Good (Girl) Art

I've never understood it. There's a comic book universe where the Earth's greatest superteam consists entirely of women. The team's leader was a top-level scientist back in the 1940's, long before the women's liberation movement. In fact, she was a divorced, working woman, professionally involved in top secret experiments at the highest security clearances during World War II which, under the circumstances of that era, means she was mentally and emotionally one of the strongest human beings on the planet before she ever took on the powers which made her the physically strongest human being on the planet.

Other members of the team also had backgrounds in science before obtaining the powers that made them superheroines. Archaeology. Biology. Heck, one member of the team was the top scientist on ANOTHER planet before traveling to Earth and adopting this world as her own. We're talking about the portrayal of strong, smart, personable women. Role models. Yet, the comic book dedicated to their adventures is dismissed by the avatars of political correctness as unworthy of being read.

I speak, of course, about the Femforce. What is it about this title that leads so many to slander it without even opening its pages? It must be the art. In 1985, when the title was first published, comic book women weren't as curvy as Mark Heike's Femforce women. Oh sure, there had been Frank Thorne's Red Sonja, but by and large, comic book heroines, unlike the femme fatales, were not purposefully drawn as being sexy. It hadn't always been that way. Back in the 1940's and early 1950's, during the Golden Age of comics, the heroines were drawn in a style that was considered very sexy for that time, but by the ‘70's and early ‘80's, superheroines weren't curvy and most of the women in comic books were non-powered girlfriends of superheroes who managed to do nothing but cause trouble for the hero.

Wonder Woman was drawn nothing like Lynda Carter looked

But Mark Heike's Femforce were curvy and attractive

Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but not by much. Then, along comes the Femforce. The women were good looking, the costumes were sexy, and the excellent characterization was ignored in the rush to label the book sexist. The title was pushed into the never read it and never will read it pile by those that form opinions without having any knowledge of the subject and who loudly voice those uninformed opinions from their pulpit of omniscience. Nevertheless, the Femforce has managed to be published for nigh on fifteen years. Fifteen years in which the comic book landscape has changed dramatically.

Fifteen years ago, when the Femforce first gave us art that harkened back to the Golden Age of Comics but with an updated feel, it was the only comic book on the market that had the audacity to put a team of females in the lead role. In fact, the accepted wisdom of the time was that books with female leads did not sell. Today, we're on the back end of a phase where women with breasts larger than their heads, waists as thin as their ankles, deformed spines, missing ribs, and costumes made out of dental floss had to appear on every cover to make a book profitable.

Comics has gone from Red Sonja...

to Red Monika

Of course, the pundits of political correctness decry the "Bad Girl" art, and some more correctly decry the "bad" girl art. Of the latter, I enjoy Sequential Tart's (www.sequentialtart.com) Bizarre Breasts feature. What is left unsaid, whether through unfamiliarity or ignorance, is that "Good Girl" art doesn't suffer from the noted unrealities that so afflict the Bad Girl genre. Rather, Good Girl art, and that is what the Femforce is and has been, is a direct descendant of Gil Elvgren's pin-up art or Matt Baker's Golden Age work. The sexy, slightly devilish, but decent, girl next door, who fights crime and evil because she can, not because she's a revenge-seeking, bloodthirsty, caricature.

Perhaps now is the time for all those who have been crying for years about the portrayal of women in comics to pick up some back issues of the Femforce. Everything they've been asking to see and read has always been between the book's pages if they'd just put aside their preconceptions and looked inside the cover. Those of us who've been reading the Femforce for years are already aware of the team's charm. The responsible Ms. Victory; the often childlike Synn; the environmentalist/conservationist Tara; the grouchy but always loyal She-Cat; the arrogant yet afraid of herself Nightveil; the alien learning to live in a new world, Stardust. We've come to know them as if they were real because, like everyone who reads a couple of issues of the Femforce, we can't get enough.