Perhaps Wonder Boy's Time Has Come

[snurri]

scans_daily has Alan Moore's three-part essay on women in comics circa 1983, "Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies." Interesting to read that in the context of, well, now. There are more women working in comics, but a lot of the same crap is still happening; and folks like Frank Miller, whom Moore cites as doing right by female characters (i.e. Elektra), have gone a fair ways backwards in recent years. This is also interesting to read in light of the recent Dave Sim/Gail Simone confrontation (if it can really be called that, seeing as how Sim mostly weasels out of actual responses to Gail's fair and thoughtful questions) over at Sequential Tart's forums. That conversation is still going on, BTW, even though Sim has slunk away.

Every time I read an interview with Sim I remember the slimy feeling I got when I was slogging my way through Reads. It went beyond making me ashamed of my gender; by the end I was uncomfortable with being from the same species as such a hateful, backwards person. Yuck. It's amazing to me that he can still inspire these feelings in me a dozen years after I gave up on his work.

Comments

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

You know, when you think about the concept of women simply being sucking voids that drain our percious light it may sound creepy, but in another way it's extremely teh sex!

Anyway, Sim isn't even a sexist. He's clearly a late-onset schizophrenic. He just happened to already have a publishing concern when his brain went *b0rk*, so he wasn't reduced to handing out handwritten leaflets about sperm, Revelations, and gravity at the bus station like the rest of them.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. The way he described the black holes of creativity made me SO horny.

I would not be surprised if you were right about the schizophrenia. Dude is clearly not operating on a level reality field. But then, god speaks to him and not to me, so I'm probably just bitter.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It's not even an original misogyny. It's an old recycled one.

Obviously, his creative juices have been sucked.

(I quit sometime during Reads, too. )

[snurri.livejournal.com]

I'll bet it's that same creativity vampire that went after Cat Stephens.

[justinhowe.livejournal.com]

Well supposedly Sim came up with his ultimate story-arc while in the hospital emergency room after doing too much LSD. I stopped around Melmoth or whatever issue it was when it was 12 pages of feet walking down stairs and 20 pages of "essays" and letters.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Man, that's the best anti-drug message I've ever heard of. "Kids, don't do drugs or you'll end up turning into an idiot who espouses a freakish variation of your great-grandparents' values."

[barbmg.livejournal.com]

It's a shame because High Society remains my favorite comic book of all time, and he was a genious satirist.

In the end I couldn't really work up much hate for the misogyny schtick because he's so obviously a frothing-at-the-mouth nutball. I lost intrest after Melmoth as well, due to the great big ladlefulls of boring. (I'll admit I did laugh at the "no artistic lisence" pun at the end of the arc, but it was a loooong way to go for a joke.)

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the early collections (after the first) had some great stuff in them. The "kitchen cabinet" stuff especially.

I don't know that I hate Sim, 'cause that doesn't seem worth the energy, but I felt seriously creeped out and betrayed by Reads; like, this is what all of this is building up to? What a waste of my time. Which is of course the risk you take every time you pick up a book (or go to a play, or put on an album, or whatever) but it felt worse because of all that had gone before it.

[readingthedark.livejournal.com]

Wow. I think this is the first comic book thing where we're not on the exact same page. For me, it was heartbreaking to watch a creator succumb to a disturbing strain of schizophrenia and the thread made me sad again. I didn't like reading it.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Well, I had never heard the schizophrenia theory before Nick mentioned it. If that's the case, then of course that's heartbreaking; but I'm not sure where you guys are getting that information.

Not so much a theory as it is an admission

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

To me, it’s a gender thing. When I had my breakdown in ’79—when I was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic—it scared my wife and she called my mother and my mother came over and both my wife and my mother proceeded to get scared and decided that I needed to get medical help (the court of first resort for most emotion-based beings).

Re: Not so much a theory as it is an admission

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that; I hadn't seen that before.