Something Positive rocks my socks-- a filler strip of note

So one of my many nerd creds is that I'm into comics. It was in fact feminist comic-blogs that started me reading sci-fi feminist blogs and feminist in general blogs along with sci-fi blogs. Ah, "Girls Read Comics (and They're Pissed)", my gateway drug. So as someone who trolls the internet looking for things of interest on comic books and who happens to be a big fan of Gail Simone, I quickly became aware of the phenomenon of "women in refridgerators". For those of you not in the know, "women in refridgerators" refers to the overused, sexist and poor writing-wise plot technique of killing off a female character solely for the effect on a male character. It's overused as people were able to create a fairly sizable list of all the female characters put in fridges. It's sexist as it happens mostly to women, and its viewing female characters solely in terms of their relation to the male character. The male is the planet, the female the satellite. She is only created as a plot point. Which brings us to the point of it being poor-writing. C'mon guys, you can do better than give your character motivation other than having the villain kill off their loved one. It's not that creative and when that character is created solely for killing off, it's not that interesting.

Anyways, today the fridging of women was addressed in R.K. Milholland's filler strip for his webcomic "Something Positive." In it, a super-villain arrives in order to kill a superhero's girlfriend and well, the girlfriend kicks his ass. Can I just take this moment to beg you to go over and look at this strip? No really it's hilarious. Here's the link: http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp12272007.shtml. It made me gleeful. And really, really want this to happen in the published superhero comic books. Are you listening DC and Marvel? Please, please, pretty please do this instead the next time one of your writers wants to fridge someone. Cause it is awesome. And so much more creative than what normally happens and what should go down. Or should have gone down with certain characters' deaths. Like Barda, remember her? I miss her. And wish she'd gone down fighting rather than in her kitchen without a sign of a struggle.

Not only did Milholland manage to reverse the fridging in a way that delighted me but also made sense (there are a lot of tough girls out there after all who would fight back and fight back hard after all), he also made the little dig about women either being victims or whores. Can't imagine who he's talking to there, now can we? Just in general, an all around great strip addressing one of the worst over used plot devices and misogyny in comic-book writing in a way that entertains.