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

When you’re biting down on a piece of hot plastic you boiled in a saucepan, making sure to follow the instructions to the letter, carefully pressing the chewy, artificial tasting stuff around each of your teeth in turn, it’s hard not to wonder, what if I get hurt?

What if you get hurt? asked my mother, when I told her. My mother and I have an arrangement. She’s had both hips replaced; I’m allowed to tell her to slow down and be careful, and don’t start climbing up ladders and repainting your bathroom when you’re supposed to be recovering from major surgery. In return she’s the only person in the world allowed to tell me not to walk down dark big city streets alone at night, without getting a lecture on third wave feminism. We live in different cities. We worry about each other. I find myself filled with filial guilt that starting roller derby will worry my mother.

My dad was a boxer, as was his dad, and his dad before him. My great granddad was, apparently, a boxer who boxed illegally on the streets of Liverpool. Made a good living from it, I hear. My granddad’s house was full of my dad’s boxing trophies, and my dad would point at professional boxers on our TV and claim to have fought them in his youth. I have no doubt that, were I a boy, I would have been encouraged to be a boxer too.

I also have no doubt that, because I was a girl, I wasn’t. My suspicions are corroborated by the appeals to my vanity which came from both parents when I suggested the possibility. “But you’re so pretty,” they said. “Don’t you want to look pretty?” I did want to look pretty, I agreed. Even my heroes Jean Grey and Catwoman looked pretty when they were kicking ass; I didn’t want to lose that.¹

When, as a child, my nose was broken in a non-boxing related incident, I was as terrified as my parents that I would have a ‘boxer’s nose’. It’s still a bit weird-looking, to be honest.

I cracked a tooth last year. In a restaurant. At a business meeting. I played it cool, got drunk, laughed about it (even when one of the authors I was with tweeted about it), then got home, saw the big black gap where my front tooth should have been in the mirror and cried and cried! Could barely smile at my own boyfriend for the two weeks it took to get a false tooth put in.² I cannot begin to imagine what a blow to your self-esteem real, serious external injuries can be. Burns, scars, facial disfigurement. Charities such as Changing Faces are doing a lot to combat this stigma, but as a society we’re not there yet.

There is nothing wrong with wanting your child to be pretty – ‘pretty’ or at least ‘conventional-looking’ people have an easier life, in lots of respects. There is nothing wrong with wanting, yourself, to be ‘pretty’. (Common misconception about feminists, that.)

Technically, my false tooth was cosmetic surgery. Not life-threatening, not a source of pain when the old tooth is gone completely, not a medical condition. But I damn well wanted that cosmetic surgery. And there was small difference between me having that done, and an older woman replacing what she’s lost by having botox on her forehead. I don’t think I’d ever have botox, but I’m not going to condemn anyone for wanting it. How could I, as some magazines do, laugh at the ‘false’ breasts of an actress when part of me, when a part of my appeal (my smile) is false?

So yes, it is okay to want to be pretty. I can worry about getting seriously hurt, but I can also worry about suffering a cosmetic injury, (for instance, breaking my nose again,) without being ‘unfeminist’. I don’t need to feel bad that eight year-old me decided not to be a boxer, nor do I need to feel bad that, starting a dangerous sport, I am still a little afraid. This might seem obvious to some of you, but it took me a little while to not feel guilty about feeling this fear.

However, none of this changes the fact that society still finds it much easier to deal with men getting hurt than with women getting hurt.

I once had a conversation with a very sincere ex-co-worker about how when they’re talking about British soldiers on the news, if a woman soldier has died or been injured, it makes him furious. Angry that girls are allowed to go to war, angry that her family let her, angry that she wanted to go. He doesn’t have the same reaction to male soldiers. Historically and even now, the reaction of men to the death and injury of female soldiers is used as a reason why women shouldn’t go to war. (Which seems like such utterly backwards logic to me. If the men can’t deal with it, aren’t they the problem?) In the UK, among many other things they’re not allowed to do in the military, women still can’t fight on the front line. So much for equality in the workplace, I guess.

It’s understandable, if you look at the messages we’re fed every day. Don’t hit girls, save girls from danger – that’s the message pop culture gives us. So what does the hero do, if the girl’s willingly putting herself in danger? Get angry, as above, or try to persuade her otherwise?

If, as a woman, you start a dangerous sport, or make another decision that seems like it could damage your health (I remember the reactions from friends and family when I briefly wanted to join the police force), you will meet with a lot of resistance. I doubt that many men have to face the same concerns from their loved ones when they start a sport like boxing or rugby, even though there’s danger of death, serious injury, and the fact that no one seems to come out of these sports with their looks intact! Just ask rugby player Daryl Gibson’s nose or boxer Evander Holyfield’s ear. But it’s much more acceptable for a male sports celebrity to wear his scars with pride than for a woman to do the same.

If you’re a woman and you want to do something dangerous, you will meet with resistance to the idea. This resistance might come from a well-meaning place, from those who love you, it may even come from inside you. It’s okay to listen, but it can be useful to interrogate how your gender plays a role in the dialogue.

1. In fact, the only time I’ve ever known a comic book superhero to have her looks compromised by kicking ass was when Emma Frost had her nose broken by Sublime, in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men #118. As the X-Men’s resident high-class rich blonde bitch (well, it’s true), she’s also one of the only superheroes I’ve ever known admit to having plastic surgery, and therefore the ‘reset’ button could be pressed and Emma could be drawn with a perfect nose in all following issues.
2. Team BadRep’s editor Miranda only managed to get me out of the house by promising me alcohol and telling me the missing tooth made me look like a lady pirate of the high seas.

Hi Maura, nice to have you here at BadRep Towers! To get us started, why don’t you tell us a bit about Róisín Dubh , which has just gone on release.

“Róisín Dubh is a three-issue comic book series that will also be collected and bound as a graphic novel. It’s set in Ireland in 1899 and follows the adventures of Róisín Sheridan, an eighteen-year-old woman who harbours ambitions to be an actress. Her life is altered forever when she and her parents are attacked on the road by a bloodthirsty man called Abhartach who has just risen from the earth. Róisín’s parents are killed and she is left for dead… until she is given a mission by ancient powers. She has to go against the conventions of the day, and her previous notions of what is possible, to try and put Abhartach back in the ground… but the person who raised Abhartach from his 1,400-year stasis has other plans.”

What might feminist readers enjoy about the comic? As if an Irish suffragette killing demons isn’t enough to get anyone interested…

“Well, I hope there’s plenty there for everyone, but the women’s suffrage movement was on my mind from the start. Róisín has had a liberal, educated upbringing, she was allowed a lot of leeway as a child, but as a woman she’s starting to discover that there are more limits on her than she imagined.

For instance, that simple thing her father says to her: of course women should have the right to vote… but a career on the stage? It’s disreputable. The struggle for equal rights is a slow erosion of the buts. People are always full of reasons why you can have some rights, but not all.

That’s why Róisín has a bike. People forget that the bicycle was a huge boon to women in the nineteenth century – it gave them a freedom of movement that they didn’t enjoy previously, and it also helped bring about a change in clothing.

Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that she thought the bicycle ‘has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world, It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.'”

What sort of heroine is Róisín – who is she as a character? Which other comic book heroines have inspired you in the past and what do you like about them?

“Róisín is a young, idealist woman with great ambition who is prone to impulsive decisions. The events in the comic book means she’s forced to deal with tragedy while learning she has far less control over her life. These are the kinds of lessons we often learn in life, although in Róisín’s case they involve an undead creature, magicians and ancient Irish divinities!

I haven’t drawn upon any other comic book heroines consciously in relation to Róisín, but there were a number that had an impact upon me over the years. First was Judge Anderson in 2000 AD. I didn’t read many American comics when I was growing up in Ireland as there weren’t many available at the time. 2000 AD was the premiere title for young teens then, so I read it too. Her first appearance in the Judge Death storyline (written by John Wagner and drawn by Brian Bolland) ticked all the boxes for me: horror and a great female lead.

What I loved about Anderson was her humour. She was the only one who poked fun at Dredd, and I loved that the Psi-Division were given loads of leeway because of the job they did and the high risk of their brains being fried in the process. Plus, she saves the world through an extreme act of self-sacrifice (thankfully, she didn’t remain in stasis forever!).

A while ago I read a comment on a website by one of the early artists of Anderson, in which he said he thought that she wasn’t very complex and was created for a bit of titillation for the lads. That comment disappointed me greatly. I guess he didn’t realise that Anderson was one of the very few women in 2000 AD at the time, and for that reason alone she had a big impact on the girls/women who read the series. Having a representation of women in comics book series is really important, and Dredd himself is not exactly the most complex character! I don’t usually hanker after writing particular characters, but writing Anderson would be a dream project.

Another character that had a big impact was Tank Girl (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin). She had a punk sensibility and a sense of humour, and liked sex, drugs and driving a tank – what was not to love?

Other characters I like are David Mack’s Scarab, Storm from the X-Men (woefully underused, I think), Alan Moore’s Halo Jones (another character I’d kill to write) and Promethea, Warren Ellis’s Jenny Sparks, and finally, the goddess herself, Wonder Woman.

I’ve only fallen in love with the Wonder Woman character in the past year, which is completely the result of Gail Simone‘s amazing writing. I’m also now a big fan of Simone’s Secret Six and Birds of Prey – so you can include all the (many) female characters in those series on my list now. Simone is one of the best comic book writers in the industry in my opinion, and she’s particularly adept at dialogue, especially for the female characters. Her comic books consistently pass the Bechdel Test, which so many titles still don’t do.”

Like Gail Simone and NK Jemisin, you’re a writer who sticks by her conscience, and you’re not afraid to call out industry figures when something’s Just Not Right. What have you learned from this so far, and has it ever worked against you?

“No change occurs if you remain silent. It’s that simple – but it’s not necessarily easy to speak up.

As a woman you know a likely response to raising an issue – such as the lack of women at an event – is that you will be dismissed or attacked (especially on the Internet).

So, I always strive to be fair and logical in how I present my case. Sometimes that’s difficult because I feel so passionately about women getting a fair shake – well, everyone getting a fair shake, no matter their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.

A number of people have asked me if I think I’m damaging my career with some of the issues I’ve raised. So far I’ve never experienced it, but would it stop me? No.

Let’s be realistic. I’m speaking out on issues from a pretty safe environment. If I was a female union representative in Mexico – for example – I would have a genuine risk in speaking up. Or a mother trying to access education for her girls in Afghanistan. Those people inspire me – they are taking real risks with their lives and yet find the courage to stand up for what is right.

When I think of that it puts what I do in perspective! (And it makes me donate to aid organisations that help people in those risky situations.)”

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our interview. Warm thanks to Maura for talking to us.

• Maura McHugh is an Irish writer with films, comics and short stories to her name. She blogs at Splinister and you can read her recent guest post for BadRep, in which she recommended us some horror writers, here. Róisín Dubh is published by Atomic Diner and the first issue can be bought online here. Or pester your local comic store to order some copies!