The Way I Am

My issues with manga (Part 2)

2010-01-04T16:08:00.001-08:00

I'm very aware that this one was long delayed, and I'm sorry. In my defense, last year was hectic and posting was impossible, but I hope that now, I can do this more often. Especially as I finally managed to connect Word with my two blogs (English and Spanish) and thus, it should be easier to post.

Last time I was talking about my issues with manga (almost two years ago, sorry, but here's the link if you want to check it out ) I mentioned mostly my issues with the fans of manga, and the general attitudes about everything that comes from Japan. Now it's about the genre, and since I'm aware that what I'm going to say might not be very popular, here comes a small disclaimer: All this is my opinion, and in my experience. It is not the absolute truth, I might be wrong in a lot of stuff, and yes, if I'm wrong, I'll apologize. Are we clear? I hope we are, because now I'll start.

Last time I ended the post with the myth that manga is somewhat better for women artists, and how the division of manga between 'for girls' and 'for boys' is one of my main problems with the genre. The division between Shojo and Shonen (And Josei, and Seinen since we're on the subject) might be very logical commercially speaking. Just like action movies are separated from romance movies depending on the demography you want to attract, and the good reasons why I'm not going to find Stephen King's books in the home arrangement section. The labels are good to help readers to find what they're looking for, what they like.

But usually those labels do not limit the demography on their own. "Horror" means what happens in the story, and not what kind of people might or might not like horror. Yes, there are people who talk about rom-com movies as chick flicks, because they're only for women to watch and enjoy, but even with all their sexist bullshit (And thanks, Warner Bros. for declaring that women as main action characters aren't viable) they do try to keep themselves open to the fact that yes, a woman can watch and enjoy Die Hard 4.0.

Shojo and Shonen, on the other hand, do limit the public just by the sake of existing, not only by gender, but also by age (And this goes double for those fans of shonen older than 30, since shonen is usually marketed to younger than 18). Women read Shojo and Josei, and men read Shonen and Seinen: the division is so defined that we also see different type of art and panel work in the different magazines. And yes, at first many said that shojo was romantic stories where the girl only wanted to find true love, and shonen the action stories where Seiya would run trying to save Saori.* But when manga started being translated by the dozen, we found more stories like Oh My Goddess! Or Video Girl Ai, so we could see that shonen also dealt with romance, and on the other side of the coin, CLAMP showed us that gore did had a place in shojo, and there was more to it than just love and rainbows.

But even so, people insist that the division is absolute and unbreakable. Even if we have evidence that in Japan a story is catalogued as shojo or shonen depending on the magazine where it's published (So Oh My Goddess! Is seinen because it runs in Afternoon, and if it was run in Ribbon, it would be shojo, with the exact same story (Although if it was run in Ribbon we might get less loli-shots of Hild and less 'peeks' at bathing Urd) by the exact same author. And honestly, Why the division has to be by the readers' gender and not the stories content? Isn't it better to say that Oh My Goddess! Is a romantic comedy with fantasy and magic realism, than to say Oh My Goddess! Is a fantasy Seinen? Or at least, isn't it more descriptive? That without taking in account that what might be good for some ages in Japan might not be the same outside that country (And that takes us to the censorship, the complains, and the insistence that no one understands the real art of anime, especially the art behind the pantyshots that are usually the ones censored)

It gets even worse when fans decide that those divisions must be absolute and respected and if you're a woman, you have to love CLAMP, Sailor Moon, and every single romantic thing filled with nice flowers and manga glitter, and if you're a man, you better start brushing up in your Naruto because you're going to love that. And on top of everything, when authors and editors decide that they're going to be strict about the division, they create a collection of stereotypes that we'll check in the next part (Coming soon, I swear. And soon as in before January is over and not as in somewhere before 2010 ends) because if I start with the phobias and the discrimination right now, we're not going to end anytime soon.

Issue number two, manga has become incredibly repetitive (Or maybe it always was, and we hadn't realized it until now due to the sheer quantity we get) What do I mean? Well, that even if the titles themselves seem to be diverse, every single one with something different and special that we've never seen before… How many magical princess are there? How many young men who are good at X and thus want to become the best at it? How many chosen ones to save us from X, Y and Z with their friends in battles that always, always end up when a stronger enemy comes forward? How many average guys who end up with an accidental harem? Yes, there are manga that are amazingly original, but the quantity of 'same' stuff is way too big (And yes, comics do have that problem too, as we have way too many superhero vigilantes and people dressed in tights to save the world. But we're not comparing them, Ok?)**

When even the most ardent defendants of the genre complain about 'yet ANOTHER Harem comedy' is because there are way too many harem comedies. Or sport adventures, or kids with little collectionable critters. And the stereotype is so great that when a non-manga comic touches those subjects, it is more than enough to end up called 'manga', or 'manga style', like W.I.T.C.H. that couldn't be more Disney unless the animated series had songs by Alan Menken and even SO it gets called Manga (Even when, despite being a world-wide success, in Japan it had to be re-written and re-drawn by a Japanese artist because it wasn't manga enough, and isn't that stupid?) While stories that do have manga influences, just because they're not the usual manga style stories, end up as "fake" manga, like anything done by Adam Warren after Dirty Pair.

This makes finding something really original and new quite hard because it makes harder to find things that are not already a proven formula. Because even before the first chapter is published, many people have decided that it will not sell, that is not commercial enough, and it will be cancelled around chapter two (Or worse, they'll make the story fit no matter what with the old stereotypes and a good premise might become the most incomprehensible mess of the decade. But more on that later)

And all this takes us to the third issue that will come in the next post, and that I mentioned a few paragraphs ago and it is all the problematic content that you can find in more than just one manga –and that sadly end up reflected in the attitude of their fans.

And before I forget… Happy 2010 to everyone who is still reading my ramblings :P

*I'm very sorry I keep using Saint Seiya as an example, but it's the most shonen-like series I known. Even more than Dragon Ball, because even in Dragon Ball we had some family time with Goku and his kids, and in Saint Seiya *everything* is just fighting, and the few flashbacks we get are… about fighting.
** In their defense, a huge part of the manga fandom try to fight against that stereotype and get very angry when manga is dismissed as 'schoolgirls with long legs and huge eyes', but that doesn't change the fact that for each Monster or Uzumaki, we get 45 stories that just copy Naruto (That does has a lot in common with Dragon Quest, Dragon ball, and similar stories) or Sailor Moon. Which for a genre that is supposed to be original, new and special, it's really sad.

Comic book Death should mean something

2009-01-28T19:32:00.000-08:00

First post of the year, and it’s about a depressing theme. Sorry about that, but my reading choices ended up on this (Besides, you all know how rare is it that I update this so I had to keep the monumentum going).

Anyway, Comic Book Deaths. They’re a joke, right? “No one stays dead except for Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben” and the three have come back already (Granted, Uncle Ben was an alternate – earth Ben and he died again, but the sentiment remains). There was a story in which a villain pretended for all of five minutes to be Thomas Wayne, and if the Waynes can’t be counted on to stay underground, who can you trust? Harry Osborn is back, thanks to One More Day and an incredibly convoluted explanation with Goblin!Juice and even when some heroes have had the decency to stay dead, despite their loyal fans wanting them back (Kon “Conner” Kent, Ted Kord, Panthra… and I think that’s about it at least of the top of my head and not counting the last three months deaths as well, it’s been only three months. They can come back next Wednesday. They’ll count when they have at least a year underground), most of the shock deaths of the last three years have been undone. Even some older deaths have been undone thanks to ‘Superboy punched the time-barrier’ and ‘It was a Skrull’. As happy as I am to see Mocking Bird back, I can’t help but think this was the cheap way out.

Because if even a 10 year old death can be retconned… well, Death has no meaning. Batman is apparently dead, so what? He’ll be back after another non-event. So the Wasp is dead (In two universes, even!), she’ll be back before you have the time to see the other characters deal with her dead. Aren’t we due to yet another return of Jean ‘I can’t stay buried’ Grey?

No matter how spectacular you make one death, no matter if it’s the goddamn Batman fighting against Darkseid, or Captain America not dodging one bullet, all comic book fans know that they’re going to come back. The bigger the body count, the longest the yawn from the public because… well, either they’re cannon fodder (See Ultimatum #1) or they’re a shock death (See Batman, Ted Kord and so on). There are deaths that are wonderfully written (Unfortunately, the one example fresh in my mind is in this week’s comics so let’s try and avoid that spoiler) but even so, it becomes pointless as the readers know that, if it’s a superhero comic book and the dead character has a name, he or she will be back sooner or later. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, much more than the old phrase leads to believe, but most of them are ignored as they aren’t readers favorites. I still well up when I read Cypher’s pointless death in New Mutants, and even when I’m sorta glad that Douglock wasn’t really Doug Ramsey as that would cheapen his death, at the same time I wonder why my favorites don’t rate the revolving heaven door like other characters who seem to have a death-long pass.

All this came to mind while I was reading Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s a manga set during a war, the last few (Japanese) episodes deal with a full blown civil war and the mangaka, Hiromu Arakawa, has always had the custom of counting her death characters at the end of each compiled volume by showing them flying to the sky. The first few volumes had an average of one death per volume (And a friend still doesn’t forgive me for lending him volume 2 that had one of the arguably crueler deaths on the whole run), volume 6 had to resort to a dead fox and two dead rabbits, although volume 7 had ‘too many to count’, same as volume 15 that counted every single death during a past war. However, as the episodes advance closer and closer to what I assume will be the ending (It hasn’t been announced to my knowledge, but I doubt it will be longer than a year before the story wraps up), Arakawa has started to be very careful with her death toll. If a named character (Be it a main one, a secondary one, or an incidental one) dies, it is because there was no other way for that character to end. But when many characters manage to get saved in the second to last minute, I grew worried about the main characters. Because mrs. Arakawa is counting her deaths, and when she reaches the end, I’m not that sure even the main characters will be safe. Hell, half the fandom still haven’t gotten over the last supportive non villain character death to the point that seeing him in a flashback is a welcome thing even if the flashback itself was critiziced!

To avoid making this a manga vs. comic thing, I also looked for an example of a great comic book death that counted because it was final. There was David Quin’s death in Strangers in Paradise, which was telegraphed from around the second volume of the series and still there were fans who hoped against hope that wouldn’t happen, but was pretty much final (As well as the off-screen death of Griffin Silver, which we only see through the consequences it has on everyone else’s lives). There was One Eye’s death on Elf Quest, which was heart-wrenching and kept even the widow in denial for a long while (Actually, all deaths in Elf Quest, at least in the original quest and all the way to Kings of the Broken Wheel are quite touching. But at the moment, the one that I can remember clearly is One Eye’s). Besides the whole fantasy vs. reality thing, what makes the deaths similar is that they’re final. David was not going to come back in the last page of Strangers in Paradise, and there was no coming back for all the death elves either. See Runaways, from Marvel too. Both Alex and Gert were loved by the readers, and even if we got a glimpse of Alex in limbo, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to come back.

At this point, more than event fatigue, readers have death fatigue. No matter how spectacular a death* one writes, if it’s a superhero, no one believes he’s really death, even more if it’s a A-list hero. Makes one wish that the ‘Dead means dead’ policy had been truth. Maybe then, the writers would be more careful when killing characters, and their deaths would be truly felt by their readers.

* or faked deaths, as the case may be. If all deaths are taken as fake deaths, then when a character is revealed not to be death after all, is not a great reveal, it’s just business as usual.

2008-2009 Nominations for the Friends of Lulu Board of Directors.

2008-10-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

The time has come again to nominate the best and brightest for the Lulu Board of Directors! We need our members to nominate dedicated people to keep up the good work, changes and new adventures for Friends of Lulu that has been the hallmark of 2008.

Nominating and voting individuals to the National Board is one of the privileges enjoyed by members of Friends of Lulu; if you are a member please visit our online nomination page at http://www.friends-lulu.org/basicNomForm.php and submit your nominations!

Comics professionals and members are welcome to run for the board; self-nominations are also accepted and encouraged! We are looking for a few dedicated souls to volunteer their time and energy for a year as we go about bringing women and comics together. Being part of the national board can be very rewarding, enjoyable, and you will make a huge difference in the FoL organization.

We currently need to fill the following positions:

Treasurer:
The Treasurer keeps account activities up to date including PayPal and checking accounts,establishes & adheres to budget for Friends of Lulu projects and programs, and processes retail purchases through the website.

Recording Secretary:
The Recording Secretary sits in on monthly online meetings, records minutes and presents them, maintains an archive of previous minutes, and prepares documents as necessary.

Membership Secretary:
The Membership Secretary keeps an updated record of current and lapsed members, and maintains e-mail and snail-mail correspondence with them. Mails out welcome letters and membership cards to FoL members, new and returning. Regularly sends membership updates to the Newsletter Editor.

Make a nomination online by using our form at:
http://www.friends-lulu.org/basicNomForm. php, and please include the full name and email of your nominee.

We are always looking for volunteers to help us out at conventions, on our website, and in our newsletter! If you wish to donate your time and energy to Friends of Lulu but do not wish to be on the Board of Directors, please contact us by e-mail: board@friends-lulu.org. We are currently seeking volunteers for many positions, and your skill set may be just what we are looking for.

Nominations will CLOSE on Monday, November 10th and voting shall begin shortly thereafter.

Follow up on the Memin Pinguin situation.

2008-07-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday post gathered a lot of responses, not here on my blog but on the blogs that linked to it. I'm glad I took my time to read those answers, even if I still don't know if it would be wise to answer them one by one, because it really nailed it to me what the whole problem is.

American people are complaining about the ART in Memin Pinguin, more specifically, the way Memin and his mom are drawn.

Mexican people are defending the STORY of Memin Pinguin, trying to put some emphasis on the fact that it was the story we paid attention to, not the art that sure is dated.

As long as the argument runs around those lines, we're not going to get anywhere.

So I was talking with my business partner Aurea Freniere, and we decided that while we don't have the power to change the way in which Memin was drawn, and the industry in our country is not in the shape to support a complete re-make of the series, we can at the very least do something to show that we understand the problem and that, if we could, we would change it, and, at the same time, try and showcase exactly why we love Memin and his pro-equality (Because, in the end, Memin preaches equality in every way) message.

Yesterday I made an open call in my DeviantArt account to all mexican and spanish-speaking members who knew Memin to redesign Memin. To take him away from the racist and stereotypical designs from which he took influence as a drawing, and instead focus on the good things he gave us. To show how we wish Memin looked now so his message wouldn't be lost and we could have avoided both controversies. After all, we can't expect every one who sees Memin in the states to understand Spanish enough to understand the context, and while I still maintain that before condemning the whole country as racist and ignorant the people behind the media reports should've done a better research, I am not saying that people in general got offended 'for nothing'. They had the right to be offended, they had the right to protest, and I hope this shows that, even when we're powerless to make a bigger change (say, get that modernized comic), we understand, and we're willing to learn and to change for the better.

And if you're still interested on this whole thing three months from now, tune in here for the announcement of the page where Aurea and I will recopilate all the new Memines.

I firmly believe something good can came out of all this, that we can use this to understand each other, and make those cultural differences smaller, respecting both cultures at the same time.

The trouble with Memin Pinguin.

2008-07-10T03:35:00.000-07:00

I read Journalista in a sort of daily basis, but this is the first time I've felt compelled to write a long post over a story I found there. The story in question is the Top Story of yesterday, where a woman in Texas found an old Memin comic being sold, bought it and promptly declared it racist and offensive.

Sigh.

This is not the first time that Memin has caused controversy on the states, but last time I held on hopes that someone from my country would step up and explain what Memin is about, but no one did. Most of the posts in México were about how hystericals americans were at some stuff, not delving in the fact that there's a huge cultural difference between the States and México, and that most of the problem American's have with Memin is due to those cultural differences.

First point in fact: There's not that much racism in México against PoC. We have our own problems against the indigenous habitants, but not against PoC, and that makes us have troubles to relate to the situation north our border. What we have is a huge problem of class discrimination. Upper class looks down on Middle Class, who looks down on the poor. You could have green skin and purple hair but as long as you don't stray away from your own economical class, no one would bat an eye at you. If pressed, I'd say we have a huge discrimination trouble against Spainards in a very intricate level, mostly because a little over 200 years after our Independence from them, we still haven't forgiven them for Hernan Cortes.

Second point: No one in this huge complains against Memin has ever tried to actually read the whole story. I know it's daunting, as last I checked it ran around the 200 issues, but they could ask about it to people who had read it. Because when you get Memin in context, the story is quite different from what you might guess at the covers, or at a single issue.

The Wikipedia entry on Memin touches it a bit, but it doesn't quite goes in depth enough to explain why Memin is so popular here, or why no one in their right minds see him as a racist caricature. (I am aware of the history of the depiction of PoC in the States, and that Memin does borrow from those stereotypes, but again, history of both countries is completely different, and in 1940's, when Memin was created, even in America people didn't bat an eye to those representations. We have to remember that Memin is not being re-drawn, but reprinted. And knowing Sixto Valencia's art (the man behind Memin) if he had designed Memin now and not then, the kid would look completely different)

Created by Yolanda Vargas Duché, the first woman writing comics in México, hailed by many as the Queen of soaps, Memin Pinguin usually tackled social problems but it was very rare that Memin's skin color was actively addressed. In the very first issue, his classmates and professor are shocked to see him there, but it's not due to his skin color, but because he's very small, and thus, they all assume he's very young so he should be in another class. Once that mix up is cleared, Memin is just another student, nothing more and nothing less. To the seven year old reader that I was -and to many like me- it was Ricardo, the blond blue eyed rich boy, who was out of place in that class room. He was a rich kid who was going to public school because his father wanted him to learn to fend for himself, snobish and standoffish at first, and he seemed like a sore thumb in a class filled with brown haired kids. They all also made him know it, and here's where we go back to class discrimination. The poor 'good' kids wouldn't give the rich 'bad' kid the time of the day, because he was rich. He didn't belong there, and he would never belong there.

Until Memin decided to befriend him, that is, and he became the fourth in the gang conformed by Memin, Carlos, the rude mouthy kid raised by a single mom (Like Memin himself, only due to very different causes), and Ernesto, the quiet, smart kid who was the very end of the social scale, being the poorest of the four.

In the run of the comic, only the villains of the piece tend to try and make Memin feel bad for his skin color. Ernesto's father starts the story being an alcoholic carpenter, so poor that his son has to go to school without shoes, and who spends most of the time completely out of his mind. At one point, in the middle of delirious tremens, he calls Memin 'the Devil'; later on, after Ernestillo almost dies due to alcohol poisoning, the father reforms, never drinks again, and becomes one of many Memin's friends, never mentioning again that particular bout of delirium. Carlos's paternal grandmother, who is a very rich woman set in never letting Carlos's father marry his mother (Carlos's mother is a prostitute, even when the comic calls her a cabaret dancer, it's obvious what she does. Carlos's father is upper class, and left her before Carlos was born, and there's a bit of soap-operaish plot going on that leds to Carlos and his father being reunited). However, the old grandma is more concerned about Ernesto stealing her silver, than about Memin being roaming around the house, and after a very tear-inducing issue, Memin also wins over the old woman and she repents of all her previous cruelty, little before dying.

Here I'd make a pause to mention that the only real happy family of the whole thing, the ones who didn't had a soap-operaish past, and whose only problem was the lack of money which is still true to this day for many Mexican families, were Memin and his mother, who was also the most important figure of authority for the gang, over their teacher and Ricardo's father. Even the teacher and Ricardo's father would bow down to Eufrosina's authority at times.

There are, however, three times when race does comes into play. At least, the ones I remember from the 200 and so issues. (In fact, they were short stories into themselves. Mrs. Duche spent far more time in Carlos's subplot with his mom, or with Memin confronting his own fat predjudice -although at the time it wasn't called that- than with race itself). The first one I remember, and I'd like to say it was the first chronologically speaking but I'm talking from memory so I might be wrong, was when Memin and the gang entered the Boy Scouts, with the help of Ricardo's father. The Troupe leader, upon seeing Memin, declares that in the Boy Scouts there's no place for those of 'his kind', and refuses to let him go with the rest of the group. Upon hearing that, Carlos first decks the troupe leader, then they smuggle Memin into the excursion and later, when the troupe leader still won't change his mind, they leave the camp because if the Boy scouts don't want Memin, then the gang doesn't want the Boy Scouts. (I think that was the time when Memin tried to wash himself with milk, under the belief that it would lighten his skin, but upon seeing his mother's dismay at that situation, he realized that the problem wasn't his skin color, but the hate filled mind of the Scout troup leader. If it wasn't that storyline, it was in one of the other two, but I honestly can't remember it right now)

The second one, and probably the most offensive to Americans was when, for some reason I can't remember, the school football team wins some tournament and is selected to go to play against an American team in Texas. The whole gang is on the team, and so they go. This cover, that I found thanks to Supermexicanos, shows pretty much the summary of that particular storyline when Memin faces for the first time in his young life institutional racism. While he had met some nasty people like the aforementioned scout leader, he had never been denied service in any place, or treated like if he was somewhat inferior until he had gone to the States. In the story, he and Carlos go to have a milkshake, and when the man refuses to serve Memin, Carlos gets angry, ends up hitting the man (A very common thing with Carlos, he always tried to solve things by fighting) and both Memin and Carlos find themselves in Jail, so Carlos's father, Ricardo's father and Carlos's texan aunt have to get them out of the mess.

The third one, and my personal favorite to explain why Memin isn't racist and in fact can be used to teach kids that racism is wrong, is when Memin and the gang are going to have their First Communion (Another cultural thing here. Even when we do have freedom of religion, and there are many different religions in Mexico, everyone is assumed to be Catholic until there's evidence that they're not, so seeing this type of religion storylines in comics is not even considered propaganda. It just is). At one point, another kid in sunday school points out to Memin that he is wasting his time, he's going to go to hell even if he has his first communion because there are only white angels in heaven. As a proof, he shows Memin all the paintings in the church where of course, all the angels are white and blond haired.

Memin gets so disheartened at that, that he really decides that there's no point in being a good kid, and so he starts not talking to his friends, being mean to people, talking back to grown ups, not doing his homework and so on. It takes a bit of sleuthing from his teacher, his friends and the priest to figure out what is the problem, and the solution presented by the priest is simple: He sends the gang to buy some brown paint, and task them to paint some of the angels in the murals black, because of course, even if they weren't painted by the artist, there are angels of color in heaven. That gives Memin hope, and he finally makes peace with his friends. The kid who started the problem though, if I recall correctly, is expelled from Sunday school.

Now, Memin was created back in 1940, and it hasn't changed since then. Should he get a revamped version, that draws less from the old design? Maybe, if they were paying Mr. Sixto Valencia, the artist (Mrs. Duche died a while ago) for redrawing his old work. As things stands now, what Editorial Vid is doing (And had been doing for a while even before the stamps controversy three years ago) is just reprint the old material, exactly in the same way as it had been published back then. There is no modernization, no attempt to make the material more current (And trust me, there's more than just Memin's appearance that reads dated when you start reading the whole story, for instance, the much critiziced corporal punishment against Memin by his mom. In 1940, mothers were expected to do that. Or have we forgotten all those Superman covers where Superman is spanking someone, or getting spanked?) and I don't think there's any interest for it to be. While Memin is a very loved character, and his comic has been reprinted at least 5 times if my memory serves, mexican comic books aren't treated with much importance by Mexican business, mostly because they 'don't sell' and thus, a modernization of Memin is probably seen as a useless risk. Reprinting makes money with very little cost for them, so it's seen as risk free.

Oh, one final word. There's a lot said about the language used against Memin (I've even read a blog that translated parts of it, by a man who claims to be fluent in both languages but obviously fails at contextual reading), but most of it forgets one thing: In Mexico, 'Negro' is not an insult, and, when used by members of your own family, or very close friends, is usually a term of endearment. So when Memin's mom calls him "condenado negro" (lit. "Damn Black") what she is saying in spanish is equivalent to a mother calling his kid 'naughty boy' even if the words literally say something different. But then translation is a tricky business, and usually, a literal translation will only translate words, but not real meanings especially if those meanings are culturally charged.

ETA: I sent my post to Journalista, because I feel strongly about finding solutions to cultural differences, and I see that it's been posted on other sites, sparkling discussion in them. I am now thorn between going there and explaining one point that seems that I failed to make clearly, or just editing, so I will do the editing. Hopefully, the people who already read the post and didn't comment here will read it. If not, at any rate, it is a point that should be cleared.

I am completely aware on how anyone living in the United States (Or, I'd even risk to say, outside Latin America) can be offended by Memin's looks (and, by extension, how his mother looks). He is, after all, drawn in the same fashion as many people of color were ridiculed back in 1940, and yes, that is offensive, and, even if I'm pretty sure that neither Mr. Sixto Valencia nor Mrs. Duché intended it to be, racist. That should not be up to discussion, and I'm really ashamed that I couldn't make that clear. I wish Editorial Vid (Because the Mexican Goverment has nothing to do with Memin or its publication) had the good will to ask Mr. Sixto to re-design Memin and redraw the old stories. It would be a win-win situation. We could keep the anti-racist message that Mexicans love so much, lose the ugly stereotypes that make that same message get lost, and Mr. Sixto would get paid more, but I honestly doubt it will ever happen due to the bad shape the comic industry in this country is in. My only point with all of this was to put a bit of perspective on the history of the comics, and to why so many mexicans defend Memin. Mostly? They aren't talking about the art, but about the story.

In any case, I also like to thank those commenters I read in those other blogs (That you can see in posts linking to this blog), because they have made me think a lot about not only the issue of Memin, but also how we all see our cultural neighbors. And that maybe a good subject for another post.

Misa Misa. The not so dumb blonde.

2008-07-01T16:28:00.000-07:00

One of the main criticisms against yaoi fangirls (and by this I mean the type of rabid fan who will chase guys around in cons to hit them with a 'yaoi' pallet, or will say that a cute guy is 'rapeable' and not see how creepy that is) is that they will call *any* female who comes between their guys (Or, in the most extreme cases, any female) a whore, a bitch, a slut, and an idiot.

Unfortunately, that one is not so much a stereotype as it's the truth, and sometimes, not only with the most rabid type of fans. Setting aside the 'but she's not as important/strong/cool/interesting as the main character' complains, that might be true as sometimes, secondary characters don't get as much development as the main characters, I'm talking about people that complain that the daugther of a Foreign Minister doesn't has the same combat skills and military know how as a Gundam Pilot. Or, in the particular case I'm going to discuss, that a pop singer isn't as bright as the best detective in the world, and a guy who fooled every single government agency in his country. And here I make a pause to warn you, I'm going to pretty much spoil a couple of very important plot points of the Death Note manga.

Misa Misa, whose real name is Misa Amane, is, at first glance, hated by many fans and critics of Death Note alike. In secret communities, is fairly easy to find 'I know my friends will kill me, but I like Misa Misa' secrets, as easy as is to find people who complain about Misa Misa fanart (Even more if she's paired with one of the main characters of the series). On the other hand, I've also read in at least two forums (One a community in live journal, another was Girl-Wonder.org) that people where hesitant to pick up Death Note because while the two main male characters were genious level smart, the main girl was the equivalent of a teenaged Britney Spears, who talked about herself in third person, and only cared about dates. Tom S.Pepirium of IGN even compared her to Jar Jar.

Because at first sight, yes, Misa Misa could be considered at best dumb, and at worst stupid. After all, she's a struggling idol singer wannabe who, as I mentioned before, talks about herself in third person (a sign in manga of 'cuteness' and 'childlike personality'). From the moment she appears, she declares her absolute love for Light Yagami, and not only she manages to put him in danger of being caught a couple of times, she also seems to be only interested in getting him to date her. She's like a psychopathic Silver Age Lois Lane in that aspect, and yes, I understand how that can be a bit jarring.

But in a series where the main characters spend most of the first volume playing complex cat and mouse games, second guessing each other, and correctly predicting the other's actions without even meeting face to face, where L is apparently the best detective in the world at the tender age of 25 (And the second and the third best too, because he sockpuppets), and Light is a top student, who is called a genious by his teachers and is so smart that he gets bored by school easily, anyone else can come up as stupid. A good example is Naomi Misora, an FBI agent that comes incredibly close to discover Light without the help of the FBI or L, but committed the one fatal mistake of telling Light her real name because even if she knew that Kira used the real names of their victims to kill them, she had no reason to suspect Light.

Thing is, and most people forget this, that there was one person who managed to not only find that Kira was Light, but also managed to trick him into revealing his identity without revealing hers. If you've read the series, you probably will say that of course she managed to find him, since she had the Shinigami Eyes that reveal a person's name and lifespan... unless that person has a Death Note. However, the planning that went into assuring that Light would be within her eyesight without her being recognized was quite solid and she managed to fool everyone except for Light and L.

She also has a very strong personality, at least in the sense that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants. When Light tells her he will have to see other girls, she doesn't hesitate to announce that she will kill all of them if he does that. Where at that point Light still refrained himself from killing too many innocents (He killed all those who were directly a threat to him, but not random cops just to show off his powers), Misa simply views those causalities as steps on the way to make Kira's perfect world. In that way, she's far colder than Light, and one would thing that if she had been the first Kira, that is, if she had been the only possesor of a Death Note, she could've been far more dangerous than Light because even when she didn't had the intelligence that Light had, she was far more willing to kill, and had something that Light never had: A completely loyal Shinigami at her side.

Another great example of her personality is on volume 4 of the manga, in what can be called one of the most disturbing sequences of the whole story (And that's saying a lot). After her first meeting with L, she is captured by the FBI and, since they don't know how Kira kills, but know that she needs to know her victims' faces and names, they cover her eyes with a metal mask, and put her in a straitjacket, and keeping her restrained in what many fans have come to call 'bondage Misa'. Misa then is kept without water or human contact (L talks to her through a microphone but no one comes near enough to touch) until she confesses that she's Kira the Second, and who is Kira the First. And Misa, the bubbly hair head who doesn't seem to think about consequences at all, who seems more concerned about make up and clothes than anything else, doesn't budge. There's a very chilling moment when, after three days of being deprived of food and water, Misa just asks 'Kill me'. It is her codeword to give up the Death Note, but at the time, we readers don't know that. For a moment, we're witnessing Misa's suicide, and it's a very poignant moment for her, as it's the last time we'll see Kira/Misa for a while.

That same torture scene brings forward another thing that most readers overlook: Misa is far more stronger than Light in front of adversity. Following his (Incredibly complex) plan, Light gives himself up to be locked up just like Misa was. Only that he isn't troused up like Misa was. He's just handcuffed, and someone puts headphones on him, ostensibly to keep him from finding out where he is just by the sounds. He waits seven days, according to his plan, before giving up the notebook, but we never know the exact situation of his confinement. We can figure out he's being fed and given water, since there's no indication to the contrary. And when he loses his memory of being Kira, the first thing he does is to ask for his immediate release, and keeps insisting that since he's innocent, he should've let go. Misa, on the other hand, stays tied up like Hannibal Lecter's female version for 50 days. And in those 50 days, with no clear memory of how the hell she ended up like that, she doesn't cry, or begs. She comes to the conclusion that she was taken by a stalker, and starts negotiating for her freedom in a way that keeps L puzzled. She calls him a pervert, she acts as if she's bored out of her mind, and the only time she asks for something not biolgical (namely, going to pee, so we can imagine she's being fed now), is to see Light. In L's own words 'the only thing I see is the abnormal strenght of Amane's love for Light Yagami'.

After that, Misa is shoved in the role of Light's girlfriend by Tsugumi Ohba, so she gets less and less to do. But even so, she still manages to make her opinions heard and, in many occasions, she proves to be braver than the super smart guys because while she knows she can't second guess everything, she jumps into the situations life throws at her willingly, ready to make the best of them.

So sure, she seems like an airhead, only interested in Light as a romantic partner even if he doesn't love her, and at times, she can be certainly annoying. But all those things don't make her an unnecessary character, or a weak one.

If you ask me, she's one of the most multidimensional characters of the whole story, just because of that.

My issues with manga. (part I)

2008-05-11T13:15:00.001-07:00

Ok. First of all, anyone who has seen my deviantart account, or my webcomics, or even my banner will be puzzled at the title of the post. After all, I must like manga, if I'm so heavily influenced by it, right?

Well, of course. I do like manga. I have a pretty big collection of manga in my house, have read even more manga due to my wok, and admire a lot of japanese artists, as well as the people who are influenced by their style* But that doesn't mean that I don't have certain issues with it, and with the assumptions people make about people who like manga, and about people who don't like manga.

When I decided I was going to use this blog to write about comics and such, I originally said (I don't remeber if I actually posted that or not, but let's assume I did) that I wasn't going to talk about manga. I do that in my work. I review about three manga every two weeks for my job, and that's a lot of manga, especially if you take in account that there are some mangas that I read for review purposes that aren't picked for publication. So I was totally against the idea of doing even more reviews for my blog, even for those manga that I had already read.

There's a lot to be said about the idea of 'too much of a good thing', especially when half of those manga aren't that great to begin with.

Now, obviously I've changed my mind, mostly because due to the nature of the reviews, my personal opinion isn't important. I've got to be as impartial as I can, and sometimes, that can be a bit frustrating **

And that's my first issue with manga. That, for many fans, if you like one manga (or even, say, twenty), you must like all manga. Every single genre, every single author, and not find any possible flaw in comercial hits like Naruto or Death Note, and if you don't think the hit of the season is the best thing since sliced bread, then you're a hater. Maybe it's not that extreme with fans from the USA, but in Mexico, you can't say that you like, say, Saint Seiya, but you find its treatment of Greek Mythology and female characters reprehensible (True story, a friend of mine was actually threatened with physical violence for daring to say that she found plot holes in Saint Seiya, and that she didn't like Evangelion. And not just threats. She was actually followed to the bathroom during a convention, and barely managed to escape getting beaten. For not liking an anime, if you can believe that). You can't like Tokyo Babylon but find CLAMP's treatment of cross generation romance sickening at best and problematic at worst, and so on. The almost cult-like following that some animes get is one of those things that actually put me off anime and manga, and the reason why some titles are in my 'only if boss asks' list.

This of course, goes hand to hand with the idea that some fans have that somehow, manga is inherently superior to comics. I have no idea where that one came from, or why is so popular. Of course, there's also the opposite, and t comes to a point where manga-fans don't talk to comic-fans and vice-versa, and, even worse, they sneer at each other. It's like superhero readers and independent comic readers all over again. And meanwhile, there are hidden jewels that go unnoticed due to this attitude.***

Finally, or at least for this part, is the eternal idea that 'Girls love manga' and 'Girls draw manga'. Sure, I'm a woman, and I like manga. But my best friend is a woman, and she doesn't like most manga. And there's a thousand women like her. I don't know if Nicola Scott likes manga, but I can swear her style isn't manga no matter how broad your definition of manga is (Well, unless it is so broad as to include every single comic style). On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Adam Warren isn't a woman and whatever else you may say about him, his style is very manga-influenced. And the problem with this particular stereotype is that it alienates women. Both as readers and as artists. Sure, offering a particulary good manga to someone isn't alienating, but if said someone is a woman who happens to be saying that she wishes there were more strong female characters in, say, X-men or Avengers... it's not going to go well. It's just like saying "No, you can't play with this toys, but here, have a Barbie."

There's also a lot to be said about the myth that manga is somehow more 'girl-friendly'. Yes, it does has a lot more genres than the mainstream american comic industry, and yes, it appears easier for a female author to publish and become popular, however that doesn't mean that there aren't problems, starting with the division of stories 'for girls' and 'for boys'.

But I already went way too long, so that will be for another post.

*I'm not going to go now in the whole mess that is the whole debate about if manga can only be done in Japan or not. That's for another post, another day.
**That is not to say that it doesn't slip from time to time. But my editor is cool with that and understands that there's a point in which no one can find something good to say about a title, no matter how much you're grasping for straws.
***And that's not going into the art style situation, and the thousand of 'how to draw manga' books that are around now. Because, yes, if you're only copying manga you're doing it wrong, and it will take years to unlearn what you're doing now. Oh, I know. I'm still on the process of unlearning many things.

Dear Joss, please stop.

2008-05-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

I just read a couple of new scans on the latest Buffy comic, and I've never been more glad that I never listened to peer pressure and spent money on them. Even with the gorgeous covers.

And this is not about the whole 'Buffy is now experimenting' thing from last issue, although that still makes me groan. No, this is about how, once again, one of Xander's girlfriends has ended up dead. Or, at least, impaled from behind with a very big spear.

Now, I'm pretty sure that Rene is not going to even count as a WiR, because that particular trope is not about just being a female character who dies, but you also have to be a female character whose death (or rape, or depowering) is used just to further a male character's story and let's be honest, Xander has never been one to get in the warpath because one of his girlfriends dies. And he's got some experience on that.

What pisses me off is that yet again there's another romantic relationship in the Jossverse that is doomed. And while I get that perpetual happiness won't sell books, coming this close to the whole Brand New Day mess, and with so many mainstream comics showing break ups and separations its getting tiresome.

Seriously, is there any romance in the Jossverse that hasn't ended in disgrace, death, or both members of the couple hating each other?

Othello, an interesting manga surprise.

2008-05-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

I am not a very big fan of shojo manga. I liked it back when I was 16 (Sailor Moon and all CLAMP works were my favorite back then) but lately, all the girls in distress and drooling over misterious masked guys were getting on my nerves. However, this week I had to read the first volume of Othello for reviewing, and I have to admit, it was not at all what I was expecting.

Sure, the plot sounds a bit contrived: a girl who is too shy to even stand for herself develops a second personality who goes on avenging wrongs and beating bullies, and, in the middle of it, finding love and a music career for the original personality. It's like modern maho shojo 101, but without the sparkly transformation.

But in practice, Othello ended being quite different. The first thing that I noticed was that there was no sparkly trasnformation in sight, not even when the original 'gimmick' to go between Yaya (the shy, quiet personality) and Nana (the outgoing, and a bit violent) was Yaya looking at her reflection in a mirror. Yaya never remembers what Nana does, and in fact isn't even aware of her existence, while Nana knows everything that Yaya thinks, and at first just works to avenge those who made Yaya feel bad with herself.

There is a cute guy on all this, Matsuyama, who knows Yaya's secret, and swears to protect her all the time, but in truth, he ends up being moral support for Yaya when she finally realizes what's going on, and just stays in the sidelines while Yaya/Nana fix things for themselves.

The art is very shojo-standart, but I'm amazed how you can distinguish perfectly between Nana and Yaya even when Nana is dressed like Yaya. There's no change of hair color, no change of eye shape, just attitude. And while one could dismiss Othello as a 'makeover story' with a gimmick, I can honestly say that it was a worthwhile read.

Sorry for the lateness. Friends of Lulu nominations

2008-05-01T17:04:00.000-07:00

Long, long story. In the meantime, in case you haven't heard:

It's that time of year again -- time to nominate the best and brightest for the 2008 Lulu Awards!

Nominations due May 14!

The Friends of Lulu annual Lulu Awards bring honor and recognition to the most inspiring and noteworthy women in the comic book industry, as well as the efforts, achievements, and works that reflect Friends of Lulu's goals. Nominations for the Awards are open to anyone. Once the nominees are chosen, only current members of Friends of Lulu will be able to vote for who should win each award. The Lulu Awards will be handed out this year during the MoCCA Art Festival in New York City, Saturday June 7.

The Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame nominees must have published work, whether self-published, company-published, or Web-published. An individual cannot win more than once.

Women of Distinction nominees must have worked in the comic industry in a non-creator role, such as editing, publishing, reporting, or retail.

The Lulu of the Year Award honors the creator(s), book or other project whose work best exemplifies Friends of Lulu's mission.

The Kim Yale Award nominees must have published work, whether self-published, company-published, or Web-published. Nominees must be nominated for this category within three years of their first published work. An individual may not be nominated more than twice, and cannot win more than once. The award is named for comics writer Kim Yale, a founding Lulu member who passed away in 1997.

The Volunteer of the Year award was introduced in 2002 to recognize those people who have volunteered time and effort to advance Lulu's goals. Current board members are not eligible. The Volunteer of the Year award is nominated by and voted on by the National Board.

To vote -- and read more details about the awards -- go here

LULU AWARDS MOVING TO NEW YORK CITY FOR 2008, WITH THE HELP OF MOCCA, IDW, DC COMICS AND ARCHIE COMICS

2008-04-10T06:08:00.000-07:00

Friends of Lulu is moving the organization's Lulu Awards event from the San Diego Comic-Con to the popular MoCCA Art Festival (aka Artfest) this year!

The annual Lulu Awards, which recognize the efforts women make in comics, will be held at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan on Saturday, June 7 at 8:30 p.m.. Light refreshments will be served, and there will be a suggested donation of $7.00 at the door.

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, along with IDW, DC Comics and Archie Comics, is sponsoring this major event.

"We are excited to bring an award event to MoCCA Artfest, and just as excited not to be competing with the multitude of great events at San Diego Comic-Con this July. We are able to reach a larger group of people eager to see wonderful creators recognized for their hard work in this field," Treasurer Marion Vitus notes.

On the schedule to present awards are the previous years' award winners, including Rachel Nabors and Abby Denson, and on the roster to emcee the event is Lulu Eightball creator Emily Flake.

The new Lulu Awards date, in June instead of July, means the nominations are right around the corner; nominations will be open to non-members this year and begin at the joint MoCCA/Friends of Lulu table at the New York Comic-Con starting Friday, April 18.

Look for more details on the Friends of Lulu blog:

http://www.friends- lulu.org/

About our sponsors:

Founded in 2001, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is one of a small handful of not-for-profit organizations dedicated solely to the collection, preservation, study and display of America's favorite art form. In addition to a year-round slate of on-site exhibitions and programming, the museum holds an annual fundraiser, the MoCCA Art Festival, which has grown to be widely recognized as one of the major events of the comic convention season. MoCCA's Website is located at http://www.moccany. org/

IDW Publishing is a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC, a revolutionary creative service company with a wide range of clients. Among its best-selling titles are Hasbro's THE TRANSFORMERS; Paramount/CBS's STAR TREK; Fox's ANGEL; the BBC's DOCTOR WHO; and Ben Templesmith's WORMWOOD. IDW's 30 DAYS OF NIGHT film from Sony Pictures was released in October 2007 and was the #1 movie in its first week of release. IDW's website is located at http://www.idwpubli shing.com/

DC Comics, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, is the largest English-language publisher of comics in the world and home to such iconic characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Sandman. These DC super heroes and others have starred in comic books, movies, television series (both animated and live-action) and cyberspace, thrilling audiences of all ages for generations. DC Comics' Web site is located at http://www.dccomics .com/

The Archie Comics line of comic books is one of the most successful, longest-running lines in the history of the comic industry. Compared to other comic publishers whose audiences are primarily male, the comics of Archie Comics are read and enjoyed by males and females alike. Archie Comics are favorite reading of young people and young-at-heart adults. They are also published in nearly a dozen different foreign languages and distributed all over the world. Archie Comics has not only spawned characters that have been successfully exploited in comics, but characters whose popularity has spilled over into other media and who have become part of current culture. In addition to comic books, ARCHIE has found success on television, radio and in the music industry. SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH has also become a major television star with two animated series and a live action network sitcom. JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS have also enjoyed success beyond comics, with an animated series and a recording career, and a major motion picture. The characters of Archie Comics have also found success on the Internet, at http://www.archieco mics.com/

I miss Murphy Brown

2008-03-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't got cable in a couple of weeks (long story) and to be honest, I like having the tv on as 'white noise' when I work, so I decided to put on some of my DVDs in order to, well, get some white noise, and also, remember why I bought them in the first place. Also, a very good friend of mine lent me some of his copies of the different shows he has been watching, so I'm pretty much set.

But after checking The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Burn Notice (Which I loved, being a Bruce Campbell fan), and Buffy, I made my way to my lonely Murphy Brown season I set, and with the first episode something struck me.

There is no 'modern' Murphy Brown.

Sure, there are a lot of great female characters in the new tv series I've been watching (and I'm sure in some of those I haven't been watching). While I wish I could wring Jhon Connor's neck, the interaction between Sarah and the new Terminator are interesting and intriguing, if it wasn't because the new Terminator falls in the 'strong, tough young girl' category that seemed to kindle after Buffy. Fi, the female co-lead of Burn Notice, as well as Mr. Weston are quite strong in their own way, but sometimes Fi strucks me as a bit of a pshyco, and Mr. Weston... well, her role in the show is basically be Michael's mother. I won't say the female detectives, DA's and judges on Law and Order aren't great, each in their own way... but even so, I still feel like there's something missing there.

Another series I've been watching is Damages, starring Glenn Close. Now, one could argue that if I wanted the slot of 'tough, no no-sense, strong lead female', Patty in Damages is pretty much it. Except that, unlike Murphy (And, in her own sitcom, Ellen, and probably a couple I'm missing from the 90's), Patty is a very manipulative and cruel woman. I'm hooked with the series, I won't lie, but I wouldn't like to be Patty's friend, the way I would've loved for Murphy to be my aunt back when I watched the series the first time.

I'm not saying there aren't great female characters in today's TV, and maybe it's the kind of shows that I watch, the kind of shows that get released in my country. But I spent the last 24 hours trying to come up with a modern equivalent of Murphy, and the closest I got was... well, House. But he's a guy, so it's not quite the same.

If anyone has any suggestions for a modern Murphy, I would love them.

Oh, and btw... does anyone knows if Season 2 was ever released on DVD?

Broadening one's point of view.

2008-03-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting a lot, but I've been reading a lot, and thinking even more.

See, when I joined Friends of Lulu's Directors board, one of the things I said was that I could bring a different perspective to the organization, as I'm a very new person to the american comic book industry, but have a lot of experience in the Mexican comic book industry (What little is left of it)

Of course, the opposite is true too. And while one could make a point about anglo-centrism, and how many things on the internet automatically assume that a) the reader can read english, and b) the reader is in the USA, there's a lot to say about what we, as in everyone who lives outside of the USA, can learn from that anglo-centrism.

In the case of women and comics, for instance, I think we're in a pretty even territory to speak about the problematics we face. There aren't many mexican comic books being produced right now, but the "women as object" problematic is as notorious here as it is in America. I think that might be true everywhere, although I suspect places like Japan have a complete different set of problems to deal with.

In the case of the industry, and the sad death that some people like to annouce for it, with the eternal 'big summer events' and the trace artists, and porno-faces, and continuity problems... well, we (and by we, I mean Mexicans who live in Mexico) might be only able to contribute as readers. Our industry is completely different, we don't have 'corporate owned characters' and so all the attempts to revive the industry here can only be likened to the independent american comics, even when our comics may or may not be supported by an editorial. In that field, our opinion matters as much as any other reader. We're consumers, but our industry, and our country, has a lot of different troubles that I think makes it difficult for us to relate. Unless, of course, we're talking about those who work on both industries. Humberto Ramos, for instance, can talk with a lot of authority about how is both places are different because he has worked professionally in both. He wouldn't be speculating, he would be talking from experience.

Censorship, on the other hand, is that field in which I don't think anyone can find an even field when we take in account different cultures. Forget about what is pornography or not (Nipples? Boobs? underwear?) we cannot even agree in age of concent. UK has one, USA has another, México has a very strange policy about that. And once we field that one hurdle, we get in deeper waters as we try to define what is 'acceptable' and that changes from country to country. Talking about that would take us years.

And then we get to the on the one subject that I must confess that I was completely ignorant about until I started reading other blogs, especially Cherry Lynn's via When Fangirls Attack, and that is race in comics.

Living in Mexico, I had the luxury of living in a sort of bubble when it comes to racism. I am not saying that Mexico has no racial problems, but they're not in the same league as the USA. It does help that most of our population is mestiza, mixed, and thus we've got a bigger trouble with class issues than with race issues. At least where I was growing up, what mattered was the money you had, not the shade of your skin.

That is not to say, of course, that we, as a country, are not aware of the racism problems in the world. It's just that we see them a bit different than what is seen outside our country (And for that, you can google the Memin Pinguin incident. That was a very good example of different contexts). The most sexy woman in mexican comics has been, for a long time, considered to be Rarotonga, who, while she could be seen as the 'femme fatale' stereotype of a black woman, at least was always drawn as a black woman.

So it's been enlightening to read every post I've read in different blogs about diversity in comics, mostly because it's helped me to challenge my own views and my own attitudes about it. I was raised upon the principle that people are people, no matter their gender, race, economy status, or religion, and for that I've always thanked my parents, but until I got into the internet, until I got into publishing, I started realizing that no, not everyone has been raised the same, and the problems are very real.

And so far, the best education I've gotten is from reading, reading the comments, and being able to recognize that educating one's self is the best way to start solving that problem.

Femisism, Comic books, and percieved images.

2008-02-09T12:46:00.000-08:00

There is a new storm brewing in the usual comic blogosphere. As far as I know, it started when Grant Morrison wrote a dream scene where Batman saw a case for the fallen Stephanie Brown. Some people saw it as a triumph, some people saw those people as a threat, and somewhere in between, Dirk Deepey from Journalista grouped every single female blogger as part of the 'Girl Wonder crowd'.

While reading those, I also found an old 2006 post about the Wizard 'How to Draw' segments, where men were portrayed super heroic and women sexy and 'sultry'. Amazingly enough, that old discussion still has some posts where guys insist that if 'fat femnazis don't like that, they shouldn't read comics'.

Now, a bit of a digression. I was talking to a friend about old dubbing. When that happens, I get nostalgic since when I was little, Mexican Dubbing was among the best (Or was the best) dubbing in the world. I watched all Disney movies in spanish, and I know most of the songs of those old movies by heart. It's still odd for me to hear The Bare Necesities in English, and I really can't relate to many of the old dubbing actors for Disney in English as I have no idea who they are or how do they sound like. Same with old series. I know Richard Dean Anderson has a rough, manly voice, but for me MacGuyver will always have the smooth, polite voice of Mario Castañeda (Who, incidentally, was also Benton Fraser in Due South, another show that sounds alien to me in english). During this talk, I remembered who had been my first exposure to feminism. Although my mom has always been a feminist, when I was 6 I wasn't exactly aware of that. My dad agreed with her, and thus I wasn't aware of the real struggle outside the house. She was my mom, not a feminist.

And I wouldn't know about the 'man hating, bra burning' feminist until much, much later, when I started arguing about women rights on my own, way into highschool. No. My first feminist was none other than Disney's Mary Poppins Mrs. Banks.

Played by Glynis Jhons (Who, btw, was also Lady Penelope Peasoup in the Batman series), Mrs. Banks serves as a comic relief in the movie. She's a suffragette who balances the act between going to march to ask for women's votes, but whose lines inside the house are usually 'Yes, dear' to whatever her husband says.

Still her song, Sister Suffragette, is the first one of the movie, and it was always the one I remember first when talking about Mary Poppins. I remember the original translation, that, re-transtaled, would be something like "I'm a brave soldier with a skirt, who is chasing the right to vote. Today is the day we break our chains, in a hard fight to be free, and our dignified successors will sing when they're older At least, the women can vote." The new translation is more faithful to the original english but it lacks melody in my humble opinion. Anyway, Mrs. Banks is as far an image from the usual fat, unkept, hairy man hater lesbian that is the usual strawfeminist on internet debates.

Thing is no matter how much we insist that there is no such thing as a hive vagina and that no two feminist are exactly the same, critics will never believe us. Because we might disagree on the small details. Not every woman cared about Stephanie Brown, or about the Mary Jane statue. I find Maya, from Heroes, incredibly offensive, but I'm sure that for many people that's a not-issue.

And as I write this I realize that the problem is quite similar to the other problem we usually argue with the good old boy's club. All women look the same. All comic book women must be a certain shape, and dressed in a certain way. All feminist must be of one mind, and look roughly the same, despite evidence to the contrary. Which is one of the reasons why we keep arguing about that. Maybe if they realize that not all 2d women are exactly the same, they'll realize that not all 3d women are the same either.

Heroes as Celebrities. My two cents on the Wonder Woman thing.

2008-01-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

When I saw the Wonder Woman Playboy cover, the first thing that crossed to my mind was 'Oh, shit'. Basically because it was the confirmation of an idea I've been bouncing around for a long time now, and seeing it in print, and just in the magazine I said was wrong for Wonder Woman was quite a shock.

I'll explain. I'm convinced that, in our world, if superheroes existed there would be no secret identities. Take a look at our celebrities. Unless they're in the D-list or lower, they can count on a paparazzi stalking them. This triples when they're A-list, or they bring scandal to their lives. Some of them seem to be unable to get one really private moment. So if we had a man flying around New York in bright prime color tights, you can bet that before six months were up someone would've gotten that elusive picture of Superman turning into Clark Kent. Superheroes could possibly exist but the double life they have? That would've almost impossible.

On the other side of the coin, the same magazines that now fight for getting the latest picture of the hottest hollywood star would be fighting for getting the chance of having a member of the JLA or the Avengers pose for them. That was my reasoning on doing a Vouge mock cover with Wonder Woman, and can you imagine Bruce Wayne on Forbes? With an interview explaining why he is Batman? Or Booster Gold on GQ? I would bet that Wonder Girl would appear in Sixteen or Teen Vouge, while the Supergirl who was portrayed at the beginning of her newest series would shock Clark and the Kents by doing a Maxim photo spread. And Playboy? I can think of a number of heroines that, the way they've been written more or less constantly and as part of their personalities, would jump at the chance of appearing in Playboy.

That list starts with Powergirl, since I honestly think the 'secure on her sex appeal' part of her personality is not only an excuse to draw the hole in her chest bigger. She Hulk would be another who wouldn't say no. Emma Frost. Starfire. Fire, who canonically had a website of her pictures naked (although in powered form). Storm, pre-T'challa's marriage. Psyloke, maybe the Wasp.

Wonder Woman, though, I'm not sure. When she just arrived to man's world? Probably, as I doubt she had any taboos regarding nudity living on Paradise Island. After a couple of years in the USA? Doubtfully, especially as she grew in her role as an ambassador and realized the difference between Themiscra and the rest of the world.

But all in all, I can't blame Playboy for their photoshot. I don't particularly like the comparison in text to Lynda Carter but that's not because I hold Lynda Carter in a high pedestal, but because I hate the way in which new comers have to be 'the modern' anything.

What I do wish, though, was that Wonder Woman wasn't the only high recognizable superheroine so every time someone does something like this, it has to be Wonder Woman, or, in a lesser degree, Supergirl. I understand how many people think that the photoshot is somewhat demeaning to a femenist icon, and why they're offended. Someone has mentioned the fact that Wonder Woman is the only superheroine for women and girls, at least in the view of the public eye. And I can't shake the feeling that if that wasn't true, the Playboy cover wouldn't have been such a huge deal. If we had more superheroines visible and, lets admit it, maybe less cheescakey in their original medium, then maybe we wouldn't have this kind of problems.

That or, as someone else pointed out, let's have at least one Playgirl photoshoot with a model painted on as Batman. Or any other male superheroes. They have plenty to choose from.

Desing-A-Lulu Initiative

2007-12-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

We at Friends of Lulu are looking for talented artists to donate their talent to Friends of Lulu's Design-A-Lulu Initiative, a fundraising and increased public awareness effort in which we ask artists to dream up their own interpretation of our Lulu mascot.

If you can find the time to help Friends of Lulu by contributing your own unique "Lulu" design, we would most appreciate it.

Here are the specs & pertinent info:

* Our preferred deadline is by the end of January, but we will happily extend it where needed.

* Colored art is preferred but B&W is fine.

* Art should be scanned at 300 dpi.

* Torso-and-head shots preferred, though if you're inspired to draw full-body that's okay.

* Though your initial inspiration can be our original mascot Lulu (and the original Little Lulu, but not too close to her design), unique interpretations are welcome and encouraged.

* Who is "Lulu?" She's the Everywoman who reads and/or creates comic books.

* A variety of ethnicities, races, and body types for your Lulu are welcome as well.

* A request will be made for original art so we can auction it all off in a Lulu fundraising event.

* Selected art will be used for a variety of Friends of Lulu fundraising/ promotional purposes, including website & flyer art, T-shirts, stickers, and buttons.

* We will initially post the art on our blog as it comes in, then later set up a permanent gallery on our site.

Growing up with Wonder Woman.

2007-12-09T06:32:00.001-08:00

The very first superhero I can remember knowing in my life was Wonder Woman. I'm pretty sure it was in the campy TV show starring Linda Carter, followed pretty closely by the Superfriends cartoon, but there were a lot of others in the Superfriends cartoon, so my first contact with the whole comics/superhero thing had to be Linda Carter with the invisible plane, the spinning change and the Nazi villains.

And I loved Wonder Woman. I used to run around the house in my underwear yelling that I was Wonder Woman and my jumping rope was my magical lazo (I was four at the time. My cousin was Supergirl and by joint decision, Grandpa was Lex Luthor.) I didn't miss an episode, and I loved to watch Superfriends too, just to see Wonder Woman.

As time went by, I found a lot of other Superheroes. Marvel, in particular, became my favorite, but I still kept that deep love for Wonder Woman, catching her in reruns when I could. But since at the time Wonder Woman was in licencing limbo down here in Mexico, I didn't get the chance to read her until later, when a local editorial printed the first Post-Crisis issues in a magazine entitled "Superman presents" (This is, btw, a very common practice here to avoid having to register a hundred titles you're not sure will sell. So everything is showcased by the titles that do sell. Justice League, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Hawk and Dove were showcased by Superman. Batgirl, and some other minis were showcased by Batman. Every single story of the Marvel Universe was showcased by Spiderman. But that's for another post). I got to read the whole beginning, ending with Ares' original defeat and then... well, a couple of mixed issues. Because when you have to share space with other six or seven titles, plus Superman... well, there wasn't a lot of space for Wonder Woman to shine.

And since the Superman title was weekly back then, well, by the time that Wonder Woman had finally managed to defeat Ares, Superman had had a couple of adventures with a more experienced Wonder Woman. So actually *following* Wonder Woman was a bit hard for me.

So, despite her being the first ever superhero I loved, I have never continuously collected her comic. When getting the originals became easier, I did try to follow her, but as it was around when Zero Hour hit, well, continuity was an absolute mess and to make things worse, not only Diana wasn't Wonder Woman, but also I had no idea who the Banas were, why Hipolita was acting so weird and in general, what the hell was going on (I think the only thing that I didn't found strange was that Diana didn't had a secret identity, but that was because after loving Diana Prince, I had finally become used to the non-secret identity having Princess). I would flip through the comics I found at the LCS, and be absolute puzzled at what the hell was going on and not a single story made me want to buy the comic and say "Ok, from here on, I can try and figure out what went before as I keep buying the monthlies". Except for the story where she cut her hair. Not because of the story, I honestly can't remember any plot points of that particular story, but I loved the idea of a short haired Wonder Woman. It made for an interesting visual change.

Now. A little less than a year ago I stopped buying DC comics completely. My decision came from an interesting string of events. With Identity Crisis and the rape retcon, I decided I would only buy DC comics if they weren't written by Meltzer and there was one of my favorite characters on it. With Countdown and Blue Bettle's death, I decided that next time a favorite character of mine died, no matter the gender, that was it. No more DC comics. And then... they went and killed Kon, who was the one responsible to getting me back into reading DC. So, no more DC comics.

Except that Wonder Woman was always first, and if there was someone who could make me go back and buy DC would be a *good* Wonder Woman comic. When Allan Heinberg was named as the writer for the relaunch, I was pretty happy as I loved his Young Avengers, but I decided to cautiously wait. After all, while I hadn't bought Infinity Crisis, thanks to the good people at Scans_daily I had a pretty good idea of what had happened and that it wasn't exactly nice for Diana. And while I don't particulary hate the new secret identity or the idea of a romance between Diana and Nemesis (Mostly because until now, for me, Nemesis was a non-character. I knew he existed, but that's about it), the whole late schedule sort of made me glad I had waited. Then came Jodi Picoult, who, at least for me, was also an unknown since I haven't read any of her novels. And even for a sort of newbie like me, the characterization seemed off. I will not say anything about Amazons Attack! since I think everything about it has been said. Lets just say it was the mini that made me glad I had stopped buying DC a year before.

Gail Simone's first issue has been met by mostly positive criticism. I think every critic I read has loved it, and what I've read, I liked. But I'm still unsure. Mostly, because this has been a year where editorial mandates can mess up the work of any writer. Just look at One More Day, and that's pretty much the whole argument. Gail can, and is, amazing as a writer, but if word comes from upstairs that Wonder Woman has to have a retarded storyline, no matter how much she shines, the final idea will still be terribly bad.

And I'm through giving money to terrible bad ideas.

Guess what? It wasn't a joke. (Yes. Wizard again)

2007-11-23T19:37:00.000-08:00

I went to the FLCS today, after a week or so of not going, and they had the latest Wizard out. The one with the 300 cover. And, despite what everyone had said on the subject, that it was just a one time thing, that it was a joke that had backfired and so on... well, Wizard is still claiming to be the #1 Pop Entertainment magazine for men.

What I found ironic is that, at least around my country? 300 was a lot more enjoyed by women than by men. Sure, the spartans were manly men who did manly men things, but they still were manly half naked men. Eye candy, you know?

And it doesn't really change anything, except that, well, they sort of lost the right to say it was a joke. Unless they're trying for that 'three times make it funny' idea. And if they are? Sorry to say, I doubt it will work.

Can we lay this particular trope to rest, please?

2007-11-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

This is both about movies and comics, so bear with me. We're probably all aware of the Women in Refrigerator's phenomena by now. And we're probably all aware of the most usual complaint about it "But it happens to men too! It's not misogyny!" To which the answer is usually "But it doesn't happen to men as often as it happens to women." And that can't be denied because there's more male characters in comic books than female. And when a fridging happens to a male, more often than not is either a C-list character or a character who happens to be a minority. (To be an actual fridging, by the way, the character in question can't return from the death or the injury. So Batman and Superman do not count.)

Now, I am a fan of crime movies. Detective movies with grizzly crimes and machiavellian serial killers are one of my passion, so as soon as someone mentions the word "detective" in a review, I'm more often than not inspired to see it. So today I was about to watch Along Came a Spider, with Morgan Freeman, and I was quite ready for a good movie after Law and Order SVU.

The beginning of the movie, for those who haven't seen it, follows Alex Cross (Freeman) and his team as they are getting ready to capture a serial killer/rapist with the help of Alex's partner, whose name I forgot, who is working undercover as the serial killer's date. During the bust, the killer discovers that his date is a cop, she tries to arrest him but as he hits the brakes, she accidentally shoots him when she's thrown off her seat (Although she's wearing a seatbelt, so I'm not sure of how does that work) and he loses control of the car, breaking of the bridge dangling just so that he falls to his death, and she's alive for enough time as to let Freeman try and save her and lock eyes with her as she finally plummels to her death.

Which was about the moment when I turned off the tv, went to make iced tea, and then came back to pop the Fracture DVD that I had rented.

Now, I didn't got annoyed because it was yet another female character killed just to create angst for the male character. I got annoyed because right there I knew I was going to suffer through two hours of Alex emoting because he couldn't save his partner, feeling inadequate and then finally getting his act together to catch the bad guy.

As I've seen in dozen of other cop, action, and horror films, as well in a thousand comic books. It's called Dead Sidekick in tv tropes, it's called WiR when it's a woman, and it's been around more or less since Achilles decided to reenter the war after Patroclus was killed.

Honestly? Enough is enough. Let's find someway else to motivate our main characters, someway else to make them angst for an hour before kicking ass in the second act. Dead sidekicks, girlfriends, boyfriends, gay neighbours are way, way overdone. Hell, they parody that on the Simpsons already! And in Naked Gun. I guess that by the time a particular trope becomes a joke, is well past the time it can't be used seriously in an argument, at least not in its most straightforward way.

In my mind, I ended up reminding another movie that starts with a huge catastrophe for the main hero, who ends up angsting to the point of attempting suicide for the rest of the movie. The Bone Collector, which leaves Denzel Washington's character paralytic from the neck down. And that's different because the catastrophe happens to the character directly, so one can understand how it affects him (And not in a 'you touched my stuff' way) and not think "Hell, get over it. Cops die. It's sad, but it happens." every time the dead sidekick is brought up.

The thing is, in those 10 or so minutes of Along Came a Spider I perfectly understood the problem with the WiR and dead sidekick situation. I love those type of stories, I have a huge collection of crime movies dvds. And as much as I love Morgan Freeman's acting, I just couldn't bring myself to keep watching it, just because I knew how it was all going to end. When the hero's wife gets killed, we know he'll stop at nothing for a (temporary, at least in comic book world) revenge. When the sidekick gets shot, we know that we're up for a couple of years of angsting until we get a new sidekick. When a family member gets killed in a dark alley, it will get repeated so much that it will end up in a bad joke and a tag line (Anyone remember when the old saying about comic book death was 'All comic book deaths are temporary except for Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben? Or, more recently, the current batman meme "My parents are dead"?)

When things get to the point where your audience can figure out the ending in ten minutes or three pages of your comic, well, then it surely it is the time to stop killing sidekicks, family members and girlfriends just for a couple of minutes of angst and a shocking splash page, isn't it?

Comic book magazines and the people who read them.

2007-11-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the whole Wizard situation for all week, but I haven't been able to sit down and write my thoughts on it until now. Maybe it's a bit too late, or whatever, but I wanted to add my two devalued peso cents.

First, a disclaimer. I've bought two Wizards in my whole life. When I honestly cared about getting the news from the industry in a print form, I wasn't exactly swimming in money and for one Wizard I could get three comics so... guess who won? And when I finally got to read one, I found it quite lacking. That was in 2004, and I honestly didn't notice or cared if they had a match the rack feature or not, and I'm not going to go there and look for them to see if they had. What I do know is that there was absolutely nothing in them that would make me want to buy another one.

During all this discussion now, I wasn't thinking about Wizard and their new/old readership. I was thinking about how people on both sides of the debate seems to think that Wizard is dying, and that it needs either to secure its readership or find new one. And then I thought about the situation of information magazines in my own country. Although there's a long tradition of comics in Mexico, going from the fifties, both translating american comics and creating our own (although there's been less of that lately), and of course, manga, there has not been a successful comic book magazine in almost as long time. We've seen imported Spain magazines, and at least three attempts to do a similar magazine to Wizard, of which only one has been somewhat successful of late, called Comic Zone (I am not sure of how well is it doing, but I know it's still on print). On the other hand, manga-only magazines are quite a business, and many editorials have not one, but up to four magazines dedicated only to manga (And that's not counting the Hentai manga magazines), which range from the heavy fan-service images, to the heavy on the shonen ai side of the images and they all sell. Sure, the ones with more fan-service sell better, but even those have a somewhat balanced content for both female and male readers.

And neither Comic Zone, nor it's predecessors like Cuas! Comics y más, were as heavy on pandering with the T&A as Wizard has become of late. I am not a constant buyer of Comic Zone, but there has only been one Wonder Woman cover, as far as I remember, and there are honest articles with critical information. And for some reason, the Wizard in spanish didn't sell as well as it's precedent, and it stopped being shipped for Mexico. I do remember that most of the criticism against it was that it had no information, just hype. Which is, of course, the one criticism even die hard fans have against the original Wizard.

I've heard a lot of stories about why a comic book magazine doesn't work in Mexico, ranging from 'there's no interest', to 'there's no industry to support them'. But on the other hand, manga magazines keep coming out, keep selling, and keep getting new readers.

So maybe, just maybe, Wizard -and any comic book magazine- should take note of that. The manga information magazines aren't lacking in the sexy women department, the fan-service is quite high in them... but they still manage to be all inclusive, adding some fan-service for the women who read the magazine, adding actual information that can be of interest to anyone, not just to a small group.

(BTW, I'm not in any way proposing that Wizard should start including more information about manga. Or a 'match the package' game as the one I've seen somewhere in the discussion. I don't have the answer of what Wizard should add to be more inclusive. I just know that I don't want to read about how Infinitive Secret wars or whatever is going to be the greatest thing ever just because one cover, I want to read exactly what kind of *real* impact would that storyline have in the end. Or maybe, a critique *after* the crossover to see if it really was as good as the publishers promised)

The tale of one brave little hobbit

2007-10-12T00:22:00.000-07:00

I'm suffering from insomnia, and the whole bruhaha with Warner Bros. and female leads in action films reminded me of something I wanted to write eons ago.
When I was in junior high, like many others of my age, I read Lord of the Rings. I can at least say that I did read it at the same time as all my class, at it was mandatory reading for that course. And, like many others, I fell in love with Tolkien's careful constructed universe.
But for some reason, call it bad translation, call it that by the end of the first chapter , my version of Lord of the Rings had a very particular difference.
See, I was throughly convinced that Merry was, in fact, a girl hobbit. Not only that, but that 'she' was Pippin's wife.
(Later I found out that I wasn't the only one. A lot of my friends here in Mexico made the same conclusion. So I can blame translation.)
Now, I went through the whole Fellowship and part of the Two Towers with this idea in mind, following brave Merry as she did exactly all the same things that Pippin did, sometimes being braver than he was, and being utterly terrified when the orcs took them, and all that jazz. It wasn't until the beginning of the last battle, when I found out my small mistake.
The thing is, it didn't matter. Merry was equally cool for me as a man as 'she' had been as a woman.
Of course, it was just my childhood version of the Lord of the Rings. But sometimes I wonder, if there had been a woman in the Fellowship, would it have been any less successful? I'm not talking about gender-bendering Aragorn, Frodo, Sam or Boromir -I believe those four really have to be male to work as characters. One of the strongest moments -for me- on the books is when Eowyn kills the Witch King, so we know that Tolkien could write strong women. And while I understand why there weren't any women in the fellowship, I can't stop wondering what if?

In fact... how much of the succsess of some of the great adventure and action epics we all love would change if one of the characters was a women instead of a man?

Because women don't sell.

2007-10-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

It's a bit ironic that after my last two entries that were about the cool leading ladies I had found in the two last movies I saw (A trend I plan to continue as I have a couple more 'cool movies' in the to watch list), I come to the net to read that an exec in WB is saying that the company won't produce any more movies with female leads.

It is even more ironic as I had just seen the new Jodie Foster movie trailer, and upon watching it I thought "Wow! that looks like I movie I will love to see in theaters!" (And I'm still on line to see Invaders, just for Nicole Kidman, so there :P)

Now, I'm going to say something someone probably said already, and probably was said better, but I won't feel good with myself unless I say it too. And this is: "What? So the policy changed from 'very few films with leading women characters to no films with leading women characters?" Because a simple search at the IMDB showed that there hasn't been that many films with leading women characters lately distributed by WB, much less 'action' films with leading women characters.

Looking for movies with only a female leading character, that is not equal, or secondary to a male character led me to find... well, Wonder Woman, theoretically for the 2009, but honestly, who can believe that? The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, for 2008, which I guess would be cataloged as a 'chick flick', PS I love you, that is also a romance film, The Invasion, that is one of the quoted films as cause of the decision, Nancy Drew, another family film, The Reaping, and of course, The Brave One. In the 'female lead and male lead' category I can find One Missed Call, unless they seriously change the original script, I guess Sweeny Todd, judging by the trailer. Out of the first 130 titles, not counting tv series like Gossip Girl. So, in truth, this ain't really a change of politics.

But with such a small percentage of movies with lone female protagonist, how can they decide it's a female protagonist the thing that makes those movies go unseen? Doesn't that go against the comic book idea that you need a busty, usually half dressed female character to sell your comic? (Or is it that no Hollywood actress would agree to wear what the superheroines wear?)

I will be honest. I will go and watch The Brave One, and Invasion, not just because I want to see them, but because hell, anything that proves that it's not true that women in movies don't sell is good in my book. And I'll go and watch Sweenny Todd because there's at least one cool female in that trailer. And then? Well, thankfully Stephen King's The Mist isn't by Warner Bros, so I guess I can live without their movies.

Unless of course I find out they make no money out of movies shown in Mexico. Then, I'll have to look another way to vote with my wallet.

Dead and Breakfast Cool Ladies

2007-09-03T20:17:00.000-07:00

Due to a lot of real life and work related issues, I haven't read many comics lately, so, my blog posts can't be about comics unless someone really want to know my opinion on Elf Quest, ten years later. And I write way too much about manga in my job to come home and write a bit more about manga, right now.

Anyway, on to what made me start writing today.

Confession time: I love B-movies. It's my guilty pleasure, and the goriest, the better. If there's a chainsaw in there, I'm in heaven. I like good horror movies, Shaun of the Dead is my current favorite, but B-movies have a special something that makes them very special. And yes, that love makes that sometimes, renting a movie is quite dangerous, since we can end with something very, very bad. Near unwatchable.

So, Dead and Breakfast was a surprise. We (my friend Sam and I) saw the trailer when we rented Apocalypse Alien. Word of warning though, don't rent Apocalypse Alien. Not even a hard core fan of Bruce Cambpell could find something watchable there. But the Dead and Breakfast trailer looked fun, had zombies line dancing, and well... As my friend Au says, Pigeons learn faster than us.

It started bad, and cheezy, and so cliché filled that I felt like I was playing my Horror Movie bingo card. You had the group of young adults who may take drugs in a small van getting lost and going to a small little creepy town, you had your small creepy house, manned by your tall and creepy old asian guy (Played by none other than David Carradine, no less) and before you got any real feeling for any of the characters, people start getting wacked with axes.

(I just have to say, though, that the songs are hilarious)

Anyway, in the group there are three women. I had labeled them as 'the annoying one', 'the blonde one' and 'the one who won't keep screaming and I hope she dies before the first half an hour is gone'.

And while 'the annoying one', played by Bianca Lawson (Kendra from Buffy) didn't made me change my mind (Seriously, who starts discussing with her boyfriend about their relationship during a zombie outbreak?), the other two? Blew my mind.

'The blonde one', Sara, played by Ever Carradine, somehow passed from being 'the friend we brought along becuase... we needed a third' to 'the girl who actually went around the house looking for something to defend ourselves with' to, in a moment that totally strains the disbelief, but somehow manages to work, being the one who makes a shotgun out of household items. She also is the one who figures things out, and the one who gets the coolest fight scene in the movie when presented with the typical 'evil bad guy is coming to get you' moment. She's just that cool.

And the other one? Sure, she starts screaming. And she only starts doing something after she gets paired up with the cute guy. But she reacts in a way that's pretty natural for someone who is suddenly trying to survive getting killed by their best friends, then has to watch as someone opens a dead body, removes their bones, and cleans them to make stakes. All in all, the fact that she didn't faint, makes her a cool lady in my book.

Also, there's something quite odd with the male characters, and it's the fact that we never get a male hero in this movie. Or, rather, the role of the male hero keeps changing, as the guys drop faster than flies. The 'good guy' who prays over accidental roadkill is the first one to get zombified and thus becomes the evil guy quite early in the film, the 'rebel without a cause' starts quite well as the leader, trying to find his missing friends, until he gets beheaded just as the first big fight erupts, then the 'idiotic boyfriend' steps up as the main character, keeping the girls safe and in general acting like our stereotypical hero of a horror movie, Ash-school, until he too gets zombified way, way early in the second fight. Then the male lead becomes the sheriff of the town (Played by Papa Winchester, I wish I could remember his name), which is all good until he too gets killed less than half an hour after he became the one to listen to. Finally, we get the mystic drifter, the one who knows what the hell is going on about, who, although he survives, gets knocked out of the fight right before he can stop the zombies.

Who stops the zombies, do you ask? Well, the girl who kept screaming that they were all going to die.

And while I would've loved it if clumsy boyfriend survived (He had a nice death, btw, getting himself chopped with a chainsaw), it's an interesting take on why girls tend to survive horror films. It's not just because they run. It's also because they know when to run, and when to take a stand. (Or at least, my favorite horror movie lead ladies know when to do that)

Die Hard has hardcore heroines

2007-08-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Ok, this post came to be for two reasons. Reason number one, yesterday I went to see Live Free or Die Hard and I'm still on an adrenaline high. Reason number two, while answering an anonymous on my previous Girl Characters post, and chatting with my friend Leigh I remembered something that happened during the movie and it all makes sense in my head so...

Die Hard.

(Warning, there will be spoilers here)

If I tell anyone that Die Hard has kickass heroes, no one will doubt me. Maybe the plural part, but come on, Jhon McClane is worth at least two Batmans (Sue me, I'm highly biased). The man could take out 12 terrorists without shoes, and how cool is that?

However, if I say that the women in Die Hard are kickass, I will be meet by blank stares.

But stay with me. I'll make my point. I swear.

See Die Hard 1. We meet Holly Gennero, and just by that name we know that she's a take charge lady. She's married, yeah, but she put her career first. She loves her husband, but she had to do some hard choices, and her career came first. And she might sound a bit bitchy, compared to mr. I just bought our kid a giant teddy bear, but she's a take charge kind of woman. When the terrorists arrive, she doesn't lose her cool. She's the one person who confronts Hans, and in the moment she realizes that her husband is the one making short work of the terrorists, she makes damn sure she won't make things more difficult to him. She might not be out there shooting guns and breaking necks, but she keeps her cool, and even at the end, having a gun point blank at her face, she tries to stay calm enough not to be on the way of her husband.

Now that's a cool lady.

See Die Hard 2. She's still Holly McClean, she's still out of the action for most of the film, but then we realize that the one who actually took the idiot reporter to task for what he did was her. We saw her punch him at the end of the first one, mostly as a gag, but now we find that she actually broke two of his teeth, AND that there's a restriction order against her (Why, when he put her and her husband in danger, I don't know). Anyway, when everyone in the plane gets hysterical over the reporter's irresponsible reveal of the terrorist plot, Holly doesn't panic, she doesn't get hysterical. She grabs a taser and takes care of the idiot. THEN she goes to pray, and hopes as hell that someone down there is doing their job.

Man, she's still a cool lady.

I don't remember much of the third movie, to be honest. It's the one I like less of the three, but I do remember that there are no important women in that film, even when Holly is still an important part of Jhon's life.

Which bring us to Live Free or Die Hard.

While there was a woman henchmen in Die Hard 3 -and I honestly don't remember what happens to her- Mai, the girlfriend of the main baddie this time, is as take charge as her boyfriend. In fact, she's more of a take charge type of person, as we notice from the beginning that the henchmen report to her first, and later to her boyfriend. And when she fights McClean? That scene alone was worth my ticket.

Why? Well, for starters, it's a vicious fight.

Vicious in both parts. While the camera cuts and we never see his fist connect to her face, it is obvious that he does punch her with all his strength. And she answers in kind. She, in fact, throws him out of the window, forcing him to then have to use a van to stop her.

There was nothing in that fight that required that Mai was a woman. There was nothing in that fight that requiered a male henchman. Mai had to be there, because her character was the type that would be there, and the type that, after McClane did short work of her other henchmen, would take things in her hands. She dies, of course, but she goes down kicking ass, and even her last action is, in a mirror to that of Alan Rickman, an attempt to shoot McClane. (It also has to be noted that, of all the bad guys it is her the one who thinks of bringing up the file on Jhon McClane. Smart, strong, and evil. Cool woman)

Someone next to me complained that the scene was violent against woman. I answered "What? Did you expect him to ask her to surrender nicely?" Because that would've been a lot more disrespectful, and something seen in many action movies. The woman fighter gets the upper hand because the main bad guy (Or the main good guy, depending of the type of film) underestimated her. And of course 'gentlemen don't hit women' which is a perfectly good thing in real life (In my book, anyone who hits anyone else is an idiot. Violence doesn't solve anything) but in writing someone who is trying to save his own life... One can forgive a moment of not caring of the gender of the person pointing the gun at you.

So yeah, Mai dies. And she dies after the longest, coolest fight scene in the whole film. Because man, of all the henchmen that the main baddie had, she was the coolest. (Or maybe, second coolest. Spiderboy was cool too)

And then there's Lucy Gennero, Jhon's daughter who in her mom's tradition is now denying his surname. That happens to McClean a lot. And of course, the terrorists kidnap her. But from moment one is obvious that she's not that dumb, as she does ask for identification before trusting the fake FBI guys -so she can't distinguish a fake ID. So can't I. That doesn't make any of us dumb- and she is dragged kicking and biting to the main bad's headquarters.

And when the bad guy lets her talk through a walkie to her dad so she'll beg for her life, what does she say?

"There are still five."

At gunpoint, kidnapped, just having heard that she's going to die, and what does she do? She tells her father how many terrorist are still there. She doesn't scream, she doesn't cry, she doesn't beg.

That's a hard core heroine.

That's the kind of heroines I like to read about. If it makes sense for her to literally kick ass, then have her literally kick ass. If it doesn't make sense, if she has to be kidnapped and tied up, well, kidnap and tie her up, but don't reduce her to a drooling mess of quivering fear if it doesn't make sense for her to be like that.

I could guarantee there would be less complains from women readers if that happened, you know?

Ok, explain me this

2007-08-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

Sometime between 3:00 am and 7:00 am this morning, someone hacked the GirlWonder.org page and forums. I know the hours just because I had a bit of a trouble sleeping and read a couple of messages at 2:45, and it was working fine.

There was an argument there about how some lowlifes tend to shut down feminist blogs with threats and abuse, and some people were actually defending their reasoning saying it was just because they were bullies, not because they were mysoginist.

And then the forum went kaput.

Now, the GirlWonder project has been subject of a lot of criticism. The demand for a case for Stephanie Brown, the fourth Robin, has been labeled as 'fan entitlement' and there has been other, less polite insults thrown around against the forums, their members, and the bloggers who write for GirlWonder, especially Karen of Girls Read Comics (and they're pissed). Apparently, the idea of women reading and writing about comics and what they would like to see in comics is so threatening that some idiot had just to try and shut them down.

What I honestly don't understand is why. I can sort of see the moron-logic behind the spam attacks, the threats and the insults at forums and bloggers. That is meant to frighten and annoy to the point of either silencing the blogger or make it impossible for anyone to carry an intelligent conversation trough the comments or forums. It's hard to do that when a lot of /b/tards are posting crap, both metaphorically and literally, unfortunately. But to shut down the forum completely? Hack their way in and just shut it up? Where they really that threatened by what was being said in the forum?

I used to think the one wonder of Internet is that everyone had a voice, even those who said things we weren't comfortable with. Obviously, that is not the case.

Girl Characters and me

2007-08-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

This is the third time I start writing this, and I hope this time, I can finish.

I've been reading a lot in forums about women characters in comics (Specially in superhero comics) and how some fanboys (Because I can't call them other way) insist that since comic books are made for guys, and guys like their women with revealing costumes and we should all shut up because after all it's just comics and why are we doing a mountain over this? Girls have manga, right? So they shouldn't complain.

(I end up wondering why it's always 'Girls' and never 'Women' but that's a consideration for another post)

And of course, this kind of discussion tend to end with either the fact that those who complain are jealous of fictional characters, or the old tried maxim: "Well, if you don't like it, do your own."

There are a lot of problems with that particular phrase, and much better bloggers have already dissected it to death, so I won't repeat what has been said.

What got me thinking, and, in time, caused this post and it's previous non-posted versions, was that yeah. Most of the women (And men) complaining about the sexism in comic books now, if they want to create comics, will most probably not do all the things that they don't like in comics. That's true. But I was thinking... what about all those future creators who do not spend any time in comic book forums and are not familiarized with the community and this type of discussions? The ones who are reading comic books and manga right now and met every possible type of awesome guys and so-so girls? (And if you don't believe how much a girl reader can hate a female character, go hang around an anime forum for a while. Even the ones who hate yaoi take female-character bashing to an art)

Back in 1994 there was this mexican comic book, drawn manga style. The main character was *everything* one could come to expect of a stereotypical manga heroine. She was cute, bubbly, had pink hair, was a professional pop singer, day dreamed about the guy she wanted to be her boyfriend, and even when she had the whole army of hell trying to kill her, she never did anything to defend herself. Her friends (Two guys, and a girl) did all the saving. Man, I hated her.

The punchline?

I had created her.

Her name is Irene, and she was my first professionally published heroine. I had started writing her story as a half a joke, you see? But in the joke, I made her... well, just as every single heroine of the manga I read at the time. Clumsy, boy obsessed, fashion victim. Incapable of realizing she was in dire danger, or trying to save her own life. I came to hate her so much that even when she was the main character of the story, I wrote a complete chapter where she didn't appear at all (Which my partner at the time called me on. But I don't think she realized how much I hated to write about miss bubbly head)

Now, the thing is... She was liked. A lot. Even when her story had been approved by the editor with the clear intention that it was only going to last for three issues (And that's a story for another day), it became the most popular story of that particular magazine, and the only one that lasted for more than four issues. And when the magazine was canceled, everyone asked what happened to the characters, as the story hadn't been finished.

I moved on. I worked on other stories, with other characters, and every now and then someone asked me when would I finish I.Doll. And after a long time, I sat and asked myself... why do I hate her so much? Why did I created a character with so many things that bother me? And I looked around at my comic book collection, with the Sailor Moons, and Fushigi Yugi, and a ton of shojo, and then how Jean Gray might be the world's most powerful mutant every five years, but she still will get killed and left powerless, and I re-read a lot of the things I had been reading at the moment I started my career, and I realized that... she wasn't that different from the 'nice girls' I read about back then. Hell, it even coincided with the Infinity Wars at Marvel, where Sue has to absorb Malice and become 'bad' to be the team leader. And, even when I *hate* the idea that one has to use sexy images to sell a good story, I even did a cover in which my heroine (15 years old, btw) was completely naked. And the editor let it be published. To this date, I don't know who was the worst offender there. Me for drawing it -even if it was a non-sexual nude- or him for not pulling back that cover.

I wrote my pinkhaired nighmare the way I did because 'that was the way comic book heroines are'. It was it, right, it was what sold, it was what was expected. And yes, I was being a sheep, but it was the influence I had. It wasn't until I was exposed to a whole lot more of comics -and, more important, to a whole lot more of comic book creators- that I realized that I was going at it completely wrong.

And it was mostly due to influence. And I'm not going to say that every single creator is responsible for what one 16 year old hopeful creator did when she was young -or that every single girl who reads manga and comics would come to the same conclusion that I did. But then, I see y!Gallery, with many very talented artists who simply shun the female form and have wrote that 'girls are icky' being women themselves. And at the office, I see comic after comic that is written by women and still propagates the very same problems we're complaining about and when I ask those creators "Why are you writing your heroine as a useless pinup model who needs the hot cute guy to save her?" they will most of the time answer either a) Because I don't like girls, and writing about girls is boring, b) well, it's my style. And (insert popular mangaka here) does the same, or, my personal favorite c) Guys draw girls with huge boobs, because that's what they like, so I draw cute guys all the time because I don't like girls.

Like most of my posts, I don't have a very good conclusion. I know that the industry gives a very clear image to those who are starting now to read comics, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of people don't like that image (Just look at the Heroes for Hire cover. Or, leaving american comics for a moment, the Nymphette situation with Seven Seas). Of course the question is... why there's so much resistance to change that image?

New Webcomic.

2007-07-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ok. So I decided to get off my comfortable chair, and during a bit of rehabilitation (Broken arms are a bitch, I just thank every single deity in the universe I still can draw, and that the broken part of the elbow doesn't affect that) and re-start an old project. It's a webcomic, and it will start running this Monday (July 23). Hope you enjoy it (And that this time, I don't lose my blog password -again-)

More on Friends of Lulu Awards Nominations. Now, open to all.

2007-04-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

Lulu Award Nominations and Voting Extended to Non-Members!

In an effort to reach out to and recognize an even greater sphere of women creators, Friends of Lulu has decided for the first time ever to open the nominations and voting of our Lulu Awards to non-members! In order to accommodate our new voters, the deadline for nominations has been extended through May 7th, 2007!

In case you’re new to Friends of Lulu, our annual Lulu Awards bring honor and recognition to the most inspiring and noteworthy women in the comic book industry, as well as the efforts, achievements, and works that reflect Friends of Lulu’s goals. It’s up to you, Lulu members, to make the nominations and to vote for this year’s shining stars!

Nominations for the Awards are made by and voted on by current members of Friends of Lulu. The Lulu Awards are handed out during our evening awards ceremony at Comic-Con International in San Diego each year. (It’s always a blast!)

Start thinking about who you want to nominate for this year’s awards.The Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame nominees must have published work, whether self-published, company-published, or web-published. An individual cannot win more than once.

Past winners include: Roberta Gregory, Naughty Bits, Artistic Licentiousness - 2006; Rumiko Takahashi - 2005; Lynda Barry - 2004; Wendy Pini - 2003; Lynn Johnston - 2002; Trina Robbins, Hilda Terry (tie) – 2001; Marge Henderson Buell - 2000; Ramona Fradon - 1999; Dale Messick - 1998; Marie Severin - 1997.

The Women of Distinction award is designed to recognize those women who have made considerable contributions to the comics industry in non-creator roles like publishing, editing, reporting or retailing.

Past winners include: Diana Schutz, Editor, Dark Horse - 2006; Heidi MacDonald - 2005; Maggie Thompson - 2004

The Lulu of the Year Award honors the creator(s), book or other project whose work best exemplifies Friends of Lulu’s mission.

Past winners include: SCHOLASTIC/GRAPHIX, Publisher: Babysitters Club, Queen Bee, Breaking Up - 2006; Shaenon Garrity, Girlamatic.com, Modern Tales; Flight Anthology (tie) - 2005; www.Girlamatic. com, Lea Hernandez, Editor - 2004; Free Comic Book Day, Joe Field, Organizer - 2003; Sequential Tart, Marcia Allass, Editor - 2002; Go Girl!, Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons - 2001; From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines, Trina Robbins - 2000; Scary Godmother, Jill Thompson - 1999; Action Girl, Sarah Dyer, Editor - 1998; The Great Women Superheroes, Trina Robbins - 1997.

The Kim Yale Award nominees must have published work, whether self-published, company-published, or web-published. Nominees must be nominated for this category within three years of their first published work. An individual may not be nominated more than twice, and cannot win more than once. The award is named for comics writer Kim Yale, a founding Lulu member who passed away in 1997.

Past winners include: Leigh Dragoon, By the Wayside - 2006; Vera Brosgol (Flight, Hopeless Savages B-Sides) - 2005; Lark Pien (Long Tail Kitty) - 2004, Raina Telgemeier (Take-Out Comics) - 2003; Ashley-Jane Nicholaus (Haven) & Gisèle Legacé (Cool Cat Studio) (tie) - 2002; Anne Timmons (GoGirl!) - 2001; Rachel Hartman (Amy Unbounded) - 2000; Devin Grayson (writer, Catwoman, Black Widow) - 1999; Carla Speed McNeil (Finder) - 1998; Jessica Abel (Artbabe) - 1997.

So here’s the deal. We need you to nominate the people you think should receive the awards this year. Review the nominee requirements, think about who stands out in your mind for each award.

Then go to our online nomination form (http://www. friends-lulu. org/awards06nomf orm.php) to submit your nominations.

If you don’t have internet access you can send in your nominations via snail mail to:

Lulu Award Nomination 2007
83 Russell St
Suite 3R
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Nominations are due MAY 7, 2007.

Nominate whomever you wish, up to THREE per category, as long as they fit the requirements. If you are able, please include additional information (i.e. publisher, date of publication) about each individual, so we can verify the nomination quicker and easier.

We couldn’t do it without you, so if you are interested in sponsoring the Lulu Awards, please contact the board (board [AT] friends-lulu [DOT] org) for more info.

Calling for Nominees for the Lulu Awards.

2007-03-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

I suck at formal introductions, so I'll go straight and to the point with the official announcement:

Nominations Now Being Accepted for the 2007 Lulu Awards!

It’s that time of year again—time to nominate the brightest and best for the 2007 Lulu Awards! Our annual Lulu Awards bring honor and recognition to the most inspiring and noteworthy women in the comic book industry, as well as the efforts, achievements, and works that reflect Friends of Lulu’s goals. It’s up to you, Lulu members, to make the nominations and to vote for this year’s shining stars!

Past winners include: Diana Schutz, Editor, Dark Horse - 2006; Heidi McDonald - 2005; Maggie Thompson - 2004

The Lulu of the Year Award honors the creator(s), book or other project whose work best exemplifies Friends of Lulu’s mission.

So here’s the deal. We need you to nominate the people you think should receive the awards this year. Review the nominee requirements, think about who stands out in your mind for each award.

Then go to our online nomination form (http://www.friends- lulu.org/ awards06nomform. php) to submit your nominations.

If you don’t have internet access you can send in your nominations via snail mail to:

Lulu Award Nomination 2007
83 Russell St
Suite 3R
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Nominations are due MAY 1, 2007.

You must be a member in good standing (dues paid up to date) in order to nominate. If you are unsure whether you are up to date, please contact Shawnee Gibbs (Shawnee at Friends- Lulu dot org), our membership secretary, prior to sending in your nominations. We couldn’t do it without you, so if you are interested in sponsoring the Lulu Awards, please contact the board of directors (Board at Friends- Lulu dot org) for more info.

Equality in death

2007-02-04T10:19:00.001-08:00

One of the main ‘defenses’ I’ve read about the treatment of women in comics is that ‘bad things happen to males too’. And that is true. It’s hard to explain why the death of a woman, such as Phantom Lady, can be considered a bit misogynistic, and on the other hand, the death of Superboy is not a show of hate against males.

Thinking about how to make the argument on how it’s not that female characters die, but how they die, I remembered one of my guilty pleasures, Battle Royale.

Now, Battle Royale is a gore fest. Out of 42 sort of main characters, 40 die. And they don’t die in their sleep, no. We get to see their faces blown off, ripped open, riddled with bullets, stomachs torn in two, and so on. Of the three incarnations of Battle Royale, the manga is the bloodiest. My partner in the Oubilette, Aurea D’Nabe, correctly classified it as a ‘morbid’ manga. It’s designed to shock the viewer, and it doesn’t pull any stops to do so. If it has to be violence, its with violence, and if it has to be with sex, its with sex.

All of the volumes in English were sold wrapped up because of the violence, but there are certain chapters, particularly in volume 8, that get really close to a hentai comic. Girls get naked and show their panties a lot here.

But ignoring that little fact –that right there would be a mark about how Battle Royale is indeed sexist, because the girls get naked for no apparent reason than to get naked- it is a very good example of how one death is not the same as the other. After all, the 42 kids are neatly divided, 21 girls, 21 boys, and the survivors are one girl and one boy.

The exact same number of female characters and male characters die on it, so we can see how their deaths are different, and if that matters.

Needless to say, there will be a lot of spoilers.

1.- Yoshitoki Kuninobu, boy 5. Two shots in the head. We get to see his tongue ripped open with the first shot, his eyeballs go out of his skull with the second. Dies defending Noriko. Killed by the Program Director. He didn’t kill anyone.

2.- Fumiyo Fujiyoshi, girl 18. Knife in the middle of the forehead. No gore at all except for the pool of blood under her head. Dies for trying to ask a friend the rules of the Program. Killed by the Program Director. She didn’t kill anyone.

3.- Mayumi Tendo, girl 14. Arrow on the side of her head. No gore except that we see the arrow sticking out. Killed by Yoshio Akamatsu when leaving the school. She didn’t kill anyone.

4.-Yoshio Akamatsu, boy 1. Arrow on the side of his head, we see his eyeball pop out. Killed by Kazushi Niida. Killed 1 girl.

5.- Megumi Etou, girl 3. Throat cut open with a sickle, we get to see the whole process. Killed by Mitsuko Souma. She didn’t kill anyone.

6.- Hiroshi Kuronaga, boy 9. Killed by bullets, we only get to see the body. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. He didn’t kill anyone.

7.- Ryohei Sasagawa, boy 10. Killled by bullets, we only get to see the body. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. He didn’t kill anyone.

8.- Izumi Kanai, girl 5. Killed by bullets, we only get to see the body. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. She didn’t kill anyone. The translation hints that she was going to be raped by Hiroshi and Ryohei, but readers of the original say that was added by the adaptation.

9.- Mitsuru Numai, boy 17. Killed by bullets, we see the process for five pages. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. He didn’t kill anyone.

10.- Sakura Ogawai, girl 4, and Kazuhiko Yamamoto, boy #21. Suicide by jumping off a cliff. No gore. They didn’t kill anyone. She decided when to jump.

11.- Tatsumichi Oochi, boy 3. Head split in two with a machete during a fight with Shuya Nanahara. Quite gorish, but not extreme. He didn’t kill anyone.

12.- Kyoichi Motbushi, boy 20. Arm blown off by shotgun, then a shot to the stomach. We see the blood, the bone and the intestine going out (later in a nightmare scene, we see a second hole in his chest). Killed by Shogo Kawada. He didn’t kill anyone.

13.- Yukiko Kitano, girl 6 and Yumiko Kusaka, girl 7. Shot to death, from the back, then shot in the head while trying to call the other students to stop killing each other. Their agony lasts 9 pages. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. They didn’t kill anyone.

14.- Yoji Kuramoto, boy 8. Got his head shot off while on top of his girlfriend. Brains and all are seen on panel. His girlfriend tries to put the brain back into his head. Killed by Mitsuko Souma. He didn’t kill anyone although he held his girlfriend at gun point.

15.-Yoshimi Yahagi, girl 21. Head blown off, shot through the eye, after we get to see her past as teenage prostitute. Killed by Mitsuko Souma, she didn’t kill anyone.

16.- Kazushi Niida, boy 16. Beaten, eye out of his socket, arrow pushed through the back of his head all the way to his tongue, completely graphic. Killed By Takako Chigusa. He killed one boy, tried to rape one girl.

17.- Takako Chigusa, girl 13. Shot in the back, after she killed Kazushi when he tried to rape her graphically. Killed by Mitsuko Souma. Killed one boy.

18. Kaori Minami, girl 20. Shot trough the side of her head after she went insane due to her acne. Killed by Shogo Kawada. She didn’t kill anyone, but one girl died in part thanks to her actions.

19. Sho Tsukioka, boy 14. Head blown off, cleanly in two, by collar explosion. Killed (indirectly) by Kazuo Kiriyama. He didn’t kill anyone. It’s made a huge deal that he’s gay.

20. Hirono Shimizu, girl 10. Thrown in well, drowned. Also, had a terrible infection at the moment. Died trying to climb back out. Killed by Toshinori Oda. She didn’t kill anyone.

21.- Keita Ijima, boy 2. Shot in the head, graphically. Killed by Shinji Mimura. He didn’t kill anyone.

22.-Yutaka Seto, boy 12. Shot in the head, repeatedly and graphically. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. He didn’t kill anyone.

23.- Shinji Mimura, boy 19 . Shot in the stomach, in the head, back all over, and suffered an explosion, and shot in the head once more while trying to kill Kiriyama and destroy the program with a bomb. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama. He killed one boy.

24.- Tadakatsu Hatagami, boy 18. Head cut in two with sickle. Killed by Mitsuko Souma. Almost killed one boy.

25.- Yuichiro Takiguchi, boy 13. Shot in the stomach by Tadakatsu, then raped by Mitsuko, and had a sickle run through his head. Killed by Mitsuko Souma. He didn’t kill anyone.

26.- Toshinori Oda, boy 4. Shot through the groin by Kiriyama. Quite gory. Killed by Kiriyama. He killed one girl.

27.- Yuka Nakagawa, girl 14. Accidentally poisoned by Yuko. Killed by Yuko Sakaki. She didn’t kill anyone.

28.- Chisato Matsui, girl 19. Shot to death through the stomach. Killed by Satomi Noda. She didn’t kill anyone.

29.- Yukio Utsumi, girl 2. Shot to death through the chest. Killed by Satomi Noda. She didn’t kill anyone.

30.- Haruka Tanizawa, girl 12. Shot to death through the side. Killed by Satomi Noda. She managed to kill Satomi with her last breath.

31.- Satomi Noda, girl 17. Shot to death through the head. Killed by Haruka Tanizawa. She killed 3 girls.

32.- Yuko Sakaki, girl 9. Jumped to her death. Caused the deaths of 5 girls, and her own.

33.- Mizuho Inada, girl 1. Shot in the head by Kiriyama while in her underwear. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama, didn’t kill anyone.

34. Kaoyoko Kotohiki, girl 8. Lets herself be shot by Kiriyama after he almost kills Hiroki Sugimura. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama, didn’t kill anyone.

35.- Hiroki Sugimura, boy 11. Shot by Kiriyama, after Kiriyama and him fought and Hiroki was almost beat to death. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama, didn’t kill anyone

36.- Mitsuko Souma, girl 11. Shot in the head by Kiriyama, after she got naked to try and seduce him. She also was raped as a child, something that is shown many times in the manga, AND tended to get naked and touch herself. Killed by Kazuo Kiriyama, killed 3 girls and 3 boys.

37.- Kazuo Kiriyama, boy 6. Shot in the head by Shuuya Nanahara, after a 2 volume fight. Killed by Shuuya Nanahara (With a lot of help from Shogo Kawada, and using Noriko as a human shield). Killed 6 girls and 8 boys (Or maybe 9. See below)

38.- Shogo Kawada, boy 5. Shot in the stomach. No idea by whom, but probably Kiriyama. Saved Shuuya and Noriko. Killed 1 boy, 1 girl.

Survivors: Shuuya Nanahara, boy 7, and Noriko Nakagawa, girl 15. Is worth of mention that Noriko didn’t kill anyone and was dragged along the way for the 15 volumes.

Now, the problem here is that for a story that shows that everyone can do the unthinkable when pushed far enough, girls are still considered weaker and passive. In the original novel, at least, Noriko is the one who pulls the trigger on Kiriyama, showing that she was along not only as the symbol of all that was pure and nice and to be the main characters’ future girlfriend, but in the manga she’s the perfect damsel in distress. She gets shot, she gets sick, she gets to cry a lot, and that’s all she does. And the only reason why I can stomach her, is because Shuuya is pretty much the same, even when he does get action scenes.

What really bothered me now that I did this list –and that I honestly didn’t notice on first reading, when I was doing the reading one volume at the time- was that girls do nothing. There’s one girl who really fights against his would be male killer, Chigusa, and that’s because her would be killer is also her would be rapist. If he hadn’t threaten her with that, she would’ve let him go. Most of the girls don’t kill anyone, and the three with the high body count are a girl who kills her friends in a hysterical panic attack (All victims are girls), a girl who poisoned accidentally one of her friends and caused the mentioned panic attack, and Mitsuko Souma. She’s touted by the fans as one of the two ‘cool’ characters, being the evil girl as opposed to the evil boy Kiriyama, but not only she has a much lower body count, when one does examine the deaths, one can think that Mitsuko managed to kill them almost by accident. Not to mention that, to explain why a girl could become such a dangerous killer, we have to know, repeatedly, that she was raped as a child, by her step father, became a prostitute as young as 13, AND her real father abandoned them. She dies, naked, begging to her ‘daddy’ to fulfill the promise that ‘it would never hurt’.

(As a contrast, Kiriyama is such a dangerous killer because he can’t feel. He has brain damage, and doesn’t feel any empathy towards anyone. He’s a sociopath, who nevertheless was loved by his father. However, apparently in the final shooting, Shuuya manages to hit the nerve connections back in place as his final words are ‘I can feel again’. Somehow, I can’t help but feel that Kiriyama was given a lot more thought as a villain than Mitsuko)

And that’s the difference, see? It’s not that horrible things don’t happen to male characters when they happen to female characters. It’s that horrible things happen to male characters when they try to prevent them from happening, while horrible things happen to female characters when they’re just sort of standing there. All of the ‘good’ guys were forming teams and planning to try and destroy the program; all of the ‘good’ girls were… hiding. The ones who formed a team was a team to see if they could last until the third day, and then… well, either wait for someone else to have a plan or die together. As friends. And they managed to kill each other in a panic attack brought by hysteria. Guys roam through the island trying to find their loved ones and defend them to death, girls… cry a lot when found and stay around doing nothing when there’s a psychotic killer with a shotgun on the lose even if they have a gun. (And of course, guys get their clothes ripped a little bit. Girls get naked)

And while I do understand that Battle Royale comes from Japan, who doesn’t really has a very equal culture (‘Baby making machines’, anyone?) and thus it deals with a very different kind of sexism than American, European or Mexican comic books, I thought this is a perfect example of what not to do. Hey, Mitsuko is a perfect example of what I was saying about T&A not being inherently sexist. I wouldn’t have minded her parading herself naked at every single chance, if it hadn’t been for her rape backstory. Her rape backstory makes her a tragic victim, who was twisted so much that she does equal sex with taking advantage before they take things away from you. Without the rape backstory, she could’ve been a girl who knew she was gorgeous, and in a ‘kill or be killed’ situation, knew to use all the weapons in her arsenal. (And there's also a lot to say about the fact that apparently, the translator, Keith Giffen, decided to add a lot of extra mentions to rape across the story. What? Beheading and shots through the brain weren't shocking enough?)

As I say, I like Battle Royale. Its gory, it’s violent, and the story has some resemblance to Lord of the Flies and The Long Walk, which are one of my favorite reads. Given that its based on a book that criticizes Japanese culture, I understand why girls are nothing more than ornaments in the plot, mostly used to show how gentlemanly are the good guys.

But now let’s examine the deaths of Pantha and Superboy the same way. Pantha dies, rushing into battle without a plan, and gets beheaded with a backwards punch, that the guy who threw doesn’t even realize how strong it is. Superboy dies, heroically, saving the universe.

One is doing something, the other has something done to her.

Is it really that hard to see the difference?

Bad Idea / Good Idea, and when continuity matters.

2007-01-21T15:59:00.000-08:00

Last year, I made a post about how every single character, no matter how lame, how silly or how old, was someone’s favorite. (In case you’re curious, it was this one )

What prompted that post was my concern for one of my old favorites, Robbie Baldwin, aka. Speedball. When I did the post, I hadn’t read anything of Civil War, but I knew that things were not looking good for him and the New Warriors. Despite my misgivings, I caved in and bought Civil War 1 and was appalled as to how they were written because, frankly? None of them sounded in character. However, I understood the need for a huge catastrophe, and thought, ok. I hate that Namorita and co. are dead, but hell, the situation called for it, and while I rather have the Dan Slott version of what happens to small towns when supervillians and superheroes duke it out (Aka. the ‘Hulk has never taken an innocent life’ defense), I understand why Marvel thought they needed to be a bit grimmer.

At least no one was getting raped.

Then I got Frontline, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Speedball had survived the blast due to his powers. And that he was saying what everyone should’ve noticed since the fourth page of Civil War: It wasn’t the heroes that caused the blast. It wasn’t the heroes who were responsible. It was Nitro.

For 8 issues of Frontline, that was Robbie’s only defense (Btw, I love She Hulk, but her appearance as Speedball’s lawyer was abysmal. No matter how much she wanted to push the Registration on him, she should’ve never advice him to plead guilty. He was innocent, doing all the things every single other superhero has ever done. But I digress).

Due to a lot of traveling, I missed getting Frontline 9, and so, Frontline 9 and 10 were waiting for me in my pull list the next time I went to the comic book store. I flipped through them –a habit I have- and upon hitting the last page of Frontline 10, I promptly canceled my subscription.

I can’t buy a book where the character I’m following does a 180° change of mind without any explanation or real reason. Robbie’s powers mutated –why? It’s anyone’s guess- and he killed four people. That I can buy. That I can sort of understand. The fact that suddenly he’s blaming himself for all the Stamford’s deaths is absurd. He wasn’t the one who blew up then, he wasn’t the one who purposely blew up next to a school yard.

Not to mention, that, really, Penance’s suit is the worst thing I’ve seen in a comic book in a long, long time.

But what really, really nags me of all this is that continuity wise it makes no sense. Not that there are a lot of things in Civil War that make sense in continuity, but this particular one is, frankly, one of the worst I’ve seen.

Way back in the 90’s, there was this completely stupid crossover done by Marvel, in which every single hero was attacked by his evil clone. The Infinty War crossover was one of those things that I didn’t understood at all because I only got to read the issues of the series I was reading, including New Warriors 27, which surprisingly was a Speedball solo issue.

That’s right. Speedball vs. Blackball. Even the cover claimed it was because no one demanded it.

It was also the issue when Robbie’s dad, the DA on a town where masked heroes *were* illegal, found out that his son was a superhero. His mom had known for a couple of issues before, when the New Warriors saved her from the Force of Nature.

Now. Robbie arrives to Springdale after his double. The town has been half destroyed to the point of that the orders on Speedball are ‘shoot to kill on sight’. What does Robbie do when he realizes he’s been accused of something he didn’t do?

“I can’t surrender myself- They’ll never believe it wasn’t me who did all this!. Especially cro-magdad—he thinks Speedball is responsible for everything wrong from the trade deficit to Hammer’s last album! I can’t hold out either—if they start shooting at me, the ricochets could hurt this family--!”

Exclamation points aside, we can see his two priorities : Finding the right culprit and not letting the family behind him to get hurt.

WHEN the police start shooting as he flees, he realizes he can’t let the bullets bounce off him as he usually does, and he actually manages to stop them with his bubbles. This was back when Nicieza was doing all kind of weird experiments with Robbie’s powers, making him a whole lot more interesting. The panel with the cops watching the bullets fall is priceless.

But the big pay off of the issue, and the reason why it popped into my mind as soon as I started reading about ‘Penance’ and later, thanks to scan daily, the actual dialogue of the scene when he puts that torture kit they’re calling a suit, was the final confrontation between Speedball and his dark side, at his house, when his darkside is threatening his mom.

Now. This was the 90’s. The decade best known for suffering heroes, unending angst and ‘cool’ and ‘dark’ stories. And Speedball faced his dark side, conquered it, was quite bothered as to how he managed to conquer it, which stayed with him more or less until he was replaced by someone else pretending to be him. Even so, the guy pretending was a perfect copy of Robbie, and was the one who brought closure to Robbie’s relationship with his dad.

Sure, it took roughly 30 issues, but it dealt with Robbie’s issues with his anger, his lack of control with his powers, his relationship to both parents, and a final resolution to the ‘Art / Law’ debate. That’s character evolution, and the excuse that it was the same writer doesn’t work since it was dealt by three different writers as far as I remember.

Going from “I’m not guilty” to “Accepting guilt would be accepting my friends are dead” to “It was all my fault, 121 points of pain” in the lapse of 10 half issues? Not so much.

Yes. Another sexism and comics rant.

2007-01-06T18:06:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about writing this since December 28, when I saw the link to the Cenizas’s editorial “De Feministas y Fangirls: La ironía en pleno” at When Fangirls Attack. My first impulse was to groan and check the date. December 28 is the equivalent of April 1st here, so it could be a joke. But it had been posted on December 26, no luck there. My second was a lengthy answer to the Cenizas’s guys asking exactly why they were addressing the points made in Girls read comics (And they’re pissed) assuming they were from WFA, and how could they simply not get the point. I erased that answer, and then I realized that the reason why it made me mad was because GRC (And the entirely of Wonder-girl org) are mainly English speakers. Even if they found the Cenizas’s link, which of course they did, they wouldn’t quite understand what they were saying. Which of course takes the dialogue part of it out of the window since there’s not going to be a debate.
So I thought about translating it. And tossed the idea right out of the window too since, frankly? I don’t think the world needs yet another ‘if you don’t like big boobs, you shouldn’t be reading comics anyway’ rant in English. Does the world needs another ‘it’s not about the big boobs, damn it!’ rant? Probably not. But I’m going to put it in English and in Spanish, so… what the hell.

Anyway, among all the things I read at Cenizas, there were two that jumped out from the whole text. The first one was “The tits and ass are the only thing that justify that the geeks of spandex wearing superheroes aren’t seen as gay”. The second one was their closing statement, in which, bluntly, they state that if you’re a feminist, you have no business being a superhero fan girl, because to complain about sexism in superhero comic books is the same as “being a vegetarian and taking the meat out of the tortilla in the corner’s taqueria”.

I have issues with the first statement because it perpetuates the comic book geek stereotype. The guy living in his parent’s basement, wondering how is Jean Grey’s sex life, incapable of talking to a real, three dimensional woman. I have issues with it because it objectifies the female characters even more than the superhero comics we’re discussing, and demeans the male readers. There’s a lot to be said about that, how suddenly reading superhero comic books is inherently childish, but I was going to talk about sexism, so I’ll stick to sexism.

The second comment brought the attention of Karen Healey, the actual author of Girls Read Comics, and in her journal there came a discussion of how people can eat tacos without meat, which brings an interesting cultural difference. In Mexico, if it doesn’t has meat, it’s not a taco. So what the guys at Cenizas are saying is that if you haven’t got sexism on it, it’s not a superhero comic (I’m hoping they were limiting themselves to superhero comics, although the mention of the Sensational de Traileras, a pretty known soft porn comic book from Mexico makes me doubt it) and I have to disagree. Yes, Tits and Ass are required in soft porn and hard porn comic books. They’re porn comics for a reason. I don’t think anyone in the anti-sexism group wants the T&A to disappear from sex comics, because being anti-sexism is not being anti-sex. Yes, some T&A is expected to be found in comic book where half of your cast is dressed in spandex, but no one expects Power Girl’s breasts to disappear –in fact, many feminist blogs I’ve read love PG’s curves. But T&A is not the problem. The problem comes when the characters are treated like nothing more than furniture, shock value, and window dressing. The problem comes when female characters are raped, killed, maimed and torture just for torture sake (And, before anyone jumps, it’s the same thing when male characters get raped, killed, maimed and tortured. It’s just that usually? When a male character is tortured, it’s not just to spike sales with very few exceptions)

Now, not every single woman who has been brutalized in a comic book is a sign of misogyny. Not every single gay character who is mistreated is an example of homophobia. But when you pile every single time it happens, the picture it shows it’s a bit disheartening. Yes. There is sexism in comic books, everywhere. Yes, it started quite early, when girls were there just to be rescued. But as things have changed in the world, they should change in the industry. Not all superhero comic books are sexist. Runaways is a perfect example. Young Avengers is another. X-Factor has a wonderfully diverse cast and the women in it are strong, three dimensional woman. She Hulk is a riot, despite of the covers. I haven’t read Birds of Prey, or Manhunter, since currently I’m not buying any DC comic, but I’ve heard wonderful things about them both. Spider-man is not sexist (Aunt May kicks ass). Superhero comic books are not inherently sexist, and they do not need to be sexist to be superhero comic books.

Actually, scratch that. Nothing needs to be sexist, not even porno comic books. Because having a woman prancing naked on a book doesn’t mean that the comic is sexist. It can be sexist, but it doesn’t need to be.
Because, well, let’s remember one thing:

Sexism: 1.- Attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles.
2.- Discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, as in restricted job opportunities; esp. such discrimination directed against women.
(Dictionary.com)

So, killing a woman character because a character had to be killed =/= sexism. Killing a woman character because it is a woman = sexism. Having a woman character fight crime in swimsuit and high heels = / = sexism. Having said female character do nothing except pose and being captured by the villians= sexism.

Hey, when all it’s said and done, Manga is more inherently sexist than superhero comic books. But then, Japan is a country culturally more sexist than the US or Mexico. Which brings us to cultural differences. Mexico and the US are very different countries, with different stories of feminism. Feminism there meant a very different thing and is a very different movement than what is here. They don’t have a Ciudad Juarez, for example. Yes, there’s sexism everywhere. But now it is illegal to fire someone based on their gender.

The old ‘there’s sexism everywhere, what are you going to do about it?’ excuse doesn’t work anymore. Yes, there’s sexism everywhere, and everywhere women and men are working together to stop it, to make it disappear, for true equality. Who says it can’t disappear from comic books?

And please, remember. Disappearing sexism doesn’t mean making the T&A disappear or adding even more shots of Nightwing, Green Lantern and Batman’s ass. It means treating all characters equally, which, in the end, will only lead to better stories and isn’t that what we all want in the end?

An amazing woman.

2006-12-15T16:57:00.000-08:00

I can pinpoint exactly the moment when I started reading Strangers in Paradise, a couple of years ago when my best friend and partner in crime lend it to me after her boyfriend recommended it to her. The recommendation was great, not only because it wasn’t done in the usual ‘You should read SiP because it’s a woman’s book’, but because it was more of a ‘If you want to write real relationship stuff, you should read SiP’.

And while I completely understand the annoyance at having SiP recommended when one wants to read superheroes, I just can’t not recommend it when someone ask me about a book with strong women. Realistic women. And now that the series is almost ended (Only three numbers to go, and I can’t believe what a rollercoaster it has been), I want to talk about my current favorite female character. And no, I’m not talking about Katchoo, even when I love her to bits, or about Francine, who is every shade of amazing especially in the latest twist of the screw. No, I’m talking about the character whom I loathed when she was introduced and whom I wanted to see drown when she was getting married in Hawaii with Francine’s stupid ex-boyfriend Freddy.

Yes, I’m talking about Casey Bullocks.

The cheerleader. The annoying, always chirpy girl who suddenly attached herself to Katchoo and co. and just didn’t know when to let go. The one whose next appearance after the wedding was in a future flashback being all uncomfortable with the idea that maybe Francine and Katchoo were a couple. That Casey.

I have no idea when she became my favorite girl in SiP, but it was somewhere between her absolutely clueless attempt to seduce David after she realized Freddy would always be in love with Francine, and when she hugged Katchoo after Francine discovered they had been together one single, meaningless night. Somewhere in between, Casey went from becoming the cute but annoying sidekick who sometimes would come and make everything insane to be a woman I could respect. Sure, she did stupid things, but she did them because she thought they were the right thing to do. And in the meantime, she didn’t just became Katchoo’s friend, she became her rock.

She left the man who just married her for her body to become her own woman. She went to Vegas to be a showgirl because she could. And she went back to Katchoo and David, because she loved David, and she cares so much for Katchoo that she’ll be willing to do anything for her.

And then Terry Moore gave us a bit more background on Casey. She’s a recovering anorexic, she has had more boob jobs that one can remember, and a couple of nose jobs too. She’s dyslexic, and she had an incredibly low selfesteem that made her go and try to fix everything that wasn’t wrong with her by looking good and looking perky.

And she managed to come out of all it as one of the most balanced persons in Strangers in Paradise, becoming not only Katchoo’s rock, but David’s confident.

In issue 85 she has a heart to heart talk with Francine that even now makes me say wow. After many issues in which Casey practically locked Francine and Katchoo together in the same room, she tells Francine to stay away. Because Katchoo doesn’t need to be played with, because it has been enough of the ‘well, maybe this time it will work’ game. Because Casey will live with Katchoo, and they will raise together a child. A child that Katchoo is having with David, because Casey can’t have children for all the stupid things she did when she was younger.

Casey doesn’t do much in issue 86, and I’m truly worried about what will happen with the cast in issue 87. But whatever happens, I just have to tip my hat to Mr. Moore, who managed to turn my feelings about a character 180° degrees, and without me noticing that every time I was buying an issue it was not only to see what was happening with Katchoo, Francine and David, but because I was hoping that Casey would pop up again, filled with her love for life no matter what.

Full Metal Women

2006-05-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

Because of work situations, last week I had to see all the 51 episodes of the Full Metal Alchemist anime, and read all that was available of the manga, which led me to three very important conclusions.

First: A 51 marathon chased with 59 manga episodes read in a week is not a good idea no matter what. By episode 12 I was ready to throw my DVD out of the window.

Second: They shouldn’t make anime based on manga that haven’t revealed at least the first half of their main plot. FMA, the anime, suffers from a lot of incoherencies because it is obvious that the animators were trying to add the stuff that was being shown in the manga, months after they had already given an answer to questions that their plot needed (The Gate, for example)

Third: Maybe I’m being a bit too feminist, but I think that the main difference between manga and anime is that the manga was written by a woman, while the anime staff is mainly male.

Let me elaborate.

One of my main problems with manga lately is that if one scratches the surface just a little, there are very few active females as main characters. The vast majority are very passive, even if the story moves around them. A quick glance to my personal collection shows a lot of girls who are dependant on their male friends, boyfriends and even enemies to solve their problems (Not all manga are like this, but it is a notorious trend, especially in shojo manga) .

FMA manga is different. It is a manga with a big male cast, a lot bigger than the female cast, but there isn’t a single female character that has more than two lines that is completely passive. In fact, I can only think of two passive girls –the kind that wait for things to happen to them, rather than make things happen- in the whole manga.

Yes, at first sight the girls do look alike in the manga and in the anime. In the anime, Riza is a woman in love and nothing more than the second in command of Roy –who does very few besides standing next to him. Winry tends to stick with the Elric brothers for no reason –besides her love for Ed; Maria Ross disapears after a few episodes; Martel is murdered while she hides, scared and trembling, inside Al; Lust stops being a villian because of the love she remembered for Scar’s brother; and Izumi Curtis, who is arguably the strongest woman in the manga, has maternal instincts attacks that make her act in amazingly stupid ways as soon as anime!Wrath appears (And here I could go on and on about how Japanese authors seem to think a mother should act, remembering what happened in Silent Hill: The movie, but I better let that subject lie)

In the manga, however, no woman is secondary to the man next to her. The best examples are Lust, who up to the moment of her death is an evil, manipulative bitch; Riza, who is not only Roy’s ‘right hand’, but is obviously his equal in all but range –it’s more obvious in the latter chapters that Roy does think of her as an equal and not as an inferior- and who can hold her own in a fight in closed quarters with Gluttony; Izumi, who is the only person without automail who manages to fight Greed hand to hand; and finally Ran Fan, a manga only character, who even cuts her own arm to fulfill her duty to her country.

And the villians. In the manga, the main villian is a man, who looks a lot like the Elric’s father, whose motives to create homonculi, control the country and create a new Philosopher’s Stone (because unless I’m mistaken, he has managed to create 7) are still a mistery. In the anime is Dante, a woman who is looking to create a new Philosopher’s Stone because she wants to keep her youth and beauty just as she has for the last 400 years and for that reason she kills people by the thousands and keeps the country at war. Oh, and she hates her ex because he left her for another woman. Could she be more stereotypical and lame? The old ‘I want to be forever beautiful’ was already old when the Queen gave Snow White a poisoned apple, and the variations haven’t been many.

I’m not saying that the members of the anime studio are misogynistic, or anything like that. I’m saying that it’s very funny the way that the characters- both male and female- change completely when a man writes them.

Let’s go back to Izumi, since she’s the most obvious case.

In the manga she explains to the Elric brothers that when she tried to create a baby, she ‘lost some of her insides’, but her hand in the general area of the stomach and her expression… they make hard to think that she’s not referring to her uterus. It’s her husband, Sig, who explains why she tried to transmute a human: She aborted, lossing the chance to have children forever, feeling guilty and “Saying sorry all night, even when it wasn’t her fault”. The idea that Izumi felt guilty because she didn’t fullfill her duty to her husband is clear- and even understandable since many women are educated with the idea that they have to ‘marry and have children for her husband’. Despite all, Izumi stays strong and she learned from her mistakes. She’s motherly with the Elric brothers, but she doesn’t forget the price of her mistake, and she keeps her use of alchemy to things that really matter (Not including, btw, the fight with Greed. She does that with her bare hands) And all this makes one of her most emotive scenes the moment when she thanks Ed for his discovery about human transmutation (I won’t explain exactly what it was to avoid more spoilers) Izumi here is a woman first, then an alchemist, then a mother.

In the anime, after seeing her vomit blood in front of her students and in one of the weirdest moments in the anime, a doctor tells us that she lost ‘many organs from her stomach to her intestine’, which causes the vomiting. The first question is, of course, How does she manage to survive without ‘many organs’? And the second is Why did she did it? Because her husband made her abort. And she felt guilty and tried to resuscitate the kid.

Well, We see the difference, right? Both in the extent of her sacrifice – she sacrifices more in the anime, but her manga loss is more symbolic- as well as the reasons why. In the anime her husband took the choice out of her hands ‘to save her life’, but she was ready to die to give her son a chance. The choice wasn’t made by her. And that added to her reaction to Wrath, the mystery boy that only exists in the anime and who is the result of her attempt to bring her son back. Izumi knows that Wrath is an homunculus, that he’s dangerous and that she must kill him. Despite that, she protects him, defending him from the army and almost letting him kill her because he is her ‘son’. And this was the same woman who pretended to leave two kids in a deserted island to teach them alchemy, and who greets them and trains them by flipping them in the air by fliking her wrists, who suddenly lets a kid almost choke her because he is ‘her sin’ and isn’t able to kill something that maybe sorta has her unborn son’s face –maybe sorta because when she saw him, it was a fetus. An aborted fetus. Wrath doesn’t look like her at all. He looks like Envy’s younger brother. So Izumi in the anime is mother first, then alchemist… and then we remember she’s a woman because if she wasn’t, she couldn’t be a mother.

The saddest part of all this is that FMA was, in its manga version, a very good show with strong female characters who weren’t stereotypes, a rare thing in a shonen manga, but in the anime… for time, plot necessity, or just ignorance, they became stereotypes.

Oh, and to end this without misunderstandings. I am sure that the differences in characters were because the anime was written by guys. But I’m not saying a man can’t write well a female character. Just that he will write her differently from what a woman will write the same character (And of course, the thing also works the other way. A woman will write a male character differently from a male writer)

Everyone has a favorite.

2006-05-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

I was going to blog about my latest convention experience, but reading around the forums (mostly in English) about Civil War #1 made me change my mind.

I still haven’t bought my copy of CW, and I was not going to buy it, until I found out that the team that was going to ignite the whole thing were the New Warriors.

Confession time? I’m a big, big fan of the New Warriors, and am still trying to get the whole original run.

But I’m not a fan of the Warriors for Night Trasher (Who I always saw as the stereotypical angry street hero), or Nova, or Firestar (Who will always be in my mind as part of Spiderman’s Amazing Friends, sorry), or Marvel Boy or any of the others.

I became a fan because of Speedball, who was my favorite since his original series.

Now, if you guys read my last blog, you will see I apparently have the touch of death to my favorite characters (Other favorites? Doug Ramsey, dead. I loved Jason Todd since he was the Robin I knew from the Mexican editions, so I was devastated when I found out he died for fan voting. Ted Kord, dead. Sun Boy, who is not dead but has the awful tendency to end up exiled or de-powered. Rictor, depowered. Maddrox, who thankfully is alive but spend some time dead. Magick, dead. Synch, dead. Skin, dead. Chamber, depowered. Jubilee, depowered. Linda Danvers, erased from continuity. Hawk and Dove ver.2, one became a villain, killed the other and then was killed by Hal Jordan. Joy), but to be fair, I’m used to it. I love the less popular characters, and less popular characters tend to die easier than the big ones. (I’m still holding my breath for Chase, from Runaways, but he seems to be popular enough to survive)

The thing is, in superhero stories at least, you can’t win. No matter how obscure, useless, an annoying a character seems, someone, somewhere, loves that character. I’ll admit I was surprised at seeing in forums that I wasn’t the only Speedball fan, since he seemed to be universally disliked. But there was even someone saying that Microbe was his favorite character.

When Blue Beetle died, and the fans came out of the woodwork, there were accusations that we were only liking him because he had died. That if he *hadn’t* died, we wouldn’t care. I never argued with the guys making those accusations because, frankly? Nothing I said about my love for the character would make them change their mind over that.

The same thing happened over the outcry for Sue Dibny’s death (When they were not busy denying that it had been an atrocious show of misogyny and bad writing).

And with Kon’s death.

To be perfectly frank here, I have been guilty of that. When they killed Superman, I couldn’t care less. Hawkseye? Meh. Jean Grey? What? You think I believe for a second she’ll stay dead this time? Jade? Who was that?

But that doesn’t change that someone, out there, loves them and was profoundly hit by their deaths.

With the rumor of a death in Runaways, the fans seem divided. I’ve seen people posting in outrage that they better not dare to lay a finger on Molly, on Gert –and by extension, Old Lace-, on Katarina even if she hasn’t been around for a while, or on Nico. There’s a vocal number of fans for Chase too, but even those seem convinced that Chase is going to die. Everyone is sure that Victor is not going to die since he has to be in the future.

I would hate that Chase died, sure. And I’m rooting for Nico to bite the dust. But I’m pretty sure someone wants exactly the opposite.

And since it’s superhero comics… we know that they can come back. There have been weird cases of people staying dead after dying, sure. Gwen Stacy comes to mind. Moira McTaggert seems to be underground too. My list of favorites has that tendency. But in ten, twenty years? They could come back. Hell, I’ll be honest. If I got a job writing for Marvel? I have ten possible ways to bring the Warriors back already. Same for Kon. Ted is a bit harder, but give me a couple of free hours and I can think of a way. And I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one. We can moan and whine about how much we hate the revolving doors in superhero heaven, but we don’t want to see our favorites dead.

And everyone is someone’s favorite.

Manga, and independent comics don’t have that problem. Since the story is lineal and have an end, when a character dies is because he or she has filled a role in the story and his/her death is a fitting end. There are exceptions, of course, but in general if someone dies is because it’s needed for the story. And so, those who held the character dear to their hearts can be content in the knowledge that the characters died for the right reason.

The possibility of resurrection takes that away. Because what good is anyone’s sacrifice, if next year there will be another big event and they’ll come back, or their deaths will be written away in five years time?

I like my sacrifices to have meaning. I like my comics to have impact. But I think we need to find something besides ‘death’ and ‘rape’ since it’s obvious that rape is almost never treated like something more than a cheap plot devise, and death has become a joke among readers.

Kon-El, Superboy. 1993-2006.

2006-04-05T21:11:00.000-07:00

Or Why I am going to stop reading DC comics for a while.

I’m sorry about the spoiler title, but there’s no other way. For those who follow DC Comics religiously is not a spoiler. For those who don’t… well, I don’t think you will care.

During one of the most stupid annual events I’ve ever read since I started reading comics, Superboy, aka. Kon-el, aka. Conner Kent, dies in a fight against Superboy Prime and Alex Luthor, who wish to destroy the universe as we know it to recreate the multiverse.*

And while one could say that Superboy’s death was heroic, and that he managed to engrave himself in his friend’s memories (Especially in Wonder Girl’s memory), and one could say that he’s a less popular character, that it was better for him to die than to have him as plot device for Luthor’s ‘stock secret plan 53’…

I can’t agree with that.

When Superman died, in his big fight versus Doomsday, I didn’t read DC comics. I found them boring. And despite the great hype around Death of Superman, I didn’t believe he was staying dead for long. I bought Superman 75 out of curiosity, but that was all my interest.

By the time we got to “Reign of the Supermen” I had leafed through the stories, but hadn’t bought any. Until I read Superboy’s first appearance.

I’ll be truthfull. It wasn’t the greatness of the script what called my attention (“Don’t call me Superboy!”). It was that Superboy was *cute*.

But I was 16. So I had an excuse.

And Superboy caught me, even when I still think that Superman is a bore. I bought all the Adventures of Superman with Superboy in, I also got the tpb of Death of Superman, Funeral for a Friend, Return of Superman, and Reign of the Supermen.

Superboy #1 was the second first issue I bought new in my life.

I followed Superboy faitfully during almost all his series, through the times when he wouldn’t grow up, when he got the name Kon-El, and even when he was sent to the Kent’s farm, something that always seemed stupid to me, but I trusted DC back then.
Young Justice was one of my favorite comics thanks to Peter David’s scripts, but I started reading it because Superboy was on it.

When YJ was cancelled, I thought about giving Teen Titans a chance, but they didn’t manage to grab my attention, so for the first time since he appeared, I didn’t bought a comic book with Superboy on it (But I loved him in Legion of Superheroes)

And while I waited for Teen Titans to stop being boring to buy it, I was thrilled to see another of my old favorites back, Booster Gold, thanks to the wonderful “Formerly Known as the Justice League”. Which, by the way, is a wonderful comic comic book. Both FKATJL as it’s sequel, I Can’t Believe it’s not the Justice League are a must buy.

And then in Identity Crisis they killed one of the best supporting characters of the League, Sue Dibny, Ralph Dibny’s wife.

There has been a lot written about the fact, so I won’t fill a post with it. But I was sickened. Not enough to stop buying the Legion, and anything that had to do with the League that I liked, but I was angry.

A year later, in Prelude to the Crisis, Ted Kord, the second Blue Beetle, was killed along the character of Maxwell Lord (The latter was killed both in character, as what he did was completely out of character for him, and literally, a couple of issues after he killed Beetle). But I still kept buying the Legion because to me it was fun (And I know this is not an opinion shared by many)

Superboy’s death, however, is the last drop for me. Because it was innecessary and stupid, because it seems that someone is following a manual on ‘how to write DC crisis’, because ‘Superboy Prime’ is one of the worst villains ever…

And because when we finally get to the final battle, the climatic moment, the fatal wound… it actually happens off panel. We see Kon and SBP destroy Alex Luthor’s machine, yes. We see how Wonder Girl puts away the debris to find him impaled with an iron rod.

What? How did that happen? Following his original powers, he has a permanent TT field around him, unless he’s distracted or unconscious. Since he is awake when Cassie found him, it wasn’t the latter and… Who would get distracted during a fight against SBP?

And if we follow his ‘Superman-lite’ powers that lately had been appearing, things get worse. Because... well... Superboy should be invulnerable, right?

Citing Annie Wilkes, it’s not that he’s dead. It’s that his death was unfair. (Same could go for Speedball in Marvel’s Civil War. If he dies, well, I can take it even when he’s other of my favorites. But if he’s going to die, I hope that he’s killed with his powers taken in account and not with a dues ex machine, please)

So finally, this is a so long to DC comics. Not a boycott, because I don’t expect anyone to do the same, and it’s not forever because… well, it’s comic books. Kon-El is going to come back sooner or later (And if one sees Teen Titans 34 it may be sooner than expected) and when he does, I’ll start buying DC again.

But as comic book readers, the only way we have of telling the editorials that we don’t like something, is by not buying their titles.

*It’s a bit complicated to explain to those who don’t read comics. So let’s just say it was one of those fights to save the world as we know it and leave it as that.

Battle Royale (manga) vol. 15

2006-04-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

(I said I was going to talk about comics, right?)

Those who know me in person tend to believe that my personal taste in manga and anime is mostly shojo-based. I can’t blame them because there was a time in which all I read was shojo, with a few romantic shonen manga in between, like Oh My Goddess!, Video Girl Ai and similar stuff. The truth is that I’m also a fan of gore and ultra-violence so… you can imagine my personal collection is weird.

I found Battle Royale, like practically everyone, for the hype the movie got. Before I could see the movie, however, I had the chance to go to the San Diego Comicon for the first time, where casually TokyoPop had an offer of buy 5 and take 6. Long story short, never give me a credit card. Among the stuff I bought were the first six volumes of BR.

Fastforwarding in time, we arrive to this Wednesday, when I finally bought volume 15, because, yes, the story caught me. So much that now I have the movie, and the novel. So you can imagine how much I love the story (Spoilers follow the cut, btw…)

Battle Royale’s premise is more or less easy to explain. In an alternative Japan under a totalitarian government, among the multiple ways they have to keep the people under thumb there is ‘The Program’, where they take high school groups chosen at random, take them to secure and isolated locations and… basically they tell them that they have two choices: Kill their classmates, or let their classmates kill them. There can be only one survivor, so, get on with the killing.

Even without reading the novel, or seeing the movie, there isn’t a lot of mystery over who will be the final survivor because even when Masayuki Taguchi (Writer of the manga and author of the novel) does give each student at least a chapter for themselves, it’s obvious that he focuses in Shuuya Nanahara as the one who won’t kill and will try to save some of his friends, and on Kazuo Kiriyama, aka. the Terminator because the guy, without any emotion (literally) does kill more or less a third part of the class without help.

After 14 volumes, we finally get to the final confrontation between Kiriyama and Shuuya (Who is accompanied by Noriko and Kawada). Since volume 12 more or less, BR had gotten ‘slow’ dedicating entire chapters to nothing happening and this volume is the worst offender. In the first page, Shuuya has Kiriyama, point blank.

In page 80, he finally pulls the trigger.

Now, yes, I do like the way in which manga can use decompressed storytelling and use six or seven pages for a minute of ‘real time’, but this was too much.

Kiriyama killed many of Shuuya’s friends without mercy, including his two best friends outside Nobu, and by this time in the story, tried to kill Shuuya three times, tried to off Noriko twice and spent more or less all volume 14 in a high speed chase trying to get Shuuya and his group.

Shuuya, however, stops to think about it for 80 pages.

80 pages of Shuuya thinking about all the students who were murdered by Kiriyama (Some who weren’t killed by Kiriyama, but, well, when one is in a roll…), and Nuriko, and the love everyone felt for her (Although I’m willing to say that the last part was a translator change because I seriously doubt Sho, for instance, had any interest in Nuriko since he was gay) before he pulls the trigger. And it’s not a case of ‘lets see how much can we decompress 10 seconds for 80 pages’ because even the other characters tell him to stop thinking about it and that he has to shoot.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Battle Royale, the manga. I loved it particularly up until volume 8 where my second favorite character bites it, and I can ignore the needless and excessive fan service. But reading Shuuya feeling bad because Kiriyama is dead was a bit too much for my taste.

Why? Well, because even if as readers we know why Kiriyama acted like he did, Shuuya doesn’t know. Shuuya was defending himself and Nuriko from a dangerous psychopath who had killed at least ten people to Shuuya’s knowledge. Maybe even more. A pshycopath who even half dead had been still trying to shoot him. So Shuuya stops and performs CPR on him?

Yes. Shuuya is presented as an eternal idealist who will not shoot even if a gun is put to his head. In the movie, the final battle is Kawada versus Kiriyama. In the novel I’m not sure, but I think Nuriko is the one who shoots. The point is that Shuuya doesn’t kill. The fact that in the manga he does, the fact that he is the one who will defend Nuriko, it is an important point for the character... but the point gets messy when he tries to save Kiriyama. Yes, Shuuya has principles, and he didn’t want to participate in the game, and he was forced to, and I have no problems with him crying after Kiriyama is dead, because it’s Shuuya. He’s not crying for Kiriyama, but for the loss of potential that the game created. I have problems with him trying to save Kiriyama because in perspective it looks silly. As a reader, we know up until the last minute that if Kiriyama reacts, he will kill Shuuya, Nuriko, and if he manages, Kawada too.

By page 100, the rhythm goes back to normal, and Kawada’s plan climax doesn’t feel cut short or rushed. In fact, even if it would have helped to have a couple extra pages, it is perfect. Of all the different versions of the same, it’s the one with the more full epilogue, and I won’t lie, the way in which our heroes get to New York made me tear eyed because it gave a fitting ending to my second favorite (Yes, the one who dies in volume 8)

In general, my great beef against BR is not present in this particular volume. I mean the fanservice. I understand that mangas marketed to the male readers must put girls showing skin, with big breasts and short skirts, not to mention the panty shots, but BR went a little to far. Mitsuko got naked at the briefest excuse, and volume 10 is almost pornographic. But when the only girl left it’s virginal Noriko, well, we weren’t going to see her naked. At times the art looks grotesque, but that’s something that has been happening since volume 1, and it fits the story.

To sum up, Battle Royale is over, and it was a truly interesting trip. I highly recommend it to everyone who is an Orwell fan, doesn’t has problems with extreme violence and can stand realistic drawn intestines. On the outside of the body.

However, if you’re a woman... naked girls are the dish of the day, and women die as violently as men. If someone wants to sell the idea that manga is ‘friendlier’ toward women than American comics… Battle Royale is not the manga to do it.

Back on Blogger space

2006-03-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

After thinking a lot about this (And in one of those ego trips that sometimes one can get), I remembered that I had a Blogger profile and account.

When I started looking into the blog movement, I opened this account and posted about... five times. Or something. And LJ seduced me with its icons, and communities, and everything they have there for a fan and well, you see. I left, leaving this account emtpy, empty.

Why did I came back to blogger? Well, because LJ is wonderful in a lot of ways, and I'm not denying that, ut even if my fan experience there has had no problems and I have even managed to stop my usual net-shyness about talking to people I don't know in person... Well, LJ is my place for some fandoms that are almost exclusive for LJ. And they're ok there, separated from what is my absolute passion and my job (I'm lucky to have a job I love)

Sure, there are a million blogs on the net, and many of those are about comics. I don't think I'll bring something really new or totally different to the table, but who knows. Maybe I will. If I don't try it, I'll never know.

I ramble a lot, and sometimes I act really militant, but that comes with the territory (The militant thing. Feminist Mom, Hippie Dad, what can you expect from that combination? The rambling comes from who knows where), so I warn ahead that I can talk about something I found in the mexican comic book industry (That does exist. It's not remotely like the one you can find in other countries, but it's here), or about the last comic I bought and left me in awe, or about a manga, or a mexican fanzine. I won't talk about my cats, or the hamsters, my neighbour's parrot or something like that. That's why I have an LJ for.

I love comments, opinions and feedback. So if you want to say something, feel free. After a couple of curious experiences, I can't say I won't censor anything because I don't know what will happen in the future. But I don't plan to censor anything. I'd love if everyone could sign with a name, even if you are not in Blogger, but that's not a requirement.

And now, in theory, we can start the show.

Oh, yeah. In case you're interested. Following the example of my friend Paco (Blackpaco on the link list) I decided to try and do a Mirror in spanish. Why? Because it's my native tongue, and every single time I start a blog, I end up writting in English because all my fandom friends speak english. So I did the mirror thing to keep that one 100% in Spanish (Bocho Pega Duro, Bocho Pega Más in case you're curious)