Hey, you know what's awesome? Torture. Also: women's legs.

DC released some Batman-related art over on the DCU Blog, for those of us who can't attend SD Comic Con. (Yeah, word, they actually talk about comics at Comic Con. Who knew?)

After I got over my joy at seeing The Question on a cover (I've been informed it's for Azrael, but as we all know I have had very little interest in Bat-related titles of the past, so I dunno), I looked for any Batwoman related art, and saw a bit of red peeking out at me.

Found it:


So I guess that's the trauma in Kate's past. At least she wasn't raped by members of her squad. Just captured by terrorists. And maybe raped. We'll see! (Unless she was also raped by members of her squad, then soldiered through - pun intended - the trauma, went to the Middle East, got captured and tortured... but that'd be too much. Right? Right?) The art remains very nice, though. I love the red and faded-blue/greens of Batwoman on the bottom contrasted with the sepiaesque top.

Anyway, the cover that really got me, and I mean that in a bad way, was for... I have no idea. Some Bat-title. Where Batman gets a little of the Mrs. Robinson treatment:

Remember back in 1969 when it was pretty awesome to see an older woman, clad in very little, show her still-in-great-shape legs to a younger man in an effort to seduce him? Remember when that was subversive and powerful because it messed with our ideas of gender roles and age?

Okay, technically I don't remember it since I wasn't alive, but that's not my point. My point is that this cover is more than half taken up by some woman's naked body. She's seriously only wearing a thong. And since this is Widening Gyre, that's probably Silver St. Cloud (and Bruce!Batman), which means that we're not talking about flipping things on their head anymore, we're just talking about a mostly-naked woman splashed across a comic page similar to, oh a Maxim girl or a Playboy playmate.

Awesome.

Hey, speaking of torture and half-naked women, apparently Silver has a history of getting the shaft (pun sort of intended, but I feel bad about it), despite being a strong enough woman to handle the whole Batman/Bruce Wayne thing. I admittedly know less about Silver than I know about Azrael, but wow. Wow.

I guess at least she wasn't kidnapped by terrorists, held hostage, and eventually - hey, do you think she has purple eyes? Too bad Widening Gyre is out of continuity, right? Perfect new Bat-Girl. You heard it here first. 'Cause you can't be a Bat without trauma, right? For some reason? Probably the same reason Gotham can't survive without Batman. Which is to say: no reason at all.

You know, with all my negativity lately, I forgot to write about how much I enjoyed the most recent issue of Supergirl. She doesn't have the shorts yet, but that's okay, I still managed to survive reading through it without feeling like a traitor to my sex. Anyway, I'll do that tomorrow.

So I hear people read Marvel Comics. Why?

Nah, just kidding. I get it. There's some cool stuff there. Their movies are definitely better (sigh).

Anyway, I have exactly three titles in Marvel that I'm interested in: Exiles, New Mutants, and Captain America. We already know my thoughts on the resurrection of Steve Rogers, which has made my interest in Cap sort of waiver a bit (or a lot).

And then Marvel canceled Exiles. Blah! Yeah yeah, low ratings. I get it. I'm a Pushing Daisies fan, too.

I really liked the first run of Exiles, up until they killed Sunfire. 'Cause, you know. Lesbians generally have to die, go crazy, get pregnant, or some combination of those three. After that, I was out. What a wasted chance to write interesting stories about an Asian lesbian. How many Asian lesbians have you seen, um, anywhere? Unless you watch the Lesbian Required Movies and have seen Saving Face, I'm guess the answer is "Sandra Oh in Under the Tuscan Sun, but that was an accident because I just went to see a romantic comedy and there was a lesbian in it and she was Asian." No, really, think about it. There's going to be one on Stargate: Universe, but I haven't really been into that fandom since James Spader was involved. Also she'll probably just wander around and be asexual. At least Sunfire totally got it on with Mary Jane. Where was I? Lesbians always make me digress. Anyway, I liked the idea of a motley crew of mutants "sliding" around the multiverse and putting things right that once went wrong, hoping each leap would be their final leap home.

Ahem. I think I got my sci-fi tangled up.

And the new Exiles (not to be confused with the New Exiles, I guess, which I didn't read) seemed to have promise. Scarlet Witch and Polaris on a team together! A more bad ass and subtextually gay Beast! The token-black comic relief (not to be confused with the token morphing comic relief)! The mystery around why Blink is still there and what she's not telling us. Hopefully that'll get wrapped up in the double issue we're promised for 9/6, because I'm curious.

So now I'm down to New Mutants and a passing sort of interest in Cap, mostly because I care about what happens to Bucky. I guess one less Marvel book I'm buying is money for one more DC book I've been waffling on (probably Wonder Woman or Secret Six, though I really need to catch up on the latter and was thinking about just waiting for the trade and, oh Adventure Comics starts soon, doesn't it?).

Or maybe I should get into Spider-Woman. Haha.

Edit: I just found out that Paul Cornell, one of my favorite writers from Doctor Who and someone I've chatted with/heard speak at the Gallifrey One convention, is writing the Black Widow miniseries due in November. Fine, Marvel. You win this round!

Squee.

iGoogle gets comic themes.

Which is cool. I mean. Superman gets his own set, but the Women of the DCU have to share. (I picked that one because it's got The Question). And it's unclear whether Batwoman is in there, or relegated to the Batman Reborn theme. I'm assuming these themes are going to update with ongoing storylines, right?

By the way, Spider-Woman has her own theme.

Spider-Woman.

Have I missed something awesome about Marvel Comics' Spider-Woman? Because I don't think I have.

This doesn't really affect me much, since it doesn't change gmail and I don't really use iGoogle. (I search google via Firefox's handy search box). But I guess it's neat that if I ever accidentally click the wrong button I get a chance to see PG's giant breasts pointing at me over my news feed.

Right?

J.H. Williams III art is like a fairy tale.

Ah hah!

I had this epiphany while looking at the previews for the next issue of Detective Comics (which you can also look at here). The artwork reminds me of illustrations in fairy tale stories I've read. Which I'm okay with. I'm not really surprised either. Did I mention in my last entry on Batwoman that I think Alice in Wonderland is just a "modern" fairy tale? I may have. Anyway, it makes sense, then, why the art would look this way. I mean, it's sort of a water-colory, fantasty-heavy kind of thing with faded pastels and bright prime colors and lots of black and white.

Of course, in fairy tales red is the color of the devil. Or evil. Or whores. Depending. Okay, and the loss of innocence. Maybe that's where this is going. The loss of Kate Kane's innocence as she becomes more ensconced in the world of Gotham and the life of a Bat. Let's go there. Let's make her Little Red Hood instead of one of the evil stepmothers with red lips and red nails (hmm), or Little Red Shoes who's so intent on being the best that she dances her feet off in devil-possessed shoes. Man, fairy tales are freaky. Good stuff to mine for a Bat-comic.

I swear I'm not getting this imagery out of nowhere. I took classes! I'm legit! (Actually, that whole "I'm a trained academic in [insert area of expertise here] thing doesn't mean tons when I'm just looking at something an interpreting it, but I wanted to use a few exclamation points.) Batwoman is obviously the hero, so it sort of sets up the whole "flip our ideas on their heads" kind of thing. Can we have a minute for Batwoman's mouth, though? Sweet merciful fang, those are some pointy teeth. Quite honestly, I'm more interested in seeing Kate Kane than in seeing Batwoman. Maybe that's because I've never been a big Bat-fan.

The Watchmen DVD. Also: in defense of Laurie Juspeczyk

So Watchmen comes out today. But I'm not buying it. Because it's not done yet. Dagnabit. I'm so tired of companies trying to milk DVD releases for all their worth. It's bad enough that my 100+ DVD collection isn't in BluRay (and double bad that I picked HD DVD at first!) which means I've got half of BSG in standard def and one day will have half in high def, but why not just release the damn full version concurrently with the director's cut?

You know the one I mean. The one with "Black Freighter" and "Under the Hood" intercut with the movie. The one Snyder promises is coming. What if DVD sales of this version suck? Do we not get it? Will they poll how many of us are waiting for the full version before deciding?

By the way, now that Watchmen is dropping on DVD, it gives me an excuse to write about it. In case you couldn't tell. I was chatting about it with Anika of Fantastic Fangirls (whoa, I totally just name-dropped) yesterday, because I was thinking about writing this post and what I would say that would be 1) different to what I wrote in my livejournal when it came out and 2) hopefully different than what's been written about before. Though probably not, because the internet is big and mighty and I am small and uncreative.

Women! Specifically: Laurie! See? The title was relevent. (Oh. This will have spoilers.)

So I vaguely recall reading somewhere something about Alan Moore and women. I don't remember what it was, but I remember it being negative. I never really thought his women were particularly weak or anything, especially since the first thing I ever ready by Alan Moore was V for Vendetta. But in chatting yesterday, I could see how, yeah, the women of Watchmen (the few there are) could certainly be seen as weak. In a dated kind of way.

Like.

Nothing happens without Laurie Juspeczyk. That's it. She's the lynch pin of the entire story. But at the same time, she's defined by the men in her life. The Comedian (passively for most of the story), Dr. Manhattan, and then Dan Dreiberg. She's not moving forward on her own volition, it seems like, she's tumbling from man to man. That's pretty classic. We say women are important but we always then have to throw in this thing about some man they're with, to make them more human to us. A woman isn't human without a man, you know (this is why I have mixed feelings on the Uhura/Spock relationship of the latest Trek movie; it's very nice to watch, and Uhura is an interesting character, and I get that she's the exact opposite of Spock, but.. I don't know, let her me on her own for a movie... and NO LOVE TRIANGLES). Sorry, digressive parenthetical. Right, Watchmen, women, Laurie.

(By the way, I'm using the picture above because I love the art of the movie version of Watchmen. I want the photography book. I love looking at the stills. It's amazing. It turned a comic with art I wasn't too keen on - nothing against Dave Gibbons, but I'm just not into that style - and made it into something that blew me away.)

So Laurie is defined by the men she's with. Or... is she?

She's the one person that Adrian doesn't seem to have a handle on. He manipulates almost everyone else, but not Laurie. Of course, there could be a reason for that. He's pretty clearly, if subtextually, set up as either asexual or homosexual, so it's possible that's an anvil. But Adrian does just fine jerking Janey Slater around, so I'm choosing to ignore that possibility for now. Laurie, by virtue of being who she is - a second generation mask raised/pushed by another mask, a woman, and a daughter of a single mother - makes decisions that change the world, and that, despite the ending turning out the way Adrian wanted, don't fit into Adrian's plan.

Now, I'm not saying Laurie is the central character to this story. One of the good things about Watchmen is that it's everyone's intertwined choices and actions that lead them to the inevitable result (squid or no squid, it's all the same, thematically, to me). But Laurie is a woman in a man's world, and she's arguably the strongest of all of them. She can handle things Dan can't. She can know truths reserved for Doctor Manhattan. And she can make decisions without having her strings pulled. And it's the way people react to her decisions that change things, not vice versa. Dan puts back on the costume largely because of her. The Doc leaves largely because of her. Rorschach... is insane. But you get the idea. Laurie is important, and not just passively, but also because of what she chooses to do, how she chooses to do it, and who she chooses to do it with.

Oh, and she can kick your ass.

So Laurie's not as bad as she seems at first blush. Sure, she dresses awfully (like every other woman in comics, really). She's a bit angry. She smokes like a chimney, and has some weird mullet-like hair cut. She's got mommy issues, daddy issues, and probably a few other issue to boot (like every character in that story). But in the end she's not a weak character, and I don't think she's defined by her relationships with men quite as much as they're defined by their relationships with her.

This ain't your older sister's crisis.

Okay, admission: I don't have an older sister. But my parents didn't read comics (that I know of), and did the DCU have Crises back in the day, when old people like my parents were reading them? I don't know.

Anyway, I appreciate that Blackest Night isn't being called a Crisis, even though it very obviously is the sort of imprint-changing, cross-title event that seems to get slapped with that title every few years. Which also makes me wonder why I'm not just waiting for the trade paperback, but I'm not. I'm also only buying the main title... and maybe GL Corps. And, okay, I bought Titans #15 today, too, but that was for Aqualad. Erm. Tempest.

Aw, come on, who doesn't like Garth? And his tragic story. That is clearly being brought up again (years later, people) just so his loved ones can come back from the dead and they can duke it out. But that's okay, because I got two things from this issue: Garth and Dick not being a dick. Har har, see what I did there? The transformation when he took off the cowl was literally the best moment of the comic. The second best moment was the rest of the conversation between Dick and Garth. That right there was some good Titans stuff.

Okay, onto the main event: I really liked Blackest Night 1. Now, this is said as someone who's been in and out of the DCU for 15 years. So this caught me up to speed nicely on everyone who's died that I may not have known about (I just read Identity Crisis, but I didn't know Ralph died also.). I've never been a superfan of the GL titles, despite liking individual GL characters, but I liked following Hal through this day of rememberance. The destruction of Coast City is actually one of my earliest, strongest comic memories, so it was a good way to draw me in.

I have also read zero (0) Hawk-whatever titles, and yet in about 5 pages Geoff Johns made me love this incarnation of Hawkman and Hawkwoman. Right in time for them to get killed and resurrected, so that sort of sucks (which is a feat: I had absolutely no emotional connection to these characters and was totally saddened by their deaths). But I'm sure it'll... probably... maybe... come out... I don't know.

Which is cool. I like not knowing. And I like that this crisis (erm) is bringing everyone back from that dead (that hasn't already been brought back, sigh) in a good way. Well, not good. Bad. But that's the good part. They're evil, rotting corpse monsters of death that know our heroes intimately. Creepy!

Given what the Black Lantern said to Hal and Barry (and wtf, isn't Barry himself the Black Flash? CONTINUITY!) I wonder how he's going to deal with Kon and Bart. Probably ignore Bart entirely, because god forbid we treat Bart like an actual character in the DCU (sorry, I'm bitter) unless he's comic relief. But he got a panel, so maybe. There was a lot to do in the issue, so I forgive them.

Overall, I'm really enjoying this story. I like the concept. I like how it feels pretty epic, and how, continuity with Flash Rebirth aside, it feels like this effects the entire DCU in ways that will probably be resonating for awhile. I like how it feels like a Crisis without being a crisis.

Though I wish that Black Lantern guy would stop making out with skulls. It's sort of gross.