Review of Juvenile Humour, By Johnathan

My own juvenile humour, that is. I'm unloading all of the comic book panels that I set aside specifically because they made me snicker like a 13-year-old in Health class. They've always seemed a bit out of place when put in a review with more innocent panels, so I figured that I'd get them all over with at once. So ignore the cultured, mature portions of your brain, settle back and enjoy these bits of puerile wonderment.

Okay, so first up is some bathroom humour:

"Thanks for saving us from being ridiculed because our fire station burned down, Superboy! Now all we have to live down is the fact that you peed all over us!" I know it only works if you don't look at the picture too hard, but I like this one. I am entirely certain that a superpowered teenage boy would take any opportunity to pee out fires. It's just a given.

JOHN APPROVED

Lord knows I love Matter-Eater Lad, but this is an instance of him believing the anti-Bismollian propaganda that his powers aren't good enough to qualify him for Legion membership. Even as he makes a pretty good case for his inclusion in the group he's convinced that the only way he'll be able to keep his membership is to pander to Sun Boy's sick sense of humour. Don't do it, Matter-Eater Lad! With every iron bar you pretend to fellate you'll lose more and more of your self-respect! Take the moral high ground! Take smaller bites!

NOT APPROVED

You're gonna have to click on this one. Go ahead, I'll wait.

You heard the man, he can take it from both sides. In fact, Silver Age Superman was so invulnerable that a threesome involving a helicopter and a gorilla was the minimum that he required to achieve satisfaction - why else do you think that he avoided shacking up with Lois or Lana for so long?

JOHN APPROVED

Booster Gold gets flashed by an android. This was from the start of the 'wacky' Justice League days, so I'm not too sure whether it was intentional or not. Whether it was or it wasn't is immaterial. What matters is that Booster's got a great look on his face. More villains should run around naked, if only for the added element of surprise. Plus, Superman would look super-uncomfortable if he had to fly a naked Lex Luthor to the police station.

JOHN APPROVED

Uh, Supergirl? You should look just a bit less pleased with yourself while you explain that sort of thing.

I've got a theory that Saturn Girl's telepathic powers let her know exactly what Supergirl was about to tell her and that she interrupted so that she wouldn't have to hear it spoken aloud. And then she put Proty II in a safehouse until the Legion could work out some way to get through to Supergirl about the concept of 'dating within your species.'

NOT APPROVED

These guys are from an Atom backup story in Action Comics from the early eighties:

The Atom interferes with Plan A, so the muscle-bound bad guys charge off to the bedroom for Plan B. "Okay," you say, "this is kind of amusing when taken out of context. But why have you included it here, among so many scintillating examples of humour at its highest?" As usual when I put words in your mouth, I'm glad you asked. This panel belongs here because when they come charging back out of the bedroom they're dressed like pirates.

See? Now that's funny.

JOHN APPROVED

Last one, this time from an issue of The Brave and the Bold featuring Karate Kid, who's come back in time to clear up all of the dangling plotlines from his canceled series, and Batman, who's just doing his thing.

I'd just like to draw your attention to the fact that the cover page for this issue, seen here:

could and should be the poster for a softcore porno movie.

Batman! Karate Kid! Their forbidden love threatened to destroy society as we know it! But they refused to be stopped, refused to dampen the white hot passion of their hearts, choosing instead to dampen the white silk sheets of their beds!

Together, they are Terrorists of the Heart!

JOHN APPROVED

Review of Comic Book Weirdness Toward Women, By Johnathan

As some of you might have heard, the traditional comic book is not the most enlightened place when it comes to the 50% plus of our species that has breasts... but not the ones that have man-breasts - those are dudes. Female superheros are thin on the ground, they have lousy costumes, they get murdered and raped and so on and so on (see Living Between Wednesdays for some excellent writing on the subject as it applies to today's comics, by an actual girl who reads comics and is funny). Me, I'm still stuck in the past, so you get to hear about how women got the short end of the stick in the comics of the Sixties and Seventies.

There's a lot to cover here, so let's break it down:

1. Female Characters' Costumes.

Heading into the Seventies, the costumes that the ladies of the comics world were wearing got pretty ridiculous (the guys also had stupid outfits, but that's a tale for another time). A good example comes to us from the Legion of Superheroes, as is so often the case. Let's look at Saturn Girl, who was a tough customer from the get-go, a founding member of the Legion, two times Legion leader and had a decent costume:

As I said: nice. Kind of like the Canadian flag, if Canada was in outer space. Which I assume is the case, a thousand years hence. And look at her unmask that fraudulent Legion applicant! Smart as a whip, I tells ya.

Then, all of a sudden, this happens:

Eep and jeepers. She's got no nose, she's wearing a bathing suit and posing like a porn star. It happened to basically every female member of the Legion (except Phantom Girl - she just got some bellbottoms, bless her). Look, here's Night Girl before:

She's seven feet tall and kicks ass. Even though her powers only work in the darkness she was pretty consistently awesome. After:

Pointlessly skimpy costume, loss of distinctive hair, considerably shorter, etc. The story that this is taken from mostly consists of her getting beaten up by the bad guys over and over until her boyfriend comes to bail her out. Blarg.

2. Career Heroines Not Wanted

This is possibly the worst bit of cheering-up that I've ever seen. "Don't worry your pretty little head. You've lost your duplicate self and you no longer have super powers, but now you can be a devoted wife! Awesome, right?" Getting married was always the cue for super-heroines to retire, though this specific case might have just been a way for the writers to get Duo Damsel out of the way so they could relax and stop trying to find ways to make her power seem useful.

3. This One Panel, Like, Creeps Me Out.

This one's not really a trend, but here seems as good a place as any to bring it up. The panel is from a story where Colossal Boy is dealing with his feelings for Shrinking Violet, who he can't woo because she's in love with Duplicate Boy, who could totally kick his ass. Colossal Boy's doing okay with the urge-controlling, too - right up until this panel, where he gets incredibly creepy. She's your "flower girl", huh? I'm guessing that she put in a request not to be sent on any more missions with him for a while pretty soon after this little uncomfortable moment. Additional creepy element: this is during the period where Colossal Boy's costume didn't really include pants.

4. General Background Misogyny.

Here are a few of my favourite bits of casual contempt:

Mordru kicked Mon-el and Superboy all to hell for a couple of issues, while these three tricked him with about five minutes work. That's not ironic, Mon-el. That's you being a fucking idiot.

I just like this one because Superboy thinks that someone having an ape-man as a counterpart in an alternate reality is *way* more likely than them being a woman.

Female androids are also pretty unlikely. Also: can you really not hit a lady, Superboy, or are you just copping a feel?

Last up, here's Timber Wolf acting like a tool. His teammate just crashed her spaceship and he takes the opportunity to make a joke about women drivers. Ass.

Unsurprisingly, this is all NOT APPROVED. However, there is one upside to all of this: every once in a while it gets turned around. Every time the girls get a leg up the guys are just totally emasculated. Look:

They're very sad, poor things. They've been outclassed by the ladies and have to pout and it's hilarious and

JOHN APPROVED

A Few Quick Reviews of Some Recurring Patterns That I've Noticed In the Comics of Yesteryear, By Johnathan

Rather than do four small reviews, I have decided to serve them all up in a single entry, like a delicious platter of tiny foodstuffs. I think that I might call them 'Reviewlets,' or maybe 'Opinion Mini Quiches.' No matter, on with the ridiculousness!

First up:

The Tendency of Male Versions of Female Superheros to Wear the Exact Same Costume as Their Originals (Opinion Mini Quiche):

Take a look at this:
Saturn Girl and Princess Projectra are being manhandled by their male counterparts. I do admit that 'Prince Projectur' doesn't look too bad (though I question his choice of pants), but let's take a closer look at Saturn... Boy? Lad? Male.

He's wearing a bathing suit, folks. The white modesty panels that he's installed on the sides do nothing to disguise the fact that he took this directly out of Saturn Girl's closet. And gender-flipped doppelgangers do this every time - it's like there's a union and they'll either cover dental or the cost of costume tailoring.

NOT APPROVED

Next:

Over-Zealous Recapping (Opinion Mini Quiche):

Check this out:
In just two panels - two poorly, poorly-written panels - they've established the names of the whole Kent family, the names of their erstwhile visitors, how everyone relates to one another, and that Clark Kent (son of Jonathan and Martha [wife to Jonathan {Kent, Father to Clark} and mother to Clark {who is Superboy}, as well as girlhood friend to Lisa {mother to Kathy}] and secretly Superboy [Superboy is Clark {Superboy} Kent]) is actually Superboy. I'm surprised that they didn't squeeze in the origin of Beppo the Super-Monkey, honestly.

Now I understand that the average reader of Superboy comics circa 1970 probably needed this sort of thing - they weren't the media-savvy mental giants that we are today - but really: couldn't they have stretched it out a bit more?

NOT APPROVED

Hup!

Misogyny (Opinion Mini Quiche):

Simply put, Superboy kept the sisters down. Look at this:

So basically, Lana Lang got this alien belt, see, and she could wear it because she had such a slim waist, see, and it made her pretty much the equal of ol' Supes. Only drawback was that the belt functioned using advanced powers of magnetism, and so could only protect Lana from metallic projectiles such as bullets and not, say, rocks. Which is, I admit, a crappy weakness for someone to have. However: I do not see why this logically led to the destruction of the belt. Should someone whose only weakness (quick recap: Superboy's [Clark {Superboy} Kent] weakness is Kryptonite [Irradiated shards of the destroyed planet Krypton, home planet of Beppo the Super-Monkey]) seems to be about as common as sandstone, and who further seems to mention his susceptibility to it in every conversation that he ever has be allowed to take away someone's powers because they themselves have a weakness? Answer: no. Chauvinist pig.

NOT APPROVED

Last one!

Text Boxes With Hands (Opinion Mini Quiche):

I don't know if this was the work of one artist over at DC, or if it was a fad for a while, but text boxes with arms and hands that pointed at each other and so forth were all the rage for a while.

Witness:

Now these guys were totally awesome.

JOHN APPROVED