Mazikeen’s Faces —The Feminist Lives of Karen Berger

Abstract

The comics produced under Karen Berger’s guidance at DC’s Vertigo imprint can give us insight into her leadership. By staging Lucifer as a space of authentic negotiation of the “place” of women in comics through the means of historical fiction and mythology, this chapter explores how Vertigo illustrates the obstacles women face in the world as they seek equal social standing with men in a form traditionally conceptualized as for men. By engaging with a range of ways women have historically been marginalized, in terms of self-determination and identity. By exploring a variety of sites of contestation between men and women—and removing them from a particular historical moment and rendering them mythic—the authors and artists influenced by Berger sought to expose a variety of tactics and strategies women have used over time to gain and maintain power and to create an authentic sense of self even in the context of patriarchal oppression. Berger’s role as editor is significant in part because of how she used the tensions in her gender identity in the context of her role in an industry dominated by men to guide storylines to better represent the realities of women, and this chapter juxtaposes Berger with Mazikeen, a woman seeking a space for self-determination in Lucifer, who nonetheless acknowledges her inability to exist outside of the network of influences she lives within.