In Q & A, a weekly feature of Fantastic Fangirls, we ask our staff to tackle a simple question — then open the floor to comments.

If you woke up tomorrow with superpowers, would you fight crime?

Anika

Are you kidding? I wake up most days wanting to fight crime without superpowers. I routinely look for cybernetic projects seeking beta-testers or other volunteers. I surround myself with images ( this is posted on my bulletin board at work) and words ( like “The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.” – Clarice Starling; Hannibal) to remind me to stand up to injustice in my every day normal lacking super powers existence. I believe, firmly, that “with great power comes great responsibility”. I also believe, equally firmly, that I already have great power. We all do.

Caroline

Look, I’m gonna level with you. I don’t think that getting superpowers would change my priorities all that much. I’ve got a mortgage, you know? I have to go to work every day, feed myself, pay the cable bill, buy comics. If I had superpowers, unless they involved the superpower not to need food or clothing or shelter, would they really make that much difference in my day-to-day life? How many superpowers are really all that useful for fighting crime anyway? Isn’t “crime” just indicative of larger social problems? I watched five seasons of The Wire. There wasn’t anything going on there that would have been fixed if McNulty could punch really hard. Probably more brutality complaints. Superman could use his X-Ray vision all he wanted, they’d still have to figure out how to fit that type of surveillance onto a warrant.

So basically? Superpowers: not that good for fighting crime. Also, I’m kind of a slacker.

Sorry ‘bout that, Spider-Man.

Jennifer

I’m honestly not sure what I would do if I woke up with superpowers. I suppose it would depend entirely on what powers I acquired. I’m not a violent person by nature, and I can’t see myself using any power that requires doing physical harm to another human being, except in the most extreme circumstances. If I could shoot fire from my fingertips, I’d probably only use it to keep my tea warm. And, honestly, I don’t see much crime being committed on a day-to-day basis. I can’t fight what I don’t know about, and I can’t imagine any kind of powers I could acquire would solve the more macro-level societal problems I am aware of. If I woke up with a nonviolent but otherwise fairly useless power like telekinesis or flight, it’s likely I’d just use it for fun, multitasking, and party tricks.

But there are instances where I could see myself using a power to help others, if not to fight crime in particular. If I woke up with telepathy and wound up overhearing someone planning to harm someone else, for example, I’d like to think I’d find a way to prevent them from carrying out the action. If I woke up with healing powers, I’d have to think carefully about my limitations and how not to become some kind of government experiment, but I would definitely use them to help what people I could. In these circumstances, I think the weight of responsibility would fall on my shoulders. But otherwise? I’d just enjoy myself in little ways and try to live a normal life.

Sigrid

… That would really depend. When I was younger, when I was responsible for only me, I would have. Absolutely yes. But I am a parent now, and my goals have changed. My job, in an absolutely fundamental sense, is to produce two adults who can function in society with a reasonable degree of personal satisfaction. Does fighting crime fit into that?

Well, it might or it might not.

Would I put myself in the way of physical harm? Probably not. I take enough risks with my life every day, driving to and from work. I don’t really need to add to that. But if I could fight crime in some other way, likely yes.

I would probably try to stay quiet about it, though. I’ve seen WAY too many movies, tv shows, and stories in other forms about what happens to the Special Ones when they are discovered. Labs and testing and experiments, no thank you. Still, I would try to help in some way.

With great power comes great responsibility. Want it or not. Like it or not.

So what about you? If you woke up tomorrow with superpowers, would you fight crime?

In Q & A, a weekly feature of Fantastic Fangirls, we ask our staff to tackle a simple question — then open the floor to comments.

Who is your favorite mother in comics?

Anika

So really my answer is Mary Jane Parker in the original Spider-Girl or Aunt May, particularly in Spider-Man 2 but since I used both Mary Jane and that movie in my answer last week:

My daughter and I watched Secretariat for Mother’s Day Sunday. Diane Lane is one of my favorite actresses (she was in Judge Dredd you guys. And Jumper! And stuff) and is nearly the only reason I have any interest in the new Superman movie. But she’s honestly enough. And as far as mothers go, Martha Kent is tops! From the moment she picked up that baby, she was Kal-El’s mom. Clark Kent is super powered because of his Kryptonian blood and Earth’s yellow sun, but he’s a super man because of Ma Kent.

Caroline

The Vertigo series Scalped, by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera, begins by introducing Dashiell Bad Horse, an undercover FBI agent working on the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Scalped is a brilliantly-crafted crime story from page one, but it didn’t really start gripping me until we met Dashiell’s mother:

Gina Bad Horse is a seventies radical turned modern-day activist. In her son’s opinion, she didn’t do a great job as a mother. But as the series’ interwoven timelines progress, we learn about Gina’s history, and how it continues to affect Prairie Rose in the present day (even though, for plot reasons, we don’t see much of her in the present action).

Scalped is a great series full of complex characters, but I would read a whole series just about Gina Bad Horse.

Jennifer

Raven Darkholme is not going to win a Mother of the Year award any time soon. As the villainous shapeshifter Mystique, she’s made more of a habit of complicating her children’s lives, or being absent from them entirely, than actually being motherly. Her biological sons, Nightcrawler and Graydon Creed, are both dead, and she was never very involved with either of them. Her adopted daughter, Rogue, meanwhile, is, last time I checked, not speaking to her, and for good reason: over the years, Mystique has done everything from forcing Rogue down a path of villainy to seducing her boyfriend “for her own good.”

Yet there’s something compelling about the idea of Mystique as a mother in a genre where most mothers are the saintly dead or, if alive, defined entirely by their role as a mother. Those sorts of characters are fine, and often necessary, but it’s nice to see a character whose motherhood is only one aspect of her incredibly complicated personality. Mystique, for all her flaws, does see herself as a mother figure — she and her lover Destiny took Rogue in voluntarily, after all, and gave her the first stable home she’d had in a long time. But Mystique is also a villain, a manipulator, a mercenary, a former government agent, and a thousand other things. Her motherhood enhances her character instead of reducing it, and though she’s far from my favorite character or my favorite mother in terms of actual merits, she represents one of the best, most complex portrayals of motherhood in comics.

Sigrid

Nikki Savage.

The mother of the Hopeless Savages, Nikki has lived a wild life. Punk rock star, drug addict in recovery, devoted wife and mother — Nikki has done enough to be sure of herself as a person, and she has screwed up enough to have a realistic view of what is or is not a problem with her kids. You can meet Nikki Savage for yourself in Hopeless Savages Greatest Hits, by Jen van Meter. I highly recommend it.

So what about you? Who is your favorite mother in comics?

In Q & A, a weekly feature of Fantastic Fangirls, we ask our staff to tackle a simple question — then open the floor to comments.

What comic book character would make a good girlfriend?

Anika

So here’s the thing. If you are good at being a superhero you suck at being a girlfriend. And if you are a superhero’s girlfriend it sucks to be you (but not as much as it sucks to be a superhero’s wife). I’m almost scared to answer who “would” make a good girlfriend because what if it happens? Either a favorite superheroine screws someone over (or screws up superheroing) or a favorite heroine is screwed over. Therefore, I’ll stick with my already-is-the-best-girlfriend-in-comic-books answer:

“I know you think we can’t be together, but can’t you respect me enough to let me make my own decision? I know there’ll be risks but I want to face them with you. It’s wrong that we should be only half alive… half of ourselves. I love you. So here I am – standing in your doorway. I have always been standing in your doorway. Isn’t it about time somebody saved your life?” (Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man 2)

Caroline

It’s tempting to say, “It depends on who wants a girlfriend and what kind of girlfriend they want.” But those are real world questions for people with real world problems. If you live in a comic book world, you can pretty much never go wrong with a blonde who takes no crap and carries a shotgun.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Tulip O’Hare, of the Vertigo series Preacher:

You might have to fight Jesse Custer for her, though. And that could be tricky, but I feel better about your chances than if you had to fight Tulip for Jesse.

Don’t mess with Tulip. This is what I’m saying.

Jennifer

My first thought was to respond to this question with Thom Zahler’s Abby Tennyson, to complement my Love and Capes boyfriend answer. But in the interest of avoiding repetition, I’ll instead give the honor to the very first and still most important girlfriend in superhero comics, the character without whom Abby would not exist: Lois Lane.

I’m not really a Superman reader — I’ve read a few standalone trades, but little in regular continuity. I’ve seen Superman Returns and a few episodes of Lois and Clark, but I haven’t seen any other Superman movie and I’ve never even watched Smallville or any of the cartoons. Yet the image of Lois Lane is burned in my mind nonetheless, and I consider Lois and Clark to be the top of the top when it comes to superhero couples. A woman who is as devoted to her job as she is to her relationship, who is able to (or will be able to) take her boyfriend’s superhero identity in stride, who manages to kick ass even with a long history of damsel-in-distress moments, who manages to be the kind of person who can make the most perfect person on the planet go weak in the knee — Lois Lane is the template on which all comic book girlfriends have been based, and she more than deserves that honor.

Sigrid

Irene Merryweather would made a really decent girlfriend for me. She is smart, has a wry sense of humor, and keeps her head in a crisis. She is excellent at organization, and would understand the complexities of juggling the schedules of two children, four or more adults, homeschooling, work, and leisure. After managing Cable’s island nation of Providence, my house and life would look trivial. She wouldn’t mind the chaos at my house, and she wouldn’t mind the book-related clutter. She’s also used to sharing and doesn’t get jealous very easily. After all, she shared Cable with Deadpool. As a reporter she would have her own life and career and interests, but not at a superhero level of risk.

Plus, there’s the cute glasses and the red hair. Yep. I’m sold.

So what about you? What comic book character would make a good girlfriend?

In Q & A, a weekly feature of Fantastic Fangirls, we ask our staff to tackle a simple question — then open the floor to comments.

What character would you like to see depicted as queer?

Anika

Anya Corazon has already had an impact on the comic book industry. She’s Hispanic, she was raised by a single dad, she’s a young woman who’s had her own title twice, she has an in-character Twitter. If I were in charge at Marvel/Disney I would be green-lighting her movie (starring Selena Gomez) so fast it would probably be hastened and mishandled (I watch a lot of Disney Channel, I know of what I speak. But you know what? Even a sub-par Spider-Girl Disney Channel movie would be one of the best things to ever happen to girl comics AND the Disney Channel. Or put it on ABC Family and you have new fans with their own babysitting money to spend.) Anya doesn’t need to be gay to secure her place in history and there is a school of thought that claims adding it would be diminishing the impact of any of her reasons to be “special”. But let’s set aside politics and literary/historical significance. Let’s talk about Anya.

Anya is young. She’s fiercely independent and wants to make an impact on her world. But she wants to fit in and be accepted just as much as she wants to stand out and be respected. Hey, she’s a teenage girl. She’s had two significant mentors, Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel. And she loves her best friend, Rikki. It would be very easy to believe she is in love with her best friend, Rikki.

At the end of the day it probably would be political for Anya to come out. But it wouldn’t diminish her any more than it diminished Santana on Glee (and wouldn’t that be a great jumping off point? An in-character discussion of the impact of fictional characters, and specifically young women, being revealed as queer!). It would just be another layer of Anya’s wonderfully layered character. It’d be another reason to celebrate her diversity, and to support her title, and to give her her movie.

Caroline

Rebecca Barnes aka Rikki Barnes aka Nomad aka The Girl from Another World. Created as part of the ‘90s Onslaught crossover, Rikki has been charmingly reinvented in a series of comics written by Sean McKeever: the Nomad miniseries, Young Allies, the current Onslaught Unleashed mini, and a series of backups in the Captain America backups.

Rikki is a traditional Marvel teen hero in every sense: brave, smart, determined, and earnest, a perfect addition to the Captain America family. She’s even a legacy hero, taking on the identity of Nomad (after serving as an alternate universe Bucky in her original books). Also in the fine tradition of teen heroes, Rikki struggles with questions about her identity. Who is she? Where does she fit in? Admittedly Rikki’s questions are more literal than those of your average teen — that’s the way it goes when your entire universe blinks out of existence, and you find yourself trying to fit into a new one that’s familiar-but-different. Then again, that feeling isn’t so different from what a lot of teenagers (and adults) experience on a regular basis.

It’s precisely Rikki’s traditionality — her ability to stand in for “every teen” — that makes me want her relationship with Anya (see Anika’s answer above) to be depicted as a romance. It would fit the characters, it would depict a step that’s a part of life for many teens and families, and plus they’re just so damn cute together. Put Rikki in a tux and Anya a suitably eccentric dress (you’ve seen some of her outfits, right?), and send them to prom together. It would rock.

Jennifer

For a queer character to really make an impact on the foundational makeup of a superhero universe, he or she needs to be a character who has been around for a long time, has some amount of popular name recognition, and has a somewhat important role in the universe. Unfortunately, because of the massive number of stories that have been told about every character who fits that description, and because many of those stories feature romances with the opposite sex, it’s hard to envision a character who could believably be revealed as having been gay all along. There are characters who could be revealed to be bisexual, and I wish the comic book companies would take that route more often than they do, but it’s important for characters to exist all along the spectrum of human sexuality, and that includes characters who are 100% gay.

So my search, then, is for a superhero with enough history to make an impact — in the Marvel Universe, we’re talking a character from the 1960s — who doesn’t have a ton of heterosexual backstory and who isn’t such a household name that Marvel would never make them queer for fear of marketing repercussions. (I fully believe that Wolverine has had dalliances with people of both genders, for instance, but I’m not holding my breath for that to actually happen.) And the character who fits this description best, when all is said and done, is original X-Men Bobby Drake — Iceman.

Bobby Drake has only had a handful of romantic relationships on panel: teenage flings with a civilian named Zelda and with Lorna Dane, who he canonically never slept with; his X-Factor-era relationship with Opal Tanaka; and relationships with Cloud, a gender-switching sentient nebula, and the shapeshifting Mystique. Since his debut in 1963, the Bobby Drake of the 616 Marvel universe has only definitely slept with one woman who couldn’t turn herself into a man.

Meanwhile, almost all of his character development has focused on his lack of self-knowledge and self-confidence, his fear of using his powers to the fullest possible extent, and his uncertainty about his place in the world. A story in which he comes to terms with his sexuality would be part and parcel with everything that’s come before, taking his internal conflict to the next level. Even in the X-Men movies, where Bobby had an entirely different personality, it was his mutant “coming out” that Bryan Singer used as a deliberate gay metaphor. And, as Caroline has pointed out before, he’s the only “straight” guy in the X-Men who Northstar has canonically had a crush on. Why couldn’t that be reciprocated?

In X-Men comics right now, Bobby Drake is single, plotless, and living just outside of San Francisco. I can’t think of a better time and place for him to come out, and retroactively become one of the oldest gay superheroes in comic book history.

Sigrid

I want to see Dick Grayson come out as bisexual. Men who are bi are largely invisible in our culture, even more so than women. Yet it is a long-standing fan in-joke that Dick Grayson is considered attractive by nearly everyone he meets. He has dated a number of women and also had a number of close male friendships, particularly during his Teen Titan years. I can easily believe that Grayson, at some point, finds that his feelings toward his male friends have deepened into something more romantic.

Yet that’s not all of why I want Grayson to come out. As a second-tier legacy character, his queering would have an impact on the DCU. It would be difficult to wave his queering away or ignore it.

Besides. Everyone in the DCU thinks Dick is pretty.

So what about you? What character would you like to see depicted as queer?

In Q & A, a weekly feature of Fantastic Fangirls, we ask our staff to tackle a simple question — then open the floor to comments.

What’s the most memorable marriage in comics?

Anika

I got all excited by this topic because I have been waiting for a reason to babble about Bruce Wayne and Talia Al Ghul. Then I immediately realized that they don’t actually fit the topic seeing as NO ONE remembers they were married.

Admittedly, this marriage might not hold up in Gotham courts. But seriously, how much awesome is in this panel? Batman wants a ceremony before sex. Sex in the preserved BatHoneymoon Suite complete with birds of paradise! But it’s okay, Bruce, because her proper dad married you himself in an attempt to keep you from interfering in his plans. Like you do! But he’s absolutely legit because he is wearing a cross. You were dressed as Batman and she was dressed in a dress even Heidi Klum would call too short, but in Ra’s country that is totally appropriate wedding attire. And the witnesses/armed guards really add to the celebratory atmosphere, dontchathink? What is not memorable about this?! (I realize that Bruce himself is not remembering but then I also heard a rumor that Grant Morrison never actually read Son of the Demon. To quote Talia, ~SIGH~)

To be serious for a moment, I do adore them. And this picture (taken out of context) is a very good representation of why.

Caroline

Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor Summers.

Memorable doesn’t mean good. Every X-Men fan remembers Scott Summers’ second wedding, to longtime sweetheart Jean Grey. We also remember the affair that broke it up. But as for anything that happened in between — the actual marriage — there’s not much to recall. Scott and Jean were an item pretty much all the time that she was alive. It didn’t make any real difference to most of the stories whether they were married or not.

Scott Summers’ first marriage though. . .well, that’s an object lesson in the argument that superheroes should never get married. Especially to non-superheroes. From a Watsonian perspective, they shouldn’t get married because whoever they marry will turn out to be a clone of their dead lover and also prone to insanity. From a Doylist perspective, they shouldn’t get married because some editor will eventually come along and say, “I hate this relationship but because they are married we can’t just have them break up. Let’s write a story where she is the clone of a dead lover and also prone to insanity. Incidentally, do your best to have the hero character act like a jackass and poison his reputation for years to come.”

Scott and Maddy. Everything related to their marriage was a terrible terrible storyline in every possible way. But, hey. Everybody remembers it.

Jennifer

With Congress in the midst of debating the merits of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, it seems like a good time to highlight what may be the only same-sex marriage between superheroes in mainstream comics: Apollo and Midnighter.

I’ve said before that there are some problems inherent in the depiction of these characters, particularly under Mark Millar’s pen. But the fact remains that these are a pair of married superheroes who are no less badass because of their sexuality. In the face of all kinds of conflict, they fell in love, got married, and formed a solid family with their adopted daughter, Jenny Quantum.

Maybe — hopefully — this marriage won’t be so memorable in the future, when the idea of married same-sex superheroes isn’t so unique and different. But for now, it stands as a testament to the possibility of progress, in the genre and in the world at large.

Sigrid

Jessica Jones and Luke Cage are my favorite marriage in comics.

These are two adults coming together to become partners. They aren’t kids trying to prove themselves — they have both thrown their lives against the wall of proving themselves, and failed mightily. And they had survived those failures and kept going. Jess and Luke have each run businesses. They’ve each done some form of community service. They have each, at different points in their lives, been the kind of screw-up who has needed an understanding friend.

They are whole, is what I’m getting at. They are clear-eyed about who they each are, with very little in the way of illusion. This means that when they agreed to be partners, they each agreed to accept all of the other — flaws and warts, quirks, and flinches, insecurities and paranoias included.

And in return for this they are each partnered with a person who is strong all the way to the core. A person whose character has been tested and found true.

I am certain, because this is comics, and long-form serial comics require melodrama, that Jess and Luke’s marriage will suffer or end at some point. That’s okay, I’ll live through that. However it ends — stupidly, with bad writing for some asinine stunt, or well, with thoughtful characterization — I’ll still always have this. The marriage of two adults setting out on their second or third chance at building a life, trying to be better than their previous flaws.

So what about you? What’s the most memorable marriage in comics?