feminist comic blogs

In part because I haven't the time nor the money to read many comics, I've taken to reading blogs about comics. I've found some pretty funny and irreverent sites, many with good review sections which will help me make some purchases sometime down the line.

But the most interesting online community I've found in this forray has been the rapidly growing network of feminist comic bloggers. Two sites in particular are great reading: When Fangirls Attack and Girl Wonder. Both of them are afire with dissection of new, and startlingly mysoginist Xmen film, as well as the new lipstick lesbian version of Batwoman. The debates mirror those which arose in response to shows like The "L" Word and Sex in the City: With such a dearth of women characters, do you take what you can get or (and?) continue pushing for better representations? The analysis is smart, straight-forward and thoughtful. Even non-geeks should check it out.

One somewhat famous website/essay, which has elicited a fair amount of discussion among comic writers is entitled "Women in Refrigerators". It details the common use of women as grisly fodder- murder and meyhem victims with little agency or power themselves. It's excellent, and, if you followed that link you know that it has already generated its own Wikipedia entry. Here's the post itself.

If you don't think that such a movement is needed, check out some of the comments which greeted one of the columns on "Girl Wonder". Even searching for a good image for this story was a good illustration of the central problem: if it wasn't an impossibly built superheroine, it was an anime girl being violated by a space monster. True, the men in comics are hardly realistically rendered, but they are meant to be strong at least. Most female superheroes are essentially Penthouse models with capes. One feminist blogger photoshopped some images of what comics would look like if the men were similarly objectified. It's pretty hillarious and would likely produce more than a little bit of self-doubt among fanboys.