InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "BELIEVE IT!"

drsevarius (drsevarius) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-09-04 14:44:00

Entry tags:

char: batgirl/oracle/barbara gordon, char: batman/bruce wayne, char: joker, char: robin/nightwing/dick grayson, char: starfire/koriand'r, creator: joe bennett, creator: marc andreyko

Dick and Babs: Awkward!

This is from Nightwing Annual #2 by Marc Andreyko and Joe Bennett

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	kingrockwell 2009-09-04 07:33 pm UTC (link)
	Last Days of Animal Man is a bad example of all of the characters involved. It's not fair to judge anyone by it, except Gerry Conway. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	batcookies 2009-09-04 08:13 pm UTC (link)
	Green Lantern is awesome in it. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kingrockwell 2009-09-04 08:32 pm UTC (link)
	I'll give you that one. Everything's better with Space Whales, even if said Space Whales are the only good part. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-09-04 09:08 pm UTC (link)
	Is it a spacewhale? I thought it was an Earth whale. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kingrockwell 2009-09-05 03:12 am UTC (link)
	Eh, as a Green Lantern it counts as spacey, no matter it's origins! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	ashtoreth 2009-09-05 01:43 am UTC (link)
	What? A GL is in Conway's Animal Man????? (Reply to this) (Parent)

04nbod
2009-09-04 09:59 pm UTC (link)

a quote from todays DC Source
'“My first plot had me making out with Starfire for 22 pages,” he said. “But that got shot down for whatever reason.”'
A joke, yes. I don't think sex should be the first thing we associate with any character.
Same in countdown where she was called a stripper. Same in her introduction when she was written as 'playboy' sexy to lure Dick from Bruce.

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	04nbod 2009-09-04 10:09 pm UTC (link)
	http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/files/2009/09/tns_17_dylux-3-copy.jpg (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	starpiper 2009-09-05 12:58 pm UTC (link)
	Off-topic, but am I the only one who looks at that and thinks, "Hey, Wally and Roy are being played by the Weasley twins."? (Reply to this) (Parent)

freddylloyd
2009-09-04 10:21 pm UTC (link)

I don't think sex should be the first thing we associate with any character.

Yet sex is a huge part of what Starfire has always represented. As George Pérez said, her attitude toward sex is part of what differentiated her from the other team members: "And in creating the new Teen Titans, the one thing I enjoyed was the fact that of the three new characters we created, two of them were women. And one of them, Starfire, was definitely created for pure sex. The fact is she's sexy, she enjoys sex, and she makes no bones about it. She attacks Robin in the second issue." And of course she was drawn to look out-of-this-world sexy, in a certain way.

Starfire embodies, I'd say, sex with love and—what can make her disquieting for us in the west—without guilt. Sex doesn't make Kory "cheap" or vulnerable or despicable. The male gaze doesn't bother her. And her capacity to love, emotionally and physically, doesn't impede her capacity to fight.

Granted, all those characteristics add up to a fantasy figure for some young men. But all superheroes are fantasy figures representing different human traits taken to extremes.

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04nbod
2009-09-04 10:58 pm UTC (link)

It takes away from her skill, her empathy and her character.Be it real life or fiction western culture has a built in system of value and a character like Kory and how she is portrayed would be considered superficial and of low value. She's the Angelina Jolie of super-heroes. (good professional, does great humanitarian work but a bizarre woman and a 'homewrecker' at the same time) Its not a character I want to read about. There is only so many times you can get Kory into trouble because she's too good looking, its tiresome. I don't think a character who is sexy and enjoys sex needs sex as a part of every storyline and doesn't really have to look like kory. In the end do I really need a super-hero who is good in bed and not afraid to shout about it?

I would argue that most super-heroes are either what young men want to be or who they want to be with. Is there a character specifically created to be a female fantasy? Buffy maybe? Wonder woman, definitely not. Supergirl and Mary Marvel, you can argue it but have they drifted into a male fantasy area with countdown for Mary especially.Any characters created for women to lust after?

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freddylloyd
2009-09-05 03:06 am UTC (link)

I don't think a character who is sexy and enjoys sex needs sex as a part of every storyline

I can think of one scripter who's tried to play up other aspects of Kory. In his Teen Titans run, Geoff Johns highlighted her straightforwardness—criticizing Superman, learning to lie—and her nostalgia for home. Beast Boy made some leering mentions of her sexiness for old times' sake, but Kory wasn't in a romantic relationship, and none of the other principals of that book dared to start one.

But after a while Johns realized he was making Kory nothing more than a strict camp counselor for the kids, with no plot of her own, and he gladly sent her off to the Outsiders. Where, I guess, she could get enmeshed with Dick and be fully sexual again. It was, after all, an adult book.

I don't think a character who is sexy and enjoys sex...doesn't really have to look like kory.

Such a character in superhero comics would have to look sexy, though, since characters through their looks and costuming embody their defining ideas and qualities. Does "sexy" mean curvaceous, big-eyed, big-haired, and half-naked? Well, that would get the plurality of male votes. And, as you say, males seem to dominate in this precinct.

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sistermagpie
2009-09-05 03:58 pm UTC (link)

I don't feel like I know enough about Starfire to say for sure, but is she/has she ever really been those things? I mean, really been about sex without guilt?

Because everything I've seen of her suggests that that whole line is just a b.s. excuse to have her be completely a male fantasy without really being true to the description. Her alleged alien attitude is never followed to any logical conclusions.

For instance--does Kory cheat on Dick without guilt? Because I get that she's all "Wee, sex is free and we should all just do it because we feel like it!" but that would lead to one of two places. Either she's not faithful to Dick, or she's faithful to Dick because he prefers her to and sees that as a sacrifice that's at least sometimes frustrating. But it seems like she's always just shown as perfectly satisfied with Dick despite having her own sexual desires thwarted. Iow, her free-sex attitude starts at the place of male fantasy and stops at the point it threatens the male ego.

Likewise, I know she's been very jealous when she thinks another girl is going after Dick, or where Dick's liking another girl. Because despite the lip service to free love, deep down she believes in the same kind of exclusive romance as we do. If she wasn't jealous it might suggest she doesn't want Dick all to herself.

And while I'm at it, Kory's supposed to be comfortable naked, but that, too, never gets so extreme that it's anything but an advantage in a sex fantasy. She's not a naturalist wandering around naked so much people aren't rendered speechless each time. It goes w/o saying her body's perfect. And most of the time she wears clothing most commonly created around the promise of forbidden nudity, clothing that would take work to even keep in place. Iow, yet again her totally foreign attitude about sex somehow presents as something all too familiar. The male sex fantasy isn't an accidental by-product--there's nothing else to it.

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freddylloyd
2009-09-05 07:12 pm UTC (link)

When I wrote of "sex without guilt," I didn't mean the guilt people may feel when they have sex outside of what their partner believes is a one-on-one relationship. I mean the association of sex with sin that's dominated western thought, manifest in such cultural memes as the fall from Eden; recurrent taboos on masturbation, homosexuality, or any non-procreative sex for pleasure; the use of the Anglo-Saxon word for sex as our most profane syllable; movie ratings that treat loving sex as more objectionable than hateful violence; and so on.

I don't see Kory as believing in or representing "free love." Kory values a one-on-one, committed relationship including love and sex as much as Dick does (in Wolfman's characterization, not Jones's). So when Kory's in such a relationship, she doesn't "cheat." I can recall only one example of Kory being "jealous" about Dick and another woman, but I think that's consistent with her belief in monogamy.

Indeed, I think the jump from my phrase "sex with love and...without guilt" to "Wee, sex is free and we should all just do it because we feel like it!" reflects our western culture's linkage of sex and sin. Is it possible to think of Kory as unabashedly enjoying sex with someone she loves without thinking of her as unabashedly enjoying sex with everyone?

(A better test might be to ask what Kory would do if she loved two people: would she be comfortable having sex with them both? The closest we've come to that is Kory's first marriage. She was definitely comfortable marrying one man for political reasons while maintaining her loving and sexual relationship with Dick.)

As for nakedness, we are talking about a mainstream comic-book character here. Within the constraints of the medium, Kory's as naked as you can get—so much so that DC had to change her costume for the anti-drug issues of the 1980s and the Teen Titans TV cartoon. What's supposedly her armor shows exposes more skin than Robin's costume, for goodness’ sake.

Now, does any of that change the fact that Kory is a fantasy figure created by and for heterosexual males, especially appealing to the unrealistic spotty adolescent kind? Not at all! Indeed, Kory's commitment to monogamy is even more of a fantasy fulfillment: she's not just a buxom, half-naked alien supermodel, she's totally devoted to her man!

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sistermagpie
2009-09-06 05:32 pm UTC (link)

Ah--yes, I did take "guilt" as a more rational guilt rather than Puritanical guilt, which I guess I didn't see any of the other characters much having either.

But part of the reason for that was that wasn't there only recently scans posted where Kory claimed that she didn't believe what you're saying here? Wasn't it Dick who had to say "Love should be between 2 people" because Kory was not just about not thinking sex was dirty but also thinking sex was a sign of affection that didn't need to be tied to a monogamous relationship?

Not at all! Indeed, Kory's commitment to monogamy is even more of a fantasy fulfillment: she's not just a buxom, half-naked alien supermodel, she's totally devoted to her man!

Yup--totally agree! And also on the "she's as naked as you can get."

It just makes me laugh because Kory's so obviously not choosing her clothing the way I'd imagine a person in her situation would. She presumably prefers the freedom and comfort of nudity, yet chooses and outfit where she'd have to either glue it to herself or restrict her movement to keep it in place. And she never learns to appreciate the advantages of armor or a good support bra.

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freddylloyd
2009-09-06 08:15 pm UTC (link)

wasn't there only recently scans posted where Kory claimed that she didn't believe what you're saying here? Wasn't it Dick who had to say "Love should be between 2 people" because Kory was not just about not thinking sex was dirty but also thinking sex was a sign of affection that didn't need to be tied to a monogamous relationship?

I think you're recalling these scans posted in May. In this 1987 issue Dick does indeed say, “Love should be between two people,” explaining why he doesn't feel right experiencing more than the “love...as a friend” he acknowledges for Raven.

Dick's upset and probably feeling guilty over having an erotic dream about Raven, though he knows (a) she has the power to create such dreams, and (b) even his normal dreams aren't in his control. I see that as some of the irrational guilt about sex that pervades our culture, which Kory can't understand.

Kory dismisses Dick's guilt and urges him to allow himself to be more loving. She speaks primarily about emotions, only secondarily about sex: “On my world we allow ourselves to love many people...always emotionally...sometimes physically.”

It's notable that Kory isn't put off or jealous that Raven is manifesting erotic feelings toward her boyfriend—"We love the same man," she jokes. Nor does she suggest that Dick should open up and have sex with Raven (she knows he wouldn't go for that).

Instead, Kory takes her own friendship with Raven to a deeper level, one as physical as a comic book from 1987 could show: the two women swim naked beneath a waterfall together. There's the linkage between emotional openness and physical affection that Wolfman made part of the basis of Kory's character.

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sistermagpie
2009-09-06 08:40 pm UTC (link)

Ah, true. Though I still think Kory's enlightened attitudes manifest in some ways but not others. She still always reads to me as based around familiar human ideas about sex, often pretty simplified. Like here, Dick actually is having a somewhat sexual relationship with Raven--whether or not he chose it--through his dreams that she is controlling. When another woman does something similar to him, even though Dick is just as innocent, Kory does blame him for it. This isn't just not being guilty about dirty thoughts, imo. Constant hot dreams about a person very well might produce a sexual desire where before none existed.

Instead, Kory takes her own friendship with Raven to a deeper level, one as physical as a comic book from 1987 could show: the two women swim naked beneath a waterfall together.

Swimming naked under a waterfall isn't a physical relationship without a sexual component, is it? It's titiliating for a non-nudist audience, but for someone comfortable with nudity it shouldn't be any different than playing tennis in full uniform.

That's the thing with Kory. It's hard for a lot of us to take her advice and attitude seriously when her priority when you can't imagine her doing anything of which a male audience wouldn't approve.

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kingrockwell
2009-09-05 02:58 am UTC (link)

Countdown to Adventure's one I wouldn't put much weight in either, given it was written by Adam Beechen. And who was that quote from?
I'll give you that it is a level to her character that has been there almost from the start and has been given too much focus, but I don't think that's all there is to her, and she could benefit greatly from a more balanced approach and a better writer.

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