Good Reads: Superheroine Edition
Friday, May 23, 2014 at 2:00PM 
With various X-Men smearing their mutant DNA all of your movie screens this weekend, it's become painfully obvious that movie studios are still terrifed of superheroes with vaginas. Storm continues to be the single most-wasted ineptly-transferred great character from the comics but Kitty Pryde has an even sadder story. "X-Men Days of Future Past," one of the most famous and influential comic arcs of all time, originally granted the phasing young mutant (played by Ellen Page in the movies) the starring role. We all knew they would find a way to sideline her.
I lurve Hugh Jackman but one of my biggest disappointments about the X-Men movies continues to be the way the team aspects are muted in order to make it all about the charismatic clawed one. The Avengers figured out a way to balance multiple headliners but the X-Men movies haven't been that inspired. So here are two excellent reads from Slate if you care about the ladies and gender inequities within this genre.
"Why is Wolverine Doing All The Things I Did?"
Kitty Pryde herself (via Stephen Burt) writes a letter to the filmmakers about her suddenly sidelined heroics. Why is that exactly?
"David Goyer’s Comments About She-Hulk Make People Very, Very Angry"
The title is too utilitarian to get excited about but there a lot of great points raised in this article about origin stories and comic book sexism. This article was in response to screenwriter David S. Goyer's (The Dark Knight, Man of Steel) comments about the character of She-Hulk on a podcast we linked to yesterday. One of the two podcast hosts Craig Mazin, who used the word "slut" in the discussion, has since published an apology/clarification of what he meant. But the conversation basically treated her as a Bride of Frankenstein sex fantasy creation for Hulk -- missing the point that she was created as a female empowerment fantasy and is Bruce Banner's cousin. (Not the kissin' kind.) I suppose it's no accident that Goyer is involved with Batman v Superhero: Dawn of Justice which already controversially cast a 110 lbs underwear model as the most famous amazon superheroine of all time (that'd be Wonder Woman).
The takeaway is that we're never going to get female superheroes done right until...
Elizabeth Olsen as The Scarlet Witch in "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015)
a) more actressexual directors get involved. Joss Whedon is a great start and our best hope at the moment - look how he rescued the Black Widow from her Iron Man 2 decorative-nothingness. Can we hope that he'll also exceed expectations with The Scarlet Witch?
b) the people in charge of shepherding this genre to the screen are more evolved than Frank T.J. Mackey and don't immediately think "great tits!" first when confronted with the idea of a superheroine. There's nothing wrong with great boobs -- We fully support them and thank Scarlet Johansson for hers at least weekly -- but boobs do not a heroine make.
You wouldn't think those two things would be such tall hurdles to clear...
Reader Comments (3)
This post is great. I agree 100%.
It's especially true of Xmen, because it is a team dynamic with a wide range of great characters. It doesn't always have to be about Wolverine, Professor X & Magneto - they can actually switch it up.
There's also a great article at ComicsAlliance about why Goyer's comments are a great example of his ongoing problematic work handling DC's heroes. http://comicsalliance.com/um-actually-man-of-steel-writer-david-goyers-remarks-on-green-porn-star-she-hulk-and-other-nasty-business/
One of the many reasons I fell in,love with the X-Men when I was a kid was because the women were just as important and powerful as the male characters. And not in a "Look at this girl, she's just as good as the boys!" way. They just were like that.