Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 134

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Popular Culture Review

could sell the book abroad” (Daniels, 168). In this case, the economic motivations
of the Marvel bureaucracy instigated the creation of an international super group
which was, and is, immensely popular in America. The pluralistic cultural messages
contained in the X-Men were created by economic considerations. I bring this issue
up because finally Storm, and the rest of the X-Men, are commodities. As soon as
the book does not produce a profit, it will be gone. However, it seems deliciously
ironic that the forces of capitalism can produce a commodity that potentially
undermines that very system’s validity.

Female Superheroes
Female superheroes began with Wonder Woman in 1941, shortly after
Superman’s debut in 1938. However, as Parsons notes, the “comic audience, since
its inception, has been heavily skewed by age,” with young readers making the up
the bulk of the audience until the late 1970s (78). Thus the sexual nature of female
superheroes was likely to be moderated by fear of political repercussions like the
Wertham Inquiry of 1954, when parental concerns about children acting out violent
scenes in comics resulted in the self-regulation of its content by the comic book
industry. But by the late 1970s, depictions of female superheroes tended to be
more overtly sexual because the audience had become mostly male (90-94%) and
ranged “in age from sixteen to twenty-four with a mean age of around eighteen”
(Parsons, 78). Reynolds characterizes Storm as: “Asexual (even for a superheroine)
she sports perhaps the most revealing and fetishistic costume of any 1970s Marvel
or DC character.”
I quite agree that her dress is “revealing and fetishistic.” Storm portrays the
typical signifiers of female passivity/availability - i.e., high heels, ripped looking
bodice, thigh high black leather boots, hair ornaments, and bracelets, which, tied
to her cape, indicate sexual submissiveness. Herbody language within the comic
suggests Storm’s construction as an object to be sexually dominated. On one cover,
her hands are opened in a panicky position, not a fighting one, despite the fact that
she is being attacked by demons. One demon is pulling her hair while another one
pulls on her boots; all the visual indicators construct an abnormally attractive female
being sexually dominated. Reynolds asks the obvious question: “[H]ow can women
who dress up in the styles o f 1940s pornography be anything other than the pawns
or tools of male fantasy?” (79). Furthermore, Storm’s erotic appeal is further
exaggerated by her “exotic” appearance. She has black skin and white hair, coupled
with an extravagantly unrealistic youthful figure. Both her looks and and the
fetishistic costume that she wears combine to make Storm an extremely “exotic”
object of desire for male viewers.
However, Storm is a more complex figure despite the character’s obvious
appeal to young heterosexual males. In the same issue in which Storm is presented