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Part 94a of 105. Warning for cringe, awful relationships, and NSFW content that looks wilder than it is.

With these next two posts, we reach the end of the Justice League’s “international era,” the meteoric, controversial period that began with the loss of the “Detroit League” and ended with Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA #1. That era struggled along for four years and change after Giffen and DeMatteis left, never coming close to its glory days.

He issued his apologies on the Women in Refrigerators website, which seems like the place to do it. I like to think we’ve moved on from the level of misogyny-in-comics he described there. But echoes remain, at least.

Ice would come back eventually, but she’d be gone for a while, long enough for her loss to settle in. That loss hit Fire even harder than it hit Guy, making her crave a connection deeper than the casual flings she’d had thus far (JLA #95).

Fire’s date with Nuklon/Albert is mostly normal. The religious obstacle is too much for them to get past in the end, but it’s a good time. Things get hairier for her once she hears reports of a woman in blue with ice powers running around righting wrongs (#97).

(Again, I don’t wanna throw shade on Tora, but how fragile does your self-esteem have to be to look at the image Tora projected and go “GOD, if only I could be the TOWER OF CONFIDENCE that she was?”)

To be clear, those three pages are all from the same issue, and about the same hour. That’s how long it takes Bea to go from “you fraud” to “let me tell you all the story of the greatest hero in the universe; compared to her, Superman is an abusive drunk.”

Sigrid opens up about her insecurities to Bea, but that only makes things weirder (#100):

And by issue #101, Sigrid is starting to say the quiet part loud:

Fire bounces between insisting the new-old Icemaiden can do anything and being too overprotective to let her try anything. Issue #102, the best part of the arc, does a great job of unpacking how much this isn’t helping Sigrid.

Sigrid reaches back out to Bea after this fight (#103)…

And then she decides to really lean into the Vertigo aspect of their relationship. Not DC Comics Vertigo, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

All right, we’ve gone this far, you might as well see the rest. Like #102 with Sigrid, #104 tries to unpack some of the specific insecurities and fraught personal history that might’ve led Bea to this point.

…So, uh, Sigrid, what exactly was your plan if Bea hadn’t said “just what you were hoping she’d say”? A stern talking-to? Or just letting nature take its course?

"Oh, you thought she was a lesbian? How could you think that? We never said that!" Lordy, I remember the reactions to these issues on the early days of usenet. Many optical injuries from the eye-rolling over how this was handled.--Brian Cronin

Bea and Sigrid are at least right to realize that their becoming lovers would be twisted--not because LGBTQ, but because of the whole “reshaping Sigrid into a mirror of Bea’s dead friend/lover” problem.

But among this story's many problems...it doesn’t feel character-driven, it feels plot-driven. Bea and Sigrid are, best we can tell, wildly insecure codependents until their pornward trajectory makes them slam face-first into the Comics Code, after which Bea comes right to her senses and Sigrid turned out to have been secretly sensible the whole time, no matter what her earlier thought balloons said.

I hope it's clear here that I support LGBTQ stories, even imperfect ones. But this one feels like classic queerbait: it throws Nineties progressives a few crumbs but avoids anything that’d really honk off the homophobes. (They mind queer stuff a lot less, you see, when it’s tied to screwed-up stuff you shouldn’t do.) Plus it serves up racy imagery to drooling fanboys without actually going there.

But shippers have made do with less.

Monday: After this (un(?)-)liaison, one of the parties involved becomes a much better example of LGBTQ representation, and the other never has an explicit non-straight thought in a comic ever again. Guess which one ends up getting more panel-time.