The role of gender representation in Marvel.

What would you say if I asked you whether Marvel was good, bad or indifferent? Would you be able to tell me who are the key female presenting comic creators working today? What about from twenty years ago or perhaps even fifty years ago?

This episode aims to look at ‘shining a light on the trailblazing woman of Marvel Comics and explores how they found ways to tell their stories of representation and inclusion’.

The stated aim is grand and very welcome indeed.

Does the show succeed? In part. In some ways it’s a classic curate’s egg by which I mean there is good and bad in this documentary. It is far more insightful than the previous episode about Japanese Spider-Man but there are golden opportunities missed. I’ll explain what I mean below.

The show starts with candid interviews where female creators explain how they read comics but couldn’t see themselves in those artworks. They also explain what those comics meant to them in spite of this lack of seeing themselves in the lives they were reading about. What’s lovely is that when these creators are introduced, the comics they work on are listed and the lists are long and prestigious.

The show then explores the history of women in comics and this is where it spends most of the hour-long runtime. It takes an approach which runs us from the 1940s through to today. At this point I should say I stopped watching at 16 minutes in, went and got my teenage artist daughter and started from the beginning both because I wanted her to see these fantastic role models but also because I wanted her insights into the episode – so credit for this piece goes partly to her.

For me the most startling elements of this episode, as some who knows little to nothing about the history of the comics industry, is just how prevalent they were through to the end of the Second World War and into the early 1950s. The stats quoted in the show suggest 70 million Americans were reading comics in the 1940s and that split was 50/50 among men and women. The range of titles was extraordinary and in a flash we see several amazing female creators named and given recognition.

As we come closer to the present we see a lot of uplifting comment on how we got a Muslim Ms Marvel in the shape of Kamala Khan.

Overall the documentary has a lot to recommend it. My daughter was inspired by these tales of women creating – and in some ways I can’t ask for more than that.

Yet what is missing here is how hard they had to fight to get to where we are today. The show mythologises the role of women in comics. It suggests they simply weren’t interested in drawing or didn’t ask for it. One talking head even goes so far as to say there weren’t sexual politics in the Marvel offices… which given how the one key female creator, Marie Severin, working at Marvel in the 60s and 70s is literally described as ‘never asking for anything’ tells more about just how difficult the situation was than any actual explicit mea culpa from a brand which has done better recently.

The problem is, to do better you have to have done worse in the past. The mythology of Marvel as being a bastion of progressivism is actually done harm by not exploring how the battles were won and lost both behind the scenes and on the page among its consumers.

Every description of a woman working at Marvel in the late 20th century comes from the cliché of the insecure worker afraid of losing their job if they speak out.

I’m not asking for man bashing or calling out of bad actors in a #MeToo type affair. Yet what about focussing on what it cost these pioneering female creators to be the first, to be the ones who made space for others to come after them?

I worry my daughter came away with the idea she could get a job simply based on how good her art is. That sadly isn’t true no matter how much I want it to be. The situation is immeasurably better than it was but it’s still far from perfect and if she believes the myth she will discover reality is somewhat different. Maybe Marvel can’t bring itself to represent these kinds of discussion about itself on the screen, perhaps it smells too much of washing one’s dirty laundry in public… except many of its fictional stories are about redemption, about people learning from their mistakes and changing the world for the better as a result. How glorious would it have been to see those stories told about real people who then went on to make the world a better place through their actions and their art?

Regardless, it would have been wonderful to see them address these issues head on rather than suggest that as soon as women wanted to write and draw comics they were welcomed with open arms.

The show ends with a (gentle) call to arms and for that I’m grateful.

Verdict: This documentary is definitely worth your time, but it could have been so much more.

 

My rating: 8 Captain Marvels out of 10

Stewart Hotston