Oh, Steven Grant. Now I see why DC never let you write Wonder Woman:
I see today’s tempest in a teapot is superhero fans’ in an uproar over PLAYBOY painting a Wonder Woman costume (with vinyl thighboots and sans tiara) on their nude Playmate of the Year, who recently got fired from CELEBRITY APPRENTICE for, of all things, doing what her project manager told her to do. Turns out PLAYBOY is a sexist magazine that emphasizes female physical beauty over all other attributes. What a shocker! (Personally, I was hitting puberty about the time bodypainted nudes first became the rage, so though I know better intellectually it still counts as sort of a turn-on for me.) Most amusing aspect of this tempest: the sense that Wonder Woman has now been tainted as a role model for girls. A what now? We’re talking about Wonder Woman, right? Bazoongas out to here, skintight costume, high heels, bare legs and emphasized crotch, slave bracelets on her wrists Wonder Woman. Right? The Wonder Woman whose creator intended her to warm girls up to the joys of freedom via bondage and submission, right? If you think Wonder Woman is a role model, bodypainted nudes are about the least of your problems…
Edited to add, in contrast, Greg Rucka:
[A]s for those who say that Diana is a fetish character, 1) find me a superhero who isn’t (“Spandex,” says Mark Waid, “is a privilege, not a right.”) and 2) how many of those people would burst a vessel, if not a vital organ, if Playgirl ran a similar cover/pictorial with a male, semi-erect model painted up as Batman?
I call bullshit.
(Worth pointing out: Rucka is not responding to Grant – He wrote that comment a couple of days earlier than Grant’s column was posted. I just thought the contrast was interesting, is all.)
January 17th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Did he just call them “bazoongas”?
I hate you Graeme.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I don’t know, would anyone (outside of WB/DC execs)burst a vessel if Playgirl had a cover with a male, semi-erect model painted up as Batman? The only outrage I could see would be from people (including myself) wondering how someone could be painted up as Batman and not be fully erect.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
At least you didn’t post the bit by Rucka where he accuses Playboy of plotting against Hillary Clinton with this.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Erech, Graeme didn’t call them “bazoongas”, Steven Grant did.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Jason – Oh I know that.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
“The only outrage I could see would be from people (including myself) wondering how someone could be painted up as Batman and not be fully erect.”
Well, if the pic was taken immediately after painting that area? Maybe, maybe not. The paint could be cold.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
FINALLY. EXACTLY what I have been thinking. The outrage at the Wonder Woman cover is so amazingly hypocritical its funny. Women in superhero comics ALL LOOK LIKE THAT COVER. Women in superhero comics ARE ALL DRAWN TO LOOK LIKE BODY-PAINTED NUDE MODELS. If somebody drew Wonder Woman flat-chested and wide-hipped or, god forbid, short and muscular, sales would plummet.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I prefer the Darwyn Cooke warrior goddess WW, myself. But that’s just me, I suppose.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Really, most superheroes in comics are really colorful nudes with no genitalia, too. Spandex doesn’t contour to every little ripple of muscle, it stretches over it. So showing all the muscle definition with unrealistically tight costumes goes for both men and women in comics.
I think the individually wrapped breasts is a relatively new thing, though. Wonder Woman actually doesn’t look like she just has body paint on because her top stretches over the breasts. On the other hand, the way that Supergirl was drawn when she was unveiled in ‘Batman/Superman’ had the breasts individually wrapped in a way that would be hard to make cloth do. *That* looked like body paint.
As for these particular pictures, it doesn’t matter that it’s a Wonder Woman costume they made with the paint. It’s Playboy. This is what they do. If they had a woman in a nurse uniform it wouldn’t say anything about the nursing profession.
January 17th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Joel, in the books WW is powerful first, attractive second or third or fourth or lower. She’s also heroic, loyal, and courageous. In playboy, she’s stripped down (ha!) to being just attractive. No heroism. No loyalty. No courage. Just boobs. Yes, that’s the point of that magazine but that doesn’t make it okay. It just means that it shouldn’t have been done. I would hope that you would understand why such a depiction would anger some people.
On top of that, comparing Tiffany Fallon to Lynda Carter is just outlandish.
If WW were drawn as frumpy and plain-looking, I would continue to buy the book as long as the writing continued to be good. I buy the book to see her fight Nazis and room with gorillas not because she’s wearing a bathing suit. I’ll bet a sizable majority feel the same way.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
I just can’t believe that, in 2008, Americans are still capable of being outraged or offended by Playboy magazine.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Isn’t Greg Rucka the one who did a whole issue of Checkmate about a woman being dismembered and tortured? Appearing on the cover of Playboy is about the least objectionable thing that could happen to a female character in Dan Didio’s rapetastic DC Universe.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:30 am
If you are not interested in comics at all and read this discussion about WW, you´d had to think that this comic sells hundreds of thousands every month and is given for free in every girl school because of the role-model aspect – instead of struggling to keep it´s range in the sellchart.
And this discussion is always the same. I don´t get it. No other comic character´s perception by a lot of people is more divorced from it´s actual sales and impact than WW.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Greg Rucka’s also the guy who presented WW as being so dumb that she kills a guy who’s claiming to be mind controlling Superman, even though that guy was thought to be a friend until what, 10 minutes before his murder? Without even trying something else to buy time to make sure that the guy’s not a victim of mind control himself. Quite a role model he presented there.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Almost no one is commenting on the image of a body painted and semi-erect Batman on the cover of Playgirl? Avoiding the image possibly? Picture it guys. Picture Batman giving the viewer a come hither stare. A taut butt, possibly in a Bat-thong…
January 21st, 2008 at 1:09 am
All superheroes were pretty much fethisized, as scans_daily shows the Superman comics were no exception.
http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/4830309.html
January 21st, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I think the controversy over this is much ado about nothing myself, but there is one persistent fallback position defenders of the cover keep taking that bugs me:
“It’s Playboy. This is what they do.”
Um…wait, no. Not that. That’s what I said over on Comics Should Be Good! That can’t be it. It’s…oh, wait, here it is:
“If they had a woman in a nurse uniform it wouldn’t say anything about the nursing profession.”
Yeah. Actually, some people might disagree with that, and those people are…um…nurses, actually. nursingadvocacy.org spends a lot of time analyzing the way nurses are depicted in popular media, and they don’t seem crazy about members of their profession being consistently shown as masturbation fodder. I’m not climbing up on a soapbox here or anything, I’m just saying that this is a bullshit argument.
The More You Know ~ *