Across The Pond: How to be Frustrated

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Hi comics fans,

The other day a woman asked me why I bother reading comics . She’s a nice person and very high-minded. She teaches English and Philosophy at a high school here. The first ever comic she has read is one of the ‘Fables’ books (which I loaned to her so she could check out the Lord of the Flies references).

Ironically, I had this conversation just as I was warming up to doing my ‘whither women in comics’ column – something I’m sure I’ve never done before. Would this column answer her question? Probably not because she’s one of those people who physically just can’t read comics. Their eyes just slide off the page (she said it was like reading car manuals). Besides which, I’m not interested in making anyone read comics if they don’t want to. Each to their own, I say. The vast majority of comics reading has little to offer the high minded person. In case you’re wondering, I said that most comics were just fun and (wanting to justify my total frivolity a little) that Alan Moore was interesting. That was misleading. Moore is a genius, but I’d go round the twist if everything was as demanding as most of his work. I read comics for Judge Dredd breaking heads, the Phantom punching bad guys on the chin and the Punisher humorously murdering New York crime lords. Mr Moore just puts variety in the mix.

So whither women in comics? Ever since I graduated from Caspar the Ghost, I think I’ve been interested in comics ladies.Because comics women are so important to the stories, I’ve been interested in comics women since before I was sexual. There have been:

Diana, the Phantom’s fiancée for about forty years, when she finally married him and had kids whilst retaining her figure. She was a babe in the old 30s and 40s stories, even if she was a bit of a dip, constantly getting kidnapped by society types with sidelines in piracy. Now she works for the UN, looks after her perfect, bland children and gets kidnapped every now and then for old times’ sake.

(The Phantom helps Diana fend off yet another kidnapper)

Sue Storm: Always the maternal type, partly due to her looks and partly because she was engaged (for about twelve years. Again with the long engagements!) to Reed Richards who was even more adult and boring.

The Black Widow: Never maternal and far too seventies to be engaged to Daredevil. She just swung around the place with him and kissed occasionally in a way that hinted at naughtiness between issues. I always had the feeling that they were at it hammer and tongs in the month long interval between fighting the evil of HYDRA.

Valkyrie: pretty boring female Thor knock-off (i.e. Asgardian deity possesses humdrum mortal, further news at 7), slightly redeemed by uncomfortable-looking metal breast covers. When she finally replaced these with a sensible, yet tight, cloth top, we all wondered how long it would take the scars to heal.

Catwoman: in the TV show, an absolute babe, who confirmed Batman’s dorkiness by failing to tempt him away from Robin. In the comics, dunno, I wasn’t reading DC back then.

– do we detect a common theme here? Comics women exist largely to give shy boys a bit of friendly porn. No amount of empowering talk or kicking male characters around the joint will change this fact (particularly since most of the empowering kicking is done whilst pointing pulchritudinous backsides at the reader). Yes, I know about the women in ‘Y – The last man’.

Of actual women, much less is known. For this reason, the idea of a ‘women in comics’ column stayed in the back of my mind as an idea with not much mileage in it, until a Claire Bretecher book dropped on me from the heavens (really from my ex-pat sister’s big box of books, which my parents evicted from their house). ‘Claire Who?’, I hear you cry?

Bretecher is a French cartoonist who started work in the sixties. I’m delighted to say that she got her first break doing some work for Rene Goscinny, the co-creator of Asterix. I first came across her work in a vast feminist humour anthology called ‘Pulling our own strings’. This was a large American book, containing a mixture of the funny and the worthy. Feminism was very important to my mother and my sisters in the 70s and 80s. In fact, it was important to the whole world, something that’s hard to recall at this distance, after a long period of the gains feminism achieved being written off as matters of fact, silly arguments over the use of words and Germaine Greer making an idiot of herself.

Anyway, Bretecher’s work was on the cover, a cute little cartoon about two young girls learning how to use tampons for the first time. I realise that the description of it here does not sound cute. You’ll just have to trust me, it was cute. No words, just two girls alternately talking, looking worries, going into the closet, coming out again and finally triumphing and walking off hand in hand. The more comics-oriented of my sisters bought a couple of Bretecher collections and I was away.

Bretecher’s adults are far less cute – like many actual adults, they all look tired, lumpy and wrinkly. They’re very verbal. One of my favourites is the woman who contemplates suicide and then imagines what would happen afterwards. First a doctor charges in and dramatically puts his head to her chest. Then she re-designs it with a better-looking doctor. After that, she has a great time with the boyfriend’s remorse and all of her friends missing her terribly. The punchline is after the funeral, when what always happens after funerals happens. Life goes on, she’s forgotten. She wakes up and goes for a walk, past a street-cleaner who looks as gloomy as she does. Another cartoon is a woman who smiles politely while her mother-in-law yammers away with thinly veiled criticisms of how she does everything. She excuses herself to make tea and drinks deeply from a bottle labelled ‘XXX’ before returning to continue smiling, rather more glassily. The look on her little daughter’s face while she’s drinking is priceless.

Feminism does feature highly in Bretecher’s work, as why wouldn’t it? More than half her characters are educated women. The other half are educated men, for whom feminism was no less important. The people are full of educated middle-class concerns – adults deplore their children’s love of potty humour while reading fashionable psychobabble books about phallocentrism and anal retention, authors pride themselves on seriousness whilst groping groupies. A little girl nags her grandmother inaudibly and gets sweet grandmotherly responses until the kindly Grannie finally snaps and shouts ‘Black people are black, white people are white, yellow people are yellow, now shut up for a bit!’.
In a historical classic, a man in a stovepipe hat agonises over wether to save his wife or her baby. His Queen Victoria-like mother tells him it’s his duty to save the baby. His father faced the same decision and made the right choice. He decides to save the baby, then asks his mum if she resented father for not choosing her life. “In fact I made his life a living hell because of it”. The man screams “save the mother” and promises to build a bridge in Africa to make up for it.

She stands the test of time far better than anyone else in ‘Pulling Our Own strings’ does, including the admirable Gary Trudeau and Nichole Hollander. What’s more, she looked gorgeous on the back cover. Now she looks like someone who looked gorgeous back in the 80s, which is doing better than I am. Her pictures are going strong. Her first solo series was called ‘Les Frustres’ (the frustrated ones, published in English as ‘Frustration’) which is entirely apt given the flair with which she draws that feeling.


a Bretecher woman faces life.

Bretecher will never replace athletic women with basketball-sized breasts in the world of comics, but like the British Posy Simmonds, she shows the middle-classes themselves as they are, which is quite an achievment. Check out ‘Frustration’ and give yourself a break.