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.”

“Everyone knows my story. I get dressed up. The clock strikes twelve. I lose a shoe. And it’s all downhill from there. My name is Cinderella, Cindy to my friends. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a spy. One of the best, even if I’m being humble. And there are times I love my job.”

– Cinderella, From Fabletown with Love

Swapping the genders of characters around to put female characters in the roles usually filled by men and vice versa isn’t anything shockingly new. But that doesn’t make it any less cool when someone goes and does it well. Which, arguably, is exactly what Cinderella (in her spin-off miniseries from the Fables universe) does. (Note: this recommendation is based on the first volume of her tales, From Fabletown With Love. I haven’t read the second arc yet, Fables Are Forever.)

Cinderella, as far as most of her fellow Fables know, is an empty-headed fashionista, owner of the local shoe shop, and one of Prince Charming’s ex-wives. What most of them don’t know is that she’s also a master spy and sometimes assassin, their very own James Bond. Only better.

We open with Cinderella punching out a gun-toting mook, diving off Big Ben’s clock tower, and hang-gliding out over London. It’s one hell of an introduction and far from the most kickass moment she gets in the book. Along the way, she also finds time to kick the ever-loving crap out of some shapeshifting monsters, storm an oil rig, deal with armed assassins and overthrow an evil regime with a well-thrown clog.

So her badass credentials are certainly up to spec for the super-spy genre, but what else? Well, it wouldn’t be a spy story without a Bond girl. That role here is ably filled by Aladdin, Cinderella’s intelligence-gathering counterpart from the Baghdad Fable community. True to form he’s capable and effective but not quite up to Cinderella’s level and practically carries a glowing neon sign reading “capture and imprison me so I can be daringly rescued!”.

There are two particularly nice little points in the interaction between Cinderella and Aladdin. First up, the hook-up that’s pretty much inevitable with the genre. When it does happen, Cinderella is very definitely the active party in deciding when and initiating things. There was the risk that we’d see that whole scene take a more traditional approach, which would have entirely undermined the character, but fortunately she remains entirely herself and entirely in charge.

The other nice moment is the ideological exchange between them, shortly after they get done kicking monsters in the jaw for the first time. The conversation comes round to Islam and, honestly, it’s handled pretty fairly. It’s only one page worth of stuff, but writer Chris Roberson deals with it well. It’s certainly a nice change from the slightly cringe-inducing pro-Israel speech Bill Willingham included in the main Fables series.

The art is pretty solid too. At no point, as far as I can tell, does Cinderella adopt that terrible spine-breaker pose so commonly inflicted on comic book women. The outfits are sensible too, with the daring infiltration of an old oil platform taking place in appropriate combat gear and her regular wear never getting any more risqué than an evening dress. (Well, one of the covers does feature a wetsuit with an inexplicable cleavage window. Cleavage windows aside, Chrissie Zullo’s work on the covers is gorgeous.)

How does that wetsuit even work with a hole in it?

So that’s Cinderella, Fabletown’s very own badass super-spy. Hopefully she’s just as fantastic in her second story arc. Oh, and she comes from good company too, with others like Rose Red, Snow White, and Frau Totenkinder rocking along in the main series. Frau Totenkinder in particular is worthy of mention, since it’s nice to see a much older female character who’s still awesome.

Ah, comics. Or graphic novels, if they are trying to seduce me across a pseudy coffee bar in Edinburgh, which they did – more on that later.

Dear reader, this is a tale of a long, passionate, but fractious love affair.

It started early. I noticed them, but they never seemed to be the right one for me, stocked as they were in the “boys’ section” of the magazine racks. I kept myself busy with the garish colours of the (probably) gender neutral Dandy and the Beano. Whilst being amused but ultimately concerned by the levels of naughtiness from Minnie the Minx (I was a very conscientious child), I found myself captured by a few sections from the pages of hand-me-down copies of the now-defunct “girls’ own” annual Bunty. Looking back on it, the artwork was poor and the storylines were hammy with a sprinkling of schmaltz, but some stood out: tales of mystery, adventure, aliens and heroines were hidden amidst the pages of dreary “girl stuff”. Now we’re talking!

Cover Art for GloomCookie Issue 7

Flash forward, and I’m at university in Edinburgh with actual money in my pocket. I’ve caught flickers of images in such hallowed sanctuaries as Forbidden Planet, which is exciting but mostly full of plastic models. Deadhead, lurking on the crooked medieval road across from the pub where I’ve just earned my actual money, is poky and rammed with paper; pleasingly reminiscment in layout and smell of old bookshops.

On the shelves I spot a beautifully painted (thank you Duncan Fegredo) issue of Mike Carey’s Lucifer, where a winged schoolgirl escapes the giant maw of a fiery demon; the first of the new Catwoman where Selina Kyle is resplendent and powerful in a jumpsuit and combat boots; and the gothic lusciousness of Serena Valentino’s GloomCookie. And that was just the covers!

Ed Brubaker's 2001 Emma Peel inspired Catwoman

The stories, oh, oh, oh the stories. Magical, fantastical, intricate and complex tales of all kinds with interesting and varied female characters being just as magical, just as fantastically intricate and complex as their male counterparts.

I am doing my level best to just not list all of them because that would be a little tedious – check the Wiki articles or better yet come round and read them – my point is that they were there, and they were so far removed from any other female heroes (or anti-heroes, or villains) that I had ever seen before, and there were just SO MANY of them.

Over the next many years I spent a lot of time and money on comics. I was in love.  Besotted. I compulsively collected every issue of the jaw-dropping Fables and Y: The Last Man (a must for any comic collection). As I tend to be when in love, I was somewhat obsessed. I wrote my dissertation on postmodernist structuralism in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles (I know better now, it should have been postmodern superhero archetypes in Doom Patrol).

I found the most perfect fairy tale ever told in the form of Jeff Smith’s independent offering Bone. This is an epic adventure of derring do, lost princesses who need to save the kingdom, war, friendship, quiche and dragons. I cannot recommend it enough.

Grandma Ben in action against the famously stupid, stupid rat creatures

The character of Grandma Ben blasts away so many female stereotypes. She is mysterious, strong, forthright, takes no nonsense and just plain funny.  She also races cows. As in, races against them. I aim to also do this when I am her age (which she refuses to tell anyone, of course).

But as I read my way through everything that caught my eye, I was spotting a change.

Filthy Assistant number two Yelena Rossini romped her way through Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan and stole my heart somewhat with her hard smoking, futuristic gumshoe gonzo journalism and attack womb. Zee Hernandez from Brian Wood’s spectacular DMZ played Beatrice to the lost photographer and guided both him and the reader through a ghastly vision of New York as the Gaza Strip.

Yelena Rossini from Transmetropolitan

These women were still good, still interesting, but they were second fiddle, playing traditional (albeit revamped and turbo-boosted) support roles such as healers and helpmeets whilst also filling the “minority quota”, especially in the case of Zee who is both non-white and non-male. Naturally all of them end up sleeping with or as love interests for the male protagonists, although at least the storylines of those titles made up for the stereotypes.

Somewhere along the way, it started to go wrong. Bit by bit by bit, even these characters faded away. The series that I loved ended (I cried at the end of Lucifer) and were replaced with weaker, less interesting versions. Costumes became smaller, boobs bigger. I started my “never buy a comic where the cover art has a woman with breasts bigger than her head” campaign, and found myself wealthier but with a lot less comics.

Female characters and their stories became less widely available. There were still some bright sparks but these were increasingly ghettoised in the narrow “independent” section of the store or as part of autobiographical works such as the excellent Persepolis. The lack of new work meant that shops began pushing long-standing books like Strangers in Paradise or reprints of classics  obviously aimed at women such as Dykes to Watch Out For.

There were still good stories in comic book world, with great artwork, but the women I had come to love had gone missing from the mainstream. Titles such as Wonder Woman or Lady Death looked like bad pornography, and the artwork for some of my favourite writers became downright ridiculous to the point of offensive. My relationship with comics was getting rocky.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that caused us to break up. It was Ignition City by Warren Ellis, specifically the way that almost every page had a massive pair of tits or tight (female) bottom in it, regardless of whether that was particularly appropriate or relevant. The male characters, of course, could be as fat, wrinkly, gross, old, multicultural and multidimensional as actual people. The female characters only existed to ensure that there were toned body parts for the consumption of the reader (who obviously wasn’t meant to be me).

What happened to my love?  What changed? I don’t know. I have moved to pastures new – online comics such as Freak Angels, Girl Genius, Sinfest and XKCD fulfill my panel-related addiction, but every now and then I look longingly at my groaning bookshelf with all those beautiful trade paperbacks, wondering when, if ever, there might be a return to form.

Come back, baby. I miss you.