Brainiac 5 would have to do chores! - or - the Feminist Mistake!

So I'm reading Legion of Super-Heroes, vol. 8. As a result, this post is going out to all the ladies - I mean lasses. But boys and kids of all ages will like it, too. I tell you the tale of ... issue #368, May 1968!

Legion comics suffer from a tendency toward the 3-panel disaster story. (A building is falling over. Oh no, Karate Kid's karate is not strong enough to catch a building. Mon-El catches the building.) So nothing seems out of place when the visiting ambassador's ship just blows up for no reason. What stuns our boys is the figure who emerges from the burning craft. Superboy: "*GASP* The ambassador ... a woman!" The ambassador is equally shocked. "You're in charge? A male?" "Of course." "You mean earth still has a primitive patriarchal society ... ruled by men?" Invisible Kid: "We have a patriarchal background - but we believe in equality of the sexes." (Chew on that.)

Later, back in Legion headquarters ... when the boys are away, talk turns to curtain rods. "What do you think of this color, Vi?" "File that pattern into the robo-sewing machine, Phantom Girl, while I get the curtain rods!"" "Aren't these color-changing chameleoid rugs just fab, Shadow Lass?"

Yet thoughts of the strange events of the morning obtrude into this idyll of domesticity. Nothing about the giant explosion, of course. Princess Projectra: "What did you think of that woman ambassador, Irma? She sounded as if she believed girls should dominate the universe." Saturn Girl: "That's pretty hard to imagine with guys like Superboy and Mon-El around." "Oh, I don't know! Supergirl's every bit as strong a they are!" Supergirl: "Not really! Though our strength has never been accurately measured, theoretically, Superboy is stronger than I, just as a normal boy is stronger than a normal girl!" I think the exclamation points really add excitement to the dialogue! And now we are seeing our theme! It would really be a problem if women were as strong as men!

The splash page already foretold as much. Shrinking Violet is chirping about how she is now the biggest legionnairre, blah blah blah and Invisible Kid, Lightning Lad and Superboy sing a mournful chorus: "And we boys are the saddest legionnaires ... since the girls' powers got beefed up .. and we became victims of 'The Mutiny of the Super-Heroines!'" Anyway, it turns out the ambassador has a plan for a feminist revolution, and the key is giving the girls more power. She does this thing with some statues. Now the girls are powerful, they make the boys look like schmucks. Invisible Kid tries to order them all into quarantine on the theory that they must have some sort of space disease, but the girls bust out to save the guys, who have screwed up again in stopping a jail break. The boys claim to have had some brilliant plan for stopping the break ... and you girls get back to quarantine! Fight! Now the girls are mad! The boys are getting kicked. "We've decided you're too weak to be in the Legion, so we're taking over and you're out!"  "Why don't you guys form a Loser's Legion of your own? Ha, ha!" The poor boys. Supergirl is feeling vaguely sorry for them, but a twist of the ambassador's bracelet fixes that. "They'll think completely as I do! Then they'll turn earth into a matriarchy!" See under the fold for a few scans.

The girls start discussing which boys they'd like to have as their servants and Shadow Lass says ... Brainiac 5! Supergirl later explains what happened then. "When Shadow Lass made me think about what would happen to Brainiac 5 in a feminist world, my mind revolted ... my super-will snapped your control!" (But she plays along just long enough to foil the dastardly plot.)

I must confess I told Belle she had to read it. And she did. (As Zoë says: this is going to blow up your mind. And it did.) It isn't remarkable that the story is incredibly dumb, of course. That sort of thing happens. But I'm pretty impressed at how pitch perfect its tin ear is, Betty Friedan-wise. Doesn't miss a note. It even goes the extra mile of NOT having any hint of a lesbian subplot between the ambassador and Supergirl, which would be TOO obvious.

When things are this badly written - by Jim Shooter - what do you think is actually going on with the writer? Is he just sitting there weeping with laughter at what he has wrought? Belle suggests a story in which superheroines from the 30th century travel back in time to smack him around, making little girls read this stuff. What do the lady's think? Feministe? Bitch Ph.D.? (Or should I call you: Bitch Ph.D. Lass?)

 

Comments

[J]

Well, Jim Shooter was 16 or 17 years old when he wrote that story. How enlightened a seventeen-year-old were you back in 1968? Or, for that matter, how good a writer?

[jholbo]

Hmmm, good point. I didn't realize he was so young at the time.

[Benjamin Nelson]

Pahahaha. That's gold.

Oh, well. At least they had the decency to hide their... ah, unique perspectives... behind popular superheroes, back then. ...pah.

[NelC]

Surely that should be Bitch Lass, PhD?

[Grumpy]

In Adventure Comics #319 (mid-1960s), when Saturn Girl is chosen by random chance to join a "suicide squad," Brainiac 5 objects to having her on the mission: "It's too dangerous for a girl. I must eliminate you, Saturn Girl."

Saturn Girl insists, and does indeed go on the mission -- because, after all, she was the leader of the Legion at the time! (In the end, the suicide mission is saved by none other than Night Girl of the Subs; One of the villains exclaims, "It's a girl, with mighty power!")

A couple issues later, Saturn Girl is deemed to be the cleverest Legionnaire, and thus re-elected as leader. So some mixed messages there.

[Ginger Yellow]

"When things are this badly written - by Jim Shooter - what do you think is actually going on with the writer?"

Ask Chris Muir, because I sure don't know what he's on about.

[Ignotus]

Also on the subject of the Legion and feminism is this awesome article by Chris Sims making fun of a storyline involving another girl legionnaire revolt and the Amazon Queen of Planet Femnaz(!).

http://www.prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1229

[pbg]

I know far more about Jim Shooter's psychopathologies than I want to--or can honestly reveal in a comment, having worked under him at Marvel for his entire tenure as ed in chief at aMarvel. (I was one of his first 'discoveries.') I'll just point to two things: in Secret Wars II, his character, the Beyonder, deals with a high-priced hooker to whom Shooter gave the real name of a Marvel staffer without her permission.
And the last I heard, he has never seen his son, having deserted his wife upon finding out she was pregnant.

He was a seriously disturbed individual, and didn't get any better from his Legion days.

[Timothy Francis Sullivan]

One can see in Shooter's storytelling a sort of throbbing conflict between a recognition of the barefaced wrongness of a "patriarchal background" and an instinctive allegiance to his gender and the status quo. Why would the dude feel the need to write this story, but to explain why something that seems wrong (the oppression of women) isn't actually wrong. This seems especially obvious in that the straw man of matriarchal tyranny the alien ambassador wants to implement on earth could be seen as a point-for-point representation/critique of the existing order, with only the window dressing changed.

This kind of hysterical two-mindedness is everywhere in 50s and 60s era culture: stories that end with the characters arriving at a "final" perspective that is stylistically represented in the hues and rhythms of moral approval, of virtue and relief, when the articulated perspective is entirely perverse (note the absence of sympathy for the alien who's been coerced on the threat of death by an authority that no longer exists) and self-contradictory. It looks to me ike the wish fulfillment of a child (or a child's consciousness) who desperately wants to be good, or thought of as good, but without actually recognizing its own emotional attachment to and political complicity in the existence of non-goodness. It seems like the whole culture was sixteen or seventeen.

I guess this is all obvious. Or something.

[jholbo]

Hey, this is getting interesting. Thanks for comments. Thanks for your personal perspective, pbg.

It's terribly funny that Chris Sims already did this because I actually sat down and thought - OK, time to make some comics jokes that I didn't just steal from the ISB. Oh, well.

[Glenn Ingersoll]

I remember becoming familiar with Jim Shooter when he took over as Marvel's Editor-in-Chief in the early 80s. He introduced a series-spanning event, called Secret Wars in which all the major Marvel superheroes (& villains) were whisked off to a planet on the other side of the universe where they were pitted against each other. Being big on several Marvel series at the time I had to buy it. Shooter took on the writing chores for the Secret Wars series himself. And, dang, was that badly written. I sure felt burned. Does being feministically clueless ordain bad writing? Well, it don't help. Being clueless just don't help.

[Tlaloc]

um...1968? Doesn't that go a long ways toward explaining things? Yes, forty years ago people were- frequently- overtly sexist.

[Doctor Memory]

It's worth emphasizing the point that in addition to apparently being repulsive personally, Shooter was a thoroughgoing hack professionally. "Secret Wars" was pretty much everything that was terrible about the comics industry in the 1980s rolled into one ugly little morsel: it wasn't just that it was terribly written, and that it was a transparent ploy to wring more money out of their pre-adolescent fanbase, but the whole concept was shamelessly ripped off from DC's "Crisis on Infinite Earths", which could at least claim to be an original transparent money-grub.

You can draw a nicely straight line from Shooter's tenure as EiC at Marvel to the inanity of Image Comics and the entire industry's subsequent implosion.

[bryan]

"He was a seriously disturbed individual, and didn't get any better from his Legion days."

With great genius comes great instability of the mind.

I just had to write that.