Welcome back to Dude Looks Like a Lady Week here at Dave’s Long Box, where we take a look at gender-swapping in comics as well as the phenomenon we call Man’s Mind Trapped in Woman’s Body, as embodied by today’s entry: Mantra #2 from Malibu Comics. That sentence is going to get me some Google hits, I guarantee it.Mantra is about a guy in a woman’s body.
Written by Mike “Batman and the Goddamn Outsiders” Barr, Mantra was one of the more popular titles in Malibu Comics’ superhero universe. I’m using the word “popular” in a relative sense – Malibu’s entire line of books withered and died in the Great Extinction of the Nineties. Mantra was about a bad-ass warrior guy who gets killed and reincarnated into the body of Eden Blake, a beautiful woman with two horrible, horrible kids. Eden gets these magic artifacts – a mask, a sword, a cloak – and begins kicking ass with her new magic powers. Wacky complications ensue, however, because Mantra is AHH! AHH! DUDE LOOKS LIKE A LAY-DAY! At least, that’s how I remember it.
I’m not going to diss Mantra because I kind of liked it. The first dozen or so issues were just good solid Boob War fun, and then it started to suck. The writing got slack, they drifted from the original gender-identity-crisis theme, and the book was plagued by irregular art. But for a while it was OK.
Plus, Mantra took a lot of showers.
Eventually Malibu re-launched Mantra but with a different lead character, and then Mantra went from “kind of sucking” straight to “full-on sucking.” Instead of Dude Looks Like a Lady, they went with a nubile 16-year old girl in lingerie who gets punched in the stomach a lot, which is not as high concept of a premise if you ask me. I should do a post about NuMantra – she gets punched in the gut in every other panel! Seriously, it’s like a strange fetish comic or something.
Mantra is told in first-person narrative; we get the male character’s thoughts in captions where he often ruefully comments on being a woman. Barr makes it clear that the male character within Mantra’s female body is kind of an asshole. He’s not very nice to Eden’s horrible, horrible kids and his actions are influenced by the weird stereotypes and misconceptions he has about women.
In addition to fighting bad guys, Mantra has all sorts of minor misadventures, like putting on a bra, applying make-up, going on a girl’s night out, feeling "not so fresh," etc. When I read the first issue I remember wondering how long I’d have to wait before she tripped in her high heels.
Ah, there it is in the second issue.
Mantra is kind of like Morrison’s The Bulleteer or Dark Horse’s Ghost, in that it wants to comment on objectification of women and whatnot, but also wants to have cheesecake art, too. I mean, it’s one thing to invest your work with subtext and meta-commentary, but I mean, come on: boobs.
Wow, I made it through the entire post without directly commenting about the actual comic itself! Hurray! Hurray Dave! Hurray boobs!
21 comments:
Yes, hooray for boobies, indeed.
I hope Dude Looks Like A Lady Week will include what was possibly the worst full-line crossover event month idea EVER - when one of Rob Liefeld's studios decided to swap the genders of all the leads in his Extreme Studios. The result? EXTEME BABEWATCH. So if you'd always wondered what Chapel or Prophet or Knightmare would look like if they giant titties, well, 1995 was the year that provided the answer to your question.
--FMguru
The whole conceit of "dude looks like a lady" comics bothers me. Mostly because these guys are supposedly uncomfortable in their new forms but they dress like strippers when they go out to get in fights. Man, if I woke up one day with huge cans (not my normal fanboy andromasts) and I had to go have fisticuffs with the local mob boss, I'd tape those things down as far as they could go. And I'd probably wear pants.
And naturally he couldn't avoid wearing heel or simply wear his hair short.
Something most women do.
Sigh.
Come on, admit it... if most guys woke up in the body of a hot female, they'd spend a couple days just checking themselves out (if you know what I mean and I think you do). Why go out crimefighting when you can stay home with Mr. Rabbitt or something?
True that, michael.
I think it was Steve Martin who had a bit about if men had breasts they'd never leave the house, they'd just stay home and play with them all day.
To be fair Malibu's "Ultraverse" was actually fairly popular until Marvel bought them out, canceled all of their books, and then salted the earth so nothing could grow in their place.
Try digging out some copies of Prime or Firearm sometime. They hold up pretty well.
I have four or five issues of NuMantra. Horrid horrid crap. Barr was so heavily rewritten and so embarrassed about the whole thing he had hi name removed from the credits box. There is literally a blank where his name should have been.
I loved the Ultraverse so much. Damn you, Marvel.
I really like the couple of issues of Hero with the Dude Looks Like a Lady theme, even if the ending is a little... weird. That guy was more terrified than anything else, which I accepted as a sort of natural reaction to such an unnatural situation.
shaenon -
"One of my favorite aspects of the crappy ones is the way the (male) writers invariably assume that, if their characters became women, they'd be incredibly hot babes with giant tits. ... This is so they can manipulate men with their extreme sex appeal, which gets weirder the more you think about it."
This is a variation on one of those universal Laws of Comedy, where if a man dresses as a woman, he will be mistaken for a highly attractive woman and Hilarity Will Ensue. I think most writers get it from old vaudville routines via Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Or that all men would really like to love another man, but only if he had boobs and... well.
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Any wonder girls don't read comics that much?
Ok, ok, I'll go read Usagi Yojimbo and Fortean Times...
David, maybe you could do a post not about male superheroes who are transformed into females but the ones who pull their penises back between their legs, put on a mini-skirt, slap on some lipstick and go out to hustle a few quick bucks. I mean catch criminals.
"I think it was Steve Martin who had a bit about if men had breasts they'd never leave the house, they'd just stay home and play with them all day."
Unfortunately, I know this is not true.
You mentioned NuMantra getting punched in the guts, but you forgot the cooler ridiculous aspect of the comic!
In THREE of the first FOUR issues, there is a scene where the lead character loses her top!
Yes, that's right - three separate occasions in four comics, they managed to come up with scenes where she lost her top (once was even in her civilian identity).
It was so hilariously awesome.
Bur Brian, wasn't NuMantra a teenager? Cause ew.
As far as the Steve Martin bit, it was in LA Story.
michael says: "Come on, admit it... if most guys woke up in the body of a hot female, they'd spend a couple days just checking themselves out"
One of the reasons why I loved "Farscape" so much was that in the body-switching episode (the easiest way to do a "Dude looks like a laaaddaaaayy" story), hot male lead Crichton ends up in the body of hot female lead Aeryn. In a quieter moment of the episode, "he" does indeed unzip his vest and check himself out. Or herself. Or him as her. You know what I mean, dammit. The best part is when he gets this big grin on his face and starts jumping up and down, before getting interrupted.
To my knowledge, this is the only show that has ever shown what a man would really do when trapped in a woman's body.
Antonio is - how you say? - the sexy.
First of all, her name was not "Eve Eden," the woman's name was "Eden Blake."
Second, the kids were not both terrible. The little girl, "Evie," was a really good little kid.
The boy, Gus, was a typical sullen rebellious kid of about 12, until the beginning of the "new" Mantra series, when he became a for real little monster.
The whole concept was incredible. Mantra was kind of a Trinity -- Lukasz the warrior, who came back from death and inhabited the body of Eden Blake, who then turned into this msytical female superhero who began to develop a persona of her own -- "Mantra."
Lukasz slowly and very haltingly seemed to reconcile himself with the female portion of his being, even as he began to fall in love with Eden.
I would love to see the character resurrected -- the original concept, not the Laurie Sherwood Valley Girl Babysitters Mantra the Marvel used to destroy the entire comic.
I think if it was done seriously, in the vein of say Sin City, the newest Batman, or the Underworld movies, "MANTRA" could be an incredible film.
Excuse me, but I'm looking for help. See, I used to collect a ton of Ultraverse titles pre-crossover and I just happen to come across them again. I was wondering if you would know where I could go just to price them. Not really interested in selling, but I used to keep up on all of that back in the day and just don't know where to get started.
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