[LINK] "How the Success of Marvel’s Female Superheroes Heralds a More Inclusive Age of Comics"

[rfmcdonald]

The Vulture's Claire Landsbaum writes about how Marvel, through cultivating the growing number of female audiences and creators, is succeeding with prominent female heroes. Some errors of fact, as pointed in the comments, but generally an astute analysis.

Longer than a New York City block and bigger around than a California redwood, the shark bursts skyward from a turquoise whirlpool, jaws gnashing, purple energy beams flying from its mouth.

“It’s a Megalodon!” shouts Captain Marvel, alias Carol Danvers, a superhero imbued with superhuman strength, speed, and reflexes. She can fly and shoot photon blasts from her fingers, so when she wallops the huge, sharklike creature, it dives back underwater. Nico Minoru — a witchy Sister Grim — dives in after it, delivering her own purple blast, and then it’s Dazzler’s turn to deliver her deadly disco-light beams. Finally, Miss America hefts the thing and throws it into an otherworldly void. The Citizens of Arcadia are safe thanks to A-Force, Marvel's first-ever all-women superhero team.

A-Force, a new series from Marvel, that debuted yesterday, features better-known characters such as Captain Marvel, Nico, Dazzler, Miss America, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, and Storm, as well as more obscure heroes like Wasp, Namora, Mantis, Firestar, and echo. For a genre historically focused on male heroes, it’s an impressive pantheon.

Promoting women-led series might seem like a novel move for Marvel, but it’s not. What’s novel is that they’re succeeding. Over the years, Marvel writers and editors have tried their hands at a number of series with female leads, but they rarely panned out, and in each case, the books were quietly canceled. One starring Peter Parker’s daughter, May, Tom DeFalco’s Spider-Girl launched in October of 1998 and, despite the protests of its fanbase, was canceled in 2010. X-23, which starred a mutant named Laura Kinney, ran for only about a year and a half — from September 2010 to March 2012. Although there have been other woman-led superhero series in Marvel’s past, they’ve been few and far between.

But now the women of Marvel are taking off in their own right. With female readership hovering at about 47 percent and women as the fastest-growing comics-reading demographic, Marvel is finally succeeding with a more diverse lineup of superheroes.