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There's
been a bit of internet "discourse" lately among women who
read superhero comics and whether they're more special than
other women who read, say, Joyce Carol Oates. Some of these
women feel ostracized by their peers, by the dudes who draw
these superhero comics and keep making the ladies in the comic
book too sexxay, and, of course, by the comic book store employees.
I think
the last Spider-Man comic I read was Spider-Ham
(Peter Porker, anyone? And no, he's not a porn star). But
I used to read comics— Ambush Bug, Groo the
Wanderer, Howard the Duck, ALF. Mostly I
read Cerebus. This was before author Dave Sim got all
crazy and started denouncing women as devils incarnate. A
friend and I were involved in our own little bit of feminist
polemical shenanigans, albeit pre-internet, so things progressed
slowly and with more stamps. We used to write letters to Sim—letters
that got published in the "Aardvark Comment" letters pages
and got some people mad. Apparently some people didn't get
that they were jokes!
My friends
were big fans of Cerebus, the comic book featuring
the eponymous main character, an adorable anthropomorphized
aardvark who went from mercenary to Prime Minister to Pope
in the made-up world of Estarcion, a world that paralleled
Earth in most ways, except they had an aardvark who made policy.
No doubt I was attracted to Cerebus for two reasons—funny
animals and the Dungeons and Dragonsy aspects of Estarcion.
I didn't even realize at the time that Dave Sim was changing
the way we think about comic books—that there could be
something that wasn't from Marvel or DC that also wasn't x-rated.
This was a weird time in comic books—post-Zap Comix,
but pre-Love and Rockets. There were few independent
comic books that were written for adults that weren't porn.
My friend
and I had (and still have) a thing about writing letters to
publications, and we thought it would be funny to write to
Cerebus. Not to Sim, but to Cerebus, the aardvark. She had
just starred in a film a friend of ours had made—as a
vampire who kills her doppelgånger. There were some photos
taken during filming of her with some faux-blood dripping
from her lips. So she decided this character, the vampire,
was going to write the letter to the comic book aardvark,
and thus Connie L. was born.
The letter
was pretty salacious, just stopping short of the obvious bestiality
at which the vampire was hinting. It was signed with a very
juvenile "Love and Hisses" and a lipstick kiss. Oh, and one
of the above-mentioned photos. We added the extra postage
and filled out the customs form (Dave Sim lives in Canada)
and off went our stupid letter.
Three
months later, we opened up Cerebus and we freaked out.
Inexplicably, Dave gave Connie's letter and photo half a page
in a 32-page comic book. He must not have gotten a lot of
letters that month.
In the
next issue were responses to Connie's letter. Since Cerebus
was mostly read by guys, the letters were pretty positive.
We sent off another letter and photo and added a friend's
address in Philadelphia. We received over one hundred letters,
some signed in blood, some with Polaroids. We sent more letters,
more photos. Some were just goofy flirting letters, but usually
ended with some comments about what was going on in Cerebus.
But as time went on, there was some feminist backlash. Some
people said they couldn't read the letters pages any more,
that Connie ruined those pages. Some insisted that Connie
had to be a man, because a woman would never write those things.
Some claimed that they could no longer read Cerebus
at all because of Connie. But very few people got the joke.
I guess some people think a fake vampire writing a love letter
to a comic book aardvark is very serious business.
We were
all geeks, feminists, and proud of it. And, as feminists,
we thought it was OK to act out and come on to comic book
aardvarks. We also thought that Connie L. was a bit of social
commentary on the state of comics at that time—it still
was a boys' club. The only women in comics were characters
who got saved from car wrecks and burning buildings, or the
few who wrote the occasional letter. Women were allowed to
be fans, but very few women were working in comics back then,
and the ones who were working in comics were writing and drawing
children's titles. Connie started as a comic book boy's dream
girl—a cute teenage girl who was interested in sex and
comic books—but quickly morphed into a wise-cracking
vagina dentata. Comics at that time, even independent
comics, were such a no-woman's land that a stupid letter with
a photo could upset and unsettle people to such a degree that
it's still discussed on bulletin boards.
In many
ways, the backlash was sort of fitting, as Sim eventually
became an anti-feminist (his term) to an extreme degree. Here
were a bunch of feminists fighting over what feminism was,
and what it "allowed" us to do in a publication that was headed
towards alienating many of its female readers, anyway.
I see
little has changed in the world of superheroes, but much has
changed in the world of independent comics. Alison Bechdel,
Dame Darcy, Sarah Dyer, Mary Fleener, Trina Robbins, and Marjane
Satrapi are all producing quality comics and graphic novels.
It's no longer an anomaly to for a girl to read comics, draw
comics, or choose to tell a story in a graphic style. Not
that this would have mattered to us. I'm sure we still would
write love letters to aardvarks.
(June,
2007)
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