Lady Comic Book History

Hello! I am Alexandrea Callaghan the author and podcaster of Lady Comic Book History and I am here to talk about the history of women in comics. First I want to tell you a little bit about how I got into this. It was COVID, we had all been locked up for maybe a month and I decided that I wanted to start a podcast about female superheroes. Now I wasn’t really sure what that was going to look like, but as I went down the rabbit hole of existing superhero history podcasts I noticed that there weren’t any that were doing what I wanted to do, which ended up being a simple chronicle of the history of female comic book characters. So few characters actually stand the test of time and the treatment of women in comics has always been a little questionable. And I wanted there to be a clear and thorough documentation of this history all in one place. Several books and other accounts are also extremely inaccurate and I needed to clear that up. So you guys are going to get a super fast forwarded version of the book I wrote that goes into this history in an even more in depth way then my podcast does. A lot of what I do revolves around getting people to understand that media doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It does directly affect our daily lives and how we view and interact with the world. It's never just a comic or just a tv show. And it is ALWAYS that deep. I use philosophical, psychological and sociological evidence, these are things in making up, this is not my opinion. These are facts that have been true since the beginning of art and humanity. But today I only have 40 minutes to talk to you guys so we are just going pure history. I am going to take you through what I have deemed some of the most impactful and important moments for women in comics, including the women themselves. So we are starting at the very beginning in 1938.

The Very Beginning - 1938-1940

Often the woman that gets credited with being the first woman to have her own cover and own title is Wonder Woman. It's in several published books, it's what we’ve been told for years, but the reality is that the title actually belongs to Sheena Queen of the Jungle, who predates Wonder Woman by 3 years.

Sheena appeared on the cover of Wags in 1938, September of the same year brought her to the states on the cover of Jumbo Comics’ first issue. Does anyone know when Wonder Woman’s first cover appearance was? … 1942 which was the year Sheena got her first named title, Wonder Woman joining her shortly after.

It was the 40s so we do have to look at Sheena through the lens of what women’s stance was at that time. Now this was during wartime and thus women were given some opportunities in certain areas. So having a solo female title in comics was of course a big step for how women were portrayed in media.

That said, Sheena’s biggest problem was that the writers felt that there needed to be balance. Sheena was the savior, she had a love interest, but considering that she was Queen of the Jungle, he was often the damsel in distress. At this time comics of any kind were marketed towards men so we couldn’t have them feeling emasculated by the idea of a woman saving a man, so what do we do? We make her boobs bigger, and portray her as hypersexual of course.

This at least makes sense for the 1940s but the unfortunate reality is that the current Sheena comics not only are not better in the way that they visually portray her, but they genuinely have no story. Sheena has been forgotten about, left behind.

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane

Action Comics #1 in June of 1938

And in Superman #28 in 1944 she was given her own small feature. She foils the bad guys' plan without any help from Superman. That strip was called Lois Lane, Girl Reporter.

Then we get her “solo” series, titled Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane in 1958. For most of the early issues of the series Lois spent most of her time as an afterthought in her own series. If we take a look at the covers, she is either literally being shoved off to the side or she is being overshadowed by someone else. This changes in the 70s when she is given a lot more independence in both cover art and storylines, but of course as she starts to gain agency the series is cancelled in 1974.

Catwoman

Bill Finger and Bob Kane introduced “The Cat” in Batman #1 in 1940.

“I felt that women were feline creatures and men were more like dogs. While dogs are faithful and friendly, cats are cool, detached and unreliable. I felt much warmer with dogs around me - cats are hard to understand as women are. Men feel more sure of themselves with a male friend than a woman. You always need to keep women at arm’s length. We don’t want anyone taking over our souls, and women have a habit of doing that. So there’s a love-resentment thing with women. I guess women will feel that I’m being chauvinistic to speak this way, but I do feel that I’ve had better relationships with male friends than women. With women, once the romance is over, somehow they never remain my friends” -Bob Kane

These quotes are important because if we know what the mindset going into the creation of these characters is, things start to make a lot of sense. And it is direct evidence that how you as an individual person sees the world directly informs the things that you create.

So Mr. Kane is horrible, but don’t worry it gets worse. The origin stories that have been laid out for Catwoman are pretty consistent, something that can’t be said for most of DC as they have rebooted more times then anyone can keep track of. But for most of her origins, Catwoman was either a dominatrix or a prostitute. Sometimes she is alone and sometimes she is taking care of a younger sister type of character who is also a prostitute. And what the writers keep coming back to is that Selina Kyle does some kind of sex work. Even in the origin stories where she is a child or teenager. So we not only feel the need to oversexualize women, but children as well. The best example for why this is terrible that I could come up with is; ladies you know how when you get cat called it feels gross. Nothing happened, no one touched you, if it was from a moving car you probably aren't in any immediate danger, but it feels gross. Now let’s just change the context a bit, now you aren’t getting cat called from a moving car instead it's when you are walking through a parking lot or parking garage, maybe instead of one man it's a group. See how quickly that goes from gross to dangerous? We are going to come back to this concept so please remember this analogy.

Catwoman remains one of the most oversexualized characters in comics, if you go to the next slide you’ll see what I am talking about. There are full panels that don’t feature her face, just her boobs.

Black Canary

Dinah Drake -

Carmine Infantino

“How do you want me to draw her? He said, What’s your fantasy of a good-looking girl? That’s what I want. Isn’t that a great line? So that’s what I did. I made her strong in character and sexy in form. The funny part is that years later, while in Korea on a National Cartoonists trip, I met a dancer who was the exact image of the Black Canary. And I went out with her for three years”

Now there’s lot’s to unpack here so let's just start at the top. Artists are out here drawing women they want to have sex with. No thought as to what makes sense for their character, their power set, the world they are going to be dropped into, nope what’s your fantasy? So that’s creepy inherently and it sure as hell isn’t art. Then we have the fact that he thought dating a stripper who looked like his creepy cartoon fantasy was a cute story when in reality it's weird and creepy. But these are the men that are creating comics. This problem is so widespread because people like Bob Kane and Carmine Infantino are all over the place.

Well we most certainly can’t talk about hyper sexualization in comics without talking about Power Girl. Power Girl made her first appearance in All-Star Comics #58, the artist was Wally Wood. He was convinced none of the editors were paying attention to him so he decided to make her boobs bigger and bigger until someone noticed. It took about 7 issues and then they just never made her look like a normal person. I’m sure there was no other way to test whether or not the editors were paying attention. They had no choice really. Here’s the thing our culture is also dealing with this like weird purity culture resurgence and I really don’t want that to be how I’m coming off, but we all understand the difference between a man drawing unrealistically huge boobs on a comic book character and people not wanting to see anything remotely sexual ever right? Like the first one is very obviously sexist. When Jenette Kahn took over as publisher in All-Star Comics #64 she closed the boob window because she recognized that it was gross. Now Power Girl has some incredible female writers but that also begs the question can you really reclaim something that was created to harm you?

The Overpowered Women Trope

Okay we do have to spend some of this time talking about the tropes and traps that female heroes get caught in. We are starting with what I call the overpowered women trope. Now this has very specific requirements; 1) The hero must be at some point considered “Overpowered” ; this is normally acknowledged in fiction by the other characters. 2) That character has probably recently accessed this power, the Over part of their power set is not consistent or inherent. 3) This character is also deemed mentally or emotionally unstable. And finally 4) When the hero is returned to their “stable” state they lose access to this extra power. This can also result in full depowerment or death. Now this applies to exactly 0 male heroes, “bit what about Hulk” you mean the hulk that has several versions where Banner is fully conscious and in control? You can’t name one because they don’t exist. This is not an oh it affects more women then men trope. No this is a trope that ONLY affects women.

I believe the start of this trope is actually Fantomah - the 1941 hero was a magical jungle girl who whenever she would use her magical abilities her face would transform into a blue skull. This is a physical change not an emotional one but it does visually illustrate that when a woman hero accesses her power there has to be a price, a balance. This is also the roadmap for a lot of what Raven goes through.

But let’s get into the poster children for this trope and that is very obviously Wanda Maximoff and Jean Grey. The Scarlet Witch, my wife, the love of my life, we have Elizabeth Olsen here this weekend. I'm gonna cry. Her comic book counterpart has been through a lot. We are going to ignore all of the ridiculous changes in her origins because they aren’t really relevant to this topic of discussion and I wanna leave you a little something to read. That said, we are going to talk about House of M. If you haven’t read the story, basically the X-Men and Avengers are terrified of Wanda’s powers. She is stronger than all of them. Professor X tries to subdue her mind and he can’t do it, she is canonically stronger than Xavier. Some of the Avengers toss around the idea of killing her…which they can’t but that’s a different discussion. She is warned, runs off to Magneto and ends up creating the perfect world. Mutants are superior (guess whose idea that was) and every hero was living their best life. She manipulates reality on a crazy scale and then at the end of the story, Spoilers I guess but it was published 25 years ago so I’m not sorry, she simply says the words “no more mutants” and 75% of the mutant population gets wiped off the face of the planet. Poof, gone. Guess what the discussion was at the beginning of the story, among the avengers and x-men. Whether or not Wanda was “stable” enough to be trusted with her own powers. This is something that has followed her to the big and small screen. We simply can’t have a conversation about Wanda’s powerset at any given time without bringing up her emotional wellbeing. Multiverse of Madness did some irreparable and inexcusable damage that she won’t ever recover from.

Let’s move onto Jean Grey, another rather iconic overpowered woman. Let’s talk about the Phoenix saga; just for a little background here, the writers wanted to create a cosmic level hero. They wanted to push the powerset and make a ridiculously powerful hero, so they did and they didn’t know what to do with her so they killed her off. Now the problem with that is that the justification for that given by the writers was something along the lines of “well she had just killed so many people, there needed to be retribution for that”, funny cause I can’t remember any storylines where Hulk, Iron Man or any of the men with super high kill counts get killed off because damn they had just caused so much damage. Interesting, and hold onto that thought cause it's a trend. Anyway they kill her off and when they bring her back, she doesn’t have her powers. She can’t access them. They do this to her a few times in her appearances between Dark Phoenix and Phoenix Force and White Phoenix they keep finding ways to make her more powerful and then take that power away.

This trope unfortunately is all over Marvel, I’ve got a DC example too but just the one. Let’s talk about Sue Storm. Sue is generally a pretty well respected woman in comics, she has acted as the leader of the Fantastic Four on a few occasions, it's even canonical that she is a better leader than Reed, by his own admission. So how does she end up on this list? Well in a couple of storylines Sue is afflicted with a wildly powerful alter ego named Mailice When she is in this state her powers get a crazy steroid boost, she is able to do things she would never be able to do in her “normal” state. It’s her son that saves her from this alter ego and she in fact is not as powerful after he does so.

Now for our one and only DC example, I’m sure there are more guys but Marvel really has a monopoly on this trope. Our DC example is Raven who you may recognize from the Teen Titans. Now for those of you who don’t know about Raven’s parentage, her father is a demon. This plays a major role in most of her storylines and occasionally it pops up in rather problematic ways like you know when she gets “emotional” she physically starts to look more like a demon. Because women are over emotional creatures and that’s bad. That’s what that tells little girls reading comics, emotions are bad and when I show them I’m bad.

Is This Fridging?

Women in Refrigerators

Fridging is most certainly a term you have heard thrown around on the internet. At this point in time it has kind of lost all meaning because people do just throw it around with no regards to the fact that words have definitions. But the term fridging comes from the phrase Women in Refrigerators which was coined by the incredible Gail Simone, one of the greatest comic book writers of all time. This was referring to an issue of Green Lantern but is used to describe the trend in comics where women are used for male stories. Fridging also has specific requirements, ones that people like to forget or ignore. Fridging is not a woman who dies. Fridging is specifically when a woman dies in order to jumpstart a male character's story, now per Gail Simone it also refers to women who were killed or depowered for essentially no reason. I am going to expand on this idea and throw in a philosophical concept called Care Ethics. It houses the idea that the greater good is more important than yourself. Now this line of thinking can apply to most superheroes right? But how many actually sacrifice themselves, I’ll do you one better how many male superheroes sacrifice themselves specifically because they’ve done bad things. This is the retribution thing we were talking about earlier. I would like to combine the two. I think if a comic character sacrifices herself because she just can’t live with her decisions, that’s fridging. I’ve got candy for anyone who can name the very recent live action example I am thinking of right now.

2023 Casualties - Maria Hill and Kamala Khan

Wanda

Okay do we remember our catcalling analogy from earlier? Well here is where it wraps up. We have Catwoman and her oversexualization and her origin stories and it feels like getting cat-called, even dangerously cat-called at times. Too many people write that off as harmless, but if that behavior isn’t checked it escalates. It escalates into this.

The Rape of Ms. Marvel and The Killing Joke

Okay if you know me I’m so sorry you are about to hear this informational rant for the 10,000th time because we are about to discuss 2 storylines that I will simply never stop being angry about. Let’s start with the Rape of Ms. Marvel; In this story Captain Marvel is manipulated, impregnated and when her baby is born it grows up super quick into the man that raped her and then she left the planet to go live off world with him. When she asks what happened, and how her baby could have possibly grown this fast he fully admits that he raped her and the rest of the Avengers don’t do anything? They basically say hey congrats go have fun!

I’ve had months to plan this presentation but can you feel the anger as I talk about it, can’t practice that out. Let’s ignore the fact that no sane person would come up with this storyline, let’s ignore the fact that by this point in comics Carol has made it pretty clear that she doesn’t want children, let’s even ignore the fact that the Avengers are useless and don’t respond the way any of them actually would have. If you, as a writer or artist of any kind, use rape as a plot point you are a bad writer. You can’t write, give up and stop inflicting your “art” on the world. This is one of the biggest stains on Marvel comics because here's the thing, things get retconned all the time. What Canon means is up for grabs at any given moment because characters change hands so often but it doesn’t matter how many good writers Carol Danvers has now, this is always going to be there. And it's always going to be part of her history.

Okay now The Killing Joke. I promise to remain calm. The Killing Joke was written by Alan Moore, the editor was Len Wein, I want you to remember these names because these are the names of men we don’t support anymore. When Alan was tossing ideas around for this story he goes to Len and asks him what he thinks about paralyzing Barbara Gordon, Len responds with? Does anyone know? “Cripple the Bitch”, we’ve talked about how certain mindsets shouldn’t be creating anything the general public consumes. Alan Moore then proceeds to write the most abhorrent, disgusting and sexist superhero comic ever published by Marvel or DC. He tortures Barbara, rapes her and then paralyzes her. All of this was to lure commissioner Gordan and Batman to the Joker so only because we’ve talked about it already, what would we call this? Yeah, Barbara Gordon is fridged. What’s worse is that after the fact when asked about it Alan Moore not only admits that he wasn’t saying anything profound, he in fact had no point he was making at all. But he also admits that someone should have reigned him in. See that would have been Len’s job. But when bad people answer to bad people we get deeply harmful pieces of media that other bad people then attach themselves to. Don’t believe any YouTube video that talks about how brilliant The Killing Joke was, Alan had no intentions other than shock factor violence.

Women in the room if you are into comics or looking to get into comics and are feeling a little discouraged right now, I want to leave you with this; There are some phenomenal women writers in the industry right now that are giving you everything you are looking for. I know I speak passionately but I don’t want it to sound like I am condemning an entire company or industry. I love comics, I think they are an incredible artistic tool that like any artistic medium should be used for political, social and personal reflection. And that is why I point these things out. I want comics to be a force of good and joy and not a source of harm. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be violence and death, there should be. But the execution of these things is extremely important to how we as people experience the art we consume and interact with the world around us. Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum and it needs to reflect the reality of the world we live in, or want to live in. And if this is the world some people want to live in, that should concern the rest of us.