Greg Rucka's Post 9/11 Pin-ups.

In the opening gambit to Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, Tara Chace sits poised for her first hit. Freezing and exhausted, her target; a Russian General the American's want dead, slides out of a car. Tara fires a single bullet straight into his skull and thrusts her frozen bones into the shadows. Moments later she is spotted and makes a break for it, cue chase sequence, bullet to the leg, then eventual escape. The cold seductive killer, watches, destroys, then slips away into shadow.  That should be the end of it.. but upon return to London the mission, which was simply a favour for the CIA, has lost any shimmer of glamour. Her first kill was meaningless when it should have been for Queen and Country.

Batwoman: Elegy tells the story of a disgraced twenty-something dismissed from the military academy that had promised vengeance. Kate Kane is a vigilante super-heroine. In the opening glossy two page spread Batwoman has her sensible red boot pressed against a young man's throat. "You know what I want Rush" Her shocking red lips against her grey-white skin are a wound and a threat. "I want your secrets, I want where and I want when, I want her name. And you ... really... want to give it to me."  This emphasis bristles with sexual tension, she is the potential dominatrix, ready to punctuate her questions with the brutal work of her fists.

 But the cliched questions and the overblown dialectic suggests that she is new to the role... This is outlined beautifully in an article by Q Magazine's Colin Smith.  Referencing the moment she meets Batman, He writes: 

It's a lack of substance on Kate's part that's emphasised as she stumbles backwards with the shock of The Batman's appearance, faced with a character that's as solid and unmoving as a fundamental moral principle. Kate, we're surely being told, is a cartoon of herself, but this man in a mask is profoundly real. 

For Smith, Batman's assured competence (READ: white, wealthy hetero-normative power) sits in stark contrast to Kane's approach to vigilantism which is fueled above all by anger. When Kate's father discovers a cache of weapons she has stolen from his barracks he informs her:

 "I was actually relieved when I realized what you were doing with all this stuff. But here's a little biscuit for you to chew on, Kate. You're not a soldier anymore, and you're not a cop. Just because you survived beast at the point and you were senior elite in gymnastics doesn't mean you're a damn crimefighter and its going to stop now."

His anxiety is gendered. Jake Kane highlights his daughter's feminine achievements: the moment she survived the attack of "beast" referencing a potential rape, and her talents in gymnastics. In so doing, he airbrushes over his daughter's successes in military school. Only once Kate informs him "I've found my way to serve", proposing that the work will bring direction and discipline to her life, does Jake Kane accept her decision. His attempts to undermine her plans give her a platform to explain the decision. Rucka filters her personality through several layers, purposely weaving a narrative that shows more how others respond to Kate, rather than asserting and reasserting her core values. The following double page spread, stunningly produced by artist J.H. Williams, reiterates the reference to gymnastics.

Also she's a keen trainspotter.

 Five images of her fulfilling masculine mocked-up missions in army gear is overlaid by her contorted body as she retrains on gym beam. It is this flexibility to deny and reclaim gender stereotyping that makes Kate Kane so powerful.


In contrast, Tara Chace is unbending, determined, masculine and, as a result, brittle. Running on empty, Chace freezes, gets into fixes, gets shot, and above all is driven almost mad by the bureaucrats in London and undermine her decisions and treat her as a commodity. Following being attacked and electing to CHARGE at him like bloody lunatic  Chase is chastised by Mister Kinney; a higher up. "You! Chace! I want an answer by God! You stupid Bitch! Your orders were to draw them out, not to engage!" She is visibly exhausted, fag in mouth, the adrenaline having ripped through her. In a rage, she passes him "You have a problem with my performance, you're free to take it up with D-Ops.... at which point I'll be delighted to tell the home office about how you arrived just after the nick of time." The next time they meet, Chace is given a chance to explain her decision. [left] She smiles. "Next time you find someone shooting at you... and you're unarmed, try running towards the shooter" Then scowls "And pray the shooter isn't me."

Colin Smith, in his review of batwoman opens :

It's impossible to say whether "Batwoman: Elegy" is an angry comic book that's been written by an angry man.

But I strongly suspect that it is.

Not only is Rucka angry, but Kate Kane is furious and Chace, livid. In both series this anger is given meaning by the discrimination it responds to. Chase crumbles under the pressure of fulfilling the masculine role of spy, whilst being undermined by her female body; which gives scumbags like Kinney the opportunity to call her anything they want, undermine her decisions and insinuate that she is unable to cope with war. The female body takes the brunt; Chace self-medicates alcohol, cigarettes; whilst the brutal work of the active spy, and the stress and the strain of London politics additionally take their toll. The final panel of her time in the series shows her body dealing the final blow to active service as she sits holding a positive test for pregnancy. The battleground of Queen and Country is located not in Afganistan, Iraq, or in London, but in Chace's body which is devastated by active service. Despite this, Rucka does not suggest that Chace is unsuitable for active service, but rather that her female body impacts how the men around her respond to her work. It is society's perception of the woman at war which eventually destroys her career.

Kane on the other hand is removed from the army when she admits she is a lesbian.She removes herself from the institution that would seek to undermine her by choosing vigilantism. This choice allows her to experiment sexually and lose control of the stark and austere persona she had pursued in military school.

Another torn apart female body. 

 The choices she makes in her own appearance, sexual preferences, and the feats she performs are not politicised. Unlike Chace, she has less responsibility, and her body is not the battleground. Rucka's Post 9/11 pin-ups attack the institution. Not the military or MI6; but the institution of gender which expects women to perform like men, but continues to undermine them for the gender they attempt to conceal. Kate Kane's desire to serve her government has been squashed. Time and again that the insults of others; that she is too sexual, too feminine, too gay, too much, only feed an overarching desire to serve herself. Only by rejecting the constraints of  "institutionalised" gender roles and by living through their decisions, can Rucka's heroines coherently construct identities that are strong and female.

The Delicious Deadly Delight of They Bleed Pixels.

They Bleed Pixels is a dangerous and exciting game. The music drips with threat as you load up for the first time and see, in lo-fi graphics, the arrival of a strange emily to an austere school for girls. She discovers an evil book and having read it, is plagued by evil dreams with literary epigraphs.

The epigraphs reference not only H.P. Lovecraft's works from which the Victorian horror theme is drawn, but takes snippets from writers such as, Edgar Allen Poe, China Mievelle, and Phillip Pullman. These provide exposition for each coming level. These screens provide players with a literary bookshelf, which can extend and enrich the experience provided they are willing to look beyond their computer screens. Furthermore by having a different author, and with it a different platforming setting, whether it is underwater, in hell or Japanese lanterns, makes each new level seem like a new book. Entering these levels turns a new leaf, a new experience, and thus we mimic the curiosity of the protagonist when she opened the dark and terrible book that is now sending her visions.

In the dreams the young girl is transformed. Her arms become sharp tuning-fork shaped claws, and the game forces her to use them to inflict damage on the shadowy monsters that threaten to kill her. Initially the transformation is shown as a liberating and dangerous experience. She levitates, her arms grow and change into razor sharp weapons and simultaneously a smile grows sadistically across her face.

Then the gameplay kicks in and this sadism, delight and liberation is tainted by the reality that she has been thrown into a brutal horror setting. Littered with saw-blades, deadly and fast enemies each stunning landscape seeks to mutilate and murder her. As players, whatever pretensions of success we might have are reined in by a simple combat and platforming style that expects perfection and punishes the slightest mistake. A bit like going to boarding school then?

The gameplay mimics the polish and precision of Super Meat Boy, an insanely tricky game which encourages premature death but counteracts it with quick reloads, and fast pacing. Both games encourages not the sadism of the player, but their masochism as they repeatedly throw themselves against spikes saw-blades and enemies. Thus They Bleed Pixels alters the central dynamic of the game; the protagonist's transformation which the player initially viewed as liberating, mutilates the young girl's body and sets her up for a series of violent deaths.

When she awakes from each excruciating dream, in which she will have died over and over, she tries to elaborately rid herself of the book, burying it, throwing it in a river and burning it. But it returns again to haunt her revealing that the escapism is the means of controlling her.

A friend recently told me that to play games such as these was an exercise in futility. Unless I improve my platforming to a level where I might be able to complete the game I will never have the satisfaction that is provided by a myriad of other more mainstream titles. Each year, a new Call of Duty title reproduces a  fantasy of masculinity, which delivers the player the sense of completion and coherence that connects the physical prowess of the male body to the desire of the player to dominate. But in They Bleed Pixels: a game that foregrounds the inevitability of the characters repeated death no sense of coherence is possible.

Yet the player returns again and again to masochistically inch their way through the levels because they want to find the ending. In order to do they must do almost exactly what the game wants; hitting each button in a perfect sequence. At the end of each level, any feeling of empowerment is tainted by the reality that they survived because they did what the game told them to do. The liberation of this victorian, female character is tainted by the reality that her every action is controlled by the menacing terror of the dream-scapes. Her search for identity is futile; as the road to it is coated and slick with her blood.

---------------------------

A short post script.

This game is ridiculously fun! The bonus levels are fabulous, including a child-drawn level called "They Bleed Ponycorns" which is adorable, and the new "All Hallows Eve" level which was a free add-on for all customers, new and old and really really brilliantly done! A* Business Practice.

Rank D? Just ONE MORE GAME.