I Did It My Way

Did you ever read a romance so wrongheaded, so annoying, so stupid, you wanted to re-engineer it? Possibly from beginning to end? A romance with such a domineering hero and such a wimpy heroine that you couldn’t decide which one you wanted to slap around first? Him for being a bully, or her for being so passive and self-hating that she lets him bully her?

Of course you have. Twilight. I’ve read innumerable comments about how utterly creepy Edward is, how stupidly passive Bella is, how terrible the writing is, how disappointing the sequels are, and more. People hated this series. Hated it. And some of us are rewriting this tale in our heads even as I am writing this post. They’re thinking, “What if the first time Bella sees Edward grimacing at her, she challenges his attitude?” “What if he starts trying to eat her in science class cause she’s so tasty?” “What if she slaps him hard and he goes away like a whipped dog?” “What if he just stays in Alaska and she begins to notice the virtues of normal human boys?”

That would be fun. Tell the Twilight story from the point of view of a boy from the high school who sees Bella arrive, thinks she’s gorgeous and tries to woo her, and then sees her fall under the thrall of those weird Cullens and that creep Edward. Maybe that boy—Mike, or Eric, or Tyler—would end the story before any of its terrible sequels by staking Edward out in the sunshine and turning him into a crispy critter. Not exactly a happy ending for Edward, but after all, he kills people.

Or what about something even more Gothic, from classic literature? Wuthering Heights. I longed to have someone tell Cathy to snap out of her selfish haze, and just live her life. To be nice to her husband. She married him, after all. Treat him right. And as for Heathcliff and his household of nasty males, I have an entire novel written in my head about how Heathcliff’s sinned-against wife Isabella beats them all into shape. Yep, she kicks butt, cleans house, and turns those brutes into civilized family members. Who end up happy. Yes, happy. We are happier when we behave well towards each other, and that’s why these stories with mean bullies and passive heroines don’t sit right.

Of course I feel no need to rewrite Jane Austen, because her subtle wit avenges all readers even as she describes overbearing, prideful fools such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. In my family we have taken to heart those famous words about Lady Catherine’s daughter being a piano virtuoso if only she had learned to play. Right. If only.

The “if only” books we’ve read stick in our mind. They had a chance to be good, but went the other way. Into cliché, into sodden sentimentality, into stupid brutality. If only they had not. That’s why they outrage us so. These books get us excited, make us hope for a terrific story, and then they disappoint us. If they were boring books to begin with, we wouldn’t be so outraged. But no, they all contain a seed of something special: a great setup, an interesting plot, the potential for grappling with genuine compatibility issues instead of the superficial, and more. But the authors didn’t pull it off. Or didn’t even know what they had, and did not try to write the better story that we saw tantalizing glimpses of before the rotten plot events that dismayed us so.

Writers sometimes don’t have the vision to understand the possibilities in their stories. They’re following an instinctive tradition by creating certain cliché twists and turns. Sometimes they’re influenced by commercial concerns: Will they be able to sell a Brutish Billionaire Buys Beset Beauty tale if they do not make him overbearing? Will readers expect or demand that the hero be a macho male, an alpha male, an abuser type in all but name? Romances are fantasies, after all. It’s a fantasy that a demure, wallflower heroine can tame the wild passions of a lordly tycoon. Sometimes the melodramatic plot seems de rigeur. And yet who is truly happy when one person domineers over another?

The best romances are those that set convention on its head and tell us something real about human nature. And because this is romance, something positive. That’s why the heroine has to prevail, after all. We want her to find happiness, hoping that if she can, so can we. And that’s why we mentally rewrite disappointing stories. We know which way these characters should have gone and the happiness that should have ensued. So we mentally tinker with what is printed. Most of us don’t go beyond the daydreaming stage, but some people take it a step further and write down their alternative plot ideas. From this impulse has sprung many a new author, who often writes the equivalent of an “answer song” to the book that annoyed her. Maybe some day I’ll get around to writing my much better version of Wuthering Heights.

Pretty Comic Books and Long-Suffering Girlfriends

I've been looking at a wealth of comic book covers drawn by Bob Brown, and thinking about what art needs to be on the cover of a book. Why are there people on the covers of books? Why aren’t they all paintings of sunsets, or flowers, or big honking weapons, or fangs? It’s not that such covers don’t exist. (Although I haven’t personally seen one with fangs, someone has undoubtedly done a cover like that.) Nonrepresentational covers have been tried many times, and while they can look rather classy and sometimes even intriguing, there’s nothing like a piece of representational art to attract a reader’s eye. Strictly speaking, even a drawing of a flower is representational. But not really, when the story inside is a romance and not about floriculture. I don’t know how the online future of the book will take advantage of the appeal of cover art, but I do know that back when I was collecting comic books, every time I saw a girl on the cover, I bought it.

The cover of Green Lantern #16, for instance, drawn by Gil Kane, with its dazzling villainess, Star Sapphire. She was actually Carol Ferris, the girlfriend of Hal Jordan, the hotshot test pilot who was Green Lantern then. And she was kind of annoying as a foil for his secret identity shenanigans. But somebody has to be. Where’s the fun in having a secret identity unless someone starts asking why you never see Superman and Clark Kent in the same room? Still, that wasn’t a good enough use of a secondary character, so after a while the writers upped the ante and gave Carol a secret identity as Star Sapphire. A villainess, naturally. Comics must have conflict. This is probably my all-time favorite Green Lantern cover, strictly because of the strong and pretty female depicted.

When I was reading comic books as a kid, there were about three standard stories with girls on the cover. (I say girls, not women, because that’s how they were spoken of back then; women was meant.) The first type was a straight female-in-jeopardy story, such as this one featuring Space Ranger’s girlfriend, Myra. Which also attracted me because the villains were living jewels. Sparkly! For a while, Tales of the Unexpected put Myra on every cover, along with a little pink alien. Then both got dropped. No way of knowing which creature was least attractive to the mostly boy audience.

The second type of girl cover was some version of dating or a wedding. The best example is when the hero appears to be marrying, and all his fighting buddies are dismayed that he’s essentially leaving the Boys Only club. A great example is the cover of Blackhawk #155, in which Blackhawk appears to marry Zinda, Lady Blackhawk. (That’s not an aristocratic title; it’s her mascot name.) Of course these marriages did not happen. Only much later in comic books did anyone ever get married for real. But I was always a sucker for that kind of cover. I lived in hope. Yeah, me and Lois Lane, who perpetually sought to marry Superman. (I’m not citing Lois Lane’s own comic book because she was always on the cover. Of course I bought every issue.)

The third type of cover with a girl on it featured her as some kind of super being. Either she had suddenly gained superpowers (temporary, of course, since she could never be allowed to overshadow the hero), or she had become a supervillainess. The heroine-as-villainess was never more pronounced than in Blackhawk, a war/adventure comic about a band of quasi-soldiers that originated in the early 1940s fighting World War II enemies, and years later was fighting aliens and monsters and, of course, supervillains. Poor Lady Blackhawk got turned into Lady Killer Shark, and she spent several stories sneering and being evil—and of course, wearing standard villain colors, purple and green. (Why are they standard villain colors? Because the heroes are usually in primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. So that leaves purple and green to contrast. Bet you didn’t know that’s why Spider-Man’s arch enemy, the Green Goblin, wears purple. Now you do.)

What you notice about all these covers is that there is no attempt to make these depictions of women into pin-up art. They are not semi-nude. They are not contorted in the manner of pole dancers. They are not the victims of bondage fetishists. All of which you can find on comic book covers of the very far past, the 1940s, and the present. But these women are G-rated. And that’s another reason I bought these comics. As silly as some of these covers are, they do not degrade or laugh at women. Some of them feature strong women, even if the strength is to be temporary or they'll need the male heroes to finish the job. And some of these covers are downright romantic. You know me, crazy for romance. That’s why I always buy romance novels with weddings on the cover.

But that’s another blog entry, for another day.

Happy New Year!