There wasn’t a specific comic which made me look at the female lead and think “Girls can be heroes just as well as guys! I should be for equality, and stuff.” That doesn’t mean there weren’t loads of characters who fit the bill, only that I never looked on them that way. Which could be the whole point…

I got into comics pretty late, and mostly with UK releases instead of Marvel or DC. I think it started when an older friend had spent 2 straight hours laughing himself onto the floor at Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ “DR & Quinch“. (They STILL get asked to do more of that one.) I suppose that technically DR’s girlfriend Crazy Chrissie is an empowered and independent woman, but since she spends much of her time firing guns and/or throttling him, it’s hard to tell. It’s a great book though, especially the incredibly sensitive war poetry.

Judge Anderson says freeze, creep. Copyright 2000AD, image from http://judgedredd.wikia.com/.

2000 AD was (and still is) an important publication in the UK. It hurt like hell when I finally stopped buying it (around the age of 18 and at university, I think). It also produced a far more relevant female character for this post: Judge Anderson. I was mostly oblivious to Judge Dredd’s satire on future fascism, so all I knew was that Anderson was a determined, skilled woman who could do everything Dredd could (shout, kick doors, shoot things) but also more. She had the psi-powers side of it as well, and her storylines just seemed fuller to me. The telepathy element allowed for more of a detective story, and the others in Psi-Division such as Empaths brought in some very murky subtlety at times. There was no hint of her being less physically capable than a male Judge (although Dredd in particular is something of an unstoppable juggernaut) so my decision was completely based on which characters I got more from. (This priority of ‘story over gender’ was reflected in my affection for another 2000AD series, Pat Mills’ enjoyably bonkers Finn, which starred a male witch.) Anderson is still incredibly popular, and will feature in the new Judge Dredd movie currently in production.

In my all-time Top 10 individual graphic novels, Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost of Living will always feature highly. Technically very few of the female characters in the Sandman tales are actually human, and those in the Endless family such as Death, Delirium and Despair certainly not, but it is a remarkable book. There’s no question that Death herself is where all the focus is, as she steals the show from her brother Dream even in the main Sandman storylines which are supposedly about him.

We recently linked to Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett’s “Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether” (starring LADY SKYSHIP PIRATES), but Rucka was on my radar long before. His series Queen and Country stars Tara Chace, who in my view is about as feminist a character as can exist (hard-drinking, flawed, MI6 operative in a man’s world) – we have a post about her here. It was another graphic novel which caught my attention though, when he took over a superhero who was originally arguably one of the least feminist-friendly ever: Elektra.

Elektra, somehow managing to show off her chest and rear. Again. Copyright Marvel comics, image from http://marvel.wikia.com/.

Seriously, even quite recently before Rucka’s volume Everything Old is New Again, she was aimed at a fanbase who wanted her to look like the image here. She’s the Sexy! Killer! Babe! In Red! So far, so very sex assassin, as we call it around here.

In Rucka’s storyline however, things get shaken up a bit. Elektra has got too used to the endless killing, and is almost at a point where she can’t recover psychologically. She meets a new sensei who is the other main character of the book… an older woman of colour. That’s right, the most dangerous warrior in this story – more capable and badass than the famously lethal assassin herself – is a non-white woman of advancing years, and she is also the one with all the intelligence and wisdom. The art (in the early episodes at least) is superb, with a fight between them showing convincing movement and how muscles actually work. It also heralded a change from CombatBarbie visuals. Rucka had just previously produced Elektra/Wolverine: The Redeemer with esteemed Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, where the glorious full-page paintings showed a stylised Elektra with a body which was often much less objectified than typical comic fare. (Amano’s site doesn’t have my favourite pages from towards the end of the book, where Elektra is shown exhibiting the kind of power and savagery usually given to an avatar of an avenging death goddess, in some very powerful images.)

Everything Old is New Again frequently surprised me, since earlier chapters of this character had basically been SexyNinja books (I knew Greg Rucka would be doing more with it though). I wasn’t thinking outwardly about feminism, I was just being pulled along by the adrenaline and drama of the story.

And that’s the secret. That’s why pop culture is such a great partner for feminism: we don’t notice that it’s happening. It’s why the first Matrix film is a classic, but no matter how many motifs and clever philosophies the sequels pack in, they still fail to inspire. They will never get people thinking to the same extent as the original did because the audience is bored (and disappointed, if you’re me). Grab your reader’s/viewer’s attention and you can push your message home very effectively.

I don’t have one particular comic or character which made me stop and think YEAH FEMINISM, but I suspect there are many which slipped in under my radar and connected strongly, which is a great thing too.

Image copyright Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean / DC Comics 1988

A while back I told you about my favourite cyborg, Battle Angel Alita. Well, now I’d like to introduce you to my favourite flying plant woman, in the second in my series on really old comic books I have a tenuous excuse to blog about. Here comes the excuse…

Like feminism? Like Neil Gaiman? Then you may be happy to hear that there is a new book being put together of essays about JUST THESE THINGS. Abstract submissions have just closed, and Death, Desire, Fury, and Delirium: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman is on track to be published in early 2012.

This got me thinking back to Gaiman’s 1988 story Black Orchid. Unusual, poetic and full of references, I think it’s a cracking comic. And it’s illustrated by Dave McKean (channeling Georgia O’Keeffe) so it’s beautiful. Really – alternately lush and gritty, humming with colour, splattered with monochrome… it ruined other graphic novels for me from a very early age.

Since this is Gaiman, there are also some classy cameos: Lex Luthor, Batman, Swamp Thing (obviously) and a trip around Arkham Asylum which includes a for-once-actually-pretty-scary Poison Ivy.

What’s the story?

The original Black Orchid was a Bronze Age superhero who sounds pretty kickass (being invulnerable and superstrong and able to fly ‘n’ all…). But rather than simply rebooting the character and reworking her origin story, Gaiman does something pretty daring: he kills her off. On page ten. And with her the story sloughs off a heap of superhero clichés and leaps to somewhere and something altogether different.

As Black Orchid dies (caught out trying to infiltrate LexCorp) another being wakes up in a greenhouse somewhere else with some of her memories. The story follows her quest to discover her identity and protect herself and her clone sister – another human-plant hybrid – from the clutches of those who were pursuing the first Black Orchid, and from the abusive ex pursuing the woman she used to be.

Genderfun

I probably don’t need to say that there’s a lot of interesting stuff about identity and memory in there. There are also a lot of very feminine tropes about nature, healing, nurturing, non-violence and motherhood – the older Orchid acts as mother to her younger sister, and even Poison Ivy has some disturbing ‘babies’ in Arkham – which are certainly not commonplace in your standard superhero comic.

Poison Ivy. Image copyright Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean / DC Comics 1988

But this isn’t your standard superhero comic – this is a story about a superhero who isn’t a superhero. Who isn’t the same character she was when you started the book. All sorts of assumptions come tumbling down. Who’s the Big Bad? When’s the big fight? What’s her snappy comeback?

Like its contemporary Watchmen, the story questions the superhero myth and structure, upends and subverts it, teases out the stories stuck between the monoliths of Good and Evil. But it comes at it from an entirely different place. You could argue that in Watchmen the myth of the superhero consumes itself in a hyper-masculine world of science and violence, while in Black Orchid superheroic power is rejected for a hyper-feminine power of nature and passive resistance.

In fact Dr Julia Round has argued the second bit. In her paper ‘Can I call you “Mommy”?’ Myths of the female and superheroic in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid she explains firstly how the “non-egoistic collectivism” of Black Orchid’s shared, continuous identity overturns the “heroic individualism” of the superhero myth.

Even the look of the book resists the powerful iconography of the traditional superhero story – think of Superman’s ‘S’ and the bat sign, the cape, and even the idea of the costume itself:

Black Orchid inverts expectations of this type, as the Orchids are not costumed or linked to any specific logo. Instead they are characterized by splashes of colour in a monochrome cityscape and, in their natural surroundings, simply merge with the background. This aesthetic contributes to Black Orchid’s redefinition of the superheroic, using painted artwork that is feminised in its watercolour appearance and use of purple shades.

As the plot progresses, Black Orchid resists and escapes the men pursuing her, but doesn’t attack them. Batman encourages her to become a crime-fighter like the first Black Orchid, but she retreats. As Round says, “she is not a masculine defender of the state, but instead wants only to retreat from society and reproduce.” Yes, really. I did say hyper-feminine (‘a woman’s just gotta nurture!’)  Much as I love Black Orchid, it certainly throws up some problems. How can I give a thumbs up for her non-violent resistance and at the same time be hoping she’s going to impale the bad guy on a tree?

The final showdown between Black Orchid and Luthor’s henchmen isn’t a heroic battle, as Black Orchid refuses to go with them but also refuses to fight them, saying just “Do what you have to do.” I won’t spoil the ending, but I can say it’s not the way Alita would have done it.

Ecofeminism

Image copyright Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean / DC Comics 1988

That said, Alita does sacrifice herself at the end of her series to save the world. But only after she’s exhausted every possible ass-kicking route. In fact Black Orchid makes an interesting contrast with Battle Angel Alita, as the ‘cyborg feminism’ for which I think Alita makes such a good figurehead was proposed as an alternative to the popularity of ‘ecofeminism’ in the early 1980s. And I can think of few better poster girls for ecofeminism than Black Orchid.

Broadly, ecofeminism is a branch of our beautiful multiple complicated movement that focuses on a connection (and an implied sympathy) between the exploitation of the natural world and the oppression of women. There are a lot of sound reasons to make this link: women are usually affected first and worst by environmental damage, women make up the majority of the world’s agricultural workers, and yet it is overwhelmingly men who own land and control access to natural resources. And the association of the feminine with nature and Mother Earth is a deep and powerful one, which has been cast in a renewed positive light, thanks largely to ecofeminism.

Sadly though the movement has also spawned a lot of guff – about wafty earth goddesses, women’s spiritual connection to the natural world, their innate love of cute fluffy animals and the terrifying, all-encompassing juggernaut of their need to nurture something, anything – to which I do not subscribe.

But to show I don’t hold the theory to blame, I’d like to direct you to some brilliant and important work being done in the name of ecology and feminism by the Women’s Environmental Network. Also: go and read Black Orchid, and tell me what you think.

A couple of disclaimers…

• I’m using ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to refer to the traits, qualities, symbols and associated ideas that are loosely grouped around those words in most Western culture and emphatically NOT referring to men and women.
• When I’m talking about the ‘superhero myth’ I’m using ‘myth’ in the semiotic sense (as Round does in her article) rather than ‘myth’ in the straight up stories and legends sense. There’s quite a good definition here for anyone who’s interested.

The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

– Angela Carter, The Tiger’s Bride

Fairy tales weren’t always Disney cartoons. Once upon a time, they were part of an oral tradition passed down from mother to child, cautionary tales about the horrors that lurked in the woods, and the dangers of going off the path. They were much bloodier back then, much scarier, and with a lot more impact. Then along came the Brothers Grimm and Hans Anderson, and other men who liked writing things down and only wrote down what they liked. The fairy tales got sillier from there, cautionary tales without any of the blood and violence that made them worth paying heed to in the first place. They only got worse with Disney (though some of us love Disney movies, occasionally even with good reason).

Fortunately, it doesn’t end with a happily ever after. Modern authors have taken the sanitised narratives we were all told as kids, and twisted them, into something we recognise but appreciate in a very different way. They’re still the stories we know, but not only has the blood and gore reappeared, they’ve grown up in much the same way as our society has grown up. Rather than warning our children that they should stick to the route life’s prepared for them, walk the road to happy marriage and 2.4 kids, they instead encourag stepping away from the traditional routes, rebelling against authority, and reclaiming traditional feminine roles which are often painted in a negative light. Or they tell grown-up stories about characters traditionally relegated to the most sanitised view of childhood. There are countless modern fables which also play much the same roles as traditional folk tales, from the insanely popular wizard kids of Harry Potter to fables shrouded in mystery and played on a concept album.

Through all of this, there’s one book which, in my opinion, has succeeded in reclaiming stories once used to repress and control women (and by extension everyone else) to a far greater extent than any other: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. As Carter herself asserted, the stories therein are not simply updated or “adult” versions of the traditional stories (she really hated this idea). Rather, they build on the essence of the originals; not those set down by the likes of Perrault, but the original stories, those told in the oral tradition. From a linguistic or anthropological point of view, it’s a fascinating experiment: how would those stories have evolved and changed over the years if the game of Chinese whispers that is oral storytelling hadn’t been brought to a stop?

The result, updated versions of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast (twice), Puss In Boots, Snow White (kinda), Red Riding Hood (two or three times), plus a vampire story and a sort of
Red Riding Hood/Alice Through The Looking Glass amalgam, is a brilliantly charged piece of work. Charged emotionally, through our strongly forged connection to these stories; charged sexually, through the transition of the stories from cautionary tales to fables of teenage awakening; and crammed with ideas and themes, many of which it’s fair to say would be beyond the young minds to which these stories were once told. Instead of telling children how to behave themselves, they tell adults how not to behave themselves.

As I mentioned above, the traditional versions of these stories are very often about staying “on the path”, the course society sets for an individual based on their gender and circumstances. Nowhere is this more evident than in the traditional Red Riding Hood story; a little girl follows a shortcut through the woods, deviating from the way she’s been told to go, and as a result she and a matriarchal figure are murdered by a vicious beast, or rescued by a male hero who is otherwise absent from the story. In Carter’s versions, the little girl leaves the path, and the rewards, while terrifying, are great. In The Company of Wolves, the wolf becomes an image of feral sexuality, with the adolescent Red Riding Hood sleeping with him at the end. In The Werewolf, Granny herself is the wolf; a certain metaphor for how traditional ideas of the feminine role are monstrous – Red Riding Hood kills her, and inherits all her stuff. In Wolf Alice, which merges a variant of the story with elements of Through The Looking Glass, the titular character emerges from a feral childhood, not into the socialised womanhood which the nuns taking care of her demand, but instead redeeming the vampiric Duke in whose care she is left by the power of her sexual awakening.

Sexual power is a primary theme in many of the stories. Carter refutes the view of female sexuality as passive and submissive; such sex is presented as a sterile, pleasureless experience. The titular story, and also the longest, goes into this in detail with a version of the Bluebeard story set in the 1930s. The narrator, also the heroine, marries the familiar murderer. Rather than merely dying, as in some versions of the fairy tale, or being rescued by a male saviour, it is her mother, a badass world-travelling tiger hunter, who comes to the rescue. The “saviour male” is replaced with a blind piano tuner who ultimately becomes the heroine’s lover, taking the sexual emphasis away from the visual with which Bluebeard is so obsessed, and placing it firmly where it belongs: in the realm of the sensual.

For Carter, the beasts are not terrifying, but liberating; in one of her takes on Beauty and the Beast, The Tiger’s Bride, Beauty herself becomes a beast, instead of bringing the Beast back to humanity. I have to say this is probably my favourite story in the collection, with its beautiful emphasis on primal power and strength rather than civilised control. Beauty is at first an object, a thing given to the Beast to repay a gambling debt. It’s through her own acknowledgement and understanding of her bestial side that she claims freedom, and achieves her transformation, which in a reversal of the traditional fairy tale beast transformation is not a horrifying punishment, but a liberating reward.

In many ways, these stories aren’t for children. They’re complex narratives which many adults would struggle with. On the other hand, these stories, which challenge the expected ideas and cautionary tales of behaving like good girls and boys, are in a way exactly what we should be telling our kids: there are terrible things out there, and some of them are you. It’s no longer worth staying on the path. It’s time to explore the woods.

New to Carter? Other things to try:

• The Company of Wolves was turned into a film, although it’s more based on Carter’s radio version of the story. Contains more fairy tales, and is a better werewolf movie than some recent films.
• For more Angela Carter, there’s The Magic Toyshop
• For more modified, subversive fairy tales, you could do worse than check out Neil Gaiman. His short story Snow, Glass, Apples, which is available in Smoke and Mirrors, recasts Snow White as a vampire. He’s also tackled a number of other fairy tales from various cultures in his numerous different works, and written a few fables of his own that aren’t too far removed.

In his time, Russell has worked both on and off stage in theatre, and is currently working on the fringes of the legal profession. In his spare time, he can usually be found hanging round the comments on BadRep like a bad smell.<---- his words, not ours! ;)

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).