Misty Knight came as a total surprise to me. I’d never heard a peep about her, not in any of my varied comic reading. But she turned up in an old Chris Claremont X-Men comic from the early 80’s I was reading very recently, and I was intrigued enough to do some research.

Mercedes “Misty” Knight started out as a Marvel Comics heroine 1975, and her characterisation and storylines owed a lot to the blaxploitation and kung fu trends of the time. She has been a cop, a private investigator and a bail bondswoman, and is bionically enhanced as well as being highly trained in martial arts. She also, it has to be said, rocks a magnificent Afro.

For a long time Misty has appeared as a supporting character: she wasJean Grey of the X-Men’s roommate, for one thing, and was Iron Fist’s love interest in the Power Man/Iron Fist title of the 70′s (Power Man being perhaps more widely known these days by his civilian name Luke Cage). Her relationship with Iron Fist (Danny Rand) has continued on and off into the present day, but she often appeared in comics featuring he or Luke in her professional capacity rather than (or at least, as well as) a romantic one.

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When Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie screened this year, it certainly felt feminist-ish (or at least not unfeminist) to many moviegoers. But it didn’t pass the Bechdel Test, which asks you to consider whether a movie includes 2 or more named female characters who talk to each other, and if not to at least question why that is the case – and Black Widow was also one of the two non-super-powered characters in the team, which would have been less jarring had she not been the only woman. While Black Widow was beautifully written and performed, and given a significant piece of the movie (she has the third most lines of all the characters, behind the two headline acts Captain America and Iron Man), most people who knew their Avengers comics could put a finger directly on which female Avenger was most obviously missing.

There were many women to choose from, actually, including Ms/Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, and Hellcat. But the Wasp, AKA Janet Van Dyne (later Pym) was the only woman to be a founding member of the Avengers in the comics. Leaving her out was a bit like doing a Justice League movie without Wonder Woman (or like rewriting the Justice League continuity so Wonder Woman wasn’t the first female founding member, cough). Well okay, maybe not that. Wasp isn’t quite as famous as Wonder Woman. But it was certainly like doing a Fantastic Four movie without Sue Storm, or a ‘first’ X-Men movie without Jean Grey.

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My recent immersion in the world of superheroes started in early 2010, with Supergirl. Raeli had taken an interest in the character, based almost entirely on the image on a drinking glass (like Superman, only a girl, what else is there to know?) and I started hunting for some kind of media property that I could stand to share with my 5 year old daughter. One thing I learned very quickly from the feminist comics blogs I followed was that it wasn’t going to be the comic, which featured some pretty skeevy artwork (yep, let’s all peer up the teenage girl’s tiny skirt, shall we and OH apparently female superheroes don’t need all their ribs) and was squarely aimed at men, not young and impressionable girls.

So where else? I had a vague memory that the 80’s Supergirl movie had been fairly dreadful but I had loved it, so there was always that. At a pinch.

Finally I decided upon Justice League Unlimited. I’d enjoyed the earlier Justice League cartoon, though not enough to actually buy the DVDs. But it looked like they had a cute, interesting Supergirl character, and so I gave it a punt. Only to discover that in fact JLU was full of all kinds of amazing and well-constructed female characters, and while the Supergirl was indeed spunky and super cute, she didn’t hold a candle to Black Canary, Huntress and Wonder Woman.

Luckily for me, Raeli embraced female superheroes as a whole, and we started out on a long and crazy journey of discovery together. It’s been super fun. And the massive pile of JLU lady action figures I acquired from eBay didn’t hurt at all.

This week, while doing a bit of covert pre-Christmas detective work (as you do) I asked both Raeli (now nearly 8!) and her recently 3-year-old sister Jem which they preferred, Batgirl or Supergirl. To be frank, I assumed that at least ONE of them would pick Batgirl. They’re both thoroughly Bat-obsessed, after all. Raeli has just received the LEGO Batcave she saved her pocket money up for six months, and Jem regularly dresses up as Batman and insists on being called that.

But no, they both immediately picked Supergirl. Which not only put a serious spanner in my Christmas present buying plans, it made me think. What is it about this character that makes her so compelling that she gets to be the best, the favourite, of little girls everywhere, based on a variety of wildly differing properties?

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My favourite thing about the Thor movie was the little gang of Asgard pals who wandered around the movie, being loyal to Thor and having his back. And my favourite thing about *them* was Sif, the glamorous goddess of war (Jaimie Alexander) who didn’t get nearly enough screen time. I would have been a lot happier if she had got to be one of Thor’s platonic mates without having a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement of her squishy feelings for him, but now that I come to look at her history in the comics, I recognise that we got off pretty lightly.

My first introduction to actual Thor comics after seeing the movie was the short ‘Thor the Mighty Avenger’ run by Roger Langridge which managed to take many of the narrative elements of the movie and make them work so much better. Jane Foster was the head of the department of Nordic Antiquities at the Bergen War Memorial Museum in Bergen, Oklahoma (hence the connection to Thor and his hammer) and ends up rescuing a recently-banished Thor and taking him in as her smoochytimes houseguest. As with the movie, the gang of bromantic mates from Asgard turns up to help Thor out, and I enjoyed the portrayal of Sif very much as one of the gang.

But who was she?

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Batgirl is one of my absolute favourites, in all her variations. As with many other legacy characters, emotions often run high between fans as to which Batgirl is the best, but I think it’s important to celebrate all of them, and the legacy that each character has brought to the name.

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The original Huntress, Paula Brooks, was a super-villainess in the very early Golden Age of comics, but she’s not the character who is mostly associated with that name, and indeed her name was later retroactively changed to ‘the Tigress’ to save on confusion.

As I mentioned in the post on Catwoman, the real Huntress was a character who had her origins in Earth 2 in the 1960’s. The DC Comics multiverse allowed them to tell a variety of stories outside the main continuity, and Earth 2 was notable not only for preserving older and less fashionable versions of particular characters (such as the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, or the Golden Age Black Canary, Dinah Drake) but also for allowing characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to age naturally, marry their sweethearts and have children of their own instead of remaining static as those in the main continuity often did.

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Currently prowling around on stiletto (actual knife) heels on the big screen in The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman is probably second only to Wonder Woman when it comes to female characters from superhero comics who have an iconic, recognisable status outside the world of comics readers. As with Wonder Woman, this is helped along quite considerably by a 1960’s TV show, a series of sexy outfits, and a whole bunch of nostalgia, though Catwoman also has the benefit of several appearances in big budget films over the last twenty years.

Catwoman has been played on screen by many different actresses, including Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfieffer, Halle Berry and Anne Hathaway. But while the television and Hollywood versions of Catwoman are often almost entirely different from each other, you can also see some pretty dramatic differences in the way she, her story and her costume are presented in the comics.

Catwoman, AKA Selena Kyle, first appeared in Batman comics in 1940, as a glamorous cat burglar who led Batman a merry dance. Her femme fatale status was helped along by a design based on images of Jean Harlow and Hedy Lamarr, though it has to be admitted that her first crimefighting costume, involving an actual furry cat mask, was less than seductive. She soon made up for that, committing her crimes in a designer purple evening dress and cape, and sighing breathily at Batman whenever he looked like getting tough with her. Wielding a whip, this classy bad girl intrigued Batman, and he would at times deliberately let her escape.

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HAPPY BATWEEK!

Batman is one of the most popular and iconic superheroes of all time, and while the version of the character we see today is usually portrayed as a gravelly-voiced loner, he’s a loner with a whole bunch of people in his life. Gotham City and Batman’s personal community have spawned a huge number of characters who are vivid and interesting, and have taken on lives of their own beyond the Batman titles. Not only do his sidekicks have a habit of growing up and developing their superhero identities as they age, but so do the villains, cops and random strangers who cross his path.

It’s like he’s walking around in one big dark violent dimly lit soap opera.

One of the side benefit of the rich and detailed Batverse is that a large number of interesting female characters have arisen in Gotham City. Like Wonder Woman herself, these women are not always written awesomely, and are not always drawn awesomely, and sometimes they’re not even allowed to be fully dressed in public, and yet somehow they ALL manage to be awesome.

Even the ones created purely for the animated series.

There are indeed so many that I could write about nothing but women of Gotham City for a month or more. Which I won’t do. At least, not this month. But because of all the mask and name swapping that goes on in this city, and the way that so many of their stories and identities are intrinsically wrapped up in each other, I wanted to tackle a particular group all at once, in one glorious Batweek. So this week I’ll be looking at Batwoman, Catwoman, Robin, Huntress and Batgirl. Which actually adds up to about 75 separate people, so it’s enough to be going on with.

Here we go!

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So… whatever happened to Jubilation Lee?

Like Rogue, Jubilee is one of my favourite characters from the old X-Men cartoon. She is the point of view character for the audience in the first episode, who overhears her adoptive parents giving her up to the authorities for being a mutant, and goes on the run – only to be found and taken in by the X-Men. I recently came across Jubilee’s debut appearance in the X-Men comics, and was delighted to see how many elements of that issue were used in the cartoon itself, including her flight through a mall, pursued by the robotic giant Sentinels.

Hardly surprising that there were points of similarity between the comics and the series, as Jubilee was launched as a character in 1989, only three years before the cartoon was created, and was thus still fresh and unsquashed by a decade or more of continuity like her peers. The main difference in her origin story was that in the comics, her parents had been killed before she went on the run.

A cheeky, irreverent Chinese-American gymnast, Jubilee’s superpower was to create sparkly fireworks (or explosive plasma) from her hands, which allowed her to blow stuff up. With style. Her style also included a violently bright yellow and pink ensemble of clothes, which looked pretty awesome in the early 90’s, possibly.

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Abigail Brand is punk rock.

Abigail Brand is harder than you.

Abigail Brand is mean to everyone she knows, even (especially) those she cares about.

Abigail Brand is damned good at her job.

“We came, we saw, everything caught fire and we ran the %#&# away-”

Created by Joss Whedon in Astonishing X-Men, Abigail Brand represents the extraterrestrial defence force S.W.O.R.D., an offshoot of homeland defence force S.H.I.E.L.D. She’s a green-haired, tough-talking half-alien space agent who doesn’t suffer fools, shouts her way out of every problem, and is totally hot for Hank McCoy (Beast).

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