the ladies

Okay...I talked about it for X-Men, I suppose I should talk about it here. The portrayal of women. It doesn’t seem as offensive in The Spirit for some reason. Probably because “scantily clad” in the ‘40’s is so different than today. But there was just something about the characters in The Spirit that seemed...I don’t know. It was almost like the women in The Spirit were fully aware of the fact that they were dressing suggestively and using that to their advantage because they were intelligent enough to realize the implications/consequences/benefits/etc. of doing so. P’gell, of course, is the perfect example of this, as well as the scene in “Silk Satin” when Satin is taking the medal from the count (and various other instances). And I think that the intent to make the women intelligent like this says something for Eisner. He wasn’t just having these women in his comics to please an audience who called for women to be pretty, he was building strong, intelligent characters. And just because, as some people mentioned in class, the women who weren’t main characters weren’t portrayed that way (the wife in “Two Lives”, the old lady in “The Last Hand”), neither were the men. Again, going back to my last post about Satin, she and the Spirit are really the only ones shown with unwavering morals and intelligence. The male police, for example, are usually portrayed being easily duped and as quite portly. Again, I think Eisner was doing more than catering to the audience and giving us complex characters.