comix addix: May 2015

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Supergirl

Helen Slater as Supergirl

I'm old enough that my live-action Supergirl was Helen Slater in the 1984 film Supergirl.

She went on to guest star as Kal-El's mom, Lara, in the WB's (later the CW's) Smallville.

Screen capture of Helen Slater, as Lara, and Julian Sands, as Jor-El, from the TV show "Smallville"

Julian Sands (Kal-El) and Helen Slater (Lara) on Smallville

(I confess I had a little crush on Ms Slater back in the '80s and found her Lara preferable to Laura Vandervoort's supergirl in Smallville, but that's neither here nor there.)

Melissa Benoist as Supergirl

Now Andrew Kreisberg and CBS plan to re-introduce the character to TV in the Fall of 2015 with Melissa Benoist as the titular heroine.

Having become a daily tumblr-user, I have also become better acquainted with the construct called "fandom."

I am a bona fide geek-girl from youth having been raised on nightly readings of J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and the long lines and action figures for Star Wars IV (the original release). I am most assuredly a fan.

However, I have never before experienced the equivalent of the modern fandom found online: people who claim to love all things nerd-ish but have an amazing capacity to dissect and critique those artforms before they have even had a chance to be fully born.

I ask you, who among us could survive unscathed the brutal onslaught of critique modern artists must wade through to bring their creations to life (to print, the stage, or the screen)?

There has to be a better way to show our love for someone else's creation when we engage in conversation about how and why we love it.

http://dccomicstv.tumblr.com/post/119103587760/king-fergus-reacts-to-the-supergirl-trailer-and

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Wonder Woman on The Mary Sue

Screen capture of the top of an article from Doctor Bifrost titled "Wonder woman and the Paternal Narrative: The Rise of Wonder Woman, the Fall of Women" from the 14 of May, 2015 found on The Mary Sue

Click the pic to go to the article.

Now here's a lengthy article I am most happy to link to on The Mary Sue: "Wonder Woman and the Paternal Narrative: the Rise of Wonder Woman, the Fall of Women" by Doctor Bifrost.

According to the credit at the end of the article, Doctor Bifrost is not, in fact, from Asgard:

Doctor Bifrost is a software engineer, writer, reader, activist, and big-time nerd. He was brought up on The Lord of the Rings, The Left Hand of Darkness, Greek & Norse mythology, and comic books, which he’s been reading since he was four. He’s still running a D&D game he started in 1982. Doctor Bifrost enjoys well-thought-out world-building and nice merlot. He can be reached at DoctorBifrost@gmail.com.

Cover A of Wonder Woman #1
from the New 52 (2011) featuring
the art of Cliff Chiang

The article is a good read and addresses a dramatic shift in Wonder Woman's origin story with DC's New 52 reboot of their story-lines in 2011. I am quite a fan of Cliff Chiang's art work for the series, but I have to agree with Doctor Bifrost's complaint that transforming Diana's back-story into the archetypal "paternal narrative" version of the hero journey has robbed the series of its vital spark.

Ironically, in the second issue of the series, the comic itself presents the traditional story of Diana's birth: being shaped from the clay by her mother Hippolyta...

Images from Wonder Woman #2 (2011) by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang depicting the traditional story of Diana's birth from clay with the textual narrative: "According to legend, Hippolyta -- the queen -- her womb was barren. Yet she desperately wanted a child... So, on a moonless night, she fashioned a child out of clay... and prayed to the gods for a miracle."

Images from Wonder Woman #2 (2011) by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang depicting the traditional story of Diana's birth with a textual narrative: "When she was done, she fell exhausted...into deep slumber....And with the sun above, Hippolyta was awakened by her child. Wonder Woman is the perfect amazon -- no male seed created her."

...only to dismiss this original version of the story as legend used to cover up the nature of Diana's true birth. Hippolyta finally confesses: "There was a man. No, there was more than a man. There was a God. The God. There was Zeus."

Images from Wonder Woman #2 (2011) by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang depicting Zeus and Hippolyta in combat with Hippolyta's textual dialogue: "There was a man. No, there was more than a man. There was a God. The God. There was Zeus."

Image from Wonder Woman #2 (2011) by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang with textual dialogue between DIana and Hippolyta: D: "I wasn't made of Clay." H: "I had to protect you from Hera! She's--"

Brian Azzarello, the writer, utilizes the familiar trope of Hera's dangerous jealousy of Zeus' paramours and hatred of his bastard children from Greek myth as Hippolyta's rationale for lying to Diana about the true nature of Diana's birth.

To add to the heartbreak Diana feels over her mother's lies, Azzarello depicts her as feeling ashamed of her "new" birth, so much so that she must exile herself from her sisters, her mother, and Paradise Island forever.

Image from Wonder Woman #2 (2011) by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang with text over image of Wonder Woman/Diana: "the Only Shame on this Island is MINE and I will Take it from you all...never to return."

Before this revelation, Diana's identity well into adulthood was of a woman born as a "perfect Amazon" -- someone so wanted that her mother's prayers created her, a miracle. Talk about taking the agency out of a female narrative.

And by replacing it with the paternal narrative, Azzarello and the editors at DC have also replaced pride with shame as one of Wonder Woman's defining experiences.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Mash-Ups: GoT & Disney

Text "Mash Up" in letters from various fonts on a lined background

When I was teaching, one of my favorite projects to assign was the video mash-up. The creativity of my students was boundless: they would stitch together some of the weirdest genre combinations (clips from Mary Poppins with a horror trailer soundtrack, for example) into something completely awesome and entertaining.

On tumblr, I came across some hilarious images mashing up Game of Thrones characters with a Disney animation style. After some research (in order to be able to attribute this fine work to the actual creators of said images), I ended up at Refinery29.com and an article by Lauren Le Vine.

There I learned that illustrators Anderson Mahanski and Fernando Mendonça created the images which can be found on their website: Combo Estúdio.