Comic Book Confidential: Sex & The Single Superhero

There are some mixed reviews of the big DC Comics reboot.  Some are liking what they're seeing, some are hating what they're seeing, while others are just confused and annoyed at what they're seeing.

The chief thing that seems to be annoying and confusing these readers is how DC is treating some of its female characters.  Chiefly they seem to be bumping up the sexy, while possibly sacrificing everything else, I'm talking character, story, and quite possibly readership.

Now I'm no prude, my family's Latin motto is Fremitus pro mamillas, or Hooray for boobies, but even I think it's getting past sleazy to ultimately destructive.

Let's look at the evidence....

Amanda Waller, was, when first introduced, a career bureaucrat behind a variety of covert government programs that involve DC superheroes and supervillains in various ways, and she looked like this...

She was supposed to symbolize the sort of covert governmental power that didn't require a hot bod clad in spandex.

However, since the reboot, she now looks like this....

Now she looks like Halle Berry's sister, but you know that she's not supposed to be a sexpot because she's only showing about three inches of cleavage.  (Which is considered demure by comic book standards.)

Then there's Harley Quinn. She was created in the early 1990s as by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini originally as just a walk-on minion for an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but ended up becoming The Joker's on/off sidekick and girlfriend, and was incorporated into the comics regular continuity.  When she was created, she looked like this...

There are some curves, but it succeeds in creating a seemingly harmless mask to cover the fact that she's a complete psycho and far more dangerous than she looks.

Oh how things have changed, because she now looks like this...

Now she looks like a porn star that specializes in XXX parodies of Marilyn Manson videos.  As for masking the fact that she's a really dangerous psycho, forget it.

Then there's Catwoman, who was always drawn to be a sexy femme fatale, so this really isn't much of a stretch--

--Well, not much of an imaginative stretch, though that pose can't possibly be comfortable or even possible in the first place without some painful stretching.

But wait, there's more.

Instead of going for the usual "Will they or won't they?" sexual tension of the Batman/Catwoman rivalry/relationship, they just hop right into a nice final page humpfest in issue #1...

However, this isn't considered the most egregious move.

That involves the DC Comics character Starfire, a super-powered alien princess most famous for her debut in the 1980s as a member of the Teen Titans.  Back then, she looked like this...

Not exactly demure, but it's not her only look.  In fact, a lot of her younger fans know her looking like this...

Which is how she looked in a popular animated version of The Teen Titans from the 2000s.

But she doesn't look like that now.  Now she looks like this...

But that's not all.  Originally her character, and powers were based in and around her emotions, but now she doesn't seem to have any feelings other than boredom and horniness.  Plus, her massive breast implants seem to be throwing her entire spine out of whack.

When a seven year old girl called DC out on these changes,  DC Comics responded by basically telling people that "kids probably shouldn't read their comics."

That response got me thinking.

When I get thinking, I start to realize things, DC Comics should try it sometimes.

The whole attitude shown by DC Comics about this whole affair shows exactly why comics has gone from being a mass market medium into a niche market medium.  When asked about the over-sex and under-action, the usual response is something along the lines of "These are modern comics and they ain't your Daddy's comic book."

Of course it ain't my Daddy's comic book.  When my Dad read comic books individual titles had monthly sales in the millions, sometimes the tens of millions. Nowadays, if a book sells more than 100,000 copies, it's considered a massive major blockbuster event.

The comics industry is crumbling.  Readership is shrinking every year, as current readers get older and give up on comics, and newer readers (translation: Kids.) are kept from starting.

I've discussed this matter before, but they can be summed up as:

Comics are...

...Hard to get. You can only get monthly paper-copies or (floppies) of your favorite titles at a shrinking number of specialty stores. This is because mainstream retailers find them pain in the ass to stock.  You might find trade paperback collections of "graphic novels" in some of the larger bookstores, but just popping down to the corner store for the latest issue just isn't going to happen.

...Hard to understand.  Even if you do manage to find a comic book, they are not designed for casual readers.  If you don't have the background to get a reference to a plot point from the October 1965 issue, you're are just not going to get a damn thing.

There's no really budging with mainstream retailers, but e-book versions might fix the sales problem.  The DC Reboot is supposed to fix the whole confusing continuity thing, but it looks like, in the long run, it will just add to the confusion the way their last attempt Crisis On Infinite Earths did back in the 1980s.  Then there's the issue of all this rampant "fan service" which creates more problems, especially with future sales.

Kids are being turned away, not just by parents upset by sexual content, but more by the simple fact that kids read comics for action of the "fist in the villain's face" variety, not action of the "reverse cowgirl ending in a Rusty Venture" variety.  And if their mothers finds them with an issue of Starfire frolicking in her next-to-nothing, or Catwoman in heat, those books are going in the trash, and the parents are going to work to make sure they don't buy any more.

Adult male fans don't want people to look at their comic book collection, adorned with scantily clad vamps and/or vixens, and not see the big scale action/adventure performed by mythic characters, and assume that it's some sort of pervy hand-drawn titillation for those too much of a loser to go on the internet to beat off to photographs of real girls.  When they have to hide their comics under their beds like they were skin mags during their adolescence they'll stop buying.

Then there are female fans.  Never large in number, but they are out there.  Does the comic book industry really need to promote out of this world body-image issues to go alongside the out of this world powers and story-lines? They can't relate to freakishly built characters in physically impossible poses, while acting out prurient post-pubescent male sex fantasies. In fact they will be more likely than not be insulted and/or offended, and they will stop buying.

But it's not going to stop anytime soon.


Comic Publishers won't give it up because they, like TV networks, still think that "sex sells."  And even if it doesn't, the majors have big media conglomerates as their parent companies, and all the parent companies care about is a steady supply of movie/TV franchises and related merchandise.  The books, and who buys them and why, really don't seem to matter to them anymore.

Too many Comic Creators also refuse to give it up because it allows them to be "edgy," "adult," and "daring," without actually doing anything that's particularly "edgy," "adult," and "daring."  They also seem to share network TV's mindset that if you toss enough boobage and "mature content" people will gloss over their shortcomings when it comes to character and story.  Remember, character and story are hard to do well. Sex, however, is easy to do, and doesn't really have to be done well in the first place.


It looks like the comic book industry is really content to run itself into extinction.  Which is sad.