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A review by themyskira
Female Furies by Cecil Castellucci
1.0
I was excited when I heard that Cecil Castellucci was writing a Female Furies mini. I really enjoyed Castellucci's work on Shade the Changing Girl, and this comic looked to be an accessible starting point to get to know the Furies, a group of characters I'm broadly aware of but don't really know anything about.
I was expecting a book that would dig into the characters and their relationships, drawing out the complexities in what, on its face, is a team of villains. Something tonally similar to Gail Simone's Secret Six, perhaps - a group of apparent bad guys who do some terrible things, but whose motivations and choices aren't always so clear-cut, whose dynamics are compelling and who are a right riot to tag along with. Smart character work paired with madcap action and some light smashing of the patriarchy.
Instead Castellucci delivers an artless, gruelling #MeToo pantomime dressed up in colourful Jack Kirby characters: Apokolips is reimagined as Patriarchy on Steroids and Darkseid and his elite lieutenants as monstrous rapists who prey upon Granny and her female soldiers. Fully half of the book is spent repeatedly hitting the protagonists and the readers over the head with a nonstop torrent of misogynistic violence, from verbal abuse and humiliation, to rape, to gaslighting and manipulation, to rape, to victim blaming, to rape, to graphic murder and, oh, did I mention the rape?
Of course, eventually our protags get fed up and rebel against the system, but that's only after the reader's slogged through sixty-odd pages of nauseating scenes of sexual violence and misogynistic abuse. In theory, this serves a purpose - to draw attention systemic nature of patriarchal oppression, the way women can be co-opted into upholding the system and the way abusers are enabled and protected, for instance. In practice, it reads as a gratuitous show reel of the worst stories to come out of #MeToo, stories that I (and, I suspect, most of this book's target readers) am already all too familiar with. It forces you to wallow in the abuse, and it's so unpleasant an experience that I nearly gave up on the comic multiple times before I even made it to the smashing-of-the-patriarchy part.
The story is made even more jarring by the bewildering choice artist. Adriana Melo's style is best described as cheesecake. She draws busty, curvaceous heroines who, no matter how fiercely they're fighting in any given scene, always find a way to pout their lips, flutter their eyelashes and twist their bodies so as to reveal both boobs and butt in a single image. It's entirely the wrong aesthetic for the comic, leading to dissonant scenes in which women boldly declare that they are not sexual objects to be exploited, while the artwork boldly declares, 'BOOBS BOOBS SEXY LADY BOOBS'.
As for the Furies themselves, I can't say I know them any better than I did before. It's a pantomime, like I said, and the characters only exist to serve as mouthpieces for Castellucci's disappointingly simplistic 'sexism = bad' message. Not one of these Strong Female Characters has any sort of defined personality or arc outside of the context of abuse and misogynistic oppression, and most of their dialogue reads like a stilted PSA.
Preaching to the converted with sledgehammer subtlety, Castellucci has nothing to add to the conversation, serving only to regurgitate in upsetting fashion stories of abuse we already know far too well. As a result, Female Furies is a failure both as a superhero story and as a feminist one.
I was expecting a book that would dig into the characters and their relationships, drawing out the complexities in what, on its face, is a team of villains. Something tonally similar to Gail Simone's Secret Six, perhaps - a group of apparent bad guys who do some terrible things, but whose motivations and choices aren't always so clear-cut, whose dynamics are compelling and who are a right riot to tag along with. Smart character work paired with madcap action and some light smashing of the patriarchy.
Instead Castellucci delivers an artless, gruelling #MeToo pantomime dressed up in colourful Jack Kirby characters: Apokolips is reimagined as Patriarchy on Steroids and Darkseid and his elite lieutenants as monstrous rapists who prey upon Granny and her female soldiers. Fully half of the book is spent repeatedly hitting the protagonists and the readers over the head with a nonstop torrent of misogynistic violence, from verbal abuse and humiliation, to rape, to gaslighting and manipulation, to rape, to victim blaming, to rape, to graphic murder and, oh, did I mention the rape?
Of course, eventually our protags get fed up and rebel against the system, but that's only after the reader's slogged through sixty-odd pages of nauseating scenes of sexual violence and misogynistic abuse. In theory, this serves a purpose - to draw attention systemic nature of patriarchal oppression, the way women can be co-opted into upholding the system and the way abusers are enabled and protected, for instance. In practice, it reads as a gratuitous show reel of the worst stories to come out of #MeToo, stories that I (and, I suspect, most of this book's target readers) am already all too familiar with. It forces you to wallow in the abuse, and it's so unpleasant an experience that I nearly gave up on the comic multiple times before I even made it to the smashing-of-the-patriarchy part.
The story is made even more jarring by the bewildering choice artist. Adriana Melo's style is best described as cheesecake. She draws busty, curvaceous heroines who, no matter how fiercely they're fighting in any given scene, always find a way to pout their lips, flutter their eyelashes and twist their bodies so as to reveal both boobs and butt in a single image. It's entirely the wrong aesthetic for the comic, leading to dissonant scenes in which women boldly declare that they are not sexual objects to be exploited, while the artwork boldly declares, 'BOOBS BOOBS SEXY LADY BOOBS'.
As for the Furies themselves, I can't say I know them any better than I did before. It's a pantomime, like I said, and the characters only exist to serve as mouthpieces for Castellucci's disappointingly simplistic 'sexism = bad' message. Not one of these Strong Female Characters has any sort of defined personality or arc outside of the context of abuse and misogynistic oppression, and most of their dialogue reads like a stilted PSA.
Preaching to the converted with sledgehammer subtlety, Castellucci has nothing to add to the conversation, serving only to regurgitate in upsetting fashion stories of abuse we already know far too well. As a result, Female Furies is a failure both as a superhero story and as a feminist one.