Super-hero comics are overwhelmingly made by, for, and about white guys. This is so thoroughly the case that you can actually watch the desperate, embarrassed scramble for a more multifarious façade whenever a property gets transferred to a different medium. Nobody gives a damn about John Stewart in those little pamphlet thingies, but on the tubes? He
is Green Lantern, fanboy, because, hard as it is to believe, in the real world out there beyond the direct market people come in different shades and shapes and sizes, and gratuitous, pig-headed segregation is actually kind of bad for business.
And yet, while comics tend to assiduously ignore everyone outside of their core demographic, the reverse is by no means necessarily true. Not that there are scads of tween African-American girls reading mainstream U.S. comics because, you know, there aren't. But, as it turns out — and not surprisingly — it's actually much easier to have affection for the product if you don't partake. In any case, and for whatever reason, the fact remains that by far the most popular comic-booky star of the last year or so was not Superman or Batman or Wolverine, but Beyoncé Knowles…with Ciara not too far behind.
For those who were living in a bubble and/or a longbox over the last 12 months, Beyoncé's most recent album was called
I Am…Sasha Fierce. It's best known for the titantic, inescapable, and funky-as-hell single
Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), with accompanying black-and-white
Fosse-inspired booty-shaking dance number.
If you can tear your eyes away from the gyrating lower portion of the screen in that video, you'll notice that Beyoncé is wearing a weird robotic glove on her left hand. Said glove is, as it turns out, not just a ridiculously expensive titanium piece of jewelry; it's also a signifier of Beyoncés high-concept, not-so-secret identity. For
Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé, like many a four-color star before her, split herself into two parts. On the first disc (and in the first part of the album booklet) she's just the same girl-next-door Beyoncé we've all grown to love, singing heartfelt ballads with minimal make-up while drapery slides off her — but tastefully.
On the second disc (and in the second part of the booklet) she is…Sasha Fierce! With electro funky sexy sounds and drop-your-jaw Heavy Metal, I-can-dress-like-a hood-ornament-if-I-want outfits designed by Jean Paul fucking Gaultier, and
Star Sapphire slinking off to the cosmic little girl's room to weep quietly and curse the hacks who drew upon her pasties that didn't look at all like they'd been designed by Jean Paul Gaultier.
Ciara, unfortunately, didn't get Jean Paul either for her foray into masked adventure. Instead she turned to DC stalwart Bernard Chang to invent the look of her super-powered other-self —Super C! Alas, Chang has no discernible design ability, and
the cluttered collage of drawings and live-action ends up making both picture and photograph look unstylish and dorky…and when you're making Ciara look dorky in a skin-tight outfit, you might as well just gouge your eyes out with your drawing implement, because neither they nor it are doing you any good anyway.
Still, even blighted with a real-life comic book artist, Super C has a couple of moments where she soars above the super-shit. The last page of the book, in particular, jettisons the more literal comic pastiche and instead opts for cabaret, with our heroine decked out in a purple lace mask and purple, textured lipstick that makes her pucker look like it's been encrusted with coral. It's steamy enough that even Beyoncé might flourish a titanium glove in acknowledgment.
Ciara's conflation of action heroine and burlesque is telling, I think. Divas may like super-heroes and even comic-book iconography — and yet, their interest only accentuates how utterly divorced they and their audiences are from mainstream comic books as currently constituted. Super-hero comics tend to use multiple-identities in the interest of power fantasies; you've got all these schlubby problems and angst and melodrama, so you pull on your cape and your underwear and you go out there and do some damage. You need the mask to do that damage, but it's the damage that's the goal, not the mask. For Ciara and Beyoncé, on the other hand, the multiple-identities
are the fantasy. You get to dress up in different outfits, be somebody who isn't you but is, act sexy or tough or innocent by turns. In some ways, I suspect, the very fact that super-heroes aren't really for girls is what makes appropriating them delectable. It's not an accident that the first song on
Sasha Fierce is called "If I Were a Boy."
Even as divas may be more interested in dress-up, though, they're less interested in actually being somebody else. Thus, Sasha Fierce is supposed to be Beyoncé's "sensual, aggressive alter ego." Super C, according to Ciara, "is my super hero name. It's who I am. It's the inner strength and drive that enables me to overcome any obstacles and who I have to be in order to accomplish my dreams and survive in this tough world." Obviously, all of this is in part simply over-carbonated marketing copy. But the kind of marketing copy is important. The interest here isn't in becoming more powerful; it's in revealing the power you've already got. If the typically boy super-hero wants to ditch his whiny, limp Peter and become somebody more upright and exciting, the diva heroes want to be acknowledged instead as having been awesomely sexy and sexily awesome all along. In short, super-heroes for guys tend to want to be one powerful person who isn't them; these super-heroes retooled for girls, on the other hand, want to be scads of different people, all of whom are still the same wonderful someone. I don't know that either of these fantasies is necessarily more ridiculous than the other. But I do know which sells better.
Noah Berlatsky writes regularly for The Comics Journal, The Chicago Reader, and his own blog, The Hooded Utilitarian. He's also an artist of sorts.
A Pundit in Every Panopticon is ©2010 Noah Berlatsky
