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[Ben-San]

I once read a comic book about the Knights of the Round Table being reincarnated... into our future. Not even like, now? Their future? Our future. Laser guns, flying cars, the whole deal. Not even full-on reincarnation, they just "jump" into a bunch of fully-grown adults. For some reason.

And what ends up keeping Tristan and Isolde apart in the Laser-Gun Future is...

They both end up women.

I dunno, the gender politics of comic books just boggle my mind, sometimes.

Japanese comics, even more so.

Camelot 3000 is fuck-awesome. Do not disrespect Camelot 3000.
To clarify: They were normal reincarnations, but when aliens invaded that qualified as "England's greatest hour of need" and Arthur awoke from his sleep under Glastonbury Tor. He then went around reawakening his reincarnated knights' memories of their past knightly incarnations.

Also, what was keeping Tristan and Isolde apart in it was not social disapproval, but Tristan's own belief that Isolde couldn't possibly love another woman - in the final issue, Isolde (well, her reincarnation) makes clear that in the future it doesn't really matter.

There is a lot to boggle at in the gender politics of comic books, true (wiki up "Women In Refrigerators" for further details) but don't take a half-remembered comic in bits and pieces to task over what you may or may not recall about it.

[theinevitable]

jaydub-- really? I always think the people on the TV screen playing sports look to be kind of average. And then I see them in real life in an ice cream shop, and think "good lord... he had to duck to get through that door. he is tall as all get out."

[wombat]

(wiki up "Women In Refrigerators" for further details)

I hesitate to follow this instruction because I can't imagine anything that wouldn't be a disappointment in comparison to that sentence all on its own.

[littlefallsmets]

Camelot 3000 may well be awesome. I've never read the whole thing.

I'm just sayin'... the dude who wrote magical-lesbian-reincarnation Tristan and Isolde also invented Mantra. Ultimate Spider-Man seems to be runnin' with the same plot except with cloning instead of reincarnation and... like... half the run of the newest "Dial H for Hero" was about a dude gettin' stuck as a female superhero and ending up a stripper.

Not to mention that amazing amounts of anime also seem to revolve around the idea of men magically becoming women somehow and... escaping the career and social pressures of Japanese male cubicle-until-death culture by retreating into the safety and ease of the Eastern ideal of trophy wife-ism.

It seems like when comic book artists aren't killing off the Green Lantern's girlfriends in progressively gruesome way or eagerly awaiting "the rape pages" of Identity Crisis to come in... they're getting off to the fantasy of becoming pretty girls because being a pretty girl would somehow absolve them of all effort, they could just exist off being sexy women.

A friend of mine in college who was way into anime (he recently passed away of leukemia, sadly) and I worked up this whole theory about gender change in anime as a cultural reaction to their society's "castration" by nuclear bombs, recoiling away from war and business into doll-house stereotypes of womanhood.

"Ranma's One-Half-Culture: The Japanese Retreat into a Feminine That Does Not Exist" we called it.

Deal was, if either of us burned out and went back to get a higher degree and teach, first one to burn out would get that for a TV/Film theory doctoral thesis and totally be teaching wherever the hell we wanted in a week.

Camelot 3000 was probably quite good. Mantra was pretty good in its early run, too. I'm just sayin' that Mike W. Barr wants a pu$$y, probably. Nothing wrong with that. It's just amazing how much of comic book culture is either fat white guys hating pretty girls for not liking them or fat white guys wanting to BE pretty girls.

You REALLY wanna know about the weird sexism in the mainstream superhero comic industry?

Give this'un a read: http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/

It's a running blog by a woman who used to be an editor for DC Comics who quit because she couldn't deal with the sexism anymore and... yeah. It's some rough stuff but it's amazingly well-written and insightful.

[Ben-San]

I've read that one and it's certainly thought-provoking.

I basically just tend to get hair-triggered when people start critiqueing comics that are actually quite excellent on the basis of their preconceptions about what that comic "must be like" rather than on the basis of what the comic is actually about. There is an entire sociosphere of comics critique which is as far as I can tell built on wave after wave of people telling each other what Golden and Silver Age titles were like without ever bothering to actually read them.

[AugustWest]

I just got the strangest vision of three Chinese guys wearing horn-rim glasses and playing with their slot cars.  The Han Son brothers.

You know, I was really proud of this particular jape, yet it got no love.

Sigh.

[Sub_Topical]

I canned you it 'cause it made me think "Putting on the foyer, Coach!"

[AugustWest]

I canned you it 'cause it made me think "Putting on the foyer, Coach!"

A can for appreciating that old time (chinese) hockey.

[jaydub]

jaydub-- really? I always think the people on the TV screen playing sports look to be kind of average... "

Well, yeah - until you see them on the sidelines with the trainers or whatnot and you see a "normal man" coming up to the center's elbow.  Or standing with the ref for the coin toss.  Or best of all, when a female trainer stands on a bench to spray gatorade into a offensive tackle's mouth.  The fact that we're actually the same species as some of those guys is pretty unbelievable sometimes.

[theinevitable]

oh, see, I never watch sports broadcasts long enough to see any of these things.

[linnea]

Like a lot of other short guys, I think the first thing I notice about someone is their height.  Anyone over 6'3 or so fits into a category of "freakishly tall".  One of the drawbacks of pro basketball in my opinion is that it seems to be more of a spectacle of the physically bizzare than an athletic contest.
There was a point when I was 11 or 12 that I grew 2 inches in 6 months, and I was thinking "here I go".  I was looking forward to growth pains, ravenous appetite, knocking my forehead on the door frame, etc.  I shot up to 5'7" - and there I have remained for 25 years.  I held out some hope until I was 24 (apparently that's when the last growth plate closes - in the jaw of all places). I guess there's some consolation in being unusually short - I don't blend in with all the mopes between 5'9 and 5'11.  Probably that's a coping mechanism though.  I know when I watch football, lacrosse, or hockey that if I see someone on the roster around my height I'll root for him, even if he's on the visitor's team.  Actually, one of the reasons I really love playing lacrosse is that there is a place for short guys in that sport - I wish I had discovered it while I was still in Jr High, rather than my 2nd year of college.

Ain't nothing wrong with short dudes. My boyfriend is 5'7", and he's the sexiest man on the planet. I'm 5'4", so I don't have the weird height complex that tall girls tend to have. One of my cousins, Johanna, is close to 6 feet tall and although she's hella gorgeous, she's insecure about being so tall, and tends to slouch. Dammit, lady! Stand tall and be proud! And for folks who ain't so tall, like me: Be happy with your height, 'cos I am.

[AugustWest]

Do tall girls have inverse short man syndrome?

[Sub_Topical]

Hella yeah that I've noticed. Being taller than average (6'3") made working through female volleyball players in college ripe pickins. They could wear heels and not slouch around me while still having a complex for me to riff on to my advantage.

Heh, that post makes me realize anew that maybe I'm a kinda jerk.

[melack]

I'm cursed with being 6' tall. It's taller than average, but still so very normal and boringin its perfect roundedness.

[littlefallsmets]

Being taller than average (6'3") made working through female volleyball players in college ripe pickins.

You are describing something I wanted to do very much in college.

But I quickly learned that I lacked the one thing that pretty much all the female athletes of Syracuse University were looking for in a lover:

A pu$$y.

"Tall girls, tall girls everywhere and none of them liked dink" to paraphrase.

(frowny emoticon here)