Voodoo #1 – Review

By: Ron Marz (writer), Sami Basri (artist), Jessica Kholinne (colorist)

The Story: She literally knows what dirty thoughts you’re thinking.

The Review: Women in comics are a hot topic lately, and with this DC relaunch, the focus has landed on their fictional portrayals.  Last week, both Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws came under fire for putting their female stars into over-sexualized scenes (Catwoman’s last panel alone would have made you blush even in a men’s locker room).  With all the teasers showing its stripper-heavy first issue, Voodoo seemed well on its way to winning the prize for anti-feminism.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me just say: strippers are a fact of life.  You may see them as a moral travesty of varying degrees, but you can’t deny their existence, and it would be very false for fiction to do otherwise.  The important thing in writing them, just like writing any other class or type of people, is to make sure they don’t become mere instruments in the story, brought in just for the sake of having them.  Like anything else, if you write them well, they’re fair game.

And Marz writes them well.  Yes, you get plenty of bare skin and erotic positions in the first few pages, but as the issue moves along, he makes it clear all that stuff is mere gloss, and underneath is a living, breathing plot with conflict and tension that has absolutely nothing to do with an exploitive industry.  And anyway, by the end, the strip club setting becomes a non-issue; it is only one, temporary stop on this storyline’s train track.