Big Girls #1: A Femin-ish Kaiju Crisis

Since the genre’s inception, kaiju stories have been tied to both low-brow escapism and social commentary. From Gojira/Godzilla acting as a metaphor for nuclear warfare and its victims to Pacific Rim’s confrontation of pollution, social commentary has been part of the fabric of the kaiju genre. Enter Big Girls.

Big Girls, a book created by Jason Howard (perhaps best known for his work on Trees with Warren Ellis), focuses on an apocalyptic future Earth where an unknown manmade event has led to a genetic mutation. This mutation turns men into giant monsters which have been dubbed “Jacks,” and turns women into less monstrous but equally giant “Big Girls” whose role it has become to defend humanity against the Jacks. As the narration in Big Girls bluntly states, “There’s no more arguing about what’s wrong with the world. It’s men.”

While Big Girls will surely (one hopes) develop more nuance beyond this thesis, it’s difficult not to see Big Girls as a direct confrontation of toxic masculinity. As The Good Men Project explains, “Toxic masculinity is a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression.” Men are expected to emphasize these traits rather than, for example, be empathetic, or risk becoming “feminine” – weak – not men. Toxic masculinity is not all masculinity, but it is still a destructive component of patriarchy that hurts everyone: men included.

In Big Girls, “Jacks” become monstrous as they age, which is treated as something not only inevitable but grown into, not unlike toxically masculine traits which boys learn as they age to adulthood. Even beyond the Jacks, no men in Big Girls seem immune to toxic traits. Big Girls #1 focuses on a military unit lead by High Marshall Tannik, a unit for which 300-foot-tall protagonist Ember is an asset. The women of Big Girls may be giant, but their world (like ours) is patriarchal and treats them as weapons. The initial story beat following the issue’s exposition throws its audience into an emotionally gutting moral dilemma that quickly separates the empathetic Ember from Tannik and his men. The only way Tannik can think to destroy the Jacks – manifestations of toxic masculinity – is somewhat ironically through violence, aggression, and shows of strength. Tannik’s only exhibition of empathy is towards Ember at a moment he knows it will make her a better fighter.

However, if Howard is indeed trying to confront toxic masculinity in Big Girls, the central metaphor is damagingly bioessentialist. As explained by Colleen Clemens at Teaching Tolerance, “While gender identity is a deeply held feeling of being male, female or another gender, people of different genders often act differently, not because of biological characteristics but because of rigid societal norms created around femininity and masculinity” (emphasis mine). While these rigid societal norms still exist within Big Girls, Howard also takes the worst traits of men and manifests them as a genetic difference between men and women. As put by Danielle Indovino Cawley in her article addressing Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties and Naomi Alderman’s The Power, “an illumination of inequality through a natural phenomenon that only affects one gender… hurts discussions of intersectionality and feminism more than it helps them.”

The problem of Big Girls’ gendered genetic metaphor isn’t singular to it. Other stories with similar troubling metaphors include Sleeping Beauties, The Power, and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man. While these stories may garner acclaim for their feminism or confrontation of gender norms, they abandon trans, intersex, and genderqueer individuals in order to do so. As Cawley also puts it, “In order for the plots to operate, and for us to understand what the authors want to highlight, one must either ignore a vast community or declare that community’s identities somehow false… At the core, it declares anyone who has a certain biological trait to be a woman and anyone who doesn’t not to be one. This is damaging, bordering on hostile.” (Y: The Last Man was unquestionably hostile towards trans men.) If trans people are to exist within Big Girls’ world, Howard has every chance of associating trans women with monstrosity and implying they are “really men,” or may dodge the fact that trans men can still exhibit toxic masculine behavior by implying that they are really women.

Big Girls’ copy compares itself not only to Godzilla but the HBO series Girls – a work praised for its feminism and also condemned for how myopic that feminism was. While Big Girls seems to have a feminist streak, it also shares Girls’ selectiveness. A book that seems to question gender roles, Big Girls nonetheless aggressively reinforces a rigid understanding of gender that harms trans people.

Social commentary aside, Big Girls brings together a number of very familiar elements – i.e. creepy children’s poetry, a giant who has Feelings, women in nonsensical armor, and a military figure who believes the ends always justify the means. While none of these elements are necessarily the best the genre has to offer (i.e. the poem is effective tonally but unevenly metered), they still more or less function collectively to create a book of their own. The issue’s ending is an incredibly effective last page reveal, but nonetheless feels complicated by the thesis Big Girls sets up, due to its implication of women beyond the perpetuation of and into the creation/manufacture of toxic masculinity.

Artistically, Big Girls is an equally mixed bag. The illogical and even objectifying armor feels at odds with the book’s themes, but Howard’s design of the Jacks is striking and grotesque. Howard’s aggressive approach to hatching can make panels feel unnecessarily cluttered and often feels like it can’t be justified by the composition it is a part of. The places it pays off are usually in relation to the comic’s horror element – the Jacks – which also have the most powerful presence in the book. While Howard’s heavy hatching can sometimes make panels too busy, the colorwork beneath often does a decent if unremarkable job of setting the mood. Howard’s greatest strength as an artist is certainly shot composition. Fight scenes brim with energy and Howard often places the viewer in the middle of the action, which creates a sensation of something immediate and intimate. His wide shots and ground-level shots, meanwhile, effectively convey the towering forms of the Jacks and Big Girls.

The cover of Big Girls #1, also by Howard, shares the strengths and weaknesses of the interior art. The restricted color scheme, tight shot composition, and energetic poses effectively draw the eye and entice curious readers, and for the most part reflect the book within.