The Black Widow was not alone at Marvel as we can see all too clearly above in this wonderful issue The Avengers which introduced the "Lady Liberators", a one-shot gang of Marvel's most dangerous dames led by the Valkyrie (who was in fact the Enchantress).
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Women in comics have always been a mystery of immense proportions. Comic books have almost always been the singular playground for young boys and later young men. Girls were allowed to read romance comics when those got invented and the MLJ line stays alive even today with its Archie line up. But comics are famously about superheroes and superheroes are for boys. We all know that.
So, when dames show up in the four-colored pages they are either damsels in distress or dames of great danger. This month has featured the latter, those women who are just as inclined to stand on the throat of any superpowered mope who might imagine she needed saving. Enjoy these exceedingly dangerous dames
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So, when dames show up in the four-colored pages they are either damsels in distress or dames of great danger. This month has featured the latter, those women who are just as inclined to stand on the throat of any superpowered mope who might imagine she needed saving. Enjoy these exceedingly dangerous dames
NOTE: This is a Revised Dojo Classic Post.
I always preferred Greer as The Cat than as Tigra. Of all the female characters created then to cash in on the feminist movement, she was the most realistic in personality & temperament, not making angry speeches but acting like a mature young woman trying to shape her life in changing times. When they turned her into Tigra, she eventually became a literal sex-kitten, the very thing The Cat was created to refute by being an independent, intelligent hero. I wish she'd gotten a better chance. I know we later got Patsy Walker as Hellcat & she was a good character--but I do miss Greer.
ReplyDeleteI always like The Cat as well. Seemed like there was a new artist every month on that short-lived series. I'll have something more on Greer Nelson next month, so stay tuned.
DeleteI disagree that comics have been exclusively the domain of male readers. By the 1950s and 1960s, I think there's evidence that the female readership was concentrating mostly on romance and humor titles (I've asked a few women who were kids in the Silver Age about their contact with comics, and they seem to remember nothing but ARCHIE.)
ReplyDeleteBut if you go back to the forties, when comics first caught fire with a mass readership, the medium actually spawns a lot more female heroes than you could find in the live-action movies of the time or in animated cartoons. I hypothesize that comics publishers knew that there were a substantial number of young girl readers out there, and that's why a fair number of anthology comics included female heroes, even if there weren't that many "headliners" comparable to DC's Wonder Woman and Harvey's "Black Cat." A long time ago I saw a Golden Age survey that purported to show a large female comics readership, though I don't have access to the survey or what years it covered. Since for a long time it was commonplace that young male readers wouldn't buy books that starred female heroes, I don't know any other reason that anthology comics would include non-starring heroines like The Phantom Lady and the Blonde Phantom unless they thought that they might garner some female readers as well. (Of course some male readers might pick up books with heroine-features for lubricious reasons, as well as the Black Cat and Wonder Woman features, but I don't think the comic book publishers thought this was an audience they could DEPEND on.)
My sister read comics for a time. My girlfriend read comics for a bit. But I still say that superhero comics are a male reserve. Your point about possible lures for female readership in the Golden Age anthology size books is informative but I suggest it might point to the notion that a comic book was intended to be read by several people in its imagined brief life, passing through many hands and yes some of those might have been female hands. But I will happily concede my position in the face of evidence. Maybe I've been brainwashed by the comic book shop which is overwhelming male. There's lots of good stuff for girls out there today, but I don't see them in the store all that much.
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