ABSTRACT
Since the inception of the ‘superhero’ genre of comic books, women have had a continuous presence. With the exception of Wonder Woman, however, it took a long time until female superheroes came to the fore. When they did, they were generally representatives of mainstream white American culture, and subordinate to the more dominant, ubiquitous superheroes and their sidekicks. The 1970s, the same decade that saw the rise of The Black Panther-the fi rst African-American superhero to receive his own series despite the fact that he had been in The Fantastic Four since 1966 (Daniels 1991, 158)—witnessed the arrival of a number of ethnic superheroes in the Marvel universe, including Luke Cage (African-American), Red Wolf (Native American) and Shang-Chi (Asian) (Baron 2003, 49). The core membership of the X-Men, Marvel’s most successful series, grew to include Storm, an African-American who believed that she was the reincarnation of a goddess. Easily quantifi able, that is, ‘racial,’ qualities were the dominant way in which ethnicity was signaled to the reader. During the ‘ethnic revival’ of the 1960s and 1970s, superheroes began to display other, more subtle signals of difference. Seventeen years after the X-Men’s fi rst appearance, John Bryne and Terry Austin drew female superheroes marked not by physical difference but rather by the reliance on signs and iconic imagery that carried symbolic and, often, stereotypical signifi cation (Robbins 1996, 131). Interestingly, the fi rst of these was Jewish; the Southerner appeared the following year.
