SOLO AVENGERS, MIRACLE TEAMS PT. 4

In my examination of Golden Age hero-teams in Part 2, two facts should be evident:

(1) Most of the ongoing superhero teams are dominantly "co-ed." Miss America is an equal member of the All Winners Squad for its two paltry appearances, and Mary Marvel usually appears alongside her male counterparts in all or most MARVEL FAMILY teamups.  The use of Wonder Woman in JUSTICE SOCIETY was somewhat spottier, as she sometimes only appeared in a story to serve as the society's secretary. Some fan-critics have asserted, though, that the legal agreement between William Marson and DC Comics may have affected Wonder Woman's appearances in that august body.  It must be noted that when Black Canary was admitted, she was used without reservation, and to my knowledge never had to bring anyone their coffee. 

(2) In contrast, few other hero-teams-- some of which mixed together the "kid-gang" and "superhero" genres-- included girls in the mix.  Holyoke's "Little Leaders" feature was a necessary exception, in that it re-utilized "Kitten," sidekick to Catman, who was the star of the title in which the "leaders" appeared.  Generally, if female characters appeared at all in such teams, they were more like hangers-on than full-fleged members.  A possible model for this "hanger-on" type would be the character "Pat Savage" from the DOC SAVAGE pulps, who occasionally broke into her male cousin's "boys' club" but was never a regularly featured participant.  In pre-Code comics, one example of this was "Palomino Sue," who showed up in a few stories in the 1950 Simon & Kirby title BOYS' RANCH.

Why would the superhero teams, few as they were, of the 1940s have been dominantly "co-ed" when other types of teams were not?  The most likely reason is that the idea behind all three superhero teams was to form a "more perfect union" of costumed characters who had appeared separately in anthology-comics and occasionally met one another (Human Torch/Sub-Mariner, Captain Marvel/Spy Smasher).  In contrast, each of the non-superheroic teams was its own individual animal, created to play off a particular set of genre-trope, as well as being responsive to the perceived demands of reality.  That is to say: WWII adventurers like the Blackhawks, roughly based on the Foreign Legion, had no girls in their ranks because real-life combat troops were usually all-male.  Fictional kid-gangs occasionally allowed for female members, but they too were in part copied from real-life boys' clubs, whose raison d'etre was almost always "no girls allowed.  Oddly, one of the few teams that recycled a character from an earlier feature-- a practice that would become common following the Silver Age-- was that of the Girl Commandos, wherein a starring character named "War Nurse" decided to ally herself with a distaff band of "lady Blackhawks," and even dropped her superheroic name in order to blend in better.

But I said in the last essay that I would address the first hero-team of the post-Code era of American comics, which also begins the so-called Silver Age.  This was not a superhero team, but a close analogue: Jack Kirby's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN. (Though Kirby was not the sole creator on this feature, he was the dominant force, so I will speak as if he alone created CHALLENGERS.)

Kirby's CHALLENGERS was in essence an adult version of the kid-gang concept, and probably owes something to an earlier Simon/Kirby work for Harvey Comics, THE BOY EXPLORERS (1946). This short-lived feature concept involved a band of kids, with one adult supervisor, traveling the world in search of bizarre phenomena.  It ptovides an illustration of the rather loosey-goosey way Golden Age comics generally approached their miracles: a heavy emphasis on the visceral elements and not much sustained examination of any fantasy-logic to support said wonders.

Kirby's CHALLENGERS is a different type of science-fiction adventure.  To be sure, just like Golden-Age Kirby, Silver Age Kirby was still oriented on providing a great deal of frenetic action, in contrast to many DC comics of the period.  But for whatever reason the stories also allowed for a small degree of contemplation of a given story's wonders.  In the second CHALLENGERS story, the group encounters a colossal intelligent robot named Ultivac.  Though there's a great deal of action, Kirby devotes more time here than he would have in a BOY EXPLORERS story to delineating the nature of Ultivac's self-generated intelligence and the robot's scornful opinion of humanity.

CHALLENGERS's tryout appearances in DC's SHOWCASE magazine were popular enough to spawn a regular magazine that lasted until 1971, though Kirby's last issue was #8.  Arguably CHALLENGERS also influenced a host of other non-superhero team-books at DC.  It may be noted that Quality's long-running Blackhawks were leased (later sold) to DC Comics in the same period, and that DC's first issue of BLACKHAWK, #108, was published in the same year as the debut of the Kirby work in SHOWCASE #6.  However, while BLACKHAWK soldiered on with an all-male crew until 1959, when the Hawks acquired a female hanger-on in the form of Lady Blackhawk, the Challengers acquired their female almost-member in their second appearance, the Ultivac story in SHOWCASE #7. Though at certain points during the story Kirby places new addition June Robbins into a position not unlike that of Fay Wray in 1933's KING KONG, June seems far more strongly patterned after the image of the female professional scientist familiar with giant-critter flicks like 1955's IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA.

June was made an honorary member in that issue, and was thereafter used with a frequency I term "semi-regular" rather than merely occasional, and though in her earliest version she wasn't a combative type, it was clear that the Challenger guys respected her smarts and daring. 

This was rather a contrast to Lady Blackhawk, whom the Blackhawks couldn't even find time to nominate to the "honorary member" position

Even though the Challengers didn't have a regular gal-member for many issues, it would seem self-evident that their girl-friendly structure influenced DC to launch other adventure-teams in which girls were regular team-members, as with THE SEA DEVILS, the original SUICIDE SQUAD and the crews associated with RIP HUNTER and CAVE CARSON. 

As for how much this pattern in turn influenced the superhero teams-- stay tuned for the final installment of this series.

SOLO AVENGERS, MIRACLE TEAMS PT. 3

The stories instill a wish to be a superman, the advertisements promise to supply the means for becoming one. Comic-book heroines have super-figures; the comic-book advertisements promise to develop them. The stories display the wounds; the advertisements supply the knives. The stories feature scantily clad girls; the advertisements outfit Peeping Toms.-- Frederic Wertham, SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, p. 277.

I commented earlier that many of the creators and publishers of Golden Age comic books, most of whom were men, were willing to allow adventure-titles to be more "co-ed" than they arguably were in many other adventure-genres in popular prose-stories of the time or, for that matter, in American popular film.  I stressed that with a few exceptions-- maybe just one-- the motive may well have purely pecuniary.  I should have added that while one reason may have been to attract any female readers who wanted to read about female heroes, another would certainly be to attract male readers who may have wanted to enjoy female "super-figures" in a voyeuristic manner.  Contrary to Doctor Wertham above, there is no true way of knowing which motive weighed more heavily in the mind of this or that comics-maker.  All one can say is that there were certainly adventure-features, superheroic or otherwise, which did play up sex very overtly, and there were those that did not do so.

For instance, the first costume sported by Quality Comics heroine "Phantom Lady" shows a fair amount of skin, but the rendition hardly suggests a "super-figure," and the few stories I've encountered from this period are not notably hypersexual.  That doesn't mean that no boys bought POLICE COMICS #1 with the intent of enjoying the Phantom Lady lubriciously.  But no one but a fellow-traveler of Wertham can look at the story in that issue and find hypersexuality in it.

In contrast, after Fox Features purchased the Phantom Lady, an indisputable sexualization of the character took place, particularly thanks to the art of Matt Baker.

For anyone concerned with the literary differences between these depictions, I note that I've covered them in more detail in this essay.

Frederic Wertham was not particularly sensitive to any such differences.  He makes many objections to American comics of the period, indicting them for hyper-violence, for crass commercialism (also the subject of the above quote), and for encouraging-- though never precisely causing-- deviance.
His fulminations helped bring about a Congressional hearing, the verdict of which was a severe finger-wagging at the comics-industry, as noted in this essay:

The Senate committee did not fully endorse Dr. Wertham's theories about the effect of comic books on children, since his studies were not done on the "complete environment", but only on juvenile delinquents. But the Senate committee did agree that comic books might have an unhealthy effect on those kids that were already emotionally disturbed or morally delinquent. But because they didn't know whether comics had this effect or not, the committee decided in favour of self-policing by the comic publishers. The Senate committee's final report also issued a warning to comic companies that if their self-policing didn't work that they would re-visit the issue again, and use whatever means necessary to "prevent our nation's young from being harmed from crime and horror comic books.

Most meditations on the era by those who were there have emphasized the chilling effect of the companies' self-censorship, particularly in terms of sexual depictions.  Amy Nyberg's history of the period, SEAL OF APPROVAL, asserts that there was one long-lasting effect that the Comics Code had on the American market.  Because nothing was selling all that well in the post-Code market, this proved a factor in the reintroduction of superheroes by industry leader DC Comics.  Though there had been a smattering of titles throughout the early and middle 1950s, none were particularly successful, and even THE FLASH, the feature most often credited as beginning the "Silver Age," did not receive its own title until 1959, the same year that Supergirl received her own continuing backup feature.  Yet DC's new superheroes began what I called (at the end of Part 2) the "fusion" of two heroic types, that of the urban avenger and the miracle hero.

Despite the superpowers of the Golden Age Flash, the majority of the character's adventures fall squarely into the pattern of the urban avenger.  Occasionally one might see the hero voyage to some mysterious otherworld, as when he encountered the original version of "Star Sapphire."

But even these outre adventures didn't dwell overlong on the science-fictional nature of the worlds Flash visited, and he was much more often concerned with rounding up mundane crooks.  He was a "miracle hero" in potential, but not in actualization.

The Silver Age Flash, however, had a foot in both worlds.  From his first adventure, the new Flash's stories showed more attention to the wonders of the Flash's super-speed, apart from that power's function in helping him keep the streets clean from crooks and thugs:

There was also some concern, albeit oriented to a juvenile audience, on the ways the powers or weapons of Flash's villains worked.

One may object that a lot of the science introduced in Silver Age stores had no more grounding in reality than anything from the Golden Age.  Nevertheless, I see in this greater emphasis on technobabble an attempt to get away from the "wild and woolly" pulp days of the Golden Age.  Granted, with the exception of Marston's WONDER WOMAN, DC Comics never allowed its comics to get overly risqué.  I suggest, though, that DC, and those publishers who followed DC's example, introduced more cerebral elements into their superhero stories because said publishers knew that the visceral elements were largely off limits.

However, while these publishers-- largely DC, Archie, Charlton (albeit very minimally) and the company that would soon take the name "Marvel"-- were copying the tropes of prose and cinematic science fiction and transferring them to the superhero genre, somehow the tendency toward "co-ed superheroes" seen in the Golden Age became adumbrated.  New male heroes debuted in their own features.  New heroines did not.  Why not?  I'll propose an answer in Part 4-- as well as getting around to talking about that "first hero-team" I mentioned in Part 2.

SOLO AVENGERS, MIRACLE TEAMS PT. 2

Nothing ought to better demonstrate my thesis as to the dominion of the "urban avenger" hero-type during the Golden Age of Comic Books than the fact that although comic-book publishers were not averse to spotlighting teams of heroes, few were superhero teams.

The most numerous form of Golden Age teams were the "kid-gang" teams patterned loosely after Warner Brothers' cinematic franchise "The Dead End Kids."  Simon and Kirby's "Newsboy Legion" remains the most famous of these moppet-mobs, but other publishers came out with the Young Allies (Timely), the Boy Heroes (Harvey), the Little Leaders (Holyoke) and the Little Wise Guys (Lev Gleason).

Second runner up would probably be affiliations of heroes who had some grounding in either open warfare or Foreign Legion-like activities. This included the Blackhawks and the Ghost Patrol, and I would assume the genre of war comics-- on which I'm no expert-- had some ancestors to Silver Age creations like "Easy Company" and "Howling Commandos."  Simon and Kirby even managed to combine the two subgenres-- war-action and kid-gangs-- into one feature, "the Boy Commandos."  Harvey Comics came out with a "Girl Commandos," but these were all full-grown women and emulated the Blackhawks more than the Simon and Kirby creation.

But though there were occasional short-lived teamups of superheroes in this or that comics-story-- most of them originating either at Fawcett or Timely-- only three superhero team-features showed up on a regular schedule, and one of them was cancelled after two issues. 

One of these is 1945's THE MARVEL FAMILY, which, at least in its early issues, regularly featured teamups between Fawcett's Captain Marvel and his two epigoni.

Though one might see MARVEL FAMILY's all-in the-family orientation as an anticipation of one Silver Age creation, Lee and Kirby's FANTASTIC FOUR, 1940's JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA unquestionably provided a more integral model for superteams of the Silver Age and afterward.  To be sure, the earliest meetings of the Society were barely true "team-ups." The first issue showed the heroes having completely separate adventures-- in other words, the producers were keeping things in this feature pretty much the same as they were in any DC anthology book.  Thereafter, the heroes had separate adventures against different manifestations of the same overall menace.  Eventually some later adventures even dispensed with separate-but-roughly-related adventures, so that the heroes remained in a team as they battled the villains of a given story.

Finally, in the year after MARVEL FAMILY's debut, the "All Winners Squad" debuted in the last two issues of ALL WINNERS COMICS.  The Squad generally followed the pattern of the Justice Society, with the heroes having separate adventures against some common threat before coming together for the finale.

All of these groups, like those in the kid-gang and war-action genres, conformed to the pattern of the "urban avenger" type.  There was little in the way of extrapolating the nature of the heroes or their universe that one usually saw in the "miracle hero" type as promulgated in prose science fiction and fantasy, though occasionally Fawcett's Marvel Family characters elaborated smatterings of new information about the wizard Shazam and his past history, as in the introduction of Black Adam (MARVEL FAMILY #1, 1945).

The first hero-team of the Silver Age, however, would be one of the first features to fuse the two heroic types, and will be discussed further in Part 3.

ADDENDUM: I belatedly confess that I completely forgot one other regularly-published team feature: 1941's all-male SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY.  Mea culpa.

SOLO AVENGERS, MIRACLE TEAMS PT.1

In this essay I said:

...were none of the heroines of the later "Ages" as worthy of mention as Wonder Woman? I think that there have been many, but their prevalence is qualified by a "sea-change" in the history of superhero comics. Since the 1960s, many of the most famous female crimefighrers have not been solo combatants, but have flourished within superhero groups. Indeed, the idea of the "team book" became far more significant in post-Silver Age comics-history, apart from the role of female heroes in those teams. Most of these fighting-femmes came to prominence in teams, as with the Invisible Girl/Woman, Marvel Girl, the Wasp, Elasti-Girl, and Scarlet Witch. 

I said that my next essay would address the question of " why the most important female characters of the Silver and Bronze Ages were so "team-centric."  First, though, I chose to address the structural makeup of heroes and heroines alike in this essay, in which I mentioned that the two "generic hero-types" provided the most formative influence upon the superhero: what I termed "the urban avenger" and the "miracle hero."  That said, I added that the former heroic type tended to influence the stories of even characters with miraculous powers:

...even characters who had super-powers-- Superman, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner-- did not tend to explore their own miraculous natures in depth. They were quickly dragooned into the pattern of the "urban avenger," of patrolling a given city in search of injustices to avenge.

Interestingly, one of the main exceptions to this pattern is also comic books' best known superheroine.  As scripted by creator William Marston, Wonder Woman lived in an Amazonian domain as extraordinary as the powers she possessed, and often ventured far beyond the environs of the urban sprawl, encountering seal-men, Venusian winged girls, and many other creatures who shared only one thing in common: a predilection for exotic methods of bondage. 

However, most other female heroes followed the pattern set by the Golden Age's other successful superheroine, the  Black Cat.  Miss Victory, Black Canary, Liberty Belle, Blonde Phantom, and many others all followed the "urban avenger" pattern, and this extended also to most of the other super-powered types, like Mary Marvel.

It has been conjectured that there might have even been more female readers during the Golden Age than male readers.  This may well have been true, but most of the creators and producers of comic books were male, and I for one do not fault them for seeking their fortunes with fantasies of male accomplishment that they themselves innately understood.  The very fact that they attempted female heroes at all, even though most of these characters were not financially rewarding, demonstrates that the men behind the stories were willing to let comic books be a "co-ed club," in which girl heroes could be as forthright and powerful as boy heroes.  Probably few of them thought as actively as Marston did about seeking out a gendered identity for female readers through superhero comics.  But I hypothesize that Golden Age superhero comics made more honest attempts to appeal to a female readership than one can find in the adventure-oriented genres of the pulps whose example the comics-medium followed.  Only specialists in pulp literature can conjure with obscure heroines like the Golden Amazon (for pulp SF) or Senorita Scorpion (for pulp westerns). 

There weren't many superheroes or superheroines by the final years of the Golden Age, since other genres had become more profitable.  However, even as the Comics Code looomed on the horizon, there were still a handful of titles starring female heroes, principally jungle girls, who as discussed before may be deemed a species of "exotic avengers." 

By 1957, though, most if not all of them were off the stands, and I'm aware of no female characters who obtained their own starring features-- even as backup strips-- from 1955-1958.  The Silver Age Supergirl broke that chain, being introduced in a in ACTION COMICS #252 (May 1959), with a backup series proceeding immediately thereafter.  It may be that editor Mort Weisinger felt confident about launching her in a backup right away-- rather than waiting for reader-response-- because he'd already received positive feedback from readers from an earlier incarnation of "Super-Girl" in SUPERMAN #158 (August 1958).

When the Silver Age advanced from its first tentative steps in the late 1950s to a full-fledged investment in the superhero idiom, though, one aspect of the Golden Age was abandoned.  Male solo heroes still appeared with great frequency, but the majority of superheroines showed up only as the members of teams. 

In Part 2, I'll discuss the reasons for this development.


ADDENDUM: There is one other female character who obtained a starring feature the same year that Supergirl gained hers: in August 1959 the wartime adventuress "Mademoiselle Marie," created by Robert Kanigher and Jerry Grandinetti, made her debut in Star Spangled War Stories #84.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 3

At the end of THREE PROBABILITIES  I said:

Some specific examples of the different intersections of probability and sublimity seems called for. I'll be drawing on my examples from TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS, since that's one of the essays in which I invoked the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."

For the time being I'll supply just one of the ten: the trope I labeled "perilous pyschos."  For this trope I chose the literary-and-cinematic figure of Norman Bates.

I considered drawing a comparison between the fictional character of Norman-- whose film I reviewed here -- and a film based on the principal real-life model for Norman, ED GEIN.  I do find GEIN to be a film bereft of the subtler types of antipathetic effect, of dread and awe: it is first and foremost a film about fear, where physical peril is the dominant threat.  Though GEIN tells the true story of the real psycho's misdeeds, it takes the form of "fictionalized reality" rather than a pure documentary. The film begins with a few quotes from persons who knew Gein or persons involved in his murders, but following this preface-like section, the film depicts all real-life events in a fictionalized manner, portraying events that a pure documentary could not legitimately represent, as with a scene where Gein traipses around his yard in his "woman-suit." Yet, even though GEIN pursues the tropes of fiction, it seems inappropriate to draw comparisons between even a fictionalized version of a real person and a completely fictional figure.

But it is appropriate to compare one version of Norman with another.  Here's the Anthony Perkins version, whom I view as "uncanny" due to the nature of his madness.

And here's another version, from the recent A&E teleseries BATES MOTEL.

MOTEL shuffles a few of the basic configurations of the original PSYCHO-- the nervous young man (still in high school here), his domineering mother, and the titular motel.  However, MOTEL shows none of the intensity of the madness depicted either by Bloch or by Hitchcock.   The ten episodes thus far aired have dealt with assorted mundane menaces-- a crooked sheriff, a white-slavery ring, a rapist-- who makes the mistake of raping Norman's mother, who retaliates by knife-murdering him-- and Norma Bates herself, who may be narcissistically devoted to her son but falls very short of the sort of dreadful madness one sees in Bloch and Hitchcock.  If the teleseries lasts long enough to develop the character of Norman-- who is depicted as nothing more than a slightly geeky, but not repulsive, young fellow who captivates some of the local girls-- BATES will certainly have him doing some of the same sort of things that the Bloch-Hitchcock character does.  But in the predominantly naturalistic atmosphere of the series, it seems unlikely that it will conjure forth any of the uncanny atmosphere utilized by either Bloch or Hitchcock.

A side-point: at the end of AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT 1 I demonstrated the conditions under which a particular film-- in this case, the serial ACE DRUMMOND-- could have been naturalistic, uncanny or marvelous, depending on whether or not certain elements were present in the diegesis.  I viewed ACE as being dominated by the antipathetic affect of "awe" because I felt that this affect "trumped" those of "fear" and "dread," even though the other two were present and could have been dominant given the aforesaid alterations.  I want to add that it is feasible in some cases for the "subtler" affects to be "trumped" as well.  Hitchcock's suspense-drama SHADOW OF A DOUBT possesses a naturalistic phenomenality, for the monstrous "Merry Widow Killer" is principally a physical threat to anyone who discovers his identity, including his niece, "Young Charlie."  Yet though fear is the controlling affect, there are instances in which the film does depict moments of dread, a dread that stems from Young Charlie's anitpathy to her very relatedness to her insane relative.  This antipathy, at base a fear of psychological absorption by a threatening "Other," is not dwelled upon in SHADOW.  But roughly seventeen years later Hitchcock returned to a far more intense meditation upon that theme, thanks to his encounter with Robert Bloch's work.

THE GOLDEN AGE SUPERHERO: TWO TYPES IN ONE

Before commencing with more analyses of the superheroine, it's necessary to make a few basic statements about the nature of the superhero, irrespective of gender, as the figure took shape in the late 1930s.

While I've gone on record as stating that I think many types of genre-creations belong to what I term "the superhero idiom," it's obvious that "superheroes" constitute their own independent genre.  This genre is determined the same way as any other, on the presence of repeated, recognizable tropes that fit certain expectations of the audience.

Steranko's 2-volume HISTORY OF THE COMICS remains one of the best resources in terms of exploring the multitude of influences upon early comic books, including then-contemporary films, radio shows, prose-stories in books and magazines (particularly the pulps), and of course comic strips.  But of all the generic hero-types that influenced the normative superhero, two types seem particularly influential.

The first I term the "miracle hero." The term "hero" here connotes only "protagonist," for many of these characters-- who without exception possess some sort of super-ability or talent-- are not heroic in the moral sense of the word. Wells' INVISIBLE MAN remains one of the earliest of the "miracle heroes," though in terms of his persona he conforms to what I term "the monster."  Another, whose persona-type is also less than heroic, is the super-strong Hugo Danner of Philip Wylie's GLADIATOR, which may or may not have been an influence on Siegel and Shuster's SUPERMAN.

The second I term the "urban avenger."  This type need not have any uncanny or marvelous propensities whatever; it can include masked types like the Green Hornet, but also all manner of cops, detectives, spies, or general troubleshooters, as long as their main beat is the city.  One may generalize that when the "avenger" type is transported to other climes-- ranging from the Lone Ranger's "Old West" to the Phantom's "Bengali jungle"-- that these might be termed "exotic avengers" insofar as they contrast with the environment of the urban centers from which most popular culture is promulgated.

While there are a handful of other contributing genres, these two genre-types influence the early superhero-- and superheroine-- more than any other.  That said, even characters who had super-powers-- Superman, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner-- do not tend to explore their own miraculous natures in depth.  They are quickly dragooned into the pattern of the "urban avenger," of patrolling a given city in search of injustices to avenge.

This early pattern will be seen to have particular impact on the ways in which early superheroines were first constituted, and how this would change in the Silver Age.

PBS: "PRETTY BAD (with) SUPERHEROINES"

I didn't expect a general-interest documentary like PBS' SUPERHEROES: A NEVER-ENDING BATTLE to touch on a lot of fine textual points about comic book superheroes.  However, I did think that if the doc's creators brought up a given subject, they would pursue it to some sort of logical conclusion.

Understandably, the first of the doc's three parts dealt with the Golden Age of superhero comics.  The script, which aimed to be an upbeat examination of the history of American superheroes, quite logically did not dwell overlong on the lack of strong nonwhite heroes, though the issue of racism was addressed.  However, the script-- which included commentary from "Wonder Woman" actress Lynda Carter and from one of the comics' writers--  seemed to be building to a point about the history of female characters in a genre aimed-- at least by some of its proponents-- at male customers.  But though the first part provides strong coverage of the background of the most successful comics superheroine of the period-- as well as her eccentric creator-- the other two sections of the doc seem indifferent to most other developments in the arena of superheroine-creation.  Many well-known male heroes are covered in detail during those two sections-- Spider-Man, the Punisher, Spawn-- and even a few nonwhite male heroes, like Luke Cage and the Black Panther, are referenced.  But by the end of the doc, though one sees various "sisters in spandex" in passing, an outsider could be forgiven for thinking that the superheroine domain begins and ends with Wonder Woman.

I know that a general-interest documentary could not have expatiated on the significance of the plethora of other Golden Age Amazons.  Today it means nothing to say that Harvey Comics' "Black Cat" (1941-1951) stayed in print for almost the entire duration of the Golden Age itself.  It also would have meant little to celebrate feminine crimefighters whose names-- Black Canary, Liberty Belle, Blonde Phantom-- did not become, any more than Black Cat's, figures with which non-fans might conjure.  But were none of the heroines of the later "Ages" as worthy of mention as Wonder Woman?

I think that there have been many, but their prevalence is qualified by a "sea-change" in the history of superhero comics.  Since the 1960s, many of the most famous female crimefighrers have not been solo combatants, but have flourished within superhero groups.  Indeed, the idea of the "team book" became far more significant in post-Silver Age comics-history, apart from the role of female heroes in those teams.  Most of these fighting-femmes came to prominence in teams, as with the Invisible Girl/Woman, Marvel Girl, the Wasp, Elasti-Girl, and Scarlet Witch.  A few characters introduced as team-members went on to star in independent features of some note-- such as Power Girl-- yet it's arguable that they remained more celebrated as members of teams.  Similarly, heroines who started in their own features and failed to sell adequately-- as with the She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel-- often ended up being recycled into team-situations.  To be sure, this recycling often took place with male heroes as well.

Another issue inadequately raised is that of the "one-off" superheroine, who owes her existence to a male hero's mythos.  This category would include not only sidekick-types of the sort that commentator Trina Robbins sneered at in the doc, as with "Batgirl" and "Hawkgirl," but also characters like reformed Bat-villainess Catwoman.  That said, I could make the case that Catwoman, whose feature has now been published almost continously since the early 1990s, has proven a more substantial figure than the Punisher, a spin-off from the Spider-Man feature.  And I say that as one who did enjoy the PBS doc putting the Punisher's first exploits into contemporary sociological perspective.

Invisible (Girl) Woman, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Elasti-Girl, Marvel Girl, Storm, Shadowcat, Power Girl, the (Helena Wayne) Huntress-- these are not figures of no importance in the history of superheroes, nor are they necessarily (contra Robbins) figures overshadowed by their male compeers.  It's a shame that the scripters of the PBS doc couldn't figure out some way to address their relative importance, whether or not they'd appeared in big-screen films or not. 

In my next essay I'll offer some thoughts as to why the most important female characters of the Silver and Bronze Ages were so "team-centric."