Gender, Feminism, and Heroism in Joss Whedon and John ...

(Klock, 2002). As the revisionary superhero narrative continued to evolve, Alan Moore’s
(1986) now clichéd question, “Who watches the Watchmen?” became more complex—
are the watchers and the watched different groups at all? This changing perspective
allowed heroes to regain their morality, but the line between good and evil could never be
clearly redrawn; the legacy of Miller and Moore was and still is impossible to forget
(Klock, 2008).
This is the tradition out of which Whedon and Cassaday’s X-Men emerge, and
heavy influence is evident. In fact, the current text takes the self-consciousness of the
revisionary narrative one step further. As is argued in subsequent chapters, Kitty, Emma,
and Danger not only fit into the gray area between good and evil, but their relative shades
of gray are a driving force of their conflicts, constructing the narrative around the text’s
questioning of how dark a revisionary superhero needs to be to be revisionary.
Much like the narrative structure discussed above, the visual construction of the
X-Men characters shows great influence from conventions of the industry, which have
changed little since the Golden Age. Stan Lee and John Buscema, a prominent Marvel
penciler for forty years, published their book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way in
1978 to teach comic book artist hopefuls the norms of the industry, and along the way
they provide great insight into how gender is constructed through physicality in the comic
book world. They explain that men should be angular with wide shoulders and narrow
hips, while women should be constructed with curvy lines to make them appear “smooth
and soft” (p. 44). Superheroes of both sexes should be abnormally tall with no excess
body fat around the waist, abdomen, arms, legs, or head, but female heroes should be
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