CarnalNation

Strictly speaking, this isn't news, in the sense that it's several months old and is more a piece of criticism than reporting, but with that caveat, it is an item good to resist. I've been reading comics for over thirty years, often covertly; at certain parts of my childhood, I'm sure that my mother would have rather found me with a copy of Playboy gripped in my hands than an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. In that time, I've gotten somewhat jaded about the sexual maturity of both comics creators and fans. It's no surprise, after you've spent some time with these people, that the women in comics tend to have their entire center of gravity located about 18 inches below their neck and that their plotlines just go deeper and deeper into Women in Refrigerators territory.

All that said, I would never have believed that a comics creator would come up with the line "Get out of here! Your vagina is haunted!" in a comic that was trying to be entirely serious. Apparently, someone did. Chris Sims does a masterful job of dissecting the offending book, Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose #53 in a blog entry that has to go down as one of the classics of comics criticism. It sheds some light not only on this particular issue of Tarot, but by extension, a whole host of the weird ideas about women and sex embedded in pop cultural fantasies that are marketed to young men.

According to Sims, the "plot" of Tarot #53 has to do with some vengeful sexy lesbian ghost nurses ("the night staff of SuicideGirls Memorial Hospital!" Sims says) who are on the rampage to retrieve the various body parts that harvested for cosmetic surgery and transplanted onto other people. One ghostly nurse tears the lips off a woman who received a collagen injection. The "hero" Skeleton Man, pursues the ghostly nurses to save a woman who got vaginal reconstructive surgery using bits from one of them.

You can see where this is leading. Right to the horrible line itself. I wouldn't believe that it actually existed if Sims didn't reproduce the panel: [after the jump]

As Sims himself quite sensibly asks: "If her vagina is haunted, where does she have to get out of?! Where is she going to go to escape her own ghost-riddled nether-bits?"

If it sounds ludicrous from my sketchy summary here, Sims's description takes it into the downright surreal. Stuff like this is why I'm sometimes tempted to tell people that I'm into relatively respectable hobbies, like collecting child porn or managing hedge funds, rather than admitting that I'm a comics geek.