd people DC employs as ongoing creators will be women: Gail Simone, who will be writing Batgirl, and Amy Reeder, who will be doing pencils on Batwoman.

That tally immediately made me wonder exactly how many women were currently writing or drawing for Marvel, and on which titles.

(I don't shun DC or anything --- I love, or am interested in, quite a few things they've done, especially under their "mature" label, Vertigo. And they've given us that classic of modern comics, Watchmen! But most of the comics I own are Marvel --- I'm an X-Men fan, and the X-Men have been around a lot longer, and racked up a lot more back issues, than most of what else I read.)

Anyway, Marvel isn't having any similar across-the-board relaunch, so it's going to be a bit harder to track down all of their series that are still going concerns.

Here's a list of recently- and soon-to-be-released titles featuring women writers and/or artists:

• Emma (a serialized adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name) - written by Nancy Butler and drawn by Janet K. Lee


• X-23 - written by Marjorie M. Liu; #'s 3, 7, 10, 11 and 12 drawn by Sana Takeda


• Ultimate Fallout - #'s 2, 4 and 5 drawn by a team of artists including Sara Pichelli


• The Iron Age - # 2 co-written by Jen Van Meter; #3 co-written by Louise Simonson, cover art by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Hulk - #'s 37 and 38 drawn by Elena Casagrande


• Fear Itself: The Worthy - cover art on #1 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Amazing Spider-Man - variant cover for #667 drawn by Stephanie Hans


• Mystic - cover art on #1 by Amanda Conner


• X-Factor - #'s 209, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 223 and 224 drawn by Emanuela Lupacchino


• Spider-Girl - cover art on #8 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Spider-Island: Cloak & Dagger - drawn by Emma Rios


• Anita Blake: Circus of the Damned (an adaptation of Laurell K. Hamilton's novel Circus of the Damned) - written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Jessica Ruffner


• Journey Into Mystery - #626 drawn by Stephanie Hans

That's thirteen titles out of 250 putting out new issues in July and August; what's more, only about half of them appear to have women artists involved in whole projects rather than just coming in to do a cover, or to pencil one or two issues in the regular artist's absence.

(Just doing covers, or hopping from series to series doing single issues here and there, isn't a bad thing --- some artists might even prefer it. For instance, Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic seems to specialize in covers. I just bemoan the fact that so few women are involved long-term because that means their creative visions are less likely to make a lasting impact on a series, or to shape the way characters and events develop.)

This Is Not a Review of "X-Men: First Class" ...

... if you're looking for one of those, I can direct you to this one by Neil Kapit, a fellow X-fan and author of the webcomic "Ruby's World," who pretty much says what I would say if I were to review this film.

No, I'm going to focus on something much narrower about this movie: its depiction of Angel Salvadore, a relatively minor character in the comics and a supporting character in the film.

I was very surprised to see her in this movie, because 1) she's a very recent character, and wouldn't really belong in a story about the relationship between Professor X and Magneto as young men (not that that's stopped any of the previous movies, where characters from different generations of X-Men have always been thrown together willy-nilly), 2) none of the other characters*, or plotlines, she's involved with make any appearance in this movie, and 3) she's very unphotogenic. She's half-girl, half-fly, and her offensive weapon is super-acidic barf.

Here's what she looks like using that power in the comics:Gross, isn't it?

That's why I was so surprised, before seeing the movie, when I read that she'd be in it. Female characters in movies, especially in comic-book movies, action movies and other movies aimed at a teenage-boy audience, are primarily there as eye candy; when they're allowed to do cool stuff and look pretty it practically counts as a feminist victory, but the look-pretty requirement is not negotiable.

And there's no way to make disgusting green barf look pretty; hence my surprise.

It turns out I underestimated Hollywood's ability to pretty almost anything up: I can't find any video on YouTube that includes this, but when the younger mutants are all showing each other their powers and picking out their X-Men codenames, Angel demonstrates something that looks nothing at all like what's pictured above. She strikes a pose, puckers her lips and releases a smoldering fireball about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, which arcs prettily through the air and lands on the statue's head, where it begins to corrode the metal**.
She uses this power again in a battle near the end of the movie; she's flying through the air breathing fire like a dragon. Less ladylike, but still not gross.

*Except Professor X, obviously, and also Magneto. Though the extent to which Magneto was actually involved in the events of Planet X are debatable ... the character who tried to suborn the Xavier School's "special class" into a reconstituted Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and conquer the world was apparently later revealed to be Not Really Magneto At All. I haven't read the comic where that gets hashed out, though, so I am quite fuzzy on the details. I just know that the whole question of "Does Planet X Count as a 'Magneto Story' or not is very contentious --- see the comment thread on this post.

**For whatever reason, the fireball-spewing part of Angel's power demonstration is missing from all the clips I can find.

Now This Is Weird

(If you insist on having some context for this wonderfully bizarre image, it's here.)

So, Antarctic Press has started a new comic-book series featuring Sarah Palin and a suit of steam-powered robot armor.
Chris Murphy at Comics Alliance has reviewed the first (and so far only) issue, which he declares "so bad it's good":

Steampunk Palin hopes to capitalize on the popularity of two things. First, former Vice Presidential Candidate and ex-Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, whose life story of beauty queen to elected official to media celebrity has captivated a nation, both for those who find her to be an inspiring voice to the Tea Party movement of libertarian-influenced conservatives, and those who derive perverse entertainment from many of her public statements and behavior.

The second thing is steampunk, a literary genre that borrows the notions of cyberpunk and transplants them into an alternate history past or fantasy world, usually influenced by the works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne. It's often characterized by the use of advanced technology substitutes reliant on non-electrical power, and a visual aesthetic heavy on intricately designed gearworks. ...

And while I'm willing to believe this book when it tells me it's trying to depict Sarah Palin, my response to the idea that it can be characterized as steampunk is more along the lines of "Hold on there." Although to be fair to the book, Steampunk Palin defies classification into any literary genre, unless there's a genre I'm unaware of simply called "WTF?!?"

Some other high points of weirdness: first, Sarah Palin isn't the only contemporary political figure to get the steam-powered robot upgrade: Barack Obama is also turned into a cyborg ("Robama"), and John McCain gets a robot arm, and they all team up to save Alaska from marauding Russians and rapacious energy companies. Second, the nefarious plot to steal all the energy (all of it!) is headed by none other than Al Gore! An evil Al Gore, going by the nom de guerre "Professor Greenhouse."

I figured a publishing house that could produce that would probably have lots of other, equally oddball offerings, and Antarctic Press's website doesn't disappoint.

There's another, even more cheesecake series starring Palin: "Sarah Palin, Rogue Warrior" ...

... "President Evil," in which all the dead U.S. Presidents rise from their graves to feast on the living, and President Obama has to battle them ...
... and, probably the least off-the-wall of any of them, "The Governator," which imagines Arnold Schwarzenegger's tenure as Governor of California as it might have gone if he really were an amalgam of all his action-hero movie characters:
Unfortunately, these politicians are not all lampooned equally in their comic-book representations; Sarah Palin, besides being made into a cartoon character, is also objectified and sexualized in ways that Barack Obama, John McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are not. (About a third of the pages in Steampunk Palin #1 are devoted to pinup art of her; you can see an example at the Comics Alliance post I linked).

That's not going to surprise anyone who's even slightly familiar with either comic books or how Sarah Palin is usually depicted in the media; it's still depressing, though, that we're not yet able to caricature female politicians without turning them into hags, bimbos or sex objects.

Zany Vintage Ads - The Gift That Keeps On Giving!

I have a reproduction of Giant-Size X-Men #1, from 1975 --- this one, to be exact --- that also includes reproductions of the ads that were included in that initial printing.

Most of them are nothing special --- not appreciably different from the ads that run in comic books today, offering mail-order products guaranteed to give you a muscular body, mastery of hypnotism or martial arts, get-rich-quick schemes or collectible comics and/or action figures.

But there was one that made me laugh, not least because of its incredible seventiesness:

Stick-on fake facial hair! So that you, too, can have a sexy Van Dyke beard and mutton-chop sideburns like this guy! (I have no idea what is up with the hair on top of his head, though; the way they've drawn it, it looks more like he's wearing a deflated basketball for a skullcap).

Anyway, here's the copy, in case it's not legible in my scan:

ENJOY AN EXCITING, ROMANTIC

LOOK

IMPRESSIVE ANYTIME!

QUICK CHANGE to suit your mood time:

Send for Mustache, Sideburns and Van Dyke at once! Simply check the color you want or send a sample of your hair and leave the matching to our expert. MAIL COUPON NOW!

Adheres securely ... off and on in seconds ... can be worn as is or trimmed to just the style you want.

They then provide a listing of hair-color options, and a mailing address for "Masculiner Co." somewhere in New Jersey.

Unfortunately, since the ad is actually from 1975, the company probably doesn't exist anymore, and even if it did the offer wouldn't still be valid. (It says that at the bottom of every ad page: "Facsimile advertisement, no longer valid.")

Heck, I might even get myself some stick-on '70s-style sideburns if I could find them for super cheap. They look fun.

(I have some teeny-tiny, baby sideburns of my own that I kind of wish were bigger and more noticeable. They are a shade or two darker than the rest of my hair.)

Things You Don't See Every Day: Discussion of Sexism in Superhero Comics

I was really pleasantly surprised when I was given Classic X-Men #34 as a gift recently; besides the conclusion to an exciting story arc (which I had anticipated), the issue also included this little gem of a backup story written by Ann Nocenti and drawn by John Bolton.
Ann Nocenti frequently wrote the backup stories for the Classic X-Men series --- that series consists of reprints from an earlier run of Uncanny X-Men paired with new stories that are usually vignettes focusing on aspects of one particular character's personality. This story, which ran in June of 1989, features villains Emma Frost (the White Queen of the Hellfire Club) and Jason Wyngarde (Mastermind, also Black King of the Hellfire Club), and, caught between them, a hapless cocktail waitress who works at the Hellfire Club.

It begins with the waitress trying to serve drinks to Jason Wyngarde, who leers at her in a particularly unsettling manner:

(If you can't read the text, the topmost inset panel shows a scary-looking guy in Victorian garb staring at the body of a young woman wearing black lingerie and thigh-high boots, thinking: "How vulnerable and exposed she is. And the way she allows me to just openly stare at her! It's so base it embarrasses me!" The girl speaks to him, saying, "Will there be anything else, Mr. Wyngarde?" When he doesn't answer, she keeps trying: "Sir? Sir?" but still can't wrest any acknowledgement from him.)

Shaken, the waitress retreats to the women's dressing room, where she bumps into Emma Frost, who is changing into her uniform. The waitress starts to talk to Emma about Wyngarde, hoping to find an empathetic listener in another woman:

(Dialogue balloons say: "Oh, Miss Frost! Don't you just hate wearing these outfits?")

(Dialogue: "Isn't it all so sexist? I mean, shouldn't we protest, on principle? It's our skills, as servants, that should count, not how we look. I mean, am I right?")
(Waitress: "Shouldn't we stick together, as women, and refuse to dress like this?" Emma Frost: "What are you babbling about?")

This other woman being Emma Frost, however, no such consolation is forthcoming.

("Who do you take me for? Just another servant girl?") ("I am the White Queen! Yes, you wear that outfit, and men look at you, and it cheapens you.")
("But when I wear it, it cheapens them. Let me explain a few things about sexism, girl. It's all in what you use it for!") --- I like the appalled look on the waitress's face when she hears this. It's clear that what Emma is saying is blowing her mind, but the nuances of her reaction are left unclear. I prefer to imagine her thinking something like, "You are soooo deep in denial it's making me dizzy."

("... But it's really about personal domination. My clothes are my battle armor! I dress to go to war! My looks and body are weapons on par with a man's fists.")

("There is no such thing as sexism, unless you give them that power!")

To illustrate her highly personalized philosophy of female empowerment, Emma Frost sallies forth to confront the man whose churlish behavior inspired the whole discussion. She sits down opposite him, placing herself in the position of an equal, a competitor, rather than a servant, and plays a brutal, high-stakes game of psychic chess with him.

Neither character emerges from the battle unscathed: Emma manages to impale Wyngarde on his own spear, but in doing so she sustains enough damage to shatter her psionic self. Yet she doesn't, won't, and can't leave the table --- the combat means too much to her, even if it may ultimately kill her.

The point I see Nocenti making here is this: trying to fight sexism by making it work for you --- in Emma's case, embodying perfectly the patriarchal conception of the femme fatale --- is a sucker's game. No woman can do it well enough, and even if she could, the game is still ultimately rigged against her.

How *NOT* to Do Superhero Halloween Costumes

CaitieCat at Shakesville linked this somewhat hilaristurbing Comics Alliance article about Disguise Costumes' new line* of Marvel-superhero-themed women's Halloween costumes.

What could be more awesome than having a wider selection of ready-to-wear Marvel superhero costumes? Well, like Comics Alliance's Nick Nadel writes, it'd be a lot more awesome if these costumes actually looked much like the characters they're supposed to portray.

For example, there are three characters in the Marvel universe who might be considered female equivalents of Spider-Man: first, there's Spider-Woman**, who looks like this:

There's also Spider-Girl, who was introduced in a "What If?" one-shot comic, as the superpowered daughter of Spider-Man and his true love Mary Jane Watson. She dresses more or less exactly like her father does, in the blue-and-red spider suit:
Finally, there's Araña (Spanish for "spider"). She's a teenage girl with spider powers, and she dresses in street clothes with a spider motif:
None of these amazing characters look even a little bit like this, however.

This is more or less the pattern for all the characters featured in this line: make a standard-issue Sexy (Whatever) costume, with short skirt, bustier/crop top, and tall, vertiginously high-heeled boots, and add little details to evoke the character. Thus, Spider-Girl here looks more or less like the Black Cat looks more or less like Emma Frost looks more or less like American Dream. Only in Emma Frost's case is the resulting costume anywhere near resembling something the character in question would actually wear: hers is, if anything, a bit more modest than the outfit she wore for all those years as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club!

But the most WTF-inducing part of that article, for me at least, was this.

Sexy Venom?! That really, really does not compute.

It does not compute, because Venom looks like this:

You try to make that cute and attractive, and I'd argue you lost sight of the essence of the character a long time ago.

(In answer to your no-doubt-unasked question, "What's even more hilaristurbing than a Sexy Venom costume?", I give you a commenter at Comics Alliance's assertion that the blonde young woman modeling the Sexy Venom costume is none other than Carrie Prejean, Miss Anti-Gay California herself. How weird is that?)

*I was only able to find one of the costumes --- this one, the Sexy Cheerleader version of Captain America with the shield maybe a third the size of the one the model is holding --- on Marvel's own website, so it looks like the Women of Marvel line is mostly Disguise Costumes' brainchild. The Comics Alliance article gives the impression that Marvel is involved, but Disguise's website just says the costumes are "inspired" by Marvel superheroines, and you'd think that if Marvel had any role in designing the costumes, that they'd also be selling them on their site, which they're not.

**There have been multiple Spider-Women over the course of Marvel canon, but I am referring to Jessica Drew, the first, current and --- I believe --- longest-running holder of the title.

Autism Manga!

I finally got my hands on the first volume of Keiko Tobe's ongoing manga series, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, which I think does a wonderful job of showing how its protagonist (the young mother of an autistic boy, who in this first volume grows from a newborn to an elementary-school-aged kid) adjusts to the discovery that her son's life probably won't go the way she had fantasized before he was born.

Near the beginning of the story, when Sachiko (the protagonist) first learns that her fussy, temperamental baby boy, Hikaru, is autistic, she goes through a period of mourning.

She cries when she sees other people's cute, talkative, well-mannered toddlers (like the one shown at left) and thinks to herself that Hikaru will never be like that.

Particularly, she wishes he would call her "mommy." Hikaru doesn't speak, you see.

He also won't make eye contact, and avoids directly interacting with anyone.

This makes Sachiko miserable at first --- she feels like Hikaru is rejecting her, and at the same time her marriage is suffering because her husband, Masato, works long hours and gets angry with her when he comes home and Hikaru is having a tantrum and can't be calmed down, which happens often.
Sachiko is loneliest in this first part of the story, when she doesn't yet feel anything but grief toward her son, and she's estranged from her husband, and her husband's family thinks she's a lousy wife and mother, and she can't bear to be with her friends anymore because their typically-developing children depress her.

The only person in her life who offers her a sympathetic ear is her frail, elderly mother, from whom she keeps most of the less-pleasant parts of her life secret for fear of making her worry.

But the story doesn't stay in this rut for very long; little by little, Sachiko learns to spot the signs that Hikaru loves her, and since love is the main thing she wanted from him, this makes her happy.

Here's the scene that represents this turning point:

As sugar-coated as this might seem (Oh, he really does love me! He picked me some flowers!!), most of what happens after this point (as well as all that's come before) makes it clear that Sachiko's life is not easy. (Neither is Hikaru's, though --- that's one of the things I like most about this portrayal of a family with an autistic member: the author/artist clearly empathizes with Hikaru as well as Sachiko, and neither pits one against the other nor treats one as an extension of the other).

One of the major things that changes, once Sachiko realizes she loves Hikaru, is that she starts to notice external, systemic barriers Hikaru faces, and fights to change them. That's another thing I really like about this book --- it explicitly places Hikaru's autism, and Sachiko's efforts to get his mainstream elementary school to admit and accommodate him* in a wider context of societal ableism. Characters who are initially hostile to Sachiko and Hikaru showing up at their child's school or day care are often shown to have a disabled family member of their own (in one lady's case, an elderly mother who has trouble walking and needs physical therapy) whose struggles to get their needs met in a society that doesn't see them, and isn't built with them in mind, brings the initially hostile character around to Sachiko's side.

Hikaru does learn to thrive in his new environment, but it's very much a team effort that allows him to do so. His mother, his father, his special-ed teacher, the other teachers in his school (who have all had a crash course in Understanding and Dealing with Hikaru Azuma, courtesy of the principal), and his classmates all do their part in keeping Hikaru safe and happy, and in teaching him, little by little, to talk, to play with other children, to share, and to be polite and friendly.

The main reason Hikaru does so well, it seems, is that other people are willing to meet him halfway: find out what he understands, what he wants, and start there.

If you're a manga reader, you might want to pick this one up. While it's true that Sachiko, and not Hikaru, is the point-of-view character, and as such we see Hikaru primarily through her eyes rather than his own, I still think there's a lot in this story for autistic readers to appreciate. For me, the radically pro-disability-rights sentiments expressed in this story (in Sachiko's growing conviction that her son should be able to participate in society as fully as he can, and that, to make that wish come true, she'll need to enlist many other people's cooperation) and the explicit tie-ins to other disabilities, made With the Light a lot more interesting than most raising-an-autistic-child memoirs.

It was also interesting to see some indications of how people in Japan think of autism, particularly which misconceptions are common there. It seems like the Japanese lay understanding of autism is rooted a lot more in folk psychology than it is here. In America, I think we mostly think of autism as a disease, and a very big, scary one at that. In Japan, I got the impression from With the Light --- and its helpful Translator's Notes! --- that autism is seen as an extreme manifestation of introversion. (The Japanese term for autism, I read, translates roughly to "self-closing syndrome" or "cloistering syndrome").

*This book gave me the impression that the usual practice in Japan is for disabled students to go to their own specialized schools, though sending disabled students to mainstream schools isn't unheard-of, either. In the U.S., it's a lot more common for disabled students to go to the same schools as everyone else, even if they stay in separate special-ed classrooms all day.