Women Who Deserve Solo Titles

With Marvel releasing several new women fronted solo - limited series - comics in the new year I think it's important to draw attention to women that have spent years in the background and deserve the spotlight…

Now some of these women have had very short series in the past but their time front and center was short lived and they deserve more. The big two (Marvel and DC) are quick to pull the plug on books and characters that don’t sell without actually giving their target audience a chance to find them. The reality is that young women have been shoved out of comic book spaces for decades, women have also been portrayed like crap in comics since the beginning of comic book time so women who are fans of comics aren’t always going to catch the one female lead series out of thousands of titles right away. Marvel and DC need to give these women time to connect with their target audience, they are both big enough to suffer some losses in the meantime.

First up we have X-Men favorite, Rogue. Most of the male X-Men characters have had ongoing and long running solo series; Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Cyclops….and Rogue has had 1, it lasted 12 issues. Now with a woman as interesting and iconic as Rogue, why wouldn’t her series have at least lasted longer? Comic book writers have a terrible habit of writing solo series for women characters as limited runs. Rogue more than deserves her own ongoing title.

Speaking of the X-Men, Storm has had a couple of limited engagements but as the wife of Black Panther in some runs and the leader of the X-Men in others, she will always deserve more solo arcs. The problem really is that most comic book writers write these women as accessories to a team and then can’t figure out how to break them out of that. When you don’t actually talk to real human women it can be hard to write fictional women with their own voices.

One more in the context of the X-Men and then I will move on, Emma Frost. Now she has in fact had a solo series but we all know I’m going to announce the wild problems with it. Emma’s single solo run was entirely hinged upon her being oversexualized. It was in fact her only personality trait, in fact her facial features change on every single cover but you know what doesn't? Her tits.

Moving onto some DC, first on the list we have Raven who has had exactly one solo engagement that lasted 5 issues. Arguably one of the most powerful magic beings in the DC universe and she only has 1 solo series. There is so much to explore and flesh out in her backstory and quite frankly the original Teen Titans cartoon did it better then most of her comic book appearances have.

Finally and you know I wasn’t gonna get through this article without mentioning Hawkgirl. Shayera lived in Hawkman’s shadow for 60 years, she was in the background of their joint appearances until Hawkman was renamed for Hawkgirl for exactly 17 issues before the run was retitled again. With the DC cinematic universe rebooting it is time to bring my girl back into the spotlight.

Of course there are about 100 more women that are being wasted among the pages of comics who deserve their own titles but these are the women I think would sell the best and bring the most incredible stories back to women who love to read comics. I truly hope 2023 is a year full of female lead comics!