In late July of 1992, Batman Returns ruled the box office. I bought a ticket for something else: A film about two married women and a grumpy widow who take a holiday and, as The Seattle Times put it, “rediscover their sensuality on the sunny Mediterranean.” Strange, I know. But there I was, a twenty-one-year-old…

Somewhere in the middle of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the eponymous Jeanne eats a sandwich in her kitchen. We have, by that point in the film, seen quite a lot of Jeanne’s kitchen. We’ve watched Ms. Dielman cook in that kitchen, peel potatoes, wash dishes (shot from behind her back so…

Continued from yesterday. In this scene from Batman’s first meeting with Wonder Woman in Trinity, you can feel the writer Matt Wagner’s personality trumping the artist; though it doesn’t really add much to the narrative, Wagner can’t help but let Bats make a crack about her costume. Superheroines’ costumes are perpetually controversial, it seems (perhaps…

It’s one of my favorite images of Diana of Themyscira, a.k.a. Wonder Woman: her proud, bold body fills the page as she soars across a pink sunset, arms spread wide like a diver, her legs not straight but slightly askew as if skipping on the air. As someone who never had much use for comics,…

The day before yesterday, my eighteen-month-old daughter grabbed the bent-pull handle of a kids’ plastic wagon more than twice her size, then ran down the sidewalk next to our house, the wagon bumping wildly behind her. It was a perfect breezy, sunny Indian Summer afternoon. I ran along beside her, both to protect her from…