Last week, Marvel launched a new Avengers movie, “Age of Ultron,” and this month it’s launching a new comic book, “A-Force.” Ultron is a robot with artificial intelligence who believes that the only way to achieve peace on earth is to exterminate the human race. The A-Force is a race of lady Avengers, led by She-Hulk, who come from a “feminist paradise,” but I don’t know what that could possibly mean, because they all look like porn stars.
Left to my own devices, I’d have said that the message here is that, yes, men are being rendered redundant by robots but, phew, women still have nice breasts. (Another new movie, “Ex Machina,” in which the robot who makes men redundant has nice breasts, is a twofer.) But that seemed cynical, so I decided to consult the experts: I went to see the movie with a bunch of ten-year-old boys, and then read the comic book with two of them. To protect their secret identities, we decided I’d use their superhero names. Captain Comics is in the fourth grade and knows more about Marvel than Stan Lee. Mr. What?—who, like me, is often radically and fundamentally puzzled—is my youngest son.
“Weak,” was Captain Comics’s verdict about “Age of Ultron.” There were backstory problems, he intimated, darkly. I believe these involved the thing borne out of a cradle, about two thirds of the way through the movie. Mr. What? reminded me that this thing’s name was Vision, but we both forgot why. Vision has a red face and looks like Satan, but is, I think, a good guy—it was hard to tell and, as Anthony Lane wrote last week in the magazine, harder to care. Captain Comics complained about the lack of character development. Also, he most certainly did not approve of the romance between the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). To wit: “Blech.”
The morning after we saw “Age of Ultron”—a sleepover was involved—Captain Comics and Mr. What? and I read the first issue of “A-Force” at the kitchen table, unheroically, over waffles. I asked the captain to tell me who the women on the cover were: a swarm of female superheroes.
“She-Hulk, Phoenix, Scarlet Witch, Storm, Medusa, Rogue, Wasp, Electra,” he began. “Rescue, Miss—no, Miss Marvel, Black Widow,” he trailed off, vaguely. “I think that’s Dazzler…”
“O.K., so why are they all here together?” I asked.
“Because they’re all women.”
“So what do you think when you look at them?”
“I know that they’re all women?”
Mr. What? and I were confused about a character who looks exactly like Iron Man, except she’s got these pointy iron, uh, mammary glands.
“I thought that was Lady Iron Man,” he said. Me, too.
No, Captain Comics said, “That’s Rescue.” Rescue, he explained, is Pepper Potts in an Iron Man suit of her own. (Like a boyfriend shirt?)
Then there was a goth girl: fishnet stockings, purple-and-black bustier.
“Her name is Sister Grimm!” Mr_. What?_ said. “She’s like the Brother Grimm, but not?” Girls are so lame.
We came across a lady wearing horns on her head and, covering her nipples, emerald snakeskin pasties.
“Ooh, that’s Loki!” Captain Comics said. (Loki, in the Thor movies, is Thor’s evil brother.)
“It’s the woman Loki,” Mr. What? said. (“You can, like, see her cleavage!” the captain said.)
I was confused. Is everybody girl-this and she-that? “Why are there female versions of the male ones?”
“There are no female versions of the male ones,” the captain explained. (Duh.) “There’s She-Hulk, which is a different Hulk. Then there’s Lyra, which is the Hulk’s daughter.” And Loki is not a female version of Loki. “They rebooted Loki and she’s female.”
“Oh… Loki just became female, like how Thor became female?” I asked, finally catching on.
“Wait,” Mr. What? said, alarmed. “What? Thor became female? This. Is. Freaking. Me. Out.”
In case you missed it—the announcement was made last year on “The View”—Thor became female because he’s a Norse god and I guess he can be whatever he wants, and Marvel is trying very hard to deal with the fact that its superheroes are mainly men and just turning them into women seemed as good a plan as any. It’s a little hard to keep up, true. But it’s not a bad plan. So it’s weird, and depressing, that "Age of Ultron" and the "A-Force" should have such pervy characters and costumes, since Joss Whedon, who directed both the first Avengers movie and this latest installment, and G. Willow Wilson, one of the creators of "A-Force," have been on a mission for a while now to re-invent the female superhero. Whedon, who created "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," once wrote a script for a Wonder Woman movie and has been outspoken about the need for more and stronger female characters in superhero movies. Wilson writes a comic book that features a female Muslim superhero named Kamala Khan and known as Ms. Marvel. Marvel, in other words, is trying to create better female characters. Like … She-Hulk? To quote Captain Comics: “Weak.” Also: Wait. What?
DC Comics tried to address this very same problem seventy-five years ago. In 1940, M. C. Gaines, who published "All-Star Comics," hired, as a consultant, William Moulton Marston, who held three degrees from Harvard, including a Ph.D. in psychology. Marston convinced Gaines that the best way to counter the “blood-curdling masculinity” of characters like Superman and Batman was by introducing a female superhero. In 1941, Marston created Wonder Woman. The sources of his inspiration were suffragists, feminists, and birth-control activists, including Margaret Sanger—who, unknown to the world, was a member of Marston’s family. Marston lived for most of his adult life in a ménage with three women: his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston; a librarian named Marjorie Wilkes Huntley; and Olive Byrne, who was Sanger’s niece. They together raised four children. (I wrote about these arrangements last year in a book called “The Secret History of Wonder Woman.”) Among the shared political commitments of the grown-ups in the family was opposition to the idea that pornography is obscenity. They once together wrote a letter to the editor of the New York World, complaining about the newspaper’s recent attack on pornographic magazines: “This family believes they furnish splendid material with which to teach children that the most lovely and sacred thing in the world is a real woman’s body.”
[caption id="attachment_3046649" align="alignright" width="320"][#image: /photos/59096d49ebe912338a3768e7] The artist George Petty sketches a woman in 1939.[/caption]
Marston, though, had more than a subscriber’s interest in pornography. Earlier this year, I took Mr. What? on a research trip to look at an amazing archive that I hadn’t seen while I was writing the book. There I found out that, in 1944, Marston signed a contract to write for True: A Man’s Magazine. True, a monthly, first appeared in 1937. Near the end of the war, in an effort to make the magazine more appealing to returning G.I.s, True_ _recruited the artist George Petty to provide his signature Petty girls—air-brushed pinups—as centerfolds for a three-year term, from 1945 to 1947. Petty painted the girls, Marston wrote the copy, under the heading, “An Analysis by Dr. William Moulton Marston, Noted Author and Lecturer on Female Psychology.” By 1948, True’s circulation had grown from 440,994 to 1,066,887.
Petty’s girls are big-breasted and tiny-waisted. They’d fit right in with the A-Force. Marston also gave them the kind of names girl superheroes still get. Petty painted a girl in a pink negligée. “Miss Elusive is afraid of love,” Marston wrote. “A secret fear of men and moments amorous was implanted in her submissive subconscious during childhood or early adolescence, perhaps by inhibiting instruction, or maybe by shocking experience.” Miss Heartsnatcher (for a Valentine’s issue) wears nothing but a see-through babydoll, and clutches a box of chocolates to her chest. Marston: “You’re a fascinating, clever, yet frankly ruthless man-huntress, my heart-enslaving young friend.” A Halloween issue featured “Miss Bewitching,” in a black witch’s hat: “You keep a private prison—the more bewitched prisoners, the merrier amusement for their bewitching captoress.” “Miss Career Girl” wears a red bathing suit: “You’ll go on working after you’re married? Then you are a career girl! You’ve got what it takes—energy, initiative, persistence, poise, and most essential of all, self-reliance” Miss Girl of Tomorrow wore nothing but a cellophane raincoat. “If, my fellow trouser-wearers, you should marry Miss Girl of Tomorrow,” Marston told readers of True, “Accept your Girl of Tomorrow’s frivolity, her inconsequence, and her refusal to freeze ebullient femininity into Victorian repression.” There was Miss She-Wolf, Miss Bashful, Miss Clinging Vine, Miss Pixie, Miss Wrong Number, and Miss Paddy-Whack, who liked to be spanked.
“Before Playboy’s_ Playmate of the Month, the Petty Girl reigned supreme,” Hugh Hefner later wrote. He’d grown up on them. “One of my favorites was a statuesque stunner in a bunny costume—probably the inspiration for the Playboy _bunny.” That would be: Miss Chummy Bunny.
Back at the breakfast table, the morning after Ultron tried to destroy the planet by crashing a levitated city into it, Captain Comics and Mr. What? and I kept reading the first issue of "A-Force." The story involves a threat to the island where they live—it’s called Arcadia—and a punishment inflicted on a character called “America.” I thought she was the female Captain America. Captain Comics told me I was wrong.
“Captain America didn’t become a woman,” he explained. “Captain America became black.” That, I believe, is a story for another day.
Maybe it’s not possible to create reasonable female comic-book superheroes, since their origins are so tangled up with magazines for men. True, they’re not much more ridiculous than male superheroes. But they’re all ridiculous in the same way. Dazzler, Miss Elusive, the Enchantress, She-Wolf, Medusa, She-Hulk. Their power is their allure, which, looked at another way, is the absence of power. Even their bodies are not their own. They are without force.
“All the girls here have, like, gigantic cleavages,” Captain Comics said, giggling.
“Why do they have gigantic cleavages?” I asked. Did it seem inevitable to these little boys, I wondered, that women would be drawn this way?
“Because they’re girls, Mom,” Mr. What? said. “What else is going to happen?” And he laughed, because it was funny, and he knew I would find that funny—the idea that nothing else was possible—the way it’s funny when Jessica Rabbit says, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” Alas, the Avengers are not funny, and neither are the She-Avengers.
There’s an underwater superhero in the A-Force, but we couldn’t figure out her name. All I remember is: she wore a seashell on each breast.
Yours, ever, Professor Why?
