As anyone who reads these blogs knows, I spent some of last weekend reading some older issues that i had been meaning to get to for a while. One of these was a small stack of the Rip Hunter series from the 1960s. It was a pretty humdrum series with basically the quality that one would expect from comics at the time. One of the developments which occurs as that about two years into the two and a half year series, the main characters befriend Cleopatra and then she shows up intermittently throughout the rest of the series. There is not really a problem with this for a group of characters that time travel, the interesting thing for me though is the depiction of Cleopatra. First of all Cleopatra is generally considered to not be a beautiful as her legend insists. There are no paintings of her and any other depictions of her are on pieces of art that don't lend themselves well to flattery. Most contemporary accounts are that Cleopatra was in no great beauty, but that she has been ascribed beauty since her reign as it is a cultural norm that we associate beauty with power when it comes to women. More so than that though is that Cleopatra falls into the same trap artistically that others from the same time frame do as well, that being that she is generally depicted as a Caucasian when in fact she was not. The most obvious example of this double standard of portrayal is with Jesus who most people in the world think of as a white man when in fact he most certainly looked very Arabic. There has been some changes in the perception of such historically famous people, but then there are still those that hold to the images that they have been raised to give value to. In the case of Jesus it is obviously a very personal outlook as people identify with religious figures much more than historical figures (he being both of course) but in the case of Cleopatra, maybe it is time she gets the colour treatment which is truer to herself.

Gallery

I really think this is an example of how much things have changed. During the early days of comics I think it was just a widely accepted norm to depict someone as white. In modern day that is not so much the case. You're starting to see more heroes and heroines of different skin pigmentation taking up the roles of their former caucasian counterparts. There still is a great deal of whitewashing that goes on, but you can see in several different mediums as that the whitewashing is chipped away. Though I'm not aware of any storylines that might use Cleopatra today, I think it would be more likely to see her with a bronze skin pigmentation.

@Delphic: It would be interesting but I think the norms still exist with people enough to not make a huge difference

@RazzaTazz said:

@Delphic: It would be interesting but I think the norms still exist with people enough to not make a huge difference

I think though you are seeing heroes of different nationalities more often than we did. For example the Assassin's Creed franchise. It is a video game franchise and not a comic one, but so far there have been five protagonists. An Arabic, An Italian (with several ties to Constantinople), A mixed Native American/European American Colonist, an Africian American woman, and the descendant of the first three. There was also a short film depicting an Asian woman as one of the protagonists alongside the Italian who at that point was elderly. That's part of the reason why I love the Assassin's creed franchise. It's historically based on the Hassasshin which was a small group of Arabics that had a big hand in the Third Crusade. I also love how they turn around the crusade, making the Templars the bad guys who were the corrupt ones trying to take over the world. There are also a lot of historic figures like Sultan Saladin and The Borgia from the Italian renaissance. Even Leonardo Da Vinci has a large role in the story.

@Delphic: Interesting that you mention Leonardo, I was thinking about him recently as well.

@RazzaTazz said:

@Delphic: Interesting that you mention Leonardo, I was thinking about him recently as well.

Why were you thinking of Leonardo?

@Delphic: Just that he also showed up in the Rip Hunter series, but it was essentially a new blog idea

@RazzaTazz said:

@Delphic: Just that he also showed up in the Rip Hunter series, but it was essentially a new blog idea

Ah, very interesting

@Delphic said:

@RazzaTazz said:

@Delphic: It would be interesting but I think the norms still exist with people enough to not make a huge difference

I think though you are seeing heroes of different nationalities more often than we did. For example the Assassin's Creed franchise. It is a video game franchise and not a comic one, but so far there have been five protagonists. An Arabic, An Italian (with several ties to Constantinople), A mixed Native American/European American Colonist, an Africian American woman, and the descendant of the first three. There was also a short film depicting an Asian woman as one of the protagonists alongside the Italian who at that point was elderly. That's part of the reason why I love the Assassin's creed franchise. It's historically based on the Hassasshin which was a small group of Arabics that had a big hand in the Third Crusade. I also love how they turn around the crusade, making the Templars the bad guys who were the corrupt ones trying to take over the world. There are also a lot of historic figures like Sultan Saladin and The Borgia from the Italian renaissance. Even Leonardo Da Vinci has a large role in the story.

That is interesting, incorporating myth and legends into fiction is fun, but then that is why I like GFT so much.

@RazzaTazz said:

@Delphic said:

@RazzaTazz said:

@Delphic: It would be interesting but I think the norms still exist with people enough to not make a huge difference

I think though you are seeing heroes of different nationalities more often than we did. For example the Assassin's Creed franchise. It is a video game franchise and not a comic one, but so far there have been five protagonists. An Arabic, An Italian (with several ties to Constantinople), A mixed Native American/European American Colonist, an Africian American woman, and the descendant of the first three. There was also a short film depicting an Asian woman as one of the protagonists alongside the Italian who at that point was elderly. That's part of the reason why I love the Assassin's creed franchise. It's historically based on the Hassasshin which was a small group of Arabics that had a big hand in the Third Crusade. I also love how they turn around the crusade, making the Templars the bad guys who were the corrupt ones trying to take over the world. There are also a lot of historic figures like Sultan Saladin and The Borgia from the Italian renaissance. Even Leonardo Da Vinci has a large role in the story.

That is interesting, incorporating myth and legends into fiction is fun, but then that is why I like GFT so much.

How did I guess that somehow this would eventually turn toward GFT? :P (jk)

@Delphic: GFT featured Cleopatra on one cover.

There isn't any actual evidence as to whether or not she was pretty and actually if you've ever studied art history, Egyptians were hardly refined when it came to depicting human anatomy. They drew children as small-scale grown adults with very large heads and the likeness of the statues at the time are hardly an indication either - making a statue was hard labor and no one paid attention to likeness seeing as how there weren't any pictures and the human anatomy in art had yet to be fully realized in the individual sense. Most female statues were simply Hellenic in their features - even a statue of Aphrodite who was meant to resemble everything feminine and beautiful about life ended up looking "plain".

As for her race? Difficult to determine. I don't know if she'd be lilly white, she was from a Greek/Macedonian family but I'm not sure how they'd look racially as a result. Alexander the Great also is often depicted as being white and they were from similar regions of the world.

Also, if these were published in the 60's I would venture a guess that they were more modeled more after Elizabeth Taylor than Cleopatra. I looked at the dates for Rip Hunter's publication and it was from 1961-1965 which was when Cleopatra was the talk of the town seeing as how it was drama filled and took YEARS to make. It was huge though and I'm not just biased being that I LOVE Elizabeth Taylor. It was the most expensive movie ever made at the time, it was the highest grossing, it changed tabloid journalism (the Burton-Taylor affair, Elizabeth Taylor momentarily being declared dead), and Elizabeth Taylor bagged 1 million for and 10% of the gross (unheard of at the time). I think Cleopatra's inclusion was just the editor capitalizing on the fame of the movie.

Fun fact- Star Sapphire's likeness was originally based on Elizabeth Taylor as well.

@HexThis: There are no artistic representations but I think it has been written down in several sources that she was not a great beauty.

@RazzaTazz said:

@HexThis: There are no artistic representations but I think it has been written down in several sources that she was not a great beauty.

I think I've read some quotes suggesting something similar but I also imagine a powerful, intelligent woman would be very unsexy to a lot of the men she encountered. It's probably a huge reason for why the men she was romantically involved with ended up being men who were difficult to intimidate and equally influential.

I really wish they'd find her corpse though and do what they did with King Tut on the cover of National Geographic. They used forensic science to find the proportions of his face and render his likeness...it was cool!

@HexThis: I am not sure they will find it, aren't they thinking that most of her palace got buried beneath the water in Alexandria?

@RazzaTazz: There's an Dominican archeologist named Kathleen Martinez who's recently gotten funding to search for Cleopatra's tomb. She's been researching Cleopatra for 10 years and seems to believe the location Cleopatra was supposedly buried at is not accurate. She managed to find a royal tomb in Egypt but it's a complex series of passageways that will take a while to excavate.

@HexThis: Interesting