Comic books and Spider-Woman: a little rant

I heard an episode of the Double X Gabfest podcast the other day in which Noreen Malone of New York Magazine claimed that superhero movies were only made for teenage boys, or nerdy men, and that women didn’t go to see them. (Even though she lives in Brooklyn! That just seems improbable.) Superhero movies are for everyone, and I for one have never stopped loving them.

On the other hand, I’ve lost touch with superhero comics, because the flood of titles is too bewildering to make sense of in a crowded basement comic-book shop full of teenage boys and aggravating booming-voiced hipster idiots bent on impressing their rolling-eyes female companion with their dudey-frood bearded sneery nonsense about ‘all that Wonder Woman shit’ (I paraphrase). I visit Forbidden Planet periodically to browse the shelves but rarely buy comics, because most of their cover art all looks much as it did when I sold the things in Aberdeen’s first comic-book shop in the 1980s.

I’m also put off by the incessantly pneumatic mammary glands that have been de rigueur for comic book cover art since the 1950s, when the Marvel artists saw Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell on screen and thought, ‘that’ll bring the boys in’. In that respect, yes; most comic-books are drawn for those attracted by flimsily-covered bouncing female secondary sexual characteristics. The rest of us: BORED. Look at the old 1972 Spider-Woman costume, which is basically a naked woman in body paint. It makes me irritated, especially as it was drawn by a woman, whose brief must have been ‘breasts’, not ‘action hero’. Don’t these artists realise how much cantilevering these female superhero costumes must need to support so much weight? And how impossible it must be to run, swing, thwack, rebound, and leap with a double weight of monstrously outsized cannon-balls suspended from the chest by straining muscles and spandex? Asking for logic in a superhero world feels pointless, like wondering how Banner finds his trousers again when the green guy disappears.

So, if the cover art doesn’t pull me in, the story doesn’t stand a chance. I look for the clear-line style that Hergé invented, which continued all the way to the Hernandez Brothers with Love and Rockets, and in the new Spider-Woman series. I love what Javier Rodriguez and Veronica Fish do with the new(ish) Spider-Woman universe to make it clean, frightening, compelling and focused. I also love Spider-Woman’s new look, originally designed by Kris Anka: neat, practical, washable, undistracting, and unsexualised. Obviously she fills it with curves, but they’re in proportion, there’s nothing to get in the way of vigorous, physical crime-fighting activities, or swinging from skyscrapers.

The uniform also comes in a maternity version, because Jessica Drew – for it is she – is a single mother crime-fighting superhero. I’ve written about her here and here on Vulpes Libris. Go take a look. And then write to Kevin Feige and ask him when Spider-Woman can join the Avengers on screen.