The bulk of Alias is a procedural story about Jessica Jones, Private Eye. I like this about Alias. If I had a complaint about the show (well, I had many), it was that we rarely get to see Jessica Jones actually pursuing her actual career. She does the minimum amount of PI-ing that can be called PI-ing, like Keith Mars isn’t even the star of his show and he does way more on-screen PI-ing than Jessica Jones in Jessica Jones. Whereas in Alias, each mini-arc is about a specific case that Jessica has to solve: cheating spouses, missing persons, exactly what you’d expect.

She’s also a complicated, not-always-likeable person, and the comic does not ask us to hold this against her. We know that there’s some bad stuff in her past (hello, superhero?), but even before Bendis tells us what this is, we’re meant to be on her team as regards her choices re: costumed heroism; and in fact, we’re meant to be on her team altogether, while also recognizing that she makes mistakes and bad decisions and this is part of her too. So that’s a great look for a female-led comic, particularly one that came out in the early aughts.

You can tell that Bendis is trying not to fall into gross, overused tropes of female trauma. He really is trying. Ant-Man, who Jessica dates for a while, comes off reeeeeal Nice-Guy-ish, and she has to legit run away from him yelling “RESPECT MY BOUNDARIES SCOTT.” And there’s another scene in which he asks her — not in an unkind way — if she’s been raped, to which she answers this:

I gotcha, Bendis. I see what you’re trying to do there, buddy. I see that you are making an effort there and I appreciate it.

But you know how I have talked in this space before all about how it’s a problem to locate the value of women characters in their bodies? Well, one thousandth verse, same as the first. In the last issue of Alias, Bendis loses a huge chunk of my goodwill for this series by ending the story in the following asinine way: Jessica reveals her woeful backstory to Luke Cage, how Killgrave made her watch while he raped a whole bunch of other women and also made her beg him to love her. Here in the present, Killgrave escapes from prison. She has the power to escape his mind control for Reasons (fine), so she kills him. Then she goes find Luke Cage to tell him she’s pregnant with his child, and this fuckery ensues:

Yo, just like: Okay. Let me just — okay. Jessica has never talked about wanting a child before. This is super out of nowhere. For this to work as a final scene, Bendis is banking on the reader accepting the premise that all ladies want babies. That is number one.

(Do I need to say this, actually? I guess yes? Dude writers, your attention please: Not all ladies want babies. If you want us to buy “pregnancy” as a happy, or even a happyish ending, you need to set it up emotionally prior to pulling the trigger. But you should still probably have a lady read over what you’ve written. Dudes assuming they know what ladies want to do with their bodies is, let’s say, somewhat fraught.)

Number two, returning to that earlier panel about Jessica having been raped, I know I said I appreciated the effort, but I didn’t appreciate it that much. Killgrave’s treatment of Jessica lets Bendis garner cookies by showing awareness that Lady Comics Readers are tired of rape backstories (yes we are). But it’s all still framed like rape. Jessica is triggered during sex. She heavily identifies with young women who appear to have been abducted or assaulted. In a flashback, she’s thrown into a state of dissociation following a particularly brutal command from Killgrave. And it all just feels like a dude comic book writer thinking “what can be a traumatic backstory for a lady person that isn’t rape but is still very traumatic indeed?” and being literally unable to come up with something that didn’t involve a woman’s ability to consent being taken away by a dude looking to dominate, humiliate, and overpower her.

THUS, this sudden pregnancy thing, which evidently we are supposed to root for because evidently it’s something our heroine wants, comes off super much as a corrective expression of Jessica’s womanhood following her triumph over her female trauma.

And look, I get that that wasn’t what Bendis was aiming at. But as women we are perpetually told that our value lies in remaining sexually pure; and, when we lose that purity, it lies in becoming a vessel for new life. It’s disappointing to watch Jessica punchmurder a character who responds to her deviance from the first half of that paradigm with violence and coercion, only to have the author assume her, and our, innate desire for her to align her life with the second half of it. It’s frustrating as hell, the more so because Alias and its creators have been much applauded for this portrayal of a complex female character and her recovery from trauma.

ETA: After writing and scheduling this post, the news came out that Brian Michael Bendis will be writing a new Iron Man comic featuring a black teenage girl named Riri. I believe in Bendis’s good intentions, both in Alias and in this upcoming Iron Man comic. I’m sure he wants to do and say the right things. But the pregnancy thing above is the perfect example of having good intentions and still getting it wrong. Hire some damn women of color, Marvel, and stop looking for praise behind infinitely reupping on the same white dude writers forever and ever.

This has been your Angry Feminism Minute. Tip your servers.

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(That’s not the thing.)

Influx is about a man called Jon Grady who is such a Maverick that he invents a thing called a gravity mirror. A Shady Organization called the Bureau of Technology Control (BTC) orders him to join them in concealing this scientific innovation from the rest of the world, because the World Can’t Handle the Truth. When Grady refuses (he’s a Maverick, remember), they ship him off to an isolated torture-prison called Hibernity, whence he must find a way to escape and bring True Science back to the world.

Sounds fun, right? (That’s not the thing either. That part is all fine.)

Along the way, he encounters the following woman, who was genetically designed by the BTC to be young and beautiful forever (as well as good at fighting, and fatally attractive to all men everywhere because chemicals):

Grady did a double take on the woman. She was incredibly beautiful, fair complected, with short jet-black hair and lapis lazuli blue eyes. She wore a tailored pantsuit and crisp white blouse–normal business attire. But in fact, she was so attractive it was difficult for Grady to take his eyes off her, despite his absurd predicament.

Since she’s the only female character we’ve encountered so far, this is already annoying. But it still isn’t the thing. Here’s an internal monologue from the preposterously attractive Alexa, right after she chucks the chin of a fat little baby she meets in the BTC halls.

It hurt. It really did. They’d made her the way she was, and in many ways she was grateful. But sterility was the price. Almost fifty years old, and she looked not a day over twenty-five. But she’d never menstruated. Never felt what it was like to be a woman. That look in the young mother’s eyes… She could feel the urge to be a mother. Even if she lived to be four hundred years old, she’d never know the joys and sorrows of motherhood. . . . The woman was chunky. Genetically inferior. But at that moment Alexa wanted to be her.

I don’t need my dumb adventure stories to also have magnificent character development. If they do, then huzzah, it kicks the whole endeavor up a notch in my estimation, and I’ll probably recommend the book to more people and with more enthusiasm. But if that’s not the author’s area of strength, that’s fine. I will be here for your revenge-motivated flattish characters doing a heist to save the world’s science using their varied skill sets. I love heists! I love team-ups!

But here, at last, is the aforementioned thing: it is maddening that we end up with three characters whose lives have been, in different ways, affected and damaged by this Evil Science Corporation, and one of them is a lady, so of course the author has to rush in and tell us a) how heart-stoppingly gorgeous she is; and b) her aspirations on childbirth. Great. Thanks, Suarez. Those things seem super relevant to her quest of blowing shit up and releasing hitherto-concealed science information to the masses.

At the end, when this is all over and the information has been released to the masses and the prisoners on Prison Island have been freed, we get a mindblowingly aggravating epilogue wherein Grady and Alexa have been married for seven years and have a six-year-old daughter. She is his prize, you see, for successfully bringing down the Evil Science Corporation. And her aspirations of motherhood have been fulfilled. Doesn’t matter how. Science probably!

When characterization is lacking (this is the thing), authors tend to default back to tropes, and the tropes about women are always ladytropes. It’s about our physical appearance. It’s about our ability to bear children. And we are, ultimately, there to be awarded as prizes to male characters who succeed at things. After we’ve been told that Alexa has never experienced or been interested in romance, Grady kisses her (without, by the way, permission) out of nowhere just prior to their final assault on the BTC; and in the epilogue, boom, they’re married. Is this a thing we were supposed to be wanting for these two characters?

If the answer to that question seemed like yes to anyone, it’s because that’s what girls are for. And that is the thing. The thing that makes me want to punch a wall. When all I goddamn wanted from this book was a fun fucking adventure story.

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