When is Sin City II coming out!

John Constantine also made an appearance in Sandman, and he fit right in.

I think the trouble with Constantine, from what I’ve read, is that he’s an antihero, defined by his perverse refusal to learn from his mistakes and grow as a person. Contrast that with the main character in Books of Magic, which seemed to be a classic coming-of-age story, or Morpheus in Sandman, in which a major element of the storyline was that Morpheus had profoundly changed from what he’d been for eons, and was struggling to understand that change.

You’re mixing up cause and effect. Young men’s fantasies are captured in comic books, therefore young men read them, not the other way around. “Buffy”? proved to the world that a TV show with a smart female hero and with lots of sexualized shots of handsome men would bring in female fans.

I agree, but the people making the comics have to know their market. Personally I’d LOVE to see more generously proportioned women in comics, but I doubt they would sell well in the mainstream.

Piny, of couse JC is a shite who’ll screw up the oife of any woman he’s involved with. And he knows it too.

The book has gone through differnt writers, so I figure the whole porn thing was just a bad run of writers.

Also, the one scene with Powers Boothe was great. Between that and Deadwood I’m convinced that Powers Boothe is just exceptional at playing powerful, sleazy men.

I’m hardly pointing to Japanese comic books as a source of feminism, but it’s very true that their market is much more demographically spread than ours. There are entire, popular comic-book lines for girls. There are comics read by adults (no, not just rape manga). Here it’s seen as art drawn by teenaged boys, for the most part. That means it tends to attract teenage boys (and the older versions thereof) as writers and artists.

I LIKE Sin City. And X-Men, and Spiderman, and whole other slew of DC and Marvel comics (not a fan of retibutionists: The Punisher doesn’t do it for me). Yes, I realize that the female form is ridiculous, as is them wearing high heals (HIGH HEALS?!?! WHO THE HELL WOULD FIGHT CRIME IN HIGH HEELS?) But, I like the plots. I like the modern day mythology, I like the interwoven art forms. When I get the ones written by the chicks (and maybe I’m reading the wrong ones) they seem too girl-powery, or degenerate into stereotypes (Oh, shopping. OH boys.) *shrugs* Don’t jump on the medium too much.

There is still a glaring lack of women-written-women in comics, though. Both Alias and Strangers in Paradise are written by men. The only woman allowed to write a mainstream female-centered superhero comic does it by relentlessly fetishizing the characters (Gail Simone on Birds of Prey).

The trouble is though, that regardless of what people want to see or read the titles have to be marketable. If you were to produce a comic about an unattractive woman who worked in a library, it might be a cult hit, but wouldn’t be a huge seller like ‘X Men’ or ‘Wonder Woman’. It’s mostly young men who buy the comics, so they want to get their weekly dose of their fantasy on paper.

You’re mixing up cause and effect. Young men’s fantasies are captured in comic books, therefore young men read them, not the other way around. “Buffy” proved to the world that a TV show with a smart female hero and with lots of sexualized shots of handsome men would bring in female fans. For the record, there’s a bunch of Buffy comic books written by women that are really popular here in Austin, though I don’t know about in general.

That’s why the way that most comics are drawn is to extremes, and why when they’re made into movies they replace spandex with leather. Just look at the idealised shape of ‘Superman’ in the comics or the incredibly proportioned ‘She Hulk’

I enjoyed SiP and a few other Dark Horse titles as well, until my local comic shop went bust.

After all, if Xena was popular enough among young girls, as was buffy, why can’t we get a comic or a TV show by a woman?

Actually, there are a bunch of best-selling comics among young girls created by women. As I understand it, the best-selling comics in the US nowadays aren’t superheroes - they’re manga.

Sin City is Frank Miller’s take on noir detective fiction–the world is a gritty, ugly place, where everyone’s on the take, except for a few low-down guys like Our Hero with his own twisted brand of virtue. And everything is extreme. The guns are big, the cars don’t merely drive around curves but leap over them and bounce, heroes can get hit or shot and stagger to their feet.

I think anyone who really believes the deadly prostitutes just had weapons for fetish purposes must have gone out for popcorn anytime Miho was onscreen. (She gets a much bigger role in the comics, incidentally.)