Monthly Archives: November 2023

November 30, 2023 · 5:15 am

I don’t know who came up with this meme but yes, it fits.

For how a large chunk of America, particularly on the right, thinks about rape vs. abortion.Far too many people think the issue in rape cases is how punishing the man will ruin his life. One bad decision and he’s looking at prison? What about his scholarships? His career? Do you really want to destroy his life over “seven minutes of heaven?” Especially if she was drunk!

Unplanned pregnancy can ruin a woman’s life too. Ob/gyn care is expensive, keeping the baby will change the shape of her life but who cares? God obviously wanted her to have a kid. She chose to get drunk so in a way didn’t she choose to get raped? And she wouldn’t need abortion or pregnancy if she wasn’t a slut. Both sides of the meme are bullshit but where men get excused and hand-waved, women get punished. Just as it’s always “that baby you aborted could have grown up to cure cancer” and not “if that women hadn’t been forced to bear her father’s child, maybe she’d have grown up to cure cancer.”

For more misogynist bullshit about rape and abortion, Undead Sexist Cliches is available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holders.

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November 29, 2023 · 5:17 am

More women from pulp and paperback covers

Robert Gibson Jones gives us the return of the whispering gorilla! I didn’t know he’d shown up the first time.

Second, the kind of Bad Girl art standard for paperback PI stories. Art by Roger Kastel.Norman Saunders gives us a head-scratcher — is she trying to seduce the robot? Fight it off? Or what?And to wrap up, one by the great Virgil Finlay.#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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November 28, 2023 · 5:15 am

Rebooting everything that isn’t nailed down: John Byrne’s Wonder Woman, Year Three

One of the things I dislike most about John Byrne is his obsession with continuity. This is a common trait with comics writers: they’re forever trying to straighten out some inconsistency or rewriting around a canonical detail they don’t like. Byrne, however, can be particularly single-minded. His oft-expressed view is that nobody understands a character like the creator, therefore every change by later writers hurts the character and should be thrown out. He throws them out with an almost vicious dedication

(Byrne never had any trouble, however, overriding the original concept to suit himself. Roy Thomas wrote the Vision as a synthetic living being capable of feeling, however much he hid it; Byrne insisted Vizh had no more feelings than a blender and as part of ending Wanda and the Vision’s marriage, made the Vision a machine that could be disassembled. To give one example).

That’s the dominant theme of Byrne’s last year on Wonder Woman, rebooting Donna Troy, the Golden Age Wonder Woman and the Demon. It explains why I thought of his entire run on WW as “continuity porn” as the phrase goes.The 1990s were a big time for killing/disabling superheroes and installing replacements: Death of Superman, Knightfall and others. William Messner-Loebs had already had Diana replaced as Wonder Woman but hadn’t killed her; Byrne killed Diana at the end of his second year, then had her mother Hippolyta step in as the new Wonder Woman. Diana went up to become the Goddess of Truth among the Olympians until she learned the Olympians planned to re-establish dominion over the mortal world. She objected and Zeus was about to smite her hard when Ares sticks up for her as the God of War’s granddaughter, him being Hippolyta’s pop and all.

?????? This comes completely out of the blue (and is hardly anything either William Marston or George Perez would have imagined for an origin) and is probably passed over. I wonder if Byrne was imitating a similar out-of-the-blue claim by Mars during Diana’s depowered years but I have no clue. In any case, Zeus sends Diana back to the mortal world as the Goddess of Truth, a status she lost a couple of writers later. This arc has a lot of pointless retconning to explain why the Olympians have different names under Rome. Because you know, what comics reader hasn’t been haunted by that profound question?Hippolyta as Wonder Woman leads into a plotline in which she travels back to WW II with Jay Garrick to battle the demoness Dark Angel, now allied with Hitler. “Polly” and the JSA win and Hippolyta opts to stay in WW II, thereby giving DC a Golden Age Wonder Woman again (the shapeshifting transparent thingumajig Diana acquired in a previous Byrne arc now becomes the classic invisible jet). This is one of Byrne’s better reboot ideas — I don’t feel it was necessary (Roy Thomas put a lot of work in to plug the gap left by the Golden Age Amazing Amazon being retconned out) but it works.This led into a new retcon revolving around Donna Troy. It turns out some of her recent tragedies — the death of her ex-husband and child — are the work of Dark Angel. Donna, an orphan rescued by Wonder Woman and adopted by the Amazon — an origin was later reworked to deal with the Perez reboot having WW show up after Wonder Girl — is really a doppelganger of Diana created so she’d have another child to play with on Themyscira. Dark Angel, misreading the doppelganger as Hippolyta’s daughter, has been tormenting her ever since, plunging her into one life after another, always making them miserable or tragic. Now, though, Wonder Woman and Hippolyta finally defeat Dark Angel and stabilize Donna’s existence, also restoring some of the powers she’d lost over the course of rebooting.

This feels like a work-around by Byrne to get back to the Silver Age concept of Donna as Wonder Woman’s sister. It doesn’t simplify continuity though — hers is still complicated — and if the goal was to regain her super-powers there were simpler ways to go about it. Still, it ain’t too bad.

The third reboot of this era, though, is just Byrne being Byrne. Back in the 1970s, Jack Kirby introduced Etrigan the Demon, bound by Merlin to fight against the forces of evil, while also giving him a human identity as Jason Blood. It was a mix of fun tales and forgettable, certainly not up to Kirby’s best. In 1987, Matt gave Etrigan a different origin and backstory in a Demon miniseries that led to new open-ended series that ran three times what Kirby’s did. Byrne devoted an astonishing amount of space to retconning out the reboot and getting Etrigan back to the Kirby version. I know Kirby’s a genius but sorry, Wagner’s take was an improvement. The reboot was a complete waste of space.

Overall, Byrne’s Wonder Woman tenure wasn’t as bad as I remembered but it wasn’t particularly good. But now we’re entering new territory for me as for whatever reason I stopped reading for the next few years. I’ll report on it when I’m another year or so in.

#SFWApro. Wonder Woman covers by Byrne, Demon by Kirby, all rights remain with current holders.

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November 27, 2023 · 5:15 am

Conservatives demand you silly girls get married!

As I wrote last week,  a prime target of the anti-feminist movement back in the 1970s and 1980s was people who didn’t want to get married.  Men who didn’t marry were failures; the only ones who could prevent that were women, by marrying them, making them worthwhile members of society and then having their babies. Women, isn’t it worth giving up your freedom for the greater good of the human race?

While the criticism theoretically targeted men for resisting marriage, it targeted women more: rather than tell men to get their shit together, it was easier to tell women to take over and clean up men’s shit. Although writer Kay Hymowitz sometimes takes this view, she’s also pointed out “It is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn’t know how to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will come along and show you.” And it’s always easier to blame women than blame the capitalist system.

Today’s conservatives are likely to argue they push marriage because it’s good for you: it’s better for your kids, better for your finances, and so on. Therefore we need a big push to get people married! A lot of this is still gussied-up sexism: saying that men need women to amount to something is saying that if men are failures, it’s women’s fault (and again here). It’s also, as noted in last week’s post, another sign of how conservatives hate collective solutions. If “strong families” are the solution to getting people off welfare (they’re not. It’s way more complicated) then all we have to do is push women into marriage and presto, we can get rid of the social safety net.

This was one of the reasons given for Bill Clinton’s huge welfare reform in the 1990s: with less money for single mothers, they’d be forced to find a man. Instead, being forced to find jobs (all that talk about how motherhood is the toughest “job” in the world only applies to middle and upper-class women; poor women who stay home with the kids are lazy bums) convinced a lot of poor women they could make it without men … and they chose to.

They’re not unique. As Anna Louie Sussman writes, lots of women want to get married but can’t find anyone they’re compatible with: “‘It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.’ But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive.” Sociologist Philip Cohen makes the same point: abstract rules about the benefits of marriage may not match up with the options in a given single person’s life.

I suspect this is why so many misogynists long for the days when women had less options. The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto, for example, longs for the days when employers could legally discriminate against women: that would have them back in the home, barefoot and pregnant, trusting in the man to support them. As last week’s post noted, those salaries for men aren’t as common as they used to be, nor were those marriages particularly happy but hey, it’ll get those uppity chicks out of public life, right?

Taranto is also nostalgic for shotgun weddings. Matt Walsh favors compulsory arranged marriages. Other conservatives want to end no-fault divorce, even for abusive marriages. And some conservatives still think it’s a good idea for women to get their “MRS” degree before they leave college. Some people would like women married much sooner (see here too).  The WaPo would also like liberal women to marry lonely conservatives.

I think marriage is wonderful. My wife does too. But it’s not a guarantee of happiness, support, financial stability, health kids or anything else.

For more on misogynist marriage myths, Undead Sexist Cliches is available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holders.

 

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November 26, 2023 · 5:15 am

Hellboy, suffragettes, a Regency ghost and Johnny Quest: books read

I’ve fallen behind on the Hellboy series but I’ve begun catching up, starting with YOUNG HELLBOY: Assault on Castle Death by Mike Mignola, Tom Sniegoski and Craig Rousseau is a lightweight story set right after the BPRD moved from its base in New Mexico to Connecticut. Hellboy’s been laid low by a fever and suffering dreams in which the Lobster summons him to battle against an evil force. Little does Hellboy know that he’s in the crosshairs of a fanatic out to destroy him.

This is fluff that hardly adds anything to the mythos, but it’s fun fluff that I greatly enjoyed. And yes, it’s already added to the Hellboy Chronology.

I like food history and I like women’s history so ALL STIRRED UP: Suffrage Cookbooks, Food and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote by Laura Kumin should have hit my sweet spot perfectly. And it has a great hook, that alongside the marches and protests, many less confrontational suffragettes pushed their message through discussions at tea parties, over food at suffragette-run restaurants, or by selling cookbooks as fund-raisers, which also proved they weren’t abandoning the domestic sphere.

Unfortunately Kumin devotes too much time to just reprinting recipes (though she does a good job explaining how different food was in the pre-WW I era) and way too much time as a straight history of the suffragette movement, culmining in a final chapter about What The Suffrage Movement Means To Us Today. If I knew nothing of the topic, it might have worked better for me.

During my recent Florida trip, my friend Cindy Holbrook mentioned that years after it came out, she got a recent fan letter for her Regency romance LORD SAYER’S GHOST so naturally I reread it (I have all her books). Female lead Prudence and her aunt, who talks to dead people, have moved into their distant, deceased relative Lord Sayer’s mansion: his ghost has driven every other relative out but if they can last the year, they get the house. Except it turns out Sayer’s alive and well, hoping that posing as a ghost will enable him to smoke out his would-be murderer. Trouble is, he’s driven them all away instead. Prudence, however, helps him hatch a plan to try again, even if she does find him tempting her to be very unprudent. This was a fun, charming romp with one or two outstanding lines (“Even her dress knew better than to rustle in her presence.”).

FUTURE QUEST by Jeff Parker and multiple artists (primarily Evan Shaner) is also a fun romp, tailor-made for someone my age. The crime cartel F.E.A.R. are plotting to control an alien monstrosity reaching towards Earth, with Dr. Zinn as their in-house scientist; against them we have Dr. Quest and the rest of the Quest team alongside Birdman and Devi, his new handler. At least that’s how it starts: before long we’ve also got the Impossibles, Space Ghost, Mighty Mytor, Jezebel Jade and Frankenstein Junior in the mix (and that’s not even the complete list). This twelve issue series (two TPBs) was tremendous fun.

#SFWApro. Hellboy cover by Matt Smith, Regency cover uncredited, Future Quest cover by Shaner

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November 25, 2023 · 5:15 am

From the Renaissance to the Federation: movies across time

As TYG is an art history minor, our date night movie was an Art Center (Durham has several) showing of CARAVAGGIO (1986), Derek Janham’s unconventional biopic of the violent Renaissance artist. This was well executed but more arty than entertaining, though TYG, recognizing several scenes modeled on the artist’s paintings, got much more out of it. Plus she found a frequently semi-naked Sean Bean as the artists lover more of a plus than me (go figure). The cast also includes Robbie Coltrane and Michael Gough as church officials and some woman named Tilda Swinton as Bean’s lover. Below, the artist’s Inspiration of St. Matthew. “I did it for you.”

Moving to the 1960s, STOLEN KISSES (1968) has Truffaut’s self-insert Antoine Donel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), last seen in Antoine and Collette, struggling to adult and frequently failing. After getting discharged from the military he loses his job as a hotel desk clerk when he lets a private detective into the wrong room. He then goes to work for the detective agency but proves equally inept, finally falling hard for a married woman (Delphine Seyrig) involved in his investigation. I expected everything to come crashing down but Antoine ends up in reasonably good shape; the movie is much better than reasonably good. “You wrote to me yesterday and the answer is … me.”

Moving to the 21st century we have BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (2012). Annoyingly this is billed as fantasy but only in the I Kill Giants sense that the young protagonist — a black girl living with her dad in a low-lying area near New Orleans — frequently uses fantasies of giant beasts to deal with her problems, variously including death, tropical storms and floods. Well done, regardless, so I’m not that annoyed. “They’s got to live in the woods and eat grass and steal underpants.”

Going boldly where no-one has gone before — STAR TREK: Of Gods and Men (2008) was a fan film that boasts Nichelle Nichols as Uhura, Walter Koenig as Chekhov, Tim Russ as Tuvok, Alan Ruck as Captain Harriman, Grace Lee Jones as Rand and Cirroc Lofton, Arlene Martel (T’Pring) and Garrett Wang in supporting roles. The plot has Charlie X, finally free of his alien keepers, using the Guardian of Forever to erase Kirk from reality.

Next thing you know, the universe looks a lot like the evil Mirror, Mirror universe with Uhura and Chekhov in different ways fighting back. Charlie shows up, now repenting what he’s done, but is it too late to undo it? This was a real treat, though it reportedly disturbed Paramount enough that they started cracking down on fan films from that point on. Worth seeing on YouTube. “Who decides the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few — and who gave them the right to decide that in the first place?”

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holder.

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November 24, 2023 · 3:54 pm

I almost forgot!

I’m taking today off and that includes not blogging about my week; next week I guess I’ll do two weeks’ worth. But here’s a close-up of Snowdrop that should make you glad you’re reading this.#SFWApro

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November 24, 2023 · 5:15 am

Cats staring through windows

Here’s Wisp, gazing at the outdoors. She does that a lot since she became an inside cat, but I understand that’s a common thing with cats.And here’s Snowdrop demanding attention, and Trixie giving it to him.#SFWApro.

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November 23, 2023 · 5:15 am

Giving thanks

Following my fall on the driveway last month, I had a bandage on my bleeding knee until a few days int0 November. I removed it and found this baby.This seems like a good day to give thanks that I didn’t take a lot more damage from the fall. My health is good. I have an awesome, amazingly intelligent wife whom I love and who loves me. We own a house. We have great pets.

And I get to work at a career I love.

Do I credit luck? God’s blessings? I’ve done both at different times. Either way I have a lot to feel thankful for, and believe me I do.

I hope y’all have some blessings to count. And if you don’t, I hope that changes before too long.

#SFWApro.

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November 22, 2023 · 5:08 am

Wonder Woman meets Hercules and Goes to Hell! John Byrne Year Two

The first year of John Byrne’s three-year run on Wonder Woman was, as I’ve said, better than I expected. The second year is also better than I remembered but I don’t think it’s good — way more bland than Byrne’s reboot of Superman and way, way below his X-Men work with Claremont (much as they got on each other’s nerves, they really brought out the best in each other’s talents).

His first story arc is a four-issue reworking of an old Hawkman story, “The Men Who Moved the World.” The story involves an ancient civilization buried under the Antarctic ice as conditions on Earth have changed; they want to change it back so their city can live again. Hawkman resolved that in one issue. Wonder Woman takes four. While I like the ending resolution relying on common sense and negotiation rather than fisticuffs, it’s not a threat that needed to take that long.

It’s significant because the civilization gives Wonder Woman a shapeshifting, transparent device that can shape itself in response to her mental commands. For example, becoming an invisible jet, just like the pre-Crisis WW had. This seems like a pointless retcon but I think it’s a sign of what Byrne had planned for his third year.

Second, we meet the Champion, AKA Harold Campion, a Gateway City millionaire who gets involved in the fight and proclaims his intent to make Wonder Woman his. She finds herself falling under his spell, an aspect that gets dropped without explanation. It turns out he’s Hercules, taking mortal form to get revenge on the Amazons for his centuries of imprisonment under Paradise Island (something we learned about during George Perez’s War of the Gods arc). However he realizes he was being a dick and apologizes for his intent to seduce and humiliate Hippolyta’s daughter.

Then comes a pointless two-parter bringing back the Cheetah and — typical for Byrne’s passion for retcons — pushing her back towards villainy after William Messner-Loebs made the effort to reform her. However this begins a new plotline which involves Wonder Woman turning back to clay. Trying to figure it out she talks through her life to this point, leading to an uninspired 10th anniversary issue (cover above) which rehashes the post-Crisis stories.

It soon becomes clear that with the Olympians departing from the mortal world, all the Amazons are turning into clay. Investigating eventually leads Donna and the resurrected Artemis into hell for a battle with the demon prince Neron. This gives Byrne another chance at a retcon: Artemis didn’t just win the Wonder Woman title because Hippolyta rigged the contest but because Hippolyta also transferred some of Diana’s power to Artemis. Apparently having Artemis even close to being a match for Diana was too much for Byrne to take.

Unfortunately the power-stealing is still in operation so things don’t go well in Hell, culminating with Wonder Woman getting a lethal blast of eldritch energy. Despite the best efforts of the Justice League and demonologist Jason Blood, it appears the second year will end with the Amazing Amazon dead. Say it ain’t so, Joe — er, John!

I’ll be back hopefully next week with the resolution.

#SFWApro. Covers by Joe Kubert, George Perez and Jose L. Garcia-Lopez, all rights remain with current holders

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