MARTHA THOMASES: Mom’s the word
Tomorrow is Mothers Day. To some, it’s the most important day of the year. To others, it’s a crass exploitation, using real feelings to sell flowers, brunch, and long-distance calls.
In superhero comics, it’s pretty much a non-event. Good mothers are almost non-existent, if not dead. The good moms send their children away (see Lara) or die in a rain of pearls (Martha Wayne). Living moms are over-bearing control fiends (Phantom Girl’s mom in the 31st Century) or distracted career women (Queen Hippolyta). Recently, the mother in Blue Beetle looks like she has the most realistic relationship with her kids.
Except for Sue Storm, there aren’t any premiere super-hero moms.
The best moms in comics are those who adopt. Martha Kent, Aunt May, even Alfred Pennyworth did fabulously maternal jobs raising children who would grow up to make the world a better place.
Why is this? Some of it may be a remnant from folk tales, where heroes are orphaned so they may have adventures without familial responsibilities or ties to complicate the quest. More to the point, superhero comics are power fantasies, often aimed at adolescents (of all ages) who are extremely frustrated with their bodies. Imagining super-strength, flight, and other extraordinary abilities is comforting and satisfying to someone experiencing growth spurts, hormonal fluctuations and acne.
This is not compatible with feeling like somebody’s baby. And you will always be your mom’s sweet baby.
A mother is an even more uncomfortable reminder of sexuality. Until recently, one couldn’t be a mother without having sex. Children don’t like to think about their parents having sex. (Parents also don’t like thinking about their children having sex, even when their children are grown.) An adoptive mother can be pure and untouched, at least in the mind of her child.
And yet, being a mother is an astonishingly sensual experience. It’s more complicated and more pure than could be easily conveyed in a 22-page story, even by an expert, and almost certainly not by a man. The smell of your child’s head, the smoothness of a baby’s skin, the music of a toddler’s laugh – these are glorious sensations. Beyond this kind of intimate contact, having a child permits a mother to experience the wonders of life all over again. As an adult, you expect to see snow or rain or flowers in the spring, but these are new and awe-inspiring to a child. You know why a fire fighter wears red suspenders, but it’s all new to your kid.
There is hardly anything more annoying than listening to a bunch of us Baby Boomers talking about the good old days: the music, the sex, the drugs, the sit-ins and be-ins and love-ins, even the comics. We act like we invented rebellion, and we don’t think anyone else will ever care about the world as much as we did, and certainly no one else will make changes as important as the ones we made.
The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”
Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I know I promised, at least implicitly, to deliver Who Knows What Evil Lurks – Part 2 this week. But that will take some time and maybe digging, to write and, honestly, I have the luxury of neither. By the time you read this, I’ll either be at or returning from Juaniata, Pennsylvania, where I’ve been invited to be the guest of Jay Hosler and maybe shoot off my mouth in public a bit. I’ve been busy doodling notes for said mouth-shooting; hence no dissertation on lurking evil.
Over the weekend I started to read Will Self’s most recent novel, The Book of Dave. Like so much of Self’s work, this volume could quite comfortably be racked in the science fiction section of your bookstore. Set five or six centuries in a post-apocalyptic future, English culture has evolved based on its sacred text, the recovered letter from a divorced father, Dave, to his son.
The more years we all spend involved in comics, the less able we are to escape our past, especially in the Web 2.0 age. And that’s actually A Good Thing. For instance, check out cartoonist Howard Cruse’s blog post where he effusively and rightly 
This is specifically for Martha Thomases, our in house media maven and knitting nut: A knitted and stuffed Dalek from Dr. Who.
For as long as there has been a comics’ press, people have been wondering why there aren’t more women reading comics. And often those people wondering are, themselves, women: Maggie Thompson (who in 1960 co-published Harbinger, one of the first comics-themed fanzines back), 
