I joked at the time that all I needed was for one of my cousins to offer me some Gamma-irradiated blood, and everything would be perfect. But I didn’t need to be green to be She-Hulk, no more than she needed to change herself to pretend to be Jennifer Smith. All I needed to do was summon up her confidence and her strength in my own toughest moments, to invoke her name when a situation threatened to drown me in law student Jennifer Walters-esque despair. One summer night, several years later, after playing pool at a bar with my high school friends, I saw a girl who had tormented me from kindergarten through twelfth grade enter the room. Immediately, I felt the signs of a panic attack rising within me, could feel myself slipping back into the meekness of my 18-year-old self, quaking with fear, changing my route in the hallway between classes to avoid her notice. But no, I told myself in the bar that night. You’re She-Hulk. You’re better than this. You’re better than her. Head held high, I imagined a green hue sweeping across my skin and marched out of the bar with my friends to a more desirable locale.
But if Jennifer Walters had become my alter ego, my avatar, another comic book character would become something else entirely: an inspiration. In that same semester that I discovered She-Hulk, I also discovered Captain America. Unlike most fans, I had no preconceptions about the character, no false impressions of a right-wing jingoistic patriot that some new Cap readers seem to possess. And what I found on the page was a man whose views largely reflected my own: a sense of patriotism that doesn’t ignore America’s flaws, and a faith in the country’s capacity to someday live up to its ideals. I also found a hero who was a genuinely good man – a purely heroic, if imperfect, figure to combat the glut of antiheroes and misunderstood villains who capture the imaginations of so many other fannish folk. I’d always been a fan of the good guys, and Steve Rogers was the best guy there was.
It didn’t take long for Captain America to become my favorite superhero. I began reading every comic in which he appeared, amassed a small collection of Captain America toys and T-shirts, and even brought a tiny stuffed Captain America with me when I went with a friend in Philadelphia to visit the Liberty Bell. Captain America tapped into my love for American history (particularly of the twentieth century), my interest in World War II stories, and my interest in good guy superheroes punching Nazis in the face. But more important than my fandom was my identification. If Jennifer Walters was wish-fulfillment, an outward expression of inner desires, Steve Rogers was an ideal I wanted to live up to. I saw in myself parts of Captain America, good and bad: his sense of justice, his stubbornness, his desire to please everyone, his awkwardness in certain social situations that his decades-long sleep hadn’t prepared him for. But in Steve Rogers, unlike in myself, those traits were all magnified. I sought justice, but sometimes didn’t have the determination to carry through with it. I strove to be good and kind to all people at all times, but I frequently faltered. Steve Rogers was given the Super-Soldier Serum to transform him into the peak of human perfection, but it wasn’t his body or his fighting skills I admired. It was his equally-perfect soul – a soul that was pure without crossing the line into the unrealistic and superhuman – that attracted me to the character and made me ask myself, without embarrassment, “What would Captain America do?”
When Marvel killed off Steve Rogers in March 2007, I didn’t fret. I’d already learned, less than a year into my comic book reading tenure, that death is rarely permanent in comics. But what followed was a spate of comics that ruminated at length on the role of Steve Rogers in the Marvel Universe, meditations on his meaning as a character and as a symbol in the wake of his death. I read all of these comics, and by the end of the summer of 2007, I realized just how much time I’d been spending thinking about Captain America. Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place. I was about to become a senior in college, and with senior year would come the expectation of writing a 100-page senior thesis. As an English major, I was free to look to any medium to apply my skills in textual analysis, within reason. So I chose Captain America comics, and their relation over time to changes in American culture, politics, and history. What had started as a private symbol and obsession, a personal inspiration, became my academic calling card, and it was a chapter from that thesis that ultimately earned me entrance, two years later, into the Media and Cultural Studies graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I would begin a serious, focused, scholarly study of superhero comic books.
Three weeks after I turned in my senior thesis, however, my paternal grandfather passed away. He was just shy of his 82nd birthday and had long been waging a battle against increasingly failing health. John Wesley Smith was a World War II veteran, a man who’d lived through decades of a changing America. He was a stubborn, reserved, but intensely likable blue collar guy who worked on the brickyards that built my hometown and saw three children and eight grandchildren grow to adulthood. He lived ten minutes away from my family’s house, and for a few months during my freshman year of high school, he stayed in our home after suffering a heart attack. He was, by far, my closest family member outside of my parents and my younger brother, and I loved him dearly.
I’d compared him to superheroes before – when I discovered he’d once worked on a shrimp boat, the connections to X-Man Cyclops were inescapable. But though my grandfather didn’t live to read my thesis, didn’t even live to see my cousin and me become the first in our family to graduate college a few weeks later, I began to realize in the wake of his death who he’d become in my mind: Captain America. Here was my Cap, my heroic veteran full of kindness and generosity who never quite did get the hang of newfound technology.
During the thesis-writing process, I’d borrowed some of my grandfather’s compilations of the music of his youth – big band and swing – to play as I worked, getting me into the mindset of a character that came to adulthood in the 1940s. When my grandfather died, I played those same CDs again, and cried, and imagined that if Captain America were real, he’d certainly find a way to come to the funerals of as many World War II veterans as he could. I imagined Steve Rogers showing up in disguise at my grandfather’s funeral and striking up conversations with the mourners, giving me the chance to talk about the man my grandfather had been and how he’d very much been my own private Captain America. It was my most visceral fantasy, and possibly the most self-indulgent, but in a time of grief it was exactly what I needed. Even in this dark hour, I looked to this fictional superhero for the guidance and support that I needed but couldn’t possibly articulate.
All of this brings me back to the Capitol rotunda of Madison, Wisconsin, and the union protests of 2011. I had very personal reasons to support the protests: Not only was I a member of UW-Madison’s teaching assistants’ union, I was also the daughter and granddaughter of men who had worked their whole lives in union jobs, relying on those organizations to protect them and allow them to put food on their families’ tables. As a new Wisconsin resident, I was shocked to find a state that had seemed so liberal and progressive at first transform after election day into an autocracy with a man on top who refused to compromise or even listen to the opposite side, who claimed the destruction of half-century-old collective bargaining rights for state employee unions was a “budget” issue, and who showed no respect for the pre-existing laws of the state he now ran.
But what fueled my fire, what bolstered my righteous rage, was the thought that Captain America, and all the other heroes of my comic book fantasies, would not let this stand. These crusaders for justice had proven time and again that the mark of true patriotism was dissent, that peaceful protest and standing up for one’s rights was a valid and worthy goal, and that a group of like-minded souls might form to fight the foes no single hero could withstand. I fantasized about Captain America, Superman, Green Arrow, and a dozen other superheroes descending on the Capitol with speeches and defiance. I even imagined Bernie Rosenthal, Steve Rogers’s 1980s civilian girlfriend, bringing her legal expertise to the same college where she had, in the
comics, earned her law degree. But more than that, I imagined that we, the protestors, were the superheroes, that we were invoking their ideals and their passion and channeling it into our chants and phone campaigns and signs and marches and drum circles.
In drawing my inspiration from superheroes at these protests, I was far from alone. In the first week of the protests, I saw a man in a makeshift Captain America outfit standing outside the Capitol with a sign raised above his head that read “Unions Assemble!” Protest signs compared Governor Walker to everything from Darth Vader to the Joker, drawing on popular culture representations of evil to attempt to explain actions that seemed otherwise incomprehensibly mean-spirited. As the protests wore on, and the people of Wisconsin held the Capitol day and night for days on end, a “dance for democracy” corner was set up with music blasting, giving protestors a chance to dance and let off some excess energy. When I made my way over to the corner, I found a girl dancing her heart out while wearing Batman’s cowl. “Batman doesn’t dance” was my first thought, but then again, this was a girl. Maybe it was actually Stephanie Brown, the then-current Batgirl, fighting for justice and bouncing around through the night all at the same time.
While being a superhero comic book fan does not mean that a person resides in a childish fantasy world with no hint of maturity, it often means, in the absolute best sense, that we retain a childlike sense of wonder and empowerment. We’re all still that little girl twirling an invisible Lasso of Truth, gaining strength from the icons whose adventures we follow month after month. Like Catholic saints or Pagan gods and goddesses, superheroes represent a pantheon of figures that any fan can invoke at just the right moment. Whether we’re pretending we’re Pepper Potts to alleviate the pain of a boss’s ridiculous demands or channeling the confidence of the Black Cat while getting dressed up for a night on the town, we rely on these fictional icons as personal touchstones, constellations of traits and experiences from which we can draw strength. It doesn’t matter that Captain America isn’t real – my grandfather and Scott Walker are, and Cap’s spirit, his symbolic resonance, allowed me to mourn the former and fight against the latter. Every day I carry with me the confidence of Jennifer Walters, the principles of Steve Rogers, the wit of Hank McCoy, and the personal discipline of Scott Summers, prepared to deploy each at the most opportune time. Comic books have helped me to internalize heroism while recognizing my own, and for that I couldn’t be more grateful.
Burn, Baby, Burn
Lloyd Rose was, for ten years, the theater critic of The Washington Post. Prior to that, she was the Literary Manager at Arena Stage. She has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She wrote an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, and is the author of three Doctor Who novels and the Big Finish Doctor Who audio Caerdroia.
Like Botticelli’s Venus, she’s born from water. But Phoenix doesn’t gently drift to shore on a shell, tresses draped to conceal her charms. She erupts from an ocean crash like a rocket, her hair flying around her head, her body aggressively exposed by a skin-tight outfit. Her emergence is phallic, her presence overwhelmingly female, and few women who read comics have failed to love her.
As every fan knows, the original Phoenix – a new incarnation of X-Man Jean Grey, drably known up to that point as Marvel Girl – came to a bad end. Believing her friends dead, she fell under the spell (literally) of Mastermind, who with mental manipulation urged her most forbidden desires to emerge. They sure did. Among other side effects, a planet died, and so, soon after, did Jean/Phoenix.
The phrase “female empowerment” fits Phoenix like a ballet shoe fits a panther. She was way beyond that, a goddess of destruction unleashing days of wrath. Yet her beginnings are humble, even sleazy – some stirrings in the teen-aged libido of her co-creator (along with artist Dave Cockrum) Chris Claremont, stoked by a particularly memorable episode of The Avengers in which Diana Rigg appeared in a corset-and-boots ensemble accessorized with boa constrictor. He borrowed from the show the Hellfire Club (itself based on a real English organization that once hosted Benjamin Franklin as a guest), in which the villains dressed in eighteenth century finery and the women like dominatrixes. This is the company Mastermind introduces the mesmerized Jean into: a perverse, if stylish, gang who hope to control Phoenix for their own ends. Before they get their comeuppance, she shows a lot of leg.
Claremont was mocked at the time by some (male) comics fans and writers as having done nothing more than write up a personal sexual fantasy. But if lust can legitimately fuel major artists like Picasso and Joyce, why should it be banned from pulp? Yeah, there’s something a little snicker-worthy about Jean’s strutting around in an S&M outfit while the plot proceeds with an absolutely straight face. But then, realizing what’s been done to her, she more-or-less rips out Mastermind’s brain, leaving him a drooling husk. Joke’s over.
Phoenix owes more to Rigg’s Mrs. Peel than that one Avengers episode. John Steed’s first partner in the series had been blond, leather-clad Honor Blackman, a Tough Broad who could be as physically dangerous as a man. (Blackman also played the tough lesbian gang leader Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, whom only the supermale James Bond was studly enough to seduce.) She too has her descendents, notably Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien movies. But these characters, however talented the actresses, were basically conceived as guys with breasts. Rigg’s style was different – witty, sophisticated, and sleekly feminine without being vampish or girly. Her most famous avatar is Buffy, who could pound a vampire into dust then regret that she broke a nail in the process. (Though it turned out to be the quiet Willow who, in Joss Whedon’s description, “went all Dark Phoenix.”)
Comic book heroines prior to Phoenix didn’t have this sort of poise and self-sufficiency. In the Marvel Universe, they tended to have secondary powers – witchery, prehensile hair, becoming invisible (known in real life as fading demurely into the background). Jean Grey was an example of the type: She had a telekinetic power that moved things around and she left the heavy lifting to the boys. Phoenix is on a whole different level, yet she doesn’t simply borrow the fighting style and strength of a superhero. She’s a whirlwind rather than a missile. In spite of her explosive birth, Phoenix’s force isn’t phallic. It’s a spreading force-field, a cosmic tsunami.
When Jean-as-Phoenix visits her frightened parents, she tells them, “I am what I am.” A goddess, then, at the very least. But where in Western mythology is there a goddess like this? The Greeks relegated small aggressions to minor goddesses of spite, discord, etc.; petty, girly stuff. The Norse had Hel, but she was more spooky than raging. You have to go to India, to Kali’s precursor/aspect Durga, to find Wrath in its exaltation of power and terror. According to one source, when Durga first confronted the demon Mahishasura he, “underestimated her, thinking ‘How can a woman kill me, Mahishasur [sic] – the one who defeated the trinity of gods?’ However, Durga roared with laughter, which caused an earthquake.” She burns him to a crisp.
Unlike the monstrous Kali, Durga is beautiful. So is Phoenix, magnificently so in the way only a comic-book heroine can be – like a supercharged Pre-Raphaelite woman, all voluptuousness and masses of hair, but with a force even the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of sorceresses don’t have. Nor is it just her impossibly gorgeous body. John Byrne (who took over from Cockrum) may have at one point lovingly sketched her left buttock as she steps into the frame to confront the White Queen, but he also made her elegant and glorious, the curves of her body and hair like lines of force. Her joy in her power is the rapture of an athlete. If on one level she’s no more than a pin-up, on another she’s an illustration of male love for women, of awe, wonder, and appreciation. (And this in spite of the fact that Byrne didn’t like the character; he thought she was too powerful and disrupted the X-Men as a team.)
Byrne had drawn at least one Cosmic Woman prior to Phoenix: the Scarlet Witch, as possessed by an earth entity called Chthon. She lost that silly headdress and her wildly floating hair looked dangerous, like someth
ing that might electrocute you if you touched it. But she was only a warm-up for Phoenix, just as the pre-Mastermind Phoenix was only a warm-up for Dark Phoenix, the monster from Jean’s id. The corrupted Phoenix’s outfit mutated, in that handy comic-book way, from green to red, and the light around her (courtesy of colorist Glynis Wein) from yellows and golds to deep purple-black and a sickly-looking mauve, feverish and diseased colors. Frenzied with appetite, she became Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. Sure, it’s all a bit overwrought, even ridiculous. But some of the tale’s dark chords have a Wagnerian resonance.
There’s another resonance in the story too, at least for women. Claremont stuck to the letter of the comics-for-kids code in his story details. But any reader past puberty knew that Mastermind’s mental penetration and deception of Jean was a rape of her mind, and no one believed that, with such power over such a stunning woman, he wasn’t enjoying her body as well. When Jean briefly recovers her sanity before mutating into Dark Phoenix, she accuses Mastermind of using his powers to unleash her “darkest fantasies.” The twist is that, in spite of the set-up, those fantasies aren’t sexual.
Dark Phoenix attacks, torments, hates. She barely stops herself from harming her family, and when she takes on her former friends the X-Men, she’s out for blood. This isn’t lust, it’s scorched-earth rage. We’re looking at Hell-hath-no-fury, and it’s no longer a cute put-down. It’s the fury of the raped woman, the violence of rape turned outward – savage, merciless, beyond reason, all the male clichés about “crazy women” in full scalding flow. Obviously, she had to go.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 14
