Captain Britain and his friends

Paul Cornell wrote a mini-series a few years ago about Captain Britain and a group of other British superheroes - my Young Man lent it to me, and it is awesome!
And right at the beginning, in the middle of a Skrull invasion, he creates a new female superhero - and he does it brilliantly. Dr Faiza Hussain is in the middle of the battlefield (around the Houses of Parliament), doing her job, when she's zapped by a Skrull weapon and wakes up with the ability to heal down to the sub-atomic level.

I love the way that the British Marvel superheroes have a strong connection to magic and the Arthurian myth. After all, King Arthur was the superhero of his day. And I also love the fact that, when Excalibur turns up - which it really has to do in a story about saving Britain from alien invaders - Captain Britain wields it for a bit, but it's not meant for him, and it's the Muslim woman from Essex who pulls the sword from the stone this time!

Paul Cornell is very good at characterisation, and though I'd never heard of most of the characters in the comic before, I quickly discovered everything I needed to know about them and what they were like. So that would be about everybody except Captain Britain, who I know about because my Young Man lent me the comics with his origin story - Black Knight, Spitfire, Pete Wisdom, John the Skrull, and Captain Midlands, who I like because he's a bit rubbish really. Black Knight gets a rather sweet romantic sub-plot with Faiza, too, right from the moment when she first meets him as a hero-worshipping fan.

And then the vampires arrive, and so does Blade, and Captain Britain's wife Meggan, and there are mad things like Dracula's castle on the moon, and has Spitfire really turned to the Dark Side (and why is her son Ken wearing that ridiculous costume)? And it's all a lot of fun.

So now I've got to find out where I can get more comics like this!

How to Become a Female Superhero

I picked up a couple of comics at the recent London Super Comic Con, put out by zenescope - Robyn Hood volumes one and two. This is part of their Grimm Fairy Tales series. I enjoyed the story, but there was something about it that also made me feel uncomfortable.
I rather liked the way the heroine scoffed at the idea that she was a "fantasy land orphan" brought through a magic portal (even though she was).
And then she got into deep trouble at high school and .... seriously - did it have to be rape?

I don't have an in-depth knowledge of comic book characters, but I do know some origin stories. Batman saw his parents shot dead. Green Arrow was stranded on an island and forced to find a way to survive. Daredevil was blinded by radioactive gunk. Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider. There are all sorts of ways to become a superhero, so why are the women so often raped?
Half an hour of googling has yielded me twelve female superheroes who have been raped at some point, and four male superheroes - Batman (depending on which version of the story you read), Green Arrow, Nightwing and Swamp Thing (not sure how that one worked).
As an origin story, Red Sonja is raped and calls upon the goddess Scathach for revenge, and so gets her powers. Frank Miller's version of Catwoman was raped. So was Lady Bullseye from the Daredevil comics (by the yakuza). I understand there are more, but the names of the characters mean very little to me.

The Robin Hood parallels in this story (by Pat Shand, Joe Brusha, Raven Gregory and Ralph Tedesco) are quite fun, and Gisborne seems to be rather more than just King John's henchman, so I want to know what happens next.
I just wish they'd found some other origin story.

Making Your Own

There are some rather wonderful Captain Marvel tshirts at Kelly Sue DeConnick's page on WeLoveFine.com - but the UPS postage to the UK is $44, and since the shop where I work can get a book to the US for around £7.00, I thought that was excessive (and the tshirts are only $25 - I don't want to pay more for the postage than the tshirt).

So I started to think about it, and considered long sleeved tshirts in red and blue. When I was putting my washing away, I realised I had long sleeved tshirts in red and blue, and my big scissors were just there....
....and I spent the rest of the afternoon fixing the shoulders of the red tshirt onto the blue tshirt, and then cutting up a cheap pashmina to make the stripe and the star.
Okay, the star is a bit wobbly, but on the whole, I'm very pleased with the result, and now I'm all ready to "be the star I was always meant to be"!

All I Wanted was a Tshirt....

...it shouldn't be so difficult, surely?

So, I read Captain Marvel: In Pursuit of Flight. I thought that Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel was a really cool character, and I would really like a tshirt in the colours of her costume, with the red shoulders and gold star and stripes and blue body.
There's a whole internet out there, selling all manner of stuff - surely someone makes this?

As it turns out - no.

There's someone on Red Bubble who is selling a tshirt which is kind of like what I'm after - but that's it.

So I went on the Marvel Comics website. Captain Marvel is their character. If anyone sells merchandise for that character, it should be them, right?
Wrong.
They sell 34 tshirts and tops on their website. Thirty of them are labelled "for men" and "for boys" (though I don't see why little girls shouldn't be able to wear the small tshirts - they're the same shape as boys when they're children, more or less).
Four out of 34 tshirts are labelled "for women". Of these. one has a picture of Iron Man, with the caption "I only kiss heroes". One is labelled Girl Power, and features six female superheroes, including Ms Marvel. One is labelled "I Love a Man in Uniform" with several male superheroes depicted, and the final one has the caption "Girls Rule the World", with the description "plus plenty of glitter to chase the bad guys away." Pink glitter.

I was not impressed.

Also on the site are 10 items of sleepwear, all "for boys", 9 costumes and accessories, all "for boys", and six outerwear, all "for boys".

Seriously, Marvel - this is rubbish! You're ignoring fifty per cent of the population, many of whom would like to buy your merchandise, if only you provided it.

On the plus side, while I was looking for something to wear, I came across the Carol Corps, at http://carolcorps.tumblr.com/ and they are brilliant. They also appear to make their own costumes.

Captain Marvel

I think I've found someone else that I want to be when I grow up!
(The first choice is Sarah Jane Smilth, obviously.)

Today I picked up a copy of Captain Marvel: In Pursuit of Flight in Hereford, and I read it in the sunshine on the banks of the Wye while sipping some of the best beers the Beer on the Wye Festival could provide.
And Carol Danvers is awesome!
First of all, she has a sensible costume now, instead of flashing bare skin all over the place. She is (or was), after all, a Colonel in USAF - outranking Captain America, as she reminds him in the opening fight sequence.
It's a timeslip story - and it takes in some of the real heroic women pilots of the past - the women who ferried planes for the RAF and USAF in the Second World War, (at this point, the story suddenly becomes Commando Weekly for a while - and none the worse for that!) and the Mercury 13, who passed all the tests the men did who were training to be astronauts, but were still denied the opportunity to join the programme because this was 1961 - and they didn't have any experience in flying jets. Since only men got the opportunity to fly jets - well, they were cheated, and they should have been up there.
These are sensible women characters who have goals and desires well beyond being someone's girlfriend - they want to help the war effort (despite their lack of training), and they want to fly into space.

This is a wonderful comic book, and I will be looking out for more work by Kelly Sue DeConnick and the various artists who worked with her - principally Dexter Soy and Emma Rios, I think.

Super Heroines?

I'm fairly new to the comic scene, so my knowledge is sketchy at best.
There have been lots of films about Superman, and Batman, and Spiderman, as well as the Hulk, and Thor, and Iron Man - I love Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man - it's his sarcasm and extreme cleverness, I think. I love Captain America, too - he makes me want to hug him, and take him home and feed him home-made apple pie. But where are the films about female superheroes?
Recently, I've been seeing speculation on the web about just that. Joss Whedon wants to make a Wonder Woman film - and it struck me that I don't really know about that many other super-heroines. Or female superheroes. Women, in costume, fighting crime. I thought Black Widow, in Avengers Assemble, was brilliant, and I understand Joss Whedon had to do some arguing to even include her in the picture. I liked her so much that I went looking for the comics, and came across something that combined two of my interests. Paul Cornell, who also writes for Doctor Who, wrote a comic called Black Widow, Deadly Origin - which was an ideal starting point for me, because it included a lot of her back-story and some of the other super-heroes that she had been involved with (including Hercules! Which seemed - well, no more bizarre than Thor and Loki, I suppose)
But who else is there?
I grew up with Lynda Carter, twirling around in her red, white and blue outfit as Wonder Woman, and lassoing people with her lasso of truth - but there doesn't seem to have been a film. All those re-boots of Superman, and not one single Wonder Woman film.
But there must be some more?
I'm vaguely aware that Captain Marvel is a woman now (having originally been a man), but I know nothing else about her.
I understand there are female versions of the Hulk (She-Hulk) and Spiderman (Spiderwoman), there's Supergirl and Batgirl - but are all the female superheroes just pale imitations of a male superhero?
I've heard of Scarlet Witch, and Oracle, but I know next to nothing about them, and they certainly haven't been the subject of a film that I know of.
When I first stumbled across comics, my immediate favourite was Green Arrow, because of the archery - but he had a girlfriend called Black Canary, and I thought she was extremely cool. Not sure about the fishnet tights and blonde wig, but as a character, I thought she was very good.
So, where are the interesting, three dimensional, female superheroes? And why can't there be a film about even one of them?