Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dc

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #118: Hypotised By Headlights

Published Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:30:24 -0500

The new DC – oh wait – oops. Sorry. Got confused.

So the new DC 52 relaunch has been a resounding success as far as sales went, with some acclaim for the top tier books. However, this victory might have been slightly marred by the appalling sexism and gratuitous T&A of the first issues of RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS, VOODOO and CATWOMAN, or as I like to call the latter, CATWOM – TITS! TITS! TITS! TITS!!!! All the goodwill engendered by Gail Simone's BATGIRL and the sympathetic portrayal of a lesbian heroine in BATWOMAN threatens to be washed away by the tide of outrage over the other three books.

The thing is, gratuitous titillation has been a common practice in American comics for over fifty years. Back in the 1950s, before the Comics Code Authority, when crime and adventure comics were a major part of the market, it was normal for them to entice readers by putting women with massive (but clothed) tits on the covers. They even had a term for this – these were called "headlight covers" and comic book price guides actually pointed out which issues had them, and some of them would fetch higher prices than those without "headlights". Even DC went through a phase in the 1970s where they kept putting tied-up women on their covers to boost sales, especially for WONDER WOMAN, and the stories inside often didn't feature Wonder Woman or any other woman getting tied up.

DC should just come out and admit they're doing T&A on purpose, since that's what these books clearly were. They're no more or less guilty of depicting T&A and softcore sexploitation than any other comics publisher. As recently as 2000, there was a CATWOMAN story arc where she went to jail and was threatened with lesbian rape by some stereotypically butch predatory inmates, featured shower scenes – those issues were written by a woman! – and nobody raised a stink about that storyline! Was that because nobody bought or read it? I only knew about it because it was in a stack of comps I was given. DC should just announce a new T&A line of comics and call the new imprint HEADLIGHTS. They could say they're publishing substitutes so that teenage boys and horny guys don't have to go to real strip clubs and thus save their money and possibly avoid certain diseases. They can then use the money saved to buy more comics, of course, which would still be cheaper than spending a night at a strip club. Actually they can't really claim they're marketing the books for horny teenage boys because not many teenage boys are buying superhero comics these days. You can't excuse the books for naïve noob mistakes because the writers – Scott Lobdell, Ron Marz and Judd Winick – have all been writing comics for Marvel and DC for over 10 years now. Scott Lobdell has written various X-MEN title since the early 1990s at a time when female characters striking inappropriately sexual poses were the norm in superhero comics, especially in X-MEN titles. Judd Winick has earned praise from the LBGT community for his past sympathetic portrayals of gay and lesbian characters. Ron Marz has written WITCHBLADE and other Top Cow comics, which were fairly upfront about the fact that their books sold on the strength of T&A. This makes me suspect the editorial decision to let these NuDC books be published was a conscious, not accidental, one. It was as if they gambled on the comics blogosphere going apeshit over it and thus getting more attention and thus more sales from comics buyers. They might fetch a nice little packet on ebay soon. If a mainstream news outlet picked up on it and made a stink, I suspect the resulting public outcry would be far less desired. However, therein lay the calculated gamble: these three books were not A-List titles but minor ones, buried under the flood of the higher-profile titles so the mainstream media was unlikely to even notice they exist unless Fox News draws attention to them. If this had been a deliberate strategy and gamble, I would consider it a pretty impressive one.

(Full disclosure: I can't say I'm completely innocent of this kind of thing. I did write a superheroine comic called LA MUSE where the main character forces a bunch of Neo-Nazis into having sex with her and each other. She did it because she could, it was better than murdering them. And I thought it was a great laugh. It's almost as much fun bragging about it as it was to write it.)

Anyway, I suspect DC and probably Marvel don't really give a damn about having a female audience. I'm sure they don't sniff at the idea that there are women who buy and read their superhero books, but they are fully aware that the vast, overwhelming majority of their buyers are male. They're not even bothering to cultivate children to read their comics and thus grow a readership by keeping them interested with more appealing books as they grow older. Their respective kid-oriented lines are considered an afterthought at best, and they've pretty much ceded the kids and girls market to the manga and anime books. It's been manga that's gotten teens interested in reading comics, especially teenage girls.

Given that the female characters in CATWOMAN, RED HOOD and VOODOO were written by men, I'm reminded of what the late Angela Carter used to call "literary transvestitism" to describe what writers like DH Lawrence and Samuel Richardson did in novels with female protagonists like LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVE and CLARISSA.

If DC wants to spin some radical PR out of these T&A comics, they could claim the new Catwoman is really a transvestite. That might get them some brownie points with the LBGT community, but somehow I don't think they're going to try that.

Like a deer in the headlights at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

Adi's Justice League: Age Of Wonder comic, is republished by DC in November.

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