Monstrous Women in Comics

Samantha Langsdale, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Samantha Langsdale, Elizabeth Rae Coody

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496827647
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody's edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women's real material experiences. Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.

Part 1

The Origins, Agency, and Paradoxes of Monstrous Women

1

Rewriting to Control: How the Origins of Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Mary Magdalene Matter to Women’s Perceived Power

Elizabeth Rae Coody

Origin stories are never innocent. When individuals or groups explain to each other how comics characters, nations, or artifacts came to be, they layer their values in their choices. Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Mary Magdalene each have several origins, some of which reflect different writers’ discomfort with women’s power—power so subversive and border-crossing it ends up portrayed as monstrous. Even comics that ordinarily revel in the transgressive are thrown into a tailspin when women have too much of their own power. Origins are used to explain away or undercut women’s agency. This chapter is not for those “wry pleasures of catching patriarchy up to its old tricks once again” (Johnson 2007, 16). Rather, people who are considered “monstrous” because they cross normative, patriarchal borders must insist on owning the power associated with origins. These boundary-crossing monsters include, but are not limited to, women and people outside of gender binaries, queer people, and many of those who disrupt white, largely Christian norms in the United States. Women must own the porous nature of our origin stories; I suggest we must be monstrous about it. This is not only a matter for comics but a larger question of origins that comics can help us understand.

What mainstream comics offer to an extent that other media forms do not is what I call a “multivocal” origin story. That is, North American, especially US, mainstream comics allow for and even encourage multiple origins, especially multiple retellings or “resellings” of an origin story. Both the traditionally ephemeral nature of comics and the direct market that governs comic shops have a pull toward “entry points” that makes it possible and preferable to regularly remind readers of how a character came to be. These are serialized magazine stories told in short episodes. The expectations for entry have historically been low; only the advent of the internet has created a vitriolic “know-everything” culture of high entry points. The point at which a reader jumps on a story track with a “Fabulous New #1” places her in a particular generation, even if these generations have the longevity of fruit flies in the current mainstream reboot strategy; a series that an editorial team sees as having potential might reboot within the calendar year. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, no. 1 (December 2015) joked that it was “only their second #1 so far this year!” (North and Henderson 2015, cover).

Creators, too, have a stake in the multivocal origin story when they try to add their voice to a character with a history. Long-term comic properties thrive on the judicious “ret-con,” or retroactive continuity, which gives authors the chance to give their own spin on an older property. A fresh voice can do wonders for an old character. Older properties in the comics canon are reaching toward the century mark; Wonder Woman has been having adventures since 1941. That does not sound like a long time when compared with ancient New Testament biblical stories, but in terms of the sort of demand placed on modern characters, it is a story that is showing some age. To remain viable, creators need to try new voices with old characters.

Beyond the market and creators, the multivocal origin has to do with the inherent double voice of the form. In comics, there is an active interplay of visuals and text and a flexibility of familiar visuals and reinterpretation possible over time, meaning that every page has the potential to speak with the voice of both what is seen in images and what is read in words nearly simultaneously. The images usually speak first. As Ann Marie Seward Barry says: “The logic of the image is also associative and holistic rather than linear, so that not only does the image present itself as reality, but it also may speak directly to the emotions, bypassing logic, and works according to alogical principles of reasoning” (1997, 78). When an image is combined with words as in a comic strip, the words become secondary as the language of images becomes primary. What makes this domination or first impression of art important to understanding comics is the way the art opens meanings. The art of comics allows for bundles of information that the reader interprets to his or her context and understanding of the story context.

The medium of comics matters to my interpretation of the function of origin stories here. This chapter will set up a specific pattern around origins that can be applied to other situations. The pattern begins when there are at least two origin stories. At least one origin story is uncomfortable for some specific but often unsaid reason. Changes to these origin stories point to specific cultural discomfort over women’s agency (their monstrous will to subvert patriarchal expectations) in nuanced ways. The shift in origins can help us identify the patriarchal discomfort that these women have highlighted more precisely. That is, changes to the origins can show us what is deemed border-crossing or monstrous about these women in the ways they are characterized as unnatural by their respective patriarchal cultures.

In this study, I address three examples of women who cross patriarchal boundaries in their origins: a long-running comics superhero character (Wonder Woman), a recent chaotic comics character (Harley Quinn), and a biblical character (Mary Magdalene). I have chosen women whose stories inspire women in the real world: Wonder Woman has been a feminist icon for decades; Harley Quinn, a wildly popular cosplay model and daring character that often inspires women to play up their chaotic power; and Mary Magdalene, an inspiration for women who seek a position of power in the Christian Church. All three cross the boundaries set around the types of power that are proper to women in a patriarchal society, and then in retellings of their stories, this boundary-crossing is erased, shamed, or otherwise taken in a new direction. This study concentrates on the way that retelling their origins serves to quell their power but also on how alternative retellings offer a chance to reclaim that power. Comparing these women characters across distinct times and inside and outside comics can show the usefulness of analyzing their types of “monstrous” qualities. These are women whose quality of the “monstrous is produced at the border which separates those who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not” (Creed 1993, 11). By using these stories across time, we can reflect on the real-life implications of encouraging women to retell their own stories from multiple angles.

Wonder Woman Magically Arrives

In part because of the many-decades-long view we can take with Wonder Woman, she gives us one of the most transparent instances of this change in origin stories as an indicator of patriarchal culture anxiety. When Gloria Steinem adopted Wonder Woman as the cover image for the first full-size edition of Ms. magazine in July 1972, she embraced exactly the most “monstrous” and boundary-crossing of Diana’s qualities, even insisting to DC Comics’ Dick Giordano that she get “Paradise Island back as her origin story” as part of a play for a revival (Desta 2017). There are far more than two Wonder Woman origin stories to compare, but this chapter concentrates on one aspect of two important versions to show how this pattern works. Although the character first debuted in All-Star Comics, no. 8, it is not until Wonder Woman, no. 1 (May 31, 1942) that readers learn how Wonder Woman came to be in a set origin story. In this story, she is the product of a doubly virgin birth. First, Hippolyte is the Queen of the Amazons, all of whom Aphrodite (the goddess of love) made to be her ideal women—fierce warriors able to protect themselves from the blood-thirsty and abusive men that populate the globe. Her name switches spellings to “Hippolyta” in later works, but this is a sign of editorial inconsistency that I have used as the authors do. Here, Hippolyte lives with her sisters on Paradise Island, where no man may enter. She is not given much of a motive more than the generally understood need at the time for women to have children, but she seeks the teachings of Athena in order to mold her own daughter out of clay. Aphrodite gives her daughter life and names her Diana. The page in question is a “word-specific” one; the pictures illustrate what the words say. The art squeezes around her words across four crowded panels emphasizing the layers of meaning and allusion packed into this story; the moon goddess Diana (“mistress of the chase”), Pygmalion’s worship of Galatea, the strength of Hercules, the thunderbolts of Zeus, all the swiftness of Mercury are all present in Wonder Woman’s beginnings.

Perhaps cynically, it is no surprise that the next creator changed the origin story to run from this sort of undisguised advocacy of women’s superiority to men. Wonder Woman was too much of a monstrous boundary crosser. Robert Kanigher, who wrote and edited Wonder Woman starting in 1946 and for over twenty years, made such changes as giving the title a romantic focus, taking away Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls, and, more to the point of this chapter, changing Diana’s origins to be the child of members of the opposite sex and giving the story a tragic rather than triumphant focus.¹

Wonder Woman’s origin is convoluted, even from the beginning; the story’s historical complexity invites changes that the compact origins of Batman and Superman do not. Her story is more difficult to follow than those of the other persons of the DC trinity. Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered, and he seeks out justice in varying forms across many different styles of comics, but his core origin story always remains. It is multivocal but unified. Superman’s story is so well known that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely could create a four-panel introduction for All-Star Superman that compressed his entire origin into an elegant series of images and the words: “Doomed Planet / Desperate Scientists / Last Hope / Kindly Couple” (Morrison, Quitely, and Grant 2007, 11). Wonder Woman has not shared this elegance since her very first origin story. Arguably the fact that she is a woman is already a complication that Batman and Superman do not share—that is, by being a woman, she is from the beginning not the normative superhero type. Changes to her origins are an attempt to bring “man”-centric logic of later publishers to a story designed originally to be woman-centric. They are all multivocal stories, but only Wonder Woman’s story does not hold a center. That is, Wonder Woman’s origin story invites change because it does not align comfortably with a patriarchal world view. The number of changes both subtle and major to her story run from Kanigher’s 1940s “tragic genesis” version of events to even her most recent incarnations (Hanley 2014, 99).

The focus in this chapter, though, is on a more recent change to Wonder Woman’s origin from “The New 52” reboot. In 2011, DC cancelled all of its ongoing comics titles (not just Wonder Woman) and started them over at #1 in a campaign called “The New 52.” Pursuant to an emphasis on “realism” by the DC team, “The New 52” version of Wonder Woman could no longer be the creation of women using mystical means without male involvement. In issue no. 3 of the new Wonder Woman series, we find the Brian Azzarello version of the story with Cliff Chiang’s art. Hippolyta has told Wonder Woman that she was made of clay to be the perfect Amazon—that is, “no male seed” created her (2012). But, in issue no. 3, Wonder Woman and readers learn that Hippolyta has lied about Diana’s origins. Instead, Hippolyta had a consensual and erotic affair with Zeus that left her pregnant. The page that reveals Zeus in this context strategically places a huge sword blade to block a view of his crotch (i.e., the necessary equipment for the act) while Hippolyta’s narration emphasizes “There was a man” (Azzarello and Chiang 2012, 9; emphasis in the original) (fig. 1.1).

Hippolyta is happy to have a child and happy to be left alone by the father. She knows that Zeus’s wife, Hera, has a reputation for murdering the illicit offspring of her husband’s many romances, and his partners, too. She fabricates the story about making Diana out of clay. People are convinced, but Hippolyta is still beset by Hera. Diana is resented by the bitter residents of Paradise Island. Rather than being her loyal sisters, these women bully and sneer at her. They call her “clay” as an insult, even before the story is debunked. The magic is gone from her origin. Yes, there is still an affair with a god to be addressed, but asexual reproduction is removed. It is Hippolyta’s unusual maternity that crosses the line into the “monstrous-feminine” (Creed 1993). What made the original Hippolyte shocking was her ability to make a child without a phallus, as a “phallic woman” (Creed 1993, 156–58). That is, Hippolyta has the abilities of the phallus without consulting a man; her phallic qualities are replaced with a vengeance in “The New 52” story. The story eliminates the elements that the patriarchal culture deems outside of the ordinary imagination. Hardest of all to imagine seems to be harmony between women. There is no feminist utopia of any shape here.

Figure 1.1. Hippolyta narrates her meeting with Zeus that leads to Wonder Woman’s conception. Note the strategically placed sword. Wonder Woman (2011–2015), no. 3, p. 8, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. Copyright 2012, DC Comics.

What is the source of cultural discomfort here? First, taking away women’s power to create life alone means that reproduction without a male contributor makes the culture uncomfortable even today. It also changes the nature of conflict in Wonder Woman; Azzarello’s Diana is not set against a “Man’s World” that threatens her sisters, as William Moulton Marston’s was. The conflicts here are in-group: between women, most of whom are related to one another. No longer is Wonder Woman a product of a loving paradise, full of brilliant and supportive women; she’s an outcast even before her birth is questioned. However, this is not a matter of recovering a story for 2017 from 1942. I want to say clearly that the first-wave feminist paradise that Marston created was, if I am the most charitable I can be, misguided. He based his claims about women’s potential to lead on perceived biological differences between the sexes. Paradise Island was full of white women of a certain sort of perceived perfect shape—it is not innocent in terms of its racial ideals around white superiority, a single “correct” voluptuous body type for women, and strict biological gender identity. Despite the entertaining, even beguiling naïveté of the 1942 story, it is not innocent of biases from its culture and time. Origins never a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Origins, Agency, and Paradoxes of Monstrous Women
• Part 2: The Body as Monstrous
• Part 3: Childbearing as Monstrous
• Part 4: Monsters of Childhood
• Part 5: Taking On the Role of Monster
• About the Contributors