Like every other geek on the Internet, I’m enjoying Dr. Horrible, but I can’t help but feel that it mines the same comedy vein as Man-Man + Songs.
Musicals are notoriously hard to do in cartoon format, by the way.
But if you know of anyone who’d be willing to give it a go, we’re using essentially all the same jokes.
How about it, Internet?
Yup… it’s another landmark in the world on Man-Man, and I didn’t want to miss marking it with something a little cooler than the usual strip, so I tried something I haven’t done in a long time… an animated strip. (Though not much is really animated, but it’s a start.)
So tonight when you go out, remember to toast a drink to Strip #1300!
The one who inherits a hill must climb it.
African proverb
Jennifer de Guzman laments the sad state of women in comics (in comics as characters within comics, not women in the comic industry, although I’d bet that the latter is also a sad state, and the two facts are not unconnected) in her blog (and the Mindless Ones are known to have some fun with rampant comic misogyny from time to time as well), and while I agree with Jennifer and the Mindless Ones, I have to confess I’m not the poster boy for gender representation myself.
But — I frantically wave my hands and rationalize wildly — I have excuses!
Mainly that the state of women in comics is kind of a preferred satirical target for me. I tend to focus on the absence of meaningful roles for women rather than their perpetual victimhood, though:
In Man-Man, there’s a meta-joke that is actually built into the series: women are generally speaking absent from Man-Man’s world, and he himself is invisible to women (well, was, until recently; more women should be added to the cast now, come to think of it). The superhero world sent up in Man-Man a boy’s club populated by doofuses, and the very few women who appear in the strip are either frustrated by these dolts or bemused by the obsessiveness of grown men with costumes, power fantasies, and incredibly contrived interpersonal relationships. Sound familiar?
Rise, Kraken! is obviously not on stands yet, but it also deals (particularly in the second issue) with the boy’s club mentality of 1970s Marvel, as the whole series is a throwback to the glory days of Captain America vs. HYDRA, but spun 180° and told from the HYDRA side of things (sort of — wait and see!). There’s also a flip side to KRAKEN, which if the series does well might get told, in KRAKEN’s fellow global domination organization, the futurist/technologist and woman-friendly FIXX. It’s a KRAKEN spin-off that I’d love to get to do if the first series does well and such a thing is possible.
Captain Blood is tricky: the adaptation is finished and the comic is currently in development, but even the source material is a sign of its times, with only one woman (well, three, but two of them are victim-ciphers) in the entire book and her role pretty much sketched down to “object of desire/reproach” throughout. The book is also a bit out of whack racially, as piracy was actually a haven for ex-slaves and minorities (and women!), as an outlaw community that was less socially rigid than the world at large. Sticking to the book meant putting a woman in peril to give Captain Blood a heroic moment in the first issue, and while I’ve tried to focus on Sabatini’s most positive moments for Arabella (and to rejigger things slightly to give the book a touch more racial equity, at least), sticking to the book meant sticking to those tropes.
Dead Eyes Open is kind of an exception, in that the women in the series are (in my opinion) both strong and capable, but they’re definitely off the main stage: Jane Requin leaves John, after all, and is obviously the better parent, reuniting on her terms and being the emotional core of the series; Mayrand is the one who pushes Returner rights through the courts while John dithers and Ellard schemes. Why are they so far from front and centre? Mainly because the book is about introducing a wild card into the existing social and political order, and the bulk of the world political power structure is made up of men at the moment.
The nagging doubt is that I’m just making excuses for myself and I’m as guilty as giving women short shrift as anybody — but knowing the traps, I’m taking a devious way around them and just avoiding casting women altogether by satirizing the lack of women in the genres I’m lampooning. It’s okay for me not to include women in my stuff y’see because the stuff I’m writing about doesn’t include women and I’m mocking it so I’m okay right?
Yeah. Weak sauce. I need to do better.
The good news: I’m currently reworking The License, which is — again — a riff on a very testosterone-charged genre, the Manly Revenge book. I’m glad that Jennifer wrote this now, and that I’m thinking about it now, because this is actually going to reshape the revamp significantly: v1 of The License was a big ol’ manly brawl, but v2 is looking a bit more balanced and less frantic, with some strong female characters in it who present the “third way” to Bronson’s binary fight-or-die mentality and the entire culture that has grown up around The License.
I also have a whole different thing, a SF pitch with a strong female protagonist, that I’m hoping to find an artist for, and this sort of thing makes me think I should bump that up my to-do list.
Comics, of course, aren’t the only genre to have this problem — in my capsule review of Blacksad, I made mention of the Noir trope of women being “victims, vixens, virgins or vultures” and I think the same holds true for a lot of niche genres like horror, sci-fi, video games and cartoons.
Short on time but long on thoughts — there’s a much deeper problem in the genre, where so much of the financial health of the industry has become desperately dependent on the money of men in their 30s in a state of perpetual arrested development that any attempt to redress the “huh huh boobs” problem that comics has is perceived as potentially financially ruinous; it’s arguably this reliance on the slowly aging fanboy population that is killing comics as a whole, though. The funny thing is: I’m not sure they are the backbone of the future comics industry — they may just be the loudest minority, incredibly vocal throwbacks. The Intelligent Design crowd for comics. That’s another essay for another time, though.
More to come, maybe with numbers.
Help me out here:
It is, theoretically speaking, Monday, July 1.
I tell you that, as part of our regional Ferret Devouring Days festival (celebrating the noble efforts of the pioneers to both rid our land of ferrets and maximize local foodstuffs), I am going to eat a ferret on television next Thursday, and I want you to tune in.
As you dutifully set your alarms and program your video recorders, which date do you set them for?
- Thursday, July 4;
- Thursday, July 11.
The argument that Kali makes is that I should say “I am going to eat a ferret this Thursday,” if my ferret-devouring date is July 4, and if I say I am going to eat a ferret next Thursday, that means Thursday, July 11, the next Thursday after this coming Thursday.
I say that looking at the calendar, Thursday, July 4 is the next Thursday on the calendar, and therefore if I say “next Thursday,” it means the next possible Thursday.
There’s a surprising lack of accord on this. A quick search turns up one inconclusive survey, which seems to give the edge to my fiancée’s interpretation. Ah! Searching for “next weekend” makes the confusion much more clear, and apparently there is no real answer.
What say you?
I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, but I’ve been marveling at the work of Joel Priddy all morning. This in particular cracks me up — Wolverine dropped into those bizarre mid-’50s Jimmy Olsen situation. This is my favourite (assuming hotlinking is enabled from his site):
