Warrior Women Wednesday!

The illustration du jour is by the muy talented Victor Santos, who's been drawing lots of jungle girls lately.

Wonder Woman

pHilippos adds to the "Who is Wonder Woman?" discussion with a link to... the DC Message Board? Holy Crap. I'd given up on that place as a source of intelligent thought a long time ago, but damn if jv2000 didn't come up with something smart to say:

WW should NOT be a title about a woman who feels bad about herself or her mother or her upbringing. She should not have to go around apologizing ad naseum. Nor should she be looked upon as the pariah of DCU. Its time for someone to put the COMIC back in this comic book. And while they are at it, please remind the rest of the writers at DC that good writing doesn't equal depressing writing or killing off a character every third issue or scripting the bloodiest fight scene ever.

I would challenge the writers to write GOOD stories where our heroes feel GOOD about themselves. Or is that beyond the ability of the caliber of writer who writes for the serial form? Or is it some sick form of dealing with their own inferiority complexes? "Look, how great I am. I can make Superman and Wonder Woman feel bad. I can bring them down a notch." Or is it just a bad formula? "Issue 1- Superhero feels good. Issues 2 through 5 - Make superhero feel bad. Issue 6 - Superhero wins, but somebody close to him/her dies. Superhero feels bad."

When was the last time that WW actually used her mind to figure out a solution to a problem? When was the last time she actually outsmarted an opponent? As opposed to just beating them up.

There's more smart stuff in the linked post, but those are the parts that struck me as being important to who Wonder Woman is: smart and not at all angsty.

Oh, well. Gail's coming.

On writing women

Speaking of Wonder Woman, one of the writers who seemed to really get her, Greg Rucka, talked on his LJ about accusations that he's sexist because he makes bad things happen to female characters:

Seems there's a tirade over my treatment of Sasha on scans_daily coming out of the "CheckOut" storyline, and including her behavior in Checkmate 16. Apparently I've turned into a sexist bastard and didn't get the memo. "This would never happen to Batman." No shit. Batman isn't infested by nanobots and being examined by a madman vivisectionist. Doctor Mid-Nite asks if she was sexually assaulted, and that's a problem? Why, because it acknowledges that rape is a crime that happens? Would it have been more honest to simply pretend it wasn't a possibility, rather than treat the scene with maturity, and have Sasha answer and confirm that, no, she wasn't? Or is the problem that I dared broach it at all, that "there's no room in comics for that kind of thing"? Or is it because the fact that women are the victims of rape far more often than men are is something that we'd rather just all ignore? People read for what they want to read, I guess, rather than reading what was written.

David Welsh responds:

Super-heroic fantasy is at least partly about portraying a better world than the one we live in. There are lots of societal trends, positive and negative, that aren’t proportionately represented in comics, and arguing that you’re just being honest by folding in some of the fouler ones strikes me as specious.

I've unfairly boiled their arguments down to a paragraph each, so if you're interested you should definitely click through and read the rest of their thoughts. Because I like both of these guys and believe that each of them has given their opinion plenty of thought, I'm inclined to think that they're both right. Rucka has always pursued honesty in the comics of his that I've read and hasn't been shy about including some brutal stuff if that's what he thought the story called for. On the other hand, David is exactly right that those kinds of comics stories aren't for everyone. Some folks want lighter, escapist tales and there's nothing wrong with that. Rucka's comics aren't for those folks though, as Rucka himself points out in his post.

Still, I can't fault David for seeing Rucka's work in the broader context of the way women heroes have traditionally been portrayed in superhero books.