NEAR-MYTHS: BATGIRL YEAR ONE (2003)

The Barbara Gordon Batgirl, despite being one of the more iconically recognizable superheroines since her creation in 1966, has not fostered any concrescent myths, at least in her own assorted features. I wouldn't even have re-examined her 2003 opus, BATMAN YEAR ONE (penciled by Marcos Martin and co-written by Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty) if I didn't intend to cross-compare the comics story with a motion-comics video production.                                                           

Naturally, Beatty and Dixon rewrite a lot of things from the original sixties iteration. This Barbara still ventures into her costumed identity without intending to become a costumed crusader full-time, but she's also made previous attempts to become a law enforcer both in the FBI and the Gotham PD, only to be frustrated by height requirements. This Barbara is extremely petite, which may have come about as a rationalization of her hero-name, since it's still politically problematic to call a twenty-something woman a "girl."         

   

She still has her first bout of crimefighting when she encountered the Bat-villain Killer Moth, though the writers can't resist the Alan Moore impulse: to make the naive creations of kid-focused comics look ironic from a "mature" viewpoint. Further, this time the current Batman and Robin (still Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson) don't immediately welcome the newly christened "Batgirl" to their ranks. To the extent that YEAR ONE has a master trope to tie together the serial's episodic structure, it would be the trope of "new hero must pass baptism of fire to win respect."                                                                                                

                                                                                                                     

   

                                                                            
Naturally, the revised origin of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl must also incorporate aspects of her development in the 1970s, when she and Dick Grayson Robin begin a tentative romantic arc. These scenes are cute and certainly better written than the heroine's running battles with Killer Moth, the Moth's new partner Firefly, and various hoods. There are also a handful of heroic guest-stars who just serve to eat up space. The only time YEAR ONE generates sparks occurs at the story, when Batgirl comes up with a novel way to take down the villains' helicopter.                                                                                         

At the story's opening Dixon and Beatty make a reference to the Greek myth of Cassandra, but this myth-tidbit isn't developed into anything. The authors whip the reference out again at the very end, but it's less effective than just the general "prediction" of Barbara's fate as a costumed crusader by itself.                                                                                                          

NEAR-MYTHS: BATMAN ETERNAL (2014-15)

I'd read some decent reviews of this 2014-15 series, though I've the impression that most of the "big changes" instituted by ETERNAL proved nugatory.

The involved plot, orchestrated mostly by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV, doesn't bear a lot of close examination. It's a big, noisy Bat-soap opera, with the city of Gotham once more under siege by both ordinary criminals and super-crooks. Yet ETERNAL qualifies as a "near-myth" by virtue of its attempt to rework two previous celebrated multi-issue storylines, respectively 1996's LONG HALLOWEEN and 2003's HUSH. From HALLOWEEN, Snyder and Tynion took the idea of a foundational conflict between the mobsters and the costumed freaks, while from HUSH the writers emulated the mystery of a Master Manipulator who somehow marshals most of Batman's major foes against him. I don't think Snyder and Tynion managed to weave a tight master-trope as HALLOWEEN did, and the "hidden mastermind" schtick in ETERNALis put off for so long with red herrings that I for one lost interest in the Big Reveal.

Some myth-kernels of interest:

Contrary to some theories that Catwoman's estranged father might be venerable mob-boss Carmine Falcone, ETERNAL reveals that her true "bad dad" is a different mobster, introduced here for the first time, name of Rex Calabrese. Despite an acrimonious relationship, Calabrese eventually talks Selina into becoming a new Gotham crime-boss-- which I imagine did not last long.

The Barbara Gordon Batgirl is more or less in mourning for Dick Grayson, since I believe this is the period when he was supposed to be in a temporary state of death. Yet she apparently has some sort of tentative interaction with "second Robin" Jason Todd, reborn in the form of Red Hood, which is sort of like dating the first Robin's symbolic sibling. It's a nice touch when, thanks to the Mad Hatter's connivance, Batgirl fights Hood under the impression he's the Joker, who's a bugaboo for both characters.

Spoilers works out her daddy issues the same way Catwoman does.

And the eighties version of Alfred's daughter, Julia Pennyworth, is reborn in a new form. apparently a POC of some sort, though her racial makeup was not expounded in ETERNAL. She becomes part of the Bat-team but I don't know if she eventually got a costume or what.

And Batman pretty much remains Batman. So it's a good lively read, but nothing transformative.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2

In the previous post on this subject, I specified that whenever two or more icons with their own stature, a stature resulting from their appearances in featured serials, appeared together in Inclusive Ensembles, all such team-appearances would be crossovers. By contrast, though, when icons possessed a single or combined stature-icon and one or more charisma-icons-- that is, icons who had only been Subs in in the universe of a Prime icon-- only the first encounter of the stature-icon and the charisma-icon(s) would rate as a crossover. My example in the essay was that of an early Avengers ensemble, combining stature-icon Captain America with three charisma-types. Another example that I've cited in a previous essay is the title Femforce, which teamed a bunch of neophyte heroes with "Ms. Victory," a reworking of a forties heroine named "Miss Victory." 

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. 

One of the more convoluted ascents to Prime stature, though, is the "Barbara Gordon Batgirl." As a distaff version of Batman, she followed in the wake of two previous Sub Icons, the "Kathy Kane Batwoman" and the "Bette Kane Bargirl." There's no indication that either of these Bat-dames were considered for any sort of starring status. But although Batgirl Two debuted as a Sub as well, she had from the beginning a better shot at Prime stardom.

Barbara Gordon came into being thanks to the ABC BATMAN teleseries that lasted from Spring 1966 to Spring 1968. Sometime in 1966, ABC asked the editors at DC Comics to conceptualize some new female characters for the TV show to adapt. The show's writers particularly wanted to add a female crimefighter to aid the Dynamic Duo, and the result was that the second Batgirl appeared in DETECTIVE COMICS #359 (dated January 1967 but probably distributed at least two months previous). A few months later, Commissioner Gordon's daughter Barbara was mentioned in a BATMAN episode broadcast in March 1967, paving the way for ABC's version of the heroine to officially appear in September 1967.

For the next two years following Batgirl's first comic-book appearance, she made guest appearances in various BATMAN stories, as well as one in JUSTICE LEAGUE. However, while in comics she didn't immediately ascend to Prime status, in the BATMAN teleseries she was immediately a full member of the Bat-team. This ensemble I would judge to be Semi-Inclusive because in it Batman and Robin, though separate characters, functioned as a unit and thus as a "combined icon," while Batgirl was a new member inducted, however unofficially, into the ensemble. By the rules I advocated in the previous essay, only the first episode in which Batgirl became a regular Prime within the ensemble would be a crossover-episode.

The same basic principle applies to the cartoon series that quickly followed the demise of the live-action show. Although ADVENTURES OF BATMAN displayed some indebtedness to the West-Ward-Craig ensemble, Batgirl only appeared in 12 out of a total of 17 episodes. However, that's enough of a majority to make her at least a semi-regular rather than just a guest star, with the result that Batgirl's first episode on the cartoon, name of "The Joke's On Robin," counts as a crossover.

The year after the cartoon Batgirl started appearing on TV, comic-book Barbara Gordon received a long-term berth, starting in DETECTIVE COMICS #384 (1969). Thus, all of Batgirl Two's previous comics-appearances qualify as "proto-crossovers," and every time she guest-starred with another hero AFTER getting her own series, that was a crossover. This also includes the short-lived "Batgirl-and-Robin-Team" in BATMAN FAMILY, which became Gordon's first-- but not last-- Inclusive Ensemble.

"STOP IT, YOU'RE JUST ENCOURAGING HIM!"

Yeah, once again I tossed out a quick, snide jibe at an essay to which THE BEAT linked here: an essay in which the author claimed that Robin was a "queering influence" upon the Batman mythos. After my jibe, one reader differed with my opinion. I imagine that Heidi probably wanted to say to him-- well, what I say in the title. I responded, in keeping with my general distinction between the natures of fiction and non-fiction, I wrote:

Fictional comics about "toxic masculinity" can be directed at specific audiences because fiction does not (or should not) have to meet tests as to real-world applicability.

Non-fictional articles may indeed be written to target audiences, but in theory they ought to meet the test as to real-world applicability.

Now, from the little bit I had read of the essay, it had nothing directly to do with the contrasts of fiction and non-fiction. But now I've obligated myself to critique this newest (yawn) queeritude quitique of Robin the Boy Wonder. Here, lemme read it while I do my daily Sudoku...

___________

OK, let's go down the list of the sins of "Dick Grayson vs. Toxic Masculinity:"

Author Jess Plummer foregrounds his thoughts on Dick Grayson's oppositional status by focusing on a forthcoming, out-of-continuity miniseries in which Nightwing Will Kill the DC Universe, more or less. Plummer correctly tags this as a likely borrowing of the current "Hydra Captain America" schtick, but then decides that the choice of Dick Grayson signifies that "Dick Grayson makes straight men nervous." This is because, from the conception of the original Robin, the youth has functioned as "a damsel in distress" to his mentor Batman.

Frederic Wertham is then credited with having "picked up on" this startling truth, and with having popularized the "queering influence" of Robin on the Batman mythos. (Plummer cleverly inserts a comic-strip excerpt in which Robin is forced to dress in a frilly Louis XIV-looking gown, as if this sort of thing happened all the time in Batman comics.) Plummer then informs us that Queer Robin so informed the Bat-serials that the only reason DC Comics introduced new female characters was to deflect readers from suspecting the awful truth, that Dick Grayson was just Jaye Davidson in drag.

Plummer then quickly vaults over the romantic history of the Robin character to focus upon his NEW TEEN TITANS alliance with "his taller, stronger, much more aggressive girlfriend Starfire." There follows a Werthamesque meditation on Nightwing's "non-gendered name." We hear nothing about the intermittent romance with Barbara Gordon--

-- but Plummer is quick to vault ahead a few more years to the (out-of-continuity) DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, whose main significance is to portray a dead Robin. We are told that this is yet another assault on the Robin persona, even though Dick Grayson is alive but off-panel while Jason Todd is the one who died.

Another pole-vault, and we're in 2004, talking about the death of Stephanie Brown (not killed directly by Black Mask's power drill as I recall), and the return of Jason Todd as an amoral "hero" (which, even though he's come BACK to life, is I guess still being raked over the coals after a fashion). Then we finally get down to Plummer's theme statement: Robin is being continually killed and tortured because straight readers and/or creators see him as That Ole Debbil, the Queering Influence.

Oddly enough, this bit of "straightbaiting"-- in which straights are automatically assumed to be out to degrade and mortify anyone who may upset their sexual applecart-- borrows the exact same non-logical rhetoric as "queerbaiting." While there may well be many comic-book readers who do not like Robin, it's intellectually irresponsible to interpret those anti-Robin sentiments as part of some subconscious jeremiad against Robin's "queering influence."

Finally, I'll close by noting that Plummer doesn't appear to be very good about reading current stuff either. since he makes the statement.

You’ll never see Batman sexually assaulted while disassociating.

Oh, REALLY--

Not to mention the fact that, although Morrison did rewrite the events of the Barr-Bingham "Son of the Demon" graphic novel, he specifically has Batman task Talia with having drugged him at the conclusion of BATMAN INC.

Yes, just another day at the "How Dare They Marginalize Me and Then Not Admit It" corral.

SHADOW BOXING WITH BATGIRL'S GREATEST ENEMY

Just to get the title-explanation out of the way, the "greatest enemy" of Batgirl-- and indeed, of most if not all fictional characters-- is the ideological critic, the sort who reads fiction in order to see only what he wants to see. I've already critiqued the misrepresentations of Ennbee's Guardian essay on the KILLING JOKE DVD, and I truly meant to leave it at that. But it occurred to me that are deeper issues involved in the ideological reading of KILLING JOKE than just whether or not a given critic renders a careless, ideologically over-determined reading.

A bigger issue is that ideological critics like Ennbee are unable to understand the inevitable contradictions inherent in their position. For instance, here's Ennbee arguing that even if the DVD adaptation had been better than the source material, it still would have been a bad idea:

Rebooting stories that are racist and sexist is one way that racist and sexist narratives and ideas get replicated and perpetuated. You can sometimes change the story and make it better – and then, sometimes, you can’t. The Killing Joke didn’t have to be as wretched in cartoon form as it turned out to be, but remaking it was always going to be a bad idea.

Now, here's Ennbee arguing for what DC Animation should have done, rather than perpetuating an evil sexist story:

Instead, maybe, DC could have done an animated Birds of Prey – a series in which numerous female superheroes, not least Barbara Gordon, fight crime together without having to ask Batman for permission. 

As I mentioned in the previous essay, Ennbee made no mention of the film's allusion to Barbara Gordon becoming Oracle at the end; of continuing her heroic activities in another manner. This by itself is mere sloppiness on his part. But Ennbee's real whopper is that he doesn't even get that without the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE, there is no BIRDS OF PREY, at least in the historical sense.

Sure, it's *theoretically* possible that, had DC never published any story in which Barbara Gordon or anyone else was shot and paralyzed, the company could have published its first all-female team-book without such a character: without "Barbara Gordon in her new identity as Oracle." Such a book would still have to employ any number of narrative contortions to satisfy Ennbee's political purity test, of course. But from what Ennbee wrote in the Guardian essay, one would never know that BIRDS OF PREY was in any way dependent on the events of the Moore-Bolland work. He makes it sound like BOP was totally untainted by the events of the very graphic novel that, quite unintentionally, determined a new direction for the then-moribund adventures of Barbara Gordon.

To sum up briefly: Moore asked DC for permission to have Batgirl be crippled by the Joker in KILLING JOKE. Later he stated that he never expected the character to remain a paraplegic, given the many miracle-cures abounding in the DC Universe, and indeed DC did toy with the idea of reviving Batgirl via one such cure, "the Lazarus Pit" of Ra's Al Ghul. This idea was dropped, and credit for a better direction is usually given to writers Kim Yale and John Ostrander, who spearheaded the idea of reconfiguring Gordon as a mysterious dispenser of information to the superhero community. Thus Oracle made her debut roughly a year after her fate in KILLING JOKE, in Ostrander's SUICIDE SQUAD #23.

Once the character was revealed to be the now-paraplegic Barbara Gordon, she became a more prominent player in the DC Universe, particularly in the Bat-corner of that cosmos. This new role-- which gave Gordon greater prominence than she had enjoyed as Batgirl in the late 1980s-- engendered a one-shot team-up with Black Canary in 1996, which in its turn led to the regular BOP title.

To be sure, the first fifty-plus issues of the regular series, largely scripted by Chuck Dixon, were basically no more than decent formulaic action-stories. Gail Simone, debuting on BOP #56 in 2003, distinguished herself on the title and made both the character of Oracle and the feature's "girl power" theme more appealing to fans. 

Now, though I consider Simone's contribution to the BOP concept to be vital in a creative sense, there's no question in my mind that from first to last, BIRDS OF PREY is intimately tied to the supposedly sexist injuries inflicted on Barbara Gordon by Moore and Bolland. I have no idea whether Ennbee thinks well of the comic book itself, though he certainly seems to be stumping for an adaptation, if only one produced by female creators. 

In earlier years Simone apparently agreed to some extent with Ennbee's characterization of KILLING JOKE as sexist, for she listed Batgirl's paralysis as one of the casualties of dastardly male creators on her WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS site.  In this essay I expressed my disapproval of Simone for ham-handedly listing characters regardless of the context of their suffering in each given narrative, and over the years I've become (in contrast to Ennbee) even less sympathetic to the "WIR" complaint. But Simone's protest against female marginalization becomes even more ironic, when one realizes that BOP was her first major success in the comic-book field, and that her success stemmed in large part from the fact that DC readers were invested in the fate of Paraplegic Barbara Gordon. That Simone wrote some really good stories with PBG-- quite possibly better than anything Alleged Misogynist Alan Moore could have rendered, given the same subject-- does not obviate Simone's indebtedness to Moore's 1988 ambition desire to shock his complacent audience with an event of arresting violence. That indebtedness also does not "go away" even if Modern Moore recants his 1988 ambitions. BIRDS OF PREY, DC Comics' first all-female team-title, owes its existence to the Big Event of a heroine being sliced, diced, and stuck in a Frigidaire-- though it appears that even before Simone, Yale or Ostrander became involved, there was always the possibility of a Resurrection from the Refrigerator.

To explain the other part of the title now: this complaint comes down to mere "shadow boxing" with the ranks of ideological critics in general. From experience I know that, should I post my analysis of Ennbee's faulty logic on HU, Ennbee would not be capable of arguing any of my points. He has established a persona whereby everything he writes is for the betterment of marginalized people, so if you challenge him on logic or anything else, you must be a low-down defender of the status quo. I would be curious to know if Gail Simone perceived herself in any way indebted to Moore, but from what little I know of her during her Comic Book Resources, she has never really forsworn WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, so that may not be a likely scenario either.

At the end of NEGATIVE I.D. I said that "one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same." Even if I agreed with Ennbee that the gut-shooting of Barbara Gordon marked Moore, Bolland and DC Comics as unregenerate masculinists-- which I don't-- I would still contend that what didn't kill Barbara Gordon made her stronger, rather than reducing her to a victim. Simone herself pursued that theme in BIRDS OF PREY more than once, and any animated adaptation of the property that didn't allow Barbara Gordon to suffer for a good narrative reason would surely end up as far worse than the 2016 KILLING JOKE.

OBJECTING TO OBJECTIFICATION AGAIN

Now that I've finished my review of the 2016 DVD-adaptation of the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE graphic novel, I may as well return to a long-neglected subject: how the word "objectification" came to be used as a buzzword for anything a given critic does not like.

Here's a sampling from online reviews, with my responses, and golly gee, the first one I found-- just a little above my own, when searching "Killing Joke+ dvd+ objectification-- is my old pal ENNBEE, telling the GUARDIAN readers that you just can't update "sexist source material."

Well, certainly not as easily as a critic can lie about what a film shows:

Pursued by a creepy stalker mafia tough-guy villain, Batgirl makes amateurish mistake after amateurish mistake, prompting Batman to sneer to her face that the bad guy “led you like a lap dog”.

Does Batgirl make some mistakes in handling the "creepy, etc." villain? Yes, but not in the repetitive manner asserted by Ennbee. Nor, despite Ennbee's claim, does the Batman character ever "sneer" at the Batgirl character. I can well understand why Ennbee would make such a claim, since he's addicted to victimage. But as written, Batman has no reason to bust Batgirl's lady-balls. The storyline, whatever its failings, does make clear that Batman values Batgirl as a partner, and when she starts going off the rails, he loses an ally thereby. He gives a tough and unsympathetic assessment of the ways in which Batgirl has allowed herself to let the villain get inside her head, and he dismisses her from the case not because she's a woman, but because she has fucked up.

And then there's this willful misreading of the whole arc of the Batgirl-prologue:

In response, Batgirl whines that Batman doesn’t trust her, has impulsive sex with him, and then indulges in a series of violent emotional tantrums before deciding to retire her Batgirl identity on the grounds that the stress is too much for her.

Really, Ennbee? When a woman protests a man's verdict, it's just "whining?" They oughtta kick Ennbee out of the Liberals' League for that one. It goes without saying that Ennbee would not approve of the sex-scene, but after the sex-scene there's only one "emotional tantrum," in which the villain Franz attempts to kill Batman, almost succeeds, and is beaten to pudding when Batgirl comes to Batman's rescue.

I'm reading along as I write this, so I'm betting that Ennbee will still top this. Let's see--

As a bonus, Batman hypocritically lectures her on the dangers of objectification while the bad guy compulsively and smarmily sexualizes her, and the cartoon lingers on a closeup image of her butt when she jogs. Girls aren’t emotionally or mentally tough enough to be heroes, is the message; they’re just too darn emotional. But hey, they look good in those tight costumes, right?

Bingo! Yes, ultraliberals cannot divorce the hero's actions from those of the villain. I pointed out that Batman letting Batgirl shag him would be problematic in real-world terms-- that is, if Batman were a person. And I'd expand on that to say that a fictional portrait of sex between two people who shouldn't be together is practically the foundation of Western drama. There is of course nothing hypocritical in Batman's warning: he's not talking about objectification per se but about the effect one crook's smarminess is having on one character's psyche. There is also no blanket condemnation of women as crime-fighters. Will Ennbee even mention the DVD's reference to Barbara Gordon's transformation into Oracle?  I'm betting not, but I'm sure I can find more prevarications.

Let's see, after he quotes one of the creators about what they meant to do, Ennbee decides that the faults in KILLING JOKE are not those of the specific creators, but of all males, and that only female creators could have possibly obviated them (though probably not in an adaptation of KILLING JOKE, which is explicitly beyond saving):

Perhaps different creators could have managed to craft a non-misogynist Batgirl story, especially if those creators were women. But a big part of the problem is, simply, that this is a Killing Joke adaptation. 

I won't waste repeating Ennbee's driveling, repetitive claims that Batgirl's failure is automatically the failure of all females, and therefore leads to a "misogynist cartoon."

However, this particular review-subject didn't allow for Ennbee any enlightened posturings on the subject of race. Therefore he drops the subject of KILLING JOKE and starts harping on why the new GHOSTBUSTERS was racist because it didn't automatically make the black character a great scientist. I think the movie's greatest crime was that it wasn't funny, but I'm not surprised that Ennbee decided to cram both race and sex into one pre-digested package.

Damn, when I started this, I thought I'd just skim a few representative quotes from different reviewers. Once again, though, Ennbee's addiction to both victimage and prevarication has taken up the whole dang post. More later, perhaps.

NULL-MYTHS: BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE (1988)

For a null-mythic version of the Joker, I strongly considered the 2012 storyline "Death in the Family," which extended over an arc of 23 parts, spread out over several DC features. I did read the TPB that concluded the series. In this story, apparently the conception of Scott Snyder, the Joker has watched the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE a few too many times., since he's started wearing his own flayed face-flesh as if he were the love-child of Leatherface and Jame Gumm. 

At length I decided that (a) it wouldn't be fair to review just one section of this involved arc, and (b) I didn't have any burning desire to read the rest. I will note that I can understand why Snyder and his DC co-workers might have wanted to "re-estrange" the Joker with this grotesque makeover, given that the familiarity of the Joker's iconic visage may have bred a certain degree of audience-contempt. Reputedly the series sold well, so in one sense there's no arguing with success. Nevertheless, I'd venture that Snyder et al seem to guilty of mixing their monstrous metaphors. The Joker, insane though he is, isn't insane in the same fictionalized way as Leatherface and Jame Gumm. They wear skin-masks to efface their real, overly fragile identities. But why would the Joker resort to such a device? Everything that makes the Joker one of the medium's most popular villains suggests that he's loved because he's become a living archetype. In the comics, at least, the Joker has totally subsumed whoever he was before his transformation--

Except in the world of Alan Moore.

I wrote this essay, THE KILLING BLOKE, some four years ago. I wasn't using the "null-myth" terminology then, but the Moore-Bolland "Killing Joke" story seemed perfect as an illustration of what I called (after Philip Wheelwright) "monosignative" rather than "plurisignative."  I hadn't then elaborated the four potentialities, but now I'd view what I wrote then as an anticipation of that doctrine. KILLING JOKE is, in essence, a story in which writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland decided to tell the story of the Joker's lost humanity.

I wrote, in part:

There's no question that Alan Moore was aware of the symbolic status that Batman and the Joker had assumed over the years. To be sure, though, Moore's Batman gets short shrift in that department, coming off most of the time like a weary costumed cop, the "straight man" of the comic duo, saying things like, "How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?" In contrast, the Joker gets so many good lines describing how he embraces a world of inescapeable nihilism that Moore might've done better to title the work "Sympathy for the Joker." Moore's own expression of sympathy for the philosophy of nihilism, then, results in a work that demonstrates what happens when, as noted above, the explanation of the myth becomes what the myth "means." Frye defines allegory as "forced metaphor," and in many respects the two opponents have been forced into metaphorical roles that do more to spell out Alan Moore's philosophical views than to emulate the free play of myth. 

"It's all a joke!" declares the villain, trying to lure Batman over to the dark side, "Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?" The Joker gets much better lines than Batman, but I'm not sure his myth is any better served than Batman's by being bound in a philosophical strait-jacket. Moore's revisionist origin for the Joker posits that he was once just an ordinary schlump, a would-be stand-up comedian, who lost everything in a manner analogous to the way his bat-garbed enemy did. This take on the Joker's history didn't become accepted canon for the various ongoing Bat-serials, and it's not hard to see why: the origin gives the Joker a humanity that's at odds with his more traditional blackhat-villainy. In fairness Moore crafts his story so as to apply that the Joker's memory of his "origin" may not be true in all details, so Moore gets points for realizing that others might not care to follow his lead in playing with DC Comics' "toys."

Reviewing these remarks once more, I would even follow up my "straight man" remark to say that Batman and the Joker, instead of fulfilling their roles as archetypal crimefighter and criminal, have become something like a jaundiced pair of performers, sort of a superheroic version of the "Sunshine Boys."

Aside from the story's purely fortuitious effect on the career of Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon, the story has none of the deeper symbolism of which Moore is capable. Here we have an excellent master of his writing-craft indulging in an exercise, that of trying to graft realistic personalities onto fantasy-figures. It's a credit to Moore's dramaturgic talents that JOKE can still be read on that level. Certainly it's superior to DEATH IN THE FAMILY in that regard.

Returning to the subject of Batgirl--

Within the world of comics-fans, this may be the best-known scene in which Moore depicted a well-known female icon not of his own creation-- and given that he once wrote an essay complaining about the marginalization of superheroines in commercial comics, it's a delicious irony that it's a "Women in Refrigerators" scene all the way. I don't have quite the same knee-jerk animus toward such scenes as do others in the fan-community, but last year I was greatly amused to see that Liberal Moore found himself being pilloried for Writing Rapey Comics, mostly by Ultraliberals whose solution to the problem of evil is to avoid depicting it.

In a subsequent interview, Moore said that he didn't expect the crippling of Barbara Gordon to last: he was sure she'd get magically healed by one of the many DC miracle-devices. Kim Yale and John Ostrander are generally credited with realizing that the tossed-off mutilation of a long-time DC heroine-- albeit one at a rather low ebb of popularity in 1988-- could serve as a means of exploring the dramatic consequences of a differently abled superheroine. I wouldn't say that "Wheelchair Batgirl" was precisely much more mythic than her predecessor. I enjoyed those stories-- particularly those of Gail Simone-- on a purely dramatic level. But the fact that Original Batgirl finally did come back may say something about the sovereign function of fantasy within the context of fiction that has always been "play for play's sake." 

Ironically, though Alan Moore's tune throughout KILLING JOKE starts out as "Sympathy for the Devil," he says very little of importance about the Joker-- and instead supplies a leitmotif through which other raconteurs could compose their own version of "the Batgirl Song."

Whose baby is she, indeed?

TAKE THE COMIC BOOK "SEXUAL EMBODIMENT" TEST, PART 2

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I observed with incredulity the way a certain contingent of comics-fandom gave Kelly Thompson a free pass re: the evidence she presented with regard to the “hyper-sexualization” of female comics-characters. Despite the fact that Thompson constructed her case on the assertion that this or that character was “regularly unzipped” and so on, she gave no indication as to what time-frame these representations regularly took place, be it in the last ten months or the last ten years. It was entirely OK for Thompson to present what one respondent to my essays called “anecdotal evidence.” However, when I presented a point-of-view that mitigated Thompson’s one-sided perspective on gender representation, more than one respondent wanted chapter-and-verse, scientifically redundant, DNA-tested evidence coming out the wazoo. If I didn’t present same, that lack proved me a no-good ultraconservative defender of sexual oppression.




All this supposed demand for rigor, of course, was merely a cover to reject any observation that might mitigate the narrative of female victimization via so-called “objectification.” From a rhetorical standpoint, there’s nothing a preacher loves better than the devil against which he preaches. Without that object of scorn and detestation, the preacher’s got no audience. For most ultraliberals, the objectification of fictional female characters is one of their personal devils, and perdition help the critic who dares suggest that sexual representation, whether in comics or any other medium, might be a two-way street.



One of those respondents challenged me to show evidence of my claim that male characters in comics were also sexually embodied—apparently with the sense that even if I could show such, it would be meaningless unless I could show total parity with female sexual embodiment. I imagine he thought that the only possible rebuttal to Thompson’s imputations of inequality in “No, It’s Not Equal” would be to prove such parity. At no time did I claim that fiction aimed at a male audience would not contain a disproportionate quantity of sexualized depictions of females. What I did claim was that there was an ongoing process of embodiment that applied to both male and female character-construction, and that male characters were constructed to be appealing to female characters within the comic-book diegesis.



I mentioned on that comments-thread that I was meditating on a possible way to take a fair sampling of a batch of contemporary comic books and examine them for both male and female sexual embodiment, in contradistinction to Thompson’s skewed analysis. Given that I had in another essay touted some titles in DC’s “New 52” as representing a new development in the formulation of adult pulp, it occurred to me, “What if I performed such a survey on every New 52 title within a given month?” Limited though such a sampling would be, it would be better than Thompson’s “anecdotal” overview.



But, given the righteous attitudes displayed by most of my respondents, I thought twice. “Why bother with a full month survey, given that most fans are so in love with being blinkered and judgmental that they’ll never alter their opinions no matter what evidence is produced?” So I saved my money and, when a sale came round at a local comics-shop, I simply bought the back issues I wanted anyway and decided to use that as my sampling.

As explained in Part 1, I’m breaking down the sexual representations in each comic surveyed in terms of my deductive categories, GLAMOR, TITILLATION, and PORNIFICATION. I imagine that another easy way to dismiss my formulations would be to simply disagree with these divisions. A thoughtful critique is certainly possible.  However it's more likely most fans would just fall back to the victimization position, implying that a costume showing bare legs (an example of GLAMOR, usually) is exactly as bad as a costume that looks like Victoria’s Secret lingerie (PORNIFICATION, of course). Should anyone make this assertion, assume that I've already deemed it unilaterally stupid and move on.



I’m not counting every sexually embodied image in every one of these titles. Rather, I’m going by page-count. A book with “5 counts of GLAMOR” means five pages on which some GLAMOR-ous image is presented for the reader’s possible delectation. Covers count as only one page, though ads are not counted.
It's impossible to state that a given drawing carries the concept of sexual embodiment for everyone.  However, I focused on those drawings that at least showed enough of at least one face, one figure or the two together to connote sexual attractiveness.


Here goes.



BATGIRL #7— No counts of male sexual embodiment. 8 counts of female sexual embodiment of the GLAMOR type.

BATGIRL #8—No counts of male embodiment. 6 counts of female GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #1 – 13 counts of female TITILLATION. 7 counts of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #2 – 17 counts of female TITILLATION. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #3 – 14 counts of female TITILLATION. No counts of male embodiment.

BLACKHAWK #1 – 6 pages male GLAMOR. 7 pages female GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #5 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #6—11 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 4 counts of male PORNIFICATION. (And yes, they’re all Batman.)

CATWOMAN #7 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male PORNIFICATION.

RED HOOD AND OUTLAWS #2 – 1 count of male TITILLATION. 2 counts of female TITILLATION. 3 counts of female PORNIFICATION.

SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1—11 counts of male GLAMOR. No counts of female embodiment.

SUPERGIRL #1—11 counts of female GLAMOR. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

SUPERGIRL #2 – 16 counts of female GLAMOR. 16 counts of male GLAMOR.

If I wished to invest in a scanner to reproduce all the relevant pages, I could make arguments for all my categorizations—but again, that would involve spending money to prove my conclusions to an audience in love with defending victims—or what they like to imagine as victims.

Will that be my final word on the mélange known as “No, It’s Not Equal?”


Magic eightball says, “Maybe for now.”

LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION

"In the structuralist paradigm as developed by Lévi-Strauss in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté--whose limitations are dissected by Bataille in one of the sharpest chapters of his book [Erotism]--"incest" is simply the violation of marriage rules. Implicit in this binarism is that what is not a violation is legitimate and therefore unproblematic. Durkheim’s ambiguous and never fully analyzed notion of the sacred is reduced to precisely what Durkheim insisted it could not be reduced to: the opposition between "right" and "wrong" sexual relations. But, as Bataille makes clear, sexual relations are always transgressive. Marriage as a rite of passage is not simply a permitted move in a game; it is the conferral of a right of transgression..."-- Eric Gans, Originary Thoughts on Sexuality, the online journal of ANTHROPOETICS.

If even "right" sexual relations are a transgression, as Bataille clearly *does* argue in his 1957 book EROTISM, then what is being transgressed against? Clearly, although there have many marriages in which one or both of the spouses were coerced into marital bliss, many were not so coerced and so did not transgress against either the will of the spouses or the will of the community.

I may be taking Bataille into something more like the territory of object relations with my own answer, but it seems evident to me that the only constant transgression is that of one body interacting with at least one other body so as to violate the integrity of both, as Bataille says here:

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

In this essay, I essentially agreed with this statement insofar as both sex and violence could both be broadly defined as transgressions of somatic boundaries. However, I also said Bataille was guilty of over-identifying the two modes of human action, and suggested that the Hegel-influenced theories of Francis Fukuyama could be used as a corrective. Bataille was strongly influenced by Hegel but I don't think he ever made any attempt to crossbreed his theories of transgression with Hegelian recognition. Such a cross-pollination might prove an interesting project but I won't pursue it here.

Now, while I critiqued Bataille for over-identifying sex with violence, I've also said that the two do intersect in literary narrative in a variety of ways. Thus I
don't have to draw a hypothetical dividing line between the phenomena as I did with the literary associations of juvenility and of adulthood. The domains of literary sex and violence are better seen as two intersecting circles, where some parts overlap and others do not. At the same time, while it may be a murky matter to sort out where the two modes disassociate themselves in the psyches of real people, in literature it's a good deal easier. In literature, when sexuality and violence do intersect, one tends to dominate over the other in a pure narrative sense. Thus, if one pairs these two classes of dominance with those in which there's no meaningful intersection at all, one gets four classifications of the two modes:

1) EROTIC VIOLENCE
2) NON-EROTIC VIOLENCE
3) NON-VIOLENT SEX
4) VIOLENT SEX

Each of the illustrations featured in the previous post illustrates one of these classes. In showing distinctions between these categories, I'll be relying on both narrative and significant values (see this essay for definitions) to support my distinctions. Hopefully, though all such interpretations are somewhat subjective, by looking at both I can avoid the sloppy one-on-one equivalences asserted by Freud-influenced elitists, who come up with howlers like, "Duh--hh, da supahhero's big muskles I think looks like some sorta toigid pinnis, so dat proves supahhero's is gayboys!"




First up is an example of erotic violence: the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #203, in which the villainous Catwoman has somehow trapped Batman and Robin into performing in a cage alongside a handful of big cats. Plainly both this comics-cover and the story it advertises-- originally marketed to juvenile readers-- is meant to emphasize the heroes' peril in this sticky situation, both from the big cats and from Catwoman's whip. It would certainly be possible to frame an alternate version of the cover in which there was only a violent threat: indeed, the cover of issue #9 of DC's 1970 JOKER title shows the Joker cracking a whip at Catwoman in a similar circus-y situation, but because the Joker isn't dominantly seen as a sexual icon, I'd argue that JOKER #9 is non-erotic violence (though not interesting enough to be my chosen example for same). But because the established mythology at the time of this 1954 comic continually emphasized a romantic tension between Batman and Catwoman-- that's the narrative value-- the scene (which isn't in the story) takes on a significant value of "battle of the sexes," which is certainly one motif within the story proper (a reformed Catwoman returns to crime because she wants to challenge Batman again). We cannot know if the adult raconteurs who crafted the story (Edmond Hamilton and a "Bob Kane" ghost) were aware of the S&M associations of the whip, particularly when it's wielded by one gender against the other, but if they did they may've assumed that the scene would "tease" readers into buying the comic even though, being 1954 juveniles, they might not know consciously why the scene seemed appealing. All of the violence in the cover and story is of course "clean" violence, but some "dirty" symbolism does find its way in.




In earlier posts I've assailed Dirk Deppey's attack on this comic for its supposed decadence, so I won't repeat my earlier arguments here. I've reread SUPERGIRL #14 (2007) a couple of times and still find that the narrative by Joe Kelly and Ian Churchill is purely about two super-chicks fighting each other, with Batgirl trying not to fuck Supergirl but to cut her bloody head off. Patently the argument that reads this scene sexually is one that ignores the narrative values of the story, and how they are expressed, in order to force the imagery into a Freudian lockbox that doesn't reflect what happens in the story. Perhaps if Batgirl were stabbing Supergirl with one sword, a Freudian could rejoice at seeing yet another confirmation of the female gender's secret desire for a phallus. But Batgirl's using two swords to cut off Supergirl's head doesn't make much sense as a displaced sex act. If Supergirl was a male, one might buy into the Freudianism "head=phallus" motif, but if the subject of the beheading doesn't even have a phallus, then maybe, just maybe, her head is just a head, and the only reason Batgirl has her legs locked around Supergirl's waist is to set her up for being sliced up by the magic crystals growing from Supergirl's back. Thus the significant value to be derived from the narrative has more to do with setting up Supergirl's X-MEN-style anxiety over her body's freakishness than with suggesting girl-on-girl sex.


SWAMP THING #34's story "Rites of Spring" (Moore/Bissette/Totelbein) features about the most non-violent sexual encounter one can imagine, since the sex act is abstracted into an interweaving of minds rather than bodies. The narrative concept is that because Swamp Thing doesn't have a penis, he uses one of the hallucinogenic fruits growing on his vegetable body to give his human love Abby an ecstatic ride into his enhanced consciousness. Thus the mind-sex scenes in ST #34 bear kinship with those Hollywood sex-scenes which depict the literal sex-act as a flurry of abstract movements, with lots of touching but no hint of one body actually entering another body. I imagine that a simplistic Freudian would read the significant value of this story as an instance of "castration anxiety." But since the sex-scene takes place in a story that hypothesizes that all living things possess energy-fields to which Swamp Thing and Abby are both attuned, it's more accurate to the narrative to see "Rites of Spring" as a celebration of Jungian energy/libido in all things. In addition, to the extent that Swampy does "put" his consciousness "into" Abby, he doesn't function as a castrated male in narrative or significant valuations.



Finally, from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, we get an encounter of superheroes in which the "fighting" really is all about sex, as Superman and Wonder Woman have themselves a super-shag that shatters icebergs, knocks down airplanes, etc. Previous to this encounter Frank Miller seems to take great pleasure in overturning Wonder Woman's "porcelain saint" image, portraying her as a hard-bitten man-hater who continually busts Superman's balls (figuratively) because she realy, really wants them inside her. Whether Miller subscribes to the notion of female castration anxiety I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised given some other Freudianisms in his past works. It's a little harder to talk about narrative or significant values in TDKSA because it's something of a jumble of Scenes Frank Miller Thought Would Be Really Cool. Still, all the violence-in-real-sex that we see elided in the SWAMP THING scene and its congeners comes roaring back with a vengeance here. Of course even rough sex is still sex first and violence second, and the super-shag does result in a super-kid who may or may not have a certain Oedipal relationship with her super-dad. Notably, her name is the same as Superman's mother, while Batman's female sidekick, "Catgirl," dons a costume plainly (to the reader) modeled on that of Catwoman, Batman's old flame.

However, that particular extrapolation of significant values leads me into a deeper delving than I can cover here. Possibly an essay on the aforementioned critique Bataille made of Freud's incest complex will allow for more attention to this type of transgression.