Tuesday, May 30, 2006

 

Superheroines

This is my week for postcognition, outside scoop action. Two years ago Michael Chabon wrote a terrific essay called "A Woman of Valor", all about superheroines, and I just now stumble across it. Chabon focuses here on Jack Kirby's Big Barda, erstwhile commander of the Fighting Furies and wife of Mr. Miracle, Scott Free. His comments on Barda and her fellow superheroines are right on (with one exception: not all the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes were goyim; though it wasn't "revealed" until later, Gim Allon was definitely Jewish. Hell, he was raised on a kibbutz!). Like Chabon, I've never really grokked Wonder Woman, as much as I've tried, and even the more successful interpretations of the character (and I'm thinking in particular of George Perez's post-Crisis run) have had to dance pretty fast to make sense out of her strange mix of elements, with varying degrees of success.

I spent the last week (and all weekend) doing the final edits and layouts on Peter Coogan's Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, and consequently have beeb thinking quite a lot on the subject. Not, of course, that a part of my brain isn't always thinking about the subject...

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