A good character can enthrall you. They can inspire you. They can make you sick waiting a month for the next issue of a comic. There is a reason some characters have been around in comics for over 70 years. Unfortunately, female characters in comics are many times relegated to damsels in distress or women in refrigerators. It is important to have and celebrate strong, interesting, and flawed female characters.
These are some of my favorites:
Wonder Woman/Diana Prince
Wonder Woman was created so girls would have a hero like them to look up to. We need her now as much as we did then.
Lois Lane
Lois Lane will get the truth, the story, and the Pulitzer. When I was little I had a tape with a bunch of public domain cartoons on it, and I loved watching Lois. Now that I’m older, I love reading her.
Spoiler/Robin/Batgirl/Stephanie Brown
The unsinkable Stephanie Brown. She showed us a girl can be Robin. She makes a lot of mistakes, but the most heroic part of her story? No matter what, she always gets back up and fights.
Batgirl/Oracle/Barbara Gordon
Barbara dressed up as gender-swapped Batman for Halloween, saved Bruce Wayne from Killer Moth, and decided to become a superhero. After hanging up her tights, the Joker paralyzed her. She wheeled herself out of the fridge and used her brains to become the most powerful being in the DC universe.
Catwoman/Selina Kyle
She’s morally ambiguous, completely fascinating, and my favorite character in comics. She is perfectly believable as the villain and the hero while never quite being either. She is flawed and tough and very much the product of the city the made her.
There are other female characters I like, and a few that are working their way into my heart (I’m looking at you Black Widow and Captain Marvel), but these characters are ones that really got into my core. They resonated with me when I first encountered them, and they still do all these years later.
