I was reading a review of the old “Lady Death” animated direct-to-video movie, and the reviewer was quite frank about how terrible he thought it was. Actually, I say that as though it’s the reviewer’s opinion, but the plot alone made “Red Dawn” seem like “Citizen Kane.” I’m probably in the minority here, but I think this is a shame. I remember the old Evil Ernie comics, and based on those, Lady Death seemed like an interesting character. Let’s ignore for a second the fact she had a bra size among the later letters of the alphabet and go with the fact that she was behind this demented undead punk’s mission to kill off the earth’s population. That’s a pretty good villainous motivation. Now add in the fact that she was pretty much a walking wet dream, and you have an interesting representation of the Grim Reaper. So far, so good—you get the standard horror comic tropes, including a buxom bit of eye-candy, only this time around she was villain instead of the victim and her selected minion was unstoppable. Not the greatest moment in female comic character history, but it was fairly original for the time.
Then it turned out that a voluptuous, sultry woman wearing little clothing was popular among comic-buying males, so Brian Pulido did what anyone would do—gave Lady Death her own title, and in the process gave her a backstory, one that made her slightly sympathetic. I want to go on record here as saying the overall backstory was pretty good. Yes, it hinged on the fact that you needed to be sympathetic to someone who wanted to make humanity extinct, but it was still going to be interesting to see what Pulido would do with Lady Death. That’s where things started to get unhinged. I did read some Lady Death comics, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell WHAT was going on. What I do know is that there were a bunch of buxom female supernatural babes, including the demon Purgatori, the vampire Jade, the vampiric vampire hunter Chastitity, and a Lady Demon storyline, who was originally a corrupted Lady Death but later spun off into HER own series.
The problem with all of these characters is that they spent more time in cheesecake poses and being seductive rather than acting like normal human beings. It’s no wonder they were so popular, and it’s no wonder that the company that published them eventually went bankrupt.
I should point out that the publisher, Chaos! Comics was not the only transgressor. There were a TON of books which featured the so-called “bad girls.” I could name quite a few of them, but they all had a few things in common—women with killer bodies in clothing that covered less than your standard bikini, all of whom spent half the book in cheesecake poses and the other half slicing through their villains du jour. Very few of them have actually lasted, and with good reason. It’s hard to care about characters whose only trait is their sexiness.
In fact, sexiness in comic books falls on two sides of a fine line. Most of the time, writers try not to acknowledge that a superhero or superheroine (okay, let’s face it, this discussion is mostly about superheroines so let’s just admit it) may in fact be sexy, no matter what she wears. When the topic is brought up, it is usually not dealt with well. There are exceptions by, say, almost any Joss Whedon comic series, or a few Neil Gaiman stories where characters talk frankly about sex, but for the most part your two choices are all or nothing. Which is weird when you think about it—when your friends all wear spandex as a baseline, it’s only natural that some people will be more comfortable with showing off their bodies than others.
What could have really made a lot of these “Bad Girls” great, though, was that they didn’t have to be exploitative. They had some of the essentials for good stories—strong lead characters and decent artists to name two. I thought a couple of them were objectively interesting, too. Plus, since most of them were done by independent artists, they weren’t bound in place by the Comics Code and could have done some mature stories, in both senses of the word. Just off the top of my head, I would have thought they could have done a storyline with Lady Death being a half-succubus and trying to rise above her baser instincts, discuss what exactly about Chynna and Jazz’s personalities persuaded them to go around in bikinis for spywork and write about how it affected their missions, or discuss how Satan warped Hellina, seemingly a normal college student, to the point where her superheroine costume is a slingshot swimsuit.
I know that Lady Death and Hellina are over at Avatar Press, which gives me some hope for them. After all, their current roster of writers includes Alan Moore and Garth Ennis, both of whom handle sexuality…okay, scratch that. Both of them don’t shy away from sexuality. Moore, though, tackles it maturely. Ennis just dives straight in and goes for the jaw-dropping shock value. On the other hand, Avatar has put out some comics that could charitably be called “exploitative.” We shall see. I know there’s a fine line to be walked here, but I think if someone is willing to walk it, they could find a lot of good story potential.
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