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Female Comic Book Superheroes
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Pudding House Publications
ISBN Number: 159889319X
Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft
Female comic book superheroes
are always fighting evil in a thong,
pulsing techno soundtrack in the background
as their tiny ankles thwack
against the bulk of male thugs.
They have names like Buffy, Elektra, or Storm
Yet excel in code decryption, Egyptology, or pyrotechnics.
They pout when tortured, but always escape just in time,
still impeccable in lip gloss and pointy-toed boots,
to rescue their male partner, love interest, or father.
Impossible chests burst out of tight leather jackets,
from which they extract the hidden scroll, antidote, or dagger,
tousled hair covering one eye.
The above lines could easily serve as a pithy, tongue-in-cheek summary of Tomb Raider, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or almost any pop culture artifact featuring an ultra-feminine protagonist who kicks ass while looking great, yet they aren't exactly a parody. They're the opening stanzas to the title poem in Female Comic Book Superheroes', Jeannine Hall Gailey's delightful chapbook which examines the portrayal of women in popular literature throughout the ages. Ranging from the gleefully iconoclastic and cheeky to the somber and contemplative, Gailey's twenty-three short poems on such familiar icons as Wonder Woman, Joan of Arc, the Snow Queen and a host of other femme fatales is an entertaining, even thought-provoking read. And unlike many contemporary "deconstructions" of popular culture disguised as poetry and fiction, Female Comic Book Superheroes deals with its subject matter without resorting to literary revisionism or shrill cries of victimization.
In fact, one of Gailey's main strengths in this collection is her ability to make the viewer laugh by simply pointing out pop culture's more absurd ideas about female superheroes and super villains. This is especially true in the hilarious "Dirge for a Video Game Heroine: On Dying Again"— a poem written with the efficiency of a haiku that anyone who rolled his or her eyes at Laura Croft's more absurd death sequences can certainly appreciate:
…It is my job, after all, kill or be killed
along with changing outfits unseen between levels,
(kimono? catsuit? chain mail minidress?)
nimbly switching from blade to Uzi,
slaying assassins with increasing speed and accuracy.
And twenty seconds later (mourning period over)
I am back, ready to die again on the whim of the joystick.
But Gailey's comic book and video game women aren't just amusing caricatures; frequently, there is a beautiful and delicate pathos to them. This is especially true in "Spy Girls," in which Gailey tells of sexy secret agents who can leap into helicopters after being "temporarily blinded with acid spray" yet secretly long to be "one more girl…whose purse is not full of explosives"; and "Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon," a truly touching look at the "red-white-and-blue" bustiered heroine and her tortured relationship with her absent parents. In a sense, Gailey's character studies of these modern folkloric icons are almost as nuanced as those in Robert Browning's dramatic monologues.
Gailey's flair for such drama and complexity is also apparent in her more serious poems— typically those centered upon figures from myth and classic literature such as Persephone, The Snow Queen, and the archetypal Wicked Stepmother. Of this group, the poem "Okay, Ophelia" deserves particular mention. Arguably Shakespeare's most (in)famous heroine, Ophelia has been portrayed in painting, sculpture, opera, and literature as everything from a helpless waif to an incurable madwoman to a revisionist feminist icon (most notably in Lisa Fiedler's young adult book Dating Hamlet). Gailey acknowledges Ophelia's complex history and takes a slightly different view (reproduced in its entirety):
We've heard you were a victim.
stop crouching in the shadows, chewing your hair.
You can be graceful, not like a ballerina,
like a hedge of coral,
built up and eaten and worn down
yet alive, carving the rhythms of the seas.
You can be a threshing sledge,
new and sharp with many teeth.
In this poem, as in others about literary archetypes such as "Stepmother, at the Wedding," "The Snow Queen," and "Persephone and the Prince Meet Over Drinks," Gailey treats each character with respect and dignity. She doesn't detract from their place in folklore by portraying them as one-dimensional victims or revising their stories until they're more "politically correct." Instead, she simply adds her own twist to the source material. Thus, the wicked stepmother becomes a pragmatic wife daunted by the task of raising another's children, Gerda the clumsy and ignored girl next door, and Persephone a willing participant in her seduction by Hades.
Other poems are haunting takes on popular legends, as is the case in with "Lament for the Selkie Wife's Daughter" (about a half-human, half-seal woman forced into marrying a man) or discussions of current events, as with "Female Comic Book Superheroes II: When Catholic School Girls Strike Back"— an empowering, if abbreviated, look at what happened in 2003 when a group of angry high school girls sent a pedophile to the hospital.
Female Comic Book Superheroes is an original look at women, gender, and sex from the ancient Greeks to today's comic book geeks. More than that, it's a witty and genuinely entertaining read, and not just because of all mentions of thongs, cat suits, pointy-toed boots or tight leather jackets. Well, at least not mostly. At $8.95 it's a good investment for fans of folklore and popular culture, or anyone who ever wondered what Laura Croft, Buffy, and Storm might do when not fighting crime and looking hot.
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