Never took. Speaking of the Legion, this month's issue is actually pretty good. New writer, new (far better) artist, a little femslash...

Hmm. The current plan was to take a look during the upcoming Titans/Legion crossover. Which, luckilly, is soon.

There will never be a new Teen Titans on Cartoon Network, will there? They've been re-running seasons 1 and 2 forEVER. I have them memorized.

t edit ::snerk:: No sooner did I hit "post" than Cartoon Network ran a commercial for new TT episodes -- July 31, 8 p.m. Also new Justice League episodes start that night. And "Starcrossed" is re-running this Saturday, the 24th.

It also in terms of initial reasoning behind the big secret, had to be something brutal and horrific enough to drive them to abuse their power like they did. I've tried to figure out what other route Meltzer could have used to get the characters where he needed them, and can't seem to think of an effective one.

Off the top of my head? Murder. Tends to upset people. There are all sorts of ways to tell the "superheroes do bad things story" -- and it's been done much much better. Hell, Powers is DOING it better on a monthly basis right now.

I think you make the mistake here of trying to work within the story Meltzer is telling and to find ways to fix it, without realizing that the story itself is part of the problem at hand.

Part of the problem is the women-in-refrigerators problem -- as the material I quoted above points out, there are plenty of male characters who could have had brutal, horrific things happen to them. Let's take Connor Hawke, whom, I should specify, I choose because I like what little I know of him. But think about it. He entered superherodom willingly as an adult, so, no violence-against-children problem. He's been benched, or at least reduced to sidekickery. And, more than that, he's a practicing Buddhist, which means he's got a philosophy of non-violence and loving-kindness that would make for a much more ironic violent torture and death than that of your standard Westerner. Kill him off! Hey, the Blue Beetle has a heart condition, it wouldn't take much -- take him! There's a definite problem with women characters getting raped, maimed, and killed within superhero comics, a disturbing preponderance of actual-death dead, in ways that can't even be argued away with the lame "well, there aren't enough superheroines" excuse (Barbara Gordon kicked plenty of ass as Batgirl, and most of the women listed here were superheroes themselves).

The story, like many women-in-refrigerators stories, presumes that Sue is unable to protect herself or act on her own behalf in any meaningful way -- her entire existence within the IC world is that of a victim. This is a pretty standard trope in sexist writing -- woman as object, woman as possession, woman as property to be protected rather than as subject, agent, actor. The only plots that can happen to a woman like that are marriage, rape, and sometimes pregnancy -- stories that inscribe her into a story about a man, rather than getting to be the heroine of her own life.

Sue, who we were reminded in IC 1 is the only spouse ever to be made an honorary member of the JLA, an honor even Lois Lane never got, is deprived of any sort of agency that would make you understand why the League thought so highly of her or why she was one of the longest-running female characters in superhero comicdom. she doesn't even get to tell the story of what happened to her, even in flashbacks. A woman who was a liked recurring character is horrifically murdered (and while pregnant, no less: a pregnancy that doesn't exist for any reason other than to make the murder worse for her husband, another basic case of woman-as-object), and then raped in disturbingly fetishistic detail across multiple pages because it will upset her husband and his friends. This is the centerpiece of a heavily-promoted all-DCU crossover event?

(Let's set aside for the moment the fact that DC is promoting the hell out of this story to an all-ages audience, with no "mature content" warnings, despite its being WILDLY kid-inappropriate, because here at least we're discussing it among adults. There's still no narrative value in lingering over those panels other than the exploitation effect.)

And then of course our heroes have to act entirely out of character -- AGAIN, Sue is given no choice in the matter, made into an object by her friends as well as her enemies. Why? Is the rape of one woman that much more horrific than the destruction of an entire city? Or is it only horrific because Dr. Light is going tell people about it? Because he's going to find "all of yours" and deprive the League of their womenfolks's chastity? They had more than enough evidence to put him on trial and convict him, and give Sue her day in court. But what Sue might want is unimportant in this story.

Let us also set aside the argument that if they are so worried about Dr Light's potential escape and recidivism that they believe their actions to be justified, they now have an obligation to learn how to do the mind-trick well and do it to every other bad guy with a similar threat level. It's implied that they did do it more than once, in fact. So the entire idea that there could still be recurring villains is damaged. But, hey, Lex Luthor only tried to take over the world and kill Superman! Clearly, he's not as much of a threat as someone who'd hurt a superhero's woman.

I mean, come on.

I dp have to say that I've been gratified by the revulsion in comics fandom as collated by Johanna Draper Carlson at her blog.

Also, as a result of IC, the surprise (and surprisingly funny) hit Formerly Known as the Justice League will not be happening, and the creator has said he will never do a book like that with DC again. Sigh.

loves loves loves Misha.

What she said. All of that.

Yargh. I'm going to kick the thing that ate my post on IC.

Which is basically, I feel like I'm on the opposite of my usual side of the fence in this case, and I'm not sure why that is. Every reason given as to why it's problematic? I can see. They're legit reasons, and yet I remain not bothered. I am bothered by the fact that I'm *not* bothered at this point. It's possible that I've managed to convince myself that the story will address a lot of those issues (many of which I see as impossible to completely divorce from the Silver Age hero mindset) to my satisfaction. Which doesn't address the issue of the story itself (not the execution) as the problem.

There are a few indications here and there in the text, which indicate that Meltzer is conscious of the deep rooted sexism in the superhero mythos. (The Ollie/Dinah dynamic makes it particularly overt, though that may be the way hears Ollie's voice.) Enough anyway to make me curious to see where he's going with this.

Btw, Ple, on the Teen Titans cartoon I TiVoed tonight, they introduced Speedy. Speedy and Robin practically had little hearts burbling around their heads as they bonded. Felt very Roy and Dick.

Michele, you invoke Powers in your defense, and I'm a fan too, but I was wondering whether you let it off the hook. The first storyline is called "Who Killed Retro Girl ?" And various female characters have died over the course of the run.

On the other hand, Bendis' Daredevil run has been populated with very strong female characters who take matters into their own hands, and he has yet to put Milla in a fridge.

And on the third hand, The Pulse is currently revolving around the mystery of the murder of a female reporter.

And on the final hand, the current timeline of Secret Wars has a male superhero in peril.

This is probably a major tangent and maybe not relevant to the discussion, but I don't know any of Meltzer's work, so.

Issues like this make my head hurt, because, like Plei, I'm not bothered by it until people say I'm supposed to be bothered by it.

Plei, that will be interesting if IC goes that way especially since having read Elongated Man stories from the Silver Age (when he was frequently the backup story in Detective Comics), and given that Ralph was/is such a second (hell, third) string superhero (basically a Plas wannabe twice removed by way of Mr. Fantastic), the choice of Sue Dibney is interesting as a trigger for this since she was the most (if not only) interesting element in most of those stories.

Stop me, before I parenthesize again.

P-C, I can't speak for Misha, but here's my take:

I'd never say that women characters can't be victims in a good story. Hell, you can't have a story at all without some kind of shit happening, and with any kind of fairness, roughly half the shit should go to women.

(Of course, it's not a fair world, and a lot more than half the shit seems to happen to women characters. But that's another rant that others have ranted better than I.)

For me, the key thing is: how are these characters victims? And how do the people around them deal with it? Are they characters I care about (even in retrospect, seen through the reactions of others after their death), or are they just anonymous damsel-in-distress number 413?

The hallmarks of the literature that most pisses me off are: Only women are ever victims. They're never really characters beyond traditional feminine virtues like being pretty and soft and adored by all around them; in fact, they're adored above all others because they're practically angels. They're dead women walking -- if they're really lucky, they get to die like the bloody dull consumptive one in Little Women, and everyone's just so terribly sad. On the other hand, if it's an action story, they're offed (raped, abducted), often brutally and graphically, and it's the men's job to do something about it; the implication is that the men are protecting property. Neither the victim herself (if she lives), nor other women (although they may be included in crowd scenes) get a chance to kick the bastard's ass, because it's the role of women to be passive -- indeed, to be plot devices, sacrificed to kick off the action. In other words, John Wayne goes off to chase down the damn dirty injuns who stole the white woman, and she's no more an actor in what comes next than she was in the original crime.

By contrast, the events Who Killed Retro Girl (to take your example) kick off a widely varied response from both the costumed and non-costumed communities. John Wayne isn't here -- instead, we get to see friends, enemies, old lovers, heroes, police, the media, and the public. They all react differently. They tell us things about who Retro Girl herself was that make her much more than just the pretty one. Bendis has a world where there are heroes and non-heroes coexisting (not always smoothly) but I can believe the reactions. The victim is female, she is beloved (without being the angel/victim/damsel-in-distress type for a single panel), but I never once got the sense that she was there only to be a plot device for the boys.

What makes it worse in IC is that Sue can be and has been far more than that, but I have yet to see any sign that Meltzer knows it or cares, in spite of the fact that he's willing to take on other silver age bline spots, most notably the cold-war era black or white morality they have in dealing with villains. And there's a lot I like about the series, and that I've talked about here -- but this won't stop clawing at me.

And there's no "supposed to be bothered" about it. I'd never say that you must be bothered, but I am. Deeply and viscerally, to the point where my sense that the nasty gender politics of comics has changed is really being pretty badly shaken. Again, you don't have to feel like I do about it, but it's rather facile to dismiss the reaction with "well, a man/woman is threatened in XYZ".