Writer: Brian Wood
Artist: Stephane Crety
Publisher: Dark Horse
Released: 11th June 2014
I had to laugh after reading Star Wars #18, as writer Brian Wood performed miraculous back-flips, somersaults and a dazzling display of narrative contortionism to explain away why two female leaders of the rebel alliance had made such a massive mess of things over the past six-months of his story arc. He also had to explain why one of the most menacing and scary villains in cinematic history (Darth Vader) couldn’t pull off what amounted to shooting rebel fish in a barrel.
Princess Leia and Mon Mothma, the two great feminist leaders of the rebel alliance have just spent the past few month’s of this story-arc leading their troops into the most obvious trap since those Greeks and their silly wooden horse. Their combined incompetence has now left everybody in the Rebel alliance open to easy annihilation by any half competent villain worthy of the name. Don’t shout at me about this. I didn’t write the stupid story. That was Brian Wood’s fault.
What Wood had to do in this issue was 1- Make the two female leaders look strong, even though the story arc has just shown their incompetence. Remember this is a politically correct, feminist liberal book, so all female leaders must be portrayed in a good light. 2- Somehow make the villains fail to shoot the rebels in a barrel, even though if you are following the story they would have to be the most incompetent villains in history to not easily kill every single one of them, including Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
How does Wood achieve this goal? Firstly, he makes Mon Mothma look like a tough and courageous fighter by having her kill some low level villains, and then he reveals that she has prepared a secret weapon that will ensure that the rebels sitting in a barrel won’t get killed after all. And what about Darth Vader you might ask. Won’t his failure here make him look completely incompetent, thus diminishing him as the serious threat that he’s supposed to be? Easily fixed by the acrobatic Wood who simply removes him from the final scene so some faceless uniform can take the blame for the unbelievable incompetence. It’s genius.
The book then ends with Princess Leia kind of taking some of the blame, but not really because there are no consequences, and lets forget this all happened. You have to take your hat off to Brian Wood. His feminist liberal credentials are intact, two incompetent female leaders are portrayed as heroes, and Darth Vader doesn’t have to look weak either. Nice one, ha ha, what a laugh. Rating: 6/10
Wood is also the guy who began the all-female X-Men title at Marvel. Glad I skipped this. I figured it would be something ridiculously cliché and PC.
ReplyDeleteWood is almost unbelievably PC in his writing, and you have to ask yourself why that it so? Is he really expressing his own deep rooted feminist beliefs, or is he just pumping out product that he knows will be acceptable to corporate America in 2014? I'll give the guy some credit and suggest that it's probably the later. If he really cared about genuine gender inequalities that exist today (like women being arrested on terrorism charges for driving in Saudi Arabia, for example) then he'd put that in his books, but as he doesn't go there (as it is dangerous to do so) it looks to me that he is just giving his bosses what they want, and that is feminist empowerment nonsense that is horribly dated and old man embarrassing in that it's tackling a 'problem' that no longer exists in most western countries.
DeleteThat is a very pertinent question, Mark - and one I ask myself every time I read through a stack of new comics.
DeleteWhere do these themes come from? Sometimes I think it may be coming from the editors - dictating story ideas to the writers. Wouldn't the editors be in a better position to play social engineer than the writer?
Consider: An editor usually has a longer and more consistent tenure than most writers at a given company. Also, the editor - being more of an administrative position - would be more embedded in the establishment, so to speak, thereby being more inclined to push the propaganda.
Look at Marvel, for example. It would be fairly efficient if Fine, Quesada, Alonso, and Brevoort were of a certain political persuasion, and wanted to push a particular agenda through messages in their comics. It would be much harder, however, to make sure every single writer was on board, because there are considerably more writers, and some of them are probably just freelance, at that. I would assume that all the writers wouldn't coincidentally agree on these topics and then write them into their stories.
If this is the case, it means that the culprits are the editors and publishers, and maybe even those on the organizational pyramid above them. It also means that the editors are largely dictating the main plot points and themes, while the writers are simply scripting things out and painting by the numbers they're given.
Hell, I don't know. Just my thoughts. I've never worked at a comic publisher - I don't know exactly how this all works out. But these messages are undoubtedly there. And they're clearly coming from someone and they're obviously very much consistent.
I don't think that it's some kind of devious conspiracy, with editors controlling the writers. What I think is happening here is that the writers have grown up in schools, colleges and universities and with the mainstream media pushing this neo-liberal Marxist agenda as being the new norm, so all that is happening is that the writers are reflecting the ideological conditioning that they have been subjected to since early childhood. They have been culturally/socially programmed by the corporate elites who fund and control the education and media establishments in the west, and what they produce is thus the inevitable result of that social programming.
DeleteCould be, Mark. Again, I don't know.
DeleteBut regardless, the messages are certainly there, and it's getting worse.
I often go back and read comics in my collection from earlier decades, just to see if I'm nostalgically remembering my superhero comics as being more fun and less creepily statist when I was kid.
And honestly, I simply don't see as much of it in the older comics. Granted, there has always been an obvious left leaning by comic creators, for whatever reason. But the old comics I've went back and re-read in recent years - with new eyes since I've been "awake", no less - don't beat the reader over the head with their trendy liberalness.
At least not like the majority of them do, like nowadays.