2019 Re(ad)treat 2

If you give a pig a party by Laura Numeroff; illustrated by Felicia Bond.  Although I've read Pig a pancake, I don't think I've seen this one before.  The pig is my favorite: she's so amazingly dainty.

If you give a dog a donut by Laura Numeroff; illustrated by Felicia Bond.  Only necessary for die-hard fans.  It is interesting that, in all these, there aren't any adults about but each child (8-ish?) quickly becomes the cook, organizer, and de-facto mom, cleaning up bits trailing behind the distracted animal and becoming more frazzled each page.

Ultra: Seven days by Joshua Luna and Jonathan Luna.  A graphic novel with a female superhero, by the guy who co-wrote that awesome Alex + Ada series?: You'd expect great things!  This is lazy, sexist, and written for frat boys.

Problems are obvious in the first scene when the characters (a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, because how else are you supposed to tell hot girls apart?) compare their sexual exploits and rib each other in an interaction that only happens in drunken college football fan's wet dreams.  Here, and throughout the book, they and other female superheroes call each other "harlot," "slut," "bitch," "whore," "hoe," and more.  I recognize that we're talking about people with superpowers in some kind of alternate earth, but these women still have jobs.  They have families.  Their world is no so different from ours that it would be unrecognizable; these women aren't women, by definition, based on *every single other woman I've ever interacted with*.  Not only did this book apparently not have a single female beta reader, it seems obvious that whichever writer was the driving force behind these characters never interacted with a woman, like, ever.  No women talk like this.  No friends interact like this.  These characters do not represent anything that looks like a real-life woman.

In my approximately 3 minutes of internet research, one of the lauded points about this book is that the primary character, Pearl is Latina.  It isn't a super-big point in the book, but it's there.  But no one can hold her up as an example of Latinxs being represented in graphic novels or the superhero genre, because she is such a joke.  It would be like a man holding up a brown-haired version of a Barbie and wondering why I'm not happy that "she looks just like me."

I'm really disappointed, because the pacing was awesome and the art was amazing. There were a couple of scenes when at least two of the characters almost had personalities and growth.  Unfortunately, when they're not talking about work, the three female characters talk almost exclusively about guys in general, guys in particular, or themselves in relation to relationships with guys.  They occasionally talk (disparagingly) about other female side characters.  I'd have to say this fails the Bechdel Test.

Also a big fail is the would-be boyfriend, who (spoiler?) takes post-date photos of a sleeping, naked Pearl and sells them to a tabloid, along with private information and a totally false version of the events of their date.  Pearl gets angry and goes to look for him, but gets distracted by saving the world, which hates her now because she's a skank.  Other characters point out his actions were wrong, but the general feeling is a boys-will-be-boys shoulder-shrug; no other characters seek him out, no one suggests legal action against him, and he just fades into the background in favor of the real point of the story-- helping Pearl find "true love."  There's also a short scene where the loser date meets a sketchy guy in a car, who pays for the photos and makes references to taking Pearl down, but there's no information, prior to or after this scene, that would justify the sketchy guy's motivation to make her "burn."

Avoid.