ABSTRACT
In January 2017, Marvel released 20 superhero comics fronted by a female protagonist (Newsarama 2016). In Marvel’s nearly 60 years of publishing modern, monthly superheroes, they’ve never offered so many books featuring a female lead. This push is a clear and concerted effort on behalf of the publisher to reach what it sees as a fresh, booming audience—female readers. Axel Alonso, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, admits as much, “the eyes don’t lie. If you go to conventions and comic book stores, more and more female readers are emerging. They are starved for content and looking for content they can relate to” (quoted in Schneker, 2014: np). For Marvel, “content they can relate to” means more superheroines; while this wrongly presupposes that female fans can only relate to female characters, it has vastly increased both the presence and positive depiction of women in mainstream comics.
