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May. 15th, 2015 10:05 amhttp://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/marvel-a-force-female-superheroes
http://www.themarysue.com/g-willow-wilson-jill-lepore-aforce/
I think this is a really interesting pair of essays, in a lot of ways.
The first observation I would make is that Lepore is writing as if the natural audience of comic books is 10 year old boys, and Wilson is writing as if the natural audience of comic book is 30 year old women. When Wilson's reply is that her comic book is genre savvy, it's a strange and kind of funny response to the charge that it is teaching 10 year old boys incorrect ideas about their relationship to women. Ten year old boys don't know from genre savvy.
At the same time, my own eyes are much more attuned to read that cover the way Wilson does than the way Lepore does. She-Hulk covering her breasts with her arms, staring straight at the viewer with a don't give a fuck look, posed in an anatomically realistic way... And just the fact that it's She-Hulk, one of the smartest, cleverest superheroes of any gender. That cover is obviously a deliberate commentary on years of problematic portrayals of women in comics, and to my eye it's a thoughtfully accomplished one.
That being said, I always say that lampshades do not fix the problem they point out. Genre savvy is great, and it's important to have the conversations about genre that Wilson is fostering, but it isn't actually a full answer to the problem that most Marvel superheroines are spun-off copies of popular male counterparts to just say "We know that and are commenting on it." Not least because of the ten year old boy problem that Lepore notes.
Some of the solution to the ten year old boy problem is Runaways characters like Niko and Molly, Avengers Academy characters like Veil and Mettle- the whole host of fantastic original female heroes Marvel has been introducing over the past decade, who aren't spinoffs of male heroes. But some of the solution is probably also figuring out how to do a better job of differentiating the spin-offs, so that even the ten year old boy (and Jill Lepore) can recognize how different Jennifer Walters and Bruce Banner are.
http://www.themarysue.com/g-willow-wilson-jill-lepore-aforce/
I think this is a really interesting pair of essays, in a lot of ways.
The first observation I would make is that Lepore is writing as if the natural audience of comic books is 10 year old boys, and Wilson is writing as if the natural audience of comic book is 30 year old women. When Wilson's reply is that her comic book is genre savvy, it's a strange and kind of funny response to the charge that it is teaching 10 year old boys incorrect ideas about their relationship to women. Ten year old boys don't know from genre savvy.
At the same time, my own eyes are much more attuned to read that cover the way Wilson does than the way Lepore does. She-Hulk covering her breasts with her arms, staring straight at the viewer with a don't give a fuck look, posed in an anatomically realistic way... And just the fact that it's She-Hulk, one of the smartest, cleverest superheroes of any gender. That cover is obviously a deliberate commentary on years of problematic portrayals of women in comics, and to my eye it's a thoughtfully accomplished one.
That being said, I always say that lampshades do not fix the problem they point out. Genre savvy is great, and it's important to have the conversations about genre that Wilson is fostering, but it isn't actually a full answer to the problem that most Marvel superheroines are spun-off copies of popular male counterparts to just say "We know that and are commenting on it." Not least because of the ten year old boy problem that Lepore notes.
Some of the solution to the ten year old boy problem is Runaways characters like Niko and Molly, Avengers Academy characters like Veil and Mettle- the whole host of fantastic original female heroes Marvel has been introducing over the past decade, who aren't spinoffs of male heroes. But some of the solution is probably also figuring out how to do a better job of differentiating the spin-offs, so that even the ten year old boy (and Jill Lepore) can recognize how different Jennifer Walters and Bruce Banner are.