It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a paper comic. I was deeply in love with comics at one point in my life. I swore off them a while ago for reasons of both taste – I’d run out of titles with female characters that I was interested in – and budget: it was one too many expensive habits for a theatre professional, and in the end, red wine won the day.

I’ve kept a weather eye on the comics world, and the announcement of an all-female line-up for X-Men was enough to send me to Forbidden Planet. But what made me actually buy the thing despite the £3 price tag was writer Brian Wood (DMZ, Channel Zero and Northlanders) and colourist Laura Martin (Planetary, Authority and JLA Earth 2, which all sit beautiful and bold on my shelves thanks in part to her palette choices and ability to make heroes look truly heroic).

Marvel introduce the issue on their website as follows:

Because you demanded it! The X-Women finally get their own book!

So, a fan-based revolution in the world of comics? Perhaps. The title is part of Marvel NOW, the 2012 relaunch of the brand aiming to bring new readers into the market, or in my case, perhaps to bring readers back into the fold and into comic stores.

Could it be that the comic industry is  tackling the gap in the market for mainstream titles that are interesting to women? I’m heartened by the weight put behind this comic; it doesn’t seem to be a gimmick or an afterthought. The issue was heavily trailed with an XX teaser campaign, which was hard not to notice. And what I’ve also been interested to note is the supportive voices around the line-up, with Bleeding Cool praising Marvel for “raising their game in this regard” and other commentators using the launch as an opportunity to dedicate space to interviews with women in the industry, and to the importance of more titles about women, for women.

There’s a good piece here in Clutch, an interview with editor Jeanine Schafer over at The Mary Sue, and another piece here at Bitch magazine.

To me, my reviewers!

The series features an all-female team including Storm, Jubilee, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Rachel Grey (daughter of Scott and Jean) and Psylocke. They’re based at Jean Grey’s School for the Gifted and pitted against runaway trains, teenage tantrums in the hallway, and the arrival of John Sublime with a request for help.

I’m very pleased to see Storm’s mowhawk back in business, and Jubilee was always a favourite of mine from the TV series, even if she was often cast as a mutant girl version of Snarf. She spoke to me of teenage wish-fulfilment, her mutant power always waiting in the wings for the right moment to shine, exactly like mine. Except my mutant power hasn’t developed yet. I’m sure it will.

What’s good about it? Lots. Lots and lots. The storyline moves on nicely, with a strong introduction that sets up future intrigue. It’s issue one, so I’ve not got a lot to go on, but so far it feels well-paced and with good action scenes and themes of homecoming (positive and negative) alongside the usual “outsider” politics that have always been a solid foundation for mutant-related plot.

The main characters get set up nicely and all showcase their abilities, personalities and range of powers. Jubilee and Kitty are set at a similar age and look like they are set to play out the roles of younger, naive/vulnerable characters, although there are two pupils at the school who look like they might also fill that position, so we’ll see. In terms of more experienced or older figures, Storm takes centre stage on the cover and is the team leader and headmistress with Rachel Grey as her second-in-command. Rogue is the powerhouse, and is shown enjoying herself being gung-ho in saving the day during a classic runaway train sequence, whilst Psylocke is pleasingly intimidating in the role of bad cop when Rachel interviews John Sublime.

There’s the usual balance of action/adventure with high school drama, much as you might expect, so in the future I’m hoping for something along the lines of Grant Morrison’s New X Men. This is referenced clearly through the young people at the school, so in those panels you can play a fun game of Guess Who? Mutant High Edition. This does also tend to lead on to a less fun game of Where Are We In What Passes For Continuity Around Here, but generally I take the Doctor Who approach on that one, so try not to get cross-eyed, basically.

I can’t write this review without talking about how the characters look, partly because comics are a visual medium, but also because it’s so good to see a lot of the traditional problems of female representation overturned here. We have two non-white characters in the line-up, neither of whom are the xenophilia standard sexy blue lady. Almost all of the outfits in Olivier Coipel’s artwork are really nicely, thoughtfully designed and look very practical, including Rogue’s costume which comes complete with a hooded top. No spiked heels – or any of the break-your-legs Girl Power stacks of Frank Quitely – are in evidence. Everyone’s zippers go all the way up, with the sad exception of Storm who, in the words of a friend of mine, seems to have developed a secondary mutation allowing her outfit to stick to her breasts despite flying at speed. She’s clearly the Emma Frost replacement in the line-up.

I’m going to be charitable and say that the instances of female characters doing needlessly sexy poses is fairly low, but having passed the issue around a few friends (male and female) the mileage varies. That said, it’s certainly way below what I would have expected and certainly nowhere near the awful debacle that is DC’s recent treatment of Starfire. I could easily imagine a world in which an all-female X-Men line up could have been all bikinis, all the time…

If I’m being uncharitable, I could say that it’s sad all the women are quite so perfect in how they look. Mutation offers such a variety of bodies to the writer and artist that it would have been good to see a character who subverted traditional expectations of what heroic women in comics should look like. A woman with the glorious curves of Morrison’s Angel Salvadore before she got reworked into a “prettier” version. Similarly, it’s a shame not to have an older female character to give something of the sagacity of Professor Xavier (can we make Helen Mirren a mutant already?), not to mention the fact that without him and without Cyclops the line-up could perhaps be seen as somewhat ableist compared to other line-ups.

All said and done though, this is only the beginning, and only a few pages. And in case it wasn’t clear: I really enjoyed it. I’ll spend money on the next one. A slim volume cannot hope to achieve everything that I might have wanted from a comic, but even if it weren’t an engaging start that has me hooked, it has already done an awful lot to show what female superheroes can do when well-written and well-drawn: tell a fantastic story that makes you wish your mutant powers would hurry up and kick in…

Does this herald a much-needed change and a step in the right direction for the future of comics? I hope so. But I’m hedging my bets, just in case I’m once again entirely cut off from my source of illustrative imaginings. Instead, I’ve been out on the wild plains of internet comics, on the hunt for decent female protagonists and generally doing pretty well – more on that in another post. Watch this panel.

In the meantime, I leave you with this quote I found in the slew of Google searches that I pass off as “research”:

For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips – all comic strips (…) I cannot remember how the habit started, and I am presently unable to explain why it persists. I only know that I’m hooked, by now, that’s all.

– Dorothy Parker, 1943

Ah, comics. Or graphic novels, if they are trying to seduce me across a pseudy coffee bar in Edinburgh, which they did – more on that later.

Dear reader, this is a tale of a long, passionate, but fractious love affair.

It started early. I noticed them, but they never seemed to be the right one for me, stocked as they were in the “boys’ section” of the magazine racks. I kept myself busy with the garish colours of the (probably) gender neutral Dandy and the Beano. Whilst being amused but ultimately concerned by the levels of naughtiness from Minnie the Minx (I was a very conscientious child), I found myself captured by a few sections from the pages of hand-me-down copies of the now-defunct “girls’ own” annual Bunty. Looking back on it, the artwork was poor and the storylines were hammy with a sprinkling of schmaltz, but some stood out: tales of mystery, adventure, aliens and heroines were hidden amidst the pages of dreary “girl stuff”. Now we’re talking!

Cover Art for GloomCookie Issue 7

Flash forward, and I’m at university in Edinburgh with actual money in my pocket. I’ve caught flickers of images in such hallowed sanctuaries as Forbidden Planet, which is exciting but mostly full of plastic models. Deadhead, lurking on the crooked medieval road across from the pub where I’ve just earned my actual money, is poky and rammed with paper; pleasingly reminiscment in layout and smell of old bookshops.

On the shelves I spot a beautifully painted (thank you Duncan Fegredo) issue of Mike Carey’s Lucifer, where a winged schoolgirl escapes the giant maw of a fiery demon; the first of the new Catwoman where Selina Kyle is resplendent and powerful in a jumpsuit and combat boots; and the gothic lusciousness of Serena Valentino’s GloomCookie. And that was just the covers!

Ed Brubaker's 2001 Emma Peel inspired Catwoman

The stories, oh, oh, oh the stories. Magical, fantastical, intricate and complex tales of all kinds with interesting and varied female characters being just as magical, just as fantastically intricate and complex as their male counterparts.

I am doing my level best to just not list all of them because that would be a little tedious – check the Wiki articles or better yet come round and read them – my point is that they were there, and they were so far removed from any other female heroes (or anti-heroes, or villains) that I had ever seen before, and there were just SO MANY of them.

Over the next many years I spent a lot of time and money on comics. I was in love.  Besotted. I compulsively collected every issue of the jaw-dropping Fables and Y: The Last Man (a must for any comic collection). As I tend to be when in love, I was somewhat obsessed. I wrote my dissertation on postmodernist structuralism in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles (I know better now, it should have been postmodern superhero archetypes in Doom Patrol).

I found the most perfect fairy tale ever told in the form of Jeff Smith’s independent offering Bone. This is an epic adventure of derring do, lost princesses who need to save the kingdom, war, friendship, quiche and dragons. I cannot recommend it enough.

Grandma Ben in action against the famously stupid, stupid rat creatures

The character of Grandma Ben blasts away so many female stereotypes. She is mysterious, strong, forthright, takes no nonsense and just plain funny.  She also races cows. As in, races against them. I aim to also do this when I am her age (which she refuses to tell anyone, of course).

But as I read my way through everything that caught my eye, I was spotting a change.

Filthy Assistant number two Yelena Rossini romped her way through Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan and stole my heart somewhat with her hard smoking, futuristic gumshoe gonzo journalism and attack womb. Zee Hernandez from Brian Wood’s spectacular DMZ played Beatrice to the lost photographer and guided both him and the reader through a ghastly vision of New York as the Gaza Strip.

Yelena Rossini from Transmetropolitan

These women were still good, still interesting, but they were second fiddle, playing traditional (albeit revamped and turbo-boosted) support roles such as healers and helpmeets whilst also filling the “minority quota”, especially in the case of Zee who is both non-white and non-male. Naturally all of them end up sleeping with or as love interests for the male protagonists, although at least the storylines of those titles made up for the stereotypes.

Somewhere along the way, it started to go wrong. Bit by bit by bit, even these characters faded away. The series that I loved ended (I cried at the end of Lucifer) and were replaced with weaker, less interesting versions. Costumes became smaller, boobs bigger. I started my “never buy a comic where the cover art has a woman with breasts bigger than her head” campaign, and found myself wealthier but with a lot less comics.

Female characters and their stories became less widely available. There were still some bright sparks but these were increasingly ghettoised in the narrow “independent” section of the store or as part of autobiographical works such as the excellent Persepolis. The lack of new work meant that shops began pushing long-standing books like Strangers in Paradise or reprints of classics  obviously aimed at women such as Dykes to Watch Out For.

There were still good stories in comic book world, with great artwork, but the women I had come to love had gone missing from the mainstream. Titles such as Wonder Woman or Lady Death looked like bad pornography, and the artwork for some of my favourite writers became downright ridiculous to the point of offensive. My relationship with comics was getting rocky.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that caused us to break up. It was Ignition City by Warren Ellis, specifically the way that almost every page had a massive pair of tits or tight (female) bottom in it, regardless of whether that was particularly appropriate or relevant. The male characters, of course, could be as fat, wrinkly, gross, old, multicultural and multidimensional as actual people. The female characters only existed to ensure that there were toned body parts for the consumption of the reader (who obviously wasn’t meant to be me).

What happened to my love?  What changed? I don’t know. I have moved to pastures new – online comics such as Freak Angels, Girl Genius, Sinfest and XKCD fulfill my panel-related addiction, but every now and then I look longingly at my groaning bookshelf with all those beautiful trade paperbacks, wondering when, if ever, there might be a return to form.

Come back, baby. I miss you.

illustration by Julia Scheele

• You might remember a bit ago when our Hodge went to the London Zine Symposium? Well, brace yourself, ’cause now the rest of our arty types are following suit. On July 24th (a month today) Markgraf and Miranda are off to New Cross Turn Left: a Comics and Art Garden Party! Organised by illustrators Julia Scheele, Ellen Lindner and Howard Hardiman, this is gonna rock. You should come too. Especially if you’re a fan of Markgraf’s art for this site, or the concept of losing your Feminist Awkward Balloon. We are very friendly and (mostly) do not bite, so do come say hi.
• In other news, Em Carroll’s website is finally up, too! We’ve been waiting for it. Not in a creepy way. Just enthusiastically. Draw This Dress, which we’ve linked before, continues to be awesome. Vera Brosgol, the other half of DTD, is also very cool.
• AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Pablo K of the Disorder of Things blog talks Race, Gender, Nation and Game of Thrones. It’s very good.
• Comics Alliance present The New Harley Quinn Costume… Adapted for a Male Superhero. With attendant illuminating paragraph which made us nod into our tea mugs. The DC Reboot Fashion Roundtable is also entertaining…. y’know, we really need to do some roundtable posts here at BR Towers. That’d be pretty cool. Assuming we could all quieten down long enough to hear each other speak, anyway. :D
• What Tami Said/Racialicious: Who Is The Black Zooey Deschanel? Really, really thought-provoking piece on race and the stereotypes we inhabit, on the screen and off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-white Manic Pixie Dream Girl, particularly in a live-action format. Except within anime?