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There is a school of thought that any publicity is good publicity. I suppose that Marvel considers the furor over the recent demise of Captain America (see “Comics in Context” #168) to be good publicity if it boosted sales of the comics. But just what kind of lasting impression did that leave in the world beyond comics speculators? If people believe that Captain America really has been killed off, then it would seem to them that Marvel has destroyed an iconic figure representing the finest in the American spirit. If people believe that Captain America isn’t really dead, or will be resurrected, then it would seem to them that Marvel is exploiting and trampling upon said American icon as a publicity stunt to make big bucks. Why would a company that cares about its public image want to create either impression?

Last week Marvel got still more publicity of questionable value when the mainstream media discovered Sideshow Collectibles’ rather sexist statuette of Spider-Man’s leading lady Mary Jane Watson as a sexually submissive laundress. Not only was I interviewed about this figurine on MSNBC (see last week’s column), but former Spider-Man comics editor Danny Fingeroth showed up five times on the network to talk about the controversy (as you can see on YouTube here).

Comics artist Adam Hughes has posted his design for the statue on his website, and I find the original drawing considerably less objectionable, prettier, and even charming. Perhaps it was the people at Sideshow who pushed the design over the edge of taste. (And just who designed the rear of the statue?)

Even so, Hughes seems not to get why it was regarded as sexist and offensive, and this is part of the problem. “Mary Jane is a bit of a bimbo,” he explains, blaming the victim, adding that “Well, she’s bending over. Pin-up girls do that.” It’s as if male artists had nothing to do with creating the pin-up girl image. “But by that argument ““ if we take bending over to be a sign of sexual availability, every woman who bends over to pick up something should be chastised.” And just how many such women show off their thongs as they do so? Using some inappropriate hyperbole, Hughes asserts that “I think the whole “˜sexual availability’ claim comes from trying to back up the argument that this is the most awful thing to hit mankind since the Holocaust”. Here is a perfect example of someone who finds himself in a hole and unfortunately reacts by digging himself in even more deeply.

Hughes asks, “is it really a sexist or misogynistic act if it wasn’t intended that way on the part of the people doing it? . . .are you seeing something that’s either not there, or that the artist never intended to be there?” First, this demonstrates a lack of understanding of human psychology. Certainly, a person can be subconsciously sexist or misogynistic. Certainly people can consciously hold prejudiced opinions without being aware they are prejudiced: they consider their opinions to be correct. D. W. Griffith was reportedly surprised that his film Birth of a Nation (1915) was attacked as racist, though today that is the unanimous opinion of cinema scholars. There’s that song in the musical Avenue Q, “Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist.”

Moreover, even if Hughes did not consciously or unconsciously have sexist intentions, that does not mean that people who interpret the statue as sexist are wrong. Certainly artwork can be interpreted in ways of which the artist was not consciously aware. A Freudian interpretation of Oedipus Rex is not invalid simply because Sophocles died centuries before Freud devised the term “Oedipus complex.” If an interpretation fits the artwork, it is justified whether or not the creator agrees with it. This is a basic principle of criticism, long accepted in academia, and comics writers and artists had best wake up and take notice. (Not surprisingly, Neil Gaiman recognizes this principle, as can be seen from his introduction to The Sandman Papers, Fantagraphics’ 2006 anthology of academic essays about his work.)

But the Mary Jane maquette, as I suggested last week, is relatively tame compared to what just turned up in the comics shops. Years ago, back when I was first mulling over doing a column on the Internet, I considered doing a segment called “Atrocity of the Week.” Maybe I shouldn’t have dismissed the idea, since, lo and behold, less than a week after I wrote about the MJ statue, Quick Stop editor Ken Plume e-mailed me about this: the cover of Marvel’s new issue of Heroes for Hire, appropriately #13. It appears that the ladies in bondage, with necklines cut so low that in two cases they approach the navel, are the Black Cat and the detective team of Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, all formerly presented as empowered, independent heroines. Drawn in manga-influenced style, they’re virtually unrecognizable, and Misty looks less like the African-American she’s supposed to be than a well tanned Caucasian. But the biggest problem is those tentacles feeling them up.

Researching this week’s column has expanded my knowledge of Japanese cartoon culture, though not in a way I would have preferred. It seems that the Heroes for Hire cover evokes the style and content of hentai manga, a term used outside Japan for Japanese comics dealing in explicit sexual or pornographic content. It turns out that so many Japanese comics deal in “tentacle rape” that this subgenre merits its own Wikipedia entry, which informs us that “Tentacle rape is a concept found in some horror hentai titles, where various tentacled creatures (usually fictional monsters) rape or otherwise penetrate women (or, less commonly, men). Much of the genre also consists of humiliation and bondage fetishes, since the victim typically is restrained by the appendages.” That suggests that the point of this cover is to take three of Marvel’s empowered, independent heroines and humiliate them.

Even the great Japanese artist Hokusai did a “tentacle rape” woodcut, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1820), as shown in the aforementioned Wikipedia entry, a considerably superior work of art, as well as further evidence that great artists are not necessarily beyind reproach (see Wagner, Richard).

And it turns out that the Heroes for Hire cover was done by a female Japanese artist, Sana Takeda, and that fact is a forceful reminder that being a member of a group that is the target of prejudice does not necessarily make one enlightened about prejudice.

But you don’t have to know this background in Japanese culture to be appalled by this cover. All you have to have is a sufficient grasp of Freudian psychology to recognize tentacles as phallic symbols. And can that milky white fluid splattered atop one of the Black Cat’s breasts be what I think it is?

Probably the mainstream media will take no notice of this cover, since people who don’t read Marvel comics are unaware of the three characters depicted. But what if superhero comics continue down this path, and sooner or later produce an equally, or even more offensive cover or a story about a character that the mainstream media knows–and that they notice?

I wonder if this is another sign that contemporary superhero comics are overreaching in their pursuit of the sensationalistic, to try to get a charge out of its shrunken, jaded niche audience. I worry that superhero comics are in a decadent phase, marked by the continual killing of longtime characters, and the distortion and demeaning of others, and that not even the reconstructionalist writers can pull the genre out of its descent. Is this Heroes for Hire cover the kind of work of which those of us who value the comics medium can be proud?

So let’s turn instead to a recent event that did do comics proud. On April 26, the night after my trip to Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (see “Comics in Context” #176–177), I attended the world premiere of a new documentary about one of the artform’s greatest creators, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. Eisner was one of the founding fathers of modern American comic books, the creator of one of its masterpieces, The Spirit, and the pioneer of the contemporary American graphic novel (see “Comics in Context” #6, 25, 64, 68, 69).

Tribeca, which is short for a “triangle below Canal Street,” is a section of lower Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Center. Robert De Niro and his business partner, producer Jane Rosenthal, founded the festival in 2002, in part to help revitalize lower Manhattan following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In May, 2003, shortly before I started “Comics in Context,” the second Tribeca Film Festival included a panel, which I attended, called “The Return of the Superhero,” dealing with the new wave of superhero movies. The panelists were Mark Steven Johnson, the writer/director of the Daredevil movie, and since then, this year’s Ghost Rider flick; Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United, which premiered that month; and Kevin Misher, a producer who was developing a Sub-Mariner movie (which seems to have sunk from sight).

It occurs to me that I haven’t written about the Ghost Rider movie yet. Even if Nicolas Cage doesn’t look like the young, blond Johnny Blaze, I think the idea of Cage as a middle-aged Blaze with an Elvis Presley vibe. The visual concept of this demonic motorcyclist with a flaming skull for a head is undeniably powerful, and, as an updated version of Faust, Ghost Rider has great story potential. But it has gone untapped: I agree with Peter B. Gillis’s observation that Ghost Rider was never a great comics series, even despite Mike Ploog’s memorable art in the early stories. Although I can tell from the Tribeca panel that Mark Steven Johnson’s heart is in the right place in his respect for Marvel series, the execution of his movies doesn’t match his good intentions. The Ghost Rider movie is just an empty series of action sequences, devoid of wit or true human interest, not really worth writing about for more than a paragraph. Casting Easy Rider‘s Peter Fonda as Mephisto was clever, but I couldn’t care about Ghost Rider battling another devil, Blackheart, on behalf of Fonda’s not-quite-as-bad devil. As an update of Faust, Ghost Rider the comic and the movie both should be better than they ever have been. At the end, Blaze defiantly declares that Mephisto may possess Blaze’s soul but not his spirit. But if you don’t understand that they’re the same thing, you don’t get what Faust is about. I exited the Ghost Rider screening, wondering how low the reputation of Marvel movies would be were it not for Sam Raimi’s great Spider-Man trilogy.

But back to the “Return of the Superhero” panel. Of course, there are more comics writers, artists and editors in the New York City area than anywhere else in the nation. Constantine Valhouli, the indie filmmaker with whom I collaborated on the documentary Sex, Lies and Superheroes, offered to put the Tribeca Festival’s panel programmers in touch with comics professionals we had interviewed for the movie. But the Festival wasn’t interested. Presumably they felt that people who wrote and drew the superhero comics on which the movies were based had no relevance to a panel about said movies. Considering that one of the people on Constantine’s list of contacts was Frank Miller, soon to become a formidable filmmaker himself, this seems even more ironic.

A great deal has changed in only four years. Now the Tribeca Film Festival was showing a movie about the life of a comics professional, filled with interviews with other comics pros. This was the glorious end of a long, long road for the filmmakers, director/producer Andrew D. Cooke, and its writer/producer, his brother Jon B. Cooke, the editor of Comic Book Artist, an invaluable magazine that serves as a continuing oral history of American comics. They had been working on this movie made for five years, showing a twenty minute sample of their work-in-progress at comics conventions, as they searched for the additional financing they needed to complete it. It is their and our good fortune that they were able to conduct extensive interviews with Will Eisner before he passed away in early January of last year. You may recall that Jon B. Cooke showed the sample of his documentary at Eisner’s memorial (see “Comics in Context” #80). Finally, teamed with the film’s editor and executive producer Kris Schackman and Montilla Pictures, they had completed the film, roughly a year after the memorial.

The Tribeca Film Festival scheduled four showings of the Eisner film, and initially, I tried to get a ticket for the second one, on Saturday evening April 28, after learning that Eisner’s widow Ann would attend. A number of comics professionals who appear in the documentary–Jules Feiffer, Jerry Robinson, and Art Spiegelman–also attended the Saturday screening. But that one was sold out, so I went with my second choice, the world premiere, on the evening of April 26.

The Tribeca Film Festival has grown so large in five years that this premiere wasn’t in Tribeca, but further north, at the AMC Village VII multiplex on Third Avenue and 11th Street, in the East Village. The showing was in one of the multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and though it was well attended, and I was surprised to see that there were still plenty of empty seats. I assumed that since thousands of people attend the New York Comic-Con, surely all of the Eisner documentary showings would be sold out, but no.

Moreover, I got the sense that the people at this initial screening weren’t a crowd of comics buffs, either. During the opening credits, the audience broke into applause when they saw the credit for “Schackman Films,” executive producer Kris Schackman’s company, so his friends must have attended en masse. I expected there might be applause for at least some of the notable figures of the world of comics when they first appeared on screen, but no. There was, however, a gasp from one member of the audience when an unexpected interviewee first turned up in the film: novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who had died on April 11. Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist presumably is his final public appearance.

Nor did I spot any comics professionals in the audience, aside from Jon Cooke, who greeted me before the movie started, and Randolph Hoppe of the Jack Kirby Museum (http://www.jackkirbymuseum.org/), with whom I chatted after the film had ended. Not even the legendarily ubiquitous Beat had come!
There still seems to be far too little serious interest in the study of comics, whether it takes the form of classes in critical appreciation of the medium, museum exhibitions, or documentaries such as this one.

So, then, I told myself, that meant I was part of a small group who can say in years to come that they were fortunate enough to attend the world premiere of a film whose reputation will surely grow as the serious appreciation of the comics artform continues to rise.

The program began with an introduction by a man named Aaron (I didn’t catch his last name), one of the people who selects the films to be shown at the Tribeca festival, who told us how much this film had surprised him. He was not a comics aficionado, but as amazed to learn from the movie about Eisner, “someone I never knew was so important,” who had participated in “creating a whole new artform.”

This is an indication of how effective the Cookes’ documentary is. It’s not just for people in the comics subculture who are already familiar with Will Eisner’s life and achievements. It caught the interest of someone who know nothing about them, and who, indeed, would have had to wade through many other documentaries in the course of helping to select the films for the festival. This one stood out.

In the question and answer session after the screening, Jon Cooke told us that “Previously Kris”–the executive producer–“didn’t know who Will Eisner is.” Kris Schackman then explained that he had “always liked comics,” but that working on this documentary was an “eye-opening experience.” He said that he “spent a year working on it,” during which time he “fell in love with his [Eisner’s] work” and “the whole artform.”

And if I’m correct that the audience on Thursday evening was more of a film buff crowd than a comics crowd, it worked for them too: they were quietly attentive through the entire film. This is a movie that can make converts to comics as an artform.

Let’s shift back to Aaron’s opening remarks: he then introduced Andrew Cooke, who was greeted with cheers and applause. Cooke explained that the “process” of making the movie had taken “five years.” Not only was tonight’s showing the “world premiere,” he told us, but “no one has seen the film in this form except Kris Schackman and myself.” (Not even Jon?) In fact, in the question and answer session, we were told that the Cookes had only done the interview with Jules Feiffer–who started his extraordinary career as Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit–“four or five weeks ago”! So I really was present at a special occasion.

Then the film began, and after the opening credits, there was vintage black and white footage of Manhattan–Fifth Avenue, Times Square–and then of a newsstand with comic books. An offscreen narrator, who turned out to be Art Spiegelman, explains that comic books were originally intended to entertain kids. There was a “notion,” he continued, that “kids are. . .stupid adults,” so “most comics were junk.” But it as Eisner, he went on, who pioneered comics as a “bona fide means of self-expression.”

we first hear the film’s score, jazz music played by a group that Kris Schackman’s father had assembled; it sounded appropriate playing under images from The Spirit and footage of early 20th century New York.

Next came a surprise: the voice of Jack Kirby, who passed away over a decade ago. The movie makes use of the interviews that Eisner taped in the 1980s with various peers in comics, including Kirby, Milton Caniff, and Harvey Kurtzman, all now deceased, as well as the still active Neal Adams. I read the interviews when they first appeared decades ago in The Will Eisner Quarterly and The Spirit Magazine, and Dark Horse has since published them in the book Shop Talk, but it is an unexpected pleasure to hear the voices of these giants in this movie.

Many other major figures in comics appear on-camera, including Eisner contemporaries such as Jules Feiffer, Joe Kubert, Jerry Robinson, and the late Gil Kane; leading creators of contemporary comics including Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman; Eisner’s friend and longtime publisher and agent Denis Kitchen; Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, his novel about comics’ Golden Age; and comics historian Gerard Jones.

The film’s most important interviewee, however, is Eisner himself, who appears throughout, as the movie progresses chronologically through the story of his life. Eisner comes across as open, articulate, intelligent, good-humored, warm and friendly. If he had a dark side, it never appears in this film. I expect that audiences for the movie, even those who don’t know his comics work, will find him immediately likable. He is the perfect ambassador for the comics medium.

Eisner’s story starts with his birth in 1917, and here was another surprise; a nude baby photograph of the Great Man. That certainly set a tone of intimacy, and indeed, the film is about Eisner’s personal life as well as his career in comics. It’s an appealing strategy to follow, humanizing its portrait of its subject.

It was also a surprise to see silent film footage of Eisner’s father and mother. But much of the story of Eisner’s youth and early career in comics is illustrated onscreen by selections from two of his autobiographical graphic novels, To the Heart of the Storm (1991) and The Dreamer (1986), in which Will, his parents, and other real life figures appear in thinly fictionalized form. I’ve lectured on both books at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), so it was like seeing old friends appear on the big screen. For example, Eisner, on the soundtrack, recounts the tale of how bullies taunted his brother for his Jewish-sounding first name, and how Eisner slugged one of them only to be beaten up. Meanwhile, the screen shows a succession of images from Eisner’s fictionalized depiction of the incident in To the Heart of the Storm. When Eisner, on camera, delivers the punch line, telling his brother, “From now on your name is Pete,” not only does he laugh himself, but so did the audience. He had already won them over, this early in the film.

The Cookes have good eyes for selecting artwork. Eisner’s characters can sometimes seem over the top in their broad, emotional gestures and expressions, but throughout the film the Cookes chose more subtly effectve work which can stand being blown up to the size of a movie screen. At one point they even employ some animation to a Dreamer sequence, which works well.

The documentary simply and accurately describes the arc of Eisner’s career, so that even filmgoers who are unfamiliar with comics history should be able not only to follow his life story but to understand the significance of his innovations in the medium.

But a movie like this should ideally work on two levels: stating the basics for newcomers, while providing illuminating nuggets of information and insight for people like myself who are already familiar with Eisner’s work and career. This documentary succeeds on both levels.

For example, it was interesting to me to hear Eisner say that he considered going into the theater as a career, until his mother stopped him. People compare the “cinematic” style of The Spirit to film noir, but what about examining its theatricality, through the lighting, the staging, and the “performances” of its cast of characters? When Eisner talks about the artists who influenced him, he names illustrators Dean Cornwall and J. C. Leyendecker (see “Comics in Context” #132). This is followed by a segment that follows Eisner in the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton in 1997, before it closed, in which he points to an original Krazy Kat by George Herriman, declaring that the strip was “influential on me.” I wonder how, or was it simply the fact that Herriman constantly experimented with the conventions of the artform? Among other strips he singles out are Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid; the early, now nearly forgotten adventure strip, Lyman Young’s Tim Tyler’s Luck; Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, and E. C. Segar’s Popeye. (Did Commissioner Dolan get his enormous chin from Popeye?)

Joe Kubert then appears to assert that Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant) were “saints in our business” who were “admired by every guy in comics.” That sets me wondering how many contemporary comic book artists know their work at all.

The movie then shifts back to Eisner, who declares Caniff to have been a “tremendous influence” on him, with his “ability to stage his stories so you could follow it.” (Note that “stage” is a theatrical term.) Eisner praises Caniff’s “high degree of drama” and how Caniff utilized “shadows [to] increase a sense of threat.” The “film noir“ look of The Spirit would thus actually be Eisner’s evolution of Caniff’s use of chiaroscuro. Later on in the film, Eisner is quoted as saying that his goal with The Spirit was to be “as good as Caniff.”

A little later Denis Kitchen incisively exposes the hypocrisy of newspaper people who looked down on comics. He points out that the Sunday newspapers were actually wrapped in the comics section. This is true: I remember this from my childhood. When my family and I left church on Sunday morning, we’d pick up the Sunday newspaper from a dealer on the sidewalk outside, and each one on sale had the comics section on the outside. When you looked at the Sunday Boston Herald Traveler, the first thing you saw was not the headlines, but Peanuts. “Comics sold the papers,” Kitchen triumphantly declares. Now those were the days, and a testament to the powerful role that newspaper comics then played in American popular culture.

Yes, I was having a good time watching this film, and to think that I was there, and the allegedly omnipresent chronicler of comics culture, the Beat, was not! Wait, what’s this? It was a clip onscreen from the 2004 San Diego Con, with Eisner recounting a story from his early days in comics. And there, to his right, is the Beat, gazing worshipfully at the Great Man, with her name clearly visible on a placard in front. She’s not at the movie; she’s IN the movie! How does she do it?

Within the documentary there are sequences that might be considered sidebars: short investigations of subjects relating to Eisner’s career. Art Spiegelman introduces the topic of the important role of Jewish creators in the early comic book industry (a subject on which Danny Fingeroth is even now writing a book). Kubert points out that comic books were considered a “gutter profession” in the 1930s and 1940s; today’s graphic novel enthusiasts may find that hard to believe. Chabon quotes Eisner saying that Jews would “gravitate” to comics, because they could get work there. (The implication is that bigotry barred them from other professions.) Feiffer comments that the comic book heroes these Jewish creators concocted had WASPy names: they “assimilated themselves on the comics page.” Gerard Jones widens the scope of the topic, observing that Jewish creators played important roles in movies and popular songs, as well as comics, in this period: that they contributed to American pop culture as a whole.

A little while later, Jones notes that many of the early creators in comic books “were just storytellers,” who were not adept in business, and were exploited by the publishers. In contrast, Eisner proved to be a master of both fields. Onscreen, Spiegelman phrases it cleverly: Eisner, he says, made a “great cocktail” out of his parents’ disparate ambitions: his father’s dream to be an artist, and his mother’s emphasis on making money.

Once the documentary gets to The Spirit, another sidebar emerges: Ebony, the Spirit’s African-American sidekick, who was drawn and dialogued in a stereotypically caricatured manner. The movie goes to considerable lengths to put this character in the context of the times. We are shown onscreen that Eisner’s hero Caniff also used racial caricatures. exemplified by Connie, the Chinese sidekick in Terry and the Pirates. The movie includes an excerpt from the truly dreadful movie Check and Double Check (1930), featuring the popular radio characters Amos and Andy, played in blackface by their white creators. Eisner explains that the “whole culture accepted Amos and Andy” back in the 1940s and that it “never occurred to me I was violating black sensibilities.” And you should be able to see here what relevance this passage of the film has on the controversy over the Mary Jane statuette. Here is an example of the sort of unconscious prejudice that I mentioned earlier.

The film returns to the subject of Ebony a little later, when it gets to the point that Feiffer began working with Eisner. Spiegelman comments that Ebony made Feiffer “irritable.” Feiffer explains that he was of a “different generation” than Eisner and was “more interested in civil rights” and more liberal politically than Eisner. Acknowledging that he “had great affection for Will,” Feiffer does not condemn Eisner’s use of Ebony. Feiffer says he didn’t think the treatment of Ebony was “racist”; he thought the treatment of Ebony was “dumb.”

Maybe that’s the lesson we should apply to the MJ statuette and the Heroes for Hire cover: their creators weren’t necessarily being consciously sexist, they were just being too “dumb” to understand the implications of their work.

Come back next week for the rest of my review of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist and my report on my adventures at another Tribeca Film Festival event: the American premiere of Spider-Man 3.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
Heidi MacDonald, the Beat herself, has been writing a thoughtful series of essays on the Mary Jane and Heroes for Hire controversies and the larger subject of sexism in comics. You can find them over at the following addresses:
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/17/night-of-the-feminazis-pt-1/
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/18/but-the-little-girls-understand/#comments
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/21/2563/#comments
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/22/and-the-tits-just-keep-coming/

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

A little over four hours before I began writing this week’s column on Thursday afternoon, May 18, I was on television. Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call from a member of the staff at MSNBC asking if I would we willing to be interviewed about the notorious new Comiquette statue of Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man’s leading lady. So, early this afternoon I was picked up by a car service that MSNBC sent, and taken to a midtown Manhattan studio.

This is a different sort of experience than you might expect. MSNBC is actually located in Secaucus, New Jersey. A young woman ushered me into a tiny room where I sat on a chair in front of a background photo of New York City. An earpiece was affixed to my right ear, so I could hear both the live MSNBC news telecast and the producers, who were presumably out in Secaucus. A woman came in and quickly applied makeup, mostly under my eyes. (I was impressed, since I didn’t get any makeup when I was interviewed by CBS! See “Comics in Context” #73.) I was facing a small TV monitor, and was asked if I wanted in turned on, so I could see Alex, the anchorwoman who would be interviewing me (whom you can see here). But I decided against it, which was probably a good choice, since I was not supposed to look at the monitor, but into the camera. There was no cameraman in the room, but I knew that the red light meant that it was on.

This wasn’t the first time I had been gone to a studio to be interviewed by remote control. I once spent an hour in a soundproof room in Manhattan being interviewed over a headset by a man from the BBC who was across the ocean in Britain. At least time I got to see several real people, the helpful young women who got me seated, applied my makeup and brought me a soft drink!

Readers of this column may be amazed that I can speak about comics in sound bites when it is required of me. Actually, I’m rather surprised by this myself.

In case you haven’t seen this statuette of Mary Jane, take a look on this website, and you’ll better understand why it raised such controversy (such as here). It was produced by Sideshow Collectibles, whose products I generally admire, on license from Marvel, and designed by comics artist Adam Hughes, who is well known in comics circles for his skill at portraying beautiful women.

Since the panel in which she was introduced over forty (!) years ago, Mary Jane has long been depicted in the comics as a sexy knockout. BUt this maquette pushes the sexuality just far enough to fall over the line separating tastefulness from tawdriness. She’s bent over, wearing a low cut top revealing a veritable canyon of cleavage. Her jeans ride so low that her thong underwear is visible, and there’s a hole in the seat of her jeans, as well. Her smile can be interpreted as a come hither look. The overall effect is to create the appearance of sexual submissiveness. She’s shown washing Peter Parker’s Spider-Man costume, and I can see that Hughes and Sideshow might have considered this a clever gag. I can also see the argument that the maquette implies that Mary Jane’s proper place is washing her husband’s dirty laundry, whereas in both the comics and the movies MJ has always been independent, pursuing a career in modeling and acting.

My interviewer observed that Marvel claims that the MJ maquette is being sold only to adult collectors, and not to children. The price alone demonstrates that: Sideshow is charging $124.99 each, and the entire limited edition of nine hundred has already sold out, and it hasn’t even started shipping yet. I pointed out that the comics market has primarily consisted of adults for quite some time now.

At the end of my segment, the interviewer asserted that comics sales were in decline, and asked me if I thought that Marvel had “sexed up” Mary Jane in order to push the sales up. I detected an edge in her voice when she asked me this, which I interpreted as anger at Marvel for exploiting the character this way for profit. I responded that I didn’t think that the MJ maquette would have any effect on the comics sales, and that this statuette would primarily be sold to people who had already been reading Spider-Man comics for twenty years. (I could have said “horny aging fanboys,” but I restrained myself.) I sensed that my interviewer may have been disappointed in this answer.

Earlier, she had asked me whether I thought that Marvel had anticipated the adverse reaction the maquette has received. I replied that I thought that Marvel would have been surprised. I didn’t have the time or opportunity to go into this, but comics aficionados should realize that this Mary Jane statuette is not all that different from business as usual in the male-dominated world of superhero comics. Collectors have long prized what they euphemistically call “Good Girl Art” in the comics. Female outfits bordering on the lurid go back as far as Phantom Lady’s costume back in the Golden Age of the 1940s. Wikipedia correctly defines the “Good Girl Art” of the 1940s and 1950s as “a style of comic art depicting voluptuous female characters in provocative situations and pin-up poses that contributed to widespread criticism of the medium’s effect on children” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Lady). In the 1980s and 1990s, as Wikipedia chronicles, there was the trend in comics featuring “Bad Girl Art,” whose heroines, such as Lady Death and Witchblade, wore even less than their “Good Girl Art” predecessors. This Wikipedia entry pretentiously likens “the original “˜Image Comics’ house style” to Mannerism, a 16th century style of painting that featured elongated anatomy. I find little or no aesthetic appeal in the distorted human figures perpetrated by so many artists working in “The original “˜Image Comics’ house style.” In particular, the basketball-sized breasts with which so many male comics artists have been endowing women since the late 1980s have more to do with immature male fantasies than with serious portraiture.

In other words, the Mary Jane maquette is arguably rather tame in comparison with many lurid illustrations of women in comics history. So why did this statuette inspire such a furor?

I suggested in the MSNBC interview that one reason is that comics in the early 21st century attract a larger female readership than they had even ten years ago. I can tell just by looking at the audience at an event at the Museum of Comic or Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), or at its roster of volunteers, or scanning the crowd at the New York and San Diego Comic-Cons. It’s the growth of alternative comics and graphic novels and the manga explosion that has brought many of them in. Of course many of them will perceive and object to the sexist implications of that MJ maquette.

Moreover, this is the age of the Internet, and, as I’ve said before, you never know who or how many people may read what you post there. I was a little surprised that some of the people at MSNBC I spoke with had read some of the same comments about the MJ statue on the Net that I had.

And here we come to another factor behind the furor: the mainstream media is paying attention. Ten years ago MSNBC probably wouldn’t have done a story like this, and most of the American public probably wouldn’t have recognized the name “Mary Jane Watson” (and this, despite her presence in the Spider-Man newspaper strip). But the mainstream media’s interest in comics has rapidly grown, even in the short time since I began writing this column in 2004, so much so that it is no longer much of a surprise to see, say, the profile of cartoonist Tony Millionaire in the Arts and Leisure section of last Sunday’s New York Times (May 13, 2007).

And then there are the enormously popular Spider-Man movies. Whatever you may think of the 1960s Batman TV show, one thing that it accomplished was to familiarize the American public with so many of the primary elements of the Batman mythos: Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Batcave, the Batmobile, the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, the Catwoman. Before his movies, the American public beyond comic book fans had heard of Spider-Man, but now they know about Aunt May, the Green Goblin, J. Jonah Jameson, and yes, about Mary Jane Watson. By now, after three movies, she had become an iconic figure to the worldwide moviegoing public. Consider how importance the romance between Peter Parker and Mary Jane is in the three movies, and how prominently she is featured in much of the movie advertising (and, for example, the cover of the Spider-Man 2 DVD).

In interviewing me, the MSNBC anchorwoman referred to Mary Jane as the “girl next door” that Marvel had “sexed up” in the maquette. The interviewer noted that Mary Jane had been portrayed as a character with strong sex appeal since her debut in the comics, and asked if I thought the statue updated that quality for our time. I replied that I thought the statue went beyond that, crossing the line of taste (for the reasons I’ve noted above).

But her phrase “girl next door” is significant. John Romita, Sr., who first drew Mary Jane’s face (in Amazing Spider-Man #42, November, 1966–Steve Ditko had earlier given readers a look at her figure) has stated on many occasions that he was inspired by the young Ann-Margret in drawing her. Watch the movies Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and Viva Las Vegas (1964) and you’ll see what he must have been aiming for: a young woman who can be vividly, openly sexy without coming off as tacky or promiscuous. Stan Lee gave her an enchanting, captivating party girl persona, and it was later writers who drew out the more serious side of her personality. Just last week former Spider-Man editor Jim Salicrup and I were discussing Gerry Conway’s underrated graphic novel Spider-Man: Parallel Lives (1989), in which he persuasively demonstrated that MJ’s sexily extroverted public persona was a facade for her serious side, her means of escaping the emotional pain of her family life, just as Peter Parker escaped his own unhappiness through the assumed identity of the wisecracking Spider-Man.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies not only dispense with Spider-Man’s ability as a comedian, but also with Mary Jane as life of the party, thus eliminating important parts of their characterizations from the comics. I will return to this subject when I review Spider-Man 3 in the near future. I feel that I’m only seeing half of Mary Jane–that serious side, capable of sorrow–when I see her in the movies. Referring to Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Mary Jane in his review of Spider-Man 3 (May 4, 2007), New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “this wispy, sad-eyed beauty turns into Melancholy Girl, able to melt hearts in a single glance.”

In thus simplifying Mary Jane’s personality for the movies, Raimi has turned her into a more conventional leading lady, but one which he and Dunst make affectingly real. She is the “girl next door,” both literally and figuratively. I see that Wikipedia also has an entry on this phrase, stating that “The prototype of the girl next door is often invoked in American contexts to indicate wholesome, unassuming, or “average” femininity. . . .To fall in love with the “girl next door” is an archetype of romantic fiction and a key plot element. . . .She is the sweet girl he [the male protagonist] sees every day, a really great friend, or the perfect girl to bring home to his parents. She is often a virgin.” The entry even lists Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane as its first example of this archetype. (In Stan Lee’s 1960s Spider-Man stories, it was Gwen Stacy who conformed to the “girl next door” image, not Mary Jane.)

At this point much more of the public at large, not just in America but around the world, knows Raimi and Dunst’s version of Mary Jane, rather than Lee and Romita’s from the 1960s. Doubtlessly many moviegoers, male and female, project their idealized image of what a heroine should be onto the films’ Mary Jane. So it’s no wonder that the folks at MSNBC felt a sharp disconnect between their image of MJ from the movies and the fanboy fantasy version presented by the Sideshow statuette. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, the “girl next door” is “contrasted with other stereotypes such as tomboy, valley girl, and slut.”

Marvel contends that the MJ maquette is intended only for adult collectors, and children won’t even see it. Ah, but this is the age of the Internet, and not only will children find a picture of the statue, but so did MSNBC and other members of the news media. With Spider-Man 3 so much in the news lately, the mainstream media would be more on the lookout for news like this than they might be normally.

And that makes me wonder what might have happened if the notorious Spider-Man: The Other comics saga, in which Spidey’s eye is gouged out (and subsequently grows back), had seen print closer to the release of one of the Spider-Man movies (see “Comics in Context” #118). What would the mainstream media have thought of this, had it come to their attention? Or what about the more recent Spider-Man: Reign miniseries, which my colleague Fred Hembeck found particularly appalling? In this tale of an alternate future, Mary Jane has died of cancer, her body grotesquely ravaged, induced by Peter Parker’s radioactive semen!

I believe that both storylines grossly violate the spirit of the Lee/Ditko/Romita Spider-Man concept, but within the subculture of the comic book audience, these storylines were commercial successes. But just how could Marvel have explained them to the mainstream news media, which think of Spider-Man in terms of Stan’s own stories and the Raimi movies? I suspect that such a media spotlight would expose the way that the Grim and Gritty movement has so severely distorted the superhero genre over the last two decades.

Now we should be wondering what is the next time bomb that will go off in comics about superheroes that the mainstream media know about?

How about this: writer Frank Miller and artist Jim Lee’s All Star Batman and Robin #5, which just hit the comic book shops? It seems like such a long time since I last wrote about this series, way back in “Comics in Context” #119 (which I had titled “Bats and Spats,” since it also covered Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, but IGN changed it), and indeed, it’s been over a year (!) since the last issue.

But the issue 5 starts off with a bang, as a severely pissed off Wonder Woman marches down a Metropolis street, mentally fulminating that “It stinks of men,” and she means literally, and ordering a harmless-looking male passerby, “Out of my way, sperm bank.” So, you know that meretricious stereotype about man-hating feminists? This first page seems to agree with it.

It gets worse. Several pages later, Wonder Woman is castigating the Man of Steel: “You call yourself a Superman? Kow-towing to these ants? Dropping to your knees before these earthbound, ephemeral humans?”

Now Miller has Superman remind us that this is a Wonder Woman who has newly arrived in “man’s world” from the Amazons’ island: “Settle down, Diana. You’re new to this world.” The All Star Batman series is set in the past, back when Batman first recruited Dick Grayson to be the original Robin.

But many of you will recall Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again (see “Comics in Context” #30, 31, 34), set in the future, in which Superman declares, “Ma. Pa. You were wrong. . . . I am not one of them. I am not human.” He continues, “And I am no man’s servant. I am no man’s slave. I will not be ruled by the laws of men.” We last see Superman in Dark Knight Strikes Again hovering above the Earth with Lara, his daughter by Wonder Woman, as he ominously asks, “What exactly shall we do with our planet, Lara?” In Miller’s continuity, the Superman of All Star Batman will end up agreeing with Wonder Woman: he will become Miller’s superpowered version of Friedrich Nietzche’s ubermensch, unrestrained by conventional human morality.

Continuing her harangue in All Star Batman and Robin #5, Wonder Woman tells Superman that the “rules” he follows instruct him to “mince about.” Oh, look, she’s invoking an insulting gay stereotype, just like Leonidas in Miller’s 300 dismissing the Athenians as “boy-lovers” (see “Comics in Context” #175).

Wonder Woman also tells Superman he will “prostrate yourself before whatever vermin their stupid elections prop up as the “˜authorities.'” So Wonder Woman is contemptuous of democracy and, by extension, of the law. But disdain for the law doesn’t seem to be a sin in All Star Batman. A page before, Green Lantern was arguing that the Batman isn’t all that bad: “He’s got no respect for the law. And, yeah, maybe he’s a little unhinged. But that’s no reason to run off half-cocked” after him. What harm could there be in a somewhat insane vigilante defying the law?

Wonder Woman has a different approach to the matter of Batman: “We kill him, we chop off his head and plant it on a stake and present it to your “˜authorities’ as their first gift from the Justice League.” You see, as far as Wonder Woman is concerned, the Justice League shouldn’t serve humanity, but as their superiors, may deign to present them with gifts. (Hey, it’s Wonder Woman as Salome!)

I concede that there has always been a seeming contradiction in the Wonder Woman concept: she is the princess of a warrior race, and she engages in physical combat against evildoers, and yet she has traditionally been depicted as the enemy of warmongers and an advocate of peace. Yet this latter side of Wonder Woman is essential to the character. Rather than despising men, Wonder Woman traditionally journeyed to “man’s world” because she loved the series’ original leading man, Steve Trevor. The bloodthirsty Wonder Woman whom Jim Lee draws in this issue of All Star Batman and Robin may look like Wonder Woman, but I doubt that her creator William Moulton Marston would recognize her from the script.

Do you recall that notorious sequence in Civil War: Frontline #11 in which a reporter named Sally Floyd tells off Captain America for defending the cause of individual freedom in Marvel’s Civil War, and he just sits there and takes it, rather than acting in character and mounting a stirring defense of freedom (see “Comics in Context” #168)? That suggests that the writer was on Sally’s side. Similarly here in All Star Batman, though Superman roars his outrage at Wonder Woman, Miller does not allow him to make a reasoned defense of his position. Indeed, Superman’s declaration that “This is my world. These are my people. These are my rules.” may suggest that he is already subconsciously embracing the ubermensch outlook of superiority to humanity. Superman also thunders that if “you commit murder on my land,” perhaps implying that Earth is his personal possession, “you’ll pay for it with your own precious Amazon blood.” Remember Superman’s traditional oath against killing? He certainly doesn’t remember it here.

Turn to the next page, and you’ll see that all this rage and bloodthirstiness on Superman and Wonder Woman’s parts covers over their intense sexual passion for each other, which suddenly bursts forth. (Lois who?) When George Lucas had Han Solo and Princess Leia continually quarreling, oblivious to their love for each other, I suspect he intended the viewers to think they were behaving immaturely. On the other hand, in this scene between Superman and Wonder Woman, we can see the shadows of two other characters Miller portrayed as both antagonists and lovers, Daredevil and Elektra.

As for Wonder Woman’s intention of beheading Batman, who is it that still beheads their alleged enemies in real life here in the early 21st century? Isn’t it some of the so-called “Islamo-fascists”? Wonder Woman advocates decapitation, rants against democracy, and insists that Superman act like as an ubermensch, above human law. MIller’s Wonder Woman is heading down a dangerous path, and, in Dark Knight Strikes Again, takes Superman with her. Dr. Marston created Wonder Woman to be the adversary of Nazism, not as a sympathizer.

Then Batman himself, or “the goddamn Batman,” as he calls himself yet again, shows up in this fifth issue, laughing to frighten criminals, as if he were Steve Ditko’s Creeper. There’s a reason why, even back in the 1940s when Dick Sprang regularly drew a happily grinning Batman, that he didn’t launch into maniacal jags of laughter. That’s what his enemy and opposite, the Joker does.

And the Joker has the sadistic sort of personality that gets off on inflicting harm on people. Well, the All Star version of Batman not only has the Joker’s laugh, but he has a streak of sadism, too. Miller’s original The Dark Knight Returns had already suggested that Batman takes pleasure in hurting criminals, but in All Star Miller makes this much more explicit and ups the ante considerably.

Batman comes across two man who are apparently about to rape, mutilate, and possibly kill a woman. Batman injures one assailant’s arm so badly he can no longer feel his hand. Then Batman grimly informs him, “It’s called a compound fracture, rapist. It’ll never heal. Not right it won’t. You’ll remember me every time the air goes wet and cold. Arthritis, punk. It’ll hurt like hell.” Batman seems to take satisfaction in this.

Next Batman turns his attention back to the other assailant, striking him seven times, each with a “Krunch” sound that suggests shattering bones. The woman watches, and then breaks into a smile, as if she is sexually turned on by the sight of such brutality. It wasn’t many pages before that the thought of violence impelled Superman and Wonder Woman into each other’s arms. There’s a pattern here. The first assailant, whose injured arm is bent backwards (!), asks the woman he had tried to victimize for help. She does something we can’t quite see to him with her foot, probably kicking him in the balls. (It’s the return of the genital injury motif from Sin City!) “Good girl,” Batman tells this adult woman, simultaneously commending her initiation into sadism and engaging in sexist condescension.

Batman also instructs her not to call an ambulance for these guys. “These creeps will survive,” he tells her, “but I want them to suffer pain that’ll last a lifetime.” You see, even if these guys reform, they’ll still be in pain for the rest of their lives. “I love you,” responds the woman, enthralled.

By coincidence, on the same day that I picked up All Star Batman and Robin #5 at my favorite Manhattan comics shop, Cosmic Comics at 10 East 23rd Street, I also purchased Astro City: The Dark Age, Book Two #3, by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson. Busiek is one of the principal writers of what he calls the “reconstructionist” school in superhero comics, and which I have dubbed the “Neo-Silver” movement. The Dark Age is Busiek’s critique of the comics of the 1970s and the origins of the “Grim and Gritty” aesthetic that ate away at the idealism of the comics of the Silver Age of the 1960s.

It makes Kurt uncomfortable when I point out similarities between his Astro City characters and other established superheroes, but they are inevitable, since he is devising his own variations on the character archetypes of the superhero genre.

In this latest issue Busiek includes a team of costumed urban vigilantes, Street Angel and the female Black Velvet, who remind me in part (but only in part, Kurt), of Daredevil and Elektra. Black Velvet turns out to be a killer, and Street Angel intends to turn her into the police. She then asks him how the two of them are different.

“I don’t kill,” he replies.

“Oh?” she asks. “How many have you left lying in alleyways these past two years, skull fractured, lung punctured? How many internal injuries? Did they all get medical attention? Did they all live? Did they?“

Street Angel is horrified by this, having never considered it before. His first reaction is to think that somehow she corrupted him, but Street Angel pointedly asks, “Did you ever think maybe–you just liked it?” And I thought of that scene with Batman and the would-be rapists.

Batman’s brutality fits into an aspect of the zeitgeist of early 21st century America: the concept that any cruelty directed against the Bad Guys is justified. In popular culture that leads to the frequent use of torture by the supposed Good Guys in the television series 24: usually they don’t have any moral qualms or hesitation about it. In real life, of course, this mindset led to the Abu Ghraib scandals.

Am I wrong in sensing that the majority of American public opinion is against the use of torture? As entertaining as I have found 24 in the past (This season it’s clearly running out of steam!) , I wonder if the national sensibility is shifting, whether the time will come that the series is regarded as something of a dated embarrassment, specifically because it condones torture.

Towards the end of the issue there is a vignette in which MIller and Lee show a bare-chested, surprisingly muscular Alfred the butler working out. (Is no one in contemporary superhero comics allowed to have an average build?) Alfred describes how, after she and her husband were fatally shot by the mugger, the last thing that Martha Wayne saw before she died was the look in her young son Bruce’s eyes: she metaphorically “saw him become a demon.”

Unless Miller means for us to think that Alfred witnessed this double murder (and if he did, why wasn’t he shot, too?), then Alfred must be imagining what happened. It seems as if Mrs. Wayne’s murder was horrifying enough without her witnessing her formerly innocent son’s dreadful psychological transformation, as well.

On balance, though, I approve of this reminiscence, and I wonder if Miller intended it as a response to the movie Batman Begins (see “Comics in Context” #89). In that film Bruce Wayne grows up lacking any vocation beyond shooting his parents’ killer, Joe Chill; it is Bruce’s friend Rachel, and later Henri Ducard, who direct his energies into becoming a crimefighter. However, I think that the idea that Bruce Wayne, from childhood on, was determined to avenge his parents’ death by warring on all criminals, is an important component of the Batman myth. Here Miller captures that transformation of innocent child to dedicated avenger in words, just as Alex Ross did it in a single picture in JLA: Secret Origins (see “Comics in Context” #29).

Miller has Alfred worry that Bruce Wayne suffers from “hubris” and may have gone “mad.” Readers may wonder if Miller intends us to regard Batman as going overboard, and if Miller intends that Batman will moderate his behavior over the course of the All Star series. Maybe. But is the All Star Batman really that different from the Batman of Miller’s Dark Knight books? The All Star version seems more explicit about his attitude towards violence against criminals. On the other hand, the Dark Knight Batman seems more caring towards his own new Robin, Carrie Kelly. We shall see.

In this All Star issue Alfred regards young Dick Grayson as an “innocent young boy” and thinks, “I pray this child will survive this,” namely his tutelage by Batman. But the issue concludes with Grayson picking up a broadaxe and saying, “Cool.” Just how innocent is he? And we know from The Dark Knight Strikes Again that he will end up as a serial killer.

All Star Batman and Robin is not part of DC’s canonical mainstream continuity. Miller has stated that he considers it to be part of an alternative continuity that leads to his two Dark Knight series. (It seems that Miller’s Batman: Year One belongs to both continuities.) Still, All Star Batman and Robin is putting forth rather disturbing portrayals of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. The mainstream media probably will not take any notice.

But now I’m worried about what will happen when Miller finishes his Holy Terror, Batman series, pitting his version of Batman against Al Qaeda. This is the kind of story hook that will guarantee attention from the mainstream media. What will the mainstream media–and the general public–think? There have already been reviews of the 300 movie that accuse it of homophobia and even fascist tendencies (here, for example).

I’m not saying I fear there’ll be censorship or bookburnings of comics, as in the 1950s: I think the mainstream media have by now gotten the message that comic books now have an adult audience.

The lesson of the brouhaha or the Mary Jane figurine is that comics is no longer a niche artform, the interest of a small subculture, off the radar screen of mainstream culture. The press, the literary world, academia, and the general public are all paying much more attention to comics now. Through the reports on the Mary Jane maquette, the news media exposed a sexism which much of the comics industry and readership tolerated, if they were even aware of it. The bloggers’ panel at the New York Comic-Con (see “Comics in Context” #167) pointed out that comics industry representatives now have to be more careful in their public statements, because the mainstream press may pick them up. (This is one reason why I am so appalled by the nonsensical statements made by certain comics industry executives.)

The bright spotlight of the mainstream media will bring flaws to light that may have remained concealed in the darkness of comics’ niche subculture. It’s like your mom telling you to wear clean underwear when you go out: you never know what will happen, and what may be revealed.

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–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson