To redress the balance and probably push forward the underdeveloped emotional growth of some, if not all, male comic collectors, Marvel Comics gave it's fans (and FanBoys), Ms Marvel.
See Ms., acknowledging that women were equal to men. Well, almost. A look at this cover Ms. Marvel number one suggests otherwise, in its patronising pose, tone and wordage.
Hey, look 'this female fights back'. (Doh), really, wow how new and different, how hip, how cringe worthy. Look, her alto ego can answer a phone for herself!! What ever next, driving a car, running her own bank account? But don't the dishes need washing first, who's cooking dinner tonight?
Notice also that Ms. Marvel 's still getting trashed by a male super villain and still has an ample cleavage. So if you do get bored with her agenda there's still something to look at.
And then there's that in the tradition of Spider Man!!! Like Ms. Marvel's too weak a character not to need a supporting cast of manly men. I could go on but I think you're getting the point or getting bored, or both.
There are worst sexist covers than this but, as teenage boy this was first and also my first realisation that something was not quite equal in the macho world of comics. And, I believe, that's still the case today. Some three decades later!
2 comments:
"Since Madame Medusa" is the best comparison they could make on the cover? Pretty paltry pickings in those days, it seems!
My favorite cover adjective phrase has to be "senses-shattering," but this cover's "senses-stunning" has to be running a close second. Why are either of those things considered desirable?
Sound kinda painful to me!
What a cool cover, though. Breathless cover copy of mixed messages and all!
Agreed on most of what you wrote, and I could add a little more (such as the way, as originally written, Carol Danvers was not even aware that she was Ms. Marvel for the first few issues, but had a split personality à la "Rose and the Thorn").
But you do seem to get a bit too much mileage of the picture showing Carol using a phone. At the time she already had been a fairly long-running supporting character on "Captain Marvel", where she had been head of security at the NASA base at which Mar-Vell worked in his cover ID.
Also, yes, in the fight scene she is shown at a (momentary) disadvantage against her opponent, but that is a) completely normal for a superhero cover, where it probably is more common to show the hero in danger than in a triumphant position, and b) I suspect that if Ms. Marvel had been shown fighting a a female villain, that could also have been interpreted as sexist ("ah, she can fight other gurls, but is she good enough to clean a male villain's clock?"). And these days, a lot of artists would probably have shown Ms. Marvel's costume torn in that fight scene, so that you actually got to see some cleavage.
Funnily enough, although Ms. Marvel has well-sized breasts, there is no actual cleavage evident on the cover, neither in her costume nor in her civilian threads. Although of course the costume is sexist and wrong in so many ways. The top third (well-covered chest and a scarf-like neckline) and bottom two thirds (showing as much skin as possible) don't match at all. At least a few issues later they changed the costume so that it also covered the belly.
Gerry Conway did seem to let his fan past hang out in the cover copy, that's for sure, invoking both the Spider-Man tradition and the old Medusa stories from the 1960s. As the appearance of J. Jonah Jameson, Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker on the cover shows, he wanted to have Ms. Marvel tie in fairly closely with the Spider-Man titles, with Carol Danvers being hired by JJJ to be the editor-in-chief of "Woman" magazine and befriended by MJ in the first issue. However, Conway left with #3 and the new writer, Chris Claremont, no longer used MJ and Spider-Man, focusing more on Carol's mostly female colleagues at "Woman" (IIRC there was just one minor, clearly subordinate male office worker among the staff). But there really is nothing wrong with having a strong supporting cast, that certainly was one of Spider-Man's hallmarks up until then. Also I am not so sure about the "manly men" part, seeing that the only men on the cover (apart from the villain) are J. Jonah Jameson (not so much manly man as cantankerous old coot) and somewhat nerdy Peter Parker. ;-)
And yes, "this female fights back" IS cringeworthy.
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