The Superheroine's Plight

With the coming of the sixties, sex-based roles promised to wither away and leave behind not men and women but people. In comics, the coming of this Jubilee would mean that the superheroine would become more than the Fawning Love Interest or the Hostage of Opportunity for some villain to strap to a table, awaiting rescue by whatever male superheroes revealed any interest in the matter.

Perhaps, for a brief time between the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Mica Age of comics, certain heroines did enjoy a more respectable role in superhero comics. But by the early nineties, the era of the thong had come upon us; and superheroines would increasingly play the role of superhuman lingerie model and concubine of convenience for commitment-impaired superheroes.

If we can call these changes "progress," then progress does not lift all boats as a rising tide lifts all ships. The superheroine, instead, frequently enjoys a more disposable, trite, and insulting role than that afflicted upon her in her days as the Convenient Hostage.

The Anatomical Distortions

Mention Jim Balent and his approach to anatomy comes to mind. One doesn't think of endurance for long runs of a single title, or his dedication to getting books out on time in a comics culture where pencilers sneer at the notion of deadlines.

Instead, one thinks of the way he tends to exaggerate female anatomy to the point that his women would run afoul of known laws of physics. At the very least, a Balent anatomy would render a human female almost immobile, owing to a center of gravity that did not allow normal bipedal locomotion.

Comics includes anatomical distortion among its credible and reputable repertoire of tools, but generally thoughtful pencilers pick the right tools for the task. If Robert Crumb, for instance, exaggerates female anatomy, he makes no pretense of accuracy; his work invites readers to understand that the distortions derive from his own perceptions and obsessions about the human body.

Male anatomical distortions typically center around creating a sense of physical power, which only indirectly maps to sexual appeal. The predictable female anatomical distortions, however, go straight to the heart of the matter; precisely those regions likely to attract the drooling leer of a hormone-driven adolescent male receive the most extreme distortions. Thus, legs, gluteals, and bosoms expand into territories far beyond anything one could map to a statistical bell curve.

The Stripper Costumes

The Comics Code Authority, once upon a time, prohibited certain presentations of the female form. In the passing into the Land of Nod of this Stentorian self-regulatory committee, comics found themselves freer to pursue a variety of visual approaches.

In the end, though, to look at today's comics, you might well assume that what the Code once prohibited, someone now requires. Now, perhaps inevitably, female superhero costumes seem more appropriate for dancing on tables to a crowd of screaming and drunken male patrons than for saving the world from the Next Great Menace.

Especially after the Image Revolution, female superhero costumes became less and less and less, sometimes not involving much more than a square foot of one-half-inch-wide ribbon deftly applied over a few key erogenous zones. The excess of Vampirella has become a convention rather than a sub-form, and few superheroines remain immune to the retooling of their costumes in a form more appropriate to folks who work at so-called "lingerie modeling studios."

Nudity itself doesn't offend so much as taking sober and responsible legacy heroines and thrusting them in outrageous ensembles of thigh-boots, spiked heels, fishnet stockings, thongs, and strapless-frontless-backless costumes that would serve, should the superhero business ever fail, as suitable work clothes for turning tricks behind the pawn shop.

I object because these characters deserve better. Moulton created Wonder Woman, for example, as a personification of an ideal intended to transcend the violence that blunt and unexamined social, cultural, and political hatreds can produce. He didn't intend for the character to wear something from an episode of Jerry Springer entitled "I can't take my wife to the beach because she dresses too trashy."

What should a superheroine inspire? Should she inspire simple human lust, or should she inspire a vision of heroism and altruism? And does the picture of Hippolyte - the latest version of the Wonder Woman of the 1940s, pending the next Golden Age retcon - do the character justice, or just represent some kind of wish-fulfillment for a male artist who could do with a little less heterosexual impulse?

The Ridiculous, Miraculous Pregnancies

Superheroines unfortunately find themselves dead-ended into miraculous, and generally parthenogenic, pregnancies when their luck with writers runs out. These pregnancies don't seem to play to any kind of female wish-fulfillment, since women who dream of having kids tend to want to keep them; the miraculous superheroic pregnancy model, on the other hand, usually ends with the sudden surprise package taking off, dying, flying off to heaven, or otherwise getting out of Dodge as soon as it can.

That these children - the vanished progeny of Wonder Girl, or of Power Girl, or of Ms. Marvel, or of the Scarlet Witch - do not long endure in the settings that produces them also argues against any kind of fatherhood fantasy; male fatherhood fantasies typically somehow include the child somewhere rather than having it disappear before the next story arc begins.

Given these presumptions, I'd have to conclude that superheroines produce miraculous offspring when their writers can no longer miraculously produce inspired stories. Imagine the writer: "Hmmm....did that already....hmmm, no, someone else did that this year....hmmm....I know! I think I'll make her become pregnant with no obvious cause! That's one thing you won't ever see Superman do!"

Servicing the Heroes

Writers seem to do more than play matchmaker with superheroines, particularly inactive ones. One could easily describe their deeds as procurement - "pimping" to those without the patience for euphemism.

Storytelling needs or opportunities sometimes justify connecting superheroines with superheroes in amatory exploits; more often, though, it seems more like simple wish-fulfillment, and a misuse of the heroine's time. Why, after all, if one must provide courtesans for superheroes, should it matter to them whether their regular girlfriends or disposable one-nighters similarly connect to the culture of superheroes?

Put more clearly, what male - superheroes included - would kick a gorgeous woman out of his bed for not having superpowers? This principle understood, we can wonder why superheroes need to scam their female opposite numbers at all, with a world full of non-super women to pursue.

A certain flaw in logic tends to hit these unlikely pairings, as well. Although the costumed hero of an earlier day frequently took to heroing as an antidote to a leisure problem created by too much loose money and free time - Lamont Cranston, Oliver Queen, and a number of others could fit this description - many characters would lack the opportunity to pursue such liaisons. The importance of their mission and the accompanying dedication thereto would stand inversely proportional to the amount of skirt-chasing a such heroes could find time for between missions, and the same crunch, based on the 24 short hours a day contains, would beset superheroines.

Atonement through the Mouthing of Platitudes

Male writers sometimes act out impulses through the female characters entrusted to their care. This can go badly wrong where the writers have more feeling than real-world knowledge about the subject matter. For instance, when we have a writer attempting to demonstrate a newly-found sympathy with the other half of the human race, he often expresses this through dialogue that reads like a series of slogans strung together then forced out through a female character's mouth with a compressed air tank.

Not everyone misses the irony of comics where thong-clad super-strumpets do the splits in midair while quipping one-liners theoretically derived from feminist political theory, but it seems like the writers do with a sublime consistency.

In general, one might hope that a writer would put off using a superheroine as a vehicle to express his sexual politics until such time as he had some real-world exposure to both sex and politics involving enough experience to say something insightful.

The Usual Excuses

One might argue that putting a heavy cheesecake content into comics would bring more people into purchasing the medium. This makes an assumption of Boolean logic: If a piece has superhero comics AND pinup-girl cheesecake, it will attract comics readers AND pinup-girl cheesecake consumers.

It might, however, do something altogether different; it might narrow its reader base to those readers who want both superhero comics and cheesecake in the same package, while dragging no significant number of cheesecake consumers into superhero comics nor a significant number of comics readers into cheesecake books.

Sometimes the question appears disguised as an attempt to define the comics form itself: "Comics has matured, as have its readers; so why can't books like Wonder Woman feature full frontal nudity? Like a shower scene or something?" This sounds like a straw-man criticism, but the essence of this question remains consistent with a pathetic and pleading kind of message board and Usenet posting. Some oversexed readers want it, and they want it bad, and they don't understand anyone who doesn't want it.

A Question of Purpose

Works such as a Justice League of America comic, a "Victoria's Secret" catalog, and a compendium of Penthouse "Forum" letters each target different audiences, with different purposes. One would think that the existence of other venues for material would appease the consumers of that material. After all, how plausible does this question sound: "Why can't the Victoria's Secret catalog feature superheroes?"

Superhero comics treat themes of heroism and courage against a variety of bizarre, fantastic, or occasionally mundane backdrops. These themes serve as the soul of the superhero comic, without which the works would become no more than peculiar explorations of bad fashion sense by anatomically distorted individuals from the privileged end of the gene pool.

If we graft to these works another purpose, we risk diluting or even preempting the fundamental core of the works altogether. If we decide that the enthusiastic display of female flesh and the applications to which superheroes can put such flesh compose the center of superhero comics, superheroes themselves become peripheral, extraneous, and eventually unwelcome elements in pieces best described either as romance comics, fashion catalogs, pin-up books, or simple erotica.

Whichever direction ultimately wins, the product will work better once it can orient to a single focus. But I can't help hoping for a resolution where the superheroine achieves a place beside her male peer rather than beneath him.