ABSTRACT
Latinx comic book artists/writers have played an important role in crafting superheroines with Latino and other backgrounds that have helped improve the paradigms of gender, race, and class in American superhero comic books. The role of Latino artists George Perez and Jaime Hernandez is particularly important in changing both the independent and corporate perceptions of heroic women while creating more intersectional American comics. In the WWII era, the American comic book industry saw the rise of several superheroines such as Wonder Woman. Scholar Marc DiPaolo discusses the development of the character in detail in his book War, Politics, and Superheroes: Marston created the comic book character Wonder Woman to be both strong and sexy, as a means of encouraging women to emulate her unapologetic assertiveness. This chapter shows how parody affects genre intertextuality and how important the ethnic author is in disrupting what the audience understands as conventional signifiers.
