And are comic books turning too sexy for their own good?

 

The latest issue of Catwoman takes a while to show us her face. First we meet her breasts, nearly tumbling out of a lacy scarlet bra as she yanks on her tight leather suit. As she dons said costume, she’s in no rush to zip up the front. A trio of thugs breaks into her home and as she fights back, we see her butt, in painted-on leather. It’s not until page three of DC Comics’ new Catwoman #1 that we actually see her face, smirking upside down as she flings herself through a high window. The catsuit is inexplicably still unzipped, half her bosom braving cold Gotham air and bullets.

That issue — which ends in a startlingly explicit spread featuring comic-book sex at its most gratuitous and tasteless — is one of several new DC Comics releases sparking off impassioned debate about the hypersexualisation of mainstream comic-books, superhero comics ostensibly written for all-ages. The Internet is abuzz — as those of you going to Mumbai’s upcoming comic-convention are surely well aware — with comics writers explaining how characters need to be written gender-neutrally, how it’s embarrassing when a character is made to ‘pose’ for the seduction of the reader rather then for her fellow page-inmates, how some female characters are meant to be overt in their sexuality and some aren’t — except everyone looks Power-Girl pneumatic nowadays — and how far too many female characters are being turned into mere totty.

(Sigh. My kingdom for the strikingly cool girl: like Neil Gaiman’s Death. Or Ramona Flowers.)

And while I agree with most of the points being made, here’s what I think: women in comics are being turned cartoonishly sexy simply because a lot of mainstream comic characters are now being written with big-screen feasibility in mind.

And if the character is caricaturedly sexy to begin with, as part of the source material, then Hollywood is not whipped by the fanboys when they cast some massively bosomed bimbette in a fishnet costume looking like her primary superpower is Mega Cleavage, because all they’re doing is staying l-o-y-a-l: to comics that start out wanting to be movies.

I’m a hardcore fanboy, and I love superhero movies, but comics being written a certain way merely so they’ll make for more commercially bankable movies? Man, that sounds positively LexLuthorian in both cunning and shamelessness.

And it isn’t just the girls. Nick Fury, leader of superhero-employing world-saving organisation SHIELD (so Caucasian he was once played laughably by David Hasselhoff) started looking exactly like Samuel L Jackson when Marvel rebooted him in its Ultimates line, and who plays him in the movies these days? Voila, that man with the expletives on his wallet.

The other way you can tell comics are being written keeping the screen in mind is in the overt need for diverse ethnicities. The overcompensation is the kind we see in revolving-ensemble TV shows like Law & Order and CSI. Everyone’s in the audience, and they all need to be represented. So we have Bruce Wayne hit on by some girl whose mother was a Bollywood actress, a half-Black half-Hispanic teenager getting spider-powers, and, in the panel above, the new Barbara Gordon looking quite uncannily like Priyanka Chopra, which could bode quite well for the actress’s future if the look catches on.

Piggy Chops as Batgirl? Way to make Ra One jealous, babe.

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First published Mumbai Mirror, October 19, 2011