snap judgments

So I watch over what I write on ye olde internet, seeing if anyone’s saluting the flag I run up the flagpole. Doubly more for the Fifth Color; as it is my SERIOUS BUSINESS, I try and save my A-game for the folks at Newsarama, giving my readers here (HI MOM!) a little more of what’s on my mind. I mean, come on: name your column ‘The Fifth Color’ and try and say you’re not being pretentiously vague…

Anyhoo, today’s was very important to me as I’d been saving it for awhile now, the idea of ‘Who is my favorite chick hero anyways?” one question I get asked a lot. Most of my favorite characters are dudes (multiple dudes in fact) and the fact I have to trope out ‘Wonder Woman’ in polite company gets under my skin. Because every time I pick one, they tend to go off their beam or set to the back burner or worse. The Wasp used to be the one I’d hold up as my woman champion… and then I ha to go into such explanations to say why! While I went on about how she was one of the best Chairpersons the Avengers ever had, the first to name the team and all, I’ll I’d hear was ‘Hank Pym sure hit ‘er good, hurr hurr’. Sadly, the character has been so saddled with her poor romance she’s barely grown on her own since her time as Chairwoman. No one cared, not even the artists who never seemed to bother with the fact that this was a fashion designer; seeing he recent Patsy Walker story with the Immonens just kind of hit that one home again. It’s a waste and Janet Van Dyne is probably due for a genius writer to sweep her off her feet, but until then… we’re stuck.

I thought Jennifer Walters could be my favorite female superhero as she was living large, strong and sexy, smart and confident. A lot to look up to and she always seemed to own whatever book she was in. Dan Slott brought her back to the lawyer biz and put a good inner conflict on the life of a hero and the life of just an ordinary gal and how the both are just as daring as the other. And then… the Agent of SHIELD line hit and the character seemed to go right off the rails. Sleeping with Tony Stark and being turned down by Wolverine on the job (not to mention being called ’sloppy seconds’ without putting Logan through a wall), all the self-respect I liked about the character seemed set aside to show the reader that the character needed it in the first place. It was awkward and now Peter David seems to be going in an all new, all different direction that I fear is going to be just a way gritty up a character that was so different from her male counterpart she might as well not even been the “She-Hulk”. I don’t want to have little faith in the future, but some nights one wonders if anyone gets want I’m looking for in a heroine.

And then I read The Cat #1 from the Women of Marvel TP and thought, “Hey, maybe someone does get it!”

The Cat #1 was written by Linda Fite and it’s an action/adventure comic with all the earmarks of a tried and true Marvel comic. It’s got human drama, tragedy, acrobatics and this little gooey center of truth in the whole thing. It was great and I need to hit the back issue bins like a house a’fire and grab myself the whole run of this short lived little book. If your curious, I have a rather bland little retelling I did of the issue from the Women of Marvel; I held back a lot of personal opinion to try and let people make their own decision on who Greer Nelson was and who she is now. Working at Metro, I know what it’s like to have someone go on and on and on about a beloved character to the point of causing backfire and I didn’t want to be That Girl.

Because, as far as I’m concerned, Tigra and The Cat are two ENTIRELY different characters. Sure, they have the same name but there is no trace of the young science student in the bikini-clad cat-woman that now graces comic covers. A woman that once had to fight for her independence, gained an incredible intellect through what amounts to a ‘super-soldier serum‘ is now not only a traitor and a spy in Civil War (the real crime being that she was a BAD one), but now full of meows and purrs for a man known for his incredible success with women: Hank Pym.

Careful, I’m becoming That Girl, but Greer Nelson was a lot cooler as a student of science who had surpassed what society thought of her to don a super-suit and cling to rooftops in the chilling rain. The character as she is now has little to nothing to connect her with her first issues and in a way, I’m kind of glad.