So there I was, in the middle of the Silver Age of the Super Hero, knowing everything there was to know about Beetle Bailey and Blondie, Prince Valiant and Charlie Brown, and next to nothing about Captain America or Green Lantern, Superman or Batman (except the ones on TV). I did manage to read a fair amount of Donald Duck and Scrooge, mostly because doctors with pediatric practices invariably stocked their waiting rooms with comics. The dentist had piles of Disney, and since he always ran incredibly late, I could get through two or three issues as I awaited my turn in the torture chamber. Mama let me, figuring, I suppose, that the comic cooties couldn’t eat much of my brain in an hour or two – not to mention not having to listen to my whining.
Even before the dentist’s office, however, I’d already learned to follow an extended narrative told by pictures from the Japanese screen that covered one whole wall of our good-sized living room.
It depicted the cycle of the seasons around a tea-house beside a river – not a very promising setting for gripping drama, you’d think. But you’d be wrong. The tea-house was populated by a whole continuing cast of characters – a princess [29] in flowing, layered kimono; her attendants (one of whom didn’t seem to get along with the other ones); her prince and his attendants (a war-like group bristling with swords and staves); nobles (one of whom clearly didn’t get along with the husband) and their attendants; plus horses, dogs, chickens, water buffalo, random peasants, and a black and white cat. The number of hours I spent, looking at these tiny, stylized characters, making up stories about what the peasants were doing in the background, what the noble had done to make the prince scowl at him, why the princess looked so melancholy as she viewed the autumn moon, what happened in the sections covered with swirling golden clouds, would surprise you. Or perhaps not. I did grow up to be a fiction writer, after all.
That screen and the Sunday funnies were pretty much the extent of my exposure to comics, though, until sometime in the upper reaches of middle school, when I began spending summer weekends at a friend’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. Although I really did like spending time with her, I blush to confess that the main attraction was her exhaustive collection of forbidden fruit, er, comic books. She kept them under her bed: stacks and stacks of real, honest-to-Pete, brain-eating comic books. There was True Romance and full runs-to-date of what I thought of as the Super Family (Girl, Boy, and Man – oh, and Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, which I hadn’t remembered even existed until I found myself typing the title). And, best of all to a girl who thought it grossly unfair that boys should get all the adventures, Wonder Woman.
Day after hot, bright summer’s day, I’d lie on my stomach on the spare bed in my friend’s room, potato chips and Coke easily to hand, taking in the image of a resourceful, independent, phenomenally strong, feisty heroine who didn’t take any guff from anybody, male or female, yet was decent and kindhearted. Unlike most of the other heroines who crossed my literary path, she wasn’t blonde. She didn’t giggle, she didn’t expend a lot of thought on boyfriends (or princes), and she got along with her sister Amazons just fine without backbiting and gossiping and playing favorites. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor, but fighting crime will do that to you (look at Superman). All in all, Wonder Woman struck both me and my friend as a much more sensible and attractive and, yes, realistic person than Veronica or Blondie or any of the rather drippy heroines weeping and flirting through the pages of True Romance. [30]
My personal Golden Age of comic reading ended in 9th grade, when my friend went away to boarding school. None of my other friends having the slightest interest in such things, I led a more-or-less comic-free existence (except for the funnies, of course) which lasted through high school and college and a good part of graduate school. I read SF and fantasy avidly, hungrily, indiscriminately, whether anyone else shared my taste or not. But comics pretty much fell off my radar screen.
Looking back now, I really wonder why. It’s easy (and true) to say that all my reading time was eaten up by graduate school and restoring the down-at-heel Victorian house I was living in. When I wasn’t writing papers about Beaumont and Fletcher and John Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England, I was helping my then-partner strip 50 years’ worth of white paint off oak woodwork and turn a half-acre of brush and weed into a garden. And after the heavy lifting part of grad school and restoration was finished, I was teaching and learning to can vegetables – oh, and beginning to write fiction.
But that’s just part of the truth. The rest of it is that Mama and Estes Kefauver had had a greater influence on me than I knew. When I looked in the windows of The Million Year Picnic comics store in Harvard Square, I saw an array of brightly colored covers featuring muscled, male superheroes punching out muscled, male supervillains, and assumed that there was nothing inside them (or the shop) that would appeal to me.
This meant I missed out on reading Love and Rockets when it first came out, as well as (among other books I’ve come to know and love) Watchmen and the first volumes of Sandman. I might have missed everything, if the love of fantasy and SF that helped keep me sane through graduate school hadn’t led me, in the late ’70s, to buy my first membership to the venerable Boston SF convention Boskone. Since I didn’t know anybody, and was pretty shy, mostly what I did was hang out in the Dealers’ Room, looking for SF/F The Harvard Coop (the university bookstore) didn’t carry.
One of the things I found was ElfQuest.
ElfQuest was like no comic I’d ever seen or imagined. I loved Richard Pini’s art, all bright and saturated and graceful and expressive, [31] and I loved Wendy Pini’s story, all complex and character-based, a heady blend of adventure, humor, tragedy, romance, and cultural commentary. As an extra added bonus, it was written by a woman, which made my feminist heart sing. I was, in fact, hooked. I bought (and still own) every issue as it came out – at The Million Year Picnic, as it happens – and read them multiple times, from cover to cover, including the letters section.
My second Aha! moment came in 1988 at Fourth Street Fantasy convention in Minneapolis, when Emma Bull told me about Kate Worley and Reed Walker’s Omaha the Cat Dancer. Anthropomorphic animal erotica, she said, kind of noir-ish, with crime lords and strippers, and a plot with a feminist bent that arced and developed, populated by characters who changed and grew. Also written by a woman. I can’t swear to it, but she may have said (because it is, after all, true) that Omaha isn’t so much a comic book as, well, a serialized graphic novel.
I loved it. Of course I loved it. It contained, in its own particular way, all the things I look for in fiction: psychologically complex characters caught up in stories with sophisticated emotional arcs and complicated, human-sized stakes. I’m not that interested in stories about Saving the World (or Universe). I’m more of a small-picture kind of person. For instance, though I adore comics (and novels) set in the past, [32] it’s not for the high-level political intrigue and epic sweep history. What rings my chimes are stories about the people that history happens to.
Turns out the French love them too.
French comic books are called bandes dessinées (BDs), and the variety of genres and styles they cover is bewildering. Mysteries, thrillers, high fantasy, erotica, SF, military, comic animals. Series like Tin-Tin and Asterix, that are hard to classify. And historicals. Dozens and dozens of beautifully-drawn, exhaustively-researched, long, involved, exciting stories set in courts and kitchens and forests and town – mostly French, bien sûr, but in many other countries as well – in any period you choose to mention.
It was Ellen who turned me on to bandes dessinées while we were courting, by way of Francois Bourgeon’s series Les Passagers du Vent (Riders of the Wind, roughly). “It’s got a girl dressed as a boy, and ships and adventures and really good clothes,” she said. [33] “And it’s incredibly well-researched. You’ll love it.”
She was right. Les Passagers du Vent is set in the early eighteenth century, and follows the adventures of Isa, a young girl of considerable streng
th of character and an idiosyncratic sense of honor who (among other things) sails on a ship disguised as a man, rescues her true love from a British prison ship, does her best to disrupt the slave trade in Santa Domingo, and raises hell generally. I didn’t understand all the words, many of which are not to be found in any French/English dictionary I own, but Bourgeon’s detailed, glorious art more than filled in the blanks – at least until I’d re-read it often enough to figure out what exactly was going on. [34]
BDs are an expensive habit. They’re all hardcovers, they’re large and heavy, and they cost the earth, even if you don’t factor in the plane fare to France to buy them. I have to pick and choose carefully. Right now, I’m following two series. [35] One is a super-strange and surreal romp through the literature of at least three cultures called De Capes et de Crocs (a play on “cloak and dagger” that translates loosely as Cloak and Claw) by Alain Ayroles and Jean-Luc Masbou. The heroes are a wolf and a fox with plumed hats, sweeping cloaks, flashing swords, and a nice line in banter. Think Fafherd and the Grey Mouser, only fuzzier. The wolf, Don Lope de Villalobos, is afraid of rats. The fox, Armand Raynal de Maupertuis, is in love with a beautiful human girl who isn’t as dim as she seems, even if she is blonde. At one point, they fly to the moon in a galleon propelled by a magic moonstone. Kind of steampunky, except seventeenth century. With swords and capes. It’s considered a bit odd, even in France.
The same Alain Ayroles is also responsible for Garulfo, which is basically Shrek with a French accent. The hero is a transformed frog, and the requisite Beautiful Princess on the whole prefers hanging out with ogres [36] to romance. This is the French comic I may very well love enough to actually take the trouble of translating and finding an American publisher for. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read and Bruno Maïorana’s art is wonderful – kind of children’s book meets medieval illumination meets manga. Readers of Fables would love it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Ellen’s collection of comics included a whole lot more than BDs. She introduced me to Los Bros Hernandez and Love & Rockets, to Donna Barr’s The Desert Peach and Stinz and Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. She put Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid into my hands and the first volume of Sandman. She even had a bound galley of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
I’ve since gone out and bought the book itself, and realize that the galley was more of a script with occasional sketches than the masterpiece of word and image currently sitting on my desk. But it did help me see comics in a whole new light.
In his first chapter, McCloud points out that there’s something fundamentally human in using pictures to tell stories. From the tomb paintings of the ancient Egyptians to the stained glass windows of half the great cathedrals of Europe, people have been using pictures arranged in a series to instruct, entertain and enlighten. Works as diverse as the Mexican Codex and the Bayeux Tapestry are elaborate and serious graphic texts. Physically, structurally, and perceptually, these narrative marriages of word and image are the ancestors of the comic book.
Obviously, I’m not suggesting that Tales of the Crypt is equivalent, on any level, to the Bayeux Tapestry, any more than Slave Girls of Gor (for instance) is equivalent to Mansfield Park. That would be as dumb as saying that Mansfield Park denigrates women or feeds adolescent male power fantasies because Slave Girls of Gor, which is also a novel, does those things.
What I am suggesting is that there are, and always have been, comics out there that don’t insult the intelligence, that reflect emotional reality even if they offer escape from the laws of physics, that make you think as well as laugh or gasp or happily pass a lazy afternoon.
I can’t write an ending to the story of Me and Comic Books because our relationship is still developing and growing. I still don’t buy as many comics as I buy books, at least in part because I don’t know as much about what’s out there or whose work I might like. When I pick something up, it’s mostly because a more knowledgeable friend has recommended it. That’s how I fell in love with Strangers in Paradise and Fables and Promethea and Lost Girls. It’s also how I found online comics, which are now as much a part of my morning routine as brushing my teeth and drinking my tea. With Girl Genius, Digger, Hark, a Vagrant, Gunnerkrigg Court, Lovelace and Babbage, and For Better or For Worse, I get a daily dose of graphic narrative, both short and long forms, to wake up my brain and get me ready to deal with the demands of the day.
Oh. I wear jeans, too.
[28] This led, in due course, to the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which basically gutted the horror and crime genres and pumped new life into superheroes. So to speak.
[29] She probably wasn’t really a princess. She might not even have been a noble’s wife, but a very high-class courtesan. In either case, the man was probably her lover rather than her husband, and all those guests rivals for her favors, but I was a kid and more than usually naïve for my age.
[30] The Internet informs me that Wonder Woman ’s original illustrator, H. G. Peters, died in 1958, and that the 1960s re-boot model was a debased, girly, and marginalized figure. While I have to admit that I don’t recall the any of the storylines, my memory of Wonder Woman is of a kick-ass awesome dame, so it’s likely that a good part of the stash under my friend’s bed was older than we were. On the other hand, I also remember Donna Troy, a.k.a. Wonder Girl, (born, comically speaking, in 1965). It was quite a collection.
[31] And (I realize now) manga-like.
[32] When they’re well done. Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , for instance, makes me completely happy. As do all the Sandman story lines with historical dimensions.
[33] Or something very like that. She may also have mentioned that some of it was pretty hot.
[34] Probably. Bergeron writes really Byzantine plots. His SF series, Le Cycle de Cyann , has so far resisted all my efforts to follow it. Even though I love his art a lot, I gave up after the second volume.
[35] Meaning, I buy one or two volumes when I go to France. Some BDs are translated, but the ones I like aren’t the most likely to be exported. If they’re going to be translated, I’ll probably have to do it myself.
[36] Not green ones.
I am Sisyphus, and I am Happy
Kelly Thompson graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a degree in Sequential Art. She writes the Comics Should be Good column “She Has No Head!” and runs the bi-weekly podcast 3 Chicks Review Comics. She also writes comic reviews for Comic Book Resources, and runs a popular blog, 1979 Semi-Finalist. Kelly’s short fiction and poetry have been published in The Bukowski Review, The Main Street Rag, Aggressive Behaviour 2, and Pearl. Kelly’s novel about two teenage superheroes, The Girl Who Would be King, is currently on submission to publishers. Her first comics writing credit was for Womanthology from IDW. Kelly currently lives in NYC with her boyfriend and sadly, no pets. She really wants a kitten.
In 2009, one single image got me writing critically (and sometimes not so critically) about my beloved superhero comics. Until that image appeared, superhero comics and I had endured a love/hate relationship that flip-flopped like only a veteran politician can. That relationship, though frequently fraught, had up until 2009 at least for the most part been private.
But now I had a blog!
So in 2009 I blogged – with much more passion than reason – about a now-infamous promo image for the Justice League mini-series Cry for Justice, in which a young Supergirl in her traditional “cheerleader” costume is ogled by three much older male teammates (Green Lantern, Green Arrow and Shazam). Their eyelines were drawn so that they were looking directly at her chest. And, in fact, her chest was arguably the primary focus of the image. Unbelievably, this wasn’t the biggest problem with the image. The problem was that either because of the way the image had been drawn or cropped, Supergirl had no head.
Let me say that again, SHE. HAD. NO. HEAD.
A powerful
female character and the only female being represented in the image, had been made, officially, not Supergirl, not a superhero, and not even a woman, but rather an object. An object without a head. And, one can assume, an object without all those pesky thoughts, opinions, and personality that tend to go along with having a head.
It was a horrible message to send to readers, both male and female. To men, that it was not only okay, but approved by DC Comics, to view women this way; and to women, that they were obviously less-than. That they were objects, even when they were heroes. It was too much for me. I lost my shit on my own blog. But following the losing of my shit that spring and summer, repeatedly, and over a variety of comics issues, Brian Cronin approached me about writing a column for his Comics Should be Good blog on Comic Book Resources. I gratefully (and giddily) accepted, and since Brian was letting me write my own ticket, I decided my column would be about women and comics, and there was only one thing that column could possibly be called – “She Has No Head!”
Coming up on two years and some 116 columns and podcasts later, I can say I found great freedom and voice in finally talking about mainstream superhero comics from my decidedly feminist point of view. But I also found myself feeling like Sisyphus of Greek legend, constantly pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down once I reached the top. It was endlessly frustrating. Even though there were many rewards – just as Sisyphus surely had a moment of happiness getting that boulder to the top of that hill, not to mention his excitement as he approached the top (time and time again) – most of the time it has felt like more pain than gain.
So why doesn’t one give up?
How do I give up on something that shaped me?
Picture this: I’m 15 years old (though dangerously close to 16), bored, naïve, and more than a little repressed (read: living in Utah – no offense, Utah!), while harboring vague dreams of a being a writer and even more vague dreams of being an artist. Possibly both with the equally vague idea that those careers would somehow allow me to wear pajamas all day and be a recluse, but a recluse with great purpose and at least a reasonable amount of respect. So there I am, 15 (in said pajamas) on a Saturday morning watching cartoons with my younger brother Scott on the couch. We’re flipping, we’re flipping, we’re flipping (because as anyone over the age of five who watches cartoons knows, commercials during cartoons blow especially hard). And then all of a sudden, we’re not flipping because my brother has stopped on something interesting. And I’m watching, wide-eyed, as an awesome chick without wings flies through a mall and punches a huge robot in the face. She has a white stripe in her hair and a Southern accent accompanied by massive amounts of sass. This was Rogue. In the same scene, a black woman with shocking all white hair and weather powers did some serious damage to that same robot. This, of course, was Storm. And this turned out to be the X-Men cartoon, and this was 1992 and those big robots were Sentinels. And for the first time in my young life, I was in love. It wasn’t a classmate, or a sexy movie star I dreamed of, or a rock musician plastered on my wall, or even that kid I kissed one time at camp, but superheroes. More specifically, female superheroes!
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 18