Wednesday’s J*ff G*ldst*in hilarity dissolved into a nerdfest (probably won’t be the last time, as long as I’m around) about comics; specifically Y: The Last Man. This post scores low on the timeliness scale; the series started, and established most of its themes, in 2002, but it’s winding down now and if I don’t hurry and write the post I’ve been kicking around, even fewer people will care than are going to care now (at least until someone exercises their movie option).
Disclaimers: 1) Spoilers will, by necessity, abound; 2) I am aware that other comic book fanpeople have already written about this series long ago, and I haven’t read most of those. I would imagine others will have touched on many of the themes I’m going to bring up, but we’ll survive; 3) Yes, it is worth spending this much time on a comic book, in certain cases, so please don’t ask incredulously.
Y is Yorick, a recent college graduate who, in accordance with the Little Miss Sunshine Rule of Characterization, has a Quirk which will Come In Handy Later. He’s a street magician, you see, and he has a sidekick to boot, a Capuchin Monkey named Ampersand. He’s taken on this little “shit-flinging bastard” (that may not be a quote, but it’s close enough) to prove to the world that he’s useful, like his friends, who are all apparently on post-graduation quests; his girlfriend is in Australia on an archaeological dig of some sort while he stays at home practicing his strait-jacket trick, failing to get jobs, and waxing philosophical on the phone to his girlfriend, to whom he is about to propose.
But he never gets the chance, because at that moment every male mammal on earth drops dead.
If it weren’t the whole point of the story, it’d be the most grandiose deus ex machina moment in the history of fiction.
Two male mammals do survive, though, and it’d be a much more unorthodox story than it is if they weren’t Yorick and Ampersand. The first issue, which essentially tells the story of the half-hour leading up to the moment of the ‘gendercide’ (a slang world in the Y universe, not my coining - unlike the title, which is all mine, baby), ends as Y, essentially a shut-in in his darkened apartment, hears a bang outside his apartment. This, we have already seen, is a female police officer shooting herself upon discovering that “It’s the men. All of the men are dead.”
But this reaction - “what will I do without men” - is an exception, not the rule. In fact, in issue #1 we meet several strong women, most of whom are or will be in some position of power or focus in Yorick’s life. Thus, early on in the story it is hinted that, despite the title, Yorick is not the protagonist of the story. He is certainly a main character, and the engine that drives the story, but he is not the “hero”, the engine that drives his own destiny. He’s a macguffin with character development. He’s essentially the Maltese Falcon and Brigid O’Shaughnessy wrapped into one, with less guile.
By my count, over the first 45 issues of the story (I’m a little bit behind), at least ten groups or individuals pursue or protect Yorick for their own purposes, not all (or even most, really) of which are to ensure the survival of the human race. (Many women are certain that bioengineers will soon discover the secret of asexual reproduction; one of the interesting subplots is the fact that one of them may have already been working on it and is convinced that she thereby caused the plague to begin with). The “Last Man on Earth” quickly becomes a legend, a fable pursued by tabloid reporters and secret societies, while the last man on earth is escorted from one end of the country to another under the watchful eye of a female secret agent.
In fact, in literary terms, Yorick actually occupies the role of the “woman” - too important to be risked, too weak to fight back in most cases, reduced to being the “distraction” whenever things get a little heated. Early on, Yorick’s mother, a congressperson, locks him in a bomb shelter in the basement of the White House (after first kicking his ass when he surprises her from behind) so that she can deal with the wives of the Republican congressional delegation who want to be given their husbands’ seats. The confrontation gets heated, and shots are exchanged. (After blood is spilled, one of the wives laments, “I…I’m not supposed to be here. I just wanted to get some photos out of Kurt’s office. Photos of the boys and…Jesus, I write cookbooks…”)
Soon the situation is somewhat diffused by the arrival of the Secretary of Agriculture-cum-President, and a Constitutional crisis ensues. The end comes only when Yorick, who has escaped the basement vault, intervenes and begins to lecture the women - too shocked by his continued existence to interrupt - on the once and future greatness of the United States. A very “man sets silly women straight” moment, right? Only up to the point when the President says, “That’s enough, young man. These women have suffered more than you can imagine. They don’t deserve to be lectured to by a self-righteous child.”
Far from “setting the women straight”, Yorick has just played peacemaker to warring factions by an appeal to emotion, a role usually filled by Natalie Wood or Kate Vernon. And the women involved in the shootout, letting rage and rashness get the better of them, are cast in a negative light…because they’re acting “like” men.
The first group to make a concerted effort to kill Yorick are the Amazons, a group of so-called radical feminists who are rumored to be roving packs of lesbians, but as a minor character informs Yorick “Nah, they’re not gay. They’re insane. Someone told me that they all burn one of their own boobs off…Supposedly that’s what the real Amazons did. Makes it easier to shoot an arrow or something.”
The moment of the Amazons’ introduction, issue #4, was the moment that I started to get nervous about the direction the series was taking. Radical, genocidal feminists roving the post-apocalyptic world on motorcycles carrying bows and arrows? Mad Max as written by an MRA.
But it’s not long before the attention-paying reader begins to get that the Amazons are not meant to represent the pinnacle of feminism. For one thing, they’re led by a Svengali-type who orders executions while spouting egalitarianism; for another thing, the Amazon assigned to pursue Yorick is, in one of those coincidences so outrageous that we can’t possibly be upset by the contrivance, Yorick’s sister, Hero. She was a paramedic whose pre-plague life consisted of angering her future sisters by sleeping with one handsome firefighter after another; the implied criticism more about the perception that she’s looking for validation rather than that she’s, in the words of her female colleague, a “whorebag.”
It’s a quick scene, but one that sets up a later flashback, in which it is made clear that Hero’s joining of the Amazons has a lot to do with her seeing death of her latest boyfriend (at the hands of the plague) as another in a long line of male abandonment, and little to nothing to do with a history of feminist thought on her part. Even this motivation would be problematic, an anti-feminist stereotype, if the entire world of Y weren’t filled with contrasting strong women characters; even Hero herself later repents of her bloodlust and becomes a fully functional person. She moves past anger and tribalism, where the Amazons are trapped, and into self-determination, where the true post-plague feminism resides.
And this, really, is the strength of Brian K. Vaughn’s plotting: While some characters are necessarily shallow and underdeveloped (this is a comic book, after all), Vaughn takes a cliched world and populates it with real people and, even more importantly, isn’t afraid to create unsympathetic female characters. By drawing back the curtain on the motivations of hero and villain alike, he explodes the literary convention of woman as cliche.
At least, woman as worn-out cliche; 355, the secret agent who is charged with saving Yorick’s life, is the biggest candidate for actual hero of the story, and is not unlike an adventure-novel protagonist. She’s quick, tough, resourceful, good with a gun and a steel baton, has a heart of gold, and saves Yorick from any number of sticky situations. She even, at one point, gets the girl*.
The difference, of course, is that adventure-novel protagonists are usually named Dirk.
So no, Yorick is not an archetypal heroic male struggling against an incipient “matriarchy.” He’s, quite simply, the last man on earth. The world is going on around him. The women, faced with the loss of a disproportionate amount of infrastructure (gimme a P! gimme an A! gimme a T! gimme an R! gimme an I! gimme a…well, you get the idea) are figuring out how to rebuild. And, yes, it’s the self-actualized ones - the feminists - who are taking the lead.
And saving his ass.
——–
* As a straight male, I’m supremely unqualified to comment on the issue of lesbianism in this book, but I will comment briefly anyway and will be happy to stand corrected: It would be fatuous for Vaughn to avoid the topic altogether in a story about adults in a world with no men, and given that, he handles it realistically and without prurience. As with so many other potentially hot-button issues in this series by a male author, it’s remarkable in its unremarkability. | Back
52 Responses to “The Politics of the Acockalypse”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
I’m surprised, to tell you the truth. The last commentary I read on Y from someone with any politics at all consisted of undiluted kvetching about the Amazons, peppered with outrage that Brian K. Vaughn would imply that the world would turn into Mad Max if the men disappeared, since the women wouldn’t be able to build everything back up, ‘cause they’re only good for interior decorating.
I do enjoy the book, though the world-building seems pretty shake; we don’t have any good idea of what the political state of the world is, if people are dying in mass famines, if airplanes are running again, or anything like that. On the other hand, this keeps the perspective firmly local (despite the occasional “meanwhile, in Washington…” inserts), by letting us not know much more than Yorick himself does. I can’t imagine what Vaughn can pull out of his hat to conclude it, but I’ve been waiting for something epic since Sandman and Preacher both ended, and Y is fitting the bill quite nicely.
(And I’m only up to the eighth trade paperback (Kimono Dragons); I do hope folks here are either as cheap as me and haven’t been getting the individual issues, or would at least be polite enough not to spoiler me, or mark spoilers-up-to-such-and-such an issue.)
(Side note: the same author writes Ex Machina, about a superhero becoming mayor of New York in early 2002; book four, March to War, covering early 2003, just came out. Did anyone else get a giggle out of the Homeland Security flack assuring the mayor that if only he could have seen the same intelligence, he’d realize how deep the ties between Saddam and Osama were?)
The world-building seems pretty shaky, that should be. Gah.
While I’m here… Spoilers up to book 5.
Another recurring theme is women who’ve filled leadership roles, who, upon considering the last man on earth, rail against being relegated to supporting-character status in relation to the Last Man On Earth. Consider the actresses–the play they put on about the last man ends with him committing suicide to leave the world to the women. Or the pirate captain, who says (fetching my copy…)
Girl on Girl, pages 92 to 93.I adore this series, especially the last issue. Minor not-really spoiler–it dealt with prostitution and body ownership against a very poignant backdrop. Anyone who’s claimed that this is an anti-feminist series should read the last two pages. That should lay any doubts to rest. We also saw a very important plot twist that had nothing to do with main characters, something I just love. I’d been fairly certain that the real protagonist was [redacted for spoilers]
It’s interesting, Vaughn also just finished up Runaways which does a fair job of wrestling with teen sexuality and lgbt teens when it is not constrained by the cameo/crossover demands of it’s genre and the conservative bent of Marvel in this area. The DC/Vertigo imprint certainly gives writers more room to move than others.
I don’t know if it’s been linked here, but Karen Healey has some great guidelines about how to avoid common traps with female characters in comics spinning off of Bechdel’s law. Vaughn seems to be one of the better writers who gets this.
And offtopic: if we’re doing comics now, someone should plug Blankets. I don’t think it could be described as particularly feminist, but it’s what I hand people who don’t read comics to convince them they may be making a mistake. (I stopped liking Strangers in Paradise when the plot looped around for the third damned iteration of the same story with minor tweaks that we’d been seeing since the first two books.)
They’re wonderful books and well worth a read. I particularly enjoyed the fact that Yorick is consistently portrayed as kind of an ingénu and is forever having to have the way the world works explained to him by competent females.
Another point not touched on here is the complexity of the different female characters’ reactions to the disappearance of men. Some of them feel empowered: some just a sense of loss, and all for different reasons. It’s real in the sense that very little of it resorts to stereotype, and usually only then to puncture the stereotype.
Wow, I guess I’ll make an effort to read this sometime.
I always find this theme fascinating, though I have yet to read any of the more famous-in-feminist circles classics, like Herland which I think was written by Gilman, the woman whose first names elude me who wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Are people familiar with “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by “James Tiptree,” pseud for Alice Sheldon? (The identity of the author was still secret when the story came out in the mid-70s).
I shouldn’t even mention Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet though I just did.
More recently, there was a low-budget movie featuring the actress from Eating Raoul called The New Women, in which all the men in the world fall into deep sleep or comas or something. (Eventually most of them die of malnutrition/dehydration.) I gather that it is a kind of campy 1990s remake of a movie called just The Women made back in the late 1930s. I’d really like to see that one!
In The New Women the infrastructure is not kept up at all–the power goes out for instance, and never comes back on. (To be a little fair, everyone is comatose for a day or three before the women eventually wake up again. But the power is still on then…)
In the 1990s of course I wouldn’t expect that anywhere–plenty of tech-savvy women these days, even in fields like power engineering that are probably still bastions of sexism.
But in the 1930s I suppose this would have happened in the West. However, I’d expect that at least in the Soviet Union there would have been plenty of tech-trained women to keep the wheels turning, with some pretty exciting potential for plots of global scale.
Anyway, it is pretty interesting to contemplate what might happen in Iraq, for instance, if all the men in the world fell asleep, dropped dead, or vanished.
It is ironic that feminists have had enough success that reactionary Republicans now include plenty of women–even in 2002 there would have been at least one Bushite female cabinet secretary, and if it had happened last year of course Condi would be Preznit.
But now–HAH HAH! it would be Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats would control the Senate by a HUGE majority, so HAHA!
Great piece. You’ve said pretty much what I’d like to say if I were better at articulating artistic criticism. It’s not entirely unproblematic - no comic book treatment of the premise could be, obviously - but all things considered it’s really thoughtful an extremely well scripted.
This focus on the Amazons by critics is a bit bizarre - they really don’t occupy much of the overall story arc. **************SPOILER**********In the long run the Israeli commandos or the Japanese assassin and her employer are far more important and persistent adversaries************SPOILER ENDS************
Do what now?
hmm…i havent been keeping up on y: the last man (comic books are too damn expensive) but it never sat well with me when i heard people talk about how it was anti feminist. from what id read there were just too many different women characters all with there own very diffrent traits, emotions, and actions to really just focus on one type of woman in the book and have that be the example of how it was anti feminist. hah like being feminist means thinking that no woman anywhere, can be a crazy bitch. there are some in that story but theres many more that are sane, straight thinking, and…normal.
although stray bullets still gets my pick for best comic book ever (and also feminist! in its own way)
Clarification: The reason Yorick’s keeping the monkey is a way to make himself useful is that he’s training Ampersand to be a companion to quadriplegics.
I find it very amusing how Yorick is treated as a cipher by most of the women, projecting their own fantasies of The Man upon him. In this respect, also, he is playing the woman’s part.
I may have to pick up the trade papers of these books. You’ve made them fascinating, Auguste.
After reading this now, it dawns on me to wonder if Strazinski is ever going to going to pull out a decent female character in Surpreme Power/Squadron Surpreme . . Granted the whole group is fucked up, sans maybe Stanley, but the women are particularly screwed up it seems.
One thing that I wonder: I think we can all agree that it would be a horrifying, unimaginably tragic event if 50% of the population died, whether that 50% was a random selection of humans, or all came from one gender, age group, class, or whatever, but how would these specific mass die-offs differ from each other? How would a world without males differ from a world where 50% of people died randomly without regard to sex or any other factor differ from a world without females differ from a world without asians differ from a world where the bottom 50% of the income distribution all died off differ from a world where anyone college-educated died? One can think of a bunch of different 50 percents to eliminate, demographically, and it’s interesting (although perhaps dangerous territory) to think of how all of these post-apocalyptic scenarios would differ from each other.
Mark..
Actually have read a lot of Tiptree’s stuff.
Never knew ’til latter days cross-overish author thing.
Loved the [and her] stuff….there was one especially about a soft purplish goo
overmind into which humans got absorbed..losing identity. Think it was her.
Personally so conventional and unimaginative that hardly ever read
anything but Hugo/Nebula award novel, novellas.
At one point HAD ‘em all, paperbacks…up into the ’80s.
One of those..”O’ dear! What?ever Will I Read.” things.
So I just limited to that
Anyway if we’re on comics as a medium, I like it…so be welcome.
Just learned more [and better?] about Niels Bohr’s quantum world
and thinkings and co-conspirators than ever
in a soft back ‘comic’ format.
Loved it.. Recommend it .
“Suspended in Language” (Ottavani & Purvis)
I could get ALL of my written information in that format.
I shouldn’t even mention Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet though I just did.
Heh, I thought I was the only person on earth to remember that one. I met the author at a scifi con in Baltimore many years ago, and brought a tattered copy of VP for him to sign. I felt kind of bad about what was (to me) just an ironic joke when he winced to see it. But he signed it anyway.
has_te: Was that one “Slow Music”? I can never remember which story is which; they all have these beautifully poetic titles which don’t really remind me of the content of the story. (Also, I still don’t have my own copy of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever; I read it at the library a few years ago.)
I don’t know - the one thing that didn’t ring true was that there wasn’t enough grief. I mean, come on. Every character in that book has just lost his or her father; sons; brothers; husband; boyfriend; maybe half their close friends and colleagues… and they almost all just seem to suck it up and carry on. True, some of them grieve; but not all, and never for very long. And they all seem to talk about the Event quite calmly afterwards.
Julian–
Good question. If you had a mixed sudden die-off–say, half of all people die–you’d have a massive shockwave that would knock society into a desperate spiral, that it could probably pull out of in a generation or two. If cooler heads prevailed, maybe sooner. The short-term would be awful, however.
If all men died off, I think Y is for Yorrick is about right–chaos, followed by a slow return to order, with the caveat that nobody knows whether society will last beyond the youngest generation. Awful, but almost as sustainable as the first scenario.
If all women died off, I think the chaos would be unstoppable and endless.
I don’t think that for the B.S. “women civilize men” thing. But women can do one thing that men simply cannot do–they can carry a child. As long as women are alive, there’s hope for the next generation. Even if it’s just to go the route of human cloning–that’s a relatively simple problem compared to creating and sustaining life in vitro
The first two scenarios have hope attached to them. The power would fade in and out, there would be lawlessness, but people would still be able to see the future carrying on beyond them. They would see the point in continuing on, in trying to keep pushing for a new generation, even in the face of harsh calamity.
Denied that hope, I think society would collapse–because there would be nothing to keep working for.
I just read all the trades after my surgery last month, so this is a timely topic for me! Really highly recommend this series, and I’m pretty snotty about what comics I will and won’t read due to living with a Comic Book Guy. Also interesting: The Walking Dead. Yes, it’s a zombie comic, but some of the female characters have been fascinating to watch as the series goes on…
For some thoughts on a partial apocalypse (in this case, what it would be like if all the children vanished), read Slacktivist on Left Behind (which you have to read from the bottom up, sorry). The Left Behind series says little to nothing about it, but the blogger writes some pretty interesting speculation on how it would play out. Along the way, LaHaye and Jenkins are revealed as charlatans who can neither write well or even read their Bibles coherently.
It’s a good book, with lots of very well-done female characters. I just wish that the Amazons weren’t the only women who adopted the ‘feminist’ label, because that’s really not what it’s about.
Didn’t Philip Wylie do something along these lines in the early ’50s? It was
‘The Disappearance,’ I believe.
ajay:
I see your point on the lack of grief, although the first time we see the world post-apocalypse is two months later and there are nightly vigils being held at the Washington Monument; I think the characters we run across at the beginning are mostly the ones who have processed (or are processing, violently) their grief in a less-paralyzed way; said grief, I think, also helps account for the slow rebuilding of the infrastructure.
There’s a very nice allusion to “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” (one of my favorite stories ever) right near the beginning of Y:tLM. Seeing that there was my initial reason to believe that, regardless of mis-steps, the story would have its heart in a good place.
/grendelkhan Feb 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
has_te: Was that one “Slow Music�?/
Dunno, I’ll find out (if I even got Tiptree as the right author(ess).
Really liked it but it was aeons ago. I’ll drop it here sometime.
JeffF
I am a big fan of the ’stunted Y, a short little piece of a ‘real’ human chromosome, leaving males -somewhat- ’socially’-dysfunctional but going rather to make great hunters & fighters. What Amanda derogates as ‘evo-psych’, I think
[Coming from ‘Amanda’ that must be , of course, appropriate]
Guys’r little short on empathy and ‘other’-imagination, poor schmucks, and prone to violence, narcissism and aggressive acts. But they can sure as hell throw a spear.
Little like the scorpion hitching that ride with the frog….’it’s in their nature’ thing.
Not their fault and remediable with good upbringing.
Which brings me to this…that women are also critically important, I think;
In the Bringing Up of Boys. Girls do fine with either/both.
Theory.
There’s a very nice allusion to “Houston, Houston, Do You Read� (one of my favorite stories ever) right near the beginning of Y:tLM. Seeing that there was my initial reason to believe that, regardless of mis-steps, the story would have its heart in a good place.
Yeah, an astronaut speaks the line in the first issue. I once asked Vaughn about it on a message board, and he confirmed that it was a deliberate allusion to the Tiptree story.
One add-on to Mark’s awesome list: The Female Man, by Joanna Russ. I’ve just discovered Russ and now have a huge author-crush. I also recommend her literary criticism, which is accessible and funny.
Oh god, Wylie’s The Disapperance I hadn’t thought about that one for years, a misogynist and misandrist piece of crap. Maybe just sexist will cover all the problems that book had. The net result of the (temporary) separation was that the sexes needed each other for completion and that homosexuality is just wrong.
Auguste, thanks for the post. I started to like Y then the Amazon thing started up and I thought, “Oh, no, not again.” and put it down. I’ll have to go get the trades.
/grendelkhan Feb 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
has_te: Was that one “Slow Music�?/
Dunno, I’ll find out (if I even got Tiptree as the right author(ess).
Sorry G…couldn’t find.
Read ‘em all as a kid.
‘Nother author, poss.
Maybe even Locus award or an Anthology (gotten for the novellas in)
The thesis was …did one want to subsume (physically and mentally)
into this fungus slopped all over sacred caves in this place.
Wherein you achieved some sort of Nirvana, but lost identity.
Peace security warmth company…all that. But one IS actually absorbed.
Only allowed [but encouraged] to do this thing in a rite of maturity.
So — all that good stuff…or self? Thing.
Sorry
If half the population of the Earth suddenly dropped dead, society would be seriously screwed up for a long time. It wouldn’t matter if that dropping dead was gendered, as Teh Plague killed half of Europe in a few short years and it took two or more generations to even start to recover the infrastructure.
If all the women dropped dead, society would be totally screwed up more than if all the men did, because it would die out in a generation. As it is, there is enough frozen sperm around to restart things in a generation if only women were left.
Ahhh but Ms Kate, the invisible hand of the author thought of that: Everything with a Y chromosome died; even sperm. (Someone will have to remind me whether he just went ahead and melted all the sperm due to the power outages.)
has_te: The Tiptree story involved a “channel” that was wending its way across Earth, singing a subconscious siren song to lure people in. The story opens with almost everybody gone already. It’s pretty damned dark, like everything else she wrote.
Ms Kate: Also, the Amazons were torching sperm banks. To be precise, not all sperm carry a Y chromosome; only half do. But I’m willing to let the author wave his author-wand around on that count. The men are dead, and there’s no easy way to bring them back. Check.
AS long as we’re shilling comics for their feminist qualities, everyone should check out Richard Moore’s “Boneyard” ( http://www.nbmpub.com/humor/moore/bonehome.html ). Funny as hell, the characters all have more-or-less realistic personalities, and Moore has a skill that’s incredibly rare for comic artists: he can actually draw more than 2 distinct female faces and body types. He’s sort of the Anti Frank Cho. The protagonist in the series, Paris, while being a hell of a nice guy, spends much more time as a Dude in Distress than he does saving the day. It’s the object of his affections, Abby (2,000 year old vampire who can tear cars in half) who’s the _real_ hero. And on those occasions where Moore throws in some “fan service”, he does so in a way that actually advances the plot.
A long time ago, a friend and I plotted to hoax the internet with an announcement that lesbians could now have their own kids by putting eggs together. Of course, all offspring would naturally be girls. The point was to rattle wingnut cages a bit.
That hoax would be even more realistic now, and possible within a few years with intensive research campaigns (if it isn’t already).
while we’re plugging comics, i’m going to do that (a second time now) for warren ellis’s “transmetropolitan”. it should strike a chord with anybody who’s daily driven to rage by politics and the state of the world but still has a sense of humor. that’s the kind of person the protagonist (anti-hero?) is, too. oh, i’m making it sound awful, aren’t i? what i mean to say is that spider jerusalem is a vitriolic asshole of a gonzo journalist who snacks on puppy eyes and eschews actual guns in favor of things called “bowel disruptors”. well, ok, imagine hunter s. thompson with more futuristic intoxicants.
also, he has a writing assistant (yelena) and a bodyguard (channon), two women who are really cool in very divergent ways, and although they’re supporting characters they never veer into stereotype. not only does ellis avoid trapping the two in objectifying “female” roles, he actively skewers that habit as well as capitalism’s objectification of all people. transmet is the first comic that got me believing in comics (i am not counting maus for admittedly arbitrary reasons, such as “it is serious” and “isn’t that a ‘graphic novel’?”).
A long time ago, a friend and I plotted to hoax the internet with an announcement that lesbians could now have their own kids by putting eggs together. Of course, all offspring would naturally be girls. The point was to rattle wingnut cages a bit.
I for one welcome our new female overlords.
Mike Crichton: Richard Moore also draws porn. I suppose that’s where he works out his fan-servicy urges more fully. In any case, for a wide, wide variety of distinctly-drawn female characters, see Bruno.
roula:
Transmet is indeed a good book. I do love a good Hunter Thompson pastiche. one thing that radically improves it is remembering that the women in the book are the heroes, starting with Channon, then moving to Yelena. though not the main characters (Warren Ellis’s opinion is the main character, really.) they’re the only ones who show any development.
Grendel: it’s been years since I’ve read bruno (I suddenly dropped all of my daily webcomics a few years into college, and just never picked most of them back up. the only ones I really regret and think I should catch up on are Bruno and Sluggy)
also to the general population of comics readers I express the following: we should never, ever piss off Galactus again. (yeah, I read superhero books too. not ashamed of that. and Annihilation was a fantastic story)
and Fables FTW.
that is all.
karpad,
The best part about having a son is that one can read superhero books again without even the slightest embarrassment. Right now I’m reading Augustlet the Frankie-Raye-becomes-Nova arc of 1982-era Fantastic Four.
Since you brought up Galactus and all.
[There wasn’t anything here before. Nothing at all. Move along.]
hell, I work in a comic book shop. love the job. but Civil War kind of sucks. started out promising, but got pretty stupid.
oh, and if you want to post a thread wherein we can argue about civil war, I’d be down with that.
[Or here]
(As for Civil War, there is a very good chance I will in fact post that thread - but mindful of delaying my inevitable dragging of my new platform into a black hole of readerlessness, I’ll probably post it over at my place.)
right, Auguste. plausible deniability. yes, I shall participate at your place, should you create such a thread.
also, why are we both still awake?
Well, as it’s a Friday and 11 pm PST, I don’t feel too embarrassed. Plus, my son wouldn’t go to sleep. He was probably trying to figure out what the hell a “herald” is.
ah. PST would do it. I’m just siting out at 1:30ish.
ugh. anyway. yes. enjoy annihilation. know why we should never piss off Galactus.
this officially ends the nerdly incestous pratter for the night
Now, now, karpad, some of us are just getting to work at midnight Pacific time!
Alas, I think I shot my nerd bolt on this topic yesterday.
So, no one has seen The New Women? Darn. I was hoping someone knew something about the 1930s original.
Here we go:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217686/
That actress whose name I could not recall was Mary Woronov.
Sadly, I can’t argue with the review too vigorously, though I will say I enjoyed the movie well enough by not taking it too seriously.
Note that the comatose men have erections in their sleep. This represented a great improvement in marital relations for the protagonist.
In the other stories of course there just aren’t any men left alive.
I do think that given the current state of genetic technology, women surviving such a wipe-out (assuming it didn’t involve general devastation of the technical base) could manage to at least clone themselves. As I understand it, you just transplant a nucleus from any normal cell into the egg, swapping out the haploid egg nucleus, and you are theoretically in business. Now implant that into the womb and there you are. A new generation. Albeit one without any genetic variation, but if just about everyone agrees to be cloned and bear at least one offspring, the more challenging problem of figuring out how to artificially recombine thus allowing crossbred offspring can be postponed until it is solved. As I understand it, science does look forward to developing artificial sperm in the forseeable future, from stem cells.
Obviously, it would be much worse if it were only men that survived. Subjectively, I’d do like the woman cop we were told about in the first issue of Y and end it all. Or maybe not, but only if I had some hope of bringing women back into the world. And not just because women have babies, either. Basically I don’t want to live in an all-male society, and that’s that.
Naturally then the main reason that the concept of the all-women world fascinates me, aside from abstract speculation about how it will work (better perhaps almost certainly than this one, though one hopes a mixed-sex society as good can exist in principle) is the sheer piggery of imagining myself as that single male survivor.
Well, ahem then.
But what if the sole male human being surviving were Calvin, from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes? Naturally this assures the virtual survival of Hobbes too, so that’s a twofer…
But, well…
http://www.rabittooth.com/13_calvin/faces.jpg
I think the story about the alien cult involving merging with some goo-being that may or may not have been intelligent was “A Song for Lya” by George R.R. Martin. This was vintage mid-70s as was Tiptree’s heyday. The Hugo winner by Tiptree was “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.”
Heh. Although it never crossed my mind until you mentioned that, there’s probably a case to be made that Yorick and Ampersand owe quite an ancestral debt to Calvin and Hobbes, characterization-wise.
Well, I do still take issue with the Amazons - mostly the fact that they exist at all and that they’re the only characters who identify as feminists - but I’ve already ranted on that.
This is definitely an interesting way to look at the series. I’ll continue reading at some point if someone loans me the books, but there were too many little and bigger things in Y that bugged me (haha, lookit the womens trying to recreate soap operas) and too much mockery of feminism for me to really want to support it.
But then, I loved *Preacher* to death, so my feminist-comics-credentials are pretty lousy. Transmet is great too, and the female characters are great, but most of them don’t really get to, you know, Do Stuff for a very long time. Channon is Jerusalem’s bodyguard and he still does most of the fighting.
This isn’t because Warren Ellis is sexist - check out all of his other work for Awesome Women Who Do Stuff. This is because nobody is better than Spider Jerusalem. Preacher also has a protagonist who can do everything better than everyone else but the characters are separated at various points and he does get incapacitated a few times so it’s not as obvious a problem.
(Oh, and technically, Yorick is the protagonist unless the story shifts radically after what I’ve read. He may or may not be the hero, but I still disagree that he’s essentially passive - he Did Lots of Stuff from what I read.)
And I should mention that Preacher both explicitly supports feminism (basic equality, academic feminism) and mocks it (academic feminism - or specifically, an academic feminist). Weird series.
Well, I feel funny, because I’m the one comics pro here and haven’t read most of the stuff discussed. But I will say that I most ferociously reccommend the biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon–one of the best biiographies I’ve ever read. I met Julie Phillips at the last SF convention I was at (and also got to meet Barry N. Malzberg–an idol of mine) and they both talked about Sheldon: Phillips from research and Malzberg from personal history.
I tend to agree with Barry that Sheldon/Tiptree was maybe the best short story writer period in the second half of the 20th Century.
And in terms of women SF novels, there were Suzy McKee Charnas’s books which were only OK, and Edmund Cooper’s Five to Twelve, which I only dimly remember.
EPU’ed probably but I’ll go ahead and throw in a plug for David Brin’s SF novel Glory Season, his exploration of a world based on feminist princples.
George Perez spent a little exposition time on the DC Universe Amazons in his run on Wonder Woman (who has to be the archetypal female heroine, the female Superman as it were).
Phil Foglio has always had strong women in his comics, including the protagonist of Girl Genius.
Mark Oakley’s Thieves & Kings has many more strong female characters than male ones.
And if you’re who I think you are, can I just say: Bravo.
Preacher’s female characters never say a word that isn’t about the men they are crushing on. There’s Cassidy’s women, Jesse’s women, even Starr’s women. None of whom ever have a scene where they aren’t thinking of some way to do something for their man. I wouldn’t say that the portagonist thinking it’s cool that his girl can shoot a gun make the book at all feminist.