Original subtitles

She had been written by men and drawn by men

because that was the comics' tradition.

When I was younger,

my mother told me superheroes were for boys.

Some readers felt, "How come you're writing so many girls?"

You know, there'd always be one girl,

and she had the least powers.

Whenever a woman gets there, she's not worthy.

The poor thing died in solitude and poverty,

and it's not fair.

We have a serious problem as a society, I think,

with the hypersexualization of women.

And we are playing with 50% of the world population's feelings!

Today, we are seeing a reversing trend.

The idea has always been

to look on these characters as people who can grow,

who can change, who can surprise you.

What's great is that she actually reclaims

the artifices of femininity.

Minorities bonded with the team to a remarkable extent.

For the time, she was a revolutionary character.

She is a symbol for the entire LGBT community.

It was very fascinating to see a woman in a leadership role.

There are a lot of female writers,

a lot of female artists, a lot of female editors.

The reader is not the traditional male reader.

They will be our kids' heroes.

Matriarchy will save the world!

Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel,

Black Widow, Supergirl...

Superheroines are taking over movie screens

and people's hearts

but they are also milestones in a story

that began over 80 years ago.

Social progress as well as sexist backward steps

have marked the journey of these superwomen

and their female readers.

We've met with men and women

who spearhead these characters' adventures.

From the United States to France, and even Italy,

they all speak of the worldwide influence of superheroines.

Australian comic book artist Nicola Scott, for instance,

has long been fascinated by a particular amazon

whose adventures she draws today.

The very first time I saw Wonder Woman,

it was the very first time I saw a superhero.

And it was when I was four,

watching TV in the afternoon,

and Lynda Carter's TV show came on.

And I had never seen anything like it and it blew my mind,

and I was 100% a convert from that moment on.

Before seeing the show,

I didn't know that superheroes were a thing,

so that was the very first time I saw a superhero.

And it wasn't long after that

that the Super Friends cartoon started playing on TV

and I'd go, "Oh my God, there's Wonder Woman again!"

I knew Wonder Woman as a character before the movie

because she's the superheroine.

Perhaps not the most important but an icon,

the one everyone is familiar with,

because there aren't that many superwomen.

From the little town of Cortona in Italy,

comic book artist Maria Laura Sanapo

works for American publishers like DC Comics or Dynamite,

producing pages for Wonder Woman.

My favorite superheroine is, without a doubt, Wonder Woman.

She marked my childhood because when I was little,

I discovered Lynda Carter.

I really love Lynda Carter,

her beauty, her elegance,

because she is both strong and elegant.

And so, I love that Wonder Woman I admired as a little girl.

She is dear to me.

I also like the modern version by Gal Gadot,

but not to the same extent.

When I was younger,

my mother told me superheroes were for boys.

She said it was out of the question,

I had to act like a girl.

So, I went to newsstands in secret

to buy my comic books,

and I read them in bed under the covers with a flashlight.

That's when I began to dive into that world

and get caught up in who was who,

why did he do that,

and oh, my God, there are girls, too, awesome!

In Rome, Emanuela Lupacchino is one of the most

internationally renowned figureheads

of this new generation of female artists.

In the course of my career,

I've been able to work mainly on superheroines

because I feel that it is with them

that I can express myself in the best possible way.

And readers appreciate the way I portray superwomen.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not also a big fan

of how the male body is represented

with male superheroes, such as Conan.

Heroines are fierce and intelligent,

and they manage to solve problems.

It's been a source of inspiration,

Girl Power, as we call it.

I want to be as strong as they are mentally,

perhaps even physically, I don't know,

but in any case, it was a huge inspiration

for my professional life, with drawing for instance.

It was a source of inspiration and motivation.

But might not Wonder Woman sometimes be

the tree that hides the forest?

Not only is she not the only superheroine out there,

but she is also not the first.

Several months before her appearance,

a mysterious adventuress disguised as a cat

was already turning heads,

but not the one you might think.

Miss Fury could be considered as a kind of Catwoman,

but the truth is she was there first.

Miss Fury was created,

She beat Wonder Woman

to the stands.

By about six months, I think.

She was created in 1941 by a woman also,

which makes her really the first woman,

costumed action heroine drawn by a woman,

created and written by a woman,

Tarpé Mills,

who just happened to look exactly like her heroine.

She's a very wealthy woman.

She's rich, but she's very strong, too.

She's a very humane character, and she's a crime-fighter.

She has a panther skin and at one point she starts to wear it.

At first, she only pulls it on for fun.

But then, things start to happen

and she begins to show extraordinary abilities.

That's when she becomes a superheroine.

This picture, in particular,

was done as a pin-up for the troops,

during the war.

Miss Fury had a lot of fans.

And G.I.s would write her fan letters.

And she had this picture printed out,

and she would send it to them and sign it for them.

Miss Fury is a heroine

that I'm lucky to be drawing right now.

When they contacted me to draw her, I said yes immediately,

because she was not only drawn

but also entirely created by a woman in the 40s,

a woman who succeeded as a comic book artist at that time.

This clearly inspired me because, since the early 2000s,

many female artists have become famous.

But, in the 40s, it was much harder.

The other reason why I accepted this project

is that it was an opportunity to talk about June Tarpé Mills,

who created Miss Fury.

The poor thing died in solitude and poverty,

and it's not fair.

It's not fair that this woman was forgotten

because she had so much talent.

In 1941, America was on the brink of war.

Superheroines took their cue from patriotic tradition,

and most particularly from Columbia,

the female personification of the United States,

to find inspiration for costumes reflecting the times.

Wonder Woman first made her appearance in this context.

Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston

using the pseudonym Charles Moulton,

and he specifically aimed it at girls.

He was quoted as saying,

"Even girls don't want to be girls."

Because they don't get to do all the exciting things boys do.

So, he wanted to create a role model for girls,

to show that they could be as good, better, than boys.

All they needed

was the training.

Was to work at it.

And they could do it.

We could all be Wonder Woman.

At the end of the day,

it's only doing what superhero culture has been doing all along

namely following the evolutions of society

and, ahead of time or a little late,

addressing those questions.

All superheroines are great characters,

but they were minor characters,

and Wonder Woman...

She was an amazon.

None of the others were amazons.

And she hit at just the right time,

just as America was about to go to war.

Just as the war was starting, she shows up.

And she goes to the man's world with Steve Trevor

to fight the bad guys, to fight the Axis.

She was just at the right moment.

She was an amazon.

She didn't fly.

She didn't have superpowers.

She had amazon training,

which made her the best possible athlete.

She could run, she could leap,

and she did them all marvelously.

And it didn't hurt that she was also beautiful

and that she was a princess.

William Moulton Marston was also a psychologist

whose research contributed

to the development of the lie detector.

In the comic, Wonder Woman's golden lasso

is an illustration of that research.

It is a magical variant of the lie detector.

Wonder Woman's creator was also very ahead of his time

with the amazon's love life.

William Moulton Marston hypothesized,

or suggested in a rather evident way,

that she was an LGBT character.

She was bisexual at least, or pansexual.

Later, depending on her evolution

and the people who wrote her,

we had a lesbian Wonder Woman,

a bisexual or pansexual Wonder Woman,

or a heterosexual Wonder Woman.

If Wonder Woman's costume

is based on the American flag,

a large part of her roots and appearance

is grounded in Greek and Roman mythology.

This could explain why this particular heroine

quickly reached beyond borders

and why today, in Italy or elsewhere,

female artists can work on her with such ease.

It's a concept

that has been brought to my attention many times,

although being immersed in it,

I am not consciously aware of it.

Many American colleagues tell me,

"You're so lucky to have been born in a country"

with such a rich tradition in art, ancient history...

"and culture."

Drawing Wonder Woman and the island world of Themyscira

has been relatively easy for me.

Wonder Woman is most certainly a warrior,

but she fights for the greater good.

She has to fight because she's in the middle of a war,

but she never does it in a perverse way

or just to fight for herself.

As soon as I was able to cross two streets

to get to the candy store that sold comics,

I would just look at all the comics on the rack.

Once a week, I could buy a comic.

I took my allowance and I could buy a comic,

and I would buy whatever comic starred a woman.

Whatever comic had a woman or a girl on the cover

who was powerful,

not somebody who was tied to a chair

and waiting for a hero to rescue her,

but a woman who was her own person, her own heroine,

right there on the cover.

And it even helped if that was her name,

her name was the title of the book.

So, it wasn't just Wonder Woman that I bought.

I bought Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

She really was my favorite

because my fantasy was to live in a treehouse

with my pet chimpanzee,

in the jungle and wearing leopard skin.

And I still love leopard skin.

Wonder Woman's success quickly paved the way

for the appearance of other superwomen,

like the all-powerful Mary Marvel

whose sales soon rivalled those of Wonder Woman.

I bought Mary Marvel.

She was a girl.

She was Mary Batson,

and all she had to do was say the magic word "Shazam"

and she became Mary Marvel.

And Mary Marvel could fly.

And bullets bounced off her, and she had fists of iron.

And she was only 12 years old

which meant that you didn't have to become a woman.

You could still be a girl and have superpowers.

So, I bought all the comics that had female heroes.

But during the 50s,

things began to take a backwards slide.

Even Supergirl's spectacular debut wasn't a step forward,

at least at first.

Supergirl was...

She was so tame, really, you know?

Her cousin, Superman, told her

that the world must not know about her, you know,

so she kept herself secret.

And she lived in an orphanage, for God's sake.

She never interested me.

She was only really Superman's sidekick at the time.

She wasn't a very interesting character,

except to expand Superman's universe

with what we call the Super Family.

The war was over.

War had been over for 20 years,

and women had been driven back.

All these wonderful things they had done,

you know, driving the trucks, and working in the factories,

and making ships and planes, and flying planes.

That was over.

They've been sent back to the kitchen.

The guys came back and got their old jobs back.

This is evident throughout all the comics of that period,

even with another heroine like Wonder Woman.

It really was a peculiar era

in terms of how female characters were represented.

The 60s also saw the arrival

of a new generation of superheroines

created by Marvel.

But at first, they were limited to unexciting,

almost invisible roles.

I think, for me, the basic rationale was,

I looked at all these teams.

I looked at the Fantastic Four.

I looked at the Justice League.

I looked at the Avengers.

And they were all predominantly white men.

With a girl.

And it was always a girl.

Marvel Girl.

Supergirl.

Aquagirl.

The Invisible Girl!

There'd always be one girl, and she had the least powers.

She didn't run around and jump and punch people out.

I mean, think about it.

The Fantastic Four is the core hero group

in the Marvel universe.

They are the foundation

upon which all the subsequent heroes derived.

Mr. Fantastic.

He's brilliant, he stretches, he's a cool guy.

The Thing.

A giant monster, the heart of the quartet.

Johnny Storm.

He catches fire

and races around the world to save things.

And Sue...

What is Sue Storm?

She turns invisible.

She vanishes. She disappears.

It is, intentionally or not, the most powerful metaphor

for how the world tended to view women,

and women in the workplace at that era.

They were invisible.

Oh, the Wasp, she's this tiny, little character, you know?

And what do they do?

They go shopping a lot.

You see this in the comics of the period.

Although I believe that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby both thought

that they were doing the modern woman, you know?

They really did think this, but they were guys.

There were no women involved!

At the end of the day,

truly independent heroines in the 60s were mostly 'bad girls',

like Catwoman or Poison Ivy.

The very first time I saw Poison Ivy was many years ago.

It was in the cartoon

in which Harley Quinn appears for the first time.

In the French version of this cartoon,

Poison Ivy was called "the Poisoner"

and I really liked her.

Even if she's a little too extreme

in what she says and does,

she really wants Nature to take back its rightful place,

and she thinks that men damage Nature.

This is something I really like about her,

even if she should temper her actions.

Today, Poison Ivy would probably be considered a superheroine,

because Nature needs to be protected!

But still, she does have a rather evil side.

Meanwhile, far from mainstream books,

American comics began to present heroines

enjoying much greater freedom in magazines

for an older readership.

At the end of the 60s,

Warren Publishing launched the adventures

of a bikini-clad bloodsucker, Vampirella.

Well, really, my only part in the creation of Vampirella was,

I designed her costume.

And the costume, by the way, that I designed

was not as brief as this little red ribbon

that she wears these days.

It wasn't a comic.

It was really a comic magazine published by Jim Warren.

And it was the first of these books that starred a woman,

Vampirella, who told the stories

and who also took part in the stories.

And that was very revolutionary for comics in 1969.

I really love Vampirella.

That's partly because she's a vampire,

and vampires fascinate me.

They always have because they can do whatever they like.

So, they're rather sexual characters.

They're mesmerizing, and they're charming.

It's therefore natural

that their clothes reflect that sexy side.

You have to know

that she has been exaggerated and exaggerated and exaggerated,

as the years go by.

So, she really does not, today, bear any resemblance,

as far as I'm concerned,

to the costume that I created.

She was beautifully drawn in those days

by Spanish artists, Filipino artists.

For the time, she was a revolutionary character.

In those comics, they didn't really deal with sex very much,

but she was certainly a sexy creature.

True activism made its way

through fanzines and underground comics.

In 1973, Trina Robbins brought an icon from World War II,

Rosie the Riveter, back to life in her comics

to give her new relevance

in the context of women's liberation.

Rosie the Riveter, she's become much more well-known now.

She's famous, in fact.

Everyone knows Rosie the Riveter.

But at the time, people had kind of forgotten her.

But she represented the strength of women

during World War II, you know?

When suddenly women were taken out of their homes

and working in factories, making planes,

making ships, even flying the planes.

That's what she represented.

That wonderful period during the war,

when women were as strong as men,

when women did all the things that men had done before.

Trina Robbins is a personal icon.

She's a living symbol of feminism in comics.

She's a real pioneer.

She took the first step

to turn the spotlight on feminism in comics,

when independent comics began to appear in the 70s

in San Francisco.

She's a figurehead for a whole comic book movement.

Next to Vampirella or Rosie,

traditional superheroines seemed outdated.

A young beginner writer called Chris Claremont

became part of a new generation of writers

who decided to shake things up.

When I came aboard at Marvel, ten years later,

roughly ten years later, very little had changed.

Women were still primarily an afterthought.

With comic book artist Dave Cockrum,

Chris Claremont was rapidly put in charge

of producing new episodes for X-Men.

Female characters in the series

quickly became varied and strong.

Mature or teenage, powerful or even controlling,

heroines acquired a diversity of profiles.

The point here is...

I know women who are courageous, who are smart,

who are all of the attributes of a superhero,

except for one element, their gender.

So, I thought, no one else is doing it,

I'll take a shot and see what happens.

So, I found, with the X-Men,

especially with the X-Men

that Dave Cockrum and Len Wein created in Giant-Size No.1,

not only a diversity of gender,

in Ororo and Jean,

but of societal, racial gender.

Seven years after the death

of Martin Luther King,

Ororo a.k.a. Storm brought new changes.

For the first time,

a black woman became a regular member of a superhero team.

Under Chris Claremont's leadership,

this heroine evolved to the point of becoming

a leader of the team a few years later.

Basically, I gave shape to Storm

the way I give shape to all characters,

which is look at them

and try to imagine who they are as people.

Ororo has spent her adolescence on top of Mount Kilimanjaro

or a reasonable fac-simile, in Kenya,

being worshipped as a goddess,

which is somewhat removed from the reality of Kenya but...

That's comics.

And suddenly, she is uprooted

and brought over to the first world.

If I had to mention one comic, it would be X-Men.

It's my favorite superhero series.

It's wonderful.

The characters... Everyone can identify.

It was fun.

She was distinct because she was a leader of the X-Men team.

Although I may have been exposed to other X-Men members,

it was very fascinating to see a woman in a leadership role

with that much power.

With Ororo, it's more personal

because her father is from New York.

But it takes time for her to arrive

at what that realization means.

John Byrne and I did a story

where she goes to what she remembers as her home

in New York City, in Harlem.

And what she remembers as a loving apartment

has now become a drug den,

full of young adolescents

overdosing on crack and heroin.

It is a voyage of discovery.

For her, as with all the characters,

it's dealing with them

as I imagine real people would act in a similar situation.

The change and revival brought about by Storm

was only the beginning of a new wave.

With new recruits,

Chris Claremont diversified female character profiles.

Before then, within a given comic book panel,

heroines were mostly distinguished

by their hair colour.

From that point on, female members of the X-Men

cultivated diversity in terms of race, shape, and age.

Yeah, probably Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers from Excalibur,

because I think that how I see female characters

is very close to the work of Chris Claremont.

The reader response was varied.

Some readers felt, "How come you're writing so many girls?"

I went to work on an X-Men book with the X-Women.

And I was so lucky because we had the chance of doing X-Men

with an all-female character roster.

The only guy was Colossus.

I didn't have to make too many sketches

to find my Storm or to find my Psylocke,

or to find my Rogue.

They were already there.

The idea has always been

to look on these characters not as characters,

not as functions of a defined paradigm,

but as people who can grow,

who can change, who can surprise you.

The way women began to take power

is perfectly illustrated by Jean Grey,

formerly one of the weakest members of the X-Men

but then reinvented as Phoenix,

the most powerful being in the Universe.

The Saga of the Phoenix and then of the Dark Phoenix

remains, to this day,

one of the most famous stories of the X-Men series,

marking many generations of male and female readers.

Jean became Phoenix.

Phoenix, within eight issues of that transformation,

saved the universe.

That is not a small thing.

She saved every living being in Creation at that time.

No hero had ever done that.

And yet, within 25 issues,

Phoenix became Dark Phoenix and she destroyed a world.

She killed eight billion, six billion people.

That action had consequences.

It didn't matter that she saved the universe.

She did something unforgivable that had to be atoned for.

And the nice thing was that,

for women characters,

because they were new and the readers weren't expecting them,

their journeys could be more dramatically portrayed.

Changing Cyclops is a challenge

because he'd existed for ten years before I came on board.

Whereas with Ororo, she was brand new.

Jean, by the time I was done with her,

was brand new, as Phoenix.

Kitty was brand new.

Rogue was brand new.

There were all these opportunities

to change and to build a new reality around the team,

a reality which reached out

to so many different aspects of the audience,

people who hadn't seen anything like themselves in the X-Men.

Minorities bonded with the team to a remarkable extant.

While women in the X-Men series were emancipating,

a feminist icon in comic books returned to the fore

through the TV series

in which Lynda Carter plays Wonder Woman.

Thanks to Lynda Carter,

Wonder Woman became a symbol for several generations.

The Wonder Woman TV series is very important even for comics,

for comic book creators

who, still today, claim the legacy of Lynda Carter,

a character that really marked American minds and even beyond.

The series dates back to 1975

and the context of women's rights

and the minorities' rights

and civil rights movements in the United States.

This series really puts forward a feminist agenda.

It's very clear, very explicit, as early as the first episode,

and even the pilot episode of the series,

in which Wonder Woman, played by Lynda Carter,

says that matriarchy will save the world.

But, other fervent super-feminists began to appear

besides Wonder Woman.

Aware of lost time,

Marvel Comics launched a new wave of comics

such as Spider-Woman and She-Hulk,

all variations of existing male heroes.

One of these new characters is Carol Danvers,

first known as Ms. Marvel.

In this version,

she is first described as the editor

of a feminist magazine called Woman.

Then you had Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel

with the best costume in comics for a superhero.

It was great!

And then, for Ms. Marvel,

they just put that costume on a woman.

Except...

This is where the train begins to go off the rail a little.

If you look at a comic book male body,

it is a perfect triangle.

You have the broad shoulders

and this ferocious descent to the hips.

And wow!

You look at that and you think, "Oh, baby, he's a hunk!'"

But when you put that same design

on a woman's body,

you run into problems.

The reality was, she's 29 years old.

So, here's a woman who's 29

and, in her life, she's been a secret agent,

chief of security at Kennedy Space Center,

thrown out of the Air Force.

She becomes the editor-in-chief of Woman Magazine.

She has done in a half dozen years

what most of the rest of us

would devote a lifetime, an entire career, to achieving.

And she isn't even 30 yet!

When superheroes began to appear in cinemas,

superwomen swiftly followed.

After Superman,

Hollywood decided to devote an entire film to Supergirl.

However, the results were rather mixed.

When the movie Supergirl was released in the early 80s,

it was on the heels of the success

of Superman with Christopher Reeve,

a movie we know, and that was the first big superhero movie

shown in theaters.

And what's interesting about Supergirl

is seeing how a character

with exactly the same powers and skills as Superman,

so, Supergirl, his cousin,

was not at all portrayed in the same way

and did not do the same things.

When she arrives on Earth, in order to try out her eyes,

the rays that beam out from her eyes,

instead of destroying rocks or something else as impressive,

she makes a little flower grow using her eyes,

because of course, all girls love flowers, don't they?

So, she makes a daisy grow using her eyes.

And when Supergirl flies,

it's not fist forwards like a warrior,

like a conqueror, like Superman.

No, she flits, she's very graceful,

probably because she did ballet as a girl, like all girls,.

It's worth mentioning that, for decades,

most superheroines had been created by men.

Even Wonder Woman had to wait 40 years after her debut

for a woman to finally be able to illustrate her adventures.

So, yes, I drew the first Wonder Woman.

Why did it take so long?

Because comics, comic books,

have traditionally been male-oriented.

I mean, she was created by a man.

He was a super-feminist, you know,

William Moulton Marston.

And he really... In fact,

I believe that he thought women were better than men.

He was definitely a super-feminist.

But she was created by a man,

and she had been written by men and drawn by men,

because that was the comics' tradition.

And I just happened to be around

when the tradition was starting to be broken

and women were finally, finally, very slowly,

getting into comics.

The door opened by Trina Robbins

paved the way for women to play a bigger role

in writing and illustrating comic books.

So, I made the decision to draw comics,

actually knowing nothing about the industry

or how to do the job,

or the art of sequential storytelling.

So, to sort of make it happen, I just had to push myself

and learn as fast as possible,

make sure I was challenging myself all the time,

asking a lot of questions,

sometimes really dumb questions,

so that I could get informed and get better.

And constantly drawing,

constantly trying to stick to short jobs,

so that I could evolve quickly,

and making sure that I put myself out there

and not be shy or embarrassed,

just be arrogant

about the potential of my ability.

I don't know that it was difficult for me

to break in as a woman,

and I know that my story is a little unique in that way

because I know a lot of my female peers

have had a slightly harder time,

or a much harder time, depending.

For me, I think it was a combination

of being a little older when I started...

I was already in my late 20s, early 30s, when I was starting.

Coupled with the fact that being an Australian in America,

and also I'm kind of loud, and bossy and tall.

And, so, people kind of were...

a little surprised to see me.

While Supergirl's first appearance in cinemas

was a missed opportunity,

another character stepped in

to represent women's rights on the big screen.

Catwoman became more than just a criminal.

I was moved by Catwoman

because her journey is not cliché, to my mind.

Her story doesn't give the impression

of showing a revelation or a political act,

and, in the end, it does become one

because no one wants to show it.

In fact, Catwoman,

who was first an enemy of Batman,

appeared before Miss Fury but with a very different disguise.

She gradually drew inspiration from Miss Fury

and finally acquired the costume we know her to wear.

She most closely resembles my own character.

I love her costume.

I love her whole personality.

I drew Catwoman for 30 issues in a row.

That's 22 pages, so that's 440...

660 pages of Catwoman.

I made those many pages

for two years and a half.

It was my daily job, and it was super cool.

She is sexy, and at the same time, she is quite free.

She has a bold personality.

She is independent. I really like this character.

All the while, she remains very feminine.

For me, Catwoman is Tim Burton. It's Tim Burton,

and it's especially Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns.

That was around 1992.

She's really a superwoman between good and evil.

She's a super-feminist,

she defends women who are attacked in the streets,

and she defies Batman.

For me, she's the perfect superheroine.

I think it's modern poetry, actually.

It is about how a being is suffocated

to the point of forgetting they even exist,

and about how they awaken to who they really are.

It's a bit cliché of course,

and it reflects the values of the early 90s

so, women are represented in a very particular way.

But at the end of the day,

because the character is played by an actress

who is portrays her brilliantly,

it's not cliché after all.

And what's great about Catwoman

is the fact that she has a real life.

She works, she has a boss,

and like many women in real life and many people in real life,

she is harassed by her boss. He throws her out the window,

so, of course, that's a bit more extreme than in real life.

With Catwoman's character in the movie by Tim Burton,

what's great is that she actually reclaims

the artifices of femininity

and everything that's supposed to oppress her,

like the clichés that women sow,

that women have to be gentle and sweet.

Catwoman, Selina Kyle, actually, reclaims all that

to make her costume.

And we see it in her amazing transformation scene

where she gets home

after being thrown out the window by her boss, Max Shreck.

She gets home, paints her whole house black,

brings out her sowing machine, and makes her costume.

She reclaims what was a cliché of traditional femininity

to make a weapon,

and she makes her costume out of vinyl patchwork

and creates her claws at the end of her fingers.

Her claws are made of elements used for sowing,

sowing machine spools.

So, she really reclaims everything

that makes up the oppression of women.

And she rules the movie by Tim Burton, in fact,

something that future Catwomen won't do.

I remember the Tim Burton movie, with Michelle Pfeiffer.

She was really, really sexy, but elegant, too.

What interested me most about superheroines

is that they are both elegant and strong.

In the comics, Catwoman, a.k.a. Selina Kyle,

started out as a clearly corrupt criminal.

It was not until about 30 years later

that she began to display a more ambiguous attitude

and then was allowed to have her own solo comics.

Since then, she is clearly a more positive character,

with a role of her own in Batman mythology.

My understanding of the character

is that she's the queen of Gotham

because she can beat the heroes,

because she's a villain,

and she can beat the villains because she's a hero.

And she's the only one that Batman is not going to beat up,

because Batman is in love with her.

He deals with crazy people,

but the only sane person in Gotham City is Selina Kyle.

And she fakes to be crazy sometimes,

but she's in charge of everything.

I like that about the character. It's very deep.

You know, someone like Catwoman,

who kind of weaponizes her sex-appeal,

she's a character that I would absolutely draw in...

sexual and suggestive ways.

But not in a way that's compromising to her,

because she's very much in control.

But then, in the late 90s, early 2000s,

Darwyn Cooke took Catwoman,

not changing her backstory,

but making her less sexualized

and more utilitarian.

Every single part of the costume that he designed had a purpose.

Versus putting on high heels, like we saw in the 90s.

She had boots,

she was wearing things that a thief would need,

she had googles to see in the dark.

So, you can see Catwoman change,

and she's a reflection of the time that she's in,

just like other characters that old.

Catwoman is a sexy character,

but she uses that, she's in charge of it.

That's the difference.

She's not an object. She's an actor.

Yes, she's sexy, of course,

and she uses that to tease people, men and women.

But the line between sexy and sexualisation

can be a very fine one.

Militant heroines claiming ownership of their bodies

sometimes gives way to clichés.

What annoys me is having to represent women

through hyper-sexualized objects.

In everyday life that just doesn't help us.

When I work on younger characters,

I try to be respectful

because we have a serious problem as a society, I think,

with the hypersexualization of women,

and especially teenage women.

We have top models that are 14 years old.

Those are kids.

They don't know about things.

They're not allowed to vote,

and they are selling stuff.

I tend to think

that things mustn't be all of one or all of the other.

Room must be made for stuff.

Of course, is the objectification of characters,

who aren't always of age, not a little controversial?

We've beauty standards that are absolutely impossible.

I remember Cindy Crawford,

the top model in the 90s, saying,

"Oh, I would love so much to look like Cindy Crawford."

It's impossible.

There's a song by Ladytron.

They sing, "You're only funny when you're 17."

"When you're 21, you're no fun."

And we are selling that.

That's not fine as a society.

And as a comic book artist,

you have to know how to draw a 16-year-old woman.

So, the girl has to be pretty, she has to show cleavage...

You have to have a whole list of things

that will really sexualize the character.

It's very hard to handle certain things,

like the fact of not looking like that famous Power Girl

with her big breasts, dressed in a body,

looking amazing and having a lot of people drool.

We're in a moment of our history

that we have to know what we are playing with.

And we're playing with 50% of the world population's feelings.

You know, it's not fair!

When I work on female characters, whoever they are,

I generally always try to find their humanity.

It's more of an inner representation.

I work on micro expressions a lot.

I work on the expression of character and strength a lot.

I try to give a great deal of majesty

to the characters I represent.

But there is still this thing

with your basic superheroine having to be pretty and sexy,

and that bothers me a little.

Whenever a woman in our society...

looks far from the beauty standards,

the impossible beauty standards that we have,

whenever a woman gets there, she's not worthy.

And it's absurd!

I feel like there are some female characters

whose sex-appeal is very much part of their personality.

And, for those characters,

I'm interested in finding

the different flavors of female sexuality and sensuality

that are appropriate to that specific character.

But there are other female characters

where I find it really inappropriate.

There certainly was a whole period

when female characters, in particular,

were shown in very improbable poses.

Especially on covers

with that traditional pose called the "broke back".

There are characters that I couldn't...

that I wouldn't like to draw, because...

Well.

Some characters don't inspire me.

They just wear too few clothes.

At first, I was very inspired by male artists to draw women,

the interpretation of women.

My vision was very masculine.

A character like Wonder Woman,

who is beautiful, and is sexy, and is empowered,

she's not someone

who I would necessarily be doing a butt shot of,

because she represents a different kind of feminine power

and a different kind

of feminine sexuality

of sex-appeal.

It was very sexy, very accentuated

in terms of appearance and pose.

It wasn't that natural.

I wanted keep that sexy side

because that's what I like most about male characters,

but in a more natural, less forced way.

There are things that I couldn't draw

because I find them overkill.

Like those poses showing the character's bottom.

It looks misshapen.

The body is not natural.

Superheroines have therefore

sometimes been looked upon as bimbos.

But things started to change

as more female writers and readers

made their voices heard.

The injustice began to be redressed

through projects that reinvent and restore a forgotten past.

Women have been fighting for a long time,

and it is time to point that out.

In this regard, the modern comic DC Bombshells

is rewriting history

by giving the principal heroines in DC Comics

the lead role in World War II.

I've worked on the DC Bombshells heroines for DC Comics.

It's a very special project

because it's not every day that you're asked

to improvise heroines from the 40s,

to draw something

that's supposed to work in the context of the 40s.

When I started working for DC Comics,

the Bombshells project was still in its development stage.

I saw it come alive and grow before my very eyes.

So, all the superheroes in the DC world

have been reinvented,

with clothes, contextualizations

and references to a historical period

that more or less goes from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Therefore, everything we find in the Bombshells world

is determined by a specific historical period.

And the nice thing is that

each character is reinvented in relation to their specific role.

Working on Bombshells was an amazing experience

because, like I said,

heroines from the 1940s have largely been forgotten,

except for Wonder Woman

who lasted well beyond that era.

And then, we added modern heroines

who were reinvented to adapt to the 1940s.

I had the privilege of creating the designs

for a number of these characters from scratch with Ant Lucia,

a very good colleague,

who is involved in the development

of the entire DC Bombshells world.

I was also offered to create statues

and DC Bombshells-version busts

of Supergirl, Mera, and Wonder Woman,

restyled according to a particular concept

evoking the various sectors of the American army.

One of the characteristics found in the Bombshells characters

is a reference, by analogy, to the poster of Rosie the Riveter.

You can see it in the statues of Supergirl and Wonder Woman,

represented with that classic gesture

of raised arm and closed fist, as a sign of courage,

to convey the idea that we can do anything.

This concept is inseparable from the Bombshells.

Their job is to encourage enthusiasm,

to send a positive message to people,

the message that we can all roll up our sleeves

and move on at any point in our life

and face any difficulty.

I think that the combination of Supergirl and Wonder Woman

is perfect for expressing that concept

and that it fully represents the spirit of the Bombshells.

Marvel's Black Widow

was born out of another conflict, the Cold War.

She starts out as a dangerous Soviet spy

before redeeming herself and going over to the heroes' side.

But her popularity with the general public remained limited

until she began to appear in cinemas

alongside Iron Man and the Avengers.

At first, Black Widow is incredible,

and then, as time goes by,

a few small things shift her back onto the rails

of a more admissible femininity.

She starts taking care of Hawkeye's baby,

she takes an interest in how people are doing.

She's involved with care, with how people are doing,

while Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America

sort out the world's real problems.

It also presents a problem

because the characters' costumes in the movies

are much more elaborate than the original costumes.

For example, if you look at Black Widow,

her costume basically is just a black leather jumpsuit

with bracelets, the belt, and that's it.

The jumpsuit she wears in the movie

has lots of little seams everywhere, accessories...

In Age of Ultron,

she suddenly becomes the one who has to appease the Hulk,

who has to pat his hand.

In a scene where she is opposed to the Hulk, to Bruce Banner,

she even describes herself as a monster

because she can't have children.

It's completely unbelievable.

The issue of refusing or being unable to become a mother

comes up at that point in Black Widow's story

and makes her a monster, which is just staggering.

In France,

film director Simon Astier created Hero Corp,

a television series that turned out to be so popular

as to be turned into a comic book.

The comedy series describes the adventures

of very French supermen.

There aren't many superheroines in HeroCorp.

In my writing today, I do things differently.

I think it's to counter that pattern.

What I did with my last projects,

specifically to counter that law

or way of doing things,

was write characters that I find cool, stylish, and funny,

and give them names at the end.

I also tried to create other characters,

female characters,

that are double-sided

with a cool side and a darker side.

The first movies featuring superheroines,

far from successful,

were booed and ignored by the general public and by critics.

There was a saying in Hollywood

to the effect that superwomen movies were guaranteed to bomb.

Real filmmaking success began to happen

when Wonder Woman finally appeared on the big screen,

and shortly after in films of her own.

I decided to make this Wonder Woman costume

for a competition at Japan Expo.

That choice was based on an idea I'd had

for a performance with the character.

I wanted to create something that could really move on stage,

and we were in full Wonder Woman craze.

The movie had just been released.

And superheroines were something I was interested in.

She remains an icon.

When you see her, you can hardly mistake her for someone else.

In the movie by Patty Jenkins,

Wonder Woman is also a feminist.

I think that can be argued,

even if it's a much more tender, soft kind of feminism

compared to Lynda Carter and the 70s version

where it was really displayed, explicit and really stated.

Wonder Woman is justice.

I mean, she fights for truth,

she has her Lasso of Truth to which no one can lie.

In the movie by Patty Jenkins,

Wonder Woman still has the idea

of making the world a better place,

with as little violence as possible it seems,

even if she does fight.

It's a lot more low-key than in the series.

Despite her very powerful, "nothing can touch me" side,

she does have an inner sensitivity

and something that makes her a bit human.

Even if...

Well, if I were to take a bullet in the shoulder,

I'd burst into tears!

What's interesting about the film by Patty Jenkins

is the way she films Wonder Woman.

Unlike Zack Snyder, she doesn't focus on her buttocks,

with tons of shots of Wonder Woman viewed from behind

when she's fighting, for example.

Patty Jenkins takes a greater interest

in everything that has to do with actual action.

So, she focuses on Wonder Woman's biceps, her calves...

She also films her views from the front and in motion.

Like that incredible scene

where Wonder Woman runs through the trenches,

with wide, front shots of her in full motion.

The Boys, a comic book series

by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson,

is a blithe pastiche of the Justice League.

But under false airs of trashy parody,

room is given to a feminist message through two superwomen,

cynical Queen Maeve and innocent Starlight.

The concept has become a hit TV series on Amazon Prime.

Even The Boys talk about girls!

As far as the women

and how they're treated in the original Boys comic,

the idea back then that Garth had

was inspired by true stories from the 1930s

about Hollywood casting couches

and the way women were treated back in the day.

Queen Maeve is not Wonder Woman.

She just does things like Wonder Woman would do with her powers.

But she's not Wonder Woman

because Wonder Woman has a good heart, a good soul,

and cares about people,

and Queen Maeve is shattered inside.

The conversation that, in the comic,

Starlight and Queen Maeve have

when she first meets her after she's throwing up in the toilet

and runs into Queen Maeve in the bathroom,

that was based on a real conversation

between Marilyn Monroe and Bette Davis that Garth had read,

where Marilyn Monroe said to Bette Davis,

"Oh, I'm so happy to meet you, I'm your biggest fan!"

And Bette Davis told her to fuck off.

In the television show, they're doing a great job

of updating that concept to a more socially aware world,

where Starlight is fighting back a little bit more,

and she's not as victimized.

And Queen Maeve is a little bit more sensitive to the fact

that, you know, she's not going to make it easy on her

but at the same time, Queen Maeve is more sympathetic

to what Starlight is going through.

While Wonder Woman and her variations

began to appear on-screen,

Marvel profoundly reinvented another heroine, Carol Danvers.

Divested of her identity as Ms. Marvel,

she was promoted to Captain Marvel

with a less tight-fitting costume

and a soaring popularity.

When I started working with Captain Marvel,

I had conversations with Kelly Sue DeConnick.

She worked her ass off to make her from a very small character

to something huge.

For a couple of years, maybe three,

she went to all the conventions in the tour.

She wanted a character that's power in the best ways.

I think that sometimes, people make comparisons

between Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman.

But that's wrong.

Captain Marvel is Superman.

In the comparison, she's the strongest one,

the fairest one, the best human being possible,

and she knows that if she's that powerful,

she must be good.

It's like, "With great powers comes great responsibility."

And today, Captain Marvel sends out a stronger message

that "I'm a woman and I take care of myself in this world",

today, as I am."

"I'm a woman and I take care of myself."

She's never threatening unless she must threaten somebody.

She knows people can fail,

because she has failed so many times.

I think she's a good example for people,

not only for women of course.

A hero is not the one who flies.

A hero is the one who, when he falls down, he gets up again.

You're never beat until the moment you don't get up again.

And that's the thing about Captain Marvel.

She's been an alcoholic.

She's been through a lot of crazy shit.

In the movies, Captain Marvel

sort of embodies the message driven home by Wonder Woman

that yes, female superheroes can carry a film

and be box office hits.

Did you think that being a cosplayer

was just about the costume? Think again.

While it's true that reproducing costumes

is technically difficult, there's also a moral challenge.

Wearing these heroines' clothes

also means representing their values.

From the moment you become Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel,

that also involves another form of heroism.

I found out about Captain Marvel through her movie.

And then I said to myself,

"I have to start reading the comics in which she appears."

After fighting my body for a long time,

because, if I may say so, I used to be obese,

I lost weight and I said,

"I too, one day, will not be vulgar, for one thing,"

and for another, I will wear a morph suit

"and interpret a strong heroine."

She's just great.

She's really amazing

because she's a character that reveals nothing.

We get the feeling she keeps everything to herself,

she's very sensitive.

And I thought, "Yes, she's you, really,"

because I really compared myself

to the actress's attitude in the movie,

and in fact, we have a lot of things in common,

even in terms of my personality.

I had to make my very own Captain Marvel.

So, my costume is 100% designed...

in here.

It's my very own creation.

It's my Captain Marvel.

The position she's in at the end of the movie

when she sends her former boss packing, when she beats him up

and tells him, "I have nothing to prove,"

that's kind of how I feel.

Today, I have nothing to prove.

I've taken a 180 degree turn.

It's the same with work.

I made certain decisions a year ago,

and it really coincided with the moment

when I decided to play Captain Marvel's character in cosplay.

Captain Marvel,

from an economic and strategic point of view,

is very important because she gives the green light,

somehow, to other projects

and to the possibility of having superheroines in movies.

And she's a message sent out to producers too,

telling them to go ahead.

Over the past 15 years,

female cosplayers have become more present

in geek festivals than men.

They have profoundly changed an atmosphere

that until recently was mostly masculine.

Female readers used to feel isolated

in a hobby for boys.

But when young women cosplayers

began to appear as Oracle, Starfire, or Raven,

their presence changed the rules.

Thanks to cosplay, women have gained

increasing visibility in comic book culture.

When we cosplay, there's the character aspect

but there also the challenge of the costume.

I hadn't made armors in a very long time,

I wanted to test new materials,

so my costume became a matter of course.

What's cool in cosplay

is that it involves more than just the conventions.

Yes, we have the photoshoots and the interviews,

but then there are the hospitals.

I would like to create a group of people or something,

to go and visit those poor children

or even adult enthusiasts or people who are suffering.

Success changes everything.

For a long time,

the point was to give heroines a place in comics.

But now that this place is acquired,

variety can be brought to these women's profiles.

Rather than fitting a unique model,

superwomen are unlimited in their types.

This provides room for diversity,

including for characters that have been around for ages.

The first superheroine I followed as a kid was She-Ra.

I think everyone remembers the Masters of the Universe.

For me, the first superheroine was She-Ra.

I became so enthusiastic about this genre,

this fantasy genre,

in which the protagonist isn't a damsel in distress

but the person in charge of her own actions

and with the power to save people.

I think it's something that has brought me to perceive women

as unlimited in what they can do.

It's true that I was impressed by She-Ra

because it was a rather revolutionary cartoon

in the sense that...

Careful, spoiler!

The female protagonist ends up with a woman.

Today, I've come out, and that's why I did She-Ra because...

Like I said, my cosplay therapy always matches something,

and She-Ra matched my coming out.

Supergirl also evolved.

No longer just Superman's unassuming cousin,

living in his shadow, she began to be described

as having come to Earth to protect her cousin.

Today, she even has her own TV series,

in which Superman starts out as a secondary character.

Supergirl is acquiring new relevance

and becoming a positive symbol for young girls.

Supergirl...

Well, I'm not a huge fan of Superman and that world,

but I liked Supergirl

because she's was a bit different, a bit younger.

For me, Supergirl symbolizes hope.

It's the symbol she wears on her chest.

She's also a young character,

quite juvenile in the ways she responds

to the world in which she lives.

She doesn't react like Superman, for instance.

She's a bit rough around the edges, a bit hotheaded.

Supergirl is the first important superheroine

in my life

because the first major title I worked on

for DC Comics was Supergirl.

She opened the door to the vista of the whole DC world for me.

And I liked her from the start,

maybe because when I began to draw her,

we were pretty much the same age, Supergirl and I.

To me, she was very clear as a character.

I understood her well,

because she was my age

and I assumed she could do the same things I did,

have the same friends I hung out with.

For me, representing her almost came from the gut

because I didn't have to study much for her.

She's also a very sunny character,

and I like that positive side she embodies.

I think that, in the series,

that aspect of her is very well represented.

What's nice is that the audience is very different,

not necessarily people who are comics fans,

but pretty much anyone can recognize this character

from her symbol.

So, it's fun to play her

because you can really reach and bond with everyone,

with children too.

You can see a lot more in this character

than just a super-strong heroine

that is an absolute symbol or something like that.

While Batwoman was an uninspiring variation

of Batman in the 50s,

she was entirely reinvented in the early 2000s

as a much more competent and modern character.

An LGBT heroine

claiming ownership of her own place in Gotham.

Batwoman is exactly the same thing.

She's a symbol.

But she's a symbol for the entire LGBT community.

And, at the same time,

she's gone through almost the same evolution as Supergirl.

In the 50s,

Batwoman was not represented in the way she is now.

Rather like Supergirl,

she wasn't charismatic or a feminist.

She used all sorts of rather useless accessories,

like her famous eyeshadow.

She was also just Batman's sidekick, really,

and, for the same reason, here to develop the Bat Family.

But in the early 2000s...

It was in 2006 that Greg Rucka, the screenwriter,

created that character.

We are poles apart from the 50s Batwoman.

She becomes a very strong, very charismatic character,

she's a soldier, part of the army,

and she goes through a lot of terrible things in her life.

That's the character that appealed to me,

even with regard to my own experience,

and that helped me move forward,

especially with regard to her own sexuality

and her own personal journey.

Today, we have Batwoman, who's in a relationship with a woman.

It's a cause of mine,

not only women in movies but also homosexuality,

and I think it is important to say it.

And today, things are being taken even further.

To me, LGBT representation in comics is essential

because it brings diversity to comics,

even if that diversity has always been there.

What was impossible in 1941,

when Wonder Woman's creator

only implied the heroine's bisexuality,

is, today, explicit in many titles.

She-Ra and Batwoman aren't the only characters concerned.

Even Marvel's Asgard takes an interest in LGBT issues.

Angela is a pansexual character.

She's in a relationship with a trans woman,

who was developed for the series.

She's Thor and Loki's forgotten sister.

There was no particular pressure.

With Kieron and Jimenez,

we tried to deal with the question rather quickly

because that wasn't the most important point.

The character is important

but that particular story isn't the focus.

Their collective story is the focus.

She's a character like any other,

with a background like everyone else.

That's one of the things I appreciate the most,

I have always been given free rein to interpret things my way.

I was never asked to reframe things one way or another.

Alters, a series by Paul Jenkins and Leila Leiz,

issued by independent publisher Aftershock,

also addresses these issues

through the prism of superheroes.

Alters is the story of a young boy, Charlie,

who is transitioning to become a woman.

In the meantime, he also discovers

that he has special powers.

And as he's in that transition to become a woman,

he transforms into Chalice to do justice in the city.

Diversity also means differences in appearance

as well as in tone and story type.

Who would have thought that one day

we would meet a superwoman with squirrel powers?

At the same time,

there's a lot of superheroes who don't have that standard,

that unrealistic proportions that they had in the 90s,

and they find their audience too.

For example, Squirrel Girl is a college student

who's drawn, these days, a little bigger,

not tiny-waisted,

the way characters in the 90s were drawn.

I found out about her in the comics,

and, for me, she was completely kitsch.

A woman with squirrel powers, to me, was completely absurd.

What are your superpowers?

Well, I have squirrel powers

and I can beat the biggest bad guys in the Marvel world.

But she's also intelligent enough to build strategies

to defeat bad guys

that no other character has managed to overcome.

Following in Captain Marvel's footsteps,

a number of heroines

are claiming equality with male heroes

by replacing them.

In comics, Jane Foster, Thor's former fiancée,

ended up taking on her friend's identity and powers.

And Wolverine, for a few years,

took a back seat to a female clone,

his biological daughter of sorts.

Sometimes, a character takes the mantle

of another superhero.

We have seen it in Thor.

We have seen it in Wolverine.

The point is that,

lately, there's a reactionary movement

against women becoming powerful,

having their part of power, the part they deserve.

And they get angry

because now Wolverine can be a woman for a while.

But they didn't complain when Thor was a frog.

And Thor was a frog for some time,

and nobody cared about that!

I think it's OK as long as the story is a good story.

And All-New Wolverine was a good story.

I think that

the perfect image of superheroes was readjusted over the years.

They began to be designed as more human

in terms of appearance.

I remember Ms. Marvel.

As the years went by,

she was completely revolutionized

to become closer to a concept of someone we could meet

in our neighborhood, someone we could meet at the supermarket.

And I think that's a very beautiful thing.

Carol Danvers abandoned the name Ms. Marvel

in order for her to better become Captain,

and the Ms. Marvel identity

was attributed to a young, modern heiress

in Marvel's first regular series

with a Muslim female protagonist.

Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, is really a small revolution.

She was even a big revolution

at the time when she first appeared.

She was everywhere.

It was amazing to see a new generation of heroines arrive

and represent a new generation of female readers too.

She's a young Pakistani and Muslim girl,

created by two Muslim women.

At the time, when she appeared in the Marvel world,

it was a small revolution,

not only because her character didn't exist before that point,

but also because she reached a new readership.

Other people, other female readers,

began to take an interest in this type of heroine,

and it really revolutionized, in a way,

the comic's readership at the time.

Maybe a Muslim girl might find herself

sharing stories of Ms. Marvel

more than sharing stories about Captain America and stuff.

But I think...

I like the growth, but it should only be the beginning.

Diversity can be achieved at any level.

There is room for heroines such as Kamala Khan or Squirrel Girl,

but also for more cynical female characters

marked by life, such as Jessica Jones.

Jessica Jones is superheroine meets American film detective.

To me, she's really a true-fake superheroine.

She's a heroine adapted from a comic for Netflix,

but she's been adapted by a woman

who has, to my mind, brought new balance to things

compared to the comics.

A woman who has changed a few things.

She doesn't wear a sexy costume in the series.

She won't smile,

and so, she's actually an anti-supergirl.

In Jessica Jones,

the first bad guy sent against her is Kilgrave,

a man who invades her thoughts and forces her to do things.

And even if it's not very explicit in the series,

it seems that Kilgrave raped and assaulted Jessica Jones

before we meet her in the series.

So, Jessica Jones is a very modern series and character

because if she raises the issue of consent,

she raises the issue of rape.

What Kilgrave forces her to do is smile.

He tells her, "Smile."

as Jessica Jones' smile is a mark of her submission.

It's why she refuses to smile

for a very long time in the series

and it's why, for her, smiling is a form of domination.

Be it in the movies or in real life,

there's always this thing about women having to smile,

to be nice, to be cute. Jessica Jones rejects all that.

At the end of our trip, it is clear

that 80 years after Miss Fury and Wonder Woman were created,

superheroines have become a phenomenon

representing many profiles of women.

A female comic book artist in San Francisco

now speaks much the same language

as other female artists in Rome or Toulouse.

New heroines are created every month

and are gradually helping to make up

for decades of lost time.

As long as injustice remains,

superwomen will be there to fight it.

Today, I think we are seeing a reversing trend,

and we now have interesting heroines.

We started off

with more female customers than male customers here,

from 2017.

Whatever the direction comics were going,

we were benefitting from it being more open to others.

I think the representation of women in comics,

both in the stories as characters and as creators,

has been problematic in the past

but it's getting better and better.

The reader is not the traditional male reader.

The fanbase really shifted in the last ten years.

I think around 2009, 2010,

there was a definite shift in the fanbase

towards a more female-dominated group.

We are not an exception.

I am convinced that a great many of us in the world read comics.

We realize that the girls can save the day for the guys,

that they can succeed in finding the necessary solution

to solving one problem or another.

Today we have our place in comics and that's beautiful.

It's nice to see girls and superheroines finally come along

and prove that they're just as strong as men.

That does feel good.

There are a lot of female writers,

a lot of female artists, a lot of female editors.

The era of Supergirl, Catwoman, Elektra characters,

who were box office duds, is over.

Now, money can be made with superwomen,

and I think that's helping to start new projects

with such characters.

There's a huge female audience

and so, I think that's really exciting.

It's make comics better.

We're in an era where the girls are taking their place.

They will be our kids' heroes.

I think there is a wide variety of superheroes

of different races, and ages, and genders,

but it is only the beginning, I think.

Superheroines of tomorrow

will be invented by young female readers of today,

just as Trina Robbins or Nicola Scott

once admired these characters before starting to draw them.

Today, young girls in turn are passionately interested

in Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.

They will be the ones to carry the torch into the future.

The reign of superwomen is far from over!