So I mentioned to Graeme MacMillan and Ian Brill about the whole “supervillains rape male superheroes and then have their babies” trope in comics. And Graeme pointed out that in fact, Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy also fathered a child by a supervillain, Cheshire. (Thanks to Titans Tower for more info and the image to the right.) But Cheshire didn’t rape Roy Harper. She just hooked up with him when he was a smack-addicted secret agent in Asia. A totally understandable mistake, really.

But still, this means both Green Arrow and his sidekick have fathered children by supervillains. This demands some sort of weird processing conversation between the two of them. One that Devin Grayson would be uniquely qualified to write, I suspect. I almost phoned up Devin to ask if Tarantula had gotten pregnant after raping Nightwing. Presumably she’s the only one who knows, because I doubt the comics will ever tell us.

So why so many pregnant supervillains? It’s a well-known trope of soap operas that the more ill-advised the hook-up, the more likely it is to result in conception. And comics are, at their heart, soap operas with zappy eye-bolts. And the story of “my child is being raised by a monster” is good for endless amounts of angst. But also, I can’t help wondering if some of these male comics writers have lost custody of their kids in an acrimonious divorce or something. (This isn’t an invitation for someone to blab about some poor comic writer’s private life in the comments. Any such comments will be deleted.) The whole “I can’t see my kids, and their mother is evil” thing just seems like a weirdly specific trauma. I’m trying to remember if any female superheroes have ever lost their kids to an evil ex.

Oh, and I’ve got one more, besides Nexus, Green Arrow, Speedy and Starman. I can’t believe I almost forgot that Batman had fathered a child by Talia Al Ghul! And also, didn’t Metamorpho father a baby? Who was then stolen by his wife’s evil father? Little hazy on the details there. (Evil father-in-law is a bit different from evil baby mama. But it’s at least close.) Also, there’s Peter Parker’s baby, but I can’t actually remember who stole her, and it definitely wasn’t an evil Mary Jane.

All of the discussion about the continuity snafu in Birds of Prey #109 started me thinking. For those who missed it, Tony Bedard goofed as to which of Oliver Queen’s illegitimate sons was the result of a supervillain raping him. Ollie’s firstborn son, Connor Hawke, was the result of a casual hook up with a woman named Moonday Hawke Armitage. And then later, a supervillain named Shado raped Ollie and had his baby against his will, a kid named Robert. But Bedard accidentally said Shado was Connor’s mom, which would have made a creepy recent cover of Connor and Shado making out way creepier.

Anyway, I was thinking about the fact that Starman also had a supervillain rape him and have his baby without his consent: The Mist, who left Starman a note saying that she would raise Starman’s son to be hate him and want to destroy him. (Did this plotline ever go anywhere? Is there still an evil Starman baby out there somewhere?)

So I wonder: Is this a trope? Have there been other instances in superhero comics of female villains raping male villains in order to have their super-babies? Come to think of it, didn’t this happen to Nexus as well? Are there other examples? I can’t think of examples of this happening in other media, so why is it a recurring thing in comics?

Last week, Annalee and I were wandering down those gorgeous Lyon St. steps in Pacific Heights, with their gorgeous view of the water. We spotted a handful of nice-looking women perched on a terrace halfway down the staircase. They had signs saying things like, “HUNGRY 4 PEACE.” It turned out the incredibly nice mansion they were camped in front of was Dianne Feinstein’s house. They were on a hunger strike  until DiFi agreed to meet with them to talk about ending the war in Iraq. A similar starving group was camped in front of Nancy Pelosi’s house. (Both lawmakers are home in SF for the August  Congressional recess.) Despite the fact that they were stuck outdoors on a boiling hot day with no food, they seemed amazingly polite and friendly.
Since then, I’ve been getting press releases from the Code Pink group, Medea Benjamin’s organization which organized the hunger strikes. The upshot: Feinstein finally met with the protestors, and they discontinued their hunger strike. But Pelosi has called them “nuts” and refused to meet with them — even though she flew to Arizona for a surprise visit to a Democrats and Donuts coffee klatch.

So now the hunger strikers plan to block the entrance to the federal building at 1 PM tomorrow. They’re risking arrest, but considering how many people die in Iraq every day, it seems a small price to pay. You can join them, or find out how else to get involved, by clicking here.

As I promised ages ago, here’s some of the stuff that got cut out of my Mother Jones article on online feminists and superheroes:

Feminists used to read superhero comics and seethe. Now, instead, they blog and network with each other. In the past year or two, many new sites have sprung up to let feminists critique sexist imagery and dehumanizing storylines in the DC and Marvel universes. They’re inventing new vocabulary for talking about sexist art, such as “Porn Face,” which describes one artist’s habit of drawing every female character with the same faking-an-orgasm doll face. One popular site, When Fangirls Attack, has posted dozens of links to blog posts about women in superhero comics every day since January 2006, as a way of creating a dialogue. Another site, Girl-Wonder.org, has had to upgrade its servers twice since launching in May 2006, says founder Mary Borsellino. The industry seems to be paying attention, judging DC Comics’ recent stumbling attempts to respond to critiques of its Lolita-like portrayal of Supergirl.

Women have been responding to spandex sexism since Superman first crashed on Earth. Before the Internet, women wrote trenchant letters to comic-book letter columns, says Melissa Krause, co-founder of When Fangirls Attack.

What’s new is that women are using all the resources of blogs, social networks and graphics software. (more…)

Via Mark Sarvas comes the news that the message being broadcast from the top of the Adobe building in San Jose has been decoded. It’s the full text of The Crying of Lot 49, encoded with seven-letter words from Ulysses as keys. Go here for an explanation of how the code was made, and here for an explanation of how it was broken.

The news item asks: “Are they paying royalties on this or just betting that Pynchon is too cool to sue?” Given the recent behavior of the Joyce estate, they should probably be more worried about a lawsuit from that corner.

(cross-posted at Citizen Arnold)

Yay!

Oyceter over at LJ is again hosting International Blog Against Racism Week.

Da rulez:

1. Announce the week in your blog.
2. Switch your default icon to either an official IBAR week icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBAR week icon, you may modify one of yours yourself or ask someone to do so. Here’s a round up of IBARW icons.
3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn’t yours, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc. (Linking back here is highly appreciated!)

You KNOW ima participate. Howzabout you?

Here’s Oyce’s links roundup so far.

(Cross-posted on SeeLight, my personal blog.)

One of the lovely things about democracy is it affords us little guilty pleasures now and then. Chief among those is throwing your vote away. It’s a sin, it’s wicked, and it’s like masturbating with an optical scan machine. And yet it feels so good. I enjoyed the thrill of throwing away my vote in 2000, when I voted Nader. (Note: I was in California, a sure-win state for Gore. So the guilt was, and is, pretty minor.)

But seldom does democracy afford us such a freebie as we’re getting this fall. Unless there’s something I’ve missed, Gavin Newsom is running unopposed for mayor of San Francisco. Unopposed, that is, except for a batallion of fringe candidates. There’s Chicken John, the ex-Burning Man star who used to run the Odeon. There’s the clown guy who’s sleeping on his friend’s couch so he can say he lives in SF.

And then there’s one of the members of the Powers family, which runs the Power Exchange sex club. I don’t actually know which Powers is running for mayor, because someone gave me a button which just says “POWERS 4 MAYOR.” And there’s a URL: powers4mayor.com. Which goes to a site that’s under construction. That may actually be a bad sign for your campaign, if you’re handing out buttons that go to a non-working URL.

So there’s almost no question that you’re wasting your vote no matter whom you pick for mayor. It almost takes all the guilty fun out of it.