Women in Comics (1)

Over the past few years, Marvel Comics have tried to make Ms Marvel into a major player. Unlike DC, who have Wonder Woman, Marvel, despite a varied range of heroes, never had a major female protagonist.

Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines kicks off with a quick summary of the career of Wonder Woman, the DC property, but does little to examine the broader history of women in comics. The strange story of Valkyrie, the 1970s attempt by Marvel to introduce a feminist heroine, is sadly untold, and the battles of Ms Marvel to become a major player in The Avengers is missed. The film works as an excellent primer for a certain set of representations in American media, and has an interview with Gail Simone, the cool comic writer who noted the phenomena of women ending up inside fridges to provide male protagonists with a drama. But it isn't a history of comic book superheroines.

When Alan Moore - who is pretty much God as far as comic books go - rewrote Supreme as a comment on the Superman type hero, he included some sly suggestions that comic books could be a propaganda tool for preferred emotional behaviour. Ignoring the hero's natural inclination to deal with complex moral issues by giving someone a good slap, Moore included codes of conduct in his Supreme that could usefully be applied in real world scenarios.

Sadly, the moral worth of Moore's comic, and the worth of most comics published in the last twenty years, is compromised by the absurd anatomy of the female characters. There are rumours that a certain comic book artist traces his women from pornography. Like they point out in Wonder Women!, the women in comics are eye candy. My recent attempt to build a collection of comics for my nine year old nephew from my collection was hampered by the apparent inability of artists, since 1993, to draw a woman without the most common power.

Every so often, the comic book industry and fandom ponders how they can get girls reading comics. Sometimes they come up with a more romantic plot - like the series featuring Mary Jane out of Spider-man. It never occurs to them that a good step might be to stop drawing women who have the sort of breasts that made Benny Hill get all steam coming out of his collar.

Wonder Women @ GFF

Despite its title, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines is not an analysis of women in comic books but a broad study of how action women have been marginalised in American media for the past half century. Beginning with a look at Wonder Woman's origins - skating over her creator's serious bondage fixation - it expands its focus to include the resurgence of heroines in popular media in the past twenty years, taking in television, film and, movingly, a youth workshop for young female film-makers.

Intelligent commentary from Kathleen Hanna, Gloria Steinem, Trina Robbins and other cultural critics is interspersed with a history of the heroines. Sadly, the sections on comics are the weakest: rather than address the rise of superheroines in the 1970s (a glance at Valkyrie from Marvel would have seen how clumsy but endearing their attempt to develop a feminist hero was, while Ms Marvel was partially based on Gloria Steinem, if her profession is any guide), it dwells on Wonder Woman in detail and mistakes an interlude of bad reinvention for an anti-feminist coup. Yet the message is loud and clear: strong women are under-represented in fantasy, and there remains a severe shortage of female creators.

Using the superheroine as a trope, Wonder Women is a satisfying primer for the ways in which feminism has engaged with the media. Kathleen Hanna is especially trenchant, reflecting on how the paucity of images has led to any signs of support be grasped hopefully and how her own revolution was quickly co-opted by the mainstream. Xena and Buffy are placed in a social context, and the hopes of second wave feminists are located alongside a media that has preferred objectification of women.

There is a lack of aesthetic analysis  - showing the panels that led to the Women in the Refrigerator controversy without mentioning it, or not picking up on the phallic symbolism of Xena's death Saint Sebastian style seem wasted opportunities - but this is par for a documentary that considers art in a social context. A primer on American feminism that holds up Wonder Woman as an icon rather than the definitive word on any of the topics it touches, Wonder Women provides plenty of material for serious discussion and is brave enough not to flinch at the ideals of feminism.

Monday 18 February 2013
CCA (part of Glasgow Film Festival)