YEAR 1978: LUM

Though most of the femmes formidables here belong to the mythoi of adventure or drama, Rumiko Takahashi's Lum holds pride of place as one of the formidable females of the comedy mythos.

As I've always recapitulated Lum's origin story here, I won't repeat myself on that subject.  It's interesting to observe that she was not initially the star of the series.  The first story with Ataru and Lum was followed by a second tale featuring only Ataru and his human girlfriend Shinobu, who encountered another, less science-fictional demon.  Then Lum returned in the third URUSEI tale and stayed for the remainder of the series.  At a Comic-con in the early 2000s I asked Rumiko Takahashi whether Lum's re-introduction had been intended all along or not, and my recollection is that she said "not": that the original intent was a title focused on Ataru.

Equally oddly, one of her most recognizeable features-- the ability to generate electrical shocks-- doesn't appear in the first Lum story.  In the earliest stories her shocking of Ataru is an unintended side-effect of her attempts to show affection, but it quickly progresses to become a science-fictional version of the rolling-pin, the traditional comic means used by wives to chastise their straying husbands.

The early Lum's character is somewhat nastier and more aggressive than later versions.  Arguably Takahashi may have diverted some of Lum's aggressions into other characters, such as Benten and Ran.  I don't plan to do any entries for the secondary female characters of URUSEI, but suffice to say that Takahashi devotes no small effort to making sure that her breakout series featured plenty of powerful females.

The manga series was successfully adapted to an anime teleseries in 1981, followed by a handful of bigscreen movie adaptations.  Since both of these follow the model of the manga-series quite closely, I won't provide entries for any anime-adaptations here.

TOP 50 FEMALE/MALE FIGHTS IN COMICS: #13

One question that's occured to me as I've continued to plug away at this series: does the supergirl have to win every battle in order to come out on top?

Take Rumiko Takahashi's breakout manga series URUSEI YATSURA. The story opens with teenaged goofus Ataru being drafted to fight the representative of an alien race. If he loses, Earth gets invaded; if he wins, the aliens make peace with Earth. His opponent happens to be a sexy flying bikini-babe named Lum.

The manga and its anime adaptation approach their conflict-- a game of "tag" in which Ataru must seek to grab Lum's horns, as shown below-- somewhat differently. In the anime, it's all slapstick scenes in which Ataru keeps trying to grab the flying femme and constantly falls on his face. In the original manga, Lum and Ataru go at it with a bit more violence, with Lum kicking Ataru in the face and so on. The panel below shows a little more up-close-and-personal action than one sees in the animation.




So Lum loses that battle.

But later, Lum gets her way, because she believes (or says she believes) that Ataru has proposed marriage to her, which leads to endless comic conflicts in which Ataru tries to live the life of an average Japanese high-schooler with an unwanted alien "wife" hanging around. Moreover, Lum belatedly demonstrates (as of her second appearance in the manga) that she can enforce her demands for monogamy by subjecting Ataru to horrendous electrical shocks. What this says about normative Japanese male-female relations can be safely left to the imagination.

Over time, naturally, the boy with the troublesome girl reciprocates her feeling, after a fashion: if there was no possibility of actual romance, UY would've been a dull series indeed. But this would certainly be a case where the woman lost the contest but essentially won the war of the sexes.