Who's Who in the CBU 2009

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Taking Offence

By Regie Rigby

You know, this pile of comics I picked up at Bristol is still huge. As I’ve remarked before, having more comics than you can read is a nice problem to have, but there is so much stuff I’ve not told you about yet and The Comics Expo is already many weeks in the past.

So, I’m going to take a break from gushing about fabulous comics for a week. FoolBritannia isn’t primarily a review column and there’s a bit of a backlog of other stuff I need to talk about building up. For example, I haven’t actually mentioned this poisonous little rant in The Times yet, and it’s already old news.

For those of you who missed the online kerfuffle (yes, that’s a real word) basically The Times (that’s the original one based in London, but it isn’t called The London Times whatever people in New York might think) ran an opinion piece ostensibly about the Sin City movie which slagged off all comics fans as “geeks” of an exclusively male and mysoginist flavour.

I don’t intend to quote any of it here so you’ll need to follow the link if you want to read it. You’ll spot the numerous errors of course, and the blatant misrepresentation of several comics characters and their histories as the author twists the facts to fit his premise. Your average reader of the times however is not as steeped in comics law as we are and may well have accepted the article’s ravings as fact. After all, there are many people in the UK who will tell you that “if it’s in The Times, it must be true”.

I can’t tell you how angry I got over that article. I was actually moved to write to the paper objecting – although I have no idea why I bothered since The Times chose to ignore every single communication they received on the subject. I really should know better, but I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of weeks now and I think I’ve sussed why I got so annoyed.

There’s an element of truth in it, isn’t there?

Oh, most of the assertions in the article are cobblers, but there a=is more than a grain of truth behind it, you know there is.

Sure, there are many women who read and enjoy comics. There are many women who create comics, both in the small scale, self-published arena and behind the editorial desks and drawing boards of the big publishers. But there is a persistent undercurrent in comics culture that we can’t just turn a blind eye to.

Again, taking the specific example if Frank Miller’s Sin City as the basis of an argument about misogyny in comics is clearly misguided. Sin City is a steeped in the genre of Noir. Love it or loathe it, Noir is steeped in misogyny. It’s a heavily stylised form which depends on stereotypes and extremes for its existence. Sin City is also utterly unrepresentative of comics as a whole, it was never mainstream even when it was new.

But if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that however badly the case was made in The Times, there is a case to answer.

Anglophone comics continue to be dominated by the Superhero genre, which remains trapped in an adolescent loop. These comics tend not to treat women terribly well. As a general rule (and I am generalising here, and I know I am, so please don’t swamp the message board with examples of exceptions to this generalisation, I know) women exist in spandex books to be love interests, or get rescued.

Even when they take the lead, historically they still get used as a way to live out male sexual fantasy. Early Wonder Woman comics, for example, seem to feature the Amazonian in rather more bondage situations than would appear to be necessary. Female characters always seem to get the most revealing outfits too. Batman and Superman were in skintight clothes sure, but only Wonder Woman wore a bathing suit – for the late thirties, the volume of bare flesh on display is nothing short of shocking.

She set something of a trend, although costumes have become slightly less revealing since the height of skimpiness in the late eighties, and breast sizes have reduced on the whole, so that these days I can believe that the vast majority of female characters in the DC and Marvel universes might actually be able to stand unaided.

In recent years, we have actually been presented with an array of strong, positive women. Batgirl was shot through the spine by The Joker, and lost the use of her legs. The Times article reports this as an example of the mysogenistic treatment of female characters, but Barb’s reaction to this life changing experience actually goes a long way to disproving the article’s point.

Because she doesn’t fall apart. She doesn’t depend on anyone. She gets up, gets her strength back, and then finds a way of using the abilities she has to do some good in the world. She may not be into the high kicking, rope swinging, two-fisted crime-fighting scene anymore (which was a scene she’d already decided wasn’t really for her in any case) but she’s still a strong, positive role model.

So is Catwoman. So is the new Batgirl, come to that. Strong women, with sensible costumes. The days of the dental floss outfit and the exploding powder puff are long gone. The Spandex books have started to get their act together, it’ll just take the mainstream media a few more years to catch up.

Other genres do even better. The creator published sector, which after all pretty much is the UK industry, does particularly well, but even here you’ll find people who fit the prejudiced idea of the “comic book geek”. An old friend who used to work in a comics store once told me that a great number of her customers found it impossible not to stare at her chest when they talked to her, and found it still harder to accept that she might know anything about the comics she sold.

There’s a reason for the form the “comic book geek” took, with his medieval view of women, his unkempt appearance and poor personal hygiene. The stereotype exists because it’s true, at least some of the time. What we have to do is make it less and less true. The only way to combat the kind of character assassination levelled by the Times article is to demonstrate that it’s nonsense.

How do we do this?

Easy.

Don’t buy bad books. Insist on good quality story telling. Insist on innovation, imagination and imagination when you read. If you only buy one genre of comics, branch out a little, try something new! I’ve suggested a few ideas over the past few weeks, you’ll find even more elsewhere on this very site.

But most of all, be out and proud. Read comics at your desk over lunch. Read them on the train in to work (they fold up more easily than Harry Potter novels for a start) read them in public. If people take the Mickey, tell them they’re wrong. Talk intelligently about comics. And if you’re a bloke, don’t stare at ladies’ chests while you’re doing it.