Things I am Excited For: Avatar: Legend of Korra

One of the hard things about being a geek -- and by "hard" I do not mean actually difficult but I mean "maybe I should rethink my life choice" -- is that even though you may have loads of stuff to read and watch and otherwise enjoy and engage in, there's still that moment where you get way too excited about the next big thing. It will never be enough!

So while I'm really enjoying the Twin Peaks and the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episodes I'm watching, the Fruits Basket manga I'm consuming, and the little bit of headway I've made on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- hey reading that for fun is geeky -- I'm still excited over the news that came out this week for Avatar: Legend of Korra.


Image courtesy Nickelodeon, taken from WSJ.com

You probably do not need me to tell you that Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Nickelodeon television that is not to be confused with either James Cameron's blockbuster movie nor the cowardly, racist and reportedly not very good live action film it inspired -- is amazing. Like the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World comic series, it's a great example of a western media learning from anime not just by aping its style, but by getting to the heart of its appeal and making something new. It's also brought Eastern Culture and a plethora of strong female characters into the homes of the young and the young at heart.

The spinoff series, which will have a female Avatar as its lead, was announced last year but this week was the first time we saw her face. The Wall Street Journal also has an interview with the creators where it's announced Nickelodeon has ordered 14 more episodes. Good news upon better news, there.

I was a Janey-Come-Lately to Avatar: The Last Airbender. I knew while it was airing that people enjoyed it, often saying it was a great show because it had a serious, involved story that could be enjoyed by adults as well as kids. While I think they overemphasized the seriousness of it (the show has a lot of jokey pratfalls that are meant to appeal to children) I loved almost all aspects of it.

Yet I hadn't realized quite how much it had meant to people until the controversy surrounding the movie. As a woman, as someone who was once a young girl, I was overjoyed by the great amount of strong and very different female characters that populate the story. (And they're different in both personality and design, which is another great thing.) I am white, and while I grew up searching for female characters to relate to and enjoy and didn't always find much, I'm sure those who grew up non-white found even less.

It's sort of a bummer that it's mostly hated because people thought it was bad more than people thought it was racist. There are still some who will argue that just because a character is entrenched in Asian and Inuit culture and writes in Asian languages and uses Asian styles of fighting DOESN'T MEAN HE CAN'T BE WHITE (OR WHITE WITH A TAN) and that makes me depressed. Of course, the fact that the live action movie was both racist and bad perhaps speaks to a general lack of care inherent in its creation in general. The two go hand in hand in this case.

Not that such sad news doesn't make this any less funnier:



Ahhhh, that never gets old.

But the anticipation for this new show makes it better, at the very least. And I'm really happy to have this to look forward to.

That being said, if Korra falls in love with Katara and Aang's kid I'm going to find that a little creepy. Your girlfriend can't be your dad. I draw the line here.

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Meanwhile, I'd be remiss if I as a white blogger were to discuss Asian culture for entertainment and not acknowledge the tragic earthquakes and tsunami in Japan. Please give what you can and try to do no harm.

White Tiger Was All Hook and No Bait: A Reflection on Bringing in Big Names in Other Fields

Occasionally over my years collecting/reading Marvel Comics I've picked up a mini-series here or there spotlighting a superheroine. This sometimes turns out to be a mistake, and when it does, it usually turns out to be a mistake in the exact same way. What's fascinating about Marvel's 2007 White Tiger miniseries is that it manages to have the same problems as comics back in the 1990s despite being written by a "name" writer, specifically fantasy Young Adult fantasy writer Tamora Pierce and her husband Timothy Liebe.

Reading the book was a disappointment, especially since while I have not yet read Pierce's books, both she and Liebe made mostly-favorable impressions on me when they were active on Livejournal near the time of the mini-series' release. Unfortunately, the book is something of a mess. It's saddled with an unmemorable gang/police procedural plot. The writers can't seem to decide if the heroine, Angela Del Toro, is super-serious or a wiseacre. And then there are the guest stars. The numerous, numerous, numerous guest stars.

I feel like I've read a number of miniseries like this one - the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman mini-series in the 90s being the one that comes to mind the most right now. Miniseries that spotlight a superheroine but put her in an overly-complicated plot that requires a lot of infodumping, contains a lot of continuity links and is dreadfully lacking in any human drama. All in all, the entire enterprise feels like an attempt to spotlight a character without knowing why she should be spotlighted and without even the confidence that the character can stand on her own.

Yet what bothers me about the book when I look back on it is not so much that the comic was mediocre. What bothers me is I can't figure out what Marvel was trying to do here. Presumably, putting a name writer on a book creates crossover appeal. Say what you want about the comic book adaptation of Anita Blake, but it's pretty clear the prime purpose is to get fans of the original novels to purchase the work in a new format. It may be a format they're unfamiliar with (comics) but it's a story they heard before and thus may be a good entry point for at least some of them.

But who would want this comic as an entry point? I've been reading Marvel Comics since I was 11-years-old, and while I admittedly don't know much about Heroes for Hire (case in point: I thought this comic was going to be about a tiger in human form) I had very little idea what was going on here. Many of the guest stars motivations' heavily involve things going on in other books and the book contains inside jokes that mostly play to longtime readers. It's the extreme inside of inside baseball. One might argue this was done so readers of this book would be interested in other properties, but I sort of doubt that. I can't imagine anyone becoming interested in X-Men because Emma Frost shows up for one page to point out something insignificant and snark at the heroine, never to be seen again.

There's been a lot of speculation and thought on the comic book industry and the video game industry's attempts to bring in outside writers who've succeeded in other fields, most of it coming down on the side of disfavor. I don't think it has to be that way. A writer who succeeded in one field could very well succeed in another.

But that shouldn't be taken as self-evident. Crossover appeal also shouldn't be taken as self-evident. When I worked in a bookstore, I remember telling a Jodi Picoult fan that Picoult was writing a Wonder Woman comic, and the fan, far from being happy about the news, glared at me in disbelief and wondered why Picoult would do something like that.

Also, if you're famous in another field or not, if you write a mini-series about a rarely used character, please teach me something about that character, please make me want to read her somewhere else, please make it count. Because I need no prodding to pick up a story about an FBI agent who wears a tiger costume and fights bad guys, but the writer, whoever she is, needs to give me the a reason to want to keep reading it.

Battle Royale vs. The Hunger Games: A Mostly Positive Discussion

In my secret identity, I'm a reporter for a small weekly newspaper. It was on assignment at a library when I learned about The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. Trying to entice a preteen to give me a candid quote, I asked her what her favorite book was.

"The Hunger Games," she said.

"Oh, what's that book about?" I asked, both trying to get her to open up more.

"It's about a bunch of kids who are put in an arena and have to fight each other to the death until only one is left."

"Huh ..." I said. "I thought I already read that book ..."

Of course I hadn't only read that book. I'd seen the movie and read the 12 volume manga series as well. I was first exposed to the story of Battle Royale, a story about teenagers who are put in an arena and forced to fight each other to the death until only one is left, when I bought the first movie on VHS tape at a comics convention and loved it. Then I read the novel by Koshun Takami upon which it was based and loved that a lot better. Then I read the manga by Masayuki Taguchi and that was ... um, interesting ... I won't say I like it, but I appreciate how it at least didn't change as much of the story as the movie did.

So I was a little skeptical of this newcomer on the block with largely the same premise. Yet my best friend really liked it, so I decided to give it a try. Friends and strangers, if you have loved Battle Royale and have been avoiding The Hunger Games because of that, don't. It's a great story, and there's enough differences to make both stand on their own.

Actually, for me. If you wanted me to sum up the novel Battle Royale vs. the first book of The Hunger Games I would say this:

Battle Royale is a better exploration of the premise. The Hunger Games has better central characters.

There are a couple of superficial differences so let me get them out of the way through the use of a chart ...

	Battle Royale	The Hunger Games
The setting is ...	In an alternate present Japan where the country won WWII and is run by a dictatorship that keeps the populace in a state of perpetual fear	In a future North America that has been ravaged by natural disaster and is run by a capitol that keeps its surrounding 13 12 districts in a state of perpetual fear
The government runs the contest to ...	Terrorize the country and keep the populace from revolting	Terrorize the country and keep the populace from revolting AGAIN
Contestants are chosen ...	By picking one high school class at random, gassing them and surreptitiously moving them to an arena	By holding a lottery of all children from the ages of 12 to 18 and picking two from each district - one boy and one girl - to fight in the arena
Contestants enter the arena	Staggered one by one, each getting a few minutes head start	All at once
How they distribute weapons/supplies	Each contestant gets a backpack at the beginning with supplies and one weapon or special item, which can range from good to a piece of crap (although they fight in their school uniforms)	Contestants fight over them in a free-for-all battle at the beginning, or get them through "sponsors" watching the show who choose to send them items (although the gamemakers give them appropriate clothing at the beginning)
The gamemakers keep track/control of the characters ...	Through collars around the contestants' necks	Through unseen cameras
They keep the players moving throughout the arena ...	By rigging certain areas after a period of time so if contestants walk into them, their collars will explode and kill them	By flooding an area with dangers such as fire, floods, lightning or mutant animal attacks
The novel centers around the struggles of ...	Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa, whom he likes	Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, who likes her
The "veteran" player is ...	Shogo Kawada, who won a previous Battle Royale and acts as mentor to Shuya and Noriko in the arena	Haymitch Abernathy, who won a previous Hunger Games, and mentors Katniss and Peeta before the games begin
Speaking of which, the names ...	Are normal for the country where the novel takes place	Are stupid

In many ways, the story plays out largely the same, with teenagers killing other teenagers but more people surviving than they should. Yet both novels are different in their focus, which causes strengths and detriments in both works.

Battle Royale is more concerned with the contest itself, and the effect it has on the players, whereas The Hunger Games is more interested in the main characters and the world itself. This isn't a bad thing for The Hunger Games, especially as the trilogy goes on, and we end up learning a lot about the world of Panem whereas the dictatorship government in Battle Royale is very vague.

Yet it does mean Battle Royale comes off as the more realistic of the two, and not just because in The Hunger Games the arena will occasionally get flooded with mutant werewolves. With a larger cast of characters and an omniscient viewpoint that jumps from student to student, the novel plays out as a series of episodes of mini-tragedies, from the couple that would rather kill themselves than play to the alliance of girls that ends up self-destructing in a hail of suspicion and bullets after some poisoned food is delivered to the wrong person. Not all of the pieces work. There's a stereotypical gay character that angered me so much I considered giving up the book after his chapter, and the main villains' origins aren't great, but I feel like these stories are the heart of the book. These stories are mostly absent in The Hunger Games, too, which sticks mostly to Katniss' point of view and draws most of the rest of its characters (except for Rue and Thresh) in broad, flat strokes.

So much so that in all of the incarnations of the story I find the main characters Shuya and Noriko dull by comparison. Even if you set aside their terrible manga versions, whom reach their nadir when Shuya cries to the corpose of the psychopath teenager who had been stalking them for three days that they could have escaped the island together, I never remember them as well, despite their prominent pagetime.

Still, one could say - as my best friend did - the advantage they have over The Hunger Games heroine Katniss is that they are mostly normal people, whereas Katniss' history of hunting and trapping makes her more powerful and self-sufficient than the average teenager. (Although, as another friend of mine pointed out, the scene where they and the more-experienced Shogo [SPOILER ALERT] take out a ship of armed guards after three days of trauma is rather superhero-like. [/SPOILER ALERT])

Yet at the end of the day I do feel more of an affinity for Katniss than for Shuya or Peeta than for Noriko. Part of this is probably personal preference. I'd rather see a story where the female character is the active fighter while the male character needs to be protected but can camouflage really well, than a story where the two main male characters fight while the female character makes encouraging speeches and loads the magazines.

On the other hand, for all of her skills, Katniss is one of those rare beasts in genre stories: a heroine who takes damage but keeps going. Katniss being a 16-year-old who can shoot squirrels with a bow and arrow may be a little unrealistic, but the explosion that knocks out the hearing in one of her ears brings her back to earth again. She may have some advantages in the fight, but the road is never easy. This isn't to say that Shuya and Noriko never get hurt -- they do, and badly. Yet I can't help but be taken in by a heroine who remains active even through her struggles because it is so rare. In an age where most superheroines in movies have to be beautiful rather than hurt, it's very refreshing.

I also like Katniss and Peeta better, I suppose, because their story continues. They have more time to grow before and after the games, and more time is focused on their romance (and, yes, the notorious love triangle with Gale). Of course this is due to the story structures. [SPOILER ALERT] The destiny of Shuya and Noriko is to run off into the sunset forever under the eyes of the government, whereas Katniss and Peeta will both have a role in changing it. [/SPOILER ALERT]

Once again, this is because the stories have different goals. That one doesn't do what the other does doesn't mean either story is bad. I'd encourage people who haven't read one to read the other, and vice versa. It's impossible to not compare, and undoubtedly what will attract a person to one story may be a repellent for another. Yet just because one exists doesn't mean the other can't, and they're, in the end, both worthy of consideration.

No, it's not "Twilight for Boys." Scott Pilgrim and the Bizarre Comparisons.

(Watch out for spoilers!)

Hello blogosphere! I apologize for being away for so long. I got a new job in June and so even the minuscule time I had put aside to build this blog was flushed away. Hopefully things will even out and I'll get back to posting on a semi-regular basis.

So, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie has come and hopefully will still hold on in theaters for another week or two. Personally, if it doesn't, I say "que sera." Some seem to be upset about the low box office, but I'm not. I don't really see why the low box office is such a tragedy, at least for fans. Sure, it's upsetting for everyone who made it, but I don't think there's anything fans have to lose by it. It's not like Serenity, where the low box office meant the fans wouldn't see the story continue (at least not with real actors moving around and stuff - there's always comic books), or with The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, where the low box office meant the later books in the trilogy wouldn't be adapted. The Scott Pilgrim movie adapted the entire comic book series. The story is complete in book and movie form. There's nothing more to wait for. The only thing it could possibly affect is O'Malley's chances to get another work adapted if he makes another work worthy of adaptation, and I think by that point there may be enough X factors that the movie gets made, anyway. (I think Edgar Wright is popular enough not to be affected in the long run by this.)

Anyway, I liked the movie very much. I started reading the comic book series after the first trailer hit, but I had heard good things about it previously. It's a lot of fun. It's a series that takes the standard everyplot of a video game - male character fights baddies to save female character - and overlays it in an indie-comic style romance to awesome effect. Also, despite its plot's origin as a chauvinistic trope, the comic book has awesome female characters.

O'Malley makes a huge step toward mitigating the sexism of the original trope by not having the only female character be "the princess." We see all of Ramona Flowers' (said girl) ex-boyfriends and her ex-girlfriend, who Scott has to fight. Yet Scott also has his own exes to contend with (albeit not in a battling way) in Envy Adams and Lisa Miller, both of whom have unique goals and personalities in addition to their story function to throw Scott's hypocrisies in sharp relief. There's also ex-girlfriend and Scott's bandmember Kim, who is the character in the series I would have wanted to be a few years ago: not at the center of attention, but nevertheless a sarcastic commenter on the action -- the one who has the clear picture of the whole situation. Sister Stacey Pilgrim has a similar role, but nevertheless a different personality and she remains distinct from Kim. The series also doesn't stop from having a lot of minor women characters who don't do much and have more one-note personalities, like Julie Powers, but no more or less than characters like Joseph or Kim's friend who Scott can never remember. At any rate, there are many women "outside" the standard video game plot, many of whom are retained in the movie and ensure Ramona isn't "the girl character, so naturally she must be rescued."

And there are also two main characters in the movie and comic I haven't even discussed: Knives Chau, Scott's most recent ex/sometime stalker, and Roxy Richter, because even in the 90s you usually had at least one female villain in a video game. Both of these female characters are crucial to the plot, and deserving of full blog posts on their own.

Of course, there's also Ramona, who isn't just a princess ... or much of a princess at all. In addition to helping fight some of the evil exes herself, both in the comic and movie, she also has her own emotional journey to go through. Ramona is my favorite character in the series, and the one I, in the end, find I relate to the most. I like how in the comics one of the main points is how she's revealed to not really be a perfect dream girl, but sometimes an ordinary person who has to go to work and has annoying roommates and sometimes an outright bad person who makes hurtful decisions. Scott has to forgive her, but, just as Scott has a bad self to defeat - literalized in the nega-Scott, Ramona has her own past to get over - literalized when she breaks the shackles holding her to Gideon. Her victory is Scott's victory, but also their victory, and something that cements them as a couple. It is, unfortunately, something I believe the movie muddles at the end where Knives fights Gideon with Scott, but some of it at least gets in, and the movie does a good job at bringing out Ramona's good and bad sides.

I hope what I'm getting at is coming through - this is a franchise that isn't perfect, but it has a lot to offer to female geeks in its characters. So it's mystifying, and somewhat frustrating, to see this "Twilight for Boys" comparison to come up.

It's tempting to scream out, "But Scott Pilgrim is good and Twilight is not!" but these things are, of course, relative, and that's not helpful. It's not even why the comparison irritates me.

It irritates me because even if you go by the basest, broadest stereotypes of what male and female readers like in comics, Scott Pilgrim is for boys AND girls.

Before any Twilight fans jump on me for this (any more than they would have for saying the series is bad), I just want to say that yes, I know Twilight has some male fans - my brother likes the series far more than I ever will (and yes, he recognizes the problematic elements of the series). Yet, going by broad stereotypes, most males won't read a heavily romance-based story with a female protagonist where the men do most of their fighting off-stage.

On the other hand, let's look at the broad stereotypes of female comic geeks. First, most girl geeks read manga. Hey, Scott Pilgrim is in a manga-sized format! Most girls like romance. Scott Pilgrim is about romance! Girls like pretty clothes. O'Malley said in an interview with the now-defunct Comics Foundry that he puts a lot of care into how his female characters dress, and most of them wear hip, trendy clothes that usually aren't all about showing skin. Girls' first introduction to anime was usually Sailor Moon. Scott Pilgrim has a reference to Sailor Moon!

Honestly, there was a reason that when Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass first got his blank-slate girlfriend into comics he did it with Scott Pilgrim. It's the type of comic - like Sandman or Blankets or Strangers in Paradise or any other popular comic without superheroes - that is traditionally considered girlfriend-bait. This status is so well known it was used in a movie that, while I disliked it, had a larger box office than Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the reference to it was intended to send a specific message to its adolescent audience: "girls will like this comic."

So why don't the book's critics get that? Older critics can be excused from not knowing the intricacies of fandom but younger, geekier critics have no excuse. It's frustrating, and I feel like it's another sign of how female members of fandom are often unacknowledged by the mainstream at large. Even something that has all the stereotypical signs of being ours is not any longer.

Yet now that I've covered the "for Boys" aspect, it's time to go back to the "Twilight" aspect. I've talked about this a bit with MadMarvelGirl on Twitter and, yes, I can see it in the broadest sense. There's a love triangle at the center with one character who the protagonist perceives as perfect and another, younger character who the protagonist will never be in love with but doesn't want to hurt their feelings. There's wish fulfillment involved. It may be hard to see what the perceived "perfect" character sees in the rather ordinary protagonist.

Yet I still find these comparisons rather superficial, and more based in the fact that we as a culture have Twilight on our minds than anything else. It's like how fanfic writers somehow seem to draw connections between their favorite character on a television show and the latest Top 40 hit. The world gets colored by our obsessions, and whether we like or hate it we're obsessed with Twilight as a culture.

I do not think the biggest criticisms of the Twilight series apply to Scott Pilgrim at all, anyway. Twilight has been criticized for not being conscious of its genre ("Stephanie Meyer hasn't read Dracula! The vampires sparkle!"), whereas O'Malley is a consumer of comic books, manga and video games and peppers his work with references. Twilight has been accused of not treating the appalling actions of its characters as abusive or controlling and rather as "just fine" or not the big deal that they should be, whereas Scott's dating of a high schooler is criticized by all his friends and most of the characters have to deal with the consequences of their poor actions. Twilight usually fades out before any action scene but Scott Pilgrim revels in the action scenes and usually expends most of the creativity on them. Plus, both stories deal with very different types of inner angst - Twilight is about the rush of first teenage love whereas most of Scott Pilgrim's early twentysomething characters have all been burned by romance in some way, and all the characters in the triangle - Scott, Ramona and Knives - reach the end of their journey when they earn self-respect. Twilight's characters win when they find the only one for them - their victories are contingent on another person and Scott Pilgrim's characters' victories are contingent on themselves.

So to critics from a girl geek fan: Scott Pilgrim is not Twilight, and Scott Pilgrim is for us, too. Although that doesn't mean all girls like Scott Pilgrim ... or Twilight, for that matter.

Iron Man 2 and the Hype Letdown

I hadn't been extremely excited about the first Iron Man movie when it came out -- my previous experience with the hero was some crossovers, a few of the old comics I'd read off a CD of the first 10 issues of all of the major Silver Age titles and the '90s cartoon, which was just okay. (I mostly watched it for the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman, who was incredibly dull.) Plus, I was cynical about comics in general at the time. Nevertheless, I ended up loving the film and, temporarily, became an enthusiastic comics fan again. I even found myself raising my hands and making a "wooo!" noise when the after-the-credits scene ended.

Not many feminist comic bloggers at the time agreed with me. While not a female-focused movie, I thought it made some strides in the right direction. Love interest/secretary Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) had the willpower, intelligence and wit to match the hero/her boss Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and she was crucial to multiple elements of the crusade to save the day. I also appreciated greatly how the female journalist who Tony Stark loves-and-leaves in the beginning is not just dismissed as a stupid floozy but is the one to call Tony Stark out on his attempt to sell Iron Man as his bodyguard and not his alternate identity. I thought it undercut Stark's sexism from earlier in the movie. Others, though, thought the movie didn't do enough in that area and that Stark's sexism was still celebrated, and thus condemned the movie. I respect the opinion, although I'm still mystified why Iron Man was given the thumbs-down for something that might be a parody but The Dark Knight's use of the most cliched plotline for girlfriend characters (i.e. kill them for maximum angst) and shunting aside of a young potential Barbara "Batgirl/Oracle" Gordon in favor of a son who doesn't exist in the comics was pretty much ignored.

Anyway, I get off track. While I suspected I wouldn't like Iron Man 2 as much as I liked the first -- no hype can replicate the surprise of the first movie -- I nevertheless thought the women would continue to be awesome. So I'm sad to say I came away a bit disappointed.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie. It's fun. Downey is fun. Paltrow is fun. Cheadle is fun. Rourke is fun. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the highest order -- I don't think anyone really believes a billionaire's spectacular super-suit would bring peace to the Middle East -- but the original comics require a large amount of suspension of disbelief as well. (I remember talking to a non-comics fan about the first movie and she told me she couldn't get past the terrorists letting Stark build his super-weapon right under their noses. I couldn't argue with it.) Overall, I liked it.

Still, I couldn't help but feel that Pepper lost a lot of her edge in this movie. I very much hated the last scene, when Pepper in full freak-out mode tells Tony she can't continue to be CEO because she worries too much about him and can't take the pressure. Then they kiss.

This came as a shock, and at the time I wondered where it had come from. Whenever I remembered Pepper in the previous scenes, particularly the one where Tony tries to win her favor with strawberries as apology for when he got drunk, made an ass of himself and fought with Rhodey. To me, it seemed like her curt refusal was evidence of her staying tough with a guy who hasn't quite done the right thing yet, even if she may be a little regretful about having to do so. Was I supposed to have seen it that way? Was that scene actually supposed to be about how she is clearly cracking under the pressure? Did I have an expectation of Pepper as a strong woman that perhaps did not exist?

I don't mean to say that Pepper isn't allowed to have moments of weakness. Far too often, lazy writers often try to show women are strong by making them flawless, and that doesn't make them compelling heroes. In fact, I'll admit it, I don't quite know who won that argument in the last scene. She did go through a lot -- maybe is deserving of a little bit of a freakout, and if she stays on as CEO for Iron Man 3 I really don't have much to complain about. Still, I found the last scene left a bad taste of my mouth.

And speaking of women who are shown to be strong by not having any flaws and being amazing law student/underwear model/trained in all manner of fighting arts/computer hacker/super spies ...

There is a lot to like about Natasha Romanoff/The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), but as my friend Kayleigh said after we both saw the movie the same day, her character was mostly just "boobs and asskicking." I (and she) appreciated how the movie ended up beating the famous Bechdel's Law and had Natasha and Pepper work together and talk in a non-competitive manner, yet I felt a little let down. Even her big fight scene wasn't too much more than we already saw in the trailers. I'm happy she'll be in the Avengers movie, I suppose, but at this point that's only because the filmmakers seem to have no interest in adding The Wasp onto the roster.

I guess in the end, when it comes to women and this movie, I remain feeling let down, albeit not in a manner I expected. There were elements of the first movie that I could defend in contrast to Tony having stripper flight attendants in his jet, yet I don't know if I could totally argue that Pepper and Natasha redeem the sexy Iron Man dancing girls in this one. Oh well, at least War Machine only improved from his first appearance.

This Comic-Book Related List from a Mainstream Magazine Surprisingly Does Not Suck

Yesterday, Darren Franich of EW.com published an article titled 10 Comic Book Heroines We Want to See in Movies! and I have to tell you: it's really great. The choices are excellent -- from the obvious "Why didn't we get this five years ago?" Wonder Woman movie to the obscure-but-no-less-amazing Fantomah movie starring Lady Gaga! (Can she act? Does anyone care?) -- and the list is clearly written by someone who knows and loves comics.

I'm surprised at how good this article is because in my experience mainstream articles on comic books, even if they're not the obvious "Bam! Pow! Comics Aren't for Kids Anymore!" type, are usually written by people without a knowledge of the genre. Thus we get articles where Mark Millar can say he sets his comic books in the real world and the journalist will just write it down and Maxim can declare Robin the lamest superhero ever. Yet when you read the article you can tell it's by someone who has a knowledge of the original stories and who is thinking about these female characters as characters and franchise starters, not as a way to get a sexy actress into a skintight suit.

I also find this article significant because it's by a mainstream source and it naturally assumes that audiences want to see good movies about superheroines. Since Warner Brothers apparently can't, this is also something remarkable.

Some years back, I was interviewed by a Canadian newspaper about superheroine movies, and why they didn't do well. Is the public not interested? the reporter asked. Is it sexism? I told the reporter the reason why most superheroine movies don't do well is that they are bad. It's not that nobody wanted to see Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl fighting bad guys, but Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl were not good movies, so nobody went. Unfortunately, that's never the message studio executives get.

I unfortunately can't see that mentality changing any time soon. Even when women turn out to be the big spenders for a franchise, like the unavoidable Twilight series, Hollywood tends to be tone deaf. Still, it's nice to have an acknowledgement that yes, the audience for superheroine movies is out there, and from such a major source as Entertainment Weekly as well.

Also, I don't know about Franich but I want a She-Hulk movie. Preferably a meta-one where our heroine teases Edward Norton about Fight Club and breaks the fourth wall. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

The Kick-Ass Movie is Not Feminist (and Neither is Hit-Girl)

(In-depth spoilers for the movie follow.)

I do realize I'm late in discussing this, and the reason is because for a long while I didn't want to see this movie. I'm not a fan of Mark Millar. His Marvel Knights Spider-Man was okay but he never seemed to get the character's voice completely right and I really hated Wanted (although, to be fair, more of that has to do with the art than his writing) . I haven't read the Kick-Ass comic, either.

Yet I eventually changed my mind after I read essays and exclamations proclaiming Hit-Girl as a feminist character. This did not sound convincing to me: a young girl who is superheroing because her "Big Daddy"has groomed her to be a killer is inherently a character without agency and thus not feminist. Still, I decided to see the movie for myself and found my opinion changed from "That's not feminist" to "No, really, that's not feminist."

I can see why people would want to think it is, and why people would like Hit-Girl. She beats up a bunch of bad dudes, does it better than most of the male superheroes in the story, makes semi-clever quips while doing it and does it (ostensibly) wearing clothes that don't sexualize her. I can see where that appeals to the id brain of most female superheroine fans, and I will admit I'm not totally immune.

But as I said in my last post, sometimes the way to tell if a work is feminist is not how the story treats its heroine, but how it treats the other women in the story. So we're going to talk about them before we even get to Hit-Girl.

The movie begins on a bad note for women. It starts with our hero, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson), describing his life as a comic book-reading loser who can't get girls and who masturbates all the time. Dave gets explicit about the latter point, describing how he fantasizes about his teacher: an older, buxom white woman. The film then shows Dave's fantasy wherein the teacher urges Dave to touch her breasts, and then takes off her shirt and unhooks her bra. The film cuts away before she can take reveal her breasts, but has no compunctions about cutting to a photo of two topless African tribal women on Dave's computer. In his voiceover narration, Dave explains his interest in the black women by saying, essentially, that he'll masturbate to anything -- with the clear implication that for anyone to find such women sexy is unthinkable. Essentially it's anti-feminist on two levels -- for one, it upholds the offensive double-standard that "white women's breasts are pornography, black women's breasts are anthropology" and also specifically codes an interest in black women as less desirable than an interest in white women.

Then there are the girlfriends in the story, Dave's girlfriend Katie and her Asian-American friend, who becomes a girlfriend for one of Dave's friends. Neither of these girls are real people, but are a male geek-specific fantasy of how some male geeks hope girls will act when they start dating them.

Katie is a beautiful blank slate of a girl, the type imagined by the myriad and maligned "How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Comics" essays. Her one unique interest (if you don't count "lattes") -- working at a methadone clinic, only serves to code her as "kind" and to connect her to the main plot of Dave fighting the mafia. Other than that, her role is to breathlessly state how amazing it is now that Dave is introducing her to the amazing world of comics. "I love Scott Pilgrim," she says breathlessly, "but I'm not into that superhero stuff." Although it's okay, after she's read what are considered the "girlfriend bait" comics, there's a scene later where she tells Dave "I really enjoyed those Ditko-era Spider-Man comics you gave me" as he rubs self-tanning oil onto her nearly-naked body.

An aside: There's a subplot too complicated and offensive to explain right now about how Dave is able to hang out with Katie because Katie thinks he's gay. Yet no intelligent straight woman who has respect for her gay male friend would ask him to rub tanning oil onto her body. Most gay men will see it as a cheap, titillating ploy for a girl to get an attractive guy's hands on her but make it "okay," and will ditch her for a woman who sees him as a real person and not as a handbag or a living slash fanfic fantasy posthaste.

Anyway, eventually Dave tells Katie he's straight and he's Kick-Ass, and unlike in the comic they get together. In their first love scene, Dave and Katie share a kiss, and then, like a romantic, he goes straight for the tits. Because that's what geek romance is really about, right? The guy finally getting to touch the breasts that have eluded him for so long. You may think I'm being pedantic or a prude about this, but nothing else happens in the scene. Katie doesn't try to touch him -- she just basically smiles like she's doing him a favor. The scene is not about two people who love each other getting together. It's about how Dave gets to touch tits -- that's its entire point.

About Katie's friend, all I can say is she and Dave's friend get together, even though Dave's friend sniffs her hair like a creepazoid when she's not looking. Later, he says "I'm going to explain comics to you" and she sits next to him and listens with wide eyes as if she's a five-year-old. Later she's hanging off him.

So, really, that's how the Kick-Ass movie treats its adult women: as blank objects of desire to be filled by geek males with their own interests, or freaks.

And now (finally) Hit-Girl. As I mentioned earlier, she's capable and strong. I liked her. She and her father are the best parts of the movie, and Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage put in really funny performances. If the tone of the movie didn't wildly vacillate between a humorous dark parody of superheroes and a "serious" exploration of what superheroes would be like in the real world, I might have liked them better. But the movie wants you to see Hit-Girl's story as one of a child who isn't allowed to be a child by her revenge-driven father who makes killing a game to her, but also be gleeful about a child brutally murdering mobsters. It wants to eat the cake and have it, too.

Some will say I don't get it, because they mistake this hypocricy of tone Millar employs as satire or a joke on the reader. No. It doesn't work. This movie doesn't work. You can't claim this is a realistic movie and then have the hero fly in to save Hit-Girl on a jetpack.

Defenders of the movie have also said critics of the movie are only offended because Hit-Girl is female, and they would be fine if a young boy was brainwashed by a parent or parental figure into being a superhero. For one, I would not be. For two, the problem for me does not lie so much in the concept but, as I mentioned before, how it's presented. One of my favorite DC characters is the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, who was raised by her father to be a killing machine from a young age, but that story had a consistent tone -- Cassandra's upbringing is explicitly exploitative in the text, and her father is considered a supervillain, not a superhero like Big-Daddy. Also, what makes Cassandra a superheroine is how she eventually struggles to be independent and have her own agency (consider that her father took away her power to speak and she has had to fight to win it back). Hit-Girl does not have this agency.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that Hit-Girl has to become traditionally heroic to be a good character. I also do not necessarily need every superhero to be a good person -- I love Watchmen's Rorschach. If Hit-Girl were just an exploited child with an incomplete set of morals and that was seen as a horrifying thing, I'd probably be fine. But, like I said, the movie thinks what happened to her wrong but also thinks she's the coolest, and that's just messed up.

I also want to address a common claim I've heard: Hit-Girl is feminist because she's a child and thus can't be sexualized. I've heard this a lot and it is ridiculous. How low are our standards for superheroines that "she doesn't show cleavage" is the dealbreaker? And how does having a character too young to have cleavage solve that problem? It's like slash fanfic writers who say what they write is feminist because they can have romance without women characters and thus without gender differences. It's not solving or fighting the problem, it's sweeping it under the rug.

And it's not even true. Society has certain expectations for what little girls are supposed to look like and how they are attractive to adults, and Hit-Girl meets those expectations. Her superhero outfit has a skirt. When not in costume, she wears her hair in pig-tails with bows. She's constantly smiling and speaks in the cheerful, adoring voice of a good little girl. At one point, she dresses up to fight bad guys wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

I am not saying that any of those things in of themselves are bad or that this movie is somehow obscene or pedophiliac for presenting Hit-Girl this way, but I would also argue that cleavage and women looking sexy in of themselves are not bad, obscene or pornographic. I'm just saying it's there, and it is what it is.

One could also say that Hit-Girl defies these expectations by being tough and using profanity, but while I like pretty, dress-wearing warrior princesses (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie is underrated), you could argue that buxom women in spandex beating people up is also defying some expectations. Honestly, they're both rather ordinary at this point.

But for those unconvinced, I offer up a scene with Dave's before unmentioned second friend. At one point in the story he sees a video of Hit-Girl fighting and declares, "I want to marry her!" When Dave's first friend reminds the second friend that Hit-Girl is 11, the second friend says, "I'm going to save myself for her."

Think about that scene and tell me again Hit-Girl isn't sexualized.