In the last couple days I read through Savage Dragon Archives volume 1, which is published in the same basic format as the Marvel Essentials: black and white, cheap-ass paper, and a little lower quality printing. Granted, Savage Dragon was a little nicer than the Essential volumes. I shit you not, take a thumb and rub it on an inky panel of an Essential volume. That shit'll smear worse than a brand new sneaker on a blind guy walking into a dog park. But it had the same problems, maybe even more so by my accounting.
So for those who don't know, Savage Dragons is a guy who wakes up in Chicago with no idea who he is, who he was, or why he is a dragon man with immeasurable strength. He's not the only abnormality in the world, and the police force is losing the battle to the "freaks" that have started showing up. Through a chain of events, Dragon is convinced to become Officer Dragon and start fighting every man with a claw for a head or a leg for a head that comes along.
I think the thing that really appeals to me about the story, and about the way its told, is that they don't spend a lot of time fucking around with the details. Instead, this is a comic created in a world that is aware of comics. It feels almost like the writer/artist, Erik Larsen, is saying, "Look, you've got Wolverine, Nick Fury, tough guy with mysterious past. Got it? Good, let's go." The whole thing is very antithetical to John Byrne's Next Men, which felt like eight issues of origin. I'm sure that's some people's cup of tea, but some people also put cream in their tea which is gross and wrong. Don't make milk hot, people. Don't do it. You'll hate yourself later for it, I guarantee.
Another noticeable...feature of Savage Dragon is that a number of the characters wear outfits that are pretty damn revealing. The standard female crime-fighting togs of the time appear to be something along the lines of a woman's one-piece bathing suit, low cut in the front, thong in the back.
This is by no means a big shocker in comics. I'm sure we can all agree on that. And the classic excuse offered by one character, something along the lines of the outfit serving as a distraction and an advantage, isn't terribly new either. What is different is that we actually see a pretty good number of men in suggestive poses and outfits as well. Not as many as the women, but the ratio is closer than you'll get from a Power Girl/Superman team-up wherein Superman is fully -clothed and Power Girl has for some reason decided to show all of her legs, plus cut a hole for her breasts to pop out of. All these years crime-fighting and not one titty pops out? I've seen it happen on a goddamn water slide, and that can't be nearly as bad as being shot with some kind of ray. To digress even further, I heard that Victoria's Secret only goes up to a certain size. I don't remember which exactly because I have absolutely no earthly reason to, but I do remember it being fairly small. This seems wrong to me as someone who is staring down the barrel of FFF's probably needs some real care and love put into bra-making. So fuck you, Victoria's Secret. You've been propagating lies for years, and now you're not even helping the people who need you most.
Ahem.
At any rate, readers of Dragon are treated to a smorgasbord of male semi-nudity, including the character Barbaric who has a sort of Sumo thong situation going on in back. We get a pretty explicit crotch shot of good ol' Super Patriot, and it appears that 1 out of every 10 freak males, good or bad, wears a shirt. Shirtlessness and hairy chests are the name of the game in this book, and I have to say that with outsized arms and shoulders tapering down to tiny waists, the male depictions are as distorted as the female.
The weird thing is that the equality of nudity only seems to make it MORE noticeable. It brings up the bigger issue, I'd say: Why do women in comics always look like pin-ups?
Okay, I know there are tons of examples of women who don't. But I'm not talking about Aunt May, Aunt Anna, or anybody's aunt anything here. We all know the prototypical female form in comics, but why is it that way?
I have some completely unresearched theories I'd like to share.
1. The less detail you have to devote to characters, the more iconic they have to be, the more you have to rely on visual stereotype clues to make everything easily identifiable. What are the
visual body signatures that say "female" immediately, without a second glance? Hourglass, eyes, lips. Keep in mind, we don't see anyone move, we don't hear them talk, so there's no real way to know if a character is male or female without some kind of visual clue. Even the character Horridus from Savage Dragon wears a bra, which seems silly considering that there's no real reason for her to have breasts of any fashion if the rest of her is made entirely of spikes.
As an experiment, try looking at the faces, just the faces, in a lot of books. They're fairly androgynous a lot of the time, hard to tell them apart without hair and bodies attached.
Or, take as an example, what comes out of trying to do a female version of the Thing from Fantastic Four. Look at this. How is anyone supposed to know whether this character is female? Well, without the hair, face, or general body shape, they give it the bosom of a babushka. Not pretty, but we have to know somehow.
2. Boys read comics.
We all know that. I don't think that boys are necessarily writing emails and letters demanding to see a little more skin, but since when has the comic book industry ever listened to the quiet majority of comic book readers who really don't mind some ugmos thrown in for good measure? So it's kind of an industry thing that nobody really needs, but people are a little afraid to do away with all together.
3. Why the fuck not? Seriously, why the fuck not?
Look at TV. So many TV shows are cast with characters who are much prettier than we are in real life. Friends was a show about the 6...five-ish most attractive people on television at the time, and they all live in the same building somehow. For all his faults, George on Seinfeld must have dated more attractive women than any bald, middle-aged, doughy, neurotic, jobless fool on the planet. Even the Office, which is about as close as it gets to real, is probably hotter than your office. If your office is hotter, please let me know where you work and which positions are most likely to open up in the next 1 to 1,000 weeks.
The downside, we all know, is that sometimes you have to trade a little acting skill for hotness. Not to keep picking on the Fantastic Four movies time and again, but never has a better looking cast disappointed me so thoroughly. I would have settled for someone who looked less like Ben Grimm yet made me believe something he said now and then. And Jessica Alba? I don't even buy her in surfing movies, which is pretty much her real life as far as I can tell.
The difference in comics, however, is that you can make any character, with any traits, look exactly how you want. If you want to make a scientist who looks like your favorite centerfold, you can. Just throw some glasses on her and a labcoat, boom, scientist. And in comics, she IS a scientist. There's no believability curve like watching Franco be scientific with his gorgeous hair. It's all what you made up, so why not make everyone hot?
Mark my words: The first human-looking robot, the one that actually looks like a human, will be made to look beautiful. It's just how things work.
Now to some extent you can argue that, if people can do whatever they want, why aren't they doing more interesting things? Why not a crazy port stain like Gorbachev now and then, or maybe a nose with different -sized nostrils, or a modestly-chested female character. Okay, no need to make freaks , but you get the idea.
There is some credence to that argument, but the clear water tells us that it's a revival of a different point. That's not about them being pin-ups or not, just about them not being very interesting.
Erik Larsen isn't a stranger to comics, and there's no doubt he knows exactly what he's doing. I'm sure there are a million theories out there about how Dragon, in particular, is about taking common comic book themes, visual and otherwise, and exploding them to a ridiculous size in order to point out the comic book-y ness of the whole affair.
I don't know if that's what he's doing or not, and I don't care. Because these are compulsively readable, and if he's poking fun at comics, he's doing it well enough that you can enjoy the stories and art without getting into that too much. If he's not, then I say good for him. This is a comic that does right something a lot of comics can't figure out. Reading these comics FEELS like reading comics, and I'm up for that any time.
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