Comics: Carol Danvers is too Marvelous for words
There aren’t a lot of female writers in comics, either, but the new “Captain Marvel” has one: Kelly Sue DeConnick, best known for manga translations. On Marvel.com, she described the character this way:
“My pitch (to Marvel) was called ‘Pilot’ and the take can pretty much be summed up with ‘Carol Danvers as Chuck Yeager.’ Carol’s the virtual definition of a Type A personality. She’s a competitor and a control freak. … She’ll have to figure out how to be both Captain Marvel (ital) and (end ital) Chuck Yeager …”
Chuck Yeager as a super-hero is what interests me about Hal Jordan. I’m excited to see Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel.
I was talking about Marvel vs. DC with Jim the other day and he said something smart, as he often does, “DC has the trinity, the big iconics but Marvel has a deeper bench.” Very true and it feels like Marvel desperately needs some rockin’ super-hero ladies in their own books, punching aliens and smacking villains.
At some point, I have to write about the Avengers cartoon. I’m nearly finished with the first season Netflix has on tap and after getting past the first three episodes, it has really picked up.
‘Airbender’ creators reclaim their world in ‘Korra’
During test screenings, though, boys said they didn’t care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.
Good Writing + Solid Storytelling = the smashing of executive marking conventional wisdom.
Monsterhearts: Queerness and the Supernatural Teen Romance Genre
Now, ever since I discovered Buffy, I have adored supernatural teen romance, as a genre (and I keep being disappointed by everything else I see in the genre, but that’s another matter), and I knew Apocalypse World was good, so I was already very excited about Monsterhearts. But on my first read-through of my advanced PDF copy of the game, when I got to this section I was immediately completely sold on the game.
Gaming as Women has been a consistently wonderful blog, earning its place under the category, Best of the Geek, on my Google Reader.
Now that I look things over, all of these links are about geekdom and gender. Interesting.
If you have any links that are grabbing your attention, please post them into the comments. Thanks.
Githyanki Diaspora 
For a while, back in the 90’s they had a really good run with She Hulk – she was really interesting for being one of the few superheroes who wasn’t failing at balancing her superhero antics with holding a professional job.
I think the only consistently empowered (in the normal, narrative sense) characters Marvel pulls is White Queen & Storm, but most of their stories puts them into the team role instead of solo. Jean Gray jumps back and forth depending on who’s writing her, whether she’s currently alive or not, etc.
Scarlett Witch ends up being a plot point rather than a character nearly always, and it’s frustrating because basically she’s become “crazy lady” stereotype – super powerful, but useless if not dangerous and requires saving from her self. The House of M was a chance to break out of that but all they did was reinforce it. 😦
Yeah, the whole way they’ve treated Scarlett “Bitches Be Crazy” Witch is really annoying, one in a long line of women in Marvel comics who can’t control their power because male writers blah blah blah.
White Queen is pretty awesome; I wonder if being a former villain or anti-hero somehow puts a stop to that crap.
Here’s hoping Captain Marvel is the flagship title Marvel needs and it starts a trend.
It’s frustrating because villainy is pretty much the only way women get to have agency in a lot of stories. Which… says all too much about the attitudes where “woman not under control of man = EVIL”. The Harley/Poison Ivy fan love I think is part of that.