Zak Smith
05-09-2008, 05:04 PM
I wrote this for another thing--but I figured it's about Bendis, so I'd post it here, too:
There comes a time in every child's life when they realize that Batgirl and Batman are not just two equally important characters who happen to both be about bats. Ditto Supergirl and Superman, Aquaman and Aquagirl, etc...
Batman is the important one--he has movies about him and way more t-shirts and kids shampoos and genuinely scares the Joker, and Batgirl is just someone in his supporting cast. Once in a while she has her own comic, and as soon as it ceases to have a good writer or good artist, it gets cancelled (the hallmark of a b-list character).
This is not because they're female. Wonder Woman has been around longer than nearly anybody despite almost never having good art or good writing (aside from a brief blip in the mid-80s).
The reason Batgirl, Supergirl, Aquagirl, She-Hulk, X-23 (the new female Wolverine), Spider-Woman, etc. are always going to be B-list characters is because they don't occupy their own patch of mental real estate.
Comic books take ridiculous liberties with the truth--they ask you to imagine all kinds of stupid things. The reason we're willing to do this is because if we believe the stupid things temporarily, then we get to see a kind of story that otherwise we won't get. You can see a normal-sized man pick up a 100-foot gorilla if you just believe in Superman for fifteen minutes. That's entertainment.
The characters that seem essential are the ones where the bare facts that any barely-paying-attention kid or casual reader will pick up about a character seem to promise something they couldn't read about elsewhere. Half of the promise is in the way the character looks. For example:
Batman is a very serious, grim. mysterious guy who is trying to keep a lid on a crazy city full of giggling maniacs. And he looks like it.
Superman is a Man of Steel hailing from a time when steel was a pretty big deal, and he fights insane gods and robots the size of planets with a confident smile. And he looks like it.
The Hulk is radioactive and alone and pissed off. And he looks like it.
Wolverine is clever and jaded and hairy and blue-collar and dangerous and trapped in a world of people who underestimate him. And he looks like it.
Wonder Woman is a demigoddess trying to be a symbol of respect and peace to a world that hates those things. And she looks like it.
Spider-Man is a wisecracking, self-deprecating guy who is trying to keep a lid on a dangerous city full of jerks with delusions of grandeur. And he looks like--well actually the opposite of that--he looks mysterious and scary--but he's actually funny. This is still interesting though, it's thought out. He looks scary but isn't. The idea is that he's trying to fill a role that he may or may not be fit for--that's the point of Spider-Man.
Despite comic-book crossovers, each character occupies their own world/mood, and has their own look which is an absolutely essential part of the personality of the character. An individual writer can re-write Batman as a wisecracking goofball all he wants, but he is still going to be this iconic grim guy that he looks like and reminds readers of. Because he looks like it. Comics are half visual and if the look doesn't work with the words, then there's no reason to read comics.
The most iconic superheroes look like what they're supposed to represent. That's why people buy T-shirts with them on there.
Slightly less popular characters create some confusion about what their supposed to be like. I like The Flash--but he has no specific personality. He doesn't represent some essential human relationship to "speed". Without their powers, they don't have any personality that the average person senses.
If I say "Gee, you're acting like the Hulk" you know what that means. If I say "Gee you're acting like Green Lantern" you won't know what I mean unless you read the comics.
(And even then, you'll ask "Which one? Kyle, Hal, John--Guy?" A hallmark of 2nd-tier characters is that they can pass their powers on to totally other people and not really affect the meaning of the character. This happens a lot.)
So, anyway, She-Hulk, Batgirl, etc--they have this problem in spades. Batgirl represents something and allows you to tell certain stories--but Batman already represents them and tells those stories and lives in the same world and was solving the same problems way before. So you sit there thinking "I'm believing in a redhead dressing up like a bat and fighting crime why exactly? What am I getting out of this?"
The female-copies-of-male-superheroes all have this problem, and, as characters, can't ever represent anything bigger than themselves that isn't already getting represented, and so are never top-notch characters, even though they, being style-icons, will never fade out of the collective memory.
Outside the world of the comics, they are secondary for being less popular and coming later and being unable to represent anything their male counterparts don't already represent. Inside the comics, they are secondary because they can't do anything that isn't already being done.
Except Spider-Woman, recently.
Recently, Brian Michael Bendis has begun putting her in Avengers comics and she really really works. You want to read about her.
Now, up until now, since she was invented in the '70s, she had the same problem all the other girl-analogues had--she didn't seen primary or essential. This has changed.
There are a few reasons for this--
1-her costume doesn't look like Spider-Man's. She has her own, and it is weird and creepy in its own way, though it doesn't pretend Spider-Man's doesn't exist. It's like a variation on a similar theme, but it isn't just a feminization of the original.
(This, incidentally, is why there's only one kid-sidekick that has withstood the test of time--Robin. Robin may suck, but he doesn't look like Batman, so psychologically, we assume he means something different, and therefore, even though he does most of the same kinds of things, we expect a different personality or meaning--and so writers write him that way and it works alright. Robin is no Batman, but he seems like a unique character that the pop consciousness will never be able to get completely rid of.)
2-Her powers aren't like Spider-Man's. Simple enough--the reader expects slightly different kinds of stories can now be told with Spider-Woman than Spider-Man.
(Which would put her one-up on Robin. Robin's "powers" are Batman-lite. Spider-Woman, within the world of the stories at least, are not in competition with Spider-Man.)
But these two things were always true of Spider-Woman--since the 70s. So what's the difference now, in 2008?
3--She is in the same comic with Spider-Man.
This is huge, from her point of view. Alone, Spider-Woman comics all have an elephant in the room--the elephant being Spider-Man. As a symbol, she means less than him because she's the same but showed up later.
In the new Avengers comics, however, Spider-Man and Spider-Woman become an interesting double-act, visually and in terms of characterization. Note that this only works because her powers and costume are different--if they weren't she'd seem redundant. Would you want Batman and Batgirl to team up in the Justice League? No. Batgirl would always feel extraneous-no matter how often they wrote her as saving everyone and being better and smarter than anyone else.
But in Avengers, as 2 characters who are part of a larger team, Spider-Woman and Spider-Man both seem kind of equal--yeah, Spider-Man came first, but the point is the configuration seems to be telling stories--visually--that could only exist when these two characters are together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There's a big team and inside this team, there is a sort of mini-dynamic. She does one thing, he does another thing, but they both do it in a spidery way.
(They don't necessarily interact any more than anyone else on the team--but the visual connection is there, and that's half the battle/)
Suddenly there seems like a point to Spider-Woman. Together, they mean something different than Spider-Man does alone, and more than Spider-Woman does alone.
She's no Tank Girl or Wonder Woman or Barbarella or Catwoman or Pippi Longstocking--on a T-shirt she will still read as a female Spider-Man and she still probably couldn't prop up her own comic for that long and have it be any good--but at least Spider-Woman now, as part of the Avengers, allows us to expect to see things that we couldn't if she didn't exist. As long as she and Spider-Man are both Avengers, she'll be interesting.
So--at least in the comics, at least for now, she is her own person with her own function and she doesn't seem like a leftover artifact from a cynical attempt to milk a female audience by cashing in on the popularity of an earlier male character. Some little goth girl picking up comics for the first time somewhere now has a slightly less hollow role-model.
So thats good.
There comes a time in every child's life when they realize that Batgirl and Batman are not just two equally important characters who happen to both be about bats. Ditto Supergirl and Superman, Aquaman and Aquagirl, etc...
Batman is the important one--he has movies about him and way more t-shirts and kids shampoos and genuinely scares the Joker, and Batgirl is just someone in his supporting cast. Once in a while she has her own comic, and as soon as it ceases to have a good writer or good artist, it gets cancelled (the hallmark of a b-list character).
This is not because they're female. Wonder Woman has been around longer than nearly anybody despite almost never having good art or good writing (aside from a brief blip in the mid-80s).
The reason Batgirl, Supergirl, Aquagirl, She-Hulk, X-23 (the new female Wolverine), Spider-Woman, etc. are always going to be B-list characters is because they don't occupy their own patch of mental real estate.
Comic books take ridiculous liberties with the truth--they ask you to imagine all kinds of stupid things. The reason we're willing to do this is because if we believe the stupid things temporarily, then we get to see a kind of story that otherwise we won't get. You can see a normal-sized man pick up a 100-foot gorilla if you just believe in Superman for fifteen minutes. That's entertainment.
The characters that seem essential are the ones where the bare facts that any barely-paying-attention kid or casual reader will pick up about a character seem to promise something they couldn't read about elsewhere. Half of the promise is in the way the character looks. For example:
Batman is a very serious, grim. mysterious guy who is trying to keep a lid on a crazy city full of giggling maniacs. And he looks like it.
Superman is a Man of Steel hailing from a time when steel was a pretty big deal, and he fights insane gods and robots the size of planets with a confident smile. And he looks like it.
The Hulk is radioactive and alone and pissed off. And he looks like it.
Wolverine is clever and jaded and hairy and blue-collar and dangerous and trapped in a world of people who underestimate him. And he looks like it.
Wonder Woman is a demigoddess trying to be a symbol of respect and peace to a world that hates those things. And she looks like it.
Spider-Man is a wisecracking, self-deprecating guy who is trying to keep a lid on a dangerous city full of jerks with delusions of grandeur. And he looks like--well actually the opposite of that--he looks mysterious and scary--but he's actually funny. This is still interesting though, it's thought out. He looks scary but isn't. The idea is that he's trying to fill a role that he may or may not be fit for--that's the point of Spider-Man.
Despite comic-book crossovers, each character occupies their own world/mood, and has their own look which is an absolutely essential part of the personality of the character. An individual writer can re-write Batman as a wisecracking goofball all he wants, but he is still going to be this iconic grim guy that he looks like and reminds readers of. Because he looks like it. Comics are half visual and if the look doesn't work with the words, then there's no reason to read comics.
The most iconic superheroes look like what they're supposed to represent. That's why people buy T-shirts with them on there.
Slightly less popular characters create some confusion about what their supposed to be like. I like The Flash--but he has no specific personality. He doesn't represent some essential human relationship to "speed". Without their powers, they don't have any personality that the average person senses.
If I say "Gee, you're acting like the Hulk" you know what that means. If I say "Gee you're acting like Green Lantern" you won't know what I mean unless you read the comics.
(And even then, you'll ask "Which one? Kyle, Hal, John--Guy?" A hallmark of 2nd-tier characters is that they can pass their powers on to totally other people and not really affect the meaning of the character. This happens a lot.)
So, anyway, She-Hulk, Batgirl, etc--they have this problem in spades. Batgirl represents something and allows you to tell certain stories--but Batman already represents them and tells those stories and lives in the same world and was solving the same problems way before. So you sit there thinking "I'm believing in a redhead dressing up like a bat and fighting crime why exactly? What am I getting out of this?"
The female-copies-of-male-superheroes all have this problem, and, as characters, can't ever represent anything bigger than themselves that isn't already getting represented, and so are never top-notch characters, even though they, being style-icons, will never fade out of the collective memory.
Outside the world of the comics, they are secondary for being less popular and coming later and being unable to represent anything their male counterparts don't already represent. Inside the comics, they are secondary because they can't do anything that isn't already being done.
Except Spider-Woman, recently.
Recently, Brian Michael Bendis has begun putting her in Avengers comics and she really really works. You want to read about her.
Now, up until now, since she was invented in the '70s, she had the same problem all the other girl-analogues had--she didn't seen primary or essential. This has changed.
There are a few reasons for this--
1-her costume doesn't look like Spider-Man's. She has her own, and it is weird and creepy in its own way, though it doesn't pretend Spider-Man's doesn't exist. It's like a variation on a similar theme, but it isn't just a feminization of the original.
(This, incidentally, is why there's only one kid-sidekick that has withstood the test of time--Robin. Robin may suck, but he doesn't look like Batman, so psychologically, we assume he means something different, and therefore, even though he does most of the same kinds of things, we expect a different personality or meaning--and so writers write him that way and it works alright. Robin is no Batman, but he seems like a unique character that the pop consciousness will never be able to get completely rid of.)
2-Her powers aren't like Spider-Man's. Simple enough--the reader expects slightly different kinds of stories can now be told with Spider-Woman than Spider-Man.
(Which would put her one-up on Robin. Robin's "powers" are Batman-lite. Spider-Woman, within the world of the stories at least, are not in competition with Spider-Man.)
But these two things were always true of Spider-Woman--since the 70s. So what's the difference now, in 2008?
3--She is in the same comic with Spider-Man.
This is huge, from her point of view. Alone, Spider-Woman comics all have an elephant in the room--the elephant being Spider-Man. As a symbol, she means less than him because she's the same but showed up later.
In the new Avengers comics, however, Spider-Man and Spider-Woman become an interesting double-act, visually and in terms of characterization. Note that this only works because her powers and costume are different--if they weren't she'd seem redundant. Would you want Batman and Batgirl to team up in the Justice League? No. Batgirl would always feel extraneous-no matter how often they wrote her as saving everyone and being better and smarter than anyone else.
But in Avengers, as 2 characters who are part of a larger team, Spider-Woman and Spider-Man both seem kind of equal--yeah, Spider-Man came first, but the point is the configuration seems to be telling stories--visually--that could only exist when these two characters are together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There's a big team and inside this team, there is a sort of mini-dynamic. She does one thing, he does another thing, but they both do it in a spidery way.
(They don't necessarily interact any more than anyone else on the team--but the visual connection is there, and that's half the battle/)
Suddenly there seems like a point to Spider-Woman. Together, they mean something different than Spider-Man does alone, and more than Spider-Woman does alone.
She's no Tank Girl or Wonder Woman or Barbarella or Catwoman or Pippi Longstocking--on a T-shirt she will still read as a female Spider-Man and she still probably couldn't prop up her own comic for that long and have it be any good--but at least Spider-Woman now, as part of the Avengers, allows us to expect to see things that we couldn't if she didn't exist. As long as she and Spider-Man are both Avengers, she'll be interesting.
So--at least in the comics, at least for now, she is her own person with her own function and she doesn't seem like a leftover artifact from a cynical attempt to milk a female audience by cashing in on the popularity of an earlier male character. Some little goth girl picking up comics for the first time somewhere now has a slightly less hollow role-model.
So thats good.