There’s this Women Write About Comics Carnival and as I am a woman who has been known to write about comics from time to (all the) time I really want to contribute. The thing is, they’ve got a theme and it’s Women in Refridgerators, 13 years later.

For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Women In Refridgerators, it’s the brain child of that champion of women in comics, Gail Simone. As the story goes, one day Gail noticed a pattern, whenever things got too good to be true for our doughty (super) Hero something terrible would happen to heighten the drama and spur him into action. Frequently “something would happen” meant the violent beating, rape, or death of a female member of his supporting cast. A mother, an aunt, or, as in the most famous example from Green Lantern (vol. 3) #54, a girlfriend. The list of characters is long and it’s scary and it’s one instance where my particular brand of “how I got into comics” works against me.

You see, I’m very much a Jenny-come-lately as far as comics goes. I bought my first X-Men comic in 2006 and I’ve read a lot since then, but since I’ve missed so much, I’ll probably use something like Wikipedia or UncannyXmen.Net to catch up on the backstory of anyone I don’t recognize. Which means I get spoiled for everything, which in turnt gives me a layer of distance from those traumatic events. I know they happen before the more visceral experience of reading the books. It’s a necessary thing, but it means that I can think of precious few examples of seeing this trope in action where it actually affected me.

So, I have no huge dramatic story about how I read The Adventures of Suchandsuch #Number and the death of female protagonist seared my young soul to the bone. I do, however have my usual level of righteous indignation over the way women in comics (both characters and creators) are treated.

Because Women In Refridgerators is only a part of the problem. So’s cheesecake and every single thing that fails the Bechdel test. You see, there’s this faulty assumption in not just comics, but the larger nerdy community that there just aren’t that many women to offend, so it doesn’t matter if you do. This is blatantly wrong, of course, but being blatantly wrong has never stopped a perception from damaging anything.

I came to my decision back when the furor over Starfire went down. It came from an exchange I had with my buddy Tim on Twitter. It went like this:

We had it right. It’s not enough for us to be indignant and to speak out. It’s not enough to confront the writers and editors over this online, in the letter pages, and at cons. The only way to change the comics industry is to become the comics industry.

I accidentally reread part of Mira Grant’s Feed last night and one part stood out at me in the context of this situation:

You could tell the ones who were genuinely young from the ones who’d had all the plastic surgery and regenerative treatments money could buy, because the young ones were the ones looking nauseated by all the human contact around them. They hadn’t grown up in this political culture. They just had to live with it until they became the old men at the top of the hill.

~Mira Grant, Feed p. 483

I genuinely hope that this is true of us in the comics industry. That nerdy women are coming into our own and as our generation rises to the top of the heap we’ll be able to shed the nauseating focus on violence towards and sexualization of women. I hope that this happens, but hoping isn’t going to get us anywhere.

So I shifted a few projects around on my “to write” queue. I’m not as ready as I’d like to be and everything’s in a very early stage, but I’m talking with collaborators. We’re working on it. Because I can’t just sit around and hope anymore. I’ve gotta work towards change.

That was the end of post, but if you’ve still got an earworm from my terrible pun in the title, here’s what I’ve been hearing for the last hour while I wrote this:

And then there’s books I’m excited about.

There’s a handfull of them, past and present: Wheel of Time, obviously, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, any Brandon Sanderson book, Seanan McGuire books. Those books are the ones where I obsess, count down to the release date and clear my schedule in order to read all the more speedily. Something more happens to me when I read them. I get this rush from finally having the book in my hands and then…. the book’s over. In far less time than should have been possible. I don’t know how it happens, maybe I was bitten by an irradiated book at one of the Harry Potter release parties.

Today my powers kicked in good and strong. Why?

Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Promise Part 1 (Avatar: The Last Airbender Book Four) came out today (in comic book stores, it’ll hit bookstores February 7). I’m hearing about sell outs all over. Which means that hardly any of my friends have read it while I read it twice before 1pm. And that sucks.

It sucks because the book continues Aang’s story after the end of the TV series and it’s perfect and wonderful and everything I could possibly hope it could be (except long enough).

Since no one seems to have read a copy of this except me, I’m gonna say what I can without going  into spoilers. I believed every word coming out of the characters’ mouths. They sounded actually, perfectly right. The new characters, jokes, and  antagonists feel like a logical extension of the world as we know it. The art (as you’d expect from Gurihiru) is gorgeous and translates the characters from animation to comics wonderfully. Appa and Momo appear and are important. We get the rest of that Zuko “Where is my mother?” scene.

The book was good. Very good. So good that I’m ready to call it best comic book adaptation of a TV show, ever. Better than the Buffy, Firefly, or Dr. Horrible comics (which are some damn good comics). Miles better than the Heroes comics. Better even than the All Robins issue of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold comic (an issue that was in last year’s top 10). The Promise Vol. 1 was everything I loved about Avatar: The Last Airbender brought to life by people who seem to love it as much as I do. They expanded and grew the world in a way that made sense and kept me turning pages with that freakish speed I only experience on the rare occasions when anticipation meets quality.

Let’s rewind the clock back six months, to late July when I was pondering my choices for the Best Novel Hugo. This one means the most to me and I had narrowed my final choice down to two exceptional novels: Feed by Mira Grant (Bloggers fight corruption, disease, and zombies in pursuit of the truth) and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemesin (A princess from the far flung edges of an empire is suddenly in the running for empress, with all the God-controlling powers that come with it). I absolutely loved both of these books, I was lucky enough to get my hands on copies on the sequels of both, both of which were actually better than the first entries in the series. I thought all of the books were innovative and welcome additions to the genre, but I could only give my first place vote* to one book and in the end my vote went to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

I loved The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms because it read to me like fanfiction. I mean that not in derision, but because it took attitudes I kinda hate in the fanfic context, like “Oh everyone totally sleeps with everyone else all the time and we’re all okay with that,” gave them an in-world reason for working, and made me enjoy the hell out of it. On top of that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is diverse and well written without trying too hard. I love it, but a big part of that love, for me, comes from a place of being in Fandom and I talk to people about books who, well, aren’t. This is a specifically me thing, but it means that I won’t be hounding people to read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms unless I think they fit in that narrow Fandom slice of my life.

And then there’s Feed. What can I say about Feed?

Yeah, I liked Feed. A lot. So why didn’t I vote for it back then? Well I had some reserations about the writing during my first read. I thought it came off as preachy. However, I have since discovered that preachiness comes partially from the narrator, not from the author or the world. It’s an important distinction, because Georgia, the main character, is a little preachy about the importance of honest journalism and I love that about her character. If it was bias on the authorial level other narrators would participate in that preachiness, but they don’t. It’s something you don’t notice at first because Georgia narrates the bulk of Feed with only short interludes from others. The other reason took some research to track down. Reading backstory on Feed (because I am a nerd, I love to read author blogs,and Seanan McGuire’s** blog is really good) I found out she started working on it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That makes a world of difference, because the blog was the be all and end all of communicating with the world back then. Nowadays I get 75 hits on my blog on the best days and over 1,000 people see every one of my tweets. Technology outstripped the publishing process and that’s okay. Resolving those two things really killed off my reservations about Feed, leaving behind only a desire to make everyone I know read it.

In my second impassioned plea in as many days, I now ask you all to please go read Feed and then come back here and squee about it with me. I need to squee about Feed like I get to do about comic books or Doctor Who or Sherlock or musicals or the million other things I squee about on a regular basis.

*Hugo voting is a little confusing, but here’s basically how it works. You rank the nominated books in your order of preference, then the votes are counted. If no work has a clear majority the book with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and its votes are redistributed to the next eligible book on the voter’s ballot. This continues until one book has a majority. It’s cool because your second and third and fourth choice matters. You want to have read as much of the material as possible, so you can make an informed choice.

**Mira Grant is a pen name for Seanan McGuire, who writes other, excellent, books under her own name. I like pen names, especially how they’re used by genre authors skipping around genres. I will probably tell you about the Seanan/Mira thing if you get me talking about Feed. No Twitter Nat teases me about it.

Dear Senator Franken,

I cannot describe how upset I was when I found out you were supporting PIPA. I can understand your position, unlike most Senators, you have Intellectual Property to protect. I hope to publish a novel someday and I know that if it happens chances are my book will be pirated. Heck, people already steal posts from my days at Marvel Entertainment and post them on their blogs with little to no attribution (sometimes they’ll even translate them into Russian first).  I do not look forward to that day. However, as someone who got his start in comedy I cannot believe you want to hand control of the internet over to people who gladly pull down YouTube videos for “copyright infringement” that routinely turns out to be Fair Use (it happens to This Week in Tech, a widely-respected tech news show, with startling frequency).

These are people who would stand in the way of progress, who would rather see their current model continue rather than take that next step into the future. You would be handing the keys to the future of content to people who want the electric car kept in the garage so they can keep driving their Hummers without guilt.

I know that PIPA would not explicitly hamper innovation and freedom of speech, but it would give people with the desire to protect their property at any cost the tools to do so. It would inspire fear in anyone who wanted to post a video of themselves playing the ukulele and singing a song by the artist du jour, in anyone using examples to discuss the implications of the treatment of  women in the latest controversial comic book, in anyone who wanted to make a joke or parody about copyrighted material. They could get sued for everything, or maybe, if they’re lucky, their website will merely be blocked from the entire United States until they are able to clear their name.

I’m not opposed to protecting the intellectual property of the fine content creators of the United States and beyond, but I would rather eliminate piracy by allowing a well-informed public to purchase or borrow easily-available content than keep them away from that same content through fear. I would like to buy a book because I want to support the author and publisher, not  because I’m afraid of what would happen if I downloaded a copy.

Please, Senator Franken, reconsider your position on PIPA.

Yours Sincerely,

Erin Kelly

PS: I posted a copy of this email, along with illustrative links at my blog http://literateknits.wordpress.com

*admission: Erik’s an acquaintance of mine and he knows my Dad, I was really glad to avoid raking him over the coals on this.

As of this moment I have 2,172 words, which is not great, but between being a zombie for two days (long story. Short version, new drugs didn’t work out) and only writing last night I think it should work out.

If I was unready for NaNoWriMo, that’s nothing compared to how unprepared Apple was when they released iOS5. Abrupt change of topic, I know, but it actually relates.

So iOS5 is all nifty and shiny and stuff, and I do dig the new notification center, sorta.  Except for the part where it’s ruined too many nights of sleep since I upgraded a few weeks ago. You see, notification center is actually great if you’re the kind of person for whom out of sight really is out of mindm because it’ll keep your notifications where you can look at them and dismiss them when you’re done. It’s great, but there’s one major thing missing: a sleep mode.

I’ve got really bad insomnia, I have trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, the whole nine yards. So when a feature that is, by far, the least intuitive iOS feature I’ve ever used wakes me up at lest once a week with notifications I don’t remember activating, well, we’ve got a problem. I won’t ever remember to turn the notification center on if I turn it off at night, my reaction to the vibration setting is actually worse than it is to noise, and there’s no way to say “please don’t make any noise between 11pm and 7am.”

As much as I hate to do it, I have to turn off all non-essential noises and badges, including Twitter, which is nearly essential, because taking away my sleep is the fastest way to drive me crazy. I hate it, and as Veronica Belmont says “if you have to turn off all the good features (location, notifications) for it to work, they’re doing it wrong.”

So true. I’ll be over here, writing through a fog of sleep deprivation and waiting for a sleep mode.

Of course, I’m not just sitting around while the baseball goes on, I’m also making stuff and doing my nails in elaborate fashion. Lemme show you (in a roundabout fashion, by linking to them on instagram, because the WordPress App isn’t letting me upload pictures)
“Galaxy Nails,” they look like nebulas, but I assume something is wrong with the delightfully alliterative Nebula Nails, so I’ll compromise and call them Cosmic Nails.

It’s not baseball without crafting and the unrivaled craft of this postseason is finger stripe gloves, a tribute to the only issue I have with Dick Grayson’s return to his Nightwing persona: his new costume’s lack of finger stripes. I’ll make a tutorial on these soon, but I haven’t perfected the process yet.

I’m gonna go bite off my elaborate nail polish waiting for the Tigers to defeat evil. Byes!

So epidode 2, the first proper episode, unless you follow Joss Whedon’s theory that the first six episodes are get to know you episodes and you can only start doing cool stuff after that. We’ll see if Chris Carter has the same theory, but either way we’re into the series now, including the title sequence, which I either ignored or wasn’t there last episode. I think I like it, it’s creepy in a good way.

Lemme see, lists are fun, I haven’t done a list in like, 20 hours or something. Let’s do one of them!

6 Very Cool Things About This Episode

1. Scully has gotten very glam since the Pilot. Actually, both leads have much better hair and makeup in this episode. I noticed how nice their hair was at least once every five minutes. Nice hair is very important to me. David Duchovny was maybe as high as tier two hair (there are five tiers, one is the best and five is Cousin It) It’s a really close call. He was somewhere between Matt Murdock (top of tier three, except he’s blind so it doesn’t count against him) and Eric Matthews (low on tier two). For reference, tier one consists of Scott Summers and Dick Grayson.
2. Scully has been upgraded to actual name status. When she leaned over Dr. Infodump and said “Sucker” I was like, “you have a million pounds of spunk and are not quite completely Babs, though I’d still believe it if your said you were a clone” and that was that, she gets to be Scully from here on out unless she really pisses me off.
3. SETH GREEN. I actually screamed “OZ!” when Mr. Claire Grant showed up. It was nice to see him! Only a Mark Sheppard cameo would have been more reassuring. Also how oddly prophetic his lines about Desert Storm II were.
4. It was impressive how relevant the whole conversation about the protection of national secrets felt, and also a little sad, considering how little the world seems to have changed in the nearly twenty years since this episode aired.
5. The realization that I really want Babs, Hermione and Scully to form a club where they can all be super smart, always do their homework and use it to trap the guys around them, and look pretty fabulous after staying up all night.
6. Scully talking to someone named Gail on the telephone. I’m assuming this was Gail Simone and it’s confirmation of my “Scully is a Babs clone” theory.

6 Weird Things About This Episode

1. The Military guy who showed up at the beginning and end. Is he the same one from the pilot? he looked different, but I’m not so good with faces that I’m certain.(you can most certainly answer that. I can’t look it up, I have limited resistance to spoilers)
2. The obnoxious reporter, but he’s actually a security guard guy. He was weird and a little bit Jimmy Olsen-esque. Also, I could totally hear his last line, “It is you who have acted inappropriately” being said by Actor Ozai. I laughed for like 5 minutes at that
3. Calling everything UFO technology. It just sounded awkward and like maybe the writers forgot the word extraterrestrial.
4. Why nobody asked for ID when the Men in Black showed up.
5. How the formerly missing test pilot was wearing a Packers sweatshirt and I practically growled at him. I like to think I’m past all that football nonsense, but clearly I’m not so lucky.
6. Scully taking Jimmy Olsen captive. She was nervous and jumpy to the point where I expected something to go terribly wrong. She did everything right, basically, as far as I understand these things, but the nerves were plain on her face (because Gillian Anderson is amazing) and it made me worry that something would go wrong before she could recover her shambling partner.

1 Crazy Theory

1. I think Dr. Infodump has been replaced. Blame Bendis for this, but I really think something happened when he was in that holding facility. I know they gave him amnesia, but if I was running that kind of mysterious operation I would do everything I could to rein in the crazy FBI agent. So basically, Dr. Infodump, I am watching you and your convenient amnesia (convenient amnesia is the name of my next band).

I miss you a bunch, things are super boring around here without you, at least they were until today.  Apparently my Mac Gawain is even more awesome than I thought! In fact, Gawain’s been a TARDIS in disguise this whole time*! Of course, he was a little rusty from traveling in a linear fashion for so long, so he’d lose his grip and start to pull me back every time I tried to take a picture.

So I took my TARDIS and flew off to the first place any traveler in time and space would go, the Batcave!

I didn’t expect Batman to actually be there, so I got out double time, then headed out to take in the sights of Gotham.

Gotham’s nice and all, but a little crime-ridden for my tastes. So I thought I’d head to somewhere a little brighter and cleaner, Metropolis.

This is me doing my best Lois Lane imitation. I tried to get ahold of Lois, because she is my spirit animal and how could I not, but she was out and Clark answered the phone, and I can’t lie to Superman, so I just said something about needing to go and left.

I thought a good way to wrap up my travels would be to just pop in on the Earth King, but there was something about Bosco and handstands and a fractured bone, so I just did a little Batsui in front of the palace and headed home.

It was a great trip! I wish you could have come!

Yours,

~EEK

PS: Gawain said I visit too many fictional places and that he’d need a break before he took me anyplace else.

*Or I may have discovered the part of photobooth where I can post myself in front of any picture I can dig up with my internet connection and a little Google Fu.

If you haven’t yet read Laura Hudson’s incredible editorial on Comics Alliance about the treatment of Superheroines in the DC Relaunch, do yourself a favor and check it out.  There have been plenty of other reactions to last week’s comics. Today, an interview with a 7-year-old, via io9 sparked off a discussion on Twitter today about whether it was appropriate for the writer of that piece to be showing pictures like the ones in question (from the T rated Red Hood and the Outlaws) to her child.  I think it’s fine for her to use them as a teaching tool, perhaps because I have more memories of my mom talking about Barbie being an unrealistic representation of the female form than I do of actually playing with Barbie dolls.

Thinking about my mom, about Barbies and about unrealistic representations of the female form made me realize have something to say about this topic. I wanna tell you about Christmas last year.

You see, my mom is the Batman of Christmas shopping and she still has us give her christmas lists (due by 9 pm on Thanksgiving Day) because she enjoys the challenge of finding the best price on a set of Rock Band Instruments or whatever. So, while I was putting my list together last year, I added a bottle of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Heroine perfume. It seemed like a great idea because I like a lot of the notes in the scent, I like the idea of helping out the Hero Initiative and I never seem to pull the trigger on buying whole bottles of perfume .

So imagine my surprise Christmas morning when I open a bottle of perfume from my Mom and it isn’t Heroine. It isn’t even a BPAL scent, it’s this. That’s right, it’s Twilight perfume. Volturi Twilight Reign Scented Body Mist in the Romance shade.  Now, I like Twilight a bit, and I would have just laughed it off as a fantastically terrible thing to own if it hadn’t been for my mom’s answer when I asked her why she hadn’t gotten me the BPAL.  “Erin,” she said, “have you seen the picture on that website?”

I hadn’t actually, because I’d read about the perfume on Geek Girl Diva’s blog and she cuts off the picture a bit, making my memory of some generic tough girl with a gun a bit incomplete, see:

The woman in that picture is covering her breasts and her junk and that’s it. When forced to look at the full picture without the distractions of the BPAL website, I’m completely disgusted. Compare it to the Twilight thing on the left, which despite being utter crap as far as perfume goes looks so very much classier.  No wonder my mom chose the one over the other.

And who exactly is to blame for this? No one and everyone. I know Adam Hughes is capable of drawing beautiful women without making them look like porn stars, I know BPAL is a company run by a woman and I assume the folks at The Hero Initiative are pretty darn smart, so why does she look like that? Well, maybe the art is supposed to be a generic comic book heroine and that is what we get in 2010 when we depict a generic female heroine: art that makes my mom think I ignored every one of our discussions about how Barbie is an unrealistic standard of feminine beauty.

This is cost of cheesecake, the cost of the inescapable assumption that depictions of women need to be aimed at the lowest common denominator. Greg Land on the cover of the Women of Marvel trade. Greg Horn’s Emma Frost covers. Star Sapphires. Catwoman. Starfire. It’s the look on my mom’s face when she drew my attention to that picture, her decision to buy a product based on the story of Bella motherfucking Swan rather than one featuring our generic depiction of a comic book heroine.

Whether or not cheesecake is the norm in comic books, it is the face we present to the world too much of the time. I wish I knew how to change that, but refusing to buy cheesecakey things doesn’t seem to be working, so I’m adding my voice to the crowd. I don’t condone cheesecake, it isn’t a defining factor of comics for me, so please stop using it to represent comics.

ETA: I went over time by about an hour writing this, but when the timer rang and I was still in my stride I decided to let myself write until it was done.

1. This is all Evan Shaner’s fault, first he posts a beautiful cover for his dream Captain Marvel/Shazam series on Comic Twart and then he links to the first cover in the series with an extended commentary.
2. Then he won’t say who the girl on the Magic of Shazam cover is, but after a little work I look her up and decide to take a look at her appearance in 52 (which no one mentions, but I remembered)
3. So I grab my trades off the shelf, I’m working on collecting the floppies (I’ll get to why) but right now the trades are easier.
4. Now here’s the amazing thing about 52, for me at least, it’s a new and revelatory experience every time.
5. Seriously. I had next to no idea what the DCU was when I finally gave in to Mookie’s emphatic recommendations and burned through the ENTIRE series in one sitting, but I loved it.
6. This was before the trades came out so I was reading the floppies, which is important, because the floppies starting doing these amazing little two page summaries of everyone
7. Between those summaries and the intense and emotional experience that happens whenever you read 52 the DCU managed to get its hooks embedded in me pretty deeply.
8. So much so that I’m starting to think 52, for all that it seems to be a continuity heavy behemoth is actually a perfect comic to hand to newbies.
9. I mean anyone is gonna know who Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are, so the premise is a really easy sell,
10. What happens when all three of the heroes are gone for a year?
11. It works because none of the people in the comic know who anyone is either.
12. The writing is superb and they hand you everything you need to know while those with a deeper knowledge of the DCU will get a richer, but not substantially different experience.
13. I should not have chosen a list for this but I’m gonna continue along my disjointed way.
14. Seriously, I just caught the Birds of Prey cameo this time around, but I would have understood what was going on with no help.
15. Also the cameos are a humungous help
16. You’re always wondering who’s gonna show up next, you think, “isn’t it time for Diana to show up?” or why can’t Nightwing be a main character (I know, that one’s just me)
17. The other amazing thing about 52 is how serialized it is (I lover serialization, get used to it)
18. Seriously, I think they knew that it would only work if you had to stop between bits of stories before plunging on to the next one.
19. That’s why the little summaries are in the floppies
20. it’s also why commentary happens at the end of every issue, instead of at the end of the trade like DC usually does
21. The commentary in the trades is worth the price of admission, really
22. They do a nice job of covering everyone’s angle really nicely, which is vital for such a huge and well run team
23. Massive kudos to Steve Wacker, editor extraodinaire for this and then following it up with his huge success on the thrice or twice monthly Amazing Spider-Man
24. Either way, the writers/artists/trade designers manage to make you turn a few pages at minimum to get to the next bit of story, causing an artificial break that simulates to some extent the week people had to wait the first time around
25. I hate that I had not yet realized how important it is to read serialized fiction with breaks the first time I read this.
26. Still, the fact that I read the series in less-than-optimal conditions and it’s still one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read in comics is an amazing tribute to the skill of the whole team.
27. That being said, I totally want to finish my collection of the floppies before I try to make anyone else read 52.
28. I think that 52 works as a conversion book that way, with the origin stories included.
29. the commentariy sections of the trades (much as I love them) are a bit inside baseball for new readers
30. whereas individual issues are not, somehow.
31. Running low on time, some quick character squeeing then I’m hitting post
32. out
33. of
34. time
35. out
36. Holy hell Cassie! I had no idea who you were before this read. I knew what you were, but not who. Aw sweetie.
37. out
38. of
39. time
40. out
41. Tim, timmy, timmy, tim, tim, tim, tim you really made Bruce wait a long time before adopting you. I had to rejigger my mental timeline a bit for you.
42. Also, Tim, your last appearance in 52 will always kill me. Endless tears, bro.
43. out
44. of
45. time
46. out
47. Yeah, I gotta read more Captain Marvel.
48. time
49. out
50. of
51. time
52. In conclusion, I love 52 and it’s something I can always revisit and find something new, without invalidating my original experience. It’s incredible