Category: ultracomics

Just in case you thought the comic book industry was a hotbed of feminism, think again. sure, it hets a lotof lip service, what with all those strong women flying around, kicking ass, and taking names, but every so often you see something to remind you that women in comics are often more appreciated for their tights and superhuman proportions than their abilities to stand up for themselves. Case in point, this little announcement, this little news item from the Comics Continuum, about Elektra, usually portrayed as one of comicdom’s fiercer, tougher, more self-reliant women:

MARVEL MAKEs ELEKTRA A MODEL

Marvel Comics continues to aggressively promote its Elektra character, announcing a deal with Karin Models on Thursday.

Karin Models is an international modeling agency, representing such clients as Rebecca Romijn-stamos and Estella Warren and current Yves saint Laurent girl Liliana Dominguez.

Karin will develop a portfolio for the character that will include drawings from her comic books as well as tailor-made images for advertisers created by Marvel’s artists. Just as it would for any other model in its roster, Karin will then pitch Elektra to a wide variety of the world’s top companies including clothing, makeup, and jewelry.

“We are going to treat Elektra just like we treat any other top model at Karin,” said scott Lipps President, Karin Models. “She’s beautiful, sexy and approachable. Quite simply, she is the Ultimate model. The only difference we foresee in representing a comic book character is that she won’t be able to go on casting calls.”

Marvel vice-president, licensing, Ellen Sevin said, “Elektra is every man’s fantasy and women aspire to look like her. Karin was extremely excited to bring her into its fold and we cannot imagine any fashion company having a better representative than her to show off their products. There is no doubt that she will be a survivor in the cut-throat fashion business — especially given her lethal martial arts training.”

Lucky for them, a comic book character won’t actually be able to eviscerate her agent for suggesting she lose a little weight before she takes a break from her assassin work to peddle lipstick and panties.

OK, check out this unbelievable detail from Top Ten by Alan Moore and Gene Ha. Please tell me you can appreciate how subtle and brilliant this image is:

OK, so the X-Men have this recurring menace to fight called the sentinels, right? And the sentinels are supposed to be these badass giant robots programmed to hunt down mutants and capture or destroy them. sure, that sounds great, but the simple fact of the matter is that the sentinels have never looked all that tough. In fact, they’ve always looked silly. They look like nothing more than over-sized old-skool generic super-villains in bad helmets and big shoes. For decades we’ve been asked to just trust that they’re as scary as we’re told they are.

Thankfully, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely have taken over the reins for the time being, and are delivering a totally chilling update of the sentinels that finally seem as deadly and efficient as they were always meant to be. Instead of being these lumbering anthropomorphic hulks, the new sentinels are these highly specialized Battlebots made out of available spare parts, looking more like insects and sea creatures and stuff. They look like robots, you know? Highly specialized, adapted to various functions, not wasting mass or materials on the trappings of a humanoid form. Totally creepy. In a nice touch, the new, lean, and mean sentinels keep using spare parts from old sentinels, like those goofy helmets, and working them into their unorthodox forms. If you ask me, it’s a lot creepier to see a killer robot with a half-dozen pincer arms and a video camera for a face, rather than some 60s-throwback shiny purple mannequin.

It’s this kind of radical rethinking of comic-book mainstays that I really like. More than just a flashy update, this approach looks at the basic idea of something that’s been around for a while — in this case, constantly evolving killer robots — and questions how that idea is more likely to manifest itself. so not only does it strike a more realistic note (by itself an irrelevent achievement in the world of superhero comics), but it has a more profound emotional impact because it abandons a hackneyed tradition (giant mannequins) and draws on some more primally menacing associations (faceless creatures, technology run amok). When the sentinels still bore some resemblance to people, fighting them always seemed to be just another brawl. With these newer forms, calling to mind images of industrial accidents and alien autopsies, they finally become these unnatural killing machines that won’t stop until their last moving part is prevented from completing its function.

I blame Beau, although to be fair it all started out innocently enough. We were having lunch and we strayed onto the topic of comic books and how I love them but I fear them. I stopped collecting long ago (too expensive, too hard to keep up with), but they’ve remained a dangerous temptation — I’m a Friend of Stan L.

As we talked I was telling Beau how excited I was to see what Grant Morrison would do once he started writing for The X-Men, considering how much I went bananas for The Invisibles once I stumbled across them. Whatever. It was just a brief flare-up of nerdiness at the time, and I went back to work.

Later on in the week I saw that Beau had gotten the new issue, and I suddenly became obsessed with getting a copy for myself. I went to Forbidden Planet, but they were out of stock. I was crushed, but the fever was in me, and I was in a comic book store with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket, and all sorts of things that I had to have, like the new Authority and a kooky issue of Wonder Woman (in which she’s interviewed by Lois Lane) and some other X-men titles to tide me over. Of course, I also had to pick up the trade paperback of Earth X because I’d been coveting it for so long, and I love those Alex Ross covers so much. There was no turning back.

The next day, I finally found the X-Men book I was looking for at a much bigger place near my office, and I was so elated that I also splurged on one of the Planetary and Invisibles books I’d been curious about. Great scores all around, which left with me hours of reading. I was pleased as punch, despite feeling a little bad about going on such a bender.

I know that some think it’s really old-skool, but I’m a sucker for the whole superhero genre in comics. I know that comics are a great medium for telling all kinds of stories, but the superhero stuff still excites me in a very primal way. I’ve read them my whole life, making up characters and stories of my own and soaking in as much of the varied universes of superhero stories as I could. It’s easy to look back now and see that I have a real soft spot for a lot of stuff from my youth that wasn’t especially sophisticated, but it’s also very exciting to see that a lot of comics have grown with me. A lot of them are still just slugfests, and I often get exasperated at how bloated some of the more popular mythologies have become. Luckily, there are books like The Authority and The Invisibles and Planetary that play with the myths that nurtured me: they challenge them, contradict them, turn them inside out, and even show affection for them. It’s very po-mo now, very meta. And that’s good. There are a lot of people making comics who are up to the challenge of keeping the medium vital without losing the spark of wonder that sucked me in to begin with. Thank god for that.