The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

[meganbmoore]

Subtitled “fashion, feminism, fantasy, and the history of comic book heroines,” the best summary of this book is likely “very well intentioned, but it should have been run by a few actual live women first.”

Madrid is clearly very fond of superheroines and very involved in their history and treatment by both the publishers and the fans, but the further the book gets from his personal preferences, the more it seems that he’s never considered the perspective of female fans, or asked for their input. He frequently mentions things meant to appeal to women in comics, but instead of covering what women thought of it topic of discussion, he either overlooks that completely, or instead talks about how men reacted. He also seems to prefer Golden Age characters to others, and seems less interested the closer the discussion came to contemporary comics, and focuses most of his attention on DC heroines, discussing Marvel’s heroines considerably less. (Unless they eventually merged with one of the Big Two, other companies were only briefly mentioned.) Unfortunately, the further the material gets from what appears to be Madrid’s personal preferences, the more the problems with the book stand out.

Madrid’s research is, based on my personal knowledge, extremely good, and the book’s greatest strength is tying the comics of different decades to American society and its expectations and attitudes at the time. He also does a very good job of highlighting the treatment (and mistreatment) of women in comics, but he fails to discuss them much outside of that, or to discuss women in comics much at all outside of mistreatment, physical appearance, and, of course, their love lives. He’s eager to talk about Wasp as a socialite no one takes seriously, and Black Widow and a femme fatale, but ignores that both had long, respected careers not only as Avengers, but also as the leaders of the Avengers. Similarly, he’s happy to talk about Storm’s wardrobe changes (part of the concept, no beef) and a time when she became obsessed with her power, but also ignores her years and years as a leader of the X-Men, including the fact that she led them at a time when she had no powers herself. The Birds of Prey are barely mentioned, the current Batwoman and The Question are barely addressed because of their sexuality, Catwoman ceases to exist in the book pre-Crisis, etc. In addition, the subject of female creators, something that is rather crucial this subject, is only addressed with brief mentions of Gail Simone and Trina Robbins, and the ‘comics are for boys” attitude that most female fans mention is not addressed at all. Another problem, separate from other issues, is that Madrid rarely explains when he’s talking about different characters by the same name, or with the same origin, something that’s rather important to having a clue what he’s talking about when it comes to many DC characters. Granted, most of the target audience will have at least some knowledge of DCs multiverse history, but some of the material requires a lot more than that.

However, the information contained in the book is very thorough and interesting, and it’s written with the best intentions, and a lot of fondness for the subjects themselves. It just really needed to consider, you know, actual women, in order to avoid falling into traps similar to the ones it intended to address.