One of the most amazing things I saw was, without question, the screening of the Wonder Women! : the Untold Story of American Heroines documentary.

I’d never heard of it before to be honest, which is hardly surprising as it’s an independent release (no screening near you? Organise one – there’s a link at the bottom of this post!). It’s basically a visual look at the intersections of Women Woman iconography and certain aspects of Second Wave American feminism.

Did you know that Wonder Woman was regarded by quite a few feminists as the ‘face’of Second Wave American feminism? Neither did I. Quite frankly, being a Marvel girl rather than DC, I’d always thought of Wonder Woman as one of the more tame, conservative superheroes. Didn’t she spend most of her time being tied up?

Image from Flickr.com user bbaltimore, used under Creative Commons.

I’m now going to recount my new and shiny understanding of Wonder Woman, as gleaned from the documentary through a vague haze of alcohol. Bear with me.

The iconography of Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman, it turns out, is fairly awesome. She was developed during World War II, and was therefore off fighting the Nazis (alongside Captain America? That bit wasn’t very clear) after realising that she had to go off and save America. Because that’s what awesome heroes did. She even had to win some sort of Olympiad before she was able to do it! And then she fought some Nazis, and some criminals, and in the 50s this was deemed to be DREADFUL. So she was rewritten as having given up her powers. During this period she found she wanted to make cakes, and opened a beauty parlour. OF COURSE. Because nothing says ‘superhero’ like CUPCAKES!

Anyway, along came Second Wave feminism, looking for a face for the recently-launched Ms magazine. And there was poor Wonder Woman, an icon in need of reclaiming. Off came the apron and on went on the magic bracelets!

SURELY IT IS TIME FOR THE 70S?

I won’t recount the entire documentary. Suffice to say that when the 1970s and 1980s kicked off, along with them came a whole slew of female heroines, from Cagney and Lacey, Charlie’s Angels and Bionic Woman, straight through to the live-action Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter.

Here, have a photo of her being awesome:

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Photo from Flicker user shaunwong.

Here are some other 1970s (& 1980s) heroines.

Cagney & Lacey. Image from kaksplus.fi.

Charlie’s Angels, 1977. Image from Wikimedia Commons .

Notice anything?

Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley. Image from sabotagetimes.com.

Ripley vs Van Damme

The 1980s also gave us hyper-masculinity along the lines of Van Damme, Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It also gave us Ellen Ripley and (in 1991 admittedly, therefore just in the 1990s) Sarah Connor. There are a bunch of others. The 1980s were pretty awesome for strong female heroines, which is a sentence I never thought I’d be writing. When I first saw Terminator 2 as a little girl, I didn’t even know that women could do chin-ups!

Grrrl Power dominoes

As well as the iconography of Wonder Woman herself, the documentary looked at the development of Grrrl Power. We are taken through the original use of the term through interviews with Kathleen Hanna, starting back with Riot Grrrl, and its appropriation by the Spice Girls into something commercial.

I’m not going to depress you by taking you through the deaths of all the ‘strong female characters’ on television in 2001. I think those of us in the UK were somewhat sheltered through the impact of that, having our reception of those shows delayed by several weeks or even months. We therefore did not experience their deaths as the American viewers would have: one after the other, falling down like dominoes in 2001.

Back to Wonder Woman…

Like this, only AWESOME.

… and to her fans, ages 2–99. In the documentary, there are interviews with small children and the role Wonder Woman has played in their lives. There are interviews with activists – up to and including Gloria Steinem – and their perspectives on how Wonder Woman influenced Second Wave (and in some case Third Wave) feminism – and vice versa. There are perspectives on women-saving-women and the creation of Wonder Woman Day. There’s even a Wonder-Woman-on-a-string-with-motor, making her fly around and around on a child’s ceiling. How awesome is that? I want one!

Not your grandmother’s feminism

Now let’s talk about what wasn’t there. The film isn’t marketed as a history of Second Wave Feminism, nor even the (entire) history of Wonder Woman. That’s important, because the intersections the film is talking about are intersections with white, heterosexual, cis feminism. It therefore falls down significantly on the feminism movement outside of that pretty narrowly defined range.

It was also a bit dispiriting to not have at least a mention that the original name for Ms. magazine was Sojourner. There is also little mention of the subversion of the Wonder Woman image and iconography outside of radfem activism.

That said, the film doesn’t pretend that it is in any way comprehensive, or representative of all feminism movements. And, as a look at the history of Wonder Woman and how she was reclaimed in the radfem part of Second (and Third) Wave American feminism… well, it’s pretty awesome.

Frankly, it’s worth watching for the interviews with her tiny modern-day fans alone. There is something deeply heartening about hearing a child draw strength from a feminist icon, however corrupted and reinterpreted that image has been over the years.

Not convinced? Have a look at the trailer:

See? Awesome.

• In the highly likely event that there are no screenings near you, you can contact the Outreach Coordinator at Wonder Women to arrange one.

Last week’s long-awaited, big-release comic was Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers #1, a classic coming-of-age story about a group of 18-year-olds who just happen to be superheroes.

While many mainstream comics are still producing the kind of material that gets sent up on Escher Girls and The Hawkeye Initiative, Gillen and McKelvie actively reject the kind of objectification that gives the genre such a bad reputation amongst feminists. In contrast to the stereotypical tits-and-ass fare, the opening sequence of Young Avengers provides the reader with a three-page essay on the (straight/bi) female gaze. In a medium that overwhelmingly caters for straight male desires, this is a rare demonstration of how to do a sexy scene with decent gender politics.

On page one, Kate Bishop wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, having just hooked up with a man whose name she can’t quite remember. At this point anyone who’s familiar with comics, or popular culture in general, would expect to see some slut-shaming, or at least some titillating semi-nudity, but we get neither. Kate is dressed in a t-shirt which comes down to her mid-thigh, and it’s clear that she has no regrets, thinking: For a second, some part of me thinks, “I should be ashamed.” I think that part of me is really stupid.

In the fourth panel we even see Kate smiling as she thinks back to the earlier part of her evening, and it’s the smile of someone who has just got laid and is pretty damned pleased with herself.
The second page introduces us to Noh-Varr, whose bed Kate has woken up in, and this is where we see another convention subverted, because he’s the one in nothing but his underwear. In an interview with Comics Alliance, artist Jamie McKelvie explains the idea behind this scene:

We’ve long had a problem in comics where the women are “sexy” (in a sexist fashion) and the men aren’t. Time to redress the balance. And there’s a big difference between sexist and sexy.

Although male superheroes are usually drawn with extremely muscular physiques, it’s not normally sexualised in this way – the reader is supposed to want to be them, not have sex with them. This is a rare acknowledgement that people who fancy men read superhero comics too.

But rather than providing equality of objectification, the aim here is to have a sexy scene which enhances the story and doesn’t devalue either of the characters. If you’re enjoying the view of Noh-Varr in his underwear, it’s just a bonus, not the entire point of the sequence; if you’re not into it, his lack of clothes is incidental. As Gillen puts it in an introduction to the character of Noh-Varr on his Tumblr:

…characters being sexy is cool but objectification in the process is bullshit. An inability to see the difference is a fundamental weakness. My wife’s in the next room watching Lord of the Rings, and I guarantee she’s thinking sexy thoughts about Aragorn. But that works without anything which annihilates him as a character, y’know?

The reader is supposed to see this scene through Kate’s eyes, and as she watches Noh-Varr dancing around in his pants, it acknowledges the existence of the female gaze, both through Kate’s interest in watching him, and the fanservice of the artwork.

Noh-Varr has a masculine appearance, but – perhaps because he’s an alien from another dimension – he doesn’t appear to be burdened with ideas of conventional masculinity, as we can see from his music choices. The comic’s title page states that the record he puts on is ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronettes (incidentally, this is the track played over the opening titles of the film Dirty Dancing, which is also about female sexual awakening), and he talks about his enthusiasm for “close harmony girl groups” in a way that a heterosexual Earth man probably wouldn’t, because he’d be afraid of seeming effeminate. The play on gender roles is, of course, entirely deliberate, as one of the major influences in this version of the character is David Bowie during his androgynous, bisexual-identifying period in the early 1970s.

As Kate watches Noh-Varr, the scene is interrupted by a Skrull attack (Skrulls are a species of warrior aliens that occasionally pop up in the Marvel Universe to attack either Earth or Noh-Varr’s species of warrior aliens). If this was a horror movie, this would be the moment where Kate’s decision to go back to Noh-Varr’s place for sexytimes gets her killed in a disgustingly graphic way, but rather than being punished for her naughty behaviour, Kate is rewarded with another adventure, when she pilots the space ship.

As well as understanding what many female fans want to see, Gillen also accepts that sometimes our appreciation goes beyond what’s on the page:

Ever since our work on Phonogram, Jamie have [sic] strove to make our comics – for want of a better phrase – slash-fic-able. If you’re working in certain heroic fantasy genres, that’s part of the emotional churn.

(taken from Gillen’s tumblr post on Noh-Varr)

Recent comic book adaptation movies like Avengers Assemble and X-Men:First Class have been gleefully adopted by fanfiction writers, who find that the gender imbalances and close friendships between male characters give them plenty of material to work with. While slash has sometimes been treated as fandom’s dirty secret, Gillen and McKelvie are obviously quite comfortable with it. The title page even provides a nod to fangirl culture by adopting their language: editors Jake Thomas and Lauren Sankovitch are credited with “LOLs” and “feels” respectively – that’s “humour” and “emotions” to anyone who isn’t up-to-date on their internet memes.

Young Avengers clearly demonstrates something which I’ve long suspected to be true: it really is possible for male writers to “get” female fans. Although there are female comics creators producing work that doesn’t make women cringe – even with big publishers like Marvel and DC – it doesn’t mean that their male colleagues should have a free pass to be obnoxiously sexist. We should be holding more men to the pro-feminist standard that Gillen and McKelvie have set, not just in comics, but in all forms of pop culture.

• At night Alyson Macdonald dons a cape and tights to fight sexism and the Tory government on the internet. She mostly blogs at Bright Green and tweets as @textuallimits.

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Cover of 'Blood for Blood', the first Greek Street Graphic novel, shows a woman in silhouette and Eddie holding a knife.

Yes, the words quoted above are the first words printed in Peter Milligan’s newest comic, Greek Street.  As the music plays in a strip club, these words blare from the speakers.  One might purport that they sum it up entirely…

[some spoilers in this post]

At first glance, Greek Street seems to be the kind of graphic novel I like to see on the shelves – I’m a huge Vertigo fan, because unlike many mainstream comics imprints Vertigo consistently releases a large range of stories told in a wide choice of settings¹ where one does not need a pre-existing knowledge of the characters or a love of the superhero genre to enjoy the title. Despite being myself a fan of the superhero genre, comics can and and regularly do cover so much more than stories about spandex-clad egomaniacs.

The premise of Greek Street is that some stories are too powerful to ever go away entirely. Humankind re-enacts them again and again over the centuries. This involuntary re-enactment is hardly an original idea (see Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad,) and ‘the old stories are real’ is a theme that has been explored rigorously by Vertigo’s Sandman series, their Fables series,  The Unwritten, and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to name but a few titles. In fact, it’s a pretty tired theme.

In these comics I’ve mentioned, some of the fun of reading them was in spotting the older stories underlying the modern tales – realising who each character represented. Greek Street has none of this subtlety, it wants to hit you over the head with its references, like an over-enthusiastic arts graduate in the pub who just can’t wait to tell you exactly how much they know about the theory of Shakespearean tragedy. Thus its references are clunky and, well, obvious.

The Chorus who narrate the play are all strippers, working in clubs on Greek Street in Soho. The characters – thinly disguised versions of Agamemnon, Daedalus, Medea &c. are men and women involved in the London criminal underworld who pass in and out of these clubs in-

A strip club scene from the comic. There are many of these...

Sorry, yes, you read that right – The Chorus are strippers. That is the level that Peter Milligan is pitching to, here. It’s as if he thought “Hey, Vertigo is an adult imprint, how do I make these Greek myths (with all their, y’know, inherent incest, murder, sex, blood and guts &c.) adult? I know, I’ll add a STRIPPER CHORUS!”

By virtue of their choral role, these women do end up allowing the story to pass the Bechdel Test, but it is a hollow triumph when this role seems merely an excuse to draw naked women over and over again – in the dressing room, on stage, in the bath… Did Milligan think that people would be so bored by women actually talking to each other in comics that he had to give readers some breasts to look at during it?

When one of the strippers is killed (dead sex workers in comics? How original…) and comes back to life, stalking the streets as a revenge-driven zombie, she is also drawn naked. I was slightly amused at the lengths the artist had to go to convey the image of a completely naked zombie women over and over again without ever drawing anything around her groin and therefore upsetting the censors – strategic shadows here, and little strategic scrap of clothing there… quite ingenious work, really, from an artist who can barely distinguish one very similar-looking character from another, and occasionally draws people as though their features are sliding very slowly down their faces…

The strippers aren’t the only women who appear naked (perhaps getting to draw lots of breasts was in the artist’s contract?) and none of them are anything below a D cup, or over a size 12 waistline. Maybe there’s just something in the tap water in Soho? Body diversity is rare in comics, but when an artist is trying to portray the gritty, real world, its lack is always more disappointing.

Eddie – the closest thing we have to a protagonist – begins the story by having sex with and accidentally killing his mother and ends this volume in a sexual relationship with an underage girl (a prophetess called ‘Sandy’ – see what I mean about the obvious references?). He’s a walking catastrophe – getting into all sorts of trouble with criminal gangs, mostly through his own stupidity. It’s hard to sympathise with a character with few morals and no sense of self-preservation.

Wracked with guilt after the encounter with his mother, Eddie attempts to castrate himself – a slightly more extreme version of the self-harm his Ancient Greek counterpart carries out – but useless Eddie cannot even do this properly. Presumably the writer decided that it would get in the way of him having hawt hawt illegal sex with Sandy only a few short days later. This seems a pretty unbelievable leap of logic to ask the reader to make, I mean, surely he’d rip his stitches? (Ouch!) Sandy’s mother also throws herself at Eddie – presumably this is how we know that Eddie is the protagonist, ALL of the women just can’t stop throwing themselves at this scrawny little guy.

Greek Street could have been another great addition to the Vertigo line-up, but it is let down by shallow storytelling and some very poor artwork in places. Milligan needs to shake things up a bit – where something like Fables could get away with using characters from myths and legends, this was because their myths were in the past, over and done with, the Fables characters were facing new problems, not acting out stories we already knew. But this is only the first volume of Greek Street, so perhaps the characters will move on and the plot will improve.

While this book does pass the Bechdel Test and only barely passes the Frank Miller Test, those ‘tests’ are not the be all and end all of writing gender, and unlike Fables, Milligan’s Greek Street treats its female characters as little more than stereotypes and eye candy. And for an imprint such as Vertigo, which is edited by one of the most powerful women in comics and already enjoyed by many female comics fans, that’s just disappointing.

To sum up – SEXY SEXY BODY! I’ve never been to a strip club, but if that’s what the music’s like, I’m not going.

1. Having mentioned that ‘wide choice of settings’, however, I have to ask, did we really need yet another comic set in bloody London? I imagine that comics fans around the world will begin to see Britain as merely a state comprised of one large London-like city and some small parts of Ireland (because they have to make Guinness somewhere, don’t they, Garth Ennis).