FEMMES FORMIDABLES: 2020

Sunday, December 27, 2020

FF #13: MODESTY BLAISE

The only downside of the MODESTY BLAISE comic strip, with its crisp writing and evocative art, is that being a daily restricted the execution of the fight-scenes. They're much better rendered in the handful of MODESTY novels.

FF #12: LADY SHIVA

From RICHARD DRAGON #5 comes this underwhelming fight-scene between the titular character and "the mistress of the martial arts, Lady Shiva." Given how mediocre the feature was, it's surprising that over time Lady Shiva became far more important to the DC Universe than Richard Dragon ever was.

Denny O'Neil didn't exactly shine in the research department here, claiming that Lady Shiva was named for "the Hindu goddess of destruction." Deific gender fluidity aside, Shiva was always a male deity.

FF #11: KAGURA SOHMA

The comedy series FRUITS BASKET is mostly a sentimental journey, but at times it veered into slapstick violence. In these four pages from Volume 5, dainty-looking Kagura Sohma greets her beloved cousin Kyou and beats the crap out of him for no good reason.

FF #10: JET DREAM AND HER STUNT-GIRL COUNTERSPIES

I've already done a "Jet Dream" writeup elsewhere on this blog, but I forgot to point out that their attempt to ape the Golden Age Blackhawks even extended to having a ridiculous battle cry. For the Blackhawks, it was "Hawkk-aaa," and for the Stunt Girls it was--

I bet the bad guys shivered at the sound of "Jet-a-reeno!"

But as always, some nice albeit short femme-action.

FF #9: THE INVISIBLE GIRL/WOMAN

Actually, to judge from the biceps the artist puts on Sue Richards in this Image-style iteration of the FF, circa 2000, the Invisible Woman looks more like a She-Hulk wannabe. The reader can barely make out from this badly composed page that her opponent is a poor man's version of the Lady Dorma, at one time Sue's competition for the heroic Sub-Mariner, so I guess this is sort of an alternate-world grudge match??

Friday, December 25, 2020

FF #8: HARU ONODERA

The young girl executing the drop-kick is Haru Onodera, one of the many girls making up the "harem" of the fellow being kicked. From the chapter "Public Bath" in the series NISEKOI.

FF #7: GOLDEN GIRL (1948)

Betty Ross, a minor support-character who provided a slight romantic interest in the Golden Age CAPTAIN AMERICA feature, replaced Bucky as Cap's partner in the waning days of the comic book (issue #46). She had a few decent fight-scenes but nothing on the level of the better "femme formidable" comics of the early forties, like Black Angel and Miss Victory.

FF#6: FAIRCHILD

The "strongman" from the fairly long-lived nineties supergroup was Fairchild, here seen under hypnotic control, about to pound one of her teammates into mulch.

Thursday, December 24, 2020

FF#5: ELEKTRA

One of Elektra's better performances from her epic (and fatal) fight with Bullseye in DAREDEVIL #181.

FF#4: DUO DAMSEL

The Legionnaire called Duo Damsel had a pretty unspectacular power, that of being able to make one duplicate of herself. However, she gets one moment of glory in ADVENTURE COMICS #372, as her two selves get to beat up a villain, Nemesis Kid, who earlier in the story clobbered Superboy.

FF #3: CHITOGE KIRISAKI

The comedy-romance manga NISEKOI presents the familiar trope of the "tough girl" who constantly beats up on an average guy who annoys her, all with the aim of fomenting a fractious romance. This page is cute not just because Chitoge punches out her future boyfriend Raku, but also because she does so because he implied she was indelicate-- which she proceeds to demonstrate with the punchout.

FF #2: BLACK THORN

I made the mistake of buying a "brick" of all the issues of the DC series CHECKMATE. I've no one to blame but myself for not realizing how bad it would be, since I'd read a few loose issues previously. About the only thing that was slightly impressive were a few fight-scenes featuring a superheroine named Black Thorn, who never got her own series, though possibly her appearances in CHECKMATE were an attempt to give her some fan-popularity. Scenes from issues 8 and 15 of CHECKMATE.

FF #1: THE ACE OF BLADES

Female heroes in 1940s often boasted formidable skills in judo, boxing and wrestling, but female villains usually weren't so competent. A one shot exception (from Contact Comics #10, 1946) was a Japanese lady pilot, The Ace of Blades, who had a fatal encounter with Golden Eagle, Holyoke Comics' knockoff of the popular Blackhawk.

THE FOURTH RATIONALE

I've changed the rationale of this blog about three times now, and this change-- the result of my getting played out with respect to the EFF game-- hearkens back to the original rationale of my first post here, which was merely about spotlighting examples of femmes formidables in action, all of which were meant to refute the fallacy that female characters lack "agency" in pop culture.

But a few things have changed since 2010. Back then, I was largely dependent on what random images happened to show up on Google Images and suchlike. But now there are other resources, not least Read Comics Online, which make it possible to excerpt images reprinted within the online reprints, as opposed to using whatever imagtes other bloggers may have scanned.

Instead of maintaining the "diachronic" angle that still appears in the header, now I'm just going to proceed alphabetically as I explore numerous, sometimes obscure examples of femme formidable action, usually if not exclusively in the comics medium, False modesty aside, I know a helluva lot about comics, so there's a lot of material to spotlight. There's no analytical project here as there was with the diachronic critiques; just a broad overview of what kinds of female agency have appeared over the years. Each entry will focus on some female character, alphabetized by the first letter in the name, staring with the given name in the case of regular cognomens.

This is also the sort of project where I can just toss in one or two short posts whenever I happen to find the time.