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Apr 3, 2018

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1133: Sandman Mystery Theatre #13, April 1994

https://www.comics.org/issue/54862/

From what I can tell, the next stories are about female empowerment and the "fears" society had of such a thing. I'm excited to see where the story takes us. There appears to be a female killer on the loose, but this isn't the only kind of empowerment we're seeing. There is a brief moment of queerness as one of Dian's old college friends drunkenly kisses her, and then is seen to be part of a queer relationship. There's Dian herself, stepping out of the mold that her society has set out for her, but only tentatively just now. She's pushing at the boundaries, but not quite breaking them, I think. I had a professor describe Mary Wollstencraft's proto-Feminism in the same way, and my own brief exposure to her famous text convinced me also. Wollstencraft was very much of the idea that women should be treated with more equity, but she certainly didn't envision overturning the patriarchal system within which she lived.

I have to say it again - I'm stunned that the same medium, heck, basically the same genre in the same medium, a genre that grew in this medium, is producing both these stories and the ones I've been reading in Supreme at basically the same time. SMT is just so good. So, so good.

More to come...

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