Review: Female Furies #1

When DC Comics first announced Female Furies, a six-issue mini-series featuring a group of characters from Jack Kirby’s sprawling 1970-1973 saga about a mythic war between twin planets populated by superheroes and supervillains, there was little indication that writer Cecil Castellucci had anything out of the ordinary in mind.

Here is how the first issue was solicited to retailers and readers, back in November:

All their lives the Female Furies have been raised to be the meanest, most cunning and most ruthless fighting force on all of Apokolips. So why are Granny Goodness' girls left behind every time the men go to war? With the might of New Genesis hanging over the planet, and the Forever People making mincemeat out of Darkseid’s army, Granny thinks it's about time that changed...And so, Big Barda, Aurelie, Mad Harriet, Lashina, Bernadeth and Stompa set out to beat the boys at their own game. Little do they know the game is rigged—and one accidental murder could spell disaster for them all!

If this was going to be a feminist reading of the characters and their place in the traditional Apokolips vs. New Genesis story, if there was any telegraphing in the announcement at all, it seemed to be of a rather standard, current pop culture, safe level--women are just as good as men, or, specific to this setting, just as good at being bad as men.

That is, in large part, what makes this issue so surprising, if not shocking: Castellucci and artist Adriana Melo have turned a story about a half-dozen female super-warriors, each with a particular gimmick or power reflected in their often childish name--Lashina, Stompa, Bernadeth, etc--into a #MeToo-era superhero comic exploring and eviscerating all of the types and degrees of sexism women are subjected to on a daily basis in a world where men hold all of the power.

If you’re unfamiliar with what has become known as Kirby’s Fourth World story, here are the basics. Red-eyed, stone-skinned god of evil Darkseid rules the industrialized hell-scape planet Apokolips with an iron, dictatorial grip, his high court helping him keep the population down while he quests for The Anti-Life Equation, which will allow him to crush all free will and subject all sentient life in the universe to his will. He is opposed by the white-haired, white-bearded Highfather, ruler of Apopolips' utopian sister planet New Genesis, whose heroes all seem like your typical superheroes, albeit it cut with pop culture hippie-ism and New Age philosophy.

The two rulers traded sons once upon a time as part of a peace deal, so that Highfather’s son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, eventually growing up to be the super-escape artist Mister Miracle, husband of Big Barda, one of the Female Furies, while Darkseid’s son Orion was raised on New Genesis, struggling to repress his bestial nature while fighting for the side of good against his own evil father.

In that story, the Female Furies have always been among the more colorful of Darkseid’s "name" soldiers, standing out from the crowd of winged Parademons and giant dog-riding warriors; they are the elite squad serving directly under Granny Goodness, a short, stocky hag in green chainmail who is in Darkseid’s inner circle and is charged with raising the population’s orphans, like Barda and Scott.

Female Furies opens in the distant past, the night that Darkseid takes control of his planet, in order to better catalog the indignities Granny Goodness suffered in her career. On that night, she wasn’t yet "Granny," but is just the ironically named Goodness--Big, tall, strong and young. It is she that defeats and strangles Darkseid’s mother Heggra for him, although she gets a last minute assist from Desaad, who immediately takes credit for her accomplishment.

After the battle, Darkseid corners her and propositions her: "Battle makes me hungry for what food cannot fill," he intones, grabbing her. She resists long enough to let readers know she doesn't reciprocate Darkseid's lust, but reluctantly obeys when he makes it clear her "career" depends on it. "Do as I say and rise higher than anyone else," he says. "Refuse and find yourself back with the lowest of the low."

While her obedience doesn't hurt her career, it doesn't seem to help much, either; she's given a less-than-desirable post, while the male members of Darkseid’s court all grumble at the fact that she gets "special" treatment from their god-king. The treatment she receives will sound familiar, as the Apokolips bros call her hysterical, suggest she be less emotional, comment on her looks and how she uses sex to get what she wants.

In the present, the cycle begins anew, as she presents her new Furies to Darkseid and her co-workers, but they seem more interested in the women's looks than their fighting abilities. After Darkseid refuses to let the Furies join the males in his armies--some of the arguments sounding quite familiar to anyone who has followed arguments of the integration of our own armed forces over the years--one of his circle, Willik, offers to give one of the Furies, Aurelie, private martial arts lessons.

She refuses, but is eventually convinced by Goodness, and during the training, Willik repeatedly gropes her, making a threat similar to that Darkseid gave to Goodness years ago. Aurelie is similarly punished by her peers, who chide her for using her looks to her advantage, for taking so long with Willlik and, not knowing what happened, Barda scolds her: "Stop complaining...Any of us would trade places with you in a heartbeat to get private instruction from Protector Willik."

Double standards, objectification, gaslighting, sexual harassment, sexual assault--in just the first 22 pages of the series, Castellucci covers a lot of ground, little of which has been previously covered in the almost 50 years of tellings and retellings of characters' stories, and little of which seems to contradict or take away from any of those previous tellings.

The genius of using these particular characters for such a story isn't merely that they are among the only female characters in the male dominated story cycle--in much the same way that Castellucci and Melo still stand out as rare in the male-dominated superhero comic market*--or that they are demonstrably better at fighting and killing than their male peers, the vast bulk of which don’t even have names, but that their home setting has always been the most cartoonishly evil place in comics, this side of hell.

Of course working with the god of evil, ruler of a planet of evil, who is intent on subjugating all life is a hostile work environment. Darkseid coercing a henchwoman into sex, or his other underlings sexually harassing her, might not be something we have seen in their past appearances, but it's certainly well within conceivable behavior for them. The trick of writing comics starring supervillains is to always pit them against worst villains, and next to Darkseid and his court, the Furies can’t help but seem heroic--even were it not for the presence of Barda, whom we know ultimately rebels against Apokolips and fights for New Genesis at some point after this series concludes.

There's also the matter that, while these characters are, like seemingly all superhero characters these days, fodder for cartoons, TV shows and even have a movie in the works, they are minor enough in the grand scheme of things that Castellucci and Melo can make the bad guys particularly repugnant without worrying too much about making them unmarketable, in the way DC might have worried if someone proposed a comic book in which, say, Lex Luthor, Brainiac and The Joker sexually harass Cheetah or Giganta in The Legion of Doom headquarters or something.

While Castellucci’s first issue chronicles all this supremely toxic male behavior, that;s not all there is to it. It's complicated, as the difference between Goodness' and her Furies' reactions, and Goodness' reaction to their reaction reflect generational tensions and differences that have arisen in the wake of Weinstein and #MeToo, and, well, this is still a story. Near the end of the first issue, immediately after being groped by Willik, Aurelie hears one of the male soldiers offering to torture a victim less of she kisses him, and she responds by slitting his throat, forcing Barda to help her hide the body and keep it a secret. With five more issues and about 100 pages to go, clearly it won’t remain a secret.

It's also funny. There is some humor in the juxtaposition, and in the discomfort that juxtaposition causes in readers, who might laugh nervously at the chutzpah of the book, but Castellucci includes scenes clearly meant to be read as funny, as in the second stage of the Furies' demonstration of their martial abilities to Darkseid and his court, which is basically just a 20th century beauty pageant transported into space, complete with a bake-off and evening gown and swimsuit competition (the latter renamed a "smile competition").

Humorous, yes, but blackly so.

It's always difficult to review a comic book series by its first issue, particularly a limited one like this, when one knows it will completed and republished in a new and complete form in a half-year's time, but it can be worthwhile when an easy to overlook comic delivers so much more than is expected. How successful Female Furies will ultimately be as a story remains to be seen, of course, but the first issue reveals that it is one well worth reading to see: Sharp, funny, relevant and ambitious, it's the too-rare superhero comic book with a point to make.



*I counted 58 serial issues of comics slated for release by DC into the direct market for this month, only three of which have both a female writer and a female pencil artist/primary artist listed among the creators, but it's always possible I miscounted a book or two.

Things I had scanned and had planned to post in the past, but never did for various reasons

Those of you who hang on my every word (that is, just me) may recall that on Monday night I mentioned that I was going to review a really cool small press book, but, because DC and Marvel's April solicits were being released and they're much easier to write about, I'd push that review off until Thursday night. Well, I'm not going to write that review tonight either.

See, I thought the book—Hellen Jo's Jin & Jam #1—was a 2008 release, since I'd seen it on at least one best of list, but the publisher informed me that it won't actually be released until later this month, so I think I had better wait until closer to the release date to review it.

So what will I post tonight? Well, I was cleaning out my scanned images the other day, and ran across a couple of things that I'd gone to the trouble of taking to the library and scanning for posts, but then ended up never doing anything with them.

Well, I'll do something with them now!

This was going to be a Friday Night Fights post, a four-panel Big Barda vs. Plas battle, but I ended up quitting trying to keep up with FNF, as it was too difficult to make sure I had something each Friday night when I was using a public library scanner and access was never guaranteed:


It's from 1997's JLA #33, Mark Waid's third two-part fill-in for Grant Morrison on JLA, when the latter was winding down his run and the former was apparently gearing up for his. One of the White Martians from "New World Order" that was trapped in a human body and identity thought it was Bruce Wayne and started impersonating him. Batman obviously knew it wasn't the real Bruce Wayne, but couldn't tell the rest of the team how he knew that (this was before the Brad Meltzer everyone-knows-everyone retcon, and the fact that Batman wouldn't reveal his identity to his teammates was a major plot point during Waid's run).

Batman had to separate the Leaguers who did know his secret identity from those who did not, and this is the "not" group. Plas, Barda, Orion, Steel and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner get dressed up and go undercover at a casino to keep tabs on the fake Bruce Wayne.

One has to suspend one's disbelief quite a bit when reading certain superhero comics. With this volume of JLA, for example, once had to just accept the fact that Plastic Man was never sued for sexual harassment or Boom Tube-d to an Apokalytpian fire pit by Barda or her husband.

The art here is by penciller Mark Pajarillo, who was the most frequent fill-in artist for Howard Porter, although I haven't seen his work anywhere in quite a while.



This was going to be part of a post collecting a bunch of Hulk's battle cries, but when I abandonded the idea when it started to look like too much work:

It's from Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen's way too short-lived volume of The Defenders, one of my favorite comics ever. I believe this was from 2001's #7, part of an ongoing story in which Namor had his teammates help him liberate Atlantis from Attuma and a bunch of underwater villains, and Hulk was fighting Orka-with-a-K. Orka draws strength from whales, so he kept calling more whales to the scene to become stronger, which would make Hulk angry, and he'd get stronger, and the process just continued until the end of the story. The rest of the team was sitting around a table enjoying a victory banquet at the end of the story, and Hulk and Orka were still out there on the ocean floor whaling on each other (Ha ha!).

I liked just about every word of dialogue everyone spoke in this series, but I really like Hulk shouting, "Hulk's mother wore sensible shoes!"



A year or two ago, I was reading an old encyclopedia of superheroes, and at some point I realized that for some reason owl costumes almost always look really, really stupid. Even the coolest owl-themed costumes—the JLA: Earth 2 version of DC's Owlman, Ultimate Adventures' Hawk-Owl—were pretty goofy-looking, to say nothing of the Global Guardians' Owlwoman, whose most owl-like feature was that she had a single feather on her costume, or the original Silver Age Earth-3 Owlman, who just looked like less fit Batman wearing a taxidermied bird's head as a toupee.

Unfortunately, I gave up on this post before I even took notes, so I don't remember anything about this owlman—

—although I think he was either from a novel or radio show, not a comic. His name was actually The Owl, same as the next fellow.

This "The Owl" is purple for some damn reason, but I kinda like the look on his face:

I believe Alex Ross was planning to use/is using him in one of those Project: Superpowers comics, unless there's another purple-rocking Owlman.

Finally, here's Owlwoman 1,000,000, from 1999's DC One Million 80-Page Giant, a member of Justice Legion-A. She appeared in the anthologies final story, "Crisis One Million" by Grant Morrison, Dusty Abell and Jim Royal:

I assume Abell designed her appearance, but perhaps it was Morrison. It definitely looks Nite-Owl influenced, doesn't it? Like, maybe she just stole his costume and asked a tailor to alter it for her?


Finally, here's an old Wonder Woman villain apparently named Master Destroyer:

I don't know exactly where this is from, or what his deal is. I assume I scanned him to include in this 2007 post about Wonder Woman villains, and ended up not using him, perhaps because he wasn't as awesome as The Blue Snowman or Red Centipede. Oh, and linking to that post reminds me— Gail Simone, are you out there? Where's Mouse Man at? What's the hold up? He would be perfect for Wonder Woman or Secret Six. Catman vs. Mouse Man! Think about it, won't you?

Tiny Titans gets an A+

This week's issue of Art Baltazar and Franco's Tiny Titans was just as fun, funny and incredbily cute as all of those issues that have preceded it.

The opening story was about the various Titans going to the principal's office with their guardians to get their report cards. All it consists of is a sequence of the same panel composition over and over, with different characters in each one, and a different obvious joke in each panel.

Here's the last page of the story, featuring the Tiny Titans debut of the Terror Titans:


I used to think that Wildebeest or Kid Devil was the cutest Tiny Titan, but man, how do you compete with Li'l Barda?




It was interesting to see what adult superhero (or villain) accompanied each tiny Titan, as many of them aren't sidekicks like Robin or Aqualad and thus don't have an obvious mentor.

Who, for example, is raising Blue Beetle? Ted Kord? Dan Garrett?

Even better:



I was really skeptical of this title when it was originally announced, as its stars are starring concurrently in such adult-oriented books as Titans and Teen Titans, but eight issues in, I think Baltazar and Franco have each earned an A+.

Eleven Things You Can Learn From Tales of The New Gods

The recently released Tales of The New Gods trade paperback is a pretty well-timed collection of short stories dealing with the characters created during Jack Kirby's late-seventies experiments with pop mythology for DC Comics.

With Death of the New Gods putting the characters front and center in the current DCU line, and that big, gorgeous, multi-volume Kirby omnibus project making sure the original stories are readily available, the New Gods iron is probably as hot as it's ever going to get.

Tales of the New Gods consists almost exclusively of short stories highlighing different characters and different eras of their fictional histories by different creators. Most of the stories are either written and drawn by John Byrne or written and drawn by Walt Simonson, as the bulk of the material comes from bits and pieces of Byrne's Jack Kirby's Fourth World and Simonson's Orion, but there's a real who's who of talent involved.

The list of those providing art is as varied as Erik Larsen, Arthur Adams, Howard Chaykin, Dave Gibbons and John Paul Leon. There are some real "gets" in terms of creators, like a short Frank Miller-illustrated piece, and a never before published story featuring Darkseid and his court written by Mark Millar (presumably from back in the day when he was doing whatever DC work he could get) and drawn by Steve freaking Ditko.

I was actually a little surprised there wasn't more in it, as it doesn't really strive to be a complete collection of short-pieces featuring the Fourth World characters. For example, I remember there being a tale of the young (and suprisingly hot) Granny Goodenss meeting Darkseid for the first time in a Secret Origins 80-Page Giant*, and if I were putting the thing together, I would have been sure to include the few pages of "Lost Pages" from Grant Morrison's JLA that appeared in 1998's New Gods Secret Files and Origins #1. Not because it was any good at all—it's just a couple of pages, and read like a scene cut from a movie to steamline it—but simply to add one more big creator name to the credits.

How worthwhile the reader will find the book will ultimately depend on how interested he or she is in Byrne, Simonson and/or Kirby's Fourth World characters. Personally, I didn't really need to see Darkseid and Desaad as young men, for example, or Mister Miracle and Metron hanging out in the Old West disguised as cowboys. I think the book's major value is in its ability to satiate a reader's curiosity over how well various creators tackle the Kirby characters.

And its educational value, of course. You can learn a lot of things from Tales of The New Gods.

At least eleven different things.

For example...



1.) That if anyone could make a Mister Miracle comic really work, it’s Steve Rude and Mark Evanier. Seriously, Tales of The New Gods is worthwhile for the nice reprint of their 1987 Mister Miracle Special alone.

Check out some of Rude's art from the story:


(Above: Big Barda in her action bikiki, plus Oberon and Scott performing at the circus. Quick rule of thumb: Rude + the circus = awesome)



(A full-page spread of Scott thinking on his past while locked in a safe that's about to be run over by a steamroller driven by a clown)



(Mister Miracle vs. a robot in a trap-filled funhouse erected by Granny Goodness and Darkseid)



2.) Mister Miracle had a previous wife, who had the unlikely name of Fancy Goodbody. And, despite her funny name, she was from England, not Planet Kirby



3.) That John Workman really is the greatest letterer



4.) How much sillier Darkseid’s outfit looks when, instead of a big, gray, craggy-faced, rock-looking guy, there’s a normal, human-looking dude in it:


(Byrne's drawing of the big D's brother, rocking Darkseid's look)



5.) Why Kanto dresses like someone from a medieval court



6.) The secret origin of Kanto’s moustache. Come on, you know you've always wondered.



7.) How long the Forever People have been wearing those particular outfits



8.) Just how bad a combination of John Byrne art and computer-generated graphics can look:





9.) That the whole evolution of Frank Miller’s art style seems to have been in service to drawing the most perfect Darkseid visage of them all:





10.) Baby Orion’s first utterance was “RAAAA!”



11.) If the Jeph Loeb and Rob Liefeld team can do Kirby’s creations any justice. Here's a hint:





*Update: I have it on reliable authority that the Granny Goodness story from that comic, "Goodness and Mercy" by Simonson, Jon Bogdanove and Bill Reinhold, was reprinted in the trade collection of Simonson's Orion, which may explain why it wasn't re-reprinted here, despite it fitting in so well with the contents of this collection.

MISTER MIRACLE

always gets ice cream on his mask.