The Four Color Media Monitor

Dynamite Comics is doing some new takes on Jean-Claude Forest's famous Barbarella comic strips, originally published between 1962-82, a metaphor for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. I have no idea at the moment what these new stories will be like, or if they're willing to try the same sense of humor found in the originals (I ounce found and laughed at a strip where it was shown the lady had sex with a robot), but I do notice that IO9/Gizmodo had Beth Elderkin, the same one who attacked Neal Adams over his illustrations of Wonder Woman from the rear, which were far from the travesty she wanted it to be, write up the news about this. And she said:

These days, Barbarella’s original intentions are sometimes lost in translation, especially given the comic and film’s focus on the male gaze, but her role as a sexually liberated icon is still just as relevant as it was half a century ago. And with the Emmy-winning series The Handmaid’s Tale giving us a taste of how dangerous a threat female sexual repression still is, having a female James T. Kirk doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

My my, do I sense some double-standards at work here? Because the male gaze is part and parcel of sexuality as much as the female gaze, whether she likes it or not, and if men cannot love and admire a woman's hod bod, than by that same token of logic, it's wrong for women to love and admire men for the same. Apparently, she simply can't keep her idiotic politics out of this subject. If Forest included the male gaze in his strips, then I'm not sure what she means by original intentions, when that was evidently just as much the idea as sexual liberation.

Also note the allusion made to a TV show based on Margaret Atwood's novel - one that concerns sexual repression of a Christian variety, which is cheap when you have Islamofascism doing much worse wherever it lurks. Of course, IO9 was also a site that failed to condemn Ardian Syaf for his offensive stealth tactics in X-Men when he was the first artist.

Again, I have no idea what the finished product will be like for these new adventures of Barbarella, but I do know that, if political correctness finds its way into them, they won't do any justice for the original strips.

Labels: comic strips, Europe and Asia, indie publishers, msm propaganda