Great news: The A-Force, an all-female Avengers, will be arriving on graphic novel pages near you this spring. Writers G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennet have stepped up to the task of creating a promising new team of woman heroes with Jorge Molina behind the art for the series.
The all-female team, which will be the fifteenth of its kind in Marvel history, is mostly comprised of kickass supers from different sects of the Marvel Universe, including the popular Ms. Marvel, Storm, and She-Hulk. With fifteen other lady packed teams, it isn’t a completely new sentiment for Marvel, but a standby like the Avengers becoming fully female is still a pretty radical move for the comic giant.
“If we were going to do all-women, we were going to ask the big questions,” Wilson said over Twitter. And they definitely seem to be doing so with their character list. The writers came up with brand new character Singularity, a genderless cosmological entity that chooses to be female.
With a hero like Singularity, Wilson is raising some thought-provoking questions: “What does it mean to be a woman and what would that look like to somebody who was learning about the human race as an outsider and is learning about what it means to have relationships with other people.”
A-Force looks like it’ll be a force to be reckoned with. Women superheroes, whether they are their own original characters or female versions of male heroes (a la the new female Thor), are a great way to diversify the primarily white-male universe that Marvel has created.
And female-forward titles such as Thor and Spider-Gwen (coming later this month) are selling upwards of 200,000 copies—double the usual order revenue. It’s a sign of the times, the good times, in a universe that is still primarily marketed and ruled to and by men that female heroes are gaining popularity and increasing overall sales. In order to get girls and women more interested in comics, representation is key.
Image via Hypable
