Saturday, May 16, 2009

Two things.


1.) Is Ms. Lion transexual? He's male, but dresses as a female, with pink bows on his ears, and uses a feminine modifier on his name. Of course, if he was a physically male dog that identifies himself as female, he would he be so quick to answer "yup" when asked if he's male? (Can the other animals, all being of different species, with the possible exception of Lockjaw, who's kind of a special case anyway, tell what gender he is?) Or is Ms. Lion perhaps a transvestite, a male dog who enjoys dressing as a female dog, and has adopted a more colorful female name, for the fun of it? Whatever the case, Ms. Lion is a ground-breaking character, the first transgendered or cross-dressing one in Marvel's character catalog (That I know of, anyway).*


2.) How is it that Ms. Lion knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man? Did Mephisto's mind-wipe mojo somehow not affect him?



(Image from Marvel's Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1, drawn by Ig Guara)



*Or, more likely, writer Chris Eliopoulos is just using the scene to humorously point out that Ms. Lion is so stupid that he doesn't even realize that "Ms." is an article used by females, and that pink bows are associated with female characters rather than male ones, especially in the cartoon character business. Each of the "Pet Avengers" is given a single character trait, and Ms. Lion's is stupidity.

5 comments:

Hdefined said...

Or it's just that owners sometimes treat male dogs as females if their species looks cute.

Phillip said...

I'm guessing smell would be the reason he knows who Spider-Man is, but then Wolverine should also know. Maybe he does and doesn't care? Or hasn't come in contact with Peter Parker? Or maybe the Mephistology doesn't affect animals. Or maybe I've thought too much about this.

SallyP said...

Would it help if you knew that the concept of Blue for Boys and Pink for Girls is a fairly recent phenomenon, really only since the early 1900's? Previously, it was the other way around,believe it or not. Ms. Lion is just a traditionalist.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure Ms. Lion in the cartoon was in fact female. That or everybody was completely clueless, including Angelica, who was her (or his) original owner in the show.

Teresa said...

Human identity markers don't mean anything to Ms. Lion.