Ever since William Moulton Marston decided to build up the self esteem of young women by creating a heroine who embodied everything grand about the super hero comic genre, strong women have been a staple in comic books.  Marston, utilizing a backdrop of the Greek legend of the Amazonians,created a woman stronger than any man, who could outfight everyone (even Superman on a bad day for the man of steel), and who could serve as a female role model for a new generation of young woman increasingly interested in woman's lib.

So why was she wearing a skintight tank top, bikini bottom, and calf accentuating boots?

It's a rhetorical question because I think I know the answer: while one could argue woman were being shown they could be proud of their curvaceousness, the reality was that little boys like reading comic books too, and perhaps all the more when the female hero is hotter than Miss America and Miss Universe genetically put together in the laboratory of a modern Frankenstein.  Wonder Woman is hot, whether drawn by men or women, and feeling attracted to female leads in comic books goes a long way to help suffering all the men in their skin tight bodysuits who outsiders look at as possible homoerotic archetypes.  Woman look strong and they enable us to desexualize our comic experience because we realize everyone is running around in their underwear, male and female alike, and that this practice has been the same for seventy years.

Enter Alan Moore.

Always willing to stir up controversy, perhaps most famously in his Watchmen and Swamp Thing books, Alan Moore has written for many comic book companies at different times, taking on stagnant characters and making them shine with embellishment that sometimes takes the comic books years to flesh out.  In 1997 Moore took a minor character from the Wildstorm comic book Wildcats, and turned her into a sexy siren who learns in New Orleans much more about Voodoo than she ever wanted to.  Moore's Voodoo earns her money in a shady nightclub as a stripper and pole dancer, and Moore has her wearing next to nothing, with wildly provocative artwork by Michael Lopez and Al Rio.  The four issue limited series can be found collected in "Alan Moore Wild Worlds," an incredible sampling of comic books that he did for the fledgling publishing company in the 1990s.

Not that there's anything wrong with provocative comics, I just believe the distance between Voodoo and Wonder Woman demonstrates the massive divide between the emissary from Themyscira and the other women in comic books:  Wonder Woman's sexiness is a byproduct of her strength, while some characters have their sexiness as their strength.  Reading comics now is like a lesson in titillation when it comes to the female characters, and while Voodoo was intended to be a book by Moore about magick, specifically a well told story about the traditions of Voodoo still practiced in New Orleans, for me it turned out to be a comic book about sexiness, and the modern practice of over-sexualizing to create the desired effect: to bring salivating men to the comic shop week after week, and to get them to read comics about woman, not because they identify with women, but because it is fun to ogle the women in this art form.

Now that sounds bleak and I want to step back before sounding like a total prude, but come on! Power Girl has a giant opening cut above her cleavage, showing triple D's perhaps as a method of distraction similar to Batman's chest piece.  From the new Batwoman to the long history of Poison Ivy, there has always been a DC heroine or villain who flirts with the hero while they bash away at one another, it's part of the genre's time honored equation: man fight woman, woman kick ass, man escapes with life, tricks woman with nonviolent method to stop her crime spree.  Nowadays the Catwoman wears a full body leather cat suit.  These characters are drawn hot, and while it is a celebration of the human form, woman who look like these are few and far between to say the very least.

Now in my world Alan Moore can do no wrong so I believe the emphasis on sexuality he brought to Voodoo was intentional, a metaphor symbolizing the manipulation of man's desires through ancient magick with the manipulation of man's desires through physical persuasion.  The combination is interesting, but if you want his best work on magick in the comic book form, check out the Promethea work he did.  There the female lead is even stronger, and sexuality is not the focal point of the story.  In fact Moore creates a female lead far more powerful than Marston's Wonder Woman, with a scope and design so broad the results were beyond inspiring.

But for now I leave you to ponder this, do you like female heros or female titillation?  (Couldn't help it, the interior rhyme was too cute...)