In case you missed last week’s column (“Confessions of a Comic Book Guy - They Just Don’t Get It”), I wrote about some of the current Marvel comics featuring female protagonists that I like.  I stressed that I liked them not because I was somehow obligated to because I was a card-carrying member of The Sinister Diversity/Inclusion Agenda, but because they were (a) good, and (b) different.  So there won't be any confusion later, first let me define my terms.  “Good,” of course, is as subjective as it is self-evident (i.e. you know it when you see it, but you might not see it) and by different, I definitely didn’t mean “featuring a female protagonist.” Although, in this instance, I actually kind of did.

I keep on saying that I’m always on the lookout for what’s new and next, and one of the troubles with superhero comics is the sameness. Audience expectations frequently put a stranglehold on innovation.  What makes these comics “innovative” isn’t the gender of their leads but rather that standard superhero stories are given the chance to be told from an unfamiliar perspective, one that often refuses to take conventional genre tropes and types at face value.  Those ideas can take stories in genuinely unexpected directions (see Squirrel Girl.)

These comics neither look nor read like anything else being published by Marvel at the moment, and none of them resemble each other. Last week I gave special attention to Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur but I also mentioned Ms. Marvel, Squirrel Girl, Spider-Woman and A-Force.  I also really should have mentioned Black Widow, Patsy Walker a.k.a. Hellcat, Thor and Mockingbird.  The lack of the latter was especially glaring given that it was one of my flat-out favorite from Marvel Comics.  As previously established (see “Confessions of a Comic Book Guy - The Best Superhero TV Show (Not Currently) On Television”), I have a deep affinity for super-spy comics, and since Dick Grayson went back to being Nightwing, mainstream comics was without a single spy comic.  Until Marvel’s Mockingbird.

I'm categorizing Bobbi Morse as a “super-spy” because it's probably the best way to think of the character.  She's definitely much more effective, as well as interesting, in the role of S.H.I.E.L.D. agent than she ever was as the marginal, non-powered, oddly-costumed “superhero” gymnast she’s been for the last couple of decades. Written by Chelsea Cain and illustrated by Kate Niemczyk, the scripts are cunning and frequently quite funny (Bobbi is the new queen of snarky wisecracks) and the art is strikingly beautiful.  It's an adventure series dealing with what life might be like for a ‘normal’* person in the Marvel Universe, as well as tackling gender roles and the politics of superpowers, with enough leftover space for a bit of actual romance.

I really wish I had written all of that last week.  If you somehow haven’t heard, this piece by Ryan Grenoble from The Huffington Post says it all with its headline, “Feminist Comic Book Author Quits Twitter Amid Storm of Abusive Tweets.”  If that’s not sufficient, there’s always the subhead, “Chelsea Cain got tired of strangers yelling at her ‘because I was a woman’” to bring home the point.  It quotes Cain as saying she “received ‘thousands’ of mean-spirited tweets celebrating the end of the series.”  The trigger apparently being the cover to Mockingbird #8, the final issue, which features a shot of Bobbi Morse wearing a t-shirt reading “Ask me about my feminist agenda.”

I really, really don’t want to believe there are “thousands” of comic book fans who are this incredibly vicious, cowardly, and obviously threatened by women. This response has more to do with the seemingly endless morass of racism and misogyny that continues to spew out of the Internet minute by minute.  It doesn’t matter who they are or how many of them there are.

I wish I could come up with something clever and original to say about this but if it doesn’t make me sound too much of a “bleeding heart” (for those too young, this is what you called someone that had the audacity to care about the suffering of others before they came up with the much snazzier “Social Justice Warrior”), I’m too heartsick over the current state of our society to even make an attempt.  To be honest, in a year that’s been absolutely jam-packed with stupidity, hate, and fear, this latest incident barely even registers.

So instead I’ll just quote from Kelly Hoover who tweeted Cain her support.  When the question of “how do we fix this” came up her response was “To start, call out the bad behavior when you see it, support/listen to marginalized voices, take harassment claims at face value.” It may not be much, but I know from hard personal experience you can’t ignore a bully.  Not for very long anyway.

*’Normal’ of course being a relative thing.  Even without the super spy and superhero trappings Bobbi Morse is a genius scientist, Olympic level athlete, and insanely good looking.  In the Marvel Universe that makes you more or less average.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.