Supergirl is already making white guys mad on Twitter for being “too feminist,” so it must be doing something right in terms of female representation. After much anticipation and speculation about whether it would be worth watching, the show premiered Monday night. And it was awesome.

According to Entertainment Weekly, 14 million viewers tuned in for the premiere, giving it the biggest debut of any of the Fall 2015 shows. Initial ratings suggest Supergirl is worth watching and prove, yet again, that a market for female superheroes exist and that it is stronger than ever.

One of the things that set this show apart from others in the same genre was its optimism. Kara doesn’t become a hero to get revenge, but out of a sense of altruism and desire to do what she was originally sent to Earth to do–to protect. Whether altruism as a reason for superheroing is possible is a discussion for another day, but in Supergirl it works. Supergirl is decidedly not dark and gritty, which is something that cannot be said for a lot of the genre as of late, and it has played down the tropey tragic origin story.

Though the number of viewers may drop between this week and next since viewers’ initial curiosity has been sated, the Supergirl pilot left viewers a lot to be hopeful about: a positive female hero, at least three named female characters with major roles, and a fresh take on the genre as a whole. Hopefully the series, like its title character, will be able to take flight this season.

Hey Girl Gang! Sorry about the unintentional hiatus – getting back into the swing of things after NYCC was harder than usual, with work and family stuff piling up. Hopefully this post will be our return to regular blogging! The NYCC 2015 Con Report is coming soon.

Here are some of our pulls from this week!

• Batgirl #45 (DC Comics) – I repeat this every month, but Batgirl is truly one of my favorite titles right now (and maybe ever). Seeing new Babs Tarr art is such a treat and I look forward to it with glee every single month. In this issue we finally get to see Alycia’s wedding, and I’m so excited to see her and Barbara and the rest of the Gotham gang in their wedding best. You know with Babs drawing the wedding that every single character, even the small ones in the background, will be in gorgeous outfits. Hopefully we will also see some development on the Barbara and Luke Fox front as well!
• Angela Queen of Hel #1 (Marvel) – Although I’m sad to see Kieron Gillen leaving the Angela: Asgard’s Assassin team, I have to say that Marguerite Bennett was an excellent addition to the last few issues of the ‘Assassin‘ run. I’m really excited to see what Bennett does with Angela in this new series. Also, if I was in a coma and there was only one phrase that would bring me back to consciousness, I’m pretty sure those words would be “Annie Wu variant cover.” Even if I dislike a series, if Annie Wu is doing a cover or involved in any way, I will buy the issue. You can bet I will be picking up Wu’s hip-hop Angela variant cover!
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 (Marvel) – With the end of Secret Wars, we start a new chapter for Doreen and Tippy and their friends. Kind of. After teaming up with Thor to fight the evil Norse Squirrel God, Doreen is back to being a regular computer science student! That is, when she isn’t fighting bad guys and saving the whole world. No big deal. I absolutely love this series, and I have to watch where I read it because I seriously laugh out loud at almost every page. Once I read it on an airplane and made the old guy next to me really mad with all my laughing. But it was worth it. Also we got to meet artist Erica Henderson a few times at NYCC this year and she was super awesome. Phil Noto is the artist behind the awesome Squirrel Girl hip-hop variant cover, another one worth checking out.
• Fresh Romance #6 (Rosy Press) – Fresh Romance is another series that I really look forward to every single month. Not only are the stories romantic and adorable, but they also feature a diverse group of characters. The stories remind me of the shojo manga I used to read constantly back in middle school when I first started to get into comics. I’m sad to hear that the Teen Spirit story by Kate Leth and Arielle Jovellanos will be ending in this issue, but excited to read the new story that will be replacing it by Marguerite Bennett and artist Trungles.

What other titles should we be picking up that we should be adding to this list or don’t know about? Let us know in the comments or at thegeekgirlgang@gmail.com!

Happy (almost) Wednesday girl gang!

Hey everyone! Today we’re starting our journey to NYC for New York Comic Con 2015! We will be around most of the panels related to feminism/diversity in comics and of course at the Women of Marvel panel on Sunday.

If you see two the Wicked + the Divine cosplayers on Saturday, come say hi! It might be us! And if it isn’t, you’ll make some new friends who like WicDiv so are probably awesome anyways!

We really hope to see some of you there!

I vividly remember being in the audience at the Women of Marvel panel at New York Comic Con last October as the announcement was made that there was a Black Widow YA novel by Margaret Stohl in the works. I was super excited that Natasha was getting more stories in a new format. Flash forward to a few weeks ago, when I got a package from Marvel with an advance press version of the book to review for GGG. When I was cheering with the rest of the audience after the announcement, I never thought that I would get to read the story early. Let me tell you this: I was not wrong to be excited for this book.

Forever Red focuses on two female protagonists: everyone’s favorite Russian spy Natasha Romanov and a new character, teenager Ava Orlova. Ava has a lot in common with the Black Widow: both women are red-headed Russian loners and orphans who escaped Ivan Petrovich and his infamous Red Room. After saving young Ava from Ivan’s grasp one fateful night, Natasha Romanov called Ava “sistra” and told her that if she ever needed help, just ask and the Black Widow would find her. Years later, the story opens on teenage Ava who is living a scavenger’s life with a stray cat in a YMCA basement in NYC. In the years since their meeting in Russia, Ava had needed help – and had reached out to the Black Widow multiple times. Help never came.

For months, Ava has been dreaming about a boy named Alex. She does not know who the boy is or if he even exists – until she suddenly sees him in person at a fencing competition. Alex does not recognize Ava, but the connection between them is undeniable. As if finally meeting the boy from her dreams was not enough of a shock, that same day is the day that long-lost sistra Natasha Romanov finally reappears in Ava’s life.

I really enjoyed this book. For the first few chapters, I was unsure where Stohl was going with the story of Ava, Alex, and Natasha and was worried that it would fall into typical YA tropes – girl meets boy, etc, etc – but my fear was unnecessary. Every time I thought I knew what would happen to the trio, Stohl added another twist. The plot is interesting and unpredictable and keeps you hooked. The story reads like a spy novel, but even better because it featured a character that I know and love. By the time you reach Part Three of the novel, it is impossible to put Forever Red down.

The book is a good introduction to Ava, who had her first appearance as the Red Widow in the Marvel comic universe in Mockingbird: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary #1, which was released last month. I’m definitely interested in seeing more of Ava in comic book form and watching her relationship with Natasha develop past the events of Forever Red.

I want to talk about female representation and why this book is important. Anyone who has heard me talk about comics knows that I have serious problems with the lack of female characters and with the often problematic ways that existing female characters are represented in comic media. I often feel that the companies creating the comics I love don’t care about me as a female reader. Despite the rising numbers of female readership, the existence of female fandom is ignored and even ridiculed.

When Marvel announced this title at last year’s New York Comic Con, I felt the opposite. Forever Red was clearly Marvel responding to their legions of female fans, saying ‘We hear you. Here’s something just for you.’ They branched out into a new format that they know that young fans love in order to give them something they had been asking for: More Black Widow! More female titles! I, and thousands of other female fans, finally felt our existence acknowledged with the announcement of Forever Red.

I doubt we will ever get that Black Widow movie we have been asking for for years. But who is to say that seeing her represented in a different type of media is any less important? Black Widow is the first character to get the YA treatment from Marvel, and although that is most likely because young girls are the largest audience of YA novels, it doesn’t change the fact that they are finally giving Natasha her long-awaited spotlight.

This book is also important because it could be a gateway for many young people to get interested in comics. If a young girl likes Forever Red, they’ll want to read more about Ava and Natasha. They’ll visit their local comic book store and maybe pick up the first trade of Edmondson and Noto’s recent run of Black Widow, or read about Ava in the recent Mockingjay one-shot. Maybe if we see more young girls getting involved in comics, the publishers will finally start to acknowledge their non-white/male/straight audiences and adapt the media they are producing as such.

It just takes one YA novel for someone to start reading comics, and maybe they will be the author, editor, or artist to diversify the comic book genre in the future and make it a more open community. I wouldn’t be surprised if Black Widow: Forever Red was that novel.

–

Black Widow: Forever Red will be released on October 13, 2015.

Recently, Steven Spielberg made headlines for telling The AP that he doesn’t believe superhero movies are sustainable. At first, I didn’t want to let myself think that he might be right, because the disappearance of my favorite film genre would, in a word, be crushing. I’m not so sure about it anymore, though, and I think the answer to the question, “is this a thing we can keep doing?” is more complex than a simple yes or no.

My short answer is right now, no, this is not a sustainable genre. There are a lot of things that factor into this.

My long answer is this, and I use Marvel as an example because I’m more familiar with the characters and because it’s got the movie thing down to a science.

As much as I would like to believe that Chrises Hemsworth, Pratt, and Evans are going to stay young and in the best shape of their life forever, this is probably not true. (Unless Marvel actually has perfected a supersoldier serum, in which case, give me some so I can stop my pitiful attempts to work out.) All of Marvel’s actors are in their thirties and up, which means that they could potentially age out, especially if non-Avenger films keep getting scheduled between the Avenger-related ones. Since Marvel has been in this game for a while, the actors might not want to renew their contracts, and move on to different projects. It’s already been nearly seven years since Iron Man was released.

It would benefit Marvel to start planting seeds for new heroes now. We have the film schedule for the next several years, and any one of them would be a good way to introduce new minor characters who could go on to carry their own series.

The other factor in the sustainability question is a very tangled web. Diversity is one of those issues no one seems to want to seriously discuss, but I truly believe it will be the downfall of the genre if things don’t change.

“White man makes mistakes that cost him [insert important aspect of personal life here], becomes a superhero in quest for redemption” is a summary that can be applied to Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and possibly Guardians of the Galaxy. Diversity isn’t having one or two white guys who didn’t start out as scientists. Having Falcon and War Machine is a baby step in the right direction, but even though Anthony Mackie and Don Cheadle both did great jobs in the films they were in, they were still relegated to a side role. The fact of the matter is, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will have been around for a full decade before a superhero of color gets their own film.

Strictly in film, female heroes are also underrepresented. We’ve had Black Widow for almost as long as the MCU has been around, but never in a standalone film. Wasp was introduced just to be killed off in Ant-Man. Gamora and Nebula’s relationship in Guardians of the Galaxy was one of the most underdevoped aspects of the movie. The MCU will also have been around for a decade before fans get a female-led title with Captain Marvel in 2018. Who knows how long it will be before we get a non-white female-led title, regardless of how hard we’re all crossing our fingers for a Kamala Khan film.

Okay, where is this going?

My point is not that the existing films are bad, Fantastic Four and Avengers: Age of Ultron notwithstanding. My point is that if these companies continue to release exclusively straight male hero films, the genre will not be sustainable.

I’d like to think that major companies recognize that half of its comic readers are women, and I’d like to think that they know many of their fans came from superhero movie buffs wanting to get into the backstory of the characters on screen. The films are just a jumping point for all of the great characters that exist, and by not showing them in other media, I believe that the wider audience isn’t sustainable. Your brand new fans aren’t  going to wait around forever (ten years is a long time) to see themselves represented in film. Continuing to make movies about male leads (seven of whom have almost the exact same origin story) alienates a big part of the audience.

I do not believe that the comic industry, as a whole, is out to get women, but it also isn’t here to support us. An industry that shows respect for its fans doesn’t dangle a Black Widow movie like a carrot on a stick, nebulously promised but never within reach. There are still very few toys based on female heroes for little girls who love the genre. As a whole, the industry shows a startling lack of reflexivity and adjustment to the new fans who have flooded the market.

Despite the obvious problems, I’m still hopeful it can turn around before this market lapses. I hope Steven Spielberg is wrong, because at the end of the day I still love these characters and want to see more of Captain America punching stuff. It’s not too late to take risks, but I would like to see those risks taken before the market becomes unsustainable. It could be sustainable. I hope it is.