Broken Frontier

In a week, I’m testing for my orange belt in kajukenbo at a local women’s martial arts school. In addition to the ass-kicking elements you might expect, a portion of the test is devoted to the history of women in combat. I’ve been studying about shield-maidens, Amazons, revolutionaries and resistance fighters, and, not surprisingly, thinking a lot about female costumed heroes.

Strange as it may sound, fighting is a pretty intimate exercise. There’s a lot of close body contact. As Brad Pitt and Ed Norton eloquently demonstrated in Fight Club, your relationship to someone who’s kicked you in the gut (and who you’ve kicked right back) can take on a weird, semi-transcendent gloss.

Is it the adrenaline? The resurgence of your most basic fight-or-flight instincts? Who knows. Given the intimacy of the sport, it’s not surprising that some women (and some men…again a la Fight Club) choose to train in a single-sex environment. For some, it’s more logical; for others, more comfortable.

I’ve seen a barrier-shattering range of women come together to fight: from radical feminists and queer folk to orthodox Jews and Muslims. In the middle of a sparring combination, the rawest and most vital elements of a woman’s personality come through, suspending differences in belief and intellect. A martial art, like any art, is a form of self-expression.

Yet the typical superheroine doesn’t combine femininity and fighter spirit in a way that feels authentic. A superheroine can be both a woman and a fighter, but she is rarely both at once. We’ve seen countless splash panels in which a resident team tough-girl shows up in a cute dress, in lingerie, with jewelry glistening; it’s the contrast between her mop-the-floor-with-him martial skills and her girlishness that’s meant to make us look twice.

Neither role allows for the expression of a definite personality. By contrast, you often discover richer character details about Daredevil or Batman during silent fight scenes than you do when they go off on philosophical tangents.

There’s no reason a woman’s personality can’t be expressed through combat in much the same way. Think of the first fight scene between Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in which we discover who these women really are and what secrets they’ve been hiding. I bring this movie up because it was wildly successful despite the off-formula inclusion of two female leads.

Whenever the subject of women-in-comics comes up, someone inevitably suggests that female characters don’t enjoy the same popularity as their male counterparts because the comic-reading audience is primarily male.

In other words, because men don’t want to read about women. I think the success of Crouching Tiger and the warrior-woman-heavy subgenre it spawned is proof that guys like watching female fighters, even if they never take off their clothes or don a single miniskirt. There’s no reason they shouldn’t like reading about them also.

And I think they would, if superheroines were utilized with the same martial eloquence as superheroes. In fact, I think we’re already headed in that direction: the new Batwoman has rightly been praised for her forceful, precise characterization, thanks in part to gorgeously expressive fight sequences. She’s truly a Batwoman…not a bat chick, not a bat riot grrl, not a bat ingénue.

On a similar mission, Gail Simone valiantly battles Wonder Woman’s rap as an ice bucket in star-spangled grandma panties, rolling out stories in which Diana’s character consistently shines through each punch and elegantly conflicted frown.

In other words, this isn’t a complaint—merely a series of observations. I’m not worried about the future of superheroines, or of women in comics generally. With a few course-corrections, I think female characters could fill up 22 pages with the same shin-kicking gravitas as any dark knight. It’s already started. Our only challenge is to continue recognizing stories done right, and build on them.