Gail Simone: Someone Asked…

gailsimone:

…so here we go.

One of my big problems with Watchmen is how stupidly the near-rape is handled. And it’s EPIC stupid.

It’s full of every dumbass cliche there is, and unfortunately, this was common in work of the time.

We have:

Slut Shaming, check.

Woman falls in love with her rapist, check.

Man who object to rape is only doing so because he’s gay, check.

Woman at least partly to blame for assault because of her clothes, check.

Man who rapes has oh-so tender spot for victim’s daughter (see? He’s not so bad, he’s just misunderstood!), check.

There are other issues, but if those scenes were in any other book, they would have gotten the loud raspberries they deserve. It’s just a bunch of gunk rape cliches, one after another.

I do like the book. But it’s not completely unproblematic.

Gail Simone: About Before Watchmen

gailsimone:

I’ll start off by saying, I don’t have remarkably strong feelings either way. I’m excited to see some of those creative teams, simply because I’m a huge fan of Brian, Amanda, and Darwyn, among others. So, new work for them is always a thrill.

But I must admit, I’ve not nearly romanticized Watchmen to the degree that others have. There’s nasty crap in there that is kind of inexplicable, that appears in a lot of Moore work of that period. And it really was a book, like Dark Knight, that unfortunately caused a lot of crappy imitators.

The art’s magnificent, the craft is remarkable, but I can name ten Moore works I like better without hesitation.

I have mixed feelings about Alan’s response about the books. On the one hand, it would be lovely if every creator who did a work like this got to decide how the property was handled in the future. But they don’t, and I’m not sure exactly what makes this book an exception, if that was never part of the agreement in the first place. Because of its artistic merit? Because of Alan’s well-known unhappiness with DC?  Cases could be made in both situations, but that’s not quite the complaint Alan seemed to have in his response.

He said, there were no sequels to Moby Dick, which is just bizarre and ironic, considering Alan himself uses characters from Moby Dick, and dozens of other sources, without permission or credit, in his Extraordinary Gentlemen books. Is the idea that Watchmen is SO wonderful that no other creators can work on it, despite the fact that the characters themselves are pastiches of Charleton characters owned wholly by DC?

I may be looking at this wrong. I don’t know that these books need to happen at all. But Watchmen is immensely popular, these creators are extremely talented. I suspect the books will actually be quite good. Again, I’m not so wild about the characters that I am dying to see them again.

Alan has taken a principled, if sometimes confusing, stance against almost all his former publishers and many of his co-creators. I don’t doubt his sincerity for a moment. His work is a series of milestones in the industry.  I have no doubt that many, most, or all of his complaints are valid.

But I’m not sure that the publisher is in the moral wrong, here. Alan himself had a Watchmen prequel planned at one point, so it’s weird that he says, “Moby Dick didn’t have a prequel,” when he himself planned one.

Don’t know the answers. The covers look nice, the creative teams are top-notch. I don’t know the particulars of the Watchmen contract, so I won’t speak about that.

What are your thoughts? What am I missing, here?

GLAAD Announces the Nominees for Outstanding Comic Book in the 23rd Annual GLAAD Media Awards

And the nominees are…

• Avengers: The Children’s Crusade by Allan Heinberg, Marvel

• Batwoman by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman, DC Comics

• Secret Six by Gail Simone, DC Comics

• Veronica Presents: Kevin Keller by Dan Parent, Archie Comics

• X-Factor by Peter David, Marvel Comics

As ever, I wish GLAAD would focus more of their attention on the work of queer creators, especially those weaving radical new narratives in the independent scene. Nevertheless, congratulations to all of this year’s nominees!

A Child Made of Clay

In its original form, this essay was a thank you note, posted on the Wonder Woman forums at Comic Book Resources for one Gail Simone. (My screenname there is Ceridwen.) I’ve edited and updated it, in part because it’s two years old now, in part to help it better stand alone. The original is still available here.

For a very long time, I really didn’t like the “child made of clay” aspect of Diana’s birth. It always felt so ridiculously exploitable. I can’t stand the inevitable stories about Diana turning back into clay, the way some writers seem to think she’s a golem instead of a human being. In the modern age alone, this happened during the runs of George Pérez, William Messner-Loebs, John Byrne, and Brian K. Vaughan. It was also repeatedly harped upon by some of DC’s more prominent writers as further evidence that Wonder Woman was unrelatable and inhuman.

It also felt really tacked on. I understood the desire to have this strong female character completely absent male influence. I think it’s an extremely important aspect of the character. Wonder Woman has no father. Wonder Woman needs no father. She has a mother, an island full of mothers and sisters and friends to raise her. And she has her Goddess, Athena or Artemis or my personal favorite, Aphrodite. But there are plenty of ways to create this fatherless girl in this world of the Olympians, without having Hippolyta kneel in the sand and create Diana out of mud. It felt so out of place to me that I was shocked to see it right there in Marston’s writings seventy years ago. I thought for sure it was one of those bizarre details that creeps into a long-lasting character’s history.

And then Gail Simone came on the book, and I got it.

I can’t have children. I’ve always wanted to be a mother, and I think some day I’ll be a very good one. But if that happens, I am going to have to adopt, and I may not be able to as adoption continues to be a difficult process for queer families. I can’t have children of my own. And even at my age, that’s something that’s very painful for me.

When I read Wonder Woman: The Circle, it was the first time I’d ever seen those emotions so potently captured in a comic book. The Child Made of Clay has always felt superfluous, a throw-away panel during the lead-up to The Arrival of Steve Trevor and The Contest. The parts other writers saw as more important.

Here it was an actual element of the story. Here there was an entire nation feeling that pain, my pain. Here there were whittle-babies, little infants made of wood, carried at the breasts of mourning Amazons. Here the idea of child-rearing is considered dangerous, the dolls dashed to pieces by more radical elements hoping to spare their sisters from insanity. Here a warrior queen goes down to the beach and kneels in the sand. The Gods have told her to shape a child from the clay found there, without any certainty that her child will be any different from the broken doll on her sister’s floor. But she needs to do this.

It was cemented for me in The Circle, but the revisit of that scene in Origins & Omens was also gorgeous and heartbreaking. Hippolyta kneels there in tears over the lifeless form of her clay child. “It’s not working!” The heavens open up, as if reality itself bends to the power of her emotions and then…

The moment deserves to be seen:

“Born of indiscernable yearning. Surrounded by unquantifiable love. Miracle. Oh, miracle. Wonder.

“I give you our princess! I give you our daughter!”

Gail Simone later said that part of her idea about Wonder Woman “was the insistence of inserting some things that are deeply and almost privately feminine, without any regard for filtering it through the male perspective to make it palatable. I just figured if there was one book on the stands where you could do that, it was this one.”

I had, and continue to have many critiques of her run, but this was an element I embrace whole heartedly. I think one of the “dichotomies” so many people see in Wonder Woman is the idea that she can be both feminine and strong, and that implied dichotomy is offensive to me because it implies that femininity cannot itself be a source of strength. It’s something that few writers since Marston have even realized they’re doing. They ignore the fact that femininity has fight in it, and we see that so desperately on display here.

Writers change, editors change. The story changes, and Wonder Woman is no longer The Child Made of Clay. Wonder Woman has a father now, or at least a biological one, as a true parent is so much more than a donor of genetic material.

But it’s all mythology. Sometimes Philoctetes lights Heracles’ funeral pyre. Sometimes Iolaus does. And sometimes his name is Hercules, which really makes no sense at all. But in the end, his mortality burns away and he achieves apotheosis.

Sometimes a storyteller will make you cry when she reminds you that even those who consort with Gods know your pain, and those are the stories that stay with you, because those are the stories where you achieve apotheosis too.

If They Mess Up Lois In The New Superman Movie…

gailsimone:

…I am going to go to Hollywood and kick some people in the throat.

It’s weird, but I am way, way more invested in a good Lois than a good Superman, at this point. I want a good Lois in this movie more than even a good Wonder Woman in her OWN movie.

I JUST WANT A GOOD LOIS!