This Week in Comics #3: Catwoman 74

Catwoman #74
W: Will Pfeifer
A: David Lopez
I: Alvaro Lopez
Ed: Nachie Castro

Without a doubt Catwoman #74 was the best title that I read all week. Written by Will Pfeiffer and illustrated by David Lopez's beautifully expressive pencils, this title continues to provide high-caliber action sequences while grounding these within a relevant and affective emotional foreground. It is good to see the title this good again.

When the 2001 revamp of Catwoman first came out, I was initially nonplussed. In order to make Catwoman palatable as a protagonist, writer Ed Brubaker stripped her of her status of a thief and made her the reluctant protector of Gotham City's particularly seedy East End district. Although there's nothing wrong with this as a premise, the story took awhile to get going as Brubaker and collaborator Darwyn Cooke spent the first story arc having Catwoman (Selina Kyle) taking on a fairly disposable serial killer who preyed on prostitutes. However, the series progressed and I eventually became a devoted follower. Brubaker made Selina's connection to her side of Gotham palpable and I became generally interested in the bond Selina had with her sidekick Holly and her emotionally troubled connection with the down-on-his-luck PI Slam Bradley.

Ultimately, all the problems that faced Brubaker's tenure can be traced to a problem of momentum; he simply ran out of gas. It was good to see Catwoman rid the East End of its crime lord and heart-wrenching to see her relationship with Slam Bradley sizzle and then fizzle. But this can only happen once or twice. Catwoman can only break a man's heart so many times and introducing Bradley's son for her to have an affair with instead of Slam only feels icky as opposed to morally complicated.

Similarly, Catwoman can only free the East End so many times and new crime lords can only
try to fill the power vacuum before Catwoman really just looks inefficient. Really, all of this should happen once. After all, it's not like people are being under served in their need for crime. Are they? No, the real missed opportunity of Brubaker's tenure on Catwoman is that he did not show the problems that would have come with a successful limited crusade on crime. The logical outcome of cleaning up a small area of town is not a limitless waves of crime, but in fact gentrification. How would Catwoman have felt when the rents went up in her small part of town and the down-and-outers that she identified with and swore to protect got driven out of town because yuppies and Bruce Wayne's dinner guests started to move in? But perhaps this is too much to ask of any DC Comics's writer outside of James Robinson, and only then when he was writing Starman. No one has developed a "contexutalizing city" (to borrow Scipio's terms) to the degree that Robinson did when he wrote Starman, although Brubaker tried with some success when he had Selina and Holly go on a road trip through the various burgs of the DCU.

While the return to greatness that I mentioned at the beginning of my review has been building for quite some time, I think this issue in particular manages to serve as the highpoint for Pfeifer and Lopez's run, just as the title character is at her lowest. The depths of Selina's situation is nearly summed up at the beginning of this issue with the following recap: "Apartment? Robbed. Building? Burned. Me? Desperate. Calculator? Weasel. Coffee? Drugged? Trap? You Bet. Oh, and I almost forgot. Gun? Loaded. Definitely loaded."

Issue #74 finds Selina just after she has faked her own death, given up her baby for adoption (there are of course major safety concerns for any tot who's mother is a super-villain), and has been sold-out by a villain known as the Calculator, who has been hired by a hot-shot new talent in town known simply as "The Thief." The Thief wants to establish his cred in town by taking down Catwoman. Selina, finding herself trapped, manages to escape, get her gear, and convinces (re: threatens his death) the Calculator that he should tell her how to wage her revenge on the Thief.

However, all of this is just plot, and in the wrong hands could read as just another mechanical exercise in super hero storytelling. Where this issue manages to succeed is in marshaling the emotional forces that Brubaker had set up as a title standard in the 2001 relaunch. The first of these two scenes that really sells the issue is in when Selina cuts her hair (featured above). This act recalls the title's relaunch when Selina remakes herself as an anti-hero and defender of the East End. Here, Selina in an emotionally touching scene, remakes herself not into a hero, but into a woman without a daughter. She murders a little bit of herself, so that she can keep on living with her decision to give up Helena for adoption.

This type of pathos rises again when Selina has planned her revenge on the Thief and is about to strike. Her plan is perfectly laid out, but she is attacked by a trio of "reformed" government-sponsored super-villains before she can strike. What could read as a straightforward action scene is given weight because this comes as a particularly ignominious end to Selina's plan. Just as she's about to strike her revenge on a practicing burglar, she's arrested by fellow rogues. When told of the arrest (which involves her being drugged) she mumbles "Arrest. . .? But I'm not the one you. . ." implying that they should be going after the Thief. However, Selina and we find that neither justice nor vengeance will be fully executed that night. Selina will not have her revenge on the Thief and the Thief will not be harmed as he hastily retreats from a botched job. Instead, the already suffering Selina will pay for improprieties committed long ago.

This Week in Comics #2: Jonah Hex 26

There is something that keeps me coming back to Jonah Hex, besides the fact that I get it in my mailbox monthly. This is something of a surprise to me, given the fact that I've never been one for Westerns and I have always been more attracted to heroes than anti-heroes. When I picked up the first issue more than two years now, I figured I would read the book for a little bit, get bored, and then drop it as some of the other members of the on-line community have done. If I had to put my finger on what I like about the title, I suppose I would have to trace my interest to the fact that nearly each issue has been self-contained, the stories move briskly (and sometimes satisfyingly), and the book is a break from the usual superhero fare that the big two usually bring out. I suppose there is also something attractive about the title character, Jonah Hex, the horribly scarred bounty hunter who operates on a moral code which is motivated by money as much as it is by ethics.

However, I would say that my surprise that I'm still reading Jonah Hex two years after its relaunch is that I'm surprised that I am still reading a book, which I don't think is always very good. Ever since, say, issue #9, the consistency of the title has been hit and miss. Now, some of the issues are very, very good. Take for instance, issue #24, this year's Halloween issue; that issue seamlessly combines the series's standard Western action with the supernatural without it seemingly like an overt gesture to the holiday. However, while some issues have been good, others have been merely OK, and others still (far too many) have been quite dreadful. Many of those bland and putrid stories have relied on a simple formula, which like many, I have found entirely too repetitive. The basic structure of that formula: Jonah Hex saves a rapped woman. There are variations, often minor, such as the woman is German or Mormon, but this isn't really enough to redeem the fact that it gets old and insulting over time. While I do not object to the portrayal of rape, and it certainly seems like a crime that fits the title's savage Western setting, the usage of rape in the title seems overused and frankly it sometimes appears as if writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti ran out of ideas around issue #10. In the meantime, sure, they have come up with the occasional new idea, but when in doubt, have Hex save a raped woman and hopefully the rapist is also a man who Hex has a bounty on.

Unfortunately, this week's issue of Jonah Hex falls into the later category in that it is both bad and relies on rape to advance the plot. I suppose Gray and Palmiotti thought they were being clever by playing with the formula. Here instead of rescuing the raped women (neither German nor Mormon), Hex falls victim to them. Hot on the trail of a bunch of horse thieves, Hex stumbles upon a farm house in the middle of nowhere. There he is befriended by Holly, a (seemingly) lone woman who gets him drunk. After passing out from drinking too much liquor, Hex awakes in a barn filled with other men. Holly and her partner Hannah, victimized by men in the past, now have a collection of men in their barn, who they have mutilated by chopping of their lower appendages. Left in tact in the barn while Holly discusses with Hannah what to do with him, Hex is freed by the men (the very horse thieves he's been chasing) who chew through the ropes. Hex then enacts his revenge by capturing the two women and letting the men chew them to death. But Hex is no sentimentalist. The story does not end with the women's murder; the story ends with Hex scooping up the mutilated men, putting them on horses, and ridding into town to collect his bounty.

Certainly, part of the appeal of the Jonah Hex resides in his inhuman lack of sympathy and his almost incalculable desire to collect on his bounties, but this issue goes too far and becomes lurid, nearly pornographic in its appreciation of violence. While I'm certain there are others who could point to other disturbing, and gratuitous examples from other issues, this episode does seem to be the worst of them. This is a new low for the series, and I'm almost dreading the next month's issue which will arrive in the mail whether I want it or not. Will it be good like October's Halloween issue, or will it hit the gutter lows of issue #26? The advance copy promises that it will be about a cop killer of the Old West. Hopefully, that will at least take out the rape element.

*

This Week in Comics #1: Batman and the Outsiders #1

This week begins a new quasi-weekly feature. Much like Chris's Invincible Super-Blog and The Absorbascon I will be giving weekly reviews of the comics that I read for the week. Luckily for my wallet and my typing fingers, my usual Wednesday stack is something like .5 comics per week and the most I think that I've ever bought was something like six issues, so the reviews will be relatively light and again, quasi-weekly.

This week's purchase is DC Comics's Batman and the Outsiders #1 and comes to us from the creative mind of Chuck Dixon and the talented hands of Julian Lopez. Overall, I found this first issue to be a promising start, but a little slow. Clearly, this first storyline will go for five or six issues when it could probably be parred down to three and be more enjoyable.

The series brings back a title from the mid-1980s. The concept for the original series was that Batman had started his own super-team after his own relationship with the Justice League became strained. While the series was popular for awhile, eventually sales dropped and the title was canceled. Having read a few issues of the original, it's hard to say why the series was ever popular. While there were a few interesting characters on the team, most of them were more super-lame, then superheroes. Take for instance one of the series's more "popular" characters, Halo; Halo's powers literally consist of being schizophrenic and looking like a refugee from an Abba video. The most recent reiteration of the team previous to this new series, ended only a few months ago. This title, scripted by Judd Winnick, presented the Outsiders more as a grown up version of Teen Titans, with a good deal of the team's membership coming from that title. Think Slackers meets Mission Impossible and you'll have a good idea of what was going on.

Thankfully, this new Batman and the Outsiders is taking a much different direction. The current series is un-acknowledgedly built on the back of Wildstorm's The Authority, a titlethat featured characters remarkably like the original Justice League who pretty much extort the world's governments to be peaceful and socialistic. It was in short, a leftist's wet dream. During The Authority's original run, DC (Wildstorm's parent company) found the title's radical politics too much to bear and began censoring the title until it lost much of its audience. However, since the appearance of The Authority, DC has consistently tried to build an Authority-lite team into its mainstream books. Books which have tried the Authority-lite formula have had a hard time finding their voice. Playing within the confines of the DC Universe (DCU), these team books could never be as radical as their Wildstorm equivalents and thus the aesthetic and the supposed "bad-assness" of the series always felt hackneyed.

Luckily, Batman and the Outsiders manages to find the proper balance between the bright spandex view of reality that is the DCU and the proactive stance that was necessary for a book like The Authority to work. Chuck Dixon has managed to find the right scale. The Outsiders cannot blackmail the Russian government to relent in persecuting the Chechnyan people like The Authority, and luckily Dixon does not give us the DCU equivalent (as of yet) of having the Outsiders liberate one of DCU's many fictional third world banana republics or Eastern bloc countries. Instead, the villain here is a corporation which seems to be engaged in some highly suspect research and so Batman sends his newly formed team to investigate. It's not something the JLA would normally do as it involves some espionage and undercover work, but its also not on the same scale as The Authority and so the story does not become ridiculous or parodic. It's not too big and it's not too small. Dixon has managed to find the right niche for this incarnation of The Outsiders.

While much my interest in the book has come from Dixon's ability to blend Authority style action into the DCU mainstream, most of the discussion of this book has been focused on the book's supposed homophobia, and I think it's only fair to mention this in my own review. Feminist comics bloggers like Kalinara have criticized the first issue for its disrespect of lesbians and even relatively apolitical bloggers like Chris Sims have complained that the series seems to have a moment where things become derogatory.

Most of this controversy stems from the fact that Chuck Dixon is one of the few openly right wing comic books who has chided writers for including openly gay characters in their work. Now, most of Dixon's complaints stem from his discomfort with sexuality of any sort being openly stated in comics, but it is clear and clearly lamentable that there does seem to be a double standard at work. Much like the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, Dixon's rules about representation seem to allow for open heterosexuality without it being indecent, but homosexuality always seems to be sexual or sensual and thus a big comic no-no. This does present Dixon with a noticeable problem in writing The Outsiders because he's inheriting the title from Judd Winnick, an author has had gay-rights themed issues in other titles and has made The Outsiders at times, sexually explicit. As such, Dixon inherits a book that used to be everything he hates: it was sexually explicit (although not graphic) and it had two lesbian characters.

Now the immediate controversy at hand stems from Batman, supposedly unintentionally, goading his lesbian teammate Thunder into outing herself and her girlfriend/teammate Grace. Thunder is enraged when Batman refers to Thunder and Grace's "special" relationship. According to Batman, he only meant to say that they were good friends. Thunder is the one who misunderstands and believes that he is speaking euphemistically and thus, degradingly. Much of the criticism from Kalinara and Sims has to do whether or not Batman would know about their lesbian relationship and whether or not Batman would ever speak like this. I've come to understand that this level of nuanced true-to-character stuff will vary from writer to writer, particularly in an age when DC editing is as bad as it is. Would Batman would refer to someone as being "special" friends without understanding the implication of the word "special"? One would think that he would be quite sensitive to these type of implication given the fact that he's spent most of his adult life as a single man living with young boys and a domineering, elderly gentlemen; but I cannot say for certain whether or not Batman does know about what the word "special" implied beyond what I read in the text. Dixon's version of the character seems not to know what he was doing, even if as readers we think thinks this makes Batman an idiot and not the world's greatest detective.

Kalinara particularly criticizes Dixon for Thunder's reaction to Batman's usage of the word "special", which admittedly, does seem so over the top that it paints her as irrational. There seems to be more truth to this critique then whether or not Dixon is being true to Batman's character. Thunder does seem to be unhinged at Batman's remark, even when you do consider that she is rightfully upset that Batman is trying to fire her from the team.

However, is this as homophobic as Kalinara makes it seem? I don't think so. Or at least, I'm reluctant to say from this one issue, or rather from this one scene which consists of little more than a few panels. I'm willing to wait and see what happens over the next few issues to see whether or not Dixon's ideological biases (which I clearly do not agree with) override his ability to tell a good story. What I can say for now is that the scene is awkward and it is a blemish on what is an otherwise good story. Whether or not it is awkward because it suffers from Dixon foisting his beliefs onto the story, I am at this point, undecided. In the past I have seen Dixon portray right wingers as political nuts and I've seen him write what I thought was one of the best girl-positive series in a long time, Batgirl: Year One. I have high hopes for this series; I think it might be able to make some minor advances in the superhero genre, at least in terms of the DC mainstream. That being said, I take the critiques of Kalinara with more than a grain and salt and I do have my reservations.


Addendum: Boy, was I wrong about Dixon. As later issues showed, Dixon took a kind of sleazy interest in the sex lives of his lesbian characters. Rather than succumb to homophobia, Dixon's Outsiders read like a hastily executed frat-boy wet dream.

300 and the Poetics of Terrorism

Sparta!

Perhaps the most apt critique of Zach Snyder’s 300, apt anyway for the blogsophere, would be to list 300 problems with the film. However, given the option of reading (or writing) 300 separate complaints or reading (or writing) politically trenchant criticism, I think we can all agree that the criticism is the less painful of the two options. That being said, at this point any critique of 300 comes rather late in the game. I think most people are aware of the problematic political implications of the film so I will try to make this brief or as brief as possible. What can I say? I live the graduate student life and contrary to popular expectations this life does not include champagne wishes and caviar dreams; it does however include trips to the dollar theater where films like 300 are still being showed and are still quite well attended.

Before, I discuss what I would call the films “poetics of terrorism,” I would like for a split second to discuss the films incredibly problematic gender politics. The film manages to seem entirely homoerotic and homophobic, and here I mean phobic in its most literal sense, at the same time. Triumph of the Will move aside, there’s a new contender in town. While the film delights in the eroticism of masculine muscularity, it shows that the scariest thing that can happen is for one to “worship the divinity” of a queer giant black man (Xerxes of Persia) or that one could be a “philosopher and boy lover” like those Greeks in Athens. However, overriding these queer concerns is how the film deals with its central woman character, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey). To say that Frank Miller has had a problem hoeing the P.C. line when it comes to feminism would be more than an understatement. Indeed, Miller seems to go out of his way to present seemingly one dimensional female characters. For instance, in Richard Rodriguez’s adaptation of his Sin City, all the female characters are either strippers, prostitutes, naked, dead, or some combination of these things. In fact, the female characters that we are most supposed to sympathize with and admire are Basin City’s prostitutes, who manage to maintain their independence from the corrupt police and city officials by skillfully parlaying their wares and by being ninjas. What Miller tends to admire in his female characters is a mixture of strength and submission.

It comes as no surprise then that a similar articulation of womanhood is to be found in 300's Queen Gorgo as well. While her husband, King Leonidas (Gerald Butler) is off fighting the Persians, Gorgo attempts to persuade the Spartan city council to send him reinforcements. Unfortunately, this means trafficking with Theron (Dominic West) who is resisting helping his King, not because of his stated love of constitutionalism, but because he is in league with the Persian Empire. Theron tells his queen that he will change his vote if she will go to bed with him. Gorgo does so, justifying her decision because of her love of her husband and Sparta, and because as she puts it, “Freedom is not free.” Given the phrase, the parallels to the contemporary political situation should be fairly obvious. Ultimately, Gorgo’s prostitution proves to be a miscalculation as Theron betrays her in front of the council by telling them about their tryst and by insinuating that Gorgo has been unfaithful many times before in order to secure political power. Not willing to stand for this level of disloyalty to both herself and her country, Gorgo grabs a nearby sword (these are always around when you need them in the military state of Sparta) and runs it through Theron. As he dies, Persian gold falls from his purse, revealing his treachery. While Gorgo is righted, the principle that motivates her tryst with Theron is not refuted. Although she did not calculate for Theron’s true political loyalties, she did the right thing. She put love and country before her personal autonomy. She proves to be a good woman, and better yet a good citizen because she proves that she has the strength to be subservient and ultimately because she has the strength to kill Theron when his manipulation of democracy goes to far. Freedom is not free, after all.

Now if at this point you find yourself rolling your eyes because of the overbearing and ridiculous nature of the slogan “freedom is not free” than the film is not for you; it is a film that is purposely overbearing and it this type of overbearing-ness that enables the film to produce my so-called “poetics of terrorism.” The overbearing nature of the film can be perhaps be most centrally located in the fact that its narrator, Dilios, the Spartan warrior-rhetorician (David Wenham), has to tell you everything that is going on on the screen and just exactly how to interpret it. Indeed, the film’s narrative hand is so heavy that Dilios is forced to even tell the audience and his Greek listeners about events that he could not have witnessed. Regardless of the facts – and here the audience can question whether or not were watching the events as they happened or merely Dilios’s account of them – the story has to be kept if we’re going to fight those Persians.

What ultimately reinforces the poetics of terrorism is the film’s centerpiece, Leonidas’s resistance at the Battle of Thermopylae. Unable to raise a proper army, Leonidas goes to the edges of Greece with his 300 best soldiers and the support of some fairly wimpy Athenians (chest hair aside). Outmatched by the Persian hordes of Asia (the film’s terms, not mine), Leonidas devises a scheme wherein he will funnel the Persian forces into a narrow area between two cliffs and the sea. The superiority of the Persian army’s numbers will therefore be nullified and Leonidas’s 300 will be capable of repelling the Persian forces with their superior intelligence and fighting ability. And thus the film proceeds to treat us with a visual ballet of graphic violence as the 300 repeals and defeats successive waves of Persian oddities: slaves, Persian giants, freaks with blades for arms, Middle Eastern ninjas (I wonder if they know the prostitutes from Sin City), CGI elephants, and a fairly monstrous rhinoceros. All of these waves prove to be ineffective in the face of all those Spartan muscles. Indeed, it seems all is lost for poor Xerxes until the Greeks are betrayed by the deformed and thus rejected Spartan, Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) who shows the Persians a way around the cliff in exchange for money and sex with Persian prostitutes (again, I wonder if they know the girls of Sin City).

Ideologically, in order to produce a poetics of terrorism, these waves of Persian threats have to be both literally fantastic and full of spectacle as they have to be inevitably undefeatable. They have to be terrifying, threatening, and only temporarily defeatable. While I’m not one to often enjoy allegorical criticism, it would seem to me that the constant barrage of threats coming from Persia correlates quite nicely to the waves of threats that we have come to long endure under the Bush Administration. These villains are neutralized or defeated much like those that have supposedly threatened the Brooklyn Bridge, Fort Dix, or most recently at JFK Airport. However, much like the Bush Administration has told us for the past six years, eventually the terrorists will succeed and we will have another 9/11 failure. The failure of Leonidas is in fact the true strength of the film for those who would like us to more actively engage the Islamofascist threat with direct military violence. His loss and gloriously documented crucifixion – complete with arrows to evoke St. Sebastian – justify what the film and all the film’s loyal Spartan characters have wanted all along: full on war with Persia. And so the film ends with Dilios beating the drums of war by retelling the film’s story just before the full assemblage of Greece’s troops defeat once and for all the menace of Persia. Freedom is not free. Sometimes it takes a crucifixion to get you to fight (a crucifiction perhaps?) and sometimes it takes a movie with a runtime of 117 minutes. Next time I might just as soon take the earlier than the latter.

Portrait of the Comics Reader as a Young-ish Man

1985. My apartment in New York City. A sudden realization, and not a pleasant one. My thirtieth birthday is right around the corner. I’m posted to turn one year older than Batman… I’ve come to accept, in recent years, that Spider-Man is younger than my brother, but Batman? Batman? My favorite childhood hero? The lantern-jawed wise father figure? I’m actually gonna be older than Batman? This was intolerable. Something had to be done.

With these words Frank Miller opens the collected edition of his most memorable contribution to comics, The Dark Knight Returns. The work presents perhaps, the most elegant solution to Miller’s problem. Miller makes Batman older, which in the parlance of graphic novels (née comics) means somewhere around fifty. Thus, we get a Batman, much older than Miller’s thirty, a Batman who worries about his knees when climbing up his bat-rope, who needs Bat-ifocals glasses to ensure that his batarangs hit their targets, and will probably need to go to Bat-cross for his medical needs. However, nothing in comics but the status quo lasts. DKR was only a few issues long and it was not long before Bruce Wayne stopped being a Dirty Old Man and became a dashing millionaire playboy again. The number one rule of comics: you get older, but Bruce Wayne will never collect Social Security.

It was only after college when I had some sense of what Frank Miller was writing about. I found that I could no longer identify with the teen sidekicks. My life had passed them by and unless their emotional plight hit some type of universal cord, I just could not identify with them. Yes, it could be exciting to see Robin fight a Yeti in the rocky mountains of Tibet, but in the end I could not care about his fights with his father or the bad grades he got because he was out fighting crime. Even for comics, it seemed trivial. I had my B.A., was working a crappy administrative job at UCLA, and was hopping that I would get into graduate school so that said job would be over. Robin was fifteen, worrying about getting his driver license, and was hopping the Teen Titans would ask him to join. I was simply too old to be hanging out with the Boy Wonder. I had Big Boy concerns.

But, if comics eventually make you feel old because you outgrow the characters, things get even worse when you realize that your mastery over the storylines has grown out of date. Every 10 years DC Comics does what fans call retconning, meaning that they retroactively change their company wide continuity; they change the narrative past. Small retconning is common place in comics to allow for creative growth, however every ten years it seems DC attempts to do it in a comprehensive way. Since DC Comics overhauled their line last year I’ve found that things I could recall with a frightening level of encyclopedic detail – things such as Superman’s origin story – have been, if not fundamentally altered, significantly tweaked. Now, if you asked me to give you a description of what Krypton was like, I honestly could not tell you with any veracity. This is after a lifetime of reading Superman comics. Things I used to know, I don’t know anymore. What really makes you feel old as a comics is fan is not growing older than the perpetually young heroes of your childhood, but that comics companies force an odd form of senility upon you. It’s nerdy, fictitious Alzheimer’s and I don’t know my way around the House of Mystery.

The cure: read more comics. But with my healthcare, how could I afford it? Anyway, can’t I die with dignity and just read the reprints?