KHAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Not as homo-erotic as it looks.

I'd never seen Space Seed, you see. The housemates and I were watching The Wrath Of Khan and I mentioned this gap in my knowledge. Naturally, we then had to watch Space Seed...

I had high hopes for this episode or, at least, higher hopes than I should have had. Now, for the most part it was exactly what I expected: the Enterprise stumbles across Khan's sleeper ship, wakes the fella up, he hides his evil semi-competently for about quarter of an hour, tries to take over the ship and gets promptly defeated before being dumped on Ceti Alpha Five with his followers and his beloved wife. In most regards it was exactly what I expected.

So why was I disappointed? Why did my housemates look so gleeful when I slotted the DVD into the player?

Well, it's the beloved wife, I'm not going to lie. You see, what I had imagined went down in this episode, based on Khan's motives and dialogue in the movie, was that he met someone on the Enterprise, they fell in love, she talks him down from whatever evil plan of evil he was trying to execute and they retire to live happily ever after on the planet of the brain-eating earwigs.

Lt. Marla McGivers, ship's historian and a hot mess of 1960s gender issues. The woman is obsessed with the big, butch manly men of history. She has filled her quarters with endless paintings of Roman centurions and other warriors. She becomes infatuated with Khan before he's even awake on the tenuous logic that he's a 20^th century Sikh and that makes him a great warrior (so add some 1960s racial issues to the aforementioned hot mess). Though the whole scene where he gives her the choice “Go or stay, but do it because it is what you wish to do!” is a nice little number where you can sort of see what she sees in him... well, it's far outnumbered by the moments when he roughs her up, tortures her colleagues in front of her and transparently manipulates her to follow his agenda all while she simpers submissively.

And then she decides to settle down with him.

I felt I was being realistic. I didn't expect this episode to be anything more than a run-of-the-mill TOS episode with what I knew to be a superlative actor in the guest villain role but the sheer awfulness of Marla McGivers genuinely shocked me. Okay, Star Trek is of its time and that's some defence but it does far better with female characters in so many other episodes that screwing up this badly here genuinely baffles me. Even the functionally identical subplot with Carolyn Palamas in Who Mourns for Adonais? gives that character far more agency than McGivers gets here.

I just can't connect the reality of McGivers with how Khan talks about her in the film. Eh, the memory cheats I suppose. 

The Secret To Writing Flawed Women

I had to explain this to someone the other day and I think there's some mileage in putting this out there in case anyone is interested.

The reason I think that Mad Max: Fury Road can get away with doing things with and to its female characters that would normally bring it in for criticism (like, say, running a pregnant woman over with a monster truck or the one Bride who decides for a moment that, yep, sexual slavery in exchange for material comfort wasn't too bad a deal, actually) is because there are close to a dozen named, speaking female roles in the movie. What this means is that no single character has to bear the weight of representing their entire gender.

When you only have one or two developed female characters in an overwhelmingly male cast (oh, hello, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, I didn't see you there) you get way less leeway because there's nothing to offset these things. Its easier to read the Bride who breaks as an individual rather than a statement on women as a group because she's standing next to Furiosa, the other Brides and the sniper grannies.

So, how do you get to explore flaws or weakness in female characters without being accused of portraying women as innately weak? You include plenty of them in what you're writing to show that you are treating characters as individuals and not as a case study on your views of an entire half of the human race.

And I hate that something this simple even needed to be explained. 

Should Harley Quinn ever come out?

Before we go off to the races let's establish where the starting blocks are. For the purposes of this post let's assume that Harley Quinn is definitely, canonically bisexual: that every joke and innuendo in print and on screen the last twenty-plus years has been made in earnest; that the scene in Harley & Ivy where they seem to be sharing a double bed is not about lacking rent money; and that Harley isn't just being catty when she takes note of Power Girl's curves in Harley Quinn #11.

So, for our purposes today it is 100% established fact that Harley is bi and that at one time at least she and Poison Ivy were lovers. All clear?

Okay, so this was all kicked off by someone telling me Batwoman was cancelled. Between that, the continued absence of Renee Montoya in the New 52 and Alan Scott's increasing backgrounding in the Earth 2 titles that leaves Harley as the only headlining queer character DC has and she's not even out.

But does she need to be?

Let me be clear: queer characters who are out? Good and definitely needed, should be more of them. The Batwoman title in particular will be sorely missed. What I'm arguing here is that perhaps the current portrayal of Harley's queerness has some value in and of itself beyond fun innuendo.

I should like at this stage to point out that whilst I don't view Harley as “out” I don't view her as closeted, especially under her current writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti. Anyone who has read their Power Girl run or Painkiller Jane (most any of their work, really) knows that these are creators who are very comfortable with sex as a subject. As creators they proceed from the idea that sex and sexuality are major parts of the adult human psychology and they're unafraid to tackle that. In Painkiller Jane the main character's bisexuality is a simple fact portrayed as attraction completely divorced from gender (according to Palmiotti) whilst their Power Girl directly addresses the fact of her physicality and how it is perceived by her and others.

With Harley they mainly address her sexuality with jokes. Yes, they're presented as Easter Eggs for fans but there's nothing particularly subtle about them (one of them's a beaver joke, for goodness sake!) but I like it because its not presented as an issue at all, just a fact of Harley's personality. It helps that they've reverted her to the carefree, often childlike Harley from before the New 52: no impulse control, no baggage, no sense of limits and because we're talking about the writers we are that attitude informs how her sexuality is represented. Even if we took Harley to be bi (and we are today, remember) I honestly don't think she would ever feel the need or desire to identify that way, or any way, it just isn't her.

It would be easy for me to segue here into one of those tangents about how we don't need labels and I would like that to be the world we lived in (I do, it must be admitted here, identify with one of the... less choosy sexualities and am therefore biased) but on the macro scale I think that's generations off. For the time being, a period probably far longer than our lifetimes, labels serve an important purpose whilst we sort out the social issues surrounding them and probably will continue to serve a purpose long after.

But in this one case whilst we have characters like Batwoman, Bunker and Alan Scott proudly identifying and representing perhaps it serves an equally useful purpose for there to be a bisexual character to whom sexuality is not an issue at all. There's something beautifully Utopian about this carefree, anarchic spirit not even acknowledging genders and labels or even really the need to.

Right now, I admit, its just jokes but I honestly believe one day someone will write an explicitly queer Harley. After all, she's gone from straight to implicitly bisexual on the strength of little more than fan 'shipping entering the mainstream. One day the next generation of fans will take over and to them Harley will just be bisexual. When that day comes I just hope they continue with Harley's sexuality in its present context, that it just is; not an issue to her; not a source of internal conflict; its just her; don't use the labels and just show it in action.

Because of the character's history DC has a chance to present a queer character whose sexuality isn't a revelation on any level because for two decades various levels of authorial intent are on their side. Not even in the “plausible deniability” vein of Comics Code era characters like Northstar where it was a matter of censorship, here its a perfectly natural act of literary evolution. 

The Spectacular Spider-Gwen

Let me preface this by saying that whilst I'm not as in love with this issue and this character as a lot of people on the internet I found it interesting and I really hope a Gwen Stacy: Spider-Woman limited series or ongoing is in the works.

Also, the problem might be me. I went into this very keen to keep my enthusiasm on a leash. I get like that when a character is as insistently marketed to me as “Spider-Gwen” was. The dialogue-free art preview of the issue on Comicbook Resources was introduced with a headline telling me I'd want a Gwen ongoing just from reading three pages of pretty pictures. So I tried not to fall under the spell.

It worked anyway, I'm under the spell, I want more of this character and here's why:

(SPOILERS ahead for Edge of Spider-Verse #2, you have been warned.)

Here's a funny thing: the interesting angle with re-interpreting most characters is to take the original and see how their essential characteristics work when they're given a new twist like updating their origin to the modern day (Ultimate Spider-Man) or being born into another culture (Superman: Red Son) or inserted into another genre (Marvel Mangaverse). You can't really do that with Gwen Stacy because under the hood of that character... well, there isn't any “there” in there. She's a poorly defined Silver Age girlfriend character that most modern fans know of primarily because of how she died and how that event defined decades of Spider-Man's character development.

It has to be admitted, up front, that the character Latour introduces is only halfway Gwen Stacy. Given how storytelling and sexual politics have changed since the 1970s creating a new take on this character basically means creating a whole new character surrounded by familiar props.

At this, Latour succeeds admirably and I flat out love his set-up. He covers the origin of Spider-Woman in two pages of single panel flashbacks covering the usual high points: spider bite, vacuous celebrity, original sin, public distrust and effective fugitive status. Bish, bash, bosh. What's really interesting is the nature of Gwen's original sin:

(LOOK, SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS)

Peter Parker dies because of her. In this turn of events she uses her powers to save him from bullies and Peter, consumed by a sense of worthlessness, becomes the Lizard to show people how tough he can be with SCIENCE! If nothing else allying the idea of Peter with the Lizard means the Amazing Spider-Man films finally get some decent legacy in the comics, as little as they deserve them. Somehow this kills him and Spider-Woman is blamed, her father Captain George Stacy unknowingly leading the hunt for his own daughter.

Captain Stacy is actually the only part of the issue I didn't like. Now, as much as I might bash the classic Gwen, I always like her father when I read Silver Age Spidey comics. He was a great character and an interesting surrogate father for Peter, a calming emotional influence to practically everyone around him. This version is pretty much just another slightly overweight New York cop. Still, a couple of good character moments between him and Gwen give me hope he could be closer to the character I loved than he seems.

She's also a drummer in a band where Mary Jane is the lead vocalist and I really hope that was meant to be a metaphor. No one notices the drummer but they set the whole tone and rhythm of a band and here we have the character who is the very Platonic ideal of Spider-Man girlfriends being the dependable backing to the most culturally visible of Spider-Man girlfriends.

Most of all is the moment at the end when Gwen unmasks for her father, admitting that Peter's death is her fault but not in the direct fashion Captain Stacy and J. Jonah Jameson had assumed. Now, this is the big moment that took me from just liking the visual (we'll get there) to thinking this character had some real legs to her. A long-standing problem I have with Silver Age Gwen is how the narrative was fine with Peter lying to her: she never finds out or is told his identity and she even blames Spider-Man for her father's death. This is a whole mess of issues that would take a whole post or more to untangle but the bottom line is this: Peter lies to her continuously whilst fully intending to marry her and, presumably, continue to lie to her for the rest of her life.

This Gwen, at gun point incidentally, admits to her mistakes and her identity. Partly to escape, yes, but also because she wants someone she loves to understand her and stop blaming her for a crime she didn't commit, even though they don't consciously blame her. The issue ends there but she could have destroyed her own life by taking responsibility for her actions. She could now be a fugitive and her father's reaction is less than entirely positive so who knows how he'll process these revelations?

And good grief, do I like that costume: the colour combinations are unusual and very different from the classic Spider-suit; the white stands out against backgrounds while the black gives it an element of stealth but also strategically taking emphasis off Gwen's sexual characteristics; and I love the blue outlines on the web patterns. Plus, it has a hood (like Spoiler, another favourite costume) and the eye lenses seem to be outlined in red eyeliner, which is a funny signifier that is really the only design decision here based on gender tropes. Really, when was the last time you saw a female superhero costume that de-emphasised the character's breasts and hips?

She's slated for two more appearances during Spider-Verse but I really hope that isn't all the plans Marvel has for her. 

Justin Bieber could have been great for DC's comics and films

This is actually a thing that's a year old but here's the short version: Justin Bieber chucked a selfie on the internet a while back with a faked up Batman Vs. Superman script and the hashtag #Robin. It was fake, obviously, there was no script at the time and yadda yadda yadda. I heard about it on an old podcast but the thing is, I got thinking and, well...

It might actually be a good idea.

Oh, don't look at me like that! I have no opinion on Bieber as an artist, good or bad. I've heard a few of his songs, one I found catchy, most I found bland. I have almost no point of comparison for him as an actor. His public persona is obnoxious but since I am as far from the target demographic for his stunts as it is possible to get I'm more than willing to let that pass. Also, everything I just wrote equally applies to my opinion of early-career Elvis so let's see where we stand in twenty years if and when Bieber reaches his mature artistic phase.

Moving on...

You know what casting Justin Bieber as Dick Grayson or Tim Drake would mean if it had happened? It would actually give me, as a viewer, some sense of creative vision behind this film.

I'm not saying good, I'm not saying bad, I'm just saying that creative vision would be seen to exist. Man Of Steel was bland to me. I paid my money, picked up my 3D glasses, sat through the trailers and then the film started. 143 minutes later I left the cinema with no sense of who the production team thought was Clark Kent in any sense other than the visual. I hate Joseph Campbell and his damn mono-myth theory with a fiery passion but if you're going to do the bloody cocking pissing hero's journey then “refusing the call” should involve refusing the bloody call not just looking broody before saving the oil rig crew anyway.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh but in all honestly when I look at Man Of Steel I can't actually point at any aesthetic decision and say it was about Superman. Almost the whole visual style and aesthetic was lifted wholesale from Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and the one thing that wasn't, the huge display of military hardware, was straight out of Michael Bay's Transformers series.

So, aesthetic decisions lifted straight from other popular franchises, a longterm plan that's a cut down version of Marvel's Avengers franchise and a character arc with no arc beyond Clark gaining the physical props of Superman (costume, Fortress of Solitude, save Lois, put on some glasses, roll credits). Henry Cavill is actually a very good actor but one with almost zero public profile in the US and only really known for one role here, as Charles Brandon in The Tudors. Casting him says little and all that's left to make a statement with it is what you do with him but... eh, we've covered that.

On a similar level, I like Ben Affleck and I'm eager for his Batman but here we have the opposite problem: an actor whose range is so varied he could comfortably play any version of Batman from Adam West to Michael Keaton. Again, until this performance is on screen we've no way to judge where its going no matter how much Affleck's critics invoke Daredevil.

Bieber, meanwhile, has a huge public profile, a well-known public persona and a built-in following amongst a single demographic not generally associated with comic fandom or films: pre-teen and early-teen girls. Cast this guy as Robin and the statement is clear: stunt casting in the classic Batman tradition and an attempt by at least one arm of DC to actually grow its audience into new demographics. Yes, I would sure as hell question whether he is the right actor to use for those purposes but those purposes are inherently good, especially that last one.

I'm not even saying that in a social justice context, I'm stating it as blatant fact: comics as a business need new audience demographics! The audience is shrinking and has been for years because of poor marketing, limited distribution and an uncanny ability to court all the wrong controversies but most of all because of the companies' fetishistic desire to pour what little marketing budget they do spend on pursuing not a new audience but the same one they've always had: men aged 18 to 35.

So, yeah, comicbook companies: listen up because here's the master plan. Stage one: stunt cast an icon of teeny-bopper pop as Robin to draw young girls into the theatre. Step two: embrace the fact that comic films are at least halfway marketing stunts for your product and put an advert for your comics at the end of the trailers, “if you like the film why not try...” yadda yadda yadda, you can see where this goes. Most importantly, stage three is...

… DO NOTHING ELSE!

I am not kidding, this is the most important stage of the master plan. Once you have this new audience drawn in and trying out your comics you DO NOTHING ELSE! Keep the product as it is. Oh, by all means stop screwing up on the race and gender fronts but that's a separate debate. The product, absent its frequent socio-political failures, is fine. Female fandom exists, it exists in spite of the considerable apathy and even hostility publishers have demonstrated towards it for decades.

And if you're thinking about introducing a bunch of new female characters to please this demographic then STOP! That's called pandering and even little girls will notice it. Women and girls don't need female characters to identify with any more than I need a male figure to identify with. Audience identification is a really weird concept and a bit false and some day I will write a takedown of the whole bloody thing but that is not this day.

That said, there is virtue in exploiting the female IPs the companies already own better than they do. Here are the female intellectual properties from the Big Two I wrote down off the top of my head over the course of half-watching a five minute internet video (I don't own a stopwatch):

Wonder Woman, Birds Of Prey, Storm, three flavours of Batgirl, Batwoman, Kate Bishop as Hawkeye, Black Canary, Huntress, Power Girl, three flavours of Spider-Woman, two flavours of Spider-Girl, Black Cat, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Ms.Marvel, Renee Montoya as a cop or as The Question, Rogue, She-Hulk, X-23, Wonder Girl, Catwoman, Supergirl, Mystique, Zatanna, Harley Quinn and slap in the Young Avengers for having an admirable equal focus on male and female characters throughout its comparatively short history...

… and going back to my earlier point these are just properties that either currently or in the recent past have supported at least a decent length limited series. Exploiting that, and they're getting better at exploiting that, alongside existing product is the smart move. You know why?

Because girl geeks are as completist as boy geeks. Draw then into a character and they're going to want to read up on that character's history and you want that history to exist and be in print to sell it to them. New characters don't have that, established characters do.

So, yeah, a genuine argument about how Justin Bieber could be the best thing to happen to the comics industry in years.