It’s a good day to be a comics fan, especially if you’re a woman. Big hitters Marvel and DC both chose Friday to make major announcements about their comic book lines.
Marvel seemed to be edging ahead in the social media love-in after unveiling an all-female Avengers team. There was no sign of Captain America, Iron Man or Hulk, but instead a host of Marvel’s female heroes in a team to be introduced as part of its cross-title Secret Wars event in May.
Called A-Force – with the logo featuring the distinctive Avengers “A” symbol – will be written by G Willow Wilson. Wilson helped revitalise Marvel’s female characters with Ms Marvel, which rebooted the character as a young Muslim-American girl.
The co-writer is Marguerite Bennett, who has written for both Marvel – most recently about the Asgardian assassin Angela – and DC, for characters including Batgirl and Lois Lane.
The news was meant to be broken on ABC’s morning chat show The View, but was picked up by Mashable. Wilson told the website: “We’ve purposefully assembled a team composed of very different characters – from disparate parts of the Marvel U, with very different power sets, identities and ideologies. They’ll all have to come together to answer some big questions: what would you sacrifice to succeed? What is being a hero worth?”
The line-up looks like it features pretty much all of Marvel’s super-women – front and centre are She-Hulk (the green guy’s cousin), Medusa, one of the Inhuman clan with “living” hair, Jubilee and Storm, of the X-Men, and veteran avenger: the Wasp. Happily, there’s also a place for Dazzler, a singularly 80s creation who doubled as a disco singer and crime-fighter, her mutant ability being the power to transform music into devastating multicoloured disco ball flashes.
But also featured are Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Spider-Woman and Moondragon – who, despite this new age of female empowerment at Marvel comics, doesn’t appear to have lost her revealing green costume in the style popularised by Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat.
The A-Force news seemed to trump DC’s earlier announcement of a new line-up of comics coming this June: 24 brand new titles beginning at issue one, and joining 25 established DC comics which will continue their numbering.
Notable among the new DC titles is Constantine: The Hellblazer, written by Ming Doyle, who also does art for another new title, Dark Universe. Hellblazer was one of DC’s adult imprint Vertigo’s most celebrated comics, featuring the Liverpudlian occultist John Constantine. The recent TV version has rekindled interest in Constantine, and a more recent incarnation woven more closely into the DC Universe has been replaced with this reboot.
In fact, DC’s continuity seems up for grabs again as the so-called “New 52” universe – a company-wide revamp which saw all comics completely restructured – is now being formally put to bed by DC.
Other notable new starts at DC include Cyborg, written by David F Walker, a solo title for Midnighter, a gay Batman-analog previously published by DC offshoot Wildstorm, and solo comics for Black Canary and Starfire – both female heroes. However, Batwoman and Supergirl appear to have lost their own titles.
