Strong Female Protagonist
Yes, I found this by doing a lazy Google search after “decent webcomics that won’t make me scream” didn’t turn up anything useful. But it worked, and here we are. Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan (writer) and Molly Ostertag (art) is a superheroine comic about an American teenager trying to deal with being an ex-superhero, her former comrades and enemies, and going to university whilst still having epic superpowers.
There’s an X-Men-esque backdrop of mutation-hatred, and so she exists, like many superheroes, in a world that is not entirely happy about having superheroes. The black and white thick line art is really nice, I like the emphasis on characters’ faces and expressions rather than bodies, and the themes of power, responsibility and morality are something I think the “super” genre is well-placed to tackle.
The main exploration is, naturally enough, about what it means to be a Strong Female Protagonist, and links neatly to this nice article on the subject in the New Statesman recently. Yes, the lead character is “strong” – she’s a physical powerhouse, and strong-minded too. Her strength isn’t just physical, but also emerges in terms of her blunt decision-making and clearly held beliefs about right and wrong. Strength ostensibly defines her, but the comic is about the questions and complications behind what that might mean.
Delilah Dirk
I was absolutely bowled over by the quality of the artwork in Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. The colouration is superb, and the detail in each of the panels makes the whole thing look absolutely lush: there’s a “classic story” feel to the whole piece, and the pages, like our titular heroine, are full of life and activity.
The comic is set in (sort of) Constantinople in 1805, and is very much in the style of The Mummy and Adele Blanc-Sec (watch the movie now, if you haven’t). I won’t lie, I do like a good swashbuckling, wisecracking character in a gung-ho Sinbad the Sailor-style universe, where bad guys are bad and the goodies might do slightly naughty things, but it’s all in a Robin Hood sort of way.
This is one of those narratives: Delilah is half English, half Greek, all Action Famous Adventure Lady, and all tongues should remain in cheeks, except when they’re lolling at the beautiful landscapes of Tony Cliff, whose work has also graced Flight. It’s not particularly deep or meaningful, but hey, not all narratives with female characters need to be about what it is to be a female character, right? It’s definitely a damn good yarn, and worth a look for the art if nothing else.
The Fox Sister
A fox-spirit comic? I don’t mind if I do.
Rather than the more familiar Japanese shapeshifter, The Fox Sister is about the Korean Kumiho. It’s another gorgeously-drawn webcomic and the product of a very welcome collaboration between Jayd Aït-Kaci and Christina Strain, who is departing from her usual colourist work to write this modern fairytale of two sisters.
The thick line-brush work and open panels sit well with the thoughtful, slow-paced writing in a landscape of snow and secrets. I love the way the fox spirit steps out of the panel on the page I’ve included here.
Something about the artwork reminds me of a pre-Blu-ray cleanup Disney’s 101 Dalmations, especially in the colour palette and faces of characters, but this is not a Disney story, though the elements make it appear like it might be – we have an all-American hero, and his ongoing terrible attempts at both speaking Korean and trying to get romantic with our heroine, Yun Mee, who is far more interested in fighting the fox-demon that took over her elder sister’s life.
Gunnerkrigg Court
A mysterious school, in a mysterious city, by a mysterious forest, separated by a large (mysterious) moat. This is a webcomic of teenagers, demons, spirits, folktales, ghosts, robots and the usual school-related growing pains. Gunnerkrigg Court is Harry Potter meets Malory Towers meets something deeper and darker altogether.
It’s a huge, sprawling world, crammed full of interesting female characters. The story focuses on the central pair of Antimony and Katriona, who are best friends, and their experiences going to school and becoming part of a magical/technological war which is threatening to move from cold to hot.
The comic is subtle, curious, funny and strange, with tones of Gloom Cookie, although the art is cleaner and more colourful; slightly French and manga-esque in feel. I particularly like the fact that the world has rules that are revealed as you go along, and how many things (and people) are left unexplained and without immediate resolution. Relationships are equally complicated – this is a world where love and feelings are explored in detail.
That’s all for the moment – more in the next post. Please share any webcomics you find with the team here, as we’re always looking for more reading material. For bonus points, here’s a link from the Mary Sue on Gail Simone’s griping about writing those troublesome male characters. Because it made me laugh this afternoon.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a paper comic. I was deeply in love with comics at one point in my life. I swore off them a while ago for reasons of both taste – I’d run out of titles with female characters that I was interested in – and budget: it was one too many expensive habits for a theatre professional, and in the end, red wine won the day.
I’ve kept a weather eye on the comics world, and the announcement of an all-female line-up for X-Men was enough to send me to Forbidden Planet. But what made me actually buy the thing despite the £3 price tag was writer Brian Wood (DMZ, Channel Zero and Northlanders) and colourist Laura Martin (Planetary, Authority and JLA Earth 2, which all sit beautiful and bold on my shelves thanks in part to her palette choices and ability to make heroes look truly heroic).
Marvel introduce the issue on their website as follows:
Because you demanded it! The X-Women finally get their own book!
So, a fan-based revolution in the world of comics? Perhaps. The title is part of Marvel NOW, the 2012 relaunch of the brand aiming to bring new readers into the market, or in my case, perhaps to bring readers back into the fold and into comic stores.
Could it be that the comic industry is tackling the gap in the market for mainstream titles that are interesting to women? I’m heartened by the weight put behind this comic; it doesn’t seem to be a gimmick or an afterthought. The issue was heavily trailed with an XX teaser campaign, which was hard not to notice. And what I’ve also been interested to note is the supportive voices around the line-up, with Bleeding Cool praising Marvel for “raising their game in this regard” and other commentators using the launch as an opportunity to dedicate space to interviews with women in the industry, and to the importance of more titles about women, for women.
There’s a good piece here in Clutch, an interview with editor Jeanine Schafer over at The Mary Sue, and another piece here at Bitch magazine.
To me, my reviewers!
The series features an all-female team including Storm, Jubilee, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Rachel Grey (daughter of Scott and Jean) and Psylocke. They’re based at Jean Grey’s School for the Gifted and pitted against runaway trains, teenage tantrums in the hallway, and the arrival of John Sublime with a request for help.
I’m very pleased to see Storm’s mowhawk back in business, and Jubilee was always a favourite of mine from the TV series, even if she was often cast as a mutant girl version of Snarf. She spoke to me of teenage wish-fulfilment, her mutant power always waiting in the wings for the right moment to shine, exactly like mine. Except my mutant power hasn’t developed yet. I’m sure it will.
What’s good about it? Lots. Lots and lots. The storyline moves on nicely, with a strong introduction that sets up future intrigue. It’s issue one, so I’ve not got a lot to go on, but so far it feels well-paced and with good action scenes and themes of homecoming (positive and negative) alongside the usual “outsider” politics that have always been a solid foundation for mutant-related plot.
The main characters get set up nicely and all showcase their abilities, personalities and range of powers. Jubilee and Kitty are set at a similar age and look like they are set to play out the roles of younger, naive/vulnerable characters, although there are two pupils at the school who look like they might also fill that position, so we’ll see. In terms of more experienced or older figures, Storm takes centre stage on the cover and is the team leader and headmistress with Rachel Grey as her second-in-command. Rogue is the powerhouse, and is shown enjoying herself being gung-ho in saving the day during a classic runaway train sequence, whilst Psylocke is pleasingly intimidating in the role of bad cop when Rachel interviews John Sublime.
There’s the usual balance of action/adventure with high school drama, much as you might expect, so in the future I’m hoping for something along the lines of Grant Morrison’s New X Men. This is referenced clearly through the young people at the school, so in those panels you can play a fun game of Guess Who? Mutant High Edition. This does also tend to lead on to a less fun game of Where Are We In What Passes For Continuity Around Here, but generally I take the Doctor Who approach on that one, so try not to get cross-eyed, basically.
I can’t write this review without talking about how the characters look, partly because comics are a visual medium, but also because it’s so good to see a lot of the traditional problems of female representation overturned here. We have two non-white characters in the line-up, neither of whom are the xenophilia standard sexy blue lady. Almost all of the outfits in Olivier Coipel’s artwork are really nicely, thoughtfully designed and look very practical, including Rogue’s costume which comes complete with a hooded top. No spiked heels – or any of the break-your-legs Girl Power stacks of Frank Quitely – are in evidence. Everyone’s zippers go all the way up, with the sad exception of Storm who, in the words of a friend of mine, seems to have developed a secondary mutation allowing her outfit to stick to her breasts despite flying at speed. She’s clearly the Emma Frost replacement in the line-up.
I’m going to be charitable and say that the instances of female characters doing needlessly sexy poses is fairly low, but having passed the issue around a few friends (male and female) the mileage varies. That said, it’s certainly way below what I would have expected and certainly nowhere near the awful debacle that is DC’s recent treatment of Starfire. I could easily imagine a world in which an all-female X-Men line up could have been all bikinis, all the time…
If I’m being uncharitable, I could say that it’s sad all the women are quite so perfect in how they look. Mutation offers such a variety of bodies to the writer and artist that it would have been good to see a character who subverted traditional expectations of what heroic women in comics should look like. A woman with the glorious curves of Morrison’s Angel Salvadore before she got reworked into a “prettier” version. Similarly, it’s a shame not to have an older female character to give something of the sagacity of Professor Xavier (can we make Helen Mirren a mutant already?), not to mention the fact that without him and without Cyclops the line-up could perhaps be seen as somewhat ableist compared to other line-ups.
All said and done though, this is only the beginning, and only a few pages. And in case it wasn’t clear: I really enjoyed it. I’ll spend money on the next one. A slim volume cannot hope to achieve everything that I might have wanted from a comic, but even if it weren’t an engaging start that has me hooked, it has already done an awful lot to show what female superheroes can do when well-written and well-drawn: tell a fantastic story that makes you wish your mutant powers would hurry up and kick in…
Does this herald a much-needed change and a step in the right direction for the future of comics? I hope so. But I’m hedging my bets, just in case I’m once again entirely cut off from my source of illustrative imaginings. Instead, I’ve been out on the wild plains of internet comics, on the hunt for decent female protagonists and generally doing pretty well – more on that in another post. Watch this panel.
In the meantime, I leave you with this quote I found in the slew of Google searches that I pass off as “research”:
]]>For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips – all comic strips (…) I cannot remember how the habit started, and I am presently unable to explain why it persists. I only know that I’m hooked, by now, that’s all.
– Dorothy Parker, 1943
Let us fix that for you now.
- “History needs to stop being used as an excuse in the fantasy stories of TV, film, and video games that are, in general, male-dominated whether they’re history-based or not.” Word. Dan Wohl at The Mary Sue: Is ‘historical accuracy’ a good defence of patriarchal societies in fantasy fiction?
- “…this notion that History Is Authentically Sexist… what do you mean when you say ‘history?’ History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.” Tansy Rayner Roberts follows the Mary Sue’s post over on Tor: Historically authentic sexism in fantasy. Let’s unpack that.
- “The so-called middle ground that’s supposed to prevent disunity always ends up excluding women in an attempt to keep those who want to restrict their ministry happy. And funnily enough, this doesn’t exactly instill in women a sense of unity and grace. It makes some of them feel as if they can’t do what they feel called to do, what they are gifted to do.” A thoughtful set of reflections from Hannah Mudge: Bristol Christian Union and the ‘ban’ on women speakers.
- “Announcing Valentin & The Widow, a free weekly audio book series! It’s a globe-trotting 1920s adventure about plucky English aristocrat Eleanora Rosewood, brawny Russian sailor Sacha Valentin, and their fight against a secret organisation that seeks to oppress the weak and destroy the different.” We are listening to this with interest – it’s written by Andrew Wheeler, who among many other things penned the No More Mutants columns on inclusion and geek culture over on Bleeding Cool, which we linked from this site a while ago. Plus, “courageous women! Sexy men!”. How often do you hear anything advertised with the words in that order? (The second instalment just came out.)
And finally…
- Ah! Forget My Fate!: Feminist Opera! In a pub! On 25th November.
- Tomboy Blues at Oval House – finishing tomorrow!
The Rest!
- The Peckham Invalids: a comic about disabled teenage superheroines in 1906 Peckham from Howard Hardiman, Julia Scheele, Sarah Gordon and friends. We are very excited about this as we’re big fans of their previous work.
- The Armour Problem: Our Sarah C wants to know where the Reasonable LARP Armour for women is at. COME ON NOW. WHERE IS IT HIDING. We promise to kick your ass in a rules-appropriate manner.
- Tut, Skyrim! Whose idea was this?!
- Cracked: Five Old-Timey Prejudices That Still Show Up In Every Movie. Cringe.
- OverthinkingIt: Miss Bianca from The Rescuers as “the ultimate Disney Princess”. Sniff! The nostalgia…
- “My own vision is that the future of fragrance should be genderless”: Nicola Pozzani talks scents and gender for The Perfume Magazine.
- Finally, here is a Chrome extension that will genderswap the internet. “What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!”
Round Two: Sassy, Sassy Superheroes
Jenni: I demand to know what the costume designers were thinking when they called these travesties Captain America costumes, or Ninja Turtle or Wolverine costumes. I mean, I don’t think you could get into a S.H.I.E.L.D. base dressed like that and claim to be Cap. Masters of disguise, these costume makers are not.
But you look nothing LIKE Wolverine!
I was the kid who thought ‘shoddy work’ when comic book inkers coloured in panels of Wolverine’s costume the wrong colour. What do you expect will be my reaction when you try to sell me that and call it a Wolverine costume? The only time I’ve seen a male superhero wear a skirt that short was when Deadpool put on Jean Grey’s costume and insisted he was an X-Man.
Rob: Just for the record, I’m planning to do that particular Deadpool outfit for a convention next summer.
Markgraf: Fuck NEXT SUMMER, do it for THIS WEEKEND!
Miranda: This Green Lantern one’s not so bad. Good: it still has those huge abs printed on it! No toning down the muscle power for the ladies. Less good: The lines on the front come over like a bra made out of sinew. Even She-Hulk does not possess this feature.
Sarah J: Sassy Thor Girl is quite amusing. The Mighty Avenger! It’s the coy way she’s cradling the hammer that makes it. And her angry thunder god fluffy boot-tops. Are they intended to represent clouds? Anyway, I think this is one example among thousands of the failure to translate power from a masculine to a feminine character. Thor is big and strong and powerful! Look at his beard, muscles and giant throbbing hammer! Thor Girl is… er… sexy? Sassy? Look at her fluffy boots of death!
Sassy!
Miranda: Yes! The failure to translate power thing you just said? I think that nails it. Look at how Marvin-Martian-girl has no war helmet. Also, I find it really weird how these manufacturers seem to think adding heels to things in the promo shots is logical – the worst offender by far is this shot of a Neytiri from Avatar costume. That character lives in a rainforest, rides a psychic dinosaur and is part of a tribe considering waging a war, in effect, on consumerism. The electric blue stilettoes scream “just took that dinosaur on a sweet trip to Topshop”. Which sort of ruins the whole nature-hippy vibe.
Rob: Also, this seems relevant.
Miranda: Yes. This is all, really, less about Halloween specifically and more about general societal trends around gender and bodies and clothing writ large. Why are we meant to be so uncomfortable with male flesh on display in this way? Sexy male costumes do exist, but they tend to be seen as much more out of place at a general house party than a woman in stockings and suspenders.
Jenni: By the way, I think these posters are amazing. They were created by STARS – Students Teaching Against Racism, at Ohio University, and I think they really get the point across about cultural appropriation and racism at costume parties.
Sarah J: Those posters are ace.
Miranda: Yes. Yet another reason why Sexy Chinese Takeaway should just go on fire.
Jenni: Take Back Halloween and their well-researched selection of costume ideas are still going strong, judging by this appearance on The Mary Sue. I mentioned them in the Halloween post I made on BR last year. Goddesses, queens, warriors and pirates – all costumes I’d consider!
Miranda: And for everything else, there’s always Angry Birds, which is just bringing everyone together in a transcendently glorious sexy-free world of cushioning and big eyebrows.
NEXT: What we’re wearing, and our absolute favourite WTF costume Yandy.com has yet spewed into the world
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Game: Mass Effect
About a hundred years behind the rest of the entire internet, I’m playing Mass Effect 2, and I’m enjoying it so, so much. I want to book a week off work just to complete it, and game all day long.
You play Commander Shepard, who can be a man or woman, and it’s amazingly refreshing to be able to play a female war hero (either way, you’re pretty famous, after saving the galaxy in Mass Effect 1). It’s great to be able to play this female character who inspires so much respect in her colleagues, military and civilian – everywhere she goes, even big scary warlike aliens are afraid of her. My Shepard’s a not-very-physically-intimidating blonde, so it’s kind of fun.
I love the team-building aspects of the game, too. You have to persuade people to join you, and keep them happy and loyal throughout the game. You can play as a good guy or a bad guy, and some of the choices the game gives you (allow genocide to continue for the good of the galaxy?) are brilliant to play through. As writer and fellow Garrus fangirl Jennifer Williams said in her review:
Bioware seem to specialise in making the sort of games where you have to put the controller down for a bit and have a really good think about the consequences of your actions.
Several articles have been written on how feminist-friendly the game can be, some on this blog, so I won’t go into too much detail here except to add my name to the many reviewers recommending it. Even if you don’t play many games, you should try this one. I’m running it on my laptop; you can check here whether you can run it on your computer…
Mass Effect 3, out next summer, looks like it’ll be even better. They’re promising to use a female Shepard in the marketing drive, and although there were lesbian options2 available for Shepard to romance in Mass Effect 1 and 2, in 3 male Shepard will be able to romance some of the guys, too. I’m not sure why these things weren’t done before, but I feel like Bioware is at least a company that listens to what its fans want. I’ll be checking out their Dragon Age II next (another game highly recommended by geeks and feminists!) while I wait impatiently for ME3…
Comic: Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights #1
I didn’t buy many of the comics that came out of the DC52, but I did have to pick up Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights, because I’ve enjoyed his Doctor Who episodes and his Captain Britain comics before.
As much as many DC52 comics have been a disappointment, (Harley Quinn loses half her costume! Catwoman wants to show you ALL HER BRAS. ALL OF THEM. Amanda Waller becomes skinny! Disabled character Oracle walks, becomes Batgirl! DC comics manage to become even less diverse!) I still have to say, this one looks promising.
Demon Knights is set in the Middle Ages, and Paul cites Dragon Age II and ‘the medieval Magnificent Seven’ as points of inspiration. Much like my old favourite Secret Six, (sadly, sadly, outrageously cancelled for the DC52,) it seems as though it will star protagonists who range from reluctant antiheroes who’d rather be at the pub, to absolute bastards who are just along for the fun of it, saving the day and arguing and falling in and out of bed with each other while they do it. My favourite kind of heroes.
Promisingly for the fans of this blog, it also looks as though not only will four of the seven ‘knights’ be of the female persuasion, but the main baddie, the Questing Queen, is also very much a lady.
Well, I say four ladies… Sir Ystin, a knight who self-introduces as ‘sir’, may turn out to be more nuanced than that. Earlier versions of the character, the Shining Knight, have been both a cissexual man, and a young girl disguised as a man in pursuit of her true love, Sir Gawain, but neither of those seem to fit here. Hints dropped by Paul, and Ystin’s insistence on the title ‘sir’ in this volume, however, despite the other characters’ doubt, makes me wonder whether we’re actually seeing the first gender variant character of the DC52…
It’s hard to judge an entirely new comic on just twenty pages, but this issue made me laugh, and made me want to know a lot more about all seven of the main characters, which is pretty much what I want in a first issue.
It’s also extremely quotable:
We find the source of the problem, and we throw dragons at it.
Blog: The Mary Sue
The Mary Sue is really awesome. It’s like BoingBoing for fangirls. They always have the news first. Trailers, casting decisions, I don’t know how they get there so fast.
Battlestar Galactica‘s Starbuck features on the logo above, but you get a different geeky lady character every time you refresh the site. You can read about their logo design and why they picked those characters here.
I’m enjoying the way they’ve named it after Mary Sues, as well. It feels like a challenge. That word that gets thrown at the woman in a fandom work who’s, y’know, not supposed to be there.
There’s slash references and feminism and science and fun things on Etsy and Hipster Harry Potter fanart and the gender-bent Justice League and lists like 10 Things That Could Happen If You Pretend to Be A God, 10 Couples Who Are Badass Together, and 10 Fictional Universes We’d Like to Live in Based on Food Alone…
It’s a bit addictive.
And finally, under “also awesome”:
My feminist-inclined friend Hannah, who, when recently invited to a ‘Tarts and Vicars’ party, dressed as a Bakewell Tart. Because, well, what is a ‘tart’ anyway?
- AwesomeWatch returns next month. Send Jen your own geeky picks – if she agrees with you, they might get a look-in.
- Ed: “I may not have been entirely sober when I thought of this, but it’s too late now, we’re GOING WITH IT.”
- I was going to let my Shepard have a lesbian romance, but, well, the Tank Girl lookalike on my team is straight as a very straight thing, and
Space Batmanalien Garrus has caught my eye. He was on Shepard’s team in Mass Effect 1, and their dialogue’s adorable in a kind of equals-and-comrades-under-fire kind of way. “There’s no one in the galaxy I respect more than you, Shepard.” Bless.
- It’s our birthday party next week! You have to come! Bring your friends! (The ones that will dig this sort of thing, anyway. If you have friends in the EDL, that could get awkward. NICE FRIENDS. Yes.) Here’s the facebook event!
- The (Tattooed) Beauty Myth – an interesting blogpost on women, getting inked, and the tattoo press.
- Is Sex Positive Ever Negative? – the Good Men Project considers the term.
- The Six Chix – “innovative weekly comic strip devoted entirely to the work of female cartoonists.”
- The Guardian‘s Rebecca Nicholson revisits The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
- That DC Reboot Business: the best links are, we think, this, this (and indeed, the whole No More Mutants column series is ace), and this.
- Men-Ups! – men take traditionally ‘female’ vintage cheesecake pinup poses ]]>