Female Furies #1

[history79]

"Yeah, it’s interesting because as this idea about gender equality was brewing up inside of me and I was combing through Kirby’s pages and pages of work, I saw that a lot of that stuff was already embedded in his world and the way that Darkseid and his Cronies talk about Granny and the Furies. It was really fascinating. I feel like I’m pulling directly from his world and highlighting the color or turning up the volume.

Kirby knew that women were capable and strong and equal, but he also knew that wasn’t [widely seen to be] the case in his present day. So that’s stitched in there. The way men comment on Barda’s body. The way that men on Apokolips talk about the Furies. The way Gilotina, who’s not in my book, handles a handsy guard. The way that Granny treats her own girls. It felt like a real ripe time to take a look at these kinds of issues within the context of a story that was already inherently commenting on it and addressing it.

Women have been enduring these kinds of stories of not being able to advance in fields for years, and even with progress being made, we still face challenges. Look at all the headlines these days. It’s amazing that we’re saying enough. With the Fourth World, I thought it would be interesting to see an awakening on the level of a Me Too movement, but on a planet where everyone is really the bad guy — even the gals – because everything is heightened."

- Cecil Castellucci


Warning for Rape

Comments

[cyberghostface]

Admittedly I'm not that familiar with Darkseid but is this even in character for him? It's like seeing Galactus grope someone.

[michaelsaint]

Is every male character in this comic a sexual predator? Nearly every scene involves sexual harassment and they are not even subtle.

I am literally dumbfounded by this comic book.

[arilou_skiff]

It's not exactly the way he's been portrayed in the past but it kind of works? Darkseid is all about Tyranny and the abuse of power, so it kind of fits in a way it wouldn't for Galactus.

[broblawsky]

It's Apokolips. Everyone with power is terrible. That's the point of the place.

[cainofdreaming]

Is there just one way to be terrible?

[ozaline]

I believe there were other times in earlier comics where Darkseid expressed desire to possess a powerful woman, though I am not sure I've mostly been told of those.

In the Super Powers/Super Friends cartoon Darkseid wanted to make Wonder Woman his queen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaeYz7Ndq2k

[velacron]

Which is precisely why we don't need a sympathetic backstory for Granny Goodness.

Superhero fiction has a tendency anyway to give every villain a Penguin-like backstory, where they are only evil because of what they suffered, but this goes double for female criminals where every single supervillainess is some sympathetic soiled dove who was made to do it by either a boyfriend or a harsh life or some combination thereof.
Granny Goodness was the one prominent exception to this I can spontaneously think of, but no, now the evil patriarchy (IN SPACE!) made her do it and I am apparently supposed to feel sorry that she couldn't play a bigger role subjugating the universe under the iron fist of evil.

[cyberghostface]

Exactly.

Look at Negan who in the Walking Dead comics will bash someone's head in with a baseball bat and laugh but will at the same time go berserk if someone tries to rape a woman.

[gnarll]

He has several children, so presumably there is a sex dirve there. Also he has seemed to keep up with earth porn.

[flint_marko]

Granny Goodness already had a decent tragic origin, where she was forced to kill her dog.

[bradygirl_12]

These are all awful people. Sympathy isn't my primary emotion reading this.

[thanekos]

Competently told, resonating commentaryon power dynamics, and getting a wider exposure than it would be if it was something at Image featuring vaguely Kirby-esques.

Neat.

[lordultimus]

Granny's role is incredibly important. She's literally shaping the minds of the citizenry of Apokolips to not even be able to imagine a world without Darkseid ruling them. And she loves doing it because it's literally torturing children and she's a sadist. Why exactly am I supposed to sympathize more with the torturer of children than the children getting tortured?

[jlbarnett]

there's many, and they don't exclude any.

If a woman ever tried to come on to him in a bid for power, he'd probably show as much emotion as a stone and Omega Beam her

[akodo_rokku]

I mean what's done to her is definitely wrong, but yeah. She was terrible before she was victimized, so it's not exactly that she "turned to evil" because of it or anything but... yeah. This comic isn't good.

[laughing_tree]

No, but if you were in, say, 1950s Alabama, you'd be hard-pressed to find any white dude in a position of real authority who wasn't massively racist.

Sometimes discrimination is about individuals, other times it's embedded right there in the fabric.

Everyone on Apokolips has the same terrible trait of wanting to subjugate Earth in common and nobody bats an eye. Make them all have misogyny in common, and it's suddenly ridiculous?

[mastermahan]

This would be the perfect opportunity to bring back Sleez, wouldn't it?

[wizardru]

It's not so much the widespread misogyny as the cartoonish presentation of it. Darkseid is generally presented as an amoral force obsessed with discovering the anti-life equation. These scenes reduce him to being a worse version of Dabney Coleman in '9 to 5'. It's tonally off, IMHO. I get what they were going for here and it's not a bad idea, but with these specific characters, it doesn't work for me. If these were New God expys, it would make a lot more sense.

[q99]

Part of the problem? It's a type of abuse of power that favors some over others. It's just slapping a real-life prejudice instead of using a more absolute tyranny.