It all began last Wednesday, when a young woman who loves superheroes said she wants to “yell at everyone who tries to tell me that I’m not supposed to like something because I don’t happen to possess a Y chromosome,” and comics blogger Johanna Draper Carlson reacted by saying “‘superhero comics aren’t for girls‘ is true the same way ‘romance novels aren’t for boys’ or ‘action movies aren’t for girls’ are.” Pegging those forms as “gender-identified genres,” Draper Carlson says that “cross-gender participants” need to recognize that they aren’t the target audience and that that’s not likely to change.
Well, that got the comments section on Draper Carlson’s blog going, but it also drew responses from other women who run prominent fanblogs, like the proprietors of When Fangirls Attack. On her own blog, Fangirl co-manager Kalinara listed “50 things I love about superhero comics,” including the fact that “Power Girl can be sexy, confident and flaunt her goods, and NEVER be dismissed as a slut or worse by her fellows in the [DC Comics Universe],”* while her partner, Ragnell, made more direct criticisms of Draper Carlson. “What in the genre inherently makes it male?” she demands. “Give me a reasonable argument, something that is fundamental to superheroes that can not be removed without gutting the basic concept of a superhero… something that can not work with genders reversed, something that I can’t link an post countering it to prove that it is actually gender-neutral or even appeals to our feminine cultural experience more than it does to a masculine cultural experience.”
*Some readers wonder if the same can always be said for the people drawing her—though not, I should point out, with respect to the Amanda Conner illustration referenced here. Fans know what I’m talking about, because they’ve been arguing about it for a while now, and if your office skews towards the prudish, you might not want to follow the link, because it’s pretty ridiculously blatant.
Draper Carlson calls that an overreaction, adding that she believes self-described “fangirls” react to her argument so vehemently because “they’re afraid of being further marginalized.” She also clarifies, in the extended debate in the comments area, that just because she doubts comic book publishers will make superhero books “more appealing to women” doesn’t mean that women readers should accept sexism as inherent to the medium. Dirk Deppey offers a strong summation at his Journalista! blog, concluding that this isn’t just a gender issue: “I would say that the current kerfuffle is little more than a reflection of a larger problem, which isn’t sexism so much as the continuing effort to wedge an adult sensibility into a genre created for children,” he observes. “Readers of modern superhero comics seem to be chasing a cherished moment from childhood without quite understanding that they’re no longer the people capable of enjoying that moment with the same wide-eyed wonder; possessing a more adult outlook, they thus insist on reading modern variants of the superhero comics that they loved as teenagers, but with a point of view more appropriate to The Sopranos than Teen Titans wedged in there as well.”
Which, now that you mention it, would explain a lot of what both DC and Marvel have published in the last twenty-some years. Personally, I blame Watchmen…or, more precisely, I blame Alan Moore, because his run on Swamp Thing did as much to “prove” that superhero comics could carry weighty and mature themes—just as Frank Miller was establishing, first with Daredevil and then with The Dark Knight Returns. So of course their success spawned a slew of imitators, many of which wound up overdoing the ultraviolence (to the point where Miller’s Sin City verges on self-parody, and not in the good way that The Dark Knight Strikes Again did), others of which were extremely hamhanded in their treatment of “serious” themes (Civil War, anyone?), and very few of which manage to get the mix of elements right. I’ve gone on record with my appreciation of Punisher War Journal, of which Marvel has just released a first compilation, and Grant Morrison‘s run on Batman—although even there it should be said that I actually prefer his stint on All-Star Superman, which really does try to recapture the wide-eyed wonder with which readers first encountered the hero, adding the “maturity” at the emotional level rather than through depictions of graphic combat.
The point, or at least the one I’m going to try to circle back to briefly now and revisit as circumstance permits over time, lies in the degree to which publishers have or have not embraced Draper Carlson’s argument—have superheroes been abandoned as a male playground, with all hope of attracting female readers pinned on alternative formats and genres? It can certainly seem that way, but is it really the case?