Saturday, September 01, 2007
"Why Do I Always Melt Before Anything In Pants?"
Ahhhh, when a plotline pops up revolving around Tigra fighting against her own inner pussycat, you know some gooood comics is gonna happen. An oldie but goodie from "West Coast Avengers" #12-13, via Scans Daily.
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Ah, the lesser-known Avengers/Gor crossover.
ReplyDelete...somebody please slap the writer? Please?
I like Tigra. I like the fact that there's a character who's actually supposed to be a silly, brazen hussy and supposed to be treated with little respect, not because she's a woman or a hot woman, but because she's a silly, brazen hussy. Because of her personality. As long as you don't fall into thinking of her as some kind of general symbol of womankind, or worry too much about the original creators' intentions, she's a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteBut my God, how I hate Doctor Druid. He was positively unbearable. It tells you everything you need to know that when he turned into a crazy mind-slave, he was already such a jerk that nobody even noticed the difference until it was too late.
Steve Englehart wrote that, and it was part of leading up to Tigra getting free of her cat impulses. Taken as a whole story, I remember it as pretty positive for taking control of one's own destiny. Like most of Englehart's later stories, it's about the rising and ascending of the spirit
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, John Byrne undid it, with the "twist" that the cat people who cured her, made her more cat not less.
Mr Englehart deserves all the credit he can get. His run of DETECTIVE COMICS was great, and Silver St. Cloud was an interesting love interest for Bruce Wayne.
ReplyDeleteWell you can't really talk about Tigra without talking about her original incarnation as The Cat: a heroine who was created to reflect the emergent feminism of the 1970s. (Check it out: the lingo in the origin issue of The Cat is really dated but the story itself is compelling: it's good 70s comics.) The politics served the story and made the character more interesting and complicated in a way that a lot of contemporary comics could take a lesson from (see also: Batwoman).
ReplyDeleteFast forward to the 21st century and Greer Nelson has become an unfortunate cartoon of barely controlled female lust in the form of a panting, writhing...pussycat? Grab a copy of her origin issue and put it next to her recent appearance, offering herself, spread-eagled to Henry Pym (Henry Pym! Wimpy,wife-beating, Henry-freaking-PYM?) and you tell me...
Based on her origin as an explicitly feminist character vs. her portrayal FOR YEARS as a furry, barely-in-control love doll (rowr!) I can't think of a more misogynistic character in comics.