Vik's Christmas Grotto

Vik sez:

“Well, I like DVDs, obviously! Also, books and comics and random toys. These are not all from this year, and they’re not all presents. I tend to get clothes for Christmas! But anyway, in no particular order:

• Agora: Hypatia writes new mathematical theorems while Alexandria burns. I love Rachel Weisz, and although this film makes me cry a lot, I think it’s ace.
• Pride and Prejudice: one of my all time favorite books, and this BBC adaptation is the best by far. The new version has all the original colours put back in, which destroyed my impression of Regency England as cloaked in pastels.
• Senna: even if you’re not a fan of F1, I defy anyone to watch this film and not be massively affected by it.
• The 49ers (Alan Moore): this is my favourite Alan Moore graphic novel. It’s sort of steampunky, I guess, with cute boy!kissing and prejudice and war and awesome female characters.
• Air(G Willow Wilson): why is this not more well known? Flight attendant Blythe is afraid of flying, but this doesn’t stop her from a magic realism tour of lands that don’t exist. Bonus: positive depictions of Islam, Amelia Earhart being awesome beyond words, and things not being quite they seem. A bit like a cross between Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie in graphic novel format.
• Fables (Bill Willingham): If you’re not reading Fables, you need to start. All fairy tales are real, and they’re living in modern-day New York, waging a war against an enemy known only as the Adversary in their homelands. Snow White is far and away my favourite character, and her relationship with (the big, bad) Bigby Wolf is lovely.
• La Reine Margot: my go-to favourite film. The Massacre of Paris, Marguerite de Valois, Catherine de Medici, what more could you ask for? This is a really lush production of a rather Dynasty-esque Dumas novel, complete with incest, buckets of blood and lots of poisonings.
• Burlesque and the Art of the Teese (Dita von Teese): lovely coffee table book with lush pictures of Dita. The book is actually split in two: one half is burlesque-focused, and covers the history of burlesque and burlesque outfits through the ages, and other half is focused on fetish-inspired outfits.
• The Women Incendiaries (Edith Thomas): a recent gift for Yule, this is a history of the female revolutionaries during the French Revolution.
• Auto Repair for Dummies (Deanna Sclar): well, obviously. A bit too American in its language, but a decent primer, I think.
• Female Agents: Gah, this film. I don’t know why it was marketed as Female Agents rather than the original Les Femmes de l’ombre. Either way, this is the story of female agents, spies and covert operatives in France during WWII. It’s gorgeous and sexy and scary, but don’t expect everyone to live happily ever after.
• Marie Antoinette: on the other end of the spectrum, this is complete fluff. This Sofia Coppola film is light and frilly, like a giant French fancy. It’s based on the book by Antonia Fraser, and focuses on Marie Antoinette’s life up until she flees Versailles. It therefore stops before the horrible execution business happens, and you are also not subjected to Marie Antoinette’s days in captivity. Instead, you get dresses, frills, cakes, parties, and elaborate hairdos. There is nothing sad or upsetting about this film and I love it like I love cotton candy.
• Deathless (Catherynne M Valente): Communism! Fairy tales! The original warrior princess! WIN. (Possibly not as easy to grab via a physical bookstore, but order it for a new year surprise?)
• My Little Pony: I blame Sarah Cook for this.
• Compass: Also Sarah Cook’s fault. She has equipped me with this to assist with navigating my way back, should I ever get lost in strange and exotic foreign locales.
• Hot Wheels: no explanation required.”

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.

Hi Maura, nice to have you here at BadRep Towers! To get us started, why don’t you tell us a bit about Róisín Dubh , which has just gone on release.

“Róisín Dubh is a three-issue comic book series that will also be collected and bound as a graphic novel. It’s set in Ireland in 1899 and follows the adventures of Róisín Sheridan, an eighteen-year-old woman who harbours ambitions to be an actress. Her life is altered forever when she and her parents are attacked on the road by a bloodthirsty man called Abhartach who has just risen from the earth. Róisín’s parents are killed and she is left for dead… until she is given a mission by ancient powers. She has to go against the conventions of the day, and her previous notions of what is possible, to try and put Abhartach back in the ground… but the person who raised Abhartach from his 1,400-year stasis has other plans.”

What might feminist readers enjoy about the comic? As if an Irish suffragette killing demons isn’t enough to get anyone interested…

“Well, I hope there’s plenty there for everyone, but the women’s suffrage movement was on my mind from the start. Róisín has had a liberal, educated upbringing, she was allowed a lot of leeway as a child, but as a woman she’s starting to discover that there are more limits on her than she imagined.

For instance, that simple thing her father says to her: of course women should have the right to vote… but a career on the stage? It’s disreputable. The struggle for equal rights is a slow erosion of the buts. People are always full of reasons why you can have some rights, but not all.

That’s why Róisín has a bike. People forget that the bicycle was a huge boon to women in the nineteenth century – it gave them a freedom of movement that they didn’t enjoy previously, and it also helped bring about a change in clothing.

Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that she thought the bicycle ‘has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world, It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.'”

What sort of heroine is Róisín – who is she as a character? Which other comic book heroines have inspired you in the past and what do you like about them?

“Róisín is a young, idealist woman with great ambition who is prone to impulsive decisions. The events in the comic book means she’s forced to deal with tragedy while learning she has far less control over her life. These are the kinds of lessons we often learn in life, although in Róisín’s case they involve an undead creature, magicians and ancient Irish divinities!

I haven’t drawn upon any other comic book heroines consciously in relation to Róisín, but there were a number that had an impact upon me over the years. First was Judge Anderson in 2000 AD. I didn’t read many American comics when I was growing up in Ireland as there weren’t many available at the time. 2000 AD was the premiere title for young teens then, so I read it too. Her first appearance in the Judge Death storyline (written by John Wagner and drawn by Brian Bolland) ticked all the boxes for me: horror and a great female lead.

What I loved about Anderson was her humour. She was the only one who poked fun at Dredd, and I loved that the Psi-Division were given loads of leeway because of the job they did and the high risk of their brains being fried in the process. Plus, she saves the world through an extreme act of self-sacrifice (thankfully, she didn’t remain in stasis forever!).

A while ago I read a comment on a website by one of the early artists of Anderson, in which he said he thought that she wasn’t very complex and was created for a bit of titillation for the lads. That comment disappointed me greatly. I guess he didn’t realise that Anderson was one of the very few women in 2000 AD at the time, and for that reason alone she had a big impact on the girls/women who read the series. Having a representation of women in comics book series is really important, and Dredd himself is not exactly the most complex character! I don’t usually hanker after writing particular characters, but writing Anderson would be a dream project.

Another character that had a big impact was Tank Girl (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin). She had a punk sensibility and a sense of humour, and liked sex, drugs and driving a tank – what was not to love?

Other characters I like are David Mack’s Scarab, Storm from the X-Men (woefully underused, I think), Alan Moore’s Halo Jones (another character I’d kill to write) and Promethea, Warren Ellis’s Jenny Sparks, and finally, the goddess herself, Wonder Woman.

I’ve only fallen in love with the Wonder Woman character in the past year, which is completely the result of Gail Simone‘s amazing writing. I’m also now a big fan of Simone’s Secret Six and Birds of Prey – so you can include all the (many) female characters in those series on my list now. Simone is one of the best comic book writers in the industry in my opinion, and she’s particularly adept at dialogue, especially for the female characters. Her comic books consistently pass the Bechdel Test, which so many titles still don’t do.”

Like Gail Simone and NK Jemisin, you’re a writer who sticks by her conscience, and you’re not afraid to call out industry figures when something’s Just Not Right. What have you learned from this so far, and has it ever worked against you?

“No change occurs if you remain silent. It’s that simple – but it’s not necessarily easy to speak up.

As a woman you know a likely response to raising an issue – such as the lack of women at an event – is that you will be dismissed or attacked (especially on the Internet).

So, I always strive to be fair and logical in how I present my case. Sometimes that’s difficult because I feel so passionately about women getting a fair shake – well, everyone getting a fair shake, no matter their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.

A number of people have asked me if I think I’m damaging my career with some of the issues I’ve raised. So far I’ve never experienced it, but would it stop me? No.

Let’s be realistic. I’m speaking out on issues from a pretty safe environment. If I was a female union representative in Mexico – for example – I would have a genuine risk in speaking up. Or a mother trying to access education for her girls in Afghanistan. Those people inspire me – they are taking real risks with their lives and yet find the courage to stand up for what is right.

When I think of that it puts what I do in perspective! (And it makes me donate to aid organisations that help people in those risky situations.)”

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our interview. Warm thanks to Maura for talking to us.

• Maura McHugh is an Irish writer with films, comics and short stories to her name. She blogs at Splinister and you can read her recent guest post for BadRep, in which she recommended us some horror writers, here. Róisín Dubh is published by Atomic Diner and the first issue can be bought online here. Or pester your local comic store to order some copies!