HEROINE HEADCOUNT: FRENCHIE KING

And, to round out the four categories, here's a villain, albeit a comical one. One of Brigitte Bardot's few action-roles is that of the tough lady outlaw Frenchie King. (She's the one being punched in the lobby card by tough ranch-woman Claudia Cardinale.) Frenchie and her equally criminal sisters make an attempt to go straight, but complications ensue and they go back to being outlaws after the film's climactic Bardot-Cardinale battle, often rated one of the best catfights in cinema.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: THE ENCHANTRESS

For my first E, here's a character who started out as a hero for a very short tenure. After her less than memorable run, the mystical Enchantress was reconfigured into a villain, first battling Supergirl and then joining the Suicide Squad. Sadly, she was demoted from team-member to general menace in the underwhelming SUICIDE SQUAD movie.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: DOCTOR MEDUSA

And here's a "monster," or "monster-hero" if you like-- Doctor Medusa, a medical doctor who becomes afflicted with living snake-hair, the better to serve in the Creature Commandos, discussed here and here.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: CAROLINE MEREDITH

I should add that I'm using "heroine" to denote "female protagonist." This means that any combative character depicted can fall into any of my four persona-rypes (see this heading on ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE): the hero, the villain, the monster, and (my own neologism) the demihero.

Here's a good demihero. Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress), one of the two main characters in THE TENTH VICTIM.  She contends with her enemy Marcello in legal deathsports, using firearms and kung fu for a time, until they figure out that the best way to make each other miserable is to get married.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: BILLIE JENKINS

BILLIE JENKINS was the last "new witch on the block" to appear on CHARMED, during the show's eighth and final season in its original incarnation. Her powers were those of telekinesis. Played by Kaley Cuoco.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: AMAZONA

Amazona, a hypothetical influence on Wonder Woman, appeared for just one adventure in PLANET COMICS #3 (1940).

PHASE V: ANOTHER CHANGE OF PACE

The last one was in March 2016, when I decided to go back to "the original, low-maintenance concept of the blog."

Now I'm thinking about focusing less on visual art than on a particular type of Femme Formidable: the type who is (a) involved primarily in what I term "the combative mode," and who is also (b) either the solo focus of the narrative or belongs to an ensemble of characters, usually other combative types.

Most of the examples I've cited under the yearly studies were combative types. However, because I also examined famous villains, monsters, and other character-types, those essays are a mixed bag.

For a few weeks at least, I'm going to attempt a sort of "abbreviated database" of Formidables related to the combative mode-- abbreviated in that I probably won't provide much data beyond a sentence or two. 

I'll proceed alphabetically, covering two characters at a time. As I plan things now:

(1) One of the two will be reasonably well known by fans; the other not so much.

(2) One will be from the first sixty-something years of the 20th century; the other from any time later.

(3) One will originate in a "performance" form of media, like radio, television or film; the other will originate in a "non-performance" type like comics, cartoons, or prose fiction.

And that's all the explanation I'll give, until I get bored enough to change again.