In the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, the titular protagonist sets out on a journey of self-discovery, trying to give new meaning to a life spent fighting errant gods, space elves, and other pseudo-mythological villains. After “saving planet Earth for the 500th time,” as the trailer for the film puts it, what is there left to do for Thor? The answer, the trailer suggests, will partly be more of the same. Love and Thunder will again have Thor face off with a nefarious antagonist, tussle with other gods, and punch out many monsters and henchmen in the process. At the same time, Love and Thunder also appears to claim new territory for future Marvel movies. It introduces a new female Thor portrayed by Natalie Portman and presents Chris Hemsworth’s version of the character going through a superheroic mid-life crisis and trying to stake out an existence beyond the established routine.

Thor’s attempts to reinvent himself (but not too much) mirror the challenges faced by the entire superhero blockbuster genre—as well as the reason why these films, much like Thor’s red cape, are not going anywhere. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe is a 28-film franchise that has brought figures such as Iron Man, Black Panther, and Black Widow to the cinema. But it’s only a fraction of the roughly 100 superhero films to come to American theaters (and, more recently, streaming services) since the year 2000, including multiple big-screen incarnations of comic book favorites such as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man, as well as lesser-known characters such as Valiant Comics’ Bloodshot. All of them play variations on similar themes and motifs, pitting more-or-less virtuous, more-than-human heroes against evil counterparts that threaten the fragile status quo of a social order that is not necessarily ideal, but that will be defended nonetheless.

Superhero blockbusters generally try to provide a well-calibrated mix of familiar pleasures and innovative ideas. The formula puts known characters into situations that are similar to what came before, but, ideally, even more spectacular—a task that is becoming more and more difficult as new entries are added to the genre. Against this backdrop, Thor’s mid-life crisis can be understood as a self-reflexive joke about a looming exhaustion of creative options and the fear that there might not be all that much left that’s worth telling stories about (not coincidentally, the specter of “superhero fatigue” among audiences has haunted coverage of the genre for some time now).

This challenge is not unique to the superhero blockbuster. Other film genres have faced it before—such as Westerns or “creature feature” horror movies, for example, both of which enjoyed significant popularity but eventually returned to the fringes of Hollywood production. Filmmaking trends like these are examples of an “aesthetics of seriality” that, as the semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco suggested, is more generally at work in modern mass media. Seriality here has a double meaning: On the one hand, it refers to cultural creators producing new material on the basis of established success formulas, stock scenarios, and character types, which are then invested with new meaning, combined with new ideas and interesting twists, or rearranged in unexpected ways. (Think the American Western being appropriated by Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leone, or Steven Spielberg’s Jaws inspiring Joe Dante’s horror comedy Piranha.) Eco understood trends, appropriations, and reinventions of this kind as the norm in commercial popular culture. These products, he wrote, would invariably be characterized by “a dialectic between order and novelty, … between scheme and innovation.” In other words, there’s nothing truly new under the sun (or multiple suns, as on Star Wars’ Tatooine—a setting that combines the Western’s frontier vibes with the desert planet aesthetics of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and thus presents itself as another example of Hollywood’s tendency to reuse and remix well-established ideas).

But seriality also refers to a mode of storytelling in which narrative information is doled out piece-by-piece and across multiple installments to engage audiences over extended periods of time. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe and other contemporary superhero franchises embody this model of serial narration par excellence: A film like Love and Thunder, for example, might still have a relatively self-contained story at its core, but is clearly not meant to be watched outside of the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Recent entries of the genre are furthermore riddled with in-jokes, callbacks, and other nods to earlier superhero properties and comic books—references which require more than a passing familiarity with the material to be understood.

The result can be a peculiar sense of narrative fragmentation—instances in which superhero blockbusters cease to tell self-contained and classically coherent stories altogether. In such moments, films appear to be constructed around conspicuous narrative gaps, as motivations for characters’ actions are implied rather than spelled out. In this year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, for example, one character’s transformation from hero to villain only makes sense if one also has seen preceding Avengers films and the 2021 Disney+ streaming series WandaVision (and even then it remains pretty implausible). This type of serial storytelling makes good sense for Marvel and parent Disney, who can use it to point consumers from one arm of their multifaceted entertainment offerings to the next. In fact, the superhero blockbuster’s strong reliance on serial narration is arguably a key reason why the genre has not yet gone the way of the Western or the “creature feature.” At the same time, such interconnectedness can also make it difficult to follow along if one does not want to invest the time. But in our contemporary media environment—thanks to sites such as Wikipedia, chatter on social media, and the ceaseless coverage of the genre on entertainment news fan websites—the necessary background information is usually just a quick Google query away.

The existence of lively surrounding discourse is another important reason for superhero blockbuster cinema’s enduring success. After all, serial storytelling thrives on the temporal gaps between installments, which offer audiences (including fans and journalists on the popular culture beat) ample time and opportunity to celebrate or criticize recent releases, pitch hot takes about films’ broader significance, trace references to source materials, share news about the production of upcoming features, and speculate about future plot developments. Ultimately, it is this multifaceted and ongoing public discourse about superhero movies that creates much of the genre’s cultural visibility, and thereby lays the groundwork for the continued profitability of this type of film (after all, audiences need to know about a film before they can go see it).

Like our celestial universe, the superhero universe continues to find ways to expand—it has, by now, grown so large that some of its entries deliberately position themselves against the humor, playfulness, and fragmentation of recent Marvel fare. This year’s The Batman, for example, offered gritty violence, corrupt cops, and civil unrest along with a 176-minute runtime that left enough room to flesh out even minor aspects of the backstory in great detail. In this tradition, we can expect that superhero movies will, in the coming years, continue to play through all possible variations of the underlying hero-vs.-villain theme—and, in the process, continue to combine the well-worn cliché with the unexpected twist.

Will audiences eventually tire of this continued reinvention of the already known? So far, superhero movie fatigue has not yet left a significant dent in the genre’s overall commercial success; likewise, the public discourse about the genre shows little signs of souring. Like Thor, the superhero movie probably will overcome whatever obstacles stand in its way.

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So it may come as a surprise—though it shouldn’t—to learn that women have always been at work behind the scenes, aiding in the development of the horror genre across numerous media. Milicent Patrick was the costume designer behind the Gill-man from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Daphne du Maurier wrote the short story that Alfred Hitchcock adapted as The Birds (1963); TV horror hosts Maila Nurmi (Vampira) and Cassandra Peterson (Elvira) reshaped how audiences engage with horror films through the lens of camp and kitsch; Stephanie Rothman worked alongside B-movie legend Roger Corman for several years before going on to direct the cult horror exploitation film The Velvet Vampire in 1971. More recently, Nia DaCosta made history when Candyman (2021) became the first film directed by a Black woman to debut in first place at the box office, setting a vital precedent for the future of the horror genre.

Decades earlier, as we chronicle in our new book, Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age, women were also at the forefront of the horror genre. Between the 1920s and 1940s, pulp magazines, seen today as an ancestor of horror cinema and B movies as well as a direct precursor to comic books, emerged as the forum for fantasy, science fiction, and horror tales starring women in peril. While the bylines were dominated by male writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch, it was a woman who defined the aesthetic of one of the most influential pulp magazines during its most iconic and memorable era.

Margaret Brundage, who began her career as a fashion illustrator for various Chicagoland newspapers, began painting for Weird Tales in 1933. Initially hired by editor Farnsworth Wright to produce illustrations for the adventure pulp Oriental Stories, Brundage was soon tasked with providing cover art for Weird Tales, the more popular of the two Wright-helmed publications. In total, Brundage was responsible for 66 of the magazine’s cover illustrations between 1933 and 1945. She is the artist most associated with Weird Tales—and, arguably, the shudder pulp genre.

Beautiful women in danger were a favorite subject of Brundage, and the stories published in Weird Tales contained no shortage of damsels in distress to inspire her. While her painterly, colorful covers often feature nude women cowering as they were beaten, chained up, or pursued by some kind of beast, a key element of her style was that she depicted women as aggressors, as characters with power and control, in frequent, if not equal, measure. Her artwork was so popular with readers that authors sometimes wrote scenes into their stories in hopes of inspiring a Brundage-illustrated cover. Nevertheless, she was the one who bore the brunt of criticism for performing the very task that her job called for: depicting eroticized, violent scenes featuring beautiful women. H.P. Lovecraft himself criticized the sexual overtones of many of her cover illustrations as a cheap ploy by Weird Tales’ editors to attract a larger audience. In a letter to fellow sci-fi author Robert Bloch, Lovecraft called Brundage’s covers “irrelevant” and “even worse” than some of the fiction that appeared in the pages of pulp magazines, claiming not to understand the relevance of her work to the weird fiction genre.

Despite such criticism by others in her field for depicting women in vulnerable, erotically charged situations, Brundage never stopped—or paid much attention to naysayers. In a 1973 interview, Brundage commented that she had been asked by Weird Tales to “make larger and larger breasts…larger than [she] would have liked”; otherwise, she seems to not have taken much issue with the work assigned to her by the magazine. In fact, Brundage is alleged to be one of the few Weird Tales illustrators who took the time to read the magazine cover-to-cover, with her eyes peeled for scenes that would make for eye-catching cover art that aligned with her style and interests. Brundage’s legacy as a figure in the history of the horror genre goes far beyond her cover illustrations for Weird Tales, though; as a woman artist who openly created sexually charged, violent works, she paved the way for women with untraditional, perhaps “indecent” perspectives to find homes for their work in the developing horror comics genre.

Weird Tales, November 1934, cover by Margaret Brundage. Courtesy of Flickr CC BY 2.0 / Tom Simpson

Brundage is just one of a number of women creators who helped develop the horror genre. June Tarpé Mills was another pioneer, but she had to drop her first name when signing her work in order to create a masculine sounding pen name. Best known for creating the early female action hero Miss Fury (who some argue is the first female superhero), she also created “The Purple Zombie,” one of the earliest ongoing horror characters in comics. Mills’s horror resume also includes “The Vampire” and “The Ivy Menace,” two horror tales that appeared during the late 1930s, well before horror comics gained widespread popularity. “The Vampire” even included a twist ending—an uncommon device for comics at the time, but which became a staple of EC horror comics by the 1950s and in cinema decades later.

EC Comics dominated the horror genre with such well-remembered series as Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, but it’s thanks to artist Lily Renée that horror comics gained new ground. Renée worked on “The Werewolf Hunter” between 1943 and 1948, creating plot ideas and drawing all manner of supernatural terrors for stories that regularly featured powerful female villains in relatively empowered roles for the era. EC’s distinctive touch was also thanks to Marie Severin, EC’s lone female creator. The colorist for the publisher’s gory, gruesome images, she had a substantial influence on the publishing house. Severin was a pioneer of the genre, often using dark color palettes to define the aesthetic of the most popular horror comics of all time. By obscuring the ghastliest panels with shadowy tones, EC could get away with publishing its most shocking content.

These women are just a few examples of genre pioneers who today have been largely neglected by modern fans because of the male-dominated way in which comic book history has been told. In more recent years, it’s become much easier to identify the contributions women creators are actively making to the horror genre, thanks to the work of directors like Nia DaCosta, Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark), Mary Lambert (Pet Cemetery), Mary Harron (American Psycho) and Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), and novelists like Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire) and Alma Katsu (The Hunger). Horror comics are also experiencing a renaissance thanks to the award-winning work of Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) and Marjorie Liu (Monstress).

Still, to hear some tell it, horror isn’t a genre that women are interested in. A few years ago, contemporary horror hitmaker Jason Blum caught flack for denying that there were any—or enough—women who wanted to direct horror movies, though he insisted he was “always trying” to find one. As Blum’s comments demonstrate, when it comes to the horror genre, women continue to be thought of as victims first and foremost. But with respect to scream queens like Jamie Lee Curtis—whose latest entry in the Halloween franchise opened this month—we must not forget that women have been in horror from the beginning, using the genre as a forum to have their voice heard in ways that are louder and more resonant than the visceral scream.

The post The Women Who Built the Horror Genre appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Growing up in Australia, I learned the basic stories of American history from the pages of these Superman comics. I read about the Boston Tea Party; Nathan Hale’s patriotism; Washington crossing the Delaware (complete with a comic book replication of Emanuel Leutze’s painting); the hoary myth of Betsy Ross, creator of the Stars and Stripes; John Paul Jones’s fighting spirit; and the importance of Lincoln. I knew whose faces are carved on Mount Rushmore. And a Lois Lane story taught me that Hawaii was the 50th state of the union.

It might be no surprise that I became a historian of the United States. But Superman’s global impact was not limited to one Australian kid, or indeed, even just to kids. From early in the existence of the character, Superman was seen as symbolic of America, for better or for worse.

After his debut in Action Comics #1, June 1938, Superman quickly became a global figure, his worldwide fame predicated on his being an American. Who could be more American than Superman, who, though Krypton-born, put his incredible powers to use serving “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”? And what did that mean for the rest of the world?

Just how important Superman was to the rest of the world after World War II is hard to evaluate. We know Superman made it as far as Italy, India, and Japan, but there’s little scholarly work that tells us what people in those countries made of him. Anecdotally, it seems that readers around the world loved him—and that cultural critics and politicians worried about the appeal of such a character, and of American culture in general. But he also served as a minor flashpoint for concerns about American power in the aftermath of World War II.

In 1949, the Soviet Literary Gazette attacked Superman as promoting the “mass fascisization” of American children. That same year, the French government restricted the type and amount of foreign comics’ content allowed into the country, on the grounds that it created juvenile delinquency. Journalists at Le Monde defended comics and Superman, arguing that it was a bit much to blame the Man of Steel, given the negative impacts of the recent German occupation.

And when the “Superman” television show was first broadcast in the U.K. in 1957, one critic said it was not only the worst thing he’d ever seen on television but was the worst thing he had “ever encountered in any form.”

His fans applaud Superman’s kindness, decency, and small acts of charity—in contrast to the United States’ attempts at systemic change on a global scale, which sometimes go astray. Image courtesy of Flickr.

The most certain evidence of Superman’s global influence, good and bad, comes from the box office revenues of the 1978 Superman movie, starring Christopher Reeve. The U.S. domestic take for the film was $134 million, or 44.7 percent of the total. The remaining 55.3 percent, $166 million, came from the international market. In contrast, the original Star Wars movie of 1977 sold 60 percent of its tickets in the United States and only 40 percent in international markets. Superman was the first blockbuster to derive the majority of its sales in the international market—and it did so nine years before foreign markets regularly became larger revenue generators for American films than the domestic market.

Why was it that in 1978, after Watergate and the American war in Vietnam, that an international audience took so eagerly to Superman? Marketing probably had something to do with it. So did the much-publicized hiring of Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman for the film, at great cost to the producers. But—and here lies the tricky bit—the key to the movie’s success was Superman’s role as ambassador of America’s idealistic promise to the world.

How can that be, you might ask, when Superman’s fighting for “Truth, Justice and the American Way” seems to many like an oxymoron? The answer lies in Superman’s combination of ideals and independence: He has mostly been an agent quite separate from the American state. To be sure, there were comic book covers and strips during World War II that lent themselves to the war effort, and a late 1960s story set in Vietnam that reflected America’s official views of that war, but very little else Superman did directly represented American foreign policy. The American Way, according to Superman in comics and on screen, was primarily one of simple decency and acts of charity.

The movie deliberately tapped into this side of America. In one crucial scene, as she interviews the hero to learn about his origins and purpose, Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane asks Reeve’s Superman why he is on Earth. “To fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” he replies. Lois expresses incredulous cynicism, and Superman affirms his sincerity. At the time, Christopher Reeve told a reporter for The New York Times that it was important for the hero not to be cynical and to believe in the sentiments of that catchphrase.

The kindness-and-decency side to Superman is not without its critics. In the early 1960s, the eminent scholar and novelist Umberto Eco, who had about 200 or so Superman comic books available to him in Italy, argued that Superman’s habit of restricting himself to small acts of charity represented a particular ideology that was opposed to necessary systemic change. After all, he said, a hero with the powers of Superman could upend the economic and political systems that lay at the crux of society’s problems and so end the need for such charity. Eco’s Superman functions as a metaphor for American power, though a problematic one. Small acts of charity might have been more appealing for international audiences than the sorts of systemic change America has attempted on a global scale, which have not always gone as planned.

Today, as an Asia-based cultural historian who studies the United States, I sometimes wonder what it is that people across the globe still see in Superman. In June of this year I was in Milan’s Chinatown and spotted a painted portrait of Superman, very much in the Christopher Reeve mode, in a shop window. What do the artist or the shop owner have in common with the man I saw wearing a Superman symbol T-shirt yesterday at lunch in São Paulo, Brazil? And what do they have in common with the Malay family of four, all wearing identical Superman symbol T-shirts, who I saw in The Pavilion mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia several years ago?

In my research on Superman, I found that for many readers around the world Superman exemplifies how values like tolerance and civility may be used constructively—to promote justice—in places where rulers shut down legitimate debate. Superman offers some hope that whatever you think of America, some of the values it exports may be worthwhile. Loving Superman, just maybe, is one way our world hopes against hope.

The post It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Positive Symbol of American Power! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Coming after this summer’s smash hit Wonder Woman, Batgirl is poised to make a powerful statement on the role of women in superhero media. Director Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman was a commercial and critical success for Warner Bros. in part because it abandoned the bleak tone of its moody, male-led predecessors in the DC cinematic superhero universe, presenting a compassionate, powerful heroine who has inspired fans all over the world.

With Batgirl now in the works and tentatively scheduled to hit theaters in 2019, it would seem natural for writer and director Joss Whedon to follow Wonder Woman‘s lead in both tone and characterization, but Batgirl’s backstory makes this a complicated proposition. Much like Wonder Woman’s, Batgirl’s comic book past includes many genuine, inspiring examples of female empowerment. However, it also contains episodes that highlight a fundamental contradiction in how the superhero industry presents powerful female characters. While these women are depicted as strong and proactive, their stories often include plot elements in which they are brutalized—sexually and otherwise—and victimized. They inevitably overcome these horrors and fight on, but these scenes border on exploitation. With the superhero genre in particular, such plotlines appeal to the prurient fantasies of elements of the predominantly male fan base, objectifying female characters and undercutting their powerful attributes.

Batgirl was a strong role model at the start. Created by Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino in 1967, her alter ego, Barbara Gordon, was a brilliant librarian who took off her glasses and let down her hair to become a superhero. Batman initially told her that he and Robin “can’t worry ourselves about a girl,” but she proved more than capable of handling things by herself. In her first caper, Barbara crafted her own costume and accessories and pursued the villainous Killer Moth, despite Batman ordering her to stay away. When Batgirl ended up saving the Dynamic Duo and capturing her foe, even the Caped Crusader was impressed: “From what I’ve seen, she doesn’t have to take a back seat to anybody!” Five years before Wonder Woman appeared on the cover of the debut issue of Ms. Magazine and was reinvented as a modern feminist icon, Batgirl was embodying female strength and self-reliance.

Yvonne Craig as Batgirl in the campy 1960s television show, Batman. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Batgirl beat Wonder Woman to the small screen as well, with Yvonne Craig starring in the third season of the Batman television show in 1967. The program was known for its elaborate death traps, and Batgirl ended up saving Batman and Robin just as often as they saved her. Batgirl also had her own hideout, built her own Bat-cycle, and made her own weaponry. No matter how many times Batman told her, “You better leave the crimefighting to the men,” she always stayed on the case.

Her brand of feminism soon moved beyond battling crooks. After the show ended, Batgirl carried on in the comics and decided that vigilante justice wasn’t enough. So Barbara ran for Congress in 1972 to fight crime through legislation. Her campaign to “boot the rascals out” and tackle gun control, drug trafficking, and prison reform earned her the nickname Babs the Boot, and she was elected on a wave of support from the youth vote. In her new role, she fought bad guys as both a congresswoman and a superhero. While many female superheroes embraced feminism in the 1970s, including Ms. Marvel, Supergirl, and Wonder Woman, Batgirl was the only one to take her fight for justice into political office as well.

But things quickly turned darker for her. Barbara lost her re-election bid in 1980, her regular solo feature ended soon after, and guest spots were few. In the 1980s, superhero comic readership was on the decline as dwindling newsstand distribution was replaced by the rise of specialty comic book shops, and female fans had largely abandoned the genre after decades of male-centric tales. So the industry targeted its existing fan base with edgier content aimed at a more mature, predominantly male audience. “Edgier” meant different things for male and female characters. The latter were regularly sidelined via assault, rape, and death—crimes that stoked the anger of males leads and furthered their stories as they violently avenged these now discarded women.

Case in point: Barbara’s 1988 assault in Batman: The Killing Joke. Creators Alan Moore and Brian Bolland proposed a gruesome scene in which the Joker shoots Barbara and leaves her paralyzed. This brutal attack, they decided, would enrage Batman and add drama to his battle with the Joker. Editor Len Wein was on board and, according to Moore, told them, “Cripple the bitch.” In the resulting passage, the Joker arrived at Barbara’s apartment dressed like a tourist with a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a camera. He shot her, taunted her as she lay helpless, and then sexually assaulted her while taking photos. The horror proved popular. Batman: The Killing Joke has been a bestseller for decades, and Barbara’s harrowing experience still remains canonical in the comics, despite multiple reboots of DC’s line.

Some writers have tried to move past the trauma. Kim Yale and John Ostrander reinvented Batgirl as Oracle, a computer hacker whose true identity was revealed in the pages of Suicide Squad in 1990. Barbara could no longer chase after criminals as Batgirl, so she used her vast intelligence and computer skills to track them down from her wheelchair. Before long, Oracle was a key source of intelligence for every DC superhero and was starring in Birds of Prey, a series with lengthy runs by writers Chuck Dixon and Gail Simone in which Barbara oversaw covert missions carried out by Black Canary and the Huntress.

Having a person with a disability in such a prominent role was a huge step for representation in the superhero genre, and Oracle quickly became a fan favorite. While Alicia Silverstone’s portrayal of a new, slightly different version of Batgirl in 1997’s Batman & Robin was widely panned—much like the movie itself—Dina Meyer was well regarded as Barbara/Oracle in the Birds of Prey television series in 2002. The rest of the show failed to capture the spirit of the comic, however, and it was cancelled midway through the first season.

Birds of Prey also exhibited a preoccupation with Batman: The Killing Joke. Each episode opened with a preamble that showed the Joker shooting Barbara in the spine, repeating the traumatic event over and over. Comics did the same, regularly flashing back to the gruesome attack in a parade of Hawaiian-shirted horror. While Oracle’s larger story was an inspirational tale of overcoming tragedy, the constant replaying of the assault fetishized the violence.

The attack remained a major focus in the comics when Barbara returned as Batgirl in 2011 after experimental surgery gave her the ability to walk again. While the story dealt with Barbara’s PTSD and her path to overcoming her fears, the book was dark and the trauma still haunted her. In one particularly brutal arc, the Joker returned to kidnap and torture Barbara’s mother, resulting in scores of flashbacks and further distress for Batgirl.

But things were changing. Because of the superhero film boom and a diversification of genre, style, and tone in comic books throughout the 2000s, women had become a major part of superhero fandom again, and this led to a new direction for Batgirl. In 2014, Brendan Fletcher, Cameron Stewart, and Babs Tarr revamped the character. Barbara moved to Burnside, Gotham’s version of Brooklyn, and got a hip, young supporting cast that helped her in her battles against evil app developers and other topical foes. The Joker’s attack remained canonical, but it was substantially de-emphasized after Batgirl reached a level of closure on the matter.

This new take on Batgirl was a hit with female readers even before the book was officially published. Her look included sturdy yellow boots, and women’s yellow Doc Martens sold out all over the internet on the day the new design was released. While Batman: The Killing Joke was DC’s top selling graphic novel in bookstores last year, second place went to DC Super Hero Girls: Finals Crisis, a book about the high school adventures of DC’s heroines that was part of a new initiative aimed directly at young girls. Batgirl is a co-star in this line, sporting the same yellow boots she does in her regular series.

Will this lighter angle continue into the Batgirl movie? Part of what’s made Wonder Woman so successful is its tone. Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Suicide Squad were bleak, violent outings full of brooding characters in a dark, desaturated color palette. Wonder Woman is brighter, literally and figuratively. With its powerful heroine front and center throughout, it avoids the objectification and gendered violence tropes that have been common in the superhero genre over the past few decades.

Batgirl could follow Wonder Woman’s example. Barbara’s encounter with the Joker has defined her for decades, and the trauma therein would mesh well with the grimness of the studio’s earlier films, which draw from the same gritty sensibilities of 1980s comics. But her history includes plenty of brighter and more empowering episodes, from the pluck of her earliest years to the determination of Oracle to the fun of her Burnside incarnation. As Wonder Woman and Batgirl’s current comics show, a new generation of fans wants female characters to take charge and have fun, not be mistreated plot contrivances. With Batgirl, Warner Bros. has the opportunity to leave the bleak past behind and embrace a brighter future for its superheroines. It’s time to put away the Hawaiian shirt for good, and focus solely on the yellow boots.

The post Is Batgirl the Next Great Feminist Superhero? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The it’s-ok-to-say-it-if-it’s-true defense of politically incorrect comedy may be a simplistic one. But it’s a defense that has prevailed for a reason: It’s made for some of the most celebrated humor in modern American comedy.

Although today’s ire over offensive jokes is mostly aimed at privileged white men accused of comedic bullying of minority groups, it’s worth remembering that this kind of line-crossing humor has very different origins. As a historian who studies 20th century humor, I’ve spent countless hours studying the evolution of comedy over the decades. What emerges from the record is that outsider voices—namely Jews and blacks—were the real foundational voices that paved the way for today’s most cutting comedy.

The history begins in the 1950s, when stand-up was a fairly benign genre. Clean and apolitical, it was suitable for viewing on family outlets such as The Ed Sullivan Show. But under the radar, a few comics began to experiment with socially relevant material.

The first breakout star of this era was undeniably Lenny Bruce. The comedian radically transformed the genre by bringing his outlandish, raunchy act from L.A. strip clubs to New York City nightclubs. He pushed the boundaries of taste with provocative routines featuring slang, profanity, and incendiary remarks on sex and race. Although his comedic style was influenced by fast-talking New York Jews, Bruce made it his own by peppering his work with vulgarity and stinging satirical social commentary.

In one of his routines, “Religions Inc.,” he imagines faith leaders like the pope and Billy Graham convening on Madison Avenue to exchange tips for defrauding their followers. In another, “Tits and Ass,” Bruce called out mid-century America’s reflexive squeamishness about sexual language and the supposed dirtiness of the human body. And in the famous bit “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” the comic mocked the way white people use social niceties to shroud their bigotry. He frequently used ethnic and racial slurs on stage, and did so to diffuse their power. Instead of taking aim at the usual victims of the slurs, he used them to lampoon the bourgeois American values and the post-war climate of cultural conformity in which they thrived.

The acts got Bruce in trouble, most notably in the form of multiple arrests for obscenity between 1961 and 1965. He was technically charged for uttering words like “cocksucker” and “schmuck,” on stage. Historians suggest, however, that the comedian was likely targeted for his sacrilegious remarks about the Catholic Church and the government—routines that described Saint Paul having sex or characterized Lyndon Johnson as racially clueless, among others. (Then, unlike now, certain kinds of line-crossing humor could put you through the criminal justice system, not just the social media justice system.) To many, his bold humor and run-ins with the law made him a brazen, anti-establishment hero, a legacy that endures today.

A decade later, Richard Pryor, who was African-American, followed in Bruce’s footsteps with his own subversive routines. Pryor’s early material was safe and race-neutral—“Mickey Mouse,” as he called it—mostly silly slapstick with an easy-to-please stage persona. But Pryor quickly grew tired of catering to the sensibilities of white audiences. In the late 1960s, he moved to Berkeley, the hotbed of student protests and the Free Speech movement, and started reading Malcolm X. He dramatically reworked his act, infusing it with anger, race-consciousness, and dirty words. By the 1970s, he had built a reputation for a style of humor that was at once sociopolitical and salacious.

Among other taboo material, Pryor’s routines included racially charged anti-police jokes. “They give niggers time like it’s lunch, down there,” he quips in one bit about the plight of blacks in the South, “You go looking for justice, that’s just what you find—just us.” Some critics balked, and others accused him of being a Black Panther. But he continued with his searing, sharp racial commentary. “You ever notice how nice white people get when there’s a bunch of niggers around?” Despite his detractors, Pryor’s counterculture appeal ultimately translated into mainstream commercial success. He’s still hailed as a revolutionary and a prophet, and—as fellow comedian Argus Hamilton donned him—our “Dark Twain.”

Although both Bruce and Pryor get much-deserved praise for their prescience, it’s worth noting that some of their material can be cringe-worthy to hear now. Bruce openly joked about the Holocaust, rape, amputees, and homosexuality; Pryor’s bits were often tinged with misogyny. Both performers made liberal use of the word “nigger.” There is, of course, room to critique these jokes. But it’s also important that we not lose sight of the big picture—that, on the whole, these comedians were challenging moral righteousness and creating new spaces to talk about issues previously off limits.

In this way, the pair was wildly influential. Their legacies not only changed stand-up, but also played a role in shaping sketch shows like Saturday Night Live, sitcoms like All in the Family, and satire magazines like the National Lampoon. Bruce and Pryor opened doors for comedians of all backgrounds to approach controversial themes like sex, race, politics, violence, and religion—and showed that this kind of comedy sells. By the 1980s, those looking to make a career in comedy had a clear roadmap for how to generate publicity, revenue, and renown.

That said, not all of the shocking or vulgar humor they gave rise to was inherently good. The popular “shock jock” comedians of the 1980s, such as Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, were as offensive as their progenitors, but without any of the intimacy, pathos, or insight. They rightly came off as sexist, rage-fueled bullies. Still, their presence on the stage held up a mirror to 1980s tensions over gender and sexuality. Take, for example, the smug jokes Kinison and Dice Clay both made about gay men deserving to get AIDS. Although the jokes were distasteful, the backlash they caused provoked larger conversations about homophobia during the decade. In this way, even crude, derogatory comedy can be valuable as a barometer of the national mood, and an opportunity to bring up dicey issues that are otherwise repressed or ignored.

If Bruce and Pryor created the world in which straight white guys could yell “faggot” in a crowded theater, their comedic boldness also gave rise to some of the best contemporary comedy performed by women and people of color. Bruce and Pryor’s explicit sexual candor—and, of course, the women’s liberation movement—helped pave the way for modern female comedians like Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Ilana Glazer, and Abbi Jacobson to speak frankly, even grotesquely, about their bodies and sexualities. Black comics like Dave Chappelle, Keegan Michael Key, Jordan Peele, and W. Kamau Bell were able to pick up where Pryor left off in the way they mock assumptions about race and masculinity.

Comedians will continue to take on what polite society considers to be out of bounds. Although standards may change, comics will always be pushing buttons and crossing lines because they know it can be a good way to get a laugh. And there’s more to it than just the joke. From Bruce to Pryor and beyond, inflammatory humor has also been a vehicle for tackling social ills. It’s been speaking truth to power, rattling the enfranchised, and exposing hypocrisy. It’s been bringing uncomfortable anxieties and impulses out from the shadows. It’s how offensive comedy became the American way of comedy—and we’re better for it.

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