Writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky have created a warm and intelligent comic with an overtly pro-feminist take on sex and relationships. Don’t let the fact that it’s called Sex Criminals put you off – the title is a play on words and refers to the main characters’ ability to literally stop time when they have sex, which they use to carry out bank robberies.
It’s a surreal concept, and one which is difficult to write well, but Fraction has built a successful career out of telling these kinds of stories, and is skilled in persuading readers to suspend their disbelief.
In Sex Criminals, time is not presented as strictly linear: events are shown out of sequence, and the adult version of the lead character Suzie narrates scenes from her adolescence, sometimes even appearing next to her younger self on the page. This time-travel effect makes it easier for the reader to accept Suzie’s time-stopping powers, while also establishing her as our link to the story.
By choosing a female lead character, writer Fraction is challenging popular culture’s tendency to shy away from female leads, as well as the relative taboo of women’s sexuality.
In particular, his willingness to discuss female masturbation is refreshing because, while male wanking is openly discussed, joked about, and accepted as a fact of life, there’s still a lingering sense that it’s dirty when women do it.
Early on in the comic, we see young Suzie discovering the Greatest Love of All in the bath, and it’s dealt with in a sensitive, not overtly-eroticised way – adult Suzie, narrating while fully clothed and perched on the edge of the bathtub, is the focus of the panel.
Although we are aware that young Suzie is masturbating in this scene, the aim is not to sexualise her but to introduce her orgasm-related superpower, so the masturbation is less important than what happens immediately afterwards. In a pastiche of the old comics trope of an ordinary kid acquiring superpowers when they hit puberty, Suzie realises that time stops when she comes. Here, Fraction takes an inspired dig at the state of sex education in American schools, because Suzie has no idea whether her experience is normal, and she’s forced to rely on the dubious wisdom of a classmate when the adults won’t answer her questions.
Despite this, Suzie eventually becomes more confident about sex, and it’s made very clear to the reader that when she has sex with a partner it’s her choice to do so. As the narrator, she informs us that the first time she slept with her high school boyfriend Craig she had decided to do so in advance, and we see her enjoy the experience, even though it doesn’t live up to her expectation that it would be a profound, life-changing event. From a feminist point of view, the most interesting of the comic’s sex scenes is Suzie’s first encounter with Jon, who has just been introduced as the love interest. Jon explicitly checks for consent before initiating physical contact, in a way that seems natural, relaxed, and pretty damn sexy.
The admirable gender politics of the writing are perfectly complemented by Zdarsky’s art, which fits perfectly with a comic which is played for laughs as much as for titillation. It isn’t drawn in an overtly erotic style, and there isn’t as much nudity as you might expect. The fact that the art isn’t wank-bank material in and of itself highlights the more cerebral aspects of Suzie’s attraction to Jon; they fancy one another, but their interest is sparked by shared interests over looks.
The art is also key to conveying the comic’s humour, whether it’s in Craig’s ridiculous gurning expression when he’s frozen in time right at the point of orgasm, or the crude drawings of nonsensical sex acts that Rachelle uses to explain “the real raw sex shit” to teenage Suzie. There are also a range of less obvious visual gags worked into the art in backgrounds or on characters’ clothes, including numerous references to a celebrity called “Sexual Gary” who appears to be a pin-up figure for teenage girls.
Although Sex Criminals is a very funny comic, it also has emotional depth. The scenes from Suzie’s adolescence aren’t solely about her sexual development, but also deal with her father’s sudden death and her mother’s difficulty in coping afterwards. Young Suzie’s reactions are balanced by the narration from her adult self, creating a richer and more satisfying narrative.
Sex comedies can often disappoint feminists, but Sex Criminals shows that writers don’t have to rely on tired sexist stereotypes when writing jokes about sex, and that decent gender politics don’t have to be po-faced and humourless. Whether you’re a devoted comics fan or simply curious, this one is definitely worth a look.
Sex Criminals is available now from Image Comics for digital download and from, ahem, specialist retailers.
- 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.
It was at once a brilliant and thoroughly embarrassing afternoon.
I came home exhausted and tearful, clutching a new book and my partner’s sleeve. “But I can’t write about that!” I protested. “What would I draw for it?”
Hello, BadRep readers. I’m here to tell you about the time I embarrassed myself in a museum.
Image: Kirsty Connell (credit link at end of article)
I live in Cambridge, which is a nice place, and contains the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is also nice. Startlingly nice, in fact. Long warrens of gold-framed paintings, glass cabinets full of glittering treasures, and ancient wooden tables polished to a mirror sheen with little toblerone notices on them telling you to keep your paws off, thank you.
There’s marble busts that I could look at for years and never get old, myriad hoards of coins, terrible thorny ranks of daggers and swords, medieval Christian bling and a glorious rotating selection of temporary exhibitions.
Their temporary exhibitions are spectacular. They recently had one on Chinese tomb treasures that I saw posters for when I was visiting London. “I’ve been to that!” I exclaimed, pointing at a poster on the Tube. But no-one was impressed, for they were cultured London types with the British Museum on their doorstep, and I am a scruffy Cambridge yokel with orange hair and visible underpants.
The most recent standout exhibit – which was so busy they had to implement a timed ticket system – was the Quentin Blake: Drawn By Hand exhibition.
You all know who Quentin Blake is, of course. He illustrated all of Roald Dahl’s books for children and many other things besides. I wasn’t very familiar with his “many other things besides”, though, and that was what this exhibit showed me.
I didn’t know, for example, that he has done public paintings for hospitals. There were many of his maternity-unit paintings, all involving cheerful mothers having fun in a variety of scenes (some are underwater for a water-birthing unit) and all very sweet and soothing to look at.
And there was this one that made me lose my shit comprehensively.
I was already on delicate emotional footing because I have a lot of feelings about Quentin Blake, and then I came across this painting he’d done for the Vincent Square eating disorder treatment unit in London.
The painting, titled Ordinary Life No. 8, is of a young woman in her hospital room in a gown, feeding birds on her windowsill through the open sash window. She looks happy, and all the birds are eating seeds.
This just in: I have just started crying writing that paragraph.
I am at work.
She’s in her room, where she has to stay until she’s better, but the birds can go where they please; she is happy to feed the birds, and the birds are happy to be fed. Oh my god, there are so many things in that piece that kind of punched me in the heart until I burst into a fire hydrant of noisy tears in the middle of the reflective silence of the exhibit.
Some very well-behaved children turned around and scowled at me. My partner ushered me on. The next piece was from the lithograph series Girls and Dogs, of a young girl in a red dress, happily showing a gigantic pitch-black terrifying-looking wolf monster a painting she’d done. The tears came again, only worse.
And then, at the end, there was an illustration for The Boy In The Dress (a children’s novel by David Walliams, of all people) and it was all too much and I had to leave.
“Mummy,” said a small child with crisp, angelic gold ringlets bearing aloft a blue ribbon, “That man is crying”.
Blake’s paintings, with their characteristic loose, expressive style – fluid washes of watercolour and ink contained by haphazard spidery cages of scratchy black ink somehow conspiring to be more life-accurate than anything photorealism could ever offer – capture and reflect simple happiness and freedom.
I don’t want to use words like “innocence”, because I don’t like its implications of fetishising a lack of knowledge. Blake’s paintings are very canny; their veneer of simplicity disguising a great depth of self-awareness and knowledge of the subject.
The young girl showing the big wolf her painting isn’t afraid of the big wolf. The big wolf likes her painting, and looms in front of her with giant, masonry-nail fangs bared in an appreciative grin. She has nothing to fear from her playmate, however, because she is brave and has made friends with something that others would find terrifying and avoid.
The young woman in her hospital room is finding joy in feeding the birds. The birds don’t know why she’s in hospital, or of her own difficulties with food; they just like seeds and she’s put some out for them.
I bought a copy of The Boy In The Dress on the way home. An entire exhibition of mostly women, magic and birds and I end up with a book about a boy who likes to wear dresses. That’s top marketing, that.
I’ll let you know how it is.
The Quentin Blake: Drawn By Hand exhibition closed in mid-May, but you can still check out the following:
- Mr. Blake’s podcast introducing his work
- Mr. Blake talking about his work in a video which I’ll also embed below – it shows some of his Girls and Dogs pieces among other brilliant things.
Image of the museum banner by Kirsty Connell on Flickr.
]]>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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]]>“I used to write for a ‘zine back when there was no internet…”
But to the ‘zines. I used to write for a fanzine, back in sixth form, when I was trying to be as cool as the girl who made the fanzine in question, who wanted to be a music journalist and who didn’t like Kula Shaker so I had to pretend not to like them either (but I did, and I do). I remember getting super excited over the fact that I was holding in my hand something that I had helped to make, and seeing my art in print for the first time. It made me realise that I could actually be creative, that there were things I could physically make outside of the dismal sessions of Art Class where I woefully, grudgingly failed to reproduce any of the techniques of the grand masters. This involved scissors and glue and a photocopier. I could totally do those things! I did pictures for two issues, until teenage bitching meant that no one was talking to anyone and it all got a bit fraught.
My treasure trove
So that was my experience. I’m glad to say that other people are still making fanzines, and that they are varied, beautiful, different and amazing. I spent a tenner on a stack of ‘zines and came home giddy with the fact I owned little bits of art, thought and lovely stuff. Counter culture. I was gobsmacked with the array of fanzines on offer and made even happier when I realised how fucking feminist all of it was. And how diverse that feminism felt. All kinds of people were making all kinds of cool, gender-diverse, body-shape positive, politically forward things. Which were funny. And nice to look at.
Here are some of my faves.
Queer and Feminist ‘Zines
I fell in love with Nancy just from the cover alone, and more so when I read the contents. A series of personal essays, rants and raves on the subject of effeminate gay men and why there is such antagonism towards them both within mainstream AND gay culture. A seriously smart read, which delivers one gay chap’s take on queer theory sliced through with pics of Lady Gaga and Brian Molko. I particularly enjoyed the list of ‘positive femme men’. Shape and Situate subtitled itself as Posters of Inspirational European Women, and it did exactly what it said on the cover. A whole bunch of artists had done different pages, in different styles, giving stories and pictures about women as varied as Jayaben Desai and Liz Ely, so I now have a whole host of new icons, plus lots of links to new artists and new feminist allies I hadn’t heard of before. Girls Who Fight – do NOT google “girls who fight”; you will get bad porn – from Monster Emporium (see the distributors list below) is a good wodge of art, essays, stories, photos and all kinds of feminist goodies. I got all three issues due to being greedy. And I regret nothing. Another of my stellar buys was Miss Moti by artist Kripa Joshi. A stunning and high quality comic, standing out from its photocopied sisters. The rich, lush artwork details the daydream life of Miss Moti:
Pronounced with a regular T this Nepali word means
A Plump Woman
But spoken with a softer T it means
A Pearl
I really liked the curvy, sexy heroine – depicted on the cover in a seashell like Venus, but clothed in a polka dot dress. The simple storylines unfolded into wonderful fantasies: a bit of cotton candy becomes a pink cloud landscape where she sculpts her own David; a piece of apple grows into a new Eden complete with Adam. This was a real change from the lycra-clad hardbodies and explosion-tasms of the usual suspect superheroines I’ve become so used to seeing. This comic focused on her desires, rather than using her as a vehicle for the (assumed straight male) reader.
Distributors and Indie Publishers
Vampire Sushi are ‘zine distributors, so they’ve got their fingers in lots of pies. They specialise in perzines1, art ‘zines, queer ‘zines, food ‘zines and feminist ‘zines. Which is pretty much all your ‘zine food groups. Similarly, Monster Emporium Press have ‘zines and artbooks, as well as being monster-themed, which we at BadRep Towers are generally in favour of. Other Asias bring together artists whose work challenges misrepresentations and generalisations of “The East”. One of their cute mini ‘zines comes with a teabag inside, which meant that all my ‘zines now have a delicious scent to them. Finally, Honest Publishing are an independent publisher based in SW London, celebrating authors with unique, alternative voices.
- If you make feminist or feminist-friendly (or friendly feminist) fanzines, please get in touch with us and tell us all about it!
- Nope, I didn’t know either. But Wiki does. Woo!
- Awesome photo of two 1980s punk girls on the Tube.
- Retronaut: the most horrendous and terrifying vintage valentines imaginable. More here! And finally, a bit of 1900s those-humourless-suffragettes sentiment here via Brainpickings… some things never change, eh ;)
- The Case of the Sudden Femme Fatale: author Delilah Des Anges guest blogs for author Melanie Clegg (whole lotta authorship in here) on reimaginations of Irene Adler.
- Scandalous Women Celebrates Black History Month (note: the USA has BHM now, the UK in autumn)
- Female Illustrators You Should Know, plus more, more, and more!
Emily Carroll
She’s pretty well known, but deserves a mention anyway. I love the glimpse into (predominantly female) costume history I get from Draw This Dress – a shared project with award-winning fellow illustrator Vera Brosgol. Her Valentine’s day comic last year, Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter, featured a lovely romance between two women (well, one’s a goddess, but anyway). Folklore-influenced The Hare’s Bride has a beautiful Carteresque simplicity to it. I love her work, and you should too.
Sarah Gordon
I mentioned Sarah in the last post – working as colourist, she’s one third of The Peckham Invalids team along with Howard Hardiman and Julia Scheele. Her blog is a great read and her art is beautiful. The above wonderfully snooty lady is her own take on one of the characters from the comic. She says: “I’d like 2012 to be a year where I stop hiding all my personal/story work in my head, notebooks and sketchbooks and get it out onto… the internet”. That really struck a chord with me, because my own situation is very similar.1 So I wanted to cheer Sarah on. Hope that’s not too weird. Uh. Yeah! Go Sarah, from a total stranger! And now, dear reader, you must go and Do Similarly.
Patrice Aggs
Thought I’d go a bit more longstanding – Patrice is pretty established, but she is also awesome, so if you aren’t familiar, here she is. Her work is soft-edged and has a kind of instant, gentle appeal – she’s done a lot of popular children’s books and resources for schools, but has a lifelong passion for comics. She’s worked with Philip Pullman and Horrible Histories and on The Snowman (CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA WIBBLY ALERT) and has signed up to draw a story for new children’s weekly comic The Phoenix. Hurrah for getting children into comics! (TANGENT: Check out this sword-wielding art for one of the other stories. I’d have loved that as a kid. I hope the story’s as good as Neill Cameron’s art makes it look.) The other reason I want her on this post is she’s apparently quoted here2 over on Ladies Making Comics as follows: “Do-it-yourself is far duller than do-it-together. We need to champion each other. Drag the male-dominated blinkered attitude into the dustbin.”
Wise words indeed.
Marc Ellerby
“Chloe Noonan is a monster hunter, but she doesn’t have any powers. She can’t beat up bad guys, she can’t run without getting a stitch. She’s kinda flakey and really not bothered about saving the world. Plus she has to get the bus everywhere. I know, right?!”
I love Marc Ellerby’s clean lines and eye for detail. His monsters are bloody excellent – you can feel how much fun he’s had dreaming them up. Also, no one draws an unimpressed glare (a favoured expression of mine, naturally, as a Strident Feminist Blog Editor) quite like him. So of course, I’m now madly in love with Chloe Noonan, his wonderfully indignant teen monster hunter heroine. She’s amazing. She hurls bombs at monsters and plays in a band whilst loudly cursing both vocations and her schoool-friend sidekick is pretty cool too (also, female: BOOM BOOM BECHDEL BUST). Check her out. Buy the comics. DO IT NOW. That is all.
You know, I still don’t think I’m done. There is so much visual awesome out there. There’s a huge stream of female creators and artists and a rich seam of great heroines, characters, and attempts at inclusive projects out there. They need shouting about as much as possible. While we’re here, though not all my choices on this list are female creators, the women who work in comics, for example (and I know I’ve I’ve not really differentiated ‘illustration’ from ‘comics’ here, but anyway) give the lie to defensive statements on why women are so frequently left off panels at events, and so on. They’re around. You just have to look around you.
For further inspiration for the budding artists out there, I leave you with this photo of Patrice Aggs in action.3
More soon.
- I’ll get around to talking about the team and what we’ve been drawing at some point. I want to talk about these awesome people first, but if you’re curious, trumpet-blowing will happen. I’m, er, shy.
- At least, I think this is a quote? I wasn’t completely clear, if I’m honest. But it’s great advice, either from her, or inspired by her work. So there you go.
- If you took it, I hope you do not mind. I haven’t tracked down the image rights, but if it was you and you can let me know, I will credit you or remove it if you’re not digging my use of it, and so on.
Illustration – or, as Wikipedia rather charmingly defines it, art created to elucidate or dictate sensual information – is really important to me. It’s basically what I would do all the time if I had my way. And I’m not the only arty person on Team BadRep, either, as you may know. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about being part of this site, in fact, is the opportunities it has raised for me to discover new illustrators from around the world, including feminist Gond tribal art and east Indian Mithili art. As I write this, I’m awaiting my copy of Sita’s Ramayana from Tara Books, so I’ll be talking about that on here soon.
This, though, is a quick post about illustrators I’m especially digging this minute. Each of them has done some work that I found interesting and beautiful with the added dimension that it also got my feminist braincogs turning, or straight up made me smile.
I’ll probably come back to this topic every so often, but to start with here’s some people you should check out.
Tiitu Takalo
Based in Finland, and mainly working in Finnish, but her art is powerful enough that you don’t need to be fluent in Finnish to love it. I interviewed her last year about her work and her feminism – read it here. I am fangirlishly proud that this site is on her links page, I can tell you! My favourite thing she’s done is probably Keha (The Ring) which is about growing up, falling in love, and boxing, but her zines are also beautiful.
Howard Hardiman
What Lengths would you be prepared to go to?
So I met Howard at a small press art fair Markgraf and I had a stall at, and I picked up issues 1 and 2 of his comic The Lengths. It’s now on issue 5. In his own words (quoted here), “…it’s a comic based around a series of interviews I did with male escorts working in London a few years ago and tells the story of Eddie, one young escort… who’s struggling with trying to do the job while craving both the adventure it offers him and the prospect of a relationship with an old friend”.
It is also very good. It’s a thoughtful, introspective comic, meandering poignantly through ideas around sex work and attitudes to it, selfhood and masculinities. I really like his decision to portray all the characters as human/dog hybrids. It just works.
On another tack, Howard’s also writing The Peckham Invalids, talking of which, scroll down!
(Oh, and according to his site bio, he’s been described by Simply Knitting magazine as “suave”. This has really only made us dig him more.)
Julia Scheele
There’s a lot about Julia’s work I love – short mini-comics like this and this, for example. I’d recommend following her work generally, but I’d particularly recommend The Peckham Invalids. I have issue 1, and it’s off to a promising start. The entire premise is a Bechdel-busting pile of badass, and features women from a range of ages and backgrounds, y’know, having their stories told, and stuff.
In 1906, as Britain surges on a tide of industrialisation driven by the brave innovations of the boldest and the best, Ms York has opened the doors of her modest home in Peckham. A group of poor, young, ill-educated, disabled and abandoned girls found their way to her and under her auspices are learning about the power they have feared the most in the world of oppression and stark inequality: their own.
So, to recap: a comic about disabled teenage superheroines in 1906 Peckham. My interest is hugely piqued, my hopes are high, and the art is looking great.
- Julia’s Art Blog
- thepeckhaminvalids.com
- Sarah Gordon, who colours The Peckham Invalids – also a talented artist
Cat Mariner
“I’m pretty sure that tiny, irrationally furious, pompously indignant animals are the funniest things on the planet.”
And who are we to argue?
Cat’s just launched her Etsy store this week, which is great, because the image above is surely the greatest alt-Valentines card imaginable (although Snails In Love… Totally Gross is surely a contender). I am particularly jealous of her command of facial expressions, and particularly enamoured of this image of the rainbow creatures that live in puddles.
I am in the process of loudly petitioning her to produce a picture book or a comic. Pray add your voice to the clamour, and purchase a card on your way out.
I’m going to stop there because it’s late and I have to sleep but please do check these people out, gift them your money and tell your friends about them.
There are more people I want to tell you about, but I think I’ll style it out into a second post!
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Her name is Tiitu Takalo. You might not know it yet, but she’s your new favourite illustrator. You’re welcome.
So much stuff is available to English-speaking markets that I reckon the vast majority of us here in BadRep Country have a lot of inertia about discovering non-English language media, from the music of Rammstein through to subtitled films, even.1 It’s a shame. We’re missing out. And though I’m not currently able to read Tiitu’s books in the obvious sense, her art is that kickass that I just don’t care. I’m willing to muddle through. Muddling is how a great deal of important learning Gets Done. And if you’re interested in feminist art and media from places outside the UK/US over a language barrier, then comic books are, for obvious reasons, an excellent place to have a go at climbing over said language barrier.
If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that at least three of Team BadRep, me included, are budding illustrators ourselves, so I was fascinated to hear how Tiitu approaches her work.
When did you first realise you were a feminist?
“I think I have always been a feminist. Or all the conflicts with the rest of the world have made me one. It started when I was a child. My mother was a career woman in the metal industry. Most of her co-workers and colleagues were men. She drove the car and also fixed it herself and one of her hobbies was carpentry. And my father did cooking, and he did our carpets by hand – I don’t know the word for it, in Finnish it’s same as knitting, knitting carpets – and he still does that as a hobby. He also did some sewing. And my parents never told us (me and my sister) that we couldn’t do something because we were girls, or that we should behave a certain way based on our gender. I never heard anything like “nice girls do not act like that”. Before I went to school I didn’t know that our family was somehow different. I didn’t know that people think there are some jobs for women and others for men. I didn’t know that men and women are not equal in this world.
“When I was six years old in school I noticed that girls and boys are treated differently. Expectations are different for boys and girls. Even as a child I knew it was not OK. I also noticed that all my friends didn’t share this opinion. They were already brainwashed to think that girls are nice and quiet and tidy, and boys are not, and that this was some kind of natural law.
“I started calling myself a feminist when I met other girls and women who were using that word and were proud to be feminists. Before that, I thought that feminism was a dirty word. (That’s what they want you to think!) And yet, still, I was thinking and acting like a feminist.”
I’m in no doubt that some readers will be asking this, so despite my earlier sentiments on it not being a must-do in any way: are there any plans to translate any of your comics into English? (I really love the look of Kehä (The Ring) as I’m really into boxing, and the blurb reminds me of Girlfight, which is one of my favourite films.)
“Kehä has been published in Sweden, but I don’t have the energy to contact more publishers. There was one small press comic publisher in England which was interested, but nothing happened. I have English translations on a leaflet for Kehä and also for Jää… but it’s sold out in Finnish.”
Who are your heroes and what inspires you?
“I get inspired by other people who do stuff, other zine makers and artists. And it’s inspiring to do things together. Organise a gig, or festivals, or protests, or an art exhibition. I don’t have any heroes or idols. Everyone should try to be one’s own hero.”
What are you working on at the moment?
“I just finished a graphic novel about the history of my hometown, Tampere. It’s a collaboration with a scriptwriter and the Museum of Tampere, so it’s different from what I have done before. Maybe more mainstream. But I like the idea. There are nine stories from different periods. For example the 1850s story is about a 14-year-old girl working in a cotton factory – not the story of the factory owner like it usually is in the history books. The book is also published in English as Foster Sons and Cotton Girls. And now I’m trying to start a new comic project about a community living project I’m involved in.”
We’ve had some artists decide they don’t fancy being interviewed on our site because they didn’t want to be identified with a “feminist” site. Have you ever had difficulty getting work because of your feminist reputation?
“No, I don’t think so. Or I just don’t know if it has been an issue somewhere. In Sweden, where my comics have also been published, it’s actually really cool to be a feminist. They have a really cool feminist comic collective called Dotterbolaget (“daughter company”), and the most popular comic artists in Sweden are women and feminists. I have heard that it’s so fashionable to be a feminist comic artist in Sweden that some male artists who are not feminists are calling themselves feminists in order to be cool or increase the sales of their books.
“We certainly don’t have that problem in Finland. The F-word is still something people don’t want to be associated with. I think it’s important that more people are calling themselves feminists. It is not something to be quiet about. We should be proud and we should be loud! After all, we are making this world a better place for everyone. For women and men and children and sisters and brothers around the globe. Feminism is not just smashing patriarchy: it’s making everyone equal.”
How much do you use digital tools to produce/edit your work (if at all!)? Mine is mainly hand done with barely any digital editing because I like marker pens and am still really getting to grips with digital at all! How is it for you?
“I don’t like computers, and I’d rather spend my time painting with watercolours than staring at a screen. I love to see how the colours blend with water or how ink spreads on the wet paper. It’s like magic! If it’s possible, I don’t do anything with digital tools. I don’t even want to scan my work myself. Someone else can do it better, or even find that interesting. Why should I do it? The answer is, unfortunately, money. When I do my own zines or other publications, I don’t have money to pay anyone to do computer stuff for me.”
You created Hyena Publishing to help get your work out there. Being arty types, we have a fair few friends who are often trying to launch self-published projects, and it’s often a lot of work to stay afloat. What advice would you give to young artists starting out?
“Take a small edition of your book or zine. It’s more fun to have sold out than to find 500 copies of unsold books under your bed when you’re cleaning up your place. Try to do something small first. Twenty copies with your home printer or copy machine at your school or workplace.
“Do something together with your friends. It’s more fun and you can split the work and expenses. Do not try to do your best book first. It seems like people have massive ideas for the first book or zine, but they get exhausted by all the work and get nothing done. Don’t think you will get rich by doing zines or even comics. It’s hard work and underpaid.
“Try to contact other self-publishers or small press people. Find out where they are printing and selling and share your knowledge with them too. Go to zine festivals and events. The best thing about being your own publisher is that no one can tell you that your comics aren’t good enough, or that they are too political, feministic, personal or emotional. Do comics you would like to read yourself. Not the comics you think other people want to read!”
Warm thanks to Tiitu for talking to us. Head to tiitutakalo.net and order her books by email – if you ask nicely you might be able to get a translation leaflet…
- I have never understood this one. It’s BEEN translated! What’s with the anglocentric excuse-making complex? It’s just embarrassing.
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]!
But I was in for a shock one day at school, when I settled myself down in the Book Corner with the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales version of Hans Christian Anderson‘s text. The Mermaid died at the end? She didn’t marry the prince? And then was turned into a “Daughter of the Air”, and wasn’t allowed a Christian soul unless a zillion children did good deeds and something-something-virtue? What a letdown. Expecting a straightforward happy ending, I was utterly bewildered. Prince or no prince, I hadn’t been prepared for quite so much all-out morbidity, and if you asked me, this Daughters of the Air business just sounded a bit suspicious.
It’s one hell of a leap from the all-out romance of Disney’s riff on the story to Anderson. Disney takes Anderson’s curious young mermaid princess and gives her a bit of sass, focusing the story on themes of adolescence and coming of age and adding a saleable happy ending into the mix. It’s a common refrain on feminist blogs to say that Disney “sanitised the originals” (whatever “original” means). Here, though, Disney at least allows Ariel her desires, even if they are chastely presented, and allows their fulfilment at the end. By contrast, Anderson focuses on the dangers of curiosity and makes the story arc a recognisably tragic one – and later, it seems, tacked on the stuff about the Daughters of the Air to add in a moral imperative for the reader: children, be good, else the mermaid will never earn her Christian soul!
In both stories, identity and self-knowledge is a key theme – and both mermaids are willing to give up their voices and identities for love and to gain access to the exciting, adult, otherworld of the land. There’s something problematic about both of them – with Anderson’s version, as Marina Warner puts it in From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, “the story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration , dissolution.” With Disney, Warner ruminates that “the issue of female desire dominates the film… the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out”, concluding that – however much we want to cry “sanitised!” – it is more that in the film “romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire”. So it’s a kind of sanitising, but it’s also a secularising.
All of which brings me to The Flight of the Mermaid, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao‘s adaptation of the tale, a wonderful picture book, now recently reprinted by India-based publishing house Tara Books. This version re-energises Anderson’s original storyline and tells it in such a way that it becomes, devoid of its Victorian moralising, a genuinely life-affirming, feminist story. The real achievement, though, is that it keeps the Daughters of the Air stuff, and Anderson’s story structure, but tells the story in such a way that a happy ending is forged. And it’s an ending that retains the sense for wanderlust Disney gives its heroine, but doesn’t end in the mermaid trading selfhood or identity for marriage – at the same time neatly avoiding Anderson’s preachy, morbid shutdown of female desire or personal autonomy.
But let’s start with basic facts: the book is gorgeous. Check it out!
Flight of the Mermaid – skipping out the diminuitive little from the title for a start – is a treat for the senses from start to finish. Beautifully letter-pressed on tactile, thick-grain paper, the cover has a press-out fish shape which doubles as a bookmark and reveals the mermaid herself underneath. The book is fully illustrated with acclaimed artist Bhajju Shyam‘s distinctive artwork in the Gond tribal style, and the results are a wonderful, fresh contrast to the European visualisations of this story I’ve become so used to. Look how colourful it is!
The title of the book also describes the ending (skip to after the grey blockquotes if you don’t want the detail spoilered!) – the mermaid comes to the realisation that the prince, though he is fond of her, does not love her romantically. She is saddened, but will not kill him – the only way she can save her own life – and chooses to sacrifice herself instead: yes, familiar Anderson territory. And yet:
Slowly, the truth came over her – her plight had nothing to do with the prince at all… he knew nothing of her, and could not carry the weight of her dreams.
And at the point where, in Anderson, her tragic end is mitigated only by the Daughters of the Air announcing “welcome to the airy feminine purgatory party!”, Wolf, Rao and Shyam show the mermaid’s transition into the air as a change, not an ending:
“Who are you?” she asked, and found that her voice had returned.
“We are the daughters of the air, they answered. “And now you are one of us.”
The mermaid was delighted. “I was born into water,” she said to them. “And I know the world on the shore too. Only the air is left to explore, and it seems to hold more freedom than sea or land.”
The air is, logically, her next destination on a continuous journey. Always on the move, the mermaid’s real aim is constant self-discovery and adventure. Visually, in each of her phases on land, sea, and air, she retains her flowing hair and colourful attributes, whether they are feathers or scales. Her identity is always hers, and is never relinquished.
It’s a wonderfully executed blend of the positive points of both Anderson’s text and the optimism the Disney generation have come to expect from the story, and for parents, schools and people who love beautifully made books, I just can’t recommend Tara Books highly enough.
We managed to grab five minutes of co-author Gita Wolf’s time, via email, to ask her a little about the book – why this story?
“We felt that the story had universal resonance,” says Gita. “It was both a coming-of-age tale as well as the story of a journey (both literal and spiritual). When we first told the story to Bhajju Shyam, he related to it right away. ‘That’s exactly it!’ he said, ‘That’s what it feels like to come into a completely new element – like when I traveled to another country for the first time. I lost my language, and it felt like I was [as Anderson’s mermaid experiences when she loses her voice] walking on knives.'”
How about the ending? “We wanted to give the tale a feminist twist, and not focus on the loss of the prince as an absolute tragic end of everything – nor did we want the Disney ending. In keeping with Anderson’s basic narrative, the Mermaid in a sense does go up in the air, but the air is here a new element to explore, and her journey will continue.”
All hail the flying mermaid!
Order your copy from Tara’s UK distributors or on Amazon.
Find out more
- See more of the interior of the book at Drawn.ca here
- Check out the Tara Books blog here, and read about their work in their recent article on For Books’ Sake. Be sure to check out their catalogue (available on their homepage as a PDF file – I’m especially excited for Sita’s Ramayana!
Warm thanks to Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao at Tara Books for taking the time to talk to us, sending us parcels and being generally lovely.