The Four Color Media Monitor

I recently noticed another terrible thing DC's been doing: turning at least two of their teenage girl protagonists into killers, and I think it's embarrassingly bad, so I thought I'd write a little list of what I found. For example, in the recent Batgirl miniseries, it's written that Cassandra Cain, when she went in with the League of Assassins, resorted to gangland killings. Reading about this, I realized why hiring the same writer who'd screwed up her character in the first place, Adam Beechen, is a big mistake. If he didn't succeed the first time, there's no chance he'll manage the second.

Then, in Final Crisis #3, the following was done with Mary Marvel:

Wonder Woman has gone to Bludhaven because of reports that someone has taken it over. She is escorted by the Atomic Knights. Inside Bludhaven they find dead S.H.A.D.E. agents, killed by Mary Marvel who has been altered by Darkseid. Mary succeeds in taking down Wonder Woman by infecting her with the Anti-Life Equation.

Wow, is that disgusting, and even if she's been brainwashed by Darkseid, and even if Cassie was brainwashed by Deathstroke's drugs, it's still going overboard, and would be if these were adults too.

Even earlier, in Supergirl last year, they kept hitting us nastily over the head with the supposed idea that Kara had been sent to earth to slay her cousin Kal-El when he was an infant. All in order to make her father Zor-El more of a flawed figure than he originally was, and Kara too. I'm sorry, but sometimes it just doesn't pay to try and make some protagonists anti-heroes. I hope that story's been abandoned since then.

DC sure isn't helping matters by writing tasteless storylines that make it less possible to appreciate their teen heroines, and even anti-heroines, and the above examples are very unappealing indeed.

Update: even Marvel once published a story featuring some teenaged girl killers, in Deadpool #52 several years ago. I once read a few issues of that bizarre series years ago, but was not impressed by its black humor approach at all, and this sure didn't help the series much.

Labels: dc comics, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, Supergirl, women of dc