The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful
Strong Women in Comics
One of the best things happening in comics today is a trend towards more and varied strong positive portrayals of women. This page and the ones that follow it explore the history of that trend, from the Good Girls of the early days of comics through the recent spate of Bad Girls and on to what I hope is a trend towards a wider range of positive portrayal of women.
I started writing these pages many many months ago after I completed my reviews of Ghost and Birds of Prey, and have been finding that I have less time to devote to them than I had hoped, so rather than waiting until I finished the whole series, I published the first two pages several months ago and the third more recently. The others will follow "Real Soon Now", as they say.
There are now five parts to this feature:
- The Good Girls of the Golden Age
- The Bad Girls of the 90's
- The Evolution of Super Women
- Today's Strong Women
- A review of Trina Robbins' book, The Great Women Super Heroes
Several of the reviews I've done lately are of books with strong female leads, which is one of the reasons that I started to write this page. Another is that my main intent in creating this whole section on comics was to write about what I see as the positive trends, and the trend to more positive portrayals of women is one of those trends.
The following pages review comics starring strong women:
- The Maze Agency
- Jenifer Mays heads the Maze Agency in this play-fair mystery comic.
- Leave It To Chance
- Chance Falconer -- Nancy Drew meets Kolchak, the Night Stalker
- Birds Of Prey
- The wheelchair-bound Oracle teams with Black Canary
- Ghost
- The ghost of Elisa Cameron searches for herself and protects Arcadia
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