Barbelith Underground > Comic Books

Y’know, I’ve really been debating whether I should pick this up. And I keep having my doubts.

The premise, of course, is in poor taste: that’s inherent. But there could be some good, squicky body-horror to be mined from it. The problem is that the starting point is such an archetypal het-male fantasy—the ultimate zipless fuck—that when the turnaround comes, as it must for horrific effect, it’s a fine line to walk to avoid sliding into outright misogyny.

What we’re playing on, here, is the simultaneous male fear of and attraction to a woman who fucks like a man—fucks who and when she wants, who has sexual urges and does not deny them. In day-to-day society, a woman like that is branded as a whore or worse. In stories of this type, though, she’s presented as an aberration—literally inhuman: an alien, a demon, a goddess, a weird Lovecraftian otherbeing. And the penalty for being a monstrous nymphoslut from beyond the stars is, usually, death.

I mean, the hero gets to fuck her first; that’s a given. But she can’t be allowed to live at the end of the story.

There are a few sex-fear stories that examine the tropes successfully and thoughtfully—Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” springs to mind—and many that descend into gynophobia at the drop of the Bad Lady’s clothing—e.g., the Species movies.

Now, Girls may indeed fall into the former select group, but I have so far not picked it up because I fear it will fall into the latter. My reasons for this are superficial, but I’ll lay them out here:

—The art, as evidenced above, is unapologetically cheesecake-y. Now, I like looking at pitchers of purty nekkid wimmins as much as the next person—but something about the voluptuary Frank Cho-style rendering puts me off. Of course, it’s necessary to the context—the aberrant otherwhore must look gorgeous and irresistible for the story to be believable.

But having seen other of J. Luna’s art, I can confirm that he lavishes just as much lusciousness on a drawing of, say, Spider-Woman as on the Evil Hottie of Girls. This leads me to believe that, like Cho, Luna just plain likes drawing cutie-pies, and that this project was undertaken not so much as a serious examination of sexual anxieties as an excuse to draw lots of pretty ladies with no clothes on, bolting them onto a standard small-town in peril plot. Which is all well and good, as far as it goes—but such stories rarely end well for the pretty ladies.

—I’ve read the occasional five-page preview at Buzzscope or CBR or wherever, and, while the storytelling is solid and the pacing seems pretty good, the dialogue is sitcom-flat and the relationships and situations seem cliché.

—Finally: the Lunas—and I’m not the first to point this out, but I can’t remember who mentioned it; maybe Augie DeBlieck—write the worst solicitation text in the business:

“As the questions pile on, only one thing remains certain—nothing will ever be the same.”

“In order to find a way out of this nightmare, everyone must stand as one. But when temptation beckons, can the men be trusted?”

Oh, God.

“Are you scared of girls?”

If that's not a tagline tailor-made for the stereotypical fatbeard fanboy, I've never seen one.

“There are some things worse than death.”

Yeah, and I’m readin’ it right now.

So. Am I right? Am I wrong? Do the Lunas hate women? Would I hate myself for reading it? Should I just wait for the J. Luna coffee-table art book of nude studies, and spare myself the tedious narrative of the lethal (and probably phallic) chastisement of a space-jezebel?