Reasons to Love Comic Books: Strong Portrayal of Female Characters

Heh heh… I love that picture. For those of you who have been following this blog since the very beginning or know me personally really well will know that I hate it when women comic book characters are treated inferior by men comic book characters. I know I keep talking about this but it really is a topic that must be made more aware of in the comic book community and as much as I love Brian Michael Bendis’ work he has recently been letting me down because of his unfair portrayal of women characters. I’m not saying this problem should be completly erased in comics, although that would be nice, but it needs to happen way less often. This problem wasn’t brought to my attention until I watched an episode of Comic Culture Warrior on Youtube. They complained about how Bendis and other comic book writers as well were not respecting women as well as they should be. They brought up New Avengers#35. The issue were Tigra is beaten/raped by the Hood, while being filmed live to a secret lair of guy super villains. I immeadiatly grabbed my copy of New Avengers#35 and re-read that part and thought, “Oh. My. God. I have been completely blind to this whole problem”. So I continued to re-read some of Bendis’ stuff and it was horrifying to see what he was doing. Again I really have a lot of respect for Bendis (not so much after what he said about Wonder Woman) and he is one of my many inspirations (I want to be a comic book writer when I grow up).

Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of writers out there who write female comic book characters really well. For example:
-Matt Fraction when he writes Emma Frost, Pepper Potts, and Maria Hill. Heck, even Black Widow.
-Greg Rucka when he writes ANY female character.
-Chris Claremont also writes female characters as well
-Gail Simone when she writes Wonder Woman

There are many others that I’m forgetting, but still these three writers are amazing. Don’t get me wrong I like guy comic book characters as well. I like female and male characters equally. I still don’t understand why some of the Top-Selling books are the books that commonly cruel towards women characters. What if a girl tried reading a comic book for the first time in her life and then sees the Sentry ripping Morganna Le Fay’s head off? I would love to see more girls reading comic books (I’d be thrilled), but because of the junk that some writers do that may not happen. If you guys have no respect for Wonder Woman or Batwoman do yourself a favor and buy Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman and Greg Rucka’s current run on Detective Comics and his run on Wonder Woman he did a while back.

Again this is just my opinion and others as well. If you disagree with me I will respect that. Thanks for bearing with me and listening to me with an open mind (hopefully).