Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 136
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Popular Culture Review
o f the issue shows the X-men relaxing from their arduous daily tasks through a
game of poker. On the one hand, Storm is here depicted as the idealized (in masculine
terms) sexy, exotic woman, but on the other, she portrays a poker playing leader/
authority figure and teacher. Poker is one of our culture’s male signifiers. It usually
involves money, competition, and some level of exclusively homosocial debauchery.
The focus on the “sexual” should be apparent; her lips, hair, eyes, breasts, and
buttocks are all exaggerated to conform to masculine ideals of femininity. However,
as the story begins we understand that she is playing poker with her teammates in
a rare issue with no battle scenes. In this issue Storm is clearly the dominant figure
on the team: one male member asks for her permission (albeit jokingly), one male
member asks for her opinion, and another asks her to tutor him. Some critics might
suggest that the division between pictorial male fantasy and feminist text will be
resolved by male readers in favor of the pictorial message that women are/should
be objects of male sexual desire. However, in his article “Deconstructive Comics”,
Ronald Schmitt argues that “.. .comic reading actively deconstructs traditional ways
of reading, creating a different literacy in which pictorial and word texts continually
exchange emphasis, effectively eradicating the primacy of either” (157).
If we accept Schmitt’s argument, then the very format of comic books seems
to create a predisposition toward a conflicted reading since very few readers can
ascribe identical meanings to even closely related texts and pictures. If we took
Storm’s voice in this example in isolation, I would argue that without any other
reference point most readers would identify this voice as a masculine one; it is
crisp, authoritative, and calm. Storm’s role as leader of the X-Men is emphasized
in this issue, which is completely free of the traditional battle scenes. This particular
character defies Reynolds’ assertion that female superheroes merely reinforce male
ways o f viewing and valuing the world. The radical difference between textual and
pictorial depiction would almost force readers to some kind of in-between resolution
or provisional understanding of the character.
Reynolds describes this kind of contradiction as “an unearned state of post
feminism.... [that is a] comforting myth which can be found expressed rather
differently in any issue o f Cosmopolitan” (81). In other words, female readers can
revel in the representation of a woman who is both powerful and sexy, while male
readers can fantasize about a sexy woman without being sexist pigs. I have my
doubts as to how “comforting” this “myth” is to the mostly male readers of superhero
comics. The myth of the superwoman, combining career success with glossy
sexuality, smacks of economic/marketing considerations in Cosmopolitan. Cosmo
has a primarily female readership, so the myth serves an economic function in
selling products to affluent women. However, I can see no economic motivation in
presenting the superwoman to a male readership — certainly not for the purpose
o f selling cosmetics. Perhaps the key difference is that the myth of the ‘90s