It's Shxt Like This That Distances Me From Comics

I know this isn't Marathon #3.

I wanted to write something that wasn't pastepunk stuff and the Marathon pieces take a lot out of me. It's something to knock out the cobwebs and get me off my intellectual butt. This is about...Necrosha. Necrosha is a story about reanimating the dead that got published today that isn't called Blackest Night.


There's a preview page of the Necrosha one-shot in the X-Men universe (from Marvel Comics) which took me out of the world the authors had created and brought me back, kicking and screaming to this one.

It's a shot of Selene, the Black Queen, an X-Men villianess. She's an important member of the Hellfire Club's inner circle and she's a powerful character. She's a 15,000 year old psychic vampire, for heaven's sake. She can grind people to dust with her mind or dominate them to her will. This is a woman with considerable powers and prowess of her own.

She's teaming up with some other death related villains to launch an attack on the X-Men, because she believes she can ascend to godhood for no adequately explored reason, but do villains really need reasons? Answer: No. It's usually better if they don't.

And yet, she's dressed up like an bondage model. That breaks the fiction for me. That pulls me out of the narrative. I don't feel like a reader when I see that. I feel like a target audience. I feel like I'm being titillated, insulted and kept on a leash to make sure I'm paying attention. Take a look at it yourself.

I feel like I'm being reminded that these designs are made to influence buyers. And yes, I know that her costume is based on an older costume, which is just as flattering. But this is 2009. We've learned, right? We don't have dress up the women in those kinds of outfits to get readers to understand the woman is meant to be alluring, destructive and nefarious. It's an image thing. It's her image. It's the image Marvel wants her to have.

The problem is that there's another image and that's Marvel's image of the buyers of which I am one. (That said, all of this could also be said for DC, at random, I could show you Green Lantern Corps #35, but that's tangential.) I recognize that this is an old argument. I recognize I'm profoundly new to this criticism that's been going on for a while now.

It's hard for me to believe that a woman who is 15,000 years old chooses to dress that scantily in on a cold night. I mean, okay, she's a vampire. That requires an abbreviated wardrobe, I grant, but the bondage theme is the straw (or tail) that broke the camel's back.

Maybe I'm just roid-raging. I felt like a kid again and the experience wasn't pleasant. For all the time I've invested in my understanding, all the different perspectives I've tried to wrap my mind around and all the fighting I've done with how I'm supposed to act, pages like this remind me that I'm still just viewed as a person to be insulted with "sultry" women.

I don't believe I'm unique in that I'm college graduate reading comics and am willing to try new universes and characters. Maybe I am. I'm going outside to take a walk and figure out how deeply I feel about this.

It makes me feel powerless and reminds me of the production of comics. The big fear in my mind is that I'm just naive. That of course these comics are aimed at dudes (used colloquially) that define the lowest common denominator. That the patina of storytelling is just that. That I'm putting too much intellectually on something that was never meant to carry it.

Maybe this feeling of being taken advantage of is in my head. I hope it is, but frankly, I never should have left the story in the first place and the fact that even after typing through this, the original problem still remains is the troubling part.