#FeministFriday: Avengers Edition | Vol. 2 / No. 14.2

This week’s #FeministFriday is just good news: Elle’s here to tell us about the first all-female Avengers team!

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So in honor of my possible future as the supervillain/antihero Feminist Fury (or perhaps in an attempt to give me a nice story so that I don’t fall to a life of alcoholism or vigilantism), friend R pointed me towards a story that genuinely fills my heart with glee: the creation of an all-female Avengers team! Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the A-Force. (Ignore the fact that they gave Dazzler, possibly the most useless of all mutants, a prime position on the poster. She’s wearing roller skates, for God’s sake. Roller skates.) Whining about Dazzler aside, this makes my inner (and outer) fangirl heart incredibly happy.

The creators of the series seem to be deliberately drawing from all corners of the Marvel Universe, with an incredible range of superhero and non-superhero identities. Just from the initial poster we have She-Hulk, the badass lawyer/kickass cousin of the Hulk; Black Widow, spy extraordinaire; Nico Minoru, a sorceress; Wasp, a fashion designer (and the person who named the Avengers); Medusa, a member of the Inhumans; Captain Marvel, a pilot and former Ms. Marvel; Rescue, who moonlights as CEO of Stark Industries; Elektra, a former assassin; and Storm, who has been a queen of Wakanda and worshipped as a goddess. There’s even a new character named Singularity who looks like she is literally made out of stars. She is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s dream girl. There are countless other amazing Marvel women that look like they’ll be featured… and also there’s Dazzler. The series will even heavily feature women on the creative side. The series will be written by G. Willow Wilson (the creator of Kamala Khan, the current incredible incarnation of Ms. Marvel) and Marguerite Bennett (the current author for Angela: Asgard’s Assassin, which I am sad to say I had never heard of prior to this moment but looks wickedly cool).

As Mashable points out, this isn’t the first time that Marvel has created an all-female superhero team, but it’s the first time that the Avengers has been made all female. This comes at a very important time for Avengers fandom—the recent forays into the Marvel Cinematic Universe have made the Avengers a household name in a way that they weren’t before. Even my mother has seen the Avengers. Announcing that there is an all-female Avengers team has ripples outside of the comic book world. At the very least it’s likely to put more pressure on Marvel to add more women to the cinematic Avengers team when the current slate of actors have finished out their contracts. (Much as I love him, there is only so long that it makes sense to pay Robert Downey Jr. ninety million dollars a film. You know Marvel is going to try and find a way to cut that cord.) If this series does well, there’s a very good chance that the movie-version of the Avengers could achieve gender parity.

Perhaps more importantly for the Marvel universe itself, this will be the first time (to my knowledge) that an all-female team actually replaces all other versions of the team. (If I’m incorrect about this, someone please correct me. I try very hard to stay relatively aware of the goings-on of Comic Land, but I occasionally have to do things like eat and sleep, and also comics are very expensive now and I am poor.) With the creation of the A-Force, every other Avengers team is going away. Poof. No Avengers team A, B, Zed, and Infinity. No “main team” and “junior/side/Bic pink team for ladiez.” The one and only Avengers team in the Marvel Comic Universe will be made up entirely of women. Women will be the Avengers. That’s pretty damn cool. And who knows, maybe someday there will be a spot for the Feminist Fury on the team.

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The photo at the top was made from four Creative Commons licensed photos of amazing cosplayers. Here are the details: Ms. Marvel from the Amazing Arizona Comic Con 2013 taken by Gage Skidmore; Wasp from this great photo by flickr user Greyloch; Echo Endless as a kickass “Gamma Bomb” She Hulk, also by Greyloch; and a great Black Widow from flickr user Pat Loika.