Before we SlutWalk, let us LinkWalk!
This Friday links thing is becoming a habit, eh? Nice way to wind down the week. Talking of which, if you’re at SlutWalk and you spot a giant vinyl banner version of our logo, come and say hi.1
AND NOW, THE LINKS.
- NURSE, THE SCREENS! Comics artist Cliff Chiang appears to be deliberately trying to incite a Fansplosion of Joy at BadRep Towers. Check out this artwork, in which a bunch of DC superheroines have a “Tonight, Matthew…” moment, and rock out as The Runaways. Ah, hell, let’s stick it up here:
He’s even titled it I Don’t Give A Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation. Particularly digging the way Joan Jett/Wonder Woman’s lasso doubles as a guitar cable. Shiny. The folks at Comics Alliance also felt the urge to shout about it, and their piece is worth a read for its comparison to another bit of cool punk/superhero mashup art. Anyway, as a result of all this excitement we’re now restraining the urge to cosplay as superheroes cosplaying as rockstars. Too much meta. Much, much too complicated for a Friday morning. BUT WE THOUGHT ABOUT IT. - Crunk Feminist Collective talks language, race, and assumptions within feminist and press coverage of the SlutWalk phenomenon. Much as we’re behind the march itself, this post raises issues – unraised in any other coverage we’ve seen – well worth contemplating, whether you’re a marcher or not.
- electronic doll of adult (and therefore NSFW) blog Post Modern Sleaze talks consent, clothes, sexism and SlutWalking.
- After the folks who run the Imperial War Museum‘s twitter account read and linked to our post on their Women War Artists exhibition this week, we got chatting and ended up spending quite a bit of time browsing the extensive online archive of propaganda posters – the history of this one is pretty interesting. Thought this teaching resource, titled “War Babes”, was pretty cool – it encourages the class to unpick gender stereotypes and challenge their own assumptions just a little bit. More than we were expecting, anyway.
That’s it! See you on SlutWalk London!
- Assuming the bloody thing arrives from the printers in time. We may just have to yell the lyrics to Bad Reputation in unison. Won’t that be great! We’re all classically trained at Grade 8 in caterwauling, I promise you. [↩]
My Secret Love: Calamity Jane
Team BadRep were sent a writing prompt this month: What is your favourite film or TV series, and why? If it’s what you’d call ‘feminist-friendly’, what about it appealed? If it isn’t, how does that work for you, and are there nonetheless scenes, characters and so on that have stayed with you and continue to occupy a soft spot for you as a feminist pop culture adventurer?
Calamity Jane (played by Doris Day) starts off the 1953 musical film of the same name as a tomboy, gets humiliated and learns to be a girl, then gets married. In a dress and everything.
Despite this, it’s one of my very favourite films.
Proud and tomboyish ‘Calam’ is a popular and respected figure in the town of Deadwood. Not just one of the boys, but determined to outshoot, outdrink, outswagger them all. But she’s met her match in Wild Bill Hickok whom she admires and who grudgingly admires her, although they get into one of those “ooh I hate you and don’t fancy you at all, nope” oneupmanship songs. Calam and Bill are comrades, but Calam’s in love with the local Lieutenant Danny, and saves his life, but he’s not interested in her. Because he’s a dick, basically.
Doris Day as Calamity and Howard Keel as Bill Hickock
Anyway, a Proper Lady (Katie) comes to town and becomes friends with Calam, helping her discover her feminine side (I know, I know, just bear with me) and Bill falls unconvincingly in love with her. But when Danny and Katie are discovered KISSING, Calam loses it and threatens to run Katie out of town. She makes a right fool of herself, and Danny is mean about her, but Bill Hickok defends her and goes to console/talk some sense into a bereft Calam. On a still summer night, in a wood, under a silvery moon, etc… they kiss, and conveniently enough it turns out they’ve been in love all along! Everyone makes friends again, Calam marries Bill and Katie marries Danny, even though he’s a knob.
Okay. So there are some tough bits, most notably the repeated references to “female thinking”, and the godawful A Woman’s Touch song. I get through this by donning slash goggles, through which it all becomes rather charming and ironic.
There’s even a symbolic castration of Calam at the end when she and Bill get married – they’re just getting on the stagecoach and he finds she has her gun tucked into her wedding dress. They all laugh and he hands it to some random in the crowd. Then they ride off singing etc.
BUT. There is a lot that is loveable about this film, and it’s not as bad as the details above might suggest.
Firstly, Doris Day’s Calam is a wonderful character. Brave, kind, funny and bursting with energy, she leaps about all over the place, and has a habit of firing at the ceiling to get people’s attention. She’s a tomboy but she’s no freak – everyone in the town is fond of her, respects her and humours her habit of exaggerating her own exploits. She’s accepted, not just tolerated. Her flaw is her pride, and the real point of the story is that it’s her pride which is ‘corrected’ and not her masculine habits.
Secondly, although she is engirlied, she doesn’t become a 50s fembot. She wears a few dresses, but mostly she’s out of her buckskins yet still in trousers. There’s no sign at all she’s going to give up riding the stage (or violently oppressing the indigenous population). I think my favourite bit in the whole film is near the end when she’s racing after Katie’s coach to bring her back to Deadwood, and she passes Bill and his mate on her horse. She thunders past, then stops, turns, rides back, kisses him, and rides off again without a word.
His friend says “I don’t know what kind of life you’ll have living with that catamount… but it ain’t gonna be dull.”
Bill replies: “That’s for dang sure.” He looks delighted.
Thirdly, although it arrives at a supremely convenient time in that way that musicals have, the relationship between Calam and Bill is a convincing one. Throughout the film there are references to their friendship and campaigns together, and they are clearly fond of each other. He sticks up for her when Danny is being disparaging, and tells her early on he thinks she’d be pretty (if she was a Proper Lady, natch). So when Calamity ‘takes off her glasses’ at the Ball (in fact she’s been covered up in a coat she claims was given to her by General Custer) it isn’t as if he’s only just noticed her. And crucially, rather than trying to put her down or get her to act in a more feminine way, his efforts are about bringing her down to earth from her flights of fancy and towering pride.
It’s not a feminist film. It’s not even close. But Calamity is wonderful, and I think better a film with her in it than not at all.
PS. The title is a reference to the most famous song in the film, Secret Love, which has become a bit of a gay anthem. My favourite is The Black Hills Of Dakota, although it has a lot less subtext.
PPS. Don’t come to this film looking for historical accuracy. Here’s some info on the actual Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.
In defence of Rihanna’s ‘Man Down’
Another week, another women-in-music controversy, and another hotly debated video from Rihanna. Having ticked domestic violence and sadomasochism off the musical list, she’s responded to recent accusations of being a major player in the oversexualisation of pop by upping the ante, making her latest offering a blend of sexual violence and violent retribution. The video for Man Down, which opens with Rihanna shooting a man who is later revealed to have assaulted her after they dance at a club, has kicked up a predictable media dustcloud. It’s all a far cry from ‘Pon de Replay’.
Amid calls for the video to be banned, it’s interesting to see how much of the outrage centres on the murder, rather than the rape. Granted, the shooting and its aftermath is shown far more explicitly than the hinted-at assault, but commentary such as that of media watchdog Paul Porter:
“‘Man Down’ is an inexcusable, shock-only, shoot-and-kill theme song. In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime…”
appears to be divorcing the shooting from its context, concentrating on Rihanna as the agent and perpetrator of a crime, rather than as the victim of one. This wilfully ignores one of the video’s central messages, which is the ease with which these roles can be merged.
Sex and violence, and sexual violence, as themes in art and entertainment are as old as art and entertainment themselves. To be flippant for a second: maybe it’s just the use of the word ‘Mama’, but the chorus of ‘Man Down’ put me in mind of that certain section of Bohemian Rhapsody where the narrator, having just killed a man, ruminates on how ‘life had just begun and now I’ve gone and thrown it all away’. And while I don’t think Freddie Mercury was ever actively described as a positive role model, neither was he castigated for encouraging cold-blooded cod-operatic executions among 1970s youth.
Is Rihanna coming in for particular criticism because of the publicity previously given to her real-life encounters with violence? Those of you following along at home will of course have noticed that she didn’t respond to her experience of assault by shooting Chris Brown on the concourse of Grand Central Station. Surely no one seriously believes ‘Man Down’ to be advocating that the victims of violence engage in violent reprisals – any more than that was true of Thelma & Louise, or Straw Dogs, or, to really stretch the analogy, Death and the Maiden? ‘Man Down’ is, on one level, a revenge fantasy which relies on the dramatic and the sensational to get its message across.
Roger Ebert wrote of Irréversible, whose backwards chronology ‘Man Down’ recalls, that the film’s structure makes it inherently moral – that by presenting the vengeance before the acts that inspire it, we are forced to process the vengeance first, and therefore think more deeply about its implications. Might the same apply to ‘Man Down’? Throughout the lyrics and video, the song’s protagonist may contextualise and explain her actions, but she’s not free of regret, she isn’t gleeful or exultant, and she acknowledges her actions as a crime with implications for the rest of her life. She calls herself a ‘criminal’ and reflects that her rapist and victim was ‘somebody’s son’. The narrative doesn’t glorify murder, but it recognises that we live in a world where this kind of fantasy-vigilante approach might often seem more accessible and plausible than relying for justice on the state or the police.
Art and entertainment don’t exist in a vacuum. Art will be asked to justify itself, particularly when it touches on themes that are an everyday reality for many of us and which feed into issues like the space which women, particularly women of colour, have to express themselves, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes versus the impetus, the desire, and perhaps the moral duty, to openly discuss the conditions under which we live.
The complex intersections of race and gender hardly lend themselves to being cleared up in the confines of a blog post, but ‘Man Down’ has sparked plenty of engaged and informative discussion online – at Crunk Feminist, The Beautiful Struggler, and Hello Beautiful for starters. I’m just glad debate is happening and that we have a mainstream artist who doesn’t shy away from instigating it.
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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.
Women War Artists at the Imperial War Museum
A couple of weekends ago I went to see the Women War Artists exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. I strongly recommend it for anyone with an interest in art and / or history as it’s a great collection. I won’t go through the exhibition work by work, but here is a slideshow of some of the key pieces and an audio slideshow featuring curator and Head of Art at the Imperial War Museum Kathleen Palmer talking about some of the star items. If you’re super keen I recommend buying the book as there are many more artworks and artists in there than make it into the physical exhibition.
Women and art
Waiting for the Train on the Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin, December 1945 - Mary Kessell
Just to get one thing out of the way before I get stuck in: women artists are not an invention of the 20th Century, they have been around for a very long time indeed. Just because you may never have heard of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist or they weren’t producing accomplished, arresting and intelligent works alongside male artists. But there are reasons you have never heard of them.1
Let’s get another old chestnut out of the way: there’s no feminine unity of theme, approach, subject or style in art produced by women, just as there’s no equivalent in the work of men. However in small collections of art by any group you can sometimes see common patterns based on the conditions of production. For example very few of the works in Women War Artists directly depict combat. This is not womanly squeamishness, they weren’t allowed on the field. Similarly there aren’t many images of chisel-jawed tommies striding forth in a blaze of noble violence, because the government paid their official (and male) war artists to produce most of the top propaganda. Female artists were drafted in for specific jobs, for example Laura Knight’s famous, glamorous portrait of Ruby Loftus.
Unofficial artists
Britain has such a wealth of art documenting the experience of war not only because it was diligently collected by post-war art committees (including the Imperial War Museum Women’s Work Sub-Committee, created in 1918) but also because the government commissioned artists to record the war. The first official war artists scheme was set up in 1916, to create propaganda and to commemorate the national war effort. 51 artists were commissioned, 47 men and four women, and of these four, three had their work rejected and one did not take up the commission. But while there was no “official” female representation, women artists recorded the impact of the war on civilians, what they saw in the factories and military hospitals, as nurses, drivers and auxiliary staff close to the frontline.
In the Second World War over 400 artists were commissioned, of whom 52 were women. Only two were given overseas commissions and only one – Evelyn Dunbar – was given a salary. But again a rich body of ‘unofficial’ work by women emerged during and after the war, and this forms the bulk of the Women War Artists exhibition, documenting everything from queues at the fishmongers (fish was popular because it wasn’t rationed) to shipyards and weapons factories, bombed out streets and army camps and hospitals.
Argh
To my mind the most powerful work in the exhibition, and in fact one of my favourite paintings full stop (because I think it’s brilliant, not because I particularly want to look at it) is Human Laundry by Doris Zinkeisen. Commissioned by the British Red Cross to record their activities, Zinkeisen arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, soon after it was liberated. Her painting shows a scene in the stable that was nicknamed the ‘human laundry’ in which survivors were washed and de-loused by staff from a nearby German army hospital before being treated in the makeshift hospital at the camp.
Human Laundry, 1945 Doris Zinkeisen
The contrast between the sparkling white uniforms and plump pink arms and faces of the German nurses and the grey emaciated bodies of the camp inmates is full of quiet horror. The ambiguous, unreadable expression of the foreground nurse and the blurred faces of the other nurses and the two doctors also contrast with the realism and detail of the water spreading across the floor, the texture of the metal buckets. What were they thinking, as they washed these half dead creatures? Whatever it is, we have no sign of their emotion. Then there’s the contrast between the tenderness and intimacy associated with washing somebody and the industrial, mechanical nature of this operation, underlining the sheer scale of the task. They found 60,000 sick and starving people at Belsen, alongside 10,000 corpses.
I know you know this, I’m sure you studied it at school just like I did. But that’s one of the main reasons war art is so important – it’s not just propaganda, it communicates the human cost of war more powerfully than the numbers do, or at least it does for me. I can’t imagine 10,000 dead bodies. I can’t really imagine 100. But I look at a painting like Human Laundry and I can grasp it, the horror of it.
However, I think the painting also contains if not hope, then the possibility of hope (or at least I feel it does compared to photographs of the same scene) The hope of a new beginning is present in the symbolism of washing, and in the way that the water spreads like a shadow across the bottom of the painting, but the people are picked out in light.
A woman’s place
Across the way from the exhibition is another gallery, which is just called ‘The Art Collection’ and looks to be part of the museum’s permanent exhibitions. There are some very fine works in there as well (John Piper! Paul Nash! <3) but my companions couldn’t find any by women. I hope that when the Women War Artists exhibition closes in January some of the works will remain on permanent display alongside the works of male artists rather than being returned immediately to the vaults and forgotten all over again.
Found Feminism: “What Science Fiction Means”
This image has been shown widely on the internet for a few weeks, but I keep coming back to it.
I think I want it on my bedroom wall, maybe a metre or two high.
'What Science Fiction Means' - copyright Egypt Urnash
Fantastic artist Egypt Urnash drew this for free, as a “t-shirt design for a college SF club”. It was then linked to by Major Internet Deity Warren Ellis, who knows groovy stuff when he sees it, and subsequently the design is now selling as framed art prints and t-shirts.
Why do I love this so much?
Possibly because it could have been titled “What I want to be when I grow up” (and still apply to me and most of Team BadRep now, if we’re honest). It has a shark with a frickin’ laser on its head, which is always good for +10 points, but it’s got to be the sheer joy on the girl’s face. I think I just have an innate love of anything which could legitimately have the caption “YEAH BABY, YEAH!”
At a time when women seem to be shockingly under-represented in Sci-fi (way beyond the ratio of actual female authors to male) and hearty debate on whether that’s because of sexism or other factors, I’m delighted at anything which tells young women they have a central place in SF. (The first link references Joanna Russ’ “How to suppress women’s writing”, which we mentioned ourselves recently.)
Women of all ages should be holding the rayguns and riding the space-sharks, dammit. After all, WisCon (‘the World’s leading feminist science fiction convention’) has just finished, and once again shows the potential of the genre not only to excite and speak to everyone, but to be a blank slate where current prejudices don’t have to be brought along. SF could be a feminist’s best friend.
Egypt’s site here contains the full-size original, as well as other Awesome Art which you should go and look at.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
Team BadRep were sent a writing prompt this month: What is your favourite film or TV series, and why? If it’s what you’d call ‘feminist-friendly’, what about it appealed? If it isn’t, how does that work for you, and are there nonetheless scenes, characters and so on that have stayed with you and continue to occupy a soft spot for you as a feminist pop culture adventurer?
Now stop asking such awkward questions.
Gather ’round, Internet; let me tell you the tale of how I became a feminist. It’s a good one, I promise. Take a seat, please! Open your mind-hatch and brace yourselves for my infosquirt.
(How many articles have I opened like that? ALL OF THEM)
I discovered that I was a feminist at university. I was nineteen. It took an enthusiastic, fiery, inspirational woman with icy blonde hair and a stack of books about gender and queer theory explaining to my class that feminism was, you know, Feminism, and not, in fact, the exclusive reserve of stereotypical humourless Second Wave womyn-born-womyn fanatics.
This came as a great relief to little transgender me, and highlighted that everything I thought about sexuality, gender expression and the nature of equality neatly fitted under the feminist banner. What a relief! So that made me a feminist, because I held those views. And those beliefs were almost unanimously implanted in my psyche by an anime called Revolutionary Girl Utena at the age of about fifteen.
They love each other very much. Did I mention how gorgeous this series is?
An anime? I hear you cry! An anime? Being feminist? An animé?, your incredulous cries ring loud through the intertubes to my desk, what, the Japanese cartoons that are full of the degradation and exploitation of women, where the source material contains less-than-consensual sex and the American dubs sanitise out all the lesbianism? Surely not.
Where did all this incest come from?:(
Well, actually, yes. It’s true as treacle. Readers who’ve seen it will already know why, of course, but let’s take this from the top – be warned, people who haven’t seen it: here be spoilers.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is a shoujo (“girls'”) animé set in a high school. It’s all very sweet to start with; you’ve got the hero (Utena) and her best friend, and you’ve got the absurdly powerful school council. And then there’s a heavy injection of what-the-fuck when you meet the Duelling Theme. There’s a mechanism in place for long, convoluted reasons, whereby selected Duellists – designated by rings – duel (with swords) to win the Rose Bride as a prize. Her name is Anthy, and her entire purpose is to be a fought-over, won-and-owned slave.
So far so messed up. But it’s fucked up for a purpose. The hero, Utena, has a prince complex. She wants to – literally – be a prince that rescues princesses – that’s her gender expression. She cross-dresses habitually and is frequently described as “a tomboy” (despite actually being quite femme), and she falls in love with Anthy, primarily by wanting to save her. The whole series is full of fluid, ambiguous gender expression and sexuality, and it’s treated and handled in a non-sensational, perfectly intelligible way. Nothing is mysterious or exotic – it is just the way it is.
The greatest thing about Utena, however, is that it tells the story of a woman who desires and ascribes to an atypical gender expression and her struggle to make her gender expression fit and work in a world that is vehemently and viciously opposed to it – and wins. Sort of. Utena’s own end (and I’m sorry for the spoilers here) is sacrificial and tragic, but in sacrificing herself she saves and liberates her friends who go on to live and love as they want. It’s not your average coming-of-age, adolescence-is-hard story: there’s pitch black themes of rape and sexual coercion in there that are painful and harrowing to watch, but resolve themselves. It’s a story of survival, but it’s not just a story of female survival. There’s Utena who is absolutely not your average girl, and there’s Mamiya and Miki, both femme men, and survivors of the destructive obsession of others.
Mamiya
So I fell madly in love with it, as I’m sure you’ll understand, because it was a thing that showed me that there was hope for me, as a trans* person, because here was a whole series full of atypical gender expression that just existed, neither as a joke nor as a plot point. It also demonstrated to me me that it is possible to fight and vanquish your ascribed social role. It’s a story of seeing oppression and unfairness and fighting it with every fibre of your being. Utena literally gives her life to liberate Anthy from her sexual degradation, slavery and torment because she cannot live in a world that would condone and support such condemnation. Every time I watch the series to the end (and it’s bloody long!) I end up in floods of tears and with a profound desire to march around town shouting at people.
Usually I draw things instead. But, you know, the desire’s there.
I absolutely recommend Revolutionary Girl Utena to you guys – I mean, it’s not without its problems, nothing is – because of how powerful and liberating it is to watch, but I caution you that the themes get darker than the forgotten recesses of hell and some bits are genuinely hard to watch. Each character is sympathetic, but flawed to fuck, and no-one emerges at the other end untarnished – and that’s perfect. Everyone fights and is wounded, because that’s how life is. Everyone’s got a streak of trauma or viciousness in them, because that’s how people are. Despite its weird, fantastic elements, it’s very engrossing and believable – and that’s what makes it so effective. It deconstructs the idea of rigidly set, gender-ascribed roles in an allegorical tale full of people. Flawed, understandable, hurting people.
And that is why I am a feminist. Because my adolescence was spent watching the adolescence of Utena. Do seek it out. It’s incredible. And deeply, deeply weird, but we all love that.
Images courtesy of Giovanna at the fantastic Empty Movement Utena fan resource.
Poor old millionaire superstar Adele, eh? No sooner has the dust settled on the furore over her objections to being a higher-rate taxpayer, than she gets thrown into the vanguard of another of those putative Real Women in Music revolutions. A mere three years after she started out, and after just seventeen weeks of her second album at Number One, it appears to have suddenly dawned on Richard Russell that Adele exemplifies all that’s healthy and hopeful in the otherwise dire and overheated state of contemporary pop.
“The whole message with [Adele] is that it’s just music, it’s just really good music,” said Russell. “There is nothing else. There are no gimmicks, no selling of sexuality. I think in the American market, particularly, they have come to the conclusion that is what you have to do.”
The main reason why Russell’s claims about Adele should be regarded with scepticism is that Russell is the head of Adele’s record label. Even leaving aside such vested interests, his argument that she represents some kind of paradigm shift has been ably deconstructed here by Laura Snapes.
The Guardian article linked to above has a few frustrating facets of its own. I’m not sure why Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ should be hoicked in to illustrate Russell’s point: there’s a difference between having a sexualised image – usually, when it’s the subject of criticism, one that’s been externally imposed on an artist – and singing about sex and sexuality. Especially when ‘S&M’ is a more complex song than that framework allows for – arguably one in which Rihanna presents non-mainstream sexuality in terms of female agency. Finally, the idea of good-girl, sexless Adele vs bad-girl, sexualised Rihanna is a false dichotomy with problems in abundance.
Adele’s own image is hardly free of contrivance, harking back as it does to the blue-eyed soul divas of the 1960s – classily sexualised, perhaps, but sexualised nonetheless. In her chosen brand of popular music, a degree of sex in your self-presentation is, as Russell correctly identifies, inextricably linked to commercial success. It’s even arguable, unfortunately, that it’s Adele’s very distance from the currently acceptable aesthetic norms of her genre that has necessitated she be marketed with a different, ‘desexualised’ focus. Had Adele possessed her own voice but the body of, oh, let’s say Katy Perry, would her image have been sexed-up business as usual?
Russell is taking issue, of course, not with the marketing and self-presentation of all women in music, but with a particular branch of commercial pop, and the marketing therein of female artists by predominantly male management, which was ever thus. If his comments do kickstart a new way of measuring the money-making potential of women in music, then great, but it’s going to be an uphill struggle in view of the constant and increasing pressures on female performers – as well as male – to conform to a blandly beautiful industry standard.
Is Adele’s refusal to bow to that standard, as Russell claims, as radical today as the Prodigy were in the early 1990s? Let’s face it, mainstream acts are so limp and colourless right now, and popular culture so devoid of ideas, experiments and imagination, that yeah, it probably is. Never mind that the Prodigy were highly politicised and engaged with a wider oppositional culture, while Adele is outspoken in bemoaning her tax burden.
While no one can begrudge Adele her success, or deny that it’s refreshing to witness, the fact that she can be said to occupy a radical position is more an indictment of contemporary music than it is a compliment to her. The most positive thing about Russell’s remarks is the opportunity they offer to reiterate a greater truth: that commercial profit-driven pap purely designed to generate a profit is more than socio-culturally damaging for women, it’s dull.
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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.
Yes, Maybe, No: Three Comics
So, here are three recent-ish comics, one good, one with potential but some issues, and one of them so eye-meltingly bad that quite possibly I am a worse person for having read it.
So, let’s start with the bad, because that’s where the fun is, right? Right.
Neonomicon – Alan Moore
A four part mini-series that wrapped up just recently, Neonomicon was… well, it was, as much as we might wish it hadn’t been. A modern spin on Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, Neonomicon actually looked like it had potential to start with. A good Mythos tale lures you in with mundane normality and then – bam! – unspeakable eldritch abomination and the creeping madness behind your eyes. In a similar way, Neonomicon lures you in with a clever enough idea and characters and then – bam! – racism and gang rape. We’ll get to that in a moment.
So, that acceptable start we mentioned. We’re given a pair of FBI agents investigating some strange goings on that very quickly become Mythos related. And hey, we think, the two lead characters are not square jawed white guys. We’ve got a female lead and a black male lead, nice to see some variety in character design for a change. Sure, some of the Lovecraft references are a bit heavy handed, but that’s okay.
And then the second issue happens. Our two agents have followed the lead to a Mythos sex shop in a quiet New England town. It’s not sure whether it wants to be creepy or played for laughs with some of the novelty items visible in the background. One thing leads to another, and they’re infiltrating a sex cult and… oh, now the guy has been shot, and the racial slurs are flowing freely. And now it’s gang rape time for the female agent. Thanks for that, Alan Moore.
Now, Moore did say (there’s a quote in this interview here) that when he was writing this he thought (paraphrased): “…let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in.” And that could have been interesting, handled differently. It could have been a chance to tackle some of the issues with Lovecraft, to look at the fact that Lovecraft was a bit of a terrible racist and misogynist. But that isn’t what happens here. This isn’t a story that uses sex and racism to raise questions and make a point. It’s just a story full of non-consensual sex and racism. Or, as a friend put it: “If God were to look down upon this benighted planet in judgement, he’d probably think the place worthy of a second chance. Until he read Neonomicon. Then he’d remember why he commissioned the Book of Revelation in the first place.”
Carbon Grey – Hoan Nguyen
Carbon Grey is our “has potential, but also issues”. Let’s look at the potential first.
Set in a slightly steampunky spin on First World War-era Europe, the story follows the Sisters Grey. Each generation, we’re told, see three sisters born to the Grey family, hereditary defenders of the Kaiser. Three sisters, one for strength, one for grace, one for wisdom. Except in this generation, where the youngest sister has a twin, a fourth Grey, a sister for revolution.
What does this get us? It gets us explosions, and action, and the four very deadly Sisters Grey kicking ass and changing the face of politics in Mitteleuropa. It gets us spies and assassins and clever dialogue. And did I mention the ass-kicking? In the opening sequence of the first issue the youngest Grey pulls off more awesome action stuff than can be found in an entire Die Hard marathon.
The issues, then? Well, mostly it revolves around one thing: the art (which for the most part is very, very pretty, as long as you don’t mind the manga influences). With one notable exception in the form of a background character with no lines, all the female characters have essentially the same body type. It’s that improbable superhero-woman build, all gravity defying breasts and waist lines that surely don’t leave enough room for internal organs. The Queen of Germany lounges around in a scrap of white fabric that’d make Emma Frost blush.
The intro arc has just wrapped up, so now’s a good time to get in on the main story of Carbon Grey, if you can look past the art problems.
And now, on to the good.
Scarlet – Brian Michael Bendis
Bendis is a lot better on his creator-owned work than he is when he’s writing superheroes for Marvel, and Scarlet is among the best of his creator-owned stuff. The first plot arc just finished, so now’s as good a time as any to get started here.
Scarlet was a regular hipster kid in Portland, just generally existing. Then things went wrong and she learnt a harsh lesson in how messed up the world is. Now she’s running a grass-roots revolution. That’s the basic gist of the series. Oh, and she wants your help and is telling the whole story via fourth-wall breaking narration. Between some excellent lines and a fantastic snapshot life sketch in the first issue, we get Scarlet as a nicely well-developed character, someone we can accept as real.
It’s an interesting look at what it takes to shake someone out of their comfortable middle-class white comfort zone, and what they do next. And with everything being told to us via Scarlet, who very definitely has an agenda, we get to see how bias colours perception. The police and politicians aren’t all corrupt and evil, but seen through Scarlet’s eyes they become significantly darker. These aren’t events as they are, they’re events as one person believes they are. And I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator.
The art serves as a distinct counterpoint to Carbon Grey’s over-the-top women and frequently absurd costumes. Scarlet, and the people she interacts with, look like real people. They dress, move and talk like real people. This is perhaps not surprising, given that (long-time Bendis collaborator and fantastic artist) Alex Maleev does a hell of a lot of photo referencing, to the point where it’s almost a comic equivalent of a rotoscoped film like A Scanner Darkly. It’s definitely nice to see, though.
So there you go. Go read Scarlet, consider Carbon Grey, and bin any spare copies of Neonomicon you find, before Judgement Day rolls around.
Unsung Heroes: The Night Witches
Russia, 1942. Not a good place to be.
A year into the war with Germany, the German 6th Army surrounding Stalingrad, millions dead and countless more dying of starvation and disease. Supplies and equipment were running low and the need for people to throw into combat was soaring. These were the conditions that gave rise to some of the most daring and impressive pilots ever, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the Night Witches by the German forces. The name alone pretty much conveys how ridiculously amazing these women were, but let’s go into a bit more detail.
Formed in October of 1941, the Night Witches were an all female bomber regiment tasked with precision bombing1 runs against German military targets. The formation of the group took some time, as the move to recruit female combat pilots had initially been rejected, with one recruiting officer quoted as saying “Things may be bad but we’re not so desperate that we’re going to put little girls like you up in the skies. Go home and help your mother.” This in spite of the fact that many young Russian women had more piloting experience than the pilots of the front line fighter regiments thanks to the Osoaviakhim, a paramilitary flying club that provided free training to Soviet boys and girls in the 1920s and 30s.
Soviet military officials then, as US military officials now, questioned whether it was strategically or morally appropriate to send women into combat. But the Night Witches proved to themselves and a skeptical country that their gender made no difference in the defense of one’s home.
– Phyllis-Anne Duncan
The heavy casualties of the war brought about a quick change to this attitude, and three regiments were formed, commanded by the famous aviatrix Major Marina Raskova (left)2. The selection process for the 588th (and its companion squads, the 586th Fighters and the 587th Dive Bombers) was gruelling, the young women going through two years’ worth of training in just six months. Up to fourteen hours a day were spent in the air, including night flights and simulated dogfights. By June 1942, they were ready to fight against the formidable might of the German invasion.
The Night Witches were not a well equipped regiment. Wearing hand-me-down uniforms from male pilots (boots were reportedly stuffed with paper and fabric to make them fit), they flew in aging Polikarpov PO-2 biplanes. The PO-2s were about as basic as a plane could get and still technically qualify as a plane. First built in 1928, they consisted of fabric strung over a wooden frame, and lacked any but the most rudimentary of instrumentation. There was no radio to communicate with ground control, and navigation was done with a stopwatch and a map – just a normal map, not even a flight chart. The planes carried no guns and only had enough weight allowance to take two bombs up on a flight, forcing the Night Witches to make multiple sorties in a single night, returning to base each time to collect more bombs.
The one thing the PO-2 had going for it, and which the Night Witches used to full effect, was its remarkable maneuverability. With a top speed of around 95mph, the plane was slower than the slowest speed a German fighter could maintain (its stall speed), allowing them to pull tight, evasive circles that the faster German craft couldn’t match. Combine this with the impressive nap-of-the-earth piloting skills that allowed the Night Witches to get closer to the ground than the planes of the Luftwaffe could manage, and shooting down a PO-2 from the air became a challenging prospect. There was, supposedly, a promise to award an Iron Cross to any Luftwaffe pilot who actually managed to bring down a Night Witch.
Whilst the German fighters struggled to bring down the Night Witches (who included Evgeniya Rudneva, left), the ground defences proved rather more formidable. 6th Army encampments were protected by what was known as the ‘circus of flak’ – concentric rings of up to two dozen flak cannons and searchlights. The traditional tactic for dealing with this had been to fly directly towards the target and hope to get your bombs away before the flak could blast you out of the air. It wasn’t the most successful tactic. The Night Witches developed a far more effective method for getting past the circus of flak: flying in groups of three, two planes would approach the target and wait for the searchlights to pick them up. These two would then split apart and manoeuvre around the target, drawing the attention of the cannons. The third plane, having waited behind, would cut their engines and glide in to deliver the bombs. This was repeated until each of the three planes had made a bombing run. The mind boggles at the sheer level of stone-cold bravery needed to repeatedly offer yourself as a distraction to dozens of flak cannons, protected only by a flimsy frame of wood and fabric, and to keep doing that night after night.
At its largest the Night Witches’ regiment consisted of 80 flying crew, plus ground support. By the end of the war they had collectively flown over 23,000 bombing runs. The surviving pilots had all flown around 1,000 missions each by 1945 (for sake of comparison, Colonel Don Blakelee, who had more missions for the USAF than anyone else in WW2, completed 500). Thirty of them had died in combat, and over a quarter of the pilots had been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Examples of extreme courage were almost the rule for them.
– Valerie Moolman, Women Aloft
The best English language source of further information on the 588th Bomber Regiment is probably Bruce Myles’ Night Witches: Untold Story of Soviet Women in Combat. There’s also Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II by Kazmeira Jean Cottam.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- Precision bombing differs from strategic bombing in that the bombs are aimed for individual targets as opposed to mass releasing them over an area, resulting in less collateral damage. It’s hard to do in the best of conditions, let alone an ageing biplane at night. [↩]
In 1938 Rakova had taken part in a record breaking non-stop flight across Russia. Somewhere over Siberia, the plane began to ice up and lose altitude, forcing the three-woman crew to jettison everything they could to lose weight and gain height. Eventually Rakova herself parachuted out of the plane to allow her two co-pilots to complete the trip. Jumping out of a plane over Siberia at night is the aviation equivalent of Lawrence Oates’ “I’m going outside, I may be some time.” [↩]