Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

  The DNA linkage between Orchid, the “babies,” and Suzy is significant. It produces a kind of self-mothering reminiscent of Gilbert and Gubar’s take on women writers. Like the women writers of the nineteenth century who lacked satisfactory female predecessors, mainstream comic book female superheroes of the twentieth century lacked “mothers” as guides. Certainly, in their approach to Black Orchid, Gaiman and McKean were striking out from typical mainstream approaches to women in comics of that genre. Although Orchid is not self-aware in the title, in the sense that she recognizes her identity as a comic book heroine, the facts of her story and the style with which it is written and narrated suggest metatextual commentary on female superheroes. Orchid’s search for identity is an attempt to write herself, or in Gilbert and Gubar’s terms, to mother herself. For Gilbert and Gubar, the danger of self-mothering is that a woman’s attempt to create her own story, without a female precursor to turn to, could “isolate or destroy her” (49). It could result in a text that will go unaccepted by mainstream literary culture. This isolation and destruction may even indicate a kind of loss of metaphysical self through the very attempt to assert one. In mothering herself, Orchid strikes a new path, one that certainly isolates her from the rest of humanity as depicted in the text.

  Instead of opening the comic with an image of Orchid, as DeZuniga did in the original version, McKean uses the first three panels of the Gaiman series to depict Orchid as a series of thought bubbles and a representative icon, an actual orchid. Her first real appearance doesn’t occur for thirteen pages, when the face of a nondescript secretary in the scene is revealed to be Black Orchid behind a rubber mask. In that scene, Orchid doesn’t speak or even move—she remains captive while the action of the scene takes place around her. Once she finally escapes from the chair in which she is bound, she is all but totally obscured by flames, until a few panels later when she dies in an explosion. She appears three pages later, but in a completely different incarnation. We don’t get a clear, unobstructed view of that version of Orchid, and she never reappears in that form again. Her first appearance as the incarnation of Black Orchid that serves as the protagonist of the text is on page 15, almost one third of the way through the first issue of the series. The end result of these delays and changes is to give an impression that Black Orchid’s physical presence is secondary to her consciousness.

  Gaiman and McKean further emphasize Orchid’s consciousness by giving it a permanence that her corporeality lacks. Each of the Orchid incarnations in the text has a separate and unique appearance. Despite the fact that the Orchids are clones, their different circumstances result in widely different appearances. Susan Linden, the original source of the Orchid DNA, is wholly human. The Orchid who appears at the beginning of the Gaiman version has been operating in the world long enough to alter her physical appearance with clothing, specifically a Black Orchid costume (modeled by McKean after DeZuniga’s concept for the original Black Orchid). The Orchid who serves as the protagonist is nude throughout the comic, so her floral features (the purple skin, the orchid-petal hair) are more prominent. The other remaining clone, who takes on the name Suzy, didn’t fully mature before her “birth,” so she takes the form of a little girl. These physical forms, though linked by a shared DNA, are unique, and when one of the Orchids dies, that physical form dies with her.

  McKean also deemphasizes Orchid’s corporeality by frequently hiding her body. The view of her is often partially obscured by plants, shadows, furniture and other objects. In the 1973 original, DeZuniga places Orchid on display with a combination of full-length views and placement of her in the center or top of most of the panels in which she appears. DeZuniga also poses Orchid in ways that make her curves, especially her breasts, particularly prominent. In the panels where she looms largest, she is invariably shown with back arched, in slight, sometimes three-quarter profile. Although his Orchid is drawn in a full bodysuit that even covers her hair, the suit fits like a second skin, so tight that it doesn’t in any way obscure her shape. What’s more, DeZuniga’s Black Orchid is proportioned such that her breasts, eyes, and lips are enlarged, and her waist is unrealistically small.

  This sort of gratuitous costuming, posing, and proportioning of female characters is still a topic of debate in mainstream superhero comics. The firestorm over a buxom and provocatively posed statuette of Mary Jane Watson doing Spiderman’s laundry, released with Marvel’s approval, grew heated enough that the story was picked up by both Fox News and the New York Post. Fans were outraged at what seemed to be a monumental backwards step in the depiction of women in popular culture, and the official description from the company that sold the statuette didn’t help matters: “The consummate ‘girl next door,’ Mary Jane discovers that her superhero husband has slipped some of his laundry into the mix, but she’s not looking too displeased about Peter’s naughty little transgression” (Sideshow). More than one commentator, however, noted that “the way MJ is presented in this maquette is pretty much par for the course” in comics, especially pieces influenced by the Japanese anime style (“Why the MJ Kerfuffle Matters”). As recently as 2009, Power Girl, one of the DC superheroine titles, made the news for an issue in which Power Girl “actually appears to lecture readers for complaining about her costume” (Hudson). Power Girl is notorious for having possibly the largest breasts of any character in superhero comics, and for her spandex costume which features a large oval cutout that explicitly highlights her cleavage.

  McKean’s decision to recreate Black Orchid as an entirely naked superheroine would certainly have drawn similar criticism, except that the way he proportions and details her body strip it of the titillating factor so often present in comics. Her breasts are not especially large, and McKean draws them without the round shape and extreme cleavage used in the depictions of Mary Jane and Power Girl that drew fire. Her waist and hips are more realistically proportioned, and her buttocks, the scant handful of times they can even be seen in a panel, aren’t particularly shapely. She is also drawn flat-footed, so her feet and calves lack the extreme curvature demonstrated in most superheroines, typically drawn in high-heeled boots or with bare but pointed feet. As a whole, McKean’s Orchid is drawn in realistic, ordinary proportions. McKean also leaves out any detail on Orchid’s body. She is a collection of vague impressions, shading that forms seamlessly from and in the space of the frame. The only parts of Orchid that are drawn with any detail anywhere in the comic are her face and hands. Her body, more often than not, simply fades into the scenery in a wash of purple.

  McKean’s approach to depicting Orchid fits perfectly with the nearly autobiographical feel of the text. As Shirley Neuman posits, “Bodies rarely figure in autobiography” (1). Instead, “traditional autobiographies highlight a person’s spiritual and cultural course. Women, however, are socially constructed as bodies and thus have to work doubly hard to be ‘worthy’ autobiographical subjects” (qtd. in Benstock 8). If women are constructed as bodies in society at large, they are even more so in the world of superhero comics. Gaiman’s Black Orchid instead locates the female self in the consciousness, establishing a new model for including a woman’s voice in a genre that has historically objectified women.

  WORKS CITED

  Benstock, Shari. “The Female Self Engendered: Autobiographical Writing and Theories of Selfhood.” Women and Autobiography. Eds. Martine Watson Brownley and Allison B. Kimmich. Worlds of Women 5. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Print.

  Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” The Newly Born Woman. London: I.B. Taurus, 1996. 63–134. Print.

  Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

  Gaiman, Neil (w), Dave McKean (a, p). Black Orchid #1–3 (Dec. 1988—Feb. 1989), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.

  Graves, Neil. “Mary Jane is Spidey ‘
Sensuous.’” New York Post. 16 May 2007. Print.

  Hudson, Laura. “Power Girl Lectures Women for Complaining about Her Costume.” Comics Alliance. 23 November 2009. Accessed 31 December 2011. Web.

  “Mary Jane’s Assets Causing Stir in Spider-Man’s World.” Fox News. 16 May 2007. FoxNews.com. Accessed 31 December 2011. Web.

  Mayer, Sheldon (w), Tony DeZuniga (a, p). “Black Orchid.” Adventure Comics #428–430 (July—December 1973). New York: National Periodical.

  Neuman, Shirley. “Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body.” Signature: A Journal of Theory and Canadian Literature 2 (1989): pp. 1–26. Print.

  Robinson, Lillian S. Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

  Round, Julia. ‘‘‘Can I call you “Mommy”?’ Myths of the Female and Superheroic in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid.” Debating the Difference: Gender Representation and Self-Representation. Eds. Rachel Jones, Hamid van Koten, Chris Murray and Keith Williams. Dundee: Duncan of Jordanstone, University of Dundee, 2010. Print.

  Sideshow Collectibles. “Mary Jane Comiquette.” 2007. Accessed 31 December 2011. Web.

  “Why the MJ Kerfuffle Matters: (Probably Not Why You Think).” Brown Betty. brown-betty-live-journal.com. 12 May 2007. Accessed 31 December 2011. Web.

  When Superheroes Awaken

  The Revisionist Trope in Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602

  BY RENATA DALMASO

  “[W]e are in a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can only be continuances,” Dr. Reed Richards ponders in Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 (7:19). This quote is particularly apt for thinking about re-writing as re-vision. For indeed we live in a universe filled with stories that are continuances of each other—Reed’s metanarrative commentary could even be perceived as being a continuance itself, an echo of Virginia Woolf’s claim that “books continue each other,” for example—and part of this continuance is done through the constant re-writing of stories (612). 1602’s central premise is based on the dislocation of the Silver Age Marvel superheroes—most of them originating in the 1960s—to the 1600s. In other words, the series is a re-writing of the classic characters from the Marvel universe into the late–Elizabethan period. The act of re-writing is certainly not new, but is particularly popular within the postcolonial and feminist contexts, as theorists from those perspectives seek to undermine binary assumptions and naturalized oppressions, present everywhere and, specially, in the canon. Adrienne Rich, in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” uses the term “re-vision” for this practice, defined as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (18). Neil Gaiman’s re-writing of the Marvel universe is in fact a re-visionist work.

  By dislocating Marvel’s classic superheroes through time, the series brings a new light to the old texts. Dear old characters—such as Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Professor Xavier, Peter Parker, Nick Fury, and the Fantastic Four, just to name a few—are recreated, redesigned, relocated, and reconnected in an Elizabethan setting. This revised context presents Doctor Stephen Strange as the court magician of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Nicholas Fury as her head of intelligence. In this world, the rise of the mutant age occurs about 400 years early. The original ensemble of the X-Men (Iceman, Cyclops, Beast, Angel, and Marvel Girl) appears as the group of disciples (Roberto Trefusis, Scotius Summerisle, Hal McCoy, Werner, and Master “John” Grey, respectively) of Carlos Javier and his College for the Sons of Gentlefolk. The College serves as a haven for the “witchbreed,” the seventeenth-century term for the “mutants.” 1602 also recreates their classic foil, Magneto, as the Grand Inquisitor Enrique, head of the Spanish Inquisition, who, among other things, is in charge of persecuting the witchbreed with as much fervor as practitioners of witchcraft. The new frontier in this reality is represented by oceanic navigation, and, as such, the Fantastic Four are re-written as explorers that gained powers while sailing on board the Fantastik towards the New World.

  In this sense, the series is a revisionist work, as it re-writes the entire Marvel world from a different perspective. Doubtlessly, the possibility of looking at this universe with fresh eyes is very welcomed, for within the comic industry the Marvel continuity is as canonical as some of the literary master narratives that have been re-vised. Rich’s definition of re-vision, nevertheless, is very particular, it goes beyond the simple act of re-writing and emphasizes a specific kind of looking back: one that entails a “new critical direction” (18, my emphasis). But does Gaiman’s re-vision of the Marvel universe lead into a new critical direction?

  1602 not only appropriates the characters and traits of the Silver Age Marvel superheroes, but it also deals with the appropriation of historical events and the context of the early 1600s. The storylines—which range in location from Elizabeth’s Court to the lost colony of Roanoke, Virginia—reference cultural anxieties connected to the Spanish Inquisition, the hopes for the New World, the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, and the growing interest in the natural sciences. The very title of the series chronologically situates the narrative and signals the importance of temporality in this historiographic metafictional version of the Marvel universe. The transposition of the Marvel superheroes to a Renaissance setting, however, does not work merely to mark the action within a specific timeframe, it also functions in a way as to intertwine what we understand as the historical facts of the time with the characters’ continuity. The result is a blurring of the lines between the fictive personal and the historically political. Linda Hutcheon characterizes the use of historical events in postmodernist fictions as a way to call historical knowledge itself into question, which can then be seen as “unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional” (67). Therefore, in historical metafictions “events no longer speak for themselves, but are shown to be consciously composed into a narrative” (66).

  The inherent “composition” of history is evidenced in the case of the Gunpowder plot in 1602. By “historical account,” the failed attempt on King James I of England’s life took place in 1605 and was orchestrated by a group of discontent English Catholics that were planning to blow up the House of Lords. The plot was discovered through an anonymous tip, leading to dozens of public executions and the further persecution of Catholics in England (Robinson). In 1602, however, Gaiman appropriates and undermines this historical account. In its new incarnation, the conspiracy is in fact a means to guarantee public support for the future King and support his persecution of the witchbreed. Enrique, the Grand Inquisitor in Spain, reassures James that the latter will have no problems convincing the public of the righteousness of his persecution: “Easily done. Tell him that, when he is King, we shall endeavor to demonstrate that the Witchbreed are plotting against his throne—obviously they wish to blow up the Houses of Parliament in some sort of explosion” (1:20). Enrique’s conspiracy with James of Scotland (later King James I) underscores the inherent fictional nature of all historical accounts. As Hutcheon emphasizes, this type of historical narrative has a doubleness that points at the same time to the events represented and to “the act of narration itself” that constitutes these “facts,” something that is particularly dependent on “social and cultural context of the historian, as feminist theorists have shown with regard to women writers of history over the centuries” (76). Thus, by appropriating known historical events and subverting them, the historiographic narrative questions the notion of authenticity attached to history. This leads, then, going back to Rich’s definition of the term, to a double kind of “re-vision,” for in the case of 1602, not only are the Silver Age Marvel superheroes seen through fresh eyes, but the accountability of history itself, and its intrinsically discursive feature, is also called into question.

  The role-played by the colony of Roanoke in the series and its symbolic importance as an emblem for the New World is another example of the appropriation of historical narra
tives in 1602. The actual fate of this early English settlement and its people remains a mystery. Historians know that the colonists disappeared into the continent about three years after the last supplies came from England, in 1587, never to be heard from again (Hoffer 112). 1602’s appropriation of these historical events offers a different version for the account of the “Lost Colony.” In the series, the colony is still active in 1602, in spite of a continuing struggle. The survival of the settlers in this reality is only due to the protection of the “Indian” Rojhaz, later revealed to be Captain America recently arrived from the future. In Gaiman’s historiographic metafiction, it is only fitting that the responsibility of ensuring the maintenance and prosperity of Roanoke colony and, incidentally, of the first child born in America, Virginia Dare, befalls on the most overtly patriotic hero of the Marvel universe. Both Roanoke and Virginia Dare represent the nation’s lost innocence, one that a superhero such as Captain America, created under the pretense of the wholeness of those innocent values, desperately seeks to salvage. As the character retells his story about arriving in the late sixteenth century from the future and coming across the early settlers of Roanoke, he expresses this desire:

  [...] And then the white people came across the great water, and I found them starving, and I fed them.

  And then there was Virginia...

  She was just a baby then. But I knew what she was. What she represented. What she meant. My America...

  I knew I had to protect her. To guard her. To fight for her, if I had to. I wasn’t going to let her die.

  I failed before. I wasn’t going to fail again.