Paper due tomorrow? Cue some more Glockblob!

Awhile back I saw somebody mention a "women in refrigerators complex." I forget where it was or what they were talking about, although the reference is specific enough that it almost had to be comic or superhero-based. I of course went and googled it, and what I found was a pretty interesting, pretty depressing webpage. The name of "Women in Refrigerators" comes from a comic where Green Lantern comes home to find that his girlfriend has been cut up and stuffed in the refrigerator. She is a superhero, too -- but her death has nothing to do with her or her enemies -- she was killed just to make a point to Green Lantern. EDIT: You know what? I went looking to try to verify my facts on this and I'm STILL not sure I've got it completely correct because this happened at least twice.


In general, "Women in Refrigerators" refers to female characters in comic books that are killed or otherwise abused in comics for no other reason than to move the plot along for the main male lead. Probably the most egregious example is the shooting, rape, and paralysis of Barbara Gordon.

Jeez, guys, can't you at least wait until she's done being shot before she stops being the focus of attention?

"The Killing Joke" is widely (and not without reason) regarded to be one of the best Batman/Joker stories. But it's amazing, when you look at the bare facts, that it's not Barbara Gordon's story. Is there really any chance that any male superhero would be paralyzed and dumped, in continuity, in a one-shot backstory showcase of a completely different character? When Moore called up The Powers That Be about doing bad things to Barbara Gordon in this story, the response was, "Cripple the bitch."
The killer is that Barbara herself doesn't even seem to realize that she's been kicked to the curb and spit on by the writers. When Batman goes to see her in the hospital, she interrupts his mild show of sympathy to direct attention back to the person who was really hurt: "My father! What's he doing to my father?!" ...Nice. Real nice.

But! I said this was about Glockblob! Several weeks later, site forgotten, I was in the middle of a story of Glockblob when I suddenly realized I was about to pull a WiR myself.
This page was already drawn when I realized what I was doing. The original storyline here was that Yippo was lured down into this woods by a false distress call and captured and de-powered by the Pun Pirates, and Glockblob had to go rescue her.
That's a fairly standard comic book conceit, and I don't think I narrowly escaped writing Mein Kampf or something, but it really bothered me when I realized that I was taking my only specifically female heroic character (Glocko and Blobbo never really had sexes before I started writing these, but that's another story) and using her as a prop to move the boys' story along, and that I didn't even realize I was doing it. In the end, I did some hasty rethinking of the plot and ended up giving Yippo a dark-past, Bruce-Wayne-type backstory that hasn't been fully hashed out yet.
Trying to think of something to do besides capture and otherwise abuse her made it pretty clear to me how hard it is not to coast on the kind of assumptions that make WiR stories so prevalent, but it also made the story and the character a lot better. Glockblob is fundamentally silly, and proudly based on cheesy old comics plots that don't have to make good semiotic sense (the Butterfly People exist solely to be captured and rescued, as far as I can tell), but Yippo is important. Yippo came to life separately from Glockblob, always drawn in full color, as a survival mechanism for one of many crappy English classes (rhymes with "Mature Heck") that made me feel better on bad days.
If I can help it, she's never going to end up in a refrigerator.