Sorry about the delay with this post, I've been spending all of my computer time editing a friend's master's thesis. Which is roughly as fun as it sounds. Of course, part of the problem is there was not much in this issue that had been rushing to the blogotron.The most awesome thing in this issue: My Three Monitors. Way in the back of the backup feature, we get a couple Monitors sounding off. "On my earth, people wear shoes on their hands and hamburgers eat people!" The pointy-ears on Vampire Monitor were pretty precious, but that hastily drawn-on mustache hanging under the nose of Industrial Revolution Monitor? Sooo cute!
Joking aside, this does bring up a question that's been in the background for a while now. Bob the Monitor is from a universe full of noble superheroes doing their darnedest, and he is pretty noble and doing his darnedest. The Monitor from the vampire universe is a vampire. Is it too much of a jump to suspect that the trouble makin' Monitor might hail from Earth-3, home of the Crime Syndicate of America? And if that's the case, that a predominately evil universe carries with it a predominately evil Monitor, don't you think maybe the other Monitors would kick this guy out of the clubhouse?
Getting to the issue itself, the search for Keith Giffen has finally ended! Which means the art on "Countdown" might hit a level of consistent competence it's thus far fallen short of. I wonder if the folks in editorial realized how easily they could avoid fans confusing this story with the most recent issue of "All New Atom" by simply dropping in a line from Ryan along the lines of "Hey, this tiny universe is oddly similar to the not nearly as tiny universe I was just in the other day. How odd". Problem solved. A new problem arises from the fact that Jimmy Olsen's costume looks strikingly like Ryan Choi's. So much so that if you were flipping through this issue quickly, you might miss the jump from the Palmerverse to Metropolis. Given the lack of action we've seen in "Countdown" so far, it might have been nice to see Mr. Action's debut a little more directly, but I'm not one to call for 22 page fight scenes.
For those of you without the energy to track these things down, the person spying on Darkseid is Forager, a member of the Bug underclass of New Genesis, who sometimes get tasked by the New Gods to run errands and generally, y'know, forage for things. He has all the abilities of a humanoid bug, which means he's the Spiderman of slave labor.
Maybe it's that I'm coming off two days of reading a paper on class, gender and race, but let's take a pause here and discuss the depiction of women in this series. We've got your scantily clad Athena recruits, your fishnet sporting Zatanna, your practically skirtless Mary Marvel and...Donna Troy. This issue we get the brief addition of Darkseid's concubine, with the throwaway line about the removal of vocal chords (prompting a pretty unpleasant discussion between the dudes over at CBR. Guys, after you've both stated you'd buy a Mary Marvel/Zatanna one-off just for the ass-shots, the "silence my concubine" jokes have got to go). And the only member of the big three who has yet to make an appearance, despite the putative importance of the Amazons in the DCU right now, is Wonder Woman. I've said it before, but let me stress it here: the inclusion of women in this series so far has amounted to poorly rendered cheesecake. This story presents multiple opportunities to develop strong female characters, and so far we have yet to see a single female demonstrate anything that even resembles agency. To run it down:
Donna- Roped into a mysterious journey by bad boy Jason Todd, who has found her doing such superheroic feats as staring at a gravestone and sitting contemplatively.
Mary- Has Black Adam's powers more or less inflicted upon her and is finding her personality overridden by them.
Holly- Shrugged and okayed her way into the Athena's Bathhouse for Wayward Girls and almost kind of raised her voice when Harleen kicked a mother and her child back out into the streets.
Add to the list Wonder Girl's bloodthirsty rant at Bart's funeral, Forerunner who is bred to be a slave and the 100% personality-free-zone that was Duella Dent and you've got pretty much the whole female cast thus far.
I haven't yet read Dini's take on Zatanna in "Detective" but she seems to have grown into more than just a pair of legs, and "52" developed Montoya (I'm not ready to call her the Question just yet) into one of DC's stronger, fully realized female characters. I'm hoping with the addition of these two to the mix, the writers might actually show us a bit of heroism from the ladies.
Of course, it looks like all of the Monitors are dudes, so I'll keep my hopes in check for now. Talk to you kids on Thursday.
3 comments:
Is funny how they do these things and then get angry when fans presume mysogyny... It's unbalanced the characterization of male/female characters that is really difficulto to presume good faith (i.e. just a lack of atentiveness to social issues, innatention to gender roles) and much more easy to presume that they are pursuing a aggressive anti-female. Not that I think they actually do, but is difficult to argue this.
I don't think "lack of attentiveness" is necessarily forgiveable because it amounts to the same thing on the page. Washing it away with a "c'mon guys, you know we're not serious" is not okay because it seems to presume first of all, that the readers are male anyway (wrong) and secondly that we can all get behind (so to speak) these portrayals DC has made a point lately to pay a lot of lip service to inclusion and diversity and to be honest, launching titles with a lesbian lead, an Asian lead and...wait, no black people yet...ahem...is admirable. Credit where it's due, DC does employ one of the most talented female superhero writers working in the industry in Gail Simone, but while launching a separate line for girls, one would hope they would tighten up their portrayal of women in their main line. It's even possible a female Minx reader might pick up a DCU title and enjoy it.
Seeing as how old this entry is, and thus this could be redundant, but there are female Monitors ... if you look closely you get to see the handsome features of Those-Not-So-Much-Monitoring-But-Talking-Amongst-Themselves-or-Standing-There-Blankly-Watching-The-Main-Ones-Talking characters set on a beautiful female body with generic comic book breasts!
As for Black people, DC had Firestorm ... which is cancelled. However, John Stewart and he are apparently with JLA now, so if that's the case they have four black members now ... "we are not tokens!" (Well, save for how DC seems to think diversity in Black men means Captain Sisco seasonal hair styling. Example:
Black Lightning:Yep he's still black! And to ensure you remember, he's bald now since we can't give him an afro, and he wears swimmer's goggles spirit-gummed to his face instead of a domino mask and open shirt! We ARE diverse!
"Not to mention he's the same brown as all our African-American characters since there's no other kind! Well, except those guys in Milestorm ... but we don't talk about that anymore."
Batwoman the Jewish Lesbian is still not in her own series as a result of the media hype it received ... that they initially wanted:
"We like gay people too! We will have a Lesbian ... that's a homosexual woman in her own comic!
"We're soo okay with it all, we'll even make it a Batcharacter! One that we wiped out of continuity years before because we didn't care for her, but now we do!
Oh wait, parents may not want their child going to see the new Batman movie, for example, if we have a homosexual character running around ... let's just use her in the background ... some scandalicious nude shots with The Question!"
Although I missed Ronnie Raymond, I had applauded that at least a more popular character like Firestorm would be black, and we do have an Asian Batgirl, but still it's the B Class or C Class citizens of the DC Universe who are given the treatment.
The New Blue Beetle isn't white, and to ensure people realize that since coloring has come a long way and we can't just color him red or brown or a mixture of such, we'll have him break into the usual white guy trying to write an ethnic person dialogue.
As for Countdown's treatment of women, we can't blame DC for trying to sell this poor sales title with some TnA can we? Well, yes, we can actually.
The New DC: "We're not just detectives anymore ... we ARE Diverse Characters!"
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