Designated Sidekick

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Two unknown guys and a moth
(Image via Wikipedia)

Lisa Fortuna mentions there’s no Wonder Woman cartoon, and it occurred to me, that I wasn’t immediately keen to see a Wonder Woman cartoon produced. Which, given my loyalty to ElectraWoman and DynaGirl, wasn’t entirely something that made sense to me.

I thought about it for a bit, and what struck me wasn’t that I didn’t want a Wonder Woman cartoon - I wanted there to be more than one go-to female lead for a Saturday morning cartoon. The DC male usual suspects list has expanded from the go-to team of Batman and Superman to include Green Arrow and Blue Beetle. So why just stick with a cartoon Amazon when there’s options for a go-to team from Zatanna, Black Canary, Huntress, Spoiler, Misfit, Barda, Supergirl, Raven, Starfire, Arrowette, Mia/Speedy(II) cartoon, Fire, Ice, or Barbara Gordon (either Batgirl or Oracle)

And then it struck me, that I could hear the auto-counterargument of “But nobody knows who [$female_character] is…” as the reflexive beat down. True, few outside of the comic book circles know Arrowette, Speedy, Fire, Ice et al… just like the way few outside of the game know this chap called Blue Beetle. I like the Blue Beetles (more Ted and Jamie, less so Dan) but outside of fandom, who’s really heard of the Blue Beetle? At least Green Arrow was on Smallville but so was Black Canary.

Beetle? His push will come from the cartoon. So I say it’s time to give the push to some less recognized female characters. I mean, imagine a set up of Brave and Bold II: Oracle, Black Canary and Zatanna.

How much literal, figurative and animated ass would this line up kick?

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Short  comment on the that Playboy cover featuring someone painted into a bad imitation of a Wonder Woman costume

1. It’s a bad imitation. That’s not Wonder Woman, that’s a celebrity in bodypaint.  Accessorize people, Accessorize! Lasso! Wrist band! INVISIBLE SANDWICH! err INDIVISIBLE JET!
2. Playboy rips off Frank Miller’s cover quite a bit there, doesn’t it?
3. Anybody got a definitive answer to question of whether DC authorised/licenced the use of their copyright materials for the cover?  I can’t imagine that Playbo’s lawyers would have cleared publishing a pretty blatant legal liability from Warner Bros.
4. If you want to see a disconnect between superheroic fantasy and mundane reality, look at the cover of the playbody.  This is the “costume” that we’re so mundanely used to seeing on hand drawn characters, it looks bloody stupid on a real person. OMG My costume is painted on yay!
5. As far as anything akin to sex appeal - I keep laughing at the cover, largely because I can’t stop rewriting it as an alternate universe PETA campaign “I’d rather fight crime naked than wear spandex!”
6. I have nothing to add on the substantive issues beyond saying that I like what Ragnell’s written because I’m not really up to speed with the Wonder Woman/Lynda Carter side of things.
   1. Anyone who has previously claimed the existence of a hive vagina and notices that Ragnell and Cheryl Lynn aren’t seeing eye to eye can have a cognitive disonance cookie
   2. Anyone who tries to prove some point about it being overblown reaction because two feminists have different opinions will be met with a swift kick to the Akismet filter.  I mean it.

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My comic book reading has been on hold due to the incursion of real life.  But recently, I’ve been thinking about Marvel Civil War now it’s over, gone, and they’ve sort of finally almost maybe finished it.  (Civil Illuminated World Hulk War of the Crossovers).

There’s two aspects to reading the comics for me - Reading the text, and then looking at the comics in terms of the bigger picture of where they fit into society.  Civil War, Tony Stark and Captain America to me have become an interesting study in the assumption of what is good, what is right, and what is the responsibility of the individual when good and bad become blurred.  In the text, Tony Stark is a manipulative conniving and borderline evil character who manipulates the whole enterprise for financial gain (that story angle got dropped quickish), for personal power (Tony Stark, Mego-Ego), and for kicks (Damn, I’m Tony Stark, and I am that goddamn good I could be Batman).

Underpinning the text, in my reading, was Captain America’s role as the foil to Tony Stark.  Stark always expected the Captain to win, to come through, and to save America and the world from what Tony had wrought, and that was the neat and tidy clean up.  Cap would win, Tony would repent, and later, cash in the holdings and profits he’d squirrelled away.

Plus, Hulk would do something dumb, and Tony’s power armour would make him a redeemable rogue, rather than the evil mastermind.

The in-story problem was Captain America’s surrender.  Tony Stark and the Registration brigade won the war, and the battles, and then found themselves with a rapidly escalating problem - first Captain America as a prisoner, then Captain America as a corpse. (later, as a zombie. Wait…)

This made for an interesting dilemma that I don’t believe the writers consciously coded into the story - what do you do if you were expecting to lose, and had planned on the good guys winning as your path to redemption?

If you draw out to a wider picture of the world, at the moment, in a wide range of places, there are a lot of people acting on the belief that good will win in the end, and whilst bad people are currently getting to run the show, and getting away with it, there’s a team of good ready and rolling to victory.  Some of the people relying on that may even be the people currently being evil.  It’s okay to break the law, to cheat, lie, steal, intimidate and harass - the good guys will win, and things will get better, and there won’t be a consequence from our personal immortality, because the moral ones will win out.

In my take on the Marvelverse, Captain America was supposed to win.  Tony Stark and Reed Richards had bet their redemption on Cap winning, and then being willing to draw on Tony’s skills to take out a rampaging Hulk, and Reed’s ability to fend of Galactus (or equivalent).  With the win in the Civil War, now they’re responsible for their own redemption.  There’s no Captain America to rescue them or redeem them. They’ll have to work their way out of what they created, and live with that.
Which is an interesting metaphor for the world as it stands.  There are a large number of places where people have backed themselves into corners, and are waiting for redemption by proxy.  Governments waiting to lose office so the problem solving can be done by the opposition parties, and by supporting the problem-solving, they can seek redemption for causing the problem.  Same for social issues, for political and personal issues.  To my mind, a lot of the world is looking for the defeat-then-redemption way out of trouble. Problem is, that usually only works in the comics, and it didn’t even work there this time around.