You ever think about how many female characters in DC died because of acts of violence committed by men and how the well of souls reincarnates the souls of women who died because of acts of violence committed by men into amazons, meaning DC could very easily bring those (usually fridged) women back to life as amazons
Hi !!! Can we get any comic recs from female writers and/or artists for international women's day? :^)
Evening! Just sneaking in under the deadline here, but I'd be happy to! Here's some DC/Vertigo comics I enjoyed written by female writers and/or drawn by female artists, and (in keeping with the theme) primarily starring female protagonists:
Also some indie recs:
And just for kicks:
Hope this provides you with some quality reading material!
There's something interesting you'll notice when reading old Brutalia where Talia will very explicitly disobey her father, verbally disagree with his goals and methods, and put herself at risk to help Batman stop him but because Talia isn't able to totally cut contact with Ra's Bruce will SWEAR that their relationship would never work out because TALIA can never choose, because SHE'S unwilling to leave her father, because SHE can never pick a side. And when she does cut all contact with her father and start taking more independence for herself, Bruce pushes her away because of an existing entanglement with Selina while acting overly suspicious of her actions and motives - despite knowing very well that her M.O. is pretending to work with the bad guy to use their resources for good, and all her acts of apparent villainy end up being elaborate fake-outs. Even while she goes out of her way to help him, he refuses any semblance of closeness or connection while benefiting from her care and skills.
And the obvious takeaway here is that Bruce is an unreliable narrator sabotaging his relationships because of his own mental hang-ups, hiding his avoidant behavior behind excuses and blame shifting. But it seems like for the most part the fandom agrees with him!! They will see Talia say shit like "I would rather die than help my father" or "my father has my heart but he will never own my soul" and then look at Bruce "relationship ruiner final boss" Wayne's internal monolog calling her conflicted and shifty and unreliable and they will nod their heads and agree that surely the reason Brutalia can never be is because TALIA is too stubborn to...give up helping her father that she betrays for Bruce all the time???? Give up the resources Bruce himself has also benefitted from plenty of times?? Not move in with Bruce permanently and play house mom while he turns their son into another Robin in the line of fire Talia was trying to leave?????
with the recent announcement of Stephanie Williams and Cody Ziglar respectively writing Vixen and Static ongoings respectively, I haven't seen anyone say this yet but big shoutout and thank you to the organizers of DCSoWhite + DCBlackout!!!
We absolutely SHOULD celebrate DC greenlighting three Black-led projects with Black creative teams because YAY but!! one of the requests of DCBlackout is that these titles be given immunity from cancellation for 2 years. Obviously we should do our part and preorder & show up for these titles, but DC is also not off the hook yet!!! Stay vigilant and keep demanding better for Black characters, fans, and creatives!!!!
evil cass arc david keeps calling slade to ask about cass and getting sent to voicemail. inbox full of how ya doin buddy it's me dave. hey how's my little firecracker. getting enough to eat or what. lord knows she won't tell you. made that mistake before. heh. has she shown you the neck thing she was always great at that. barely had to teach it to her she had it down pat. better than i ever did it i'll tell ya. betcha even a guy like you could learn a thing or two. she's the real deal believe me. god i miss my girl. you get it right. yeah i know you do. you don't gotta tell me. anyway. can't wait for the next mission. call me anytime you've got my number. day or night i mean it. i'm ready to go. locked and loaded. all that. talk to you soon my friend. again it's dave. maybe you don't have it saved in there. but hey i understand when you're in the life like we are. covert ops. gotta do what you gotta do. alright. keep in touch now
title: break my promise, it's yours
wc: 2K
ship: donnakory, background dickkory
summary: It is none of Donna's business who Kory dates. âŠNow if only either of them really believed that.
///////////
Donna is washing dishes when she gets the call, like in any good romcom. Not only because it's important to idealize the mundane, but because the most important things in life tend to happen when you aren't expecting it.
Kory is calling. Donna's had the same lockscreen for five years: The two of them, grinning and excited, in front of a roller rink. Donna is bruised, and Kory's jeans are ripped. It was the first time Donna understood why Kory loved the thrill of combat even outside of life-or-death heroics. The roller rink shut down five years ago, for hosting an underground roller derby fight club.
Donna still misses that place.
She wipes a single soapy finger on a dishtowel, then answers the call, putting Kory on speaker. "What's up?" she asks. "I wasn't expecting you tonight, is this a conversation I can have while still doing the dishes?"
"Don't be mad," Kory says.
Donna stops doing the dishes. She rinses her hands then turns the water off, and glances at her phone as though Kory can see her through it.
Actually--
"Should this be a facetime?" Donna asks, tone traitorously light. "Do I need proof of life to make sure you're not kidnapped or bleeding out in an alien spaceship?"
"No -- Donna, no, it's nothing like that."
Instead of explaining that entirely unhelpful sidestep to the question, Kory hesitates. Donna waits her out, the water in her sink slowly starting to drain.
When Kory doesn't answer after Donna's usual you-have-thirty-seconds-to-elaborate-or-I-come-find-you, Donna decides to give her one more chance. "What is it like, then?" she asks, not quite gentle, but gentle enough. "What happened?"
"I'm seeing Dick again."
Many things run through Donna's head at once. First: She's beyond grateful that Kory is not kidnapped or bleeding out on an alien spaceship. Considering their lives, that is top of mind. Second: She is also glad that Kory is not calling from another dimension, or telling her that she's lost her powers, or has decided to move back to Tamaran. Third, more spitefully: At least Kory has not called to shamefully admit that she dated Roy. Had Kory had had amnesia when it happened? Yes. Was Donna still working through her feelings about it? Also yes.
But it's the Fourth Thing that comes to mind that really messes with Donna.
Six months ago, they'd gotten drunk in Donna's tiny studio apartment, curled together on Donna's tiny little loveseat that very much could not handle a six-eight Tamaranean princess and a full grown five-ten Amazon warrior.
And they'd watched rom-coms and giggled over the terrible eighties and nineties culture they'd grown up in, and they told each other secrets, and sang some of the worlds worst karaoke, and they'd ended up in Donna's full-size bed which was barely big enough for just Donna, let alone Donna-and-Kory, but it had been so nice to share Kory's heat in the wintertime when Donna didn't want to pay her heating bill.
They'd been in that bed when they'd made the promise. Pinky fingers crossed, heads on the same pillow, hair and legs intertwined.
"Aren't we through with being hurt by our exes?" Kory had said. "Aren't we ready for something better?"
"Let's never date our shitty exes again," Donna had said, and her dark eyes met Kory's, glowing brighter than the sun. "Promise. Neither of us will ever, ever date our exes."
"I don't ever want to see you hurting again," Kory had said, and she linked her pinky with Donna's, oh so tight.
"I don't want to see you hurt again either," Donna said. "Especially not by our friends."
That was six months ago, and they were drunk. Donna wasn't sure if Kory had even remembered it. Now, she supposes she knows -- but that Kory must not have meant it all that seriously.
Donna dries her hands on the dishrag, a little too aggressively. "Why would I be mad?"
"Donna," Kory says, because she knows her too well. "I'm sorry. It happened so fast. One minute we were fighting, the next-"
"I get it," Donna says, expertly cutting her off before she can hear any of the sordid details. For some reason, thinking of it makes her feel mixed. The thrill of something she can't quite place, with the acerbic taste of jealousy. "Why are you apologizing? It's your life. Your dating preference."
"We promised, and I broke that promise. That is why I'm sorry."
Donna closes her eyes. Counts to five, very, very slowly. "Do you think it's a good idea to date him? Wasn't the whole point of that promise to avoid seeing the other hurt again?"
Kory hesitates, only for a moment. Not out of an inability to express her feelings -- god knows Kory doesn't struggle with that -- but out of her above-average tact. "He won't hurt me," Kory says, and Donna looks to the heavens, not quite rolling her eyes, but not... not rolling her eyes, either. "I am serious, Donna. He hurt me before because those were emotional relationships. This... These, would only be physical."
Donna's composure slips for just a moment.
She gets a vision of herself in a striking black and white jumpsuit, or maybe orange, to bring out her eyes. Fifteen years to life, isn't it so unfortunate to see a superhero snap and kill someone? Tragic. Everyone loved Dick Grayson. What did he ever do to deserve his best friend going and killing him?
Donna doesn't feel like herself. Her voice goes high and faux-sweet as she tries, desperately, to moderate her emotions. "So... modern! And unexpected! Tell me, was that his idea or yours?"
"Donna," Kory scolds, but for what, Donna has no idea, because she is rapidly losing the grip she has on herself. "It's going to be fine. He won't hurt me if I don't let him. And this way, I have my needs met, and there will not be all of that annoying sexual tension between us, yes?"
It takes Donna a minute to realize that Kory means us as in Dick-and-Kory.
"Yes," Donna says, trying to keep that same sweet tone to her voice. "Sure. I could see that working."
"Really?" Kory asks. "Could you?"
No. It's a terrible idea. But Donna doesn't say it. She pinches the skin between her brows, and her hands smell strongly of dish soap. She still needs to finish cleaning her kitchen. She wishes she'd cleaned it before Kory called, because now she's distracted, and when she picks the sponge back up for the dishes, she's going to end up cleaning her entire house after this conversation.
"Yes," Donna lies. "It's something new, right? Maybe it will break your curse with him. As long as it's what you really want. Is it?"
"I... Do want a physical relationship with him," Kory says.
There is a but. A very obvious but.
Yet, thirty seconds pass, and Kory doesn't say it. Donna sighs.
"But?" she prompts.
"I do not know what you mean," Kory says. "There is no but."
Donna raises her eyes skyward again. Sure there isn't.
"There isn't!" Kory says, and Donna doesn't know if she said that out loud, of if she's just that predictable. "And, for the record, I only told you so that you would not be mad at me for both breaking the promise and lying about it or hiding it from you. I am choosing to be honest. Choose to be happy for me, please. Maybe this time will be good!"
"I'm not saying you can't have a happy, physical-only relationship with someone," Donna says. "Just-- Dick? Really?"
"I don't like having to train new partners on what I like."
"You broke up because you wanted more of an emotional connection than he was giving you-"
"We broke up because I lost my memory and what I got back was incomplete," Kory says coolly. "But you would not remember that, as you were indisposed."
Donna raises her brows, and feels her body start to react, the anger coming before she gives it a voice. But she loves Kory. So she gives her exactly five seconds to walk that back.
"...I did not mean it that way," Kory says, and Donna feels her blood pressure lower a few notches. "Or, I did, but it was genuine. We were both going through our own burdens at the time. You and I were not there for each other. Perhaps that's part of why everything went so wrong."
Donna lets out a slow sigh. "Kory," she says, a little softer. "I just worry that you might end up regretting this. Giving him that much power over you, when the last time you two broke up..."
Do you love me? Kory had asked.
No.
Donna just doesn't want to see her hurt like that again. "I just want you to think about it a little more. That's everything he wanted last time, and nothing that you wanted."
"I want different things now." Kory's voice is softer, too, but there's this insistence. This desperation to prove to Donna that yes, this is what she wants, she is certain. But all Donna can see in her mind's eye is Kory being so smitten that she's in love with the idea of being in love. "Physical intimacy is enough for me now. I am certain of it."
Donna sighs. This is almost certainly going to end in tears. Dick is no longer the hopeless romantic, one-woman-for-life that he had sworn to be when dating Kory in their late teens and early twenties. And yet in some ways, Kory is still the same girl from back then. She will never admit it, not on pain of death, but Donna knows her better than Kory knows herself. What Kory wants most, on this world or any other, is for someone to truly love her. Body and soul. To prioritize her above all else, and make her feel loved. To be so secure that she never has to worry about betrayal again.
That's why this situationship with Dick can never work.
Donna just wishes she could convince Kory of that. But Kory is not easily swayed. Instead, Donna tries to make peace with it, despite knowing it will be a mess -- and that Donna will probably be the one to clean nine-tenths of it up.
"Thank you for letting me know," Donna finally says, and she can almost feel Kory's disappointment on the other end, sad that this isn't an endorsement of the relationship. "I love you. I forgive you for breaking your promise. And I hope it works the way you want it to."
Donna barely resists the urge to tack on, 'And if it doesn't, I won't even say I told you so, because I'm that nice.'
"...Thank you," Kory says, and though she still sounds disappointed, it is at least the measured kind. "I won't ask for more than that."
Donna rather wishes she would. "Alright. I've got to get back to some chores. Enjoy yourself. Be safe." She pauses. "Use protection."
"Donna!" At least now, she can hear a smile in Kory's voice again. Donna's heart feels strangely fluttery all of a sudden. "Of course I will, I do not need reminding. I am not a teenager."
No, but Donna is all too familiar with Dick and Kory's proclivities. Teenagers or not, they get stupid about each other. "Like I said," Donna says. "Have fun. But I really do have to go."
"Alright. Bye, Donna," Kory says, sounding like she's still smling just a little. "I love you, too."
"Mm-hm."
With that, Donna ends the call.
And suddenly, her apartment feels so much quieter and emptier than before. Her heart feels heavier, and it takes twice as much energy to move, even just back to her kitchen sink.
Donna picks up the sponge she'd been using to clean her dishes.
The rest of her house, she decides, could use a good scrub. And she won't admit it -- but she'd rather be scouring her bathroom floor until midnight than lie awake wondering what that heaviness in her heart means, now that Kory is with Dick again.
so many issues wrt the idea of responsibility and such in batfandom would be fixed if people remembered that leslie thompkins and selina kyle exist. like those scenarios people keep making up about protecting gothamâs infrastructure happen in the comics but because women are involved no one seems to give a shit. âwhy isnât anyone offering support in the alley??â leslie is. âwhy isnât anyone protecting the women and children of gotham??â selina is. âwhy isnât anyone more involved with stopping the mob in gotham??â helena is. âwhy isnât bruce more proactive in fixing gotham outside of batman??â who do u think funds leslieâs clinic.
Tbh one of the number one things I notice when reading Batman is how Bruce uses knowledge of women's identities to control them in a really distinct way
And how he raises his boys to do the same...
Like obviously when we see the retcons in Batgirl year one, this occurs. With Steph as well... And then in another way with Cass, where she doesn't get a civilian identity? Or when we see him bully Helena out of the mask in no man's land??? And almost every time he has one of his boys at his side assisting him
Like obviously a man so concerned with his own secret identity is going to view identity and knowledge about it as having power & he just does not hesitate to wield it against women in particular as a means of coercion
Everyone's seen the @dcfanmadezines fanzine by now right?? Isn't it beautiful????
A while ago I saw @jesncin make a references post for one of their awesome fancomics, and I was inspired to jot down notes as I was working on my first-ever attempt at a comic script. So read on if you would like to see what I'm referencing and why I made certain choices in the fanzine comic The Woman In The Refrigerator!
(This is part one of a series because I wrote too much. The problem with doing semi-academic writing for free on tumblr.com is that no one forces me to edit it down. Seriously it's so long, there's something wrong with me.)
Part 1: Refrigerator Dialogues
It's 1993. You are Ron Marz, DC writer, and you've been tasked with killing Hal Jordan, the current and longstanding Green Lantern, and transitioning the comic to his successor. How are you going to make people invest in and connect with Kyle Rayner, your new protagonist? Especially since this change is part of an editorially-mandated shakeup of DC legacy characters being replaced by a younger, wisecracking, """edgy""" new generation who still needed to fit comfortably into the mold of masculine, white, staunchly capitalist men (e.g. Superboy, Impulse, with Connor Hawke as a notable exception whom DC then spends decades not knowing how to write or draw). Kyle's an artist, which is already a little worryingly non-normatively-masculine, especially compared with Hal "fighter pilot" Jordan. How will you make sure people don't think the new guy is a wimp?
Obviously, you murder his girlfriend.
It's the oldest trick in the book, right? Make up a character who's pretty cool (actually, maybe a little too cool, to the point of threatening Kyle's masculinity herself by having more ambition and competence than him; good thing she isn't sticking around!), put her in the alternating roles of cheerleader, mommy, and trophy for a few issues to motivate and support your protagonist, and then pick a random villain to...cut her body up and put it in a refrigerator for Kyle to find.
Great. Kyle gets to show his masculinity by beating the villain up brutally in revenge, and now he's got manpain and an origin story, so you're good to go. Foolproof plan, nothing can go wrong here.
Except then in 1999, future comics writer Gail Simone uses your story as the centerpiece of her commentary on brutality against women in superhero comics. And she calls the trope "women in refrigerators." And a lot of people take a minute to stop and think and realize, yeah, actually, isn't it weird and fucked up that so many women in comics not only are raped, beaten, and murdered, but that many of them are created as characters for the specific purpose of being raped, beaten, and murdered as plot devices for a man's storyline?
Marz, unfortunately, did not handle this critique particularly well, writing in his defense that...yeah, exactly, he created Alexandra DeWitt solely to be graphically murdered, specifically because he wanted people to empathize with her boyfriend's pain. But he totally wasn't thinking about gender when he did it, so it can't be misogyny.
Simone's insight and coining of the trope have had a much wider cultural impact than the specific Green Lantern storyline the name came from. "Fridging" is now in the dictionary, with the meaning of treating a character, usually a woman, as disposable for the benefit of another character's plot or development.
Catherynne Valente and Annie Wu added to this conversation in 2017 with their graphic novella "The Refrigerator Monologues", a set of monologues from dead women parodying some of the most infamously fridged women in comics canon.
In this work you can see the discussion of the trope really solidify as being about dehumanization: Simone focused her critique in her original letter on how widespread the use of violence against women was, while Valente focused on the narrative roles that disposable women characters play and how they mirror dehumanization of women by their real-life male partners. Please read this book, it's fantastic and fantastically angry.
Subsequent work has examined fridging as applied to Black characters, disabled characters, and queer characters. Incredibly, Kyle Rayner's run as Green Lantern shows up again in the queer fridged characters list: in 2001, new Green Lantern writer Judd Winick introduced Kyle's friend and colleague Terry Berg, wrote an awkward but well-meaning coming out storyline for him, and then in 2002 wrote a story where he is brutally beaten in a homophobic hate crime. The story focuses almost exclusively on Kyle's feelings and his reaction: he once again enacts violent revenge on the perpetrator of the attack, and then loses his faith in humanity and leaves Earth for a while (so that they could write him in space as Ion). Terry disappeared from the comic in 2004, never to be seen again now that he served his purpose. (I brought him back in my script. I also made him a tarot gay. Sorry Terry, you now represent queer people's fundamental human right to be kind of annoying and still be alive and loved.)
We've had about 25 years of solid, thoughtful feminist critique of the women in refrigerators--though I will say, I'm disappointed in the lack of examination of intersectionality in the body of work on it so far. (Some very good articles have tackled intersectional feminist themes in comics more broadly, but I'm really missing a critical, intersectional examination of this trope in particular.) But I thought we could go farther.
Quick vocab note: "queering", as a verb, is a term academics use to express that they're doing something weird to a text. Sometimes the thing they're doing is critique, sometimes it's building off of a theory in a new different direction, and sometimes it's making a new thing taking pieces of the old one. Queering has implications of doing something "non-normative", questioning binaries of various kinds, and radical truth-telling. (It's often brought up in the same conversations as "decolonizing" a text, aka doing something to it that questions colonial perspectives and assumptions.) Fanfiction is a type of queering a text, not just because the fanfic is about queer sex/romance/identity and/or written by queer people, but also because it's doing something weird to the text of the canon, often in a way that questions that canon's assumptions about identity and normativity more broadly.
So when I started looking at queering the infamous woman in the refrigerator storyline, what I started thinking about was the gender binary at the heart of it: the man outside the fridge and the woman inside it. When we blur those lines, suddenly the whole thing gets a lot less stable and a lot more interesting. Who is in the fridge? Who's standing outside the door? Who put the person in there and why?
One might summarize the original Marz storyline as saying: the woman has to go in the fridge so the man can be a man. We have to kill her and chop her up and shut her away because he has to lose her in order to be a hero, to play the role he's supposed to play.
When you phrase it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously familiar to a lot of trans experiences, doesn't it? How many of us tried to cut out and shove down and lock away the parts that we thought were holding us back from the roles we were supposed to play? I sure did, for years. It almost killed me.
My queering of this narrative asks: what if the woman in the refrigerator is the man standing outside it too? What if you can't cut her out and lock her away, because she's you and you're her? What can this new reading show us about this fraught genre trope? What can it show us about the character of Kyle Rayner, who's already got some pretty interesting Gender TroubleTM going on?
FINALLY READ WOMAN IN THE REFRIGERATOR!! BANGER STORY huge highlight for me in the collection so far!! Excited to read more meta surrounding this story because I'm not caught up on Kyle lore but it was clear the comic made several homages to his many arcs that was readable to a newbie but I bet was a huge treat for Kyle fans.
discoholicmusic
prguitarman
germansingergirl
turnnoffyourmind
