Gender and 1990s comic books 4: Witchblade

Fourth and possibly last in this series, depending on whether I can muster the energy to do posts on any of Kabuki, Dawn, Aphrodite IX, or Fallen Angel. This one's just on gender, as Witchblade had little interest in race beyond the usual 1990s surfeit of honour-obsessed Yakuza assassins. Previous posts on Shi, Warrior Nun, and Ghost here, here, and here.

She's mostly forgotten now, but there was a time when Witchblade was a pretty big deal. Her comic ran for 185 issues, or 230-ish if you count the spin-offs and crossovers. It appeared monthly from 1995 all the way up to 2015: a run that dwarfs those of most of its competitors. Witchblade quickly became the tentpole of the 'Top Cow' comics universe, relegating older characters like CyberForce to the status of mere supporting cast. It had a manga series (2007-8) and an anime series (2006) and a two-season live action TV show (2001-2). And it provided a launchpad for Croatian artist Stjepan Šejić, who illustrated dozens of issues of Witchblade and its spin-offs between 2007 and 2013 before achieving online fame for his heartwarming lesbian BDSM romance comic, Sunstone (2014).

In later years, the creators of Witchblade were very open about the fact that they came up with her because Shi and Lady Death were the most successful characters in comics at the time, and they wanted a piece of the 'bad girl' action for themselves. However, unlike the other comics I've discussed in these posts, Witchblade was initially written by an actual woman, namely Christina Z, who wrote the first 39 issues. Its gender politics weren't as in-your-face as those of Ghost, but it was still pretty clearly about the difficulties of wielding female power in a world built on male violence and female victimhood. 

As the Witchblade armour shreds Sara's white ballgown, her empowered (and sexualised) 'bad girl' identity rises from the ruins of her 'good girl' femininity.

Witchblade had two opening plot arcs. The first arc - issues 1-8 - tells the story of Kenneth Irons, billionaire, sorcerer, and all-around embodiment of patriarchal power. Irons is obsessed with the Witchblade, an ancient gauntlet which grants great power to its wielder... but all of its previous wielders have been women, and any man who tries to wear it ends up maimed or dead. When it merges with NYPD detective Sara Pezzini, Irons choreographs a series of events to try to compel her to yield it up to him, in a not-very-subtle allegory for the way in which powerful men manipulate women into giving up the power that is rightfully theirs. Sara resists and reclaims the Witchblade, and Irons apparently falls to his death. 

The second arc - issues 9-14 - tells the story of Dannette Boucher, Irons's wife, who is basically a metaphor for the ways in which women become complicit in misogynistic power structures. Abjectly devoted to Irons, Dannette allowed him to experiment with implanting fragments of the Witchblade into her body, wilfully blind to the fact that he sees her sacrifices only as a means to enhance his own power. By the time he's done with her she's a monstrous mutant freak who constantly builds up power within herself, power that she can only get rid of by discharging it into other people, cooking them to death in the process. Realising that she's going to need a steady stream of victims, she demonstrates her internalised misogyny by setting up a modelling agency that keeps her supplied with desperate young women, whom she treats the same way Irons treated her: as disposable fodder. Sara hunts her down and reabsorbs her power into the Witchblade, killing her. 

Both stories set Sara up as a kind of champion of her gender, against the cruel men who seek to steal the power of women and the abject women who help them do it. The Witchblade, as its name implies, is the symbol of her power as a woman. (Pop-feminist Wiccan neopaganism was everywhere in the mid-1990s.) It connects her to a lineage of female resistance stretching back through time, embodied by all the previous women who carried the Witchblade in other times and places - a fairly obvious metaphor for the project of feminist history, which at the time was very invested in excavating histories of 'inspiring' women who could act as heroines and role models for new generations of girls. Interestingly, similar 'lineage' scenes - in which heroines have visions of all the previous women who have wielded the same power they currently hold - appear in both Magdalena and Warrior Nun Areala. Buffy, with its conceit that the power of the Slayer has passed from one woman to another throughout history, represented a minor variation on the same theme. 

So what qualifies Sara to wield the Witchblade, when most women and all men fail to do so? Simple: she's just stronger and braver and tougher than pretty much everyone else. She tells an anecdote at one point about how, when she was young, some boys encouraged her to climb a wall, and halfway up it she realised that they hadn't really done it because they wanted to see her climb: they'd just wanted to look up her skirt. She responds by climbing so far above them that their lustful leering is replaced by awe. But the limitations of this as a methodology of liberation are fairly obvious: it only works because Sara is stronger and braver than the boys who seek to humiliate her. That's great for her - but what about everyone else? What about all the girls who only possess average levels of strength and courage, the ones who will never be chosen by the Witchblade as its wielders? 

Sara frequently expresses contempt for women too weak to walk her path, including her own mother and sister. She scolds Dannette for allowing herself to become a victim, declaring: 'Unlike you, I'm not stupid. I'm not going to blame my plight on some man who screwed me over. I refuse to let anyone, man or woman or object, decide my fate.' (Dannette, as she lies dying, replies brokenly: 'I'm sorry, Sara. I wish I could have been as strong, as independent, as you.') The comic is thus led towards a kind of 'Great Woman Theory of History': advancement comes through the actions of a series of heroines, women badass enough to take on the patriarchal weight of history and kick the shit out of it. Ann Bonney is named as a previous wielder of the Witchblade, and so is Joan of Arc. Everyone else just sort of cowers and waits for the next heroine to come along. 

Sara as phallic woman, from Witchblade #1.

Even more than Ghost, Witchblade thus celebrates a version of femininity which wins power by being more masculine than the actual men. Sara Pezzini's only emotion is anger, her only mood is 'pissed off', and her only problem-solving technique is violence. Her favourite movie is Dirty Harry, she loves guns, she idolises her detective father, and when her partner is murdered she refuses to do anything as girly as talking to a counsellor: instead she works out her grief in true macho style, through boxing practise at the gym. However, whereas Ghost pairs its aggressive heroine with calmer, kinder men - 'beta heroes', as they were called in the romance literature of the time, before the internet poisoned the term beyond usefulness - Witchblade, like most female-authored media, pairs its alpha heroine with a man who is even more alpha than she is. 

Enter Kenneth's personal enforcer, Ian Nottingham, a sexy bad boy so over the top that only a woman would ever have written him. He has knee-length black hair and a British accent and he catches bullets with his bare hands and cuts cars in half with katanas. Ian actually does wield the Witchblade for a while, despite his gender - probably because, like most male love interests written by women and unlike the ultra-macho Kenneth, Ian actually has quite a lot of femme traits, including physical and emotional vulnerability, a history of abuse at the hands of patriarchal authority figures, and a tendency to wear floor-length gowns and pose with pink roses. Ultimately, though, even a gender-fluid man isn't woman enough to handle the Witchblade, and it is to Sara that it always finally returns.

Apparently Ian's pay is 'a high seven-figure salary and access to Irons's vast laser disc collection'. Adorkable.

Witchblade is also notable for being much kinkier than its competitors. The whole 'bad girl' genre owed its existence to the fact that, in those innocent days, internet pornography had not yet become ubiquitous, meaning that there was still a market of horny adolescent boys willing to pay two or three dollars a month for comic books full of pictures of mostly-naked ladies. Witchblade provided fan service in spades: every time Sara activates the Witchblade it rips her clothes up, providing endless excuses for her partial nudity. (Later writers dialled this up to absurd extremes.) But it also repeatedly featured tableaux of men and women in bondage gear or fetish fashion, and depicted Ian and Kenneth's relationship as deeply homoerotic and sadomasochistic: in one scene Kenneth even dresses Ian up in chains and a rubber gimp suit for a spot of water torture. Sadomasochism, of course, also structures Kenneth's relationship with Dannette, Dannette's relationship with her victims, and even Kenneth's relationship with the Witchblade itself, which is explicitly described as an abusive relationship in which the more the Witchblade hurts him, the more he desires it. Even Sara's triumph over Kenneth has a sado-masochistic edge to it, as Kenneth pleads with her to show him the full power of the Witchblade by hurting him as badly as she can. Sara refuses, which reminds me of the old joke: Sacher-Masoch meets De Sade in hell. 'Torture me!' begs Sacher-Masoch. De Sade thinks for a moment and then says: 'No.'

Ian Nottingham: assassin, anti-hero, gimp.

As a result, while they feature relatively little actual sex, Christina Z's Witchblade comics are much more sexually charged than, say, Shi. She's clearly interested in the inseperability of sex, power, and violence, and in the way that Kenneth, Ian, and Sara are all attracted to one another precisely because they keep trying to kill one another. She also has a much more grown-up understanding of what it feels like to be fascinated with someone else's body, as in the scene where Sara borrows Kenneth's coat and finds herself thinking about the warmth and strength of his body inside it. Sadly the art doesn't back her up on this, remaining fixated on busty women in revealing clothing to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of eroticism, although it did feature a surprising number of hot guys in bondage for a comic so clearly marketed at heterosexual boys. 

After the first fourteen issues, Christina Z's run carried on for another couple of years. She started lots of new plot threads - a cult, a conspiracy, Ian's backstory, Sara's childhood traumas - but never resolved any of them, and her run ultimately just trailed off into nothing. After that the comic passed into the hands of other authors and dissolved into stream-of-consciousness fanservice gibberish for a while, before going to David Wohl, who upped the fanservice even further but also tied up most of the dangling plot threads left over from Christina's run. Finally it went to Ron Marz, who wrote Witchblade from 2004 all the way to its final demise in 2015. Marz professionalised the comic: he gave it a consistent tone, cut back on the nudity and nonsense plotting, and tried hard to elevate it above its trashy 'bad girl' roots. But he also masculinised it, ditching Ian in favour of some generic 'nice guy' hunk, and dropping any attempt to engage with gender politics. 

I can't really claim that Witchblade is a good comic. Its art is amateurish compared to that of Shi or Ghost or Kabuki, and the writing is mostly pretty weak. Its 'solutions' to the social problems that it identifies are not exactly sophisticated: when Witchblade had a crossover with Darkminds in 2000, it takes the more emotionally intelligent Nakiko just a few pages to realise that the Witchblade's all-violence-all-the-time methods ultimately mark it out as just another abuser, and that what its wielder really needs is a supportive female friend and a good hug. But for its first 14 issues Witchblade is at least an interesting comic, worthy of note for the way in which both its author and its heroine struggle to find ways of using the 'bad girl' formula to assert themselves within a male-dominated world. That their answers are necessarily imperfect does not lessen the significance of the fact that they asked the questions in the first place!

Race, gender, and 1990s comic books 3: Ghost

Malcolm Svensson asked for more of these, so blame him for this. Previous posts on Shi and Warrior Nun Areala here and here.

Ghost was part of the same wave of comic book action heroines that gave rise to Warrior Nun and Shi. She slightly predates them both, first appearing in 1993, but her story proper began with the 1994 Ghost Special: her comic was then published almost-monthly by Dark Horse until 2000. Like Shi she appeared in 65-odd issues overall, but her stories were much less fragmented, tending towards long-arc storytelling reminiscent of the better sort of 1990s genre TV rather than a staccato rattle of throw-away miniseries. This post is mostly about the first 36 issues, which were written by Eric Luke.

Like Shi and Warrior Nun, Luke's run on Ghost is a story about wielding female power in a male-dominated world. Like them, it was written by a man; but unlike them, it initially took an openly and confrontationally feminist stance. Especially in its early issues, its heroine, Elisa Cameron, is very blunt about why the world is such a mess: it's because men are cruel, violent, and selfish, addicted to the power they wield over women, and her solution is to take them down one headshot at a time. Her targets are embodiments of exploitative patriarchal power structures: pornographers who pressure reluctant women into sex work, cult leaders who use religion to amass harems of female followers, sexually predatory businessmen who exploit their female employees, and cruel misogynists who get off on hurting and humiliating women. The cure is always the same: .45 calibre death. 

These days, people often get anxious about who has the right to tell which stories. There are certainly parts of Ghost that I suspect would have been done differently if it had been written by a woman: it can be a very male-gaze-y comic, with quite a lot of gratuitous female nudity, and it does feature an awfully large number of rape monsters. (In a particularly blunt bit of symbolism, at one point Elisa destroys a whole nest of rape-demons with the aid of a bottle of oestrogen.) At other times, though, Luke's perspective can be a positive asset: he clearly sympathises with the rage and pain of women, but he also understands something important about the ghastly force of male desire, depicted here not as some kind of accidental and easily fixable social quirk but as something horrible, primordial, and endlessly destructive. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's powerful stuff.

Ghost has a superb hook: a woman wakes up amnesiac, invisible and intangible in a bathroom, concludes she must be a ghost, and decides to solve the mystery of her own death. As following the trail leads her to one scene of injustice after another, she becomes not just a ghost but a vengeful revenant, cutting a bloody swathe through the evildoers who plague the city of Arcadia. She's terrifyingly powerful: she can control the tangibility of both her own body and whatever she's currently touching, allowing her to, for example, render her bullets solid while her body remains untouchable, or to grab someone, ghost them, push them inside a wall while they're intangible and weightless, and then let go, causing them to die messily as they rematerialise inside a solid object. But even though she can kill almost anyone, she's a complete outsider when it comes to the hidden power structures of the city. It takes her twenty-five blood-soaked issues to gradually murder her way to the truth about what is actually going on in Arcadia, and even longer to solve the mystery of her own origins.

Given the level of carnage that gets meted out in every issue, with Elisa regularly mowing down whole rooms full of men at a time, the comics very wisely make no attempt to present Arcadia as a credible American city, the kind of place where ordinary people might live and work and raise families. Exaggerated urban decay was standard in comics of this era, but Luke's run on Ghost goes much, much further, depicting Arcadia as a Gothic Art Deco hellscape of perpetual night: a kind of stylised Film Noir nightmare world in which violence is omnipresent, life is cheap, and everyone is either a criminal or a victim. (The artwork of Adam Hughes in the early issues does a great deal to define Arcadia's visual identity in this respect.) Several of Elisa's battles involve the destruction of entire city blocks, but no-one seems to care, or even really notice. Apparently Arcadia is the kind of place where a demon can crash a blimp into a skyscraper and everyone will just shrug and get on with their day. 

The airships and the Art Deco architecture, like the 1940s fashions that so many of the male characters seem to wear, serve to anchor Ghost more in the world of pulp fiction than that of conventional superheroics. Elisa's costume owes as much to 1940s 'good girl' art as to modern superhero design, and when it's revealed that the city of Arcadia was originally built by a GLOBAL CRIME CONSPIRACY as cover for an UNDERGROUND CRIME CITY built around a SECRET CRIME MACHINE - a plotline that wouldn't have been out of place in Doc Savage - it feels like a logical extension of what's come before, rather than a random asspull. (In fact, my reaction on reading the relevant issue was: 'OK, that explains so much about this place...') Elisa's twin .45 pistols are an obvious homage to The Shadow, but whereas the pulps 'explained' crime in terms of individual psychopathy or racial degeneracy, Ghost depicts it as an expression of masculinity gone berserk. A city of phallic towers ruled over by violent, abusive criminals is, for Ghost, the logical result of a society in which men think less with their brains than with their dicks.

By far my favourite part of Ghost is the way that it plays on the symbolism of this 'nightmare city' material. Elisa frequently waxes lyrical about her sense of connection to the city, the way that she experiences it as her shadow or reflection, and this connection works on at least two levels. On a personal level the city is a reflection of Elisa herself, mirroring her pain and trauma back at her: it's full of crime and violence because her mind is full of crime and violence, meaning that these are the only parts of the city she is capable of seeing. But on a collective level she mirrors it: she's the city's ghost, the composite ghost of Arcadia's innumerable anonymous victims, risen from their graves and back for blood. (Her amnesia means that she identifies less with the person she once was than with the city in general.) There's an awful lot of as-above-so-below symbolism: Elisa literally has a version of the city inside her head that she uses for teleportation purposes, while the 'real' city outside is terrorised by a demon who escaped from Elisa's subconscious, a demon who embodies everything that she hates and fears about men. When it turns out that, for example, Arcadia is the way it is because it is inhabited by a giant psychic envy monster whose tendrils grow inside the walls of every building, or because it is secretly ruled by a man with the psychic power to induce suicidal despair, these figures are simultaneously wholly symbolic and entirely literal. This wasn't new ground: back in 1989, Morrison's brilliant Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth had already made explicit that Gotham is Batman, Arkham Asylum is Batman's head, and all Batman's fights with his villains double as metaphors for his struggles with his own worst urges and deepest fears. But it's still pretty well done, and the moment where Elisa is given the key to the city by a hundred-year-old PSYCHIC CRIME SOLDIER and rises up into the sunlight, finally transcending her own inner darkness, had me grinning from ear to ear. 

As the comic goes on, and Elisa faces down her literalised inner demons one after the other, she gradually mellows out. She goes from avenger of the dead to champion of the dispossessed, toning down her anti-male rhetoric as she does so. In some ways I found this a bit of a disappointment, as the earlier issues gain a lot of their strength from the clarity of Elisa's feminist anger, but it obviously came as a relief to many of the comic's male readers, who were writing in from very early on expressing their hopes that Elisa would calm down and realise that #notallmen are rotters. It also allows her to gradually escape the 'strong female character' box she's initially trapped in, within which - like many other 1990s antiheroines - the only way to be strong and female is by actually embracing a kind of parodic ultra-masculinity, communicating entirely through violence and feeling no emotions other than rage. (See the earlier issues of Witchblade and Fallen Angel for more examples of the type.) All Elisa's complaints about the stupidity of male violence, and the absurdity of men clinging to their guns to compensate for their own sense of inadequacy, look a bit hypocritical when her own go-to problem solving technique is 'shoot everyone to death forever'. It's thus probably for the best that she's ultimately able to develop beyond it, tapping into empathy as well as rage, even if the comics do lose some of their edge as she does so.

The elephant in the room is the way that Elisa's militant feminism collides with the very male-gazey fanservice of the art direction. Elisa may talk like a particularly angry Riot Grrl, but she dresses like a showgirl - much to the perplexity and irritation of the comic's female readers, who quite reasonably wanted to know why its man-hating heroine insisted on fighting in high heels. Nor was she alone: this was a comic that featured a lot of fanservicey character designs and nearly-naked women, including supposedly 'empowered' characters like Mindgame, a female psychic whose teammates apparently couldn't come up with a better way to keep her from injuring herself during her trances than tying her up in leather bondage gear, complete with a ball-gag. At times this lends the comic a queasy sense that it's trying to have its cake and eat it: Elisa gets to take down creepy misogynist villains like Hunger and Reverend Scythe, but only after the reader's had a good chance to ogle at the debasement of their female victims, who very frequently include Elisa herself. Some of this may have been editorial mandate, based on the desire to drive sales - the editor admitted to having been the one behind Elisa's footwear choices, for example - and one reader mournfully wrote in to describe Ghost as 'a well-written comic [...] that can only survive by the grace of the lead character's cleavage'. But it remains an uncomfortable fit for a series whose heroine holds a special contempt for pornographers, and who repeatedly critiques the way that media objectifies women. In issue 30 a villain demands that Elisa engages in a 'sexy nurse' striptease for him, a process that she finds so degrading and destructive to her sense of self that she freaks out and shoots him, instead. But as he himself points out, he's not asking her to do anything all that different to what her costume does for her every issue.

Interestingly, Dark Horse assigned a female staff member, Debbie Byrd, to answer the letters columns for most of Luke's run on Ghost, making very clear that they did so because they wanted the comic to have a female 'voice'. Debbie steadfastly defended the comic's feminist politics, and sometimes poked fun at it's sillier aspects (like Elisa's costume), but her role sometimes put her in the awkward position of also having to defend things that didn't make much sense, like the issue in which Elisa is magically able to defuse an apparently hopeless situation by kissing another woman. (The amount of lesbian queerbaiting in 1990s comics was incredible.) Her position, as a woman defending a woman written by a man, feels somehow symbolic of the whole situation. Ghost was a comic that supported women in every way other than letting them actually draw or write it. 

Race-wise, Elisa inhabits a world that is, for the most part, as snowy-white as her costume - probably partly because it takes so many of its cues from 1940s film noir, where non-white people scarcely exist. On the plus side, this meant that the reflexive Orientalism that ran rampant through so many contemporary series is absent here, and Arcadia may well have the lowest ninja-to-civilian ratio in all of 1990s comics. Interestingly, though, one of Elisa's closest allies - and the man who first starts her on the road to wondering whether not all men are bastards - is King Tiger, an Asian martial arts mystic who assists her many times over the course of her story. Despite his decency and ethnicity he's not desexualised, prompting one Asian female reader to write in in issue 29:

And thank God, finally, an Asian-American superhero (Okay, so he still does the stereotypic Asian mystic stuff). And he gets the girl, too!

It all makes a welcome change from the endless sexy Japanese ninja girls with whom most other 'bad girl' comics at the time were overrun. Sadly, King Tiger - like most of the comic's character's - got thoroughly wrecked when Ghost changed hands.

Eric Luke's run on Ghost lasted for one special plus 36 issues, of which issues 1-25 were the best. After that it passed into the hands of other writers, who ditched everything that made the comic distinctive, including its feminist themes and its Deco-Gothic aesthetics. Soon it was just another 'action girl' comic book, full of boobs and gunfire, signifying nothing. But for a few years at the start it was genuinely something pretty special.

Next in line: Witchblade!

Race, gender, and 1990s comic books 2: Warrior Nun Areala

[Advance warning: this post will probably be of interest to no-one but myself and a handful of pop culture historians.]

Researching my post on Shi involved a bit of reading around it, into the weird, spine-twisting world of 1990s 'bad girl' comic books. It didn't take long for another one to catch my attention - in this case Shi's close contemporary in the surprisingly crowded field of 'fanservicey 1990s comic book Catholic martial artist superheroines', namely Warrior Nun Areala. I promptly read something like one hundred issues worth of nunsploitation superheroics, and now stagger back to report my findings. 

Anti-Pope Sixtus VI, punching through walls one-handed like a total boss.

Shi and WNA debuted in the same year, 1994, and in many ways they are mirror images. Both are drawn in manga-influenced styles, and both are action heroines in revealing outfits who jump around a lot while hitting people with swords. Both flirt with 'bad girl' iconography, while actually depicting their heroines as completely morally upright and sexually chaste. But whereas Shi was an Asian heroine created by a white American artist fascinated by Japanese Buddhism, Areala was a white heroine created by a Taiwanese-American artist fascinated by Roman Catholicism; and while Shi had aspirations to artistry, sophistication, and moral seriousness, WNA was gleefully trashy from the outset. Ana angsts endlessly over how to reconcile her violence with her religious morality. Areala just yells 'HAIL MARY!' and then beats everyone up. 

Here’s the concept: it’s the eleventh century, and Vikings are ravaging Europe. Belatedly noticing that the warriors she watches over spend most of their time brutalising helpless civilians, the Valkyrie Auria has an ‘are we the baddies?’ identity crisis and converts to Roman Catholicism. She then spots an unarmed nun being pursued by Vikings, and merges her spirit with her own, creating a new, composite, superpowered being: Warrior Nun Areala. Areala slaughters the Vikings, achieves sainthood, and proceeds to found a secret order of all-female Catholic demon-hunters, the Warrior Nuns.

The story then cuts forward to the 1990s, by which point there has been no noticeable demonic activity for decades and the Warrior Nuns are viewed as something of an obsolete embarrassment by the Vatican. Newly-qualified Warrior Nun Shannon Masters is sent out to New York… just in time for a demonic invasion of the city led by an immortal ancient Roman Satanist arms dealer named Julius Salvius, who plans to use his army of cyber-demons to TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Shannon tries to stop him and gets splattered, but as she lies dying she has a vision in which Saint Areala merges with her, healing her wounds and granting her superhuman prowess. (Oddly enough, the Trinitarian echoes here – Areala as Mother, Shannon as Daughter, Auria as Holy Valkyrie Spirit – are never discussed or explored.) Declaring herself to be Warrior Nun Areala reborn, Shannon proceeds to defeat Julius and saves the world. Then she hangs around in New York to beat down any other demons who turn up.

This concept could have been used as the basis for a serviceable urban fantasy series, and indeed several subsequent writers tried to use it to tell 'serious' urban fantasy stories, usually with poor results. But Dunn's original series leans deeply into high camp. Shannon is trained by a cyborg nun named Mother Superion. Her nun-fu fighting style involves yelling things like 'VIRGIN KICK!' and 'ROSARY ATTACK!' while hitting people. (And, yes, her rosary beads explode on impact.) Her original Warrior Nun costume has three cleavage windows. (It gradually became more sensible over time.) At one point she is attacked by a wooden golem who communicates entirely in anagrams of 'Warrior Nun Areala', and who thus lurches around saying things like 'WAR AURA, LEARN IRON' and 'I RAN A RUNE WAR'. The colours are bright and the visuals are cartoonish and the whole thing has a slightly amateurish air that reassuringly implies no-one involved in the comic was taking things too seriously. And the characters communicate in 'dialogue' like this:

"YOU STUPID NUNS! AGAIN I WIN! YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT THE FORCES OF HELL! HA! HA! HA! HA!"

(And then his plane explodes.)

It's also obvious that Ben Dunn is a massive D&D nerd. Demons answer to 'lord Orcus', describe inferior demons as 'low-level lemures', refer casually to conflicts between 'demons' and 'devils', and describe Earth as being on 'the Prime Material Plane'. One character is referred to as 'a level 5 Magic Priest', who went missing while 'battling a type 7 demon'. At one point, the demon princess Lillith is even attacked by an armoured Catholic priest who introduces himself as 'THE CLERIC!' (She kills him one panel later.) 

Even though Shi was a higher-profile property at the time, WNA had a lot more comics - 120ish vs 65ish over the same ten-year period - probably because Ben Dunn's Antarctic Press was a much more efficient comic-producing company than Billy Tucci's Crusade Fine Arts, which seems to have existed in a perpetual state of crisis. These are mostly filled with inconsequential adventures, and endless spin-off mini-series about minor characters: Shotgun Mary, Lillith, Dei, Crimson Nun, Silver Cross, Serina, The Redeemers, etc, etc, etc. As with Shi, however, the core narrative is contained in just a few issues: Warrior Nun 1-3 (1994), Rituals 1-6 (1995), Resurrection 1-3 (1998), and finally issues 9-12 of Warrior Nun series 3 (1999). Those sixteen issues tell Shannon's actual story, although frustratingly it cuts off just before reaching its climax: the next issue, Warrior Nun 3:13, time-jumps forwards to introduce a new, younger, Buffy-inspired heroine, leaving the original story unresolved. (Maybe it got wrapped up in series 4? I couldn't find those.) 

Considered as a stand-alone sequence of sixteen issues, I felt that there was a lot to like about the core story of Warrior Nun. The first twelve, by Ben Dunn, are lurid and campy and fun, fully self-aware of their own silliness: it was only when people tried to take it seriously that the whole thing went off the rails. Both Barry Lyga's Warrior Nun series (1997) and Steve Englehart's Warrior Nun: Scorpio Rose miniseries (1996) tried to use WNA to directly tackle serious themes of institutionalised sexism, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia within the Catholic church, a task to which it was wildly unsuited. They were meant to be character-driven stories about faith and doubt, but Shannon herself is essentially a non-character: her whole personality boils down to 'be good' and 'serve the church', and whenever they come into conflict the first one always wins. Her backstory is like that of every D&D character irritated at having to waste time on background that could be better spent adventuring: 'I'm an orphan who was raised by paladins to be a paladin so now I'm a paladin. Motivation: be a paladin. Personality: Lawful Good. Now where's the dungeon entrance?'

There's nothing inherently wrong with being a non-character if you're in the right kind of story. Secondary series protagonist Shotgun Mary exemplifies this: she's an ex-nun with a motorbike and a shotgun who rides around America shooting demons in the face. That's it: that's her entire life. Some of the Shotgun Mary stories are almost abstract in their pure simplicity: cultists do cultist stuff until the demons show up, and then the demons do demon stuff until Shotgun Mary shows up, and then Shotgun Mary shoots everyone in the face and the story ends. (It appears to be a fundamental law of the Warrior Nun universe that all problems can be solved by Shotgun Mary shooting them in the face.) It's more like a dance than a story. And because of that absolute simplicity, when a complication is added - as with the rather touching revelation of Mary's homosexuality in Shotgun Mary: Blood Lore (1997) - it can actually work. Whereas the writers who worked on WNA in 1996-9 kept trying to write about Shannon as though she was an actual character, and she just wasn't, and it never really came together. 

Ideologically, WNA clearly wanted to have its communion wafer and eat it, too. In one sense, Shannon is an exemplar of 1990s 'Girl Power' pop-feminism: heroic, capable, near-invincible in battle, and frequently shown to be right while her male superiors are wrong. At the same time, she's a 'good girl' who willingly subordinates herself to patriarchal religious authority, and never objects to the assortment of ridiculous stripper costumes she's asked to wear in the line of duty. (It's Mother Superion, not Shannon, who ultimately insists on a more sensible design.) Like the Paladin Girls of whom she is, in a sense, an early example, she's sexy without being sexually threatening, empowered without being confrontational. (Compare and contrast the Ghost comics written in the same period, whose 'feminist avenger' rhetoric deliberately set out to alienate parts of its male readership.) Shannon's secretly in love with a priest, Father Crowe, but they're both sworn to celibacy, and both much too moral to dream of breaking their vows. Judging from their letters columns, other contemporary comic books featuring 'strong female characters' - Shi, for example, or Ghost, or Kabuki - were extremely proud of the fact that they had female readers who identified with the pain and anger of their heroines. I'm not sure that WNA had any female readers at all.

What could possibly have driven them all away?

Religion-wise, Dunn took flak from both sides: Catholics wrote in to complain that he was sexualising and trivialising something holy, while atheists and neopagans expressed disgust at his depiction of Catholic militant orders as heroic rather than villainous. Certainly Dunn's portrayal of the Catholic church was much more positive than that of most other comic books of the era: Magdalena and Witchblade, for example, mostly depicted it as a nest of intolerant fanatics and loopy demon cultists. Maybe he absorbed something other than an epic-level nun fetish from his days as a Catholic schoolboy after all...

The most remarkable part of the series came in 2000, when Chris Allen took over as both writer and artist on the main book for four highly impressive issues. Abruptly the story swerves into operatic grandeur, as Satan comes to Earth, Shannon renounces the church, Father Crowe confesses his love, and Auria's opposite number - the demonic valkyrie Nebelhexa - manipulates the franchise's greatest villains into breaking open the hidden vaults where the first Pope is locked away, crazed and immortal, deliberately written out of history by his successors. (The true original Pope turns out to be a black man, in a fairly obvious but still effective metaphor for the erasure of black experience from Eurocentric histories.) After dozens of issues worth of plate-spinning, Allen pulls all the narrative triggers at once, and it briefly looks as though the whole franchise is actually going to grow up. Sadly, the series got yanked out from under him and soft-rebooted back into perpetual adolescence before he'd even finished his narrative arc. 

Thinking about why Allen's arc worked for me when Englehart and Lyga's didn't, I concluded that it came back to the difference between working with a concept and working against it. If your form is something that tends naturally towards absurdism, like a nunsploitation superhero comic or the average D&D adventure, then suddenly asking your audience to take it completely seriously usually won't work, because the premise is at least somewhat inherently ridiculous. But if you just keep turning up the dramatic volume, then such stories can often attain a level of weight and significance of their own accord. Shannon, like many D&D PCs, has virtually no inner life: she relates to the world purely through action, and as a result she is fundamentally ill-adapted to stories about psychological complexity. What she can do is grand gestures: doomed final stands, dramatic renunciations of allegiance, declarations of secret love. Comic books thrive off that sort of thing. So do D&D campaigns.

I haven't seen the recent Netflix adaptation. The 2019 comic book miniseries was pretty good, though!

That's what Shi said: race, gender, and 1990s comic books

Who here remembers Shi?

I certainly didn't until recently. As my dalliance with Mutant Chronicles demonstrates, however, there are few limits to my tendency to become fascinated by whatever 1990s pop culture ephemera happen to cross my path. In this case, all it took was a stray link to a recent kickstarter and the fact that the comics turned out to be on sale at Drivethru. 

In many ways, Shi turned out to be a kind of bottled essence of mid-1990s nerd culture. A sexy Japanese woman in a stripper costume, written and drawn by a white American man, engages in bloody martial arts battles against urban criminal gangs while quoting Sun Tzu and pontificating on the nature of Bushido, all against a backdrop of Japanese corporate takeover of American business. It has everything: violence, Orientalism, urban decay, mercenaries, ex-Special Forces vigilantes, objectified 'action girl' heroines, guns, katanas, rampant fetishism. It even finds room for the then-current preoccupation with Catholicism that was so much a part of other 1990s action-girl comics like Magdalena, Fallen Angel, Warrior Nun Areala, and Avengelyne.

What surprised me about Shi is that, despite all this, it actually had some real merit. It almost manages to tell a story worth telling: not a narrative for the ages, by any means, but a good, pulpy tale about the self-consuming nature of violence and the futility of revenge, with strong roots in both Christian morality and Japanese pop culture. The art, at its best, manages to accomplish an effective fusion of Manga stylings, Floating World prints, and the Western superhero comicbook tradition. In places it comes close to being a cross-cultural success story, an example of an Italian-American Catholic artist developing a fascination with Japanese Buddhism that gives rise to something greater than the sum of its parts. But it never quite managed to cohere.

Here, as elsewhere, the hallucinatory Japanese warriors Ana sees around her in battle mirror the way that the comic itself is haunted by the Floating World imagery upon which it draws. 

Here's the story it wanted to tell: some time in the 1970s, a Japanese martial artist marries an American woman, converts to Catholicism, and retires from his old life to run a small business. One of his rivals sends a Yakuza hitman, Arashi, to hunt him down. He overpowers Arashi, and is about to kill him when his daughter, Ana, runs out, yelling 'Thou shalt not kill!' Arashi takes advantage of the distraction to shoot him dead, and then flees.

Traumatised by her father's death, Ana goes to her paternal grandfather for martial arts training, planning to shape herself into an avenger. Arashi, meanwhile, emigrates to America and builds himself a criminal empire. Years later, Ana hunts him down and starts killing his henchmen, but finds herself increasingly shocked by the human toll her violence is taking: after all, the men she's killing have wives and children, too. She tries to abandon her mission, but she's in too deep, and her attempts to disentangle herself only end up with more people getting killed. Finally, sorrowfully, she concludes that she has to see this through. 

Meanwhile, Arashi's powerbase is starting to crumble under the impact of Ana's assassinations. His enemies circle and the loyalty of his followers wavers, culminating in a coup attempt in which his own lieutenants rise up against him: Arashi wins, but is left broken-hearted, having killed his own closest friends in order to preserve his power over an empire that is already falling apart. Ana arrives to kill him, they fight, and she loses, but Arashi no longer has the heart to kill her, recognising her as a truer embodiment of the martial virtues he once aspired to than he ever was. Instead he commits symbolic seppuku by calling the police and framing himself for the murders she committed, while she abandons her avenger identity and walks away, her traumas resolved. The end.

At its best, Shi manages to be a rather humane story about the way in which violence can estrange us from ourselves: a story in which every fight scene has real psychological weight for the heroine, rather than just being meaningless padding of the 'and then ninjas attack!' variety. Its moral core is a struggle between three sides of Ana's personality: the religious morality that calls her to forgive, the honour code that calls her to avenge, and the primordial bloodlust embodied by the figure of the demon-samurai which haunts her, that calls her to just keep killing people because killing people feels fucking awesome. But anyone who has the slightest familiarity with 1990s comics will be completely unsurprised to hear that this core story kept getting buried under mountains of utter gibberish. There are conspiracies and misunderstood mutants and ancient orders of secret warriors and more fetish fuel and cod-Asian mysticism than you can shake a bokken at. 

Shi had honourable beginnings. The early editorials keep emphasising that it wasn't like those other 'bad girl' comics, with their meaningless violence and gratuitous fanservice, and at first it was sort of true. Billy Tucci had an actual story he wanted to tell, supported by real characters and an above-average-for-1994 level of understanding of Japanese culture, and these helped to make Shi a hit back when it was still just a struggling indie comic coming out at irregular intervals a few times a year. It got mainstream recognition: Tucci wrote proudly about the coverage he'd received in The New York Times and Elle magazine, notice that he attributed to his heroine's 'style and sophistication', approvingly quoting a description of Ana as 'the Audrey Hepburn of comics'. He was obviously frustrated with the way that Shi kept getting lumped together with what he viewed as inferior works, a perspective that Shi: Shiseiji (1996) was written to refute, as its editorial makes clear:

[A]s he spies upon Ana's adventures as Shi, our shiseiji has no idea of the complex moral issues that drive Ana's quest to avenge her family. Consequently, all he sees in Ana is a 'super ninja-bitch'. In this respect, Shiseiji is very much like a lot of fans in the comics community who write Shi off as another 'bad girl' book. The fact of the matter is that Ana isn't bad at all. She's not a ninja, either.

By 1997 Tucci was riding high, and unwisely tried to make Shi the lynchpin of a whole new comics franchise, with everything that implied in the late 1990s: spin-offs, crossovers, trading cards, alternate covers, the works. There were even plans for a Shi movie starring Tia Carrere, whom readers of a certain age will remember as Cassandra from Wayne's World. But the audience wasn't there, and the comics industry was in crisis, and by 1998 it was obvious that the entire enterprise was in deep trouble, with cancelled series and plaintive editorials begging readers to tell them what they were doing wrong. By 1999 the whole thing had collapsed into ruin.

It's easy to critique Shi. Critiquing Shi is like shooting fish in a barrel. Ana's whole character design is an exercise in fanservice - one comic even lampshades this by having her visit a strip club, where everyone naturally assumes, based on her costume, that she's one of the performers. Her fighting style apparently consists mostly of jumping into the air while sticking her butt out. The dilemma her character is built around rests on awful essentialising stereotypes that juxtapose kind humane western Christianity with alien and implacable Asian honour codes. (Moments where Ana starts talking about her giri tend to be particularly bad.) For a story supposedly built around a 'strong female character', a surprising amount of the plot consists of men taking decisions on Ana's behalf while she flops around having existential crises. The ancient secret orders of the Nara and Kyoto sohei, whose feuds drive much of the plot, are portrayed as murderous idiots, a kind of parody of Western stereotypes about Eastern religion, forever killing each other over trivialities and committing ritual suicide at the drop of a hat: it's impossible to believe that such organisations could hold together for a single generation, let alone a thousand years. (The 2004-5 miniseries Shi: Ju-Nen - which inexplicably featured costume designs by Anna Sui, of all people - showed them finally wiping each other out: the only wonder was that it hadn't happened sooner.) And the series never knew what to do with its secondary protagonist, Tomoe, whose narrative rapidly devolved into stream-of-consciousness mad-libs even by comic book standards. Not even the queer-baiting between her and Ana ever amounted to anything.

'I love you, Tomoe! But in a totally Platonic, heterosexual way, because it's still 1997! Now let's have another scene where we hug while we're both half-naked!'

The attitude of the whole franchise towards its Asian sources is deeply conflicted. On one hand, Tucci was clearly fascinated with all things Japanese, intrigued by Shinto and Buddhism, visually enraptured by kimonos and samurai armour, and delighted by the expressive potential of manga. (Shi had a manga spin-off in 1996, an era when manga was still relatively little known to the mainstream American comic-book market.) He proudly printed an endorsement from Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi Yojimbo, who praised Shi for being more respectful of its source material than most of its competitors, and who described it as 'captur[ing] the spirit of the buyuden - tales of valor popular in medieval Japanese literature'. Tucci even collaborated with the Korean-American writer Hank Kwon on the short-lived series Horseman (1996), whose story of an immortal Korean warrior predated the arrival of Hallyu culture in America by several years. 

At the same time, though, Tucci kept condemning the very Asian cultures that he drew upon so heavily, returning repeatedly to the cruelty of the historical Japanese persecution of Christianity, and to Ana's need to reconnect with her mother's Catholicism as an antidote to the violence and inhumanity of Bushido. Even when he was publishing his own manga series it was at pains to distance itself from association with the wrong kind of manga, keeping its own brand of softcore fanservice carefully distinct from the form's reputation for more extreme pornographic content. As the editorial to the first issue explained, 'Weird monsters, giant robots, invaders from space... you name it, we'll do it (although, we'll skip emulating some of the racier stuff, like LA BLUE GIRL or DEMON BEAST INVASION. Sorry, but Shi just isn't that kind of gal).'

OUR manga isn't porny at all!

The frustrating thing about Shi is how close it kept getting to becoming something more. Take these passages from the 1995 comic Shi: Senryaku. Here's Ana, aged seventeen, learning a harsh lesson about why the white American boy she likes keeps smiling at her -  

"Let me guess," Mike offered. He let an insinuating tone creep into his voice. "You've heard some things about Oriental girls, you were wondering if they're true, and since I'm married to a Japanese woman..."

"Hey, I knew you'd understand," Ted said. The leer in his voice echoed Mike's. "The guys in my frat say that Asian women are, like, totally submissive and they'll do anything! Y'think Ana would be like that?

"Gee, Ted, I guess you'd better ask her", Mike responded, as I stepped out of the office. Ted gaped at me, astonished and ashamed. I glared at him. He turned to Mike, realized he'd been set up, and stormed out.

Full marks to Mike, right? Except that after becoming Ana's substitute father figure, and sharing all his sorrows, he shows his true colours as well:

I felt so sorry for him. Suddenly we were embracing. I was rocking him, trying to comfort him... and he kissed me.

I froze, mortified. What was he doing? He kissed my eyes, my hair, he whispered in my ear. It was okay, he said, Mariko didn't understand him, our bond was so special, so deep, and then he said: "Ana, you're so beautiful... I've been waiting for this since the day you walked in..."

He'd been waiting for this since the day I walked in. Which meant he'd been planning for it since then. Which meant that everything he'd been for me was a lie to make me vulnerable so that this could happen...

I broke away from him. I couldn't speak. I trembled with fury and anguish at the incredible depth of his betrayal.

This is pretty insightful stuff for a 1990s comic book, offering not just obvious critiques of racial stereotyping and fetishisation, but also a more subtle awareness that just because a man seems to transcend such vulgar prejudices doesn't mean he's not waiting to exploit you the moment he gets the chance. But this appears embedded in a series whose entire marketing strategy essentially boiled down to: 'HEY! LOOK! BUSTY ASIAN CHIX! CHECK OUT DAT A$$!'

See what I mean?

But under all the nonsense there's some real strength, both in the writing and the imagery. Shi, I fear, was a graphic novel manqué, undone by the realities of mid-1990s commercial comic book publishing. If the strongest elements of The Way of the Warrior, Shi: Kaidan, Shi: Senryaku, and Tora No Shi had been distilled down into a single series of about twelve issues, it could have been great, a kind of red-and-gold counterpart to David Mack's astonishing black-and-white Kabuki: Circle of Blood: a lurid martial arts crime drama about a traumatised girl taking on the legacy of her legendary ancestress in a half-crazed bid for revenge and redemption, haunted by a hallucinatory swirl of Japanese folklore and Catholic religious imagery, oni and angels, leering tengu and bleeding saints. But drawing it out to over sixty issues, and diluting it with all the superfluous characters whom Tucci hoped to publish spin-off series about, just let all its strength dissipate, reducing Ana to the status of yet another 90s action girl with too many katanas and not enough clothes.

The moral of the story is that if you only have one story to tell, then for heaven's sake just tell that story. 

The application of this moral to RPGs is left as an exercise for the reader.