Ultra-Womanite

[stubbleupdate]

This month, I have been mostly reading The Luna Brother's Ultra. It's a title that picked up a sample for through Comixology's Android app (there's SO MUCH good free stuff out there). The book has recently been released as a hardcover, and has a live action trailer to advertise it. (the trailer isn't that great, actually).

The story is about a professional superheroine, Ultra aka Pearl Penalosa. She's nominally Hispanic, or at least from an Hispanic family. The story is more about her life after hours than any sort of crime-fighting escapades. The book has been described as like a superhero Sex and the City, with Pearl's love life being one of the main threads that carries through the 8 issues of the book, along with her relationships with her fellow heroines.

It's not a book without problems. There's a lot of bitches, skanks and sluts being bandied around. Sometimes they're coming from asshole characters to insult our heroines. Sometimes they're being used by our heroines as terms of affection for each other. Sometimes they're just used as synonyms for woman. That's one massive thing that I had a problem with.

The sexual politics of Ultra are clearly going to be one of its main topics and I'll write about that in a few days. Just now, I only want to contribute the covers for the single issues, all of which are modelled after established magazines.




Issue 1 - Time Magazine


Issue 2 - Maxim


Issue 3 - Wired


Issue 4 - Rolling Stone


Issue 5 -National Enquirer


Issue 6 - Cosmo?


Issue 7 - ?


Issue 8 - A Silver Age comic book

Comments

[skalja]

The covers were very cool, but even sexual politics aside I found Ultra ... decent enough, but forgettable? The sexual politics definitely made me uncomfortable, though I could never quite decide whether that was a deliberate choice on the Luna Bros' part until I tried reading some of Girls, another one of their work. At which point I decided that if they didn't actually endorse the creepy, misogynistic Nice Guy tropes that permeated their work, they were doing such a terrible job of exploring those tropes critically that their letters pages were filled with Nice Guys thanking them for telling things the way they are, and fuck that noise. I am extremely unlikely to pick up anything they've written ever again.

[stubbleupdate]

I'm not entirely sure, after just one read through, what it was that bugged me so.

Probably the fact that Ultra is either a good girl or she's a whore and it's not always clear whether the "whore" camp are played straight or are meant to be actual negative characters for the audience to disagree with.

There's a scene at the end where one one Pearl's friends says "I like sex and I like fucking. Nothing wrong with that" which comes of as positive. Then we get Pearl's embarrassment with her own dildo, which turns her sexuality into a joke (and I'm not sure if the bruises that she left on her date in issue 4 were meant to be funny or serious)