Xavin explaining not fitting in to male-female gender roles in Runaways. via

Both print comics and webcomics seem to be paying more attention to being inclusive these days, especially when it comes to LGBT characters. I've long treasured the diversity that's out there in webcomics if you dig a little bit, but even the comics you don't have to dig for are starting to include characters of color and queer characters. Jeph Jacques, for example, upped the inclusion ante at Questionable Content last year when two women of color and a white transwoman appeared in a one-panel diversitysplosion. Other comics seem to be moving in the same direction. Maybe next Randall Munroe will strike a blow to androcentrism and retcon the xkcd stick figures into being female-to-intersex pansexuals of color.

To celebrate inclusion in comics and encourage more, I'd like to put forward my top five list of the best genderqueer characters in comics. "Genderqueer," for this article, refers to characters who resist categorization as one gender or another. This list won't cover female-to-male and male-to-female transfolks, but I will say that Rooster Tails and The Princess are highly recommended. I'll be using the gender-neutral pronouns ze/hir throughout. It's my default pronoun for women, men, and the rest of us. The glorious thing about a gender-neutral pronoun is that it's neutral. The characters I'll be discussing have been variously described as "ey,""she,""he,""zie," and even "it" in other contexts.

Rebis in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol

Rebis is a floating, mummy-looking weirdo in bad sunglasses. Ze's struggling to live as one person with three identities: a woman of color, a white man, and an energy being. Like the rest of the Doom Patrol, Rebis is a total badass and a mostly terrible superhero. In the end, though, Rebis’ efforts to transcend the gender binary (spoiler alert) end up being exactly what's needed to save the world. How awesome is that?

Desire in Neil Gaiman's Sandman

Desire, like Death and Dream, is one of the Endless who govern life in the Sandman universe. This immortal being disrupts gender not by failing to be man or woman, but by being both simultaneously. Pronoun confusion ensues every time Desire appears. He? She? Language fails around this apparition with golden eyes, who lives, appropriately enough, in a citadel called the Threshold. Desire is never quite knowable, never quite obtainable. Just like in real life, Desire always a little distant and amused, and almost always hiding something. Also, a shout out to Sandman artist Mike Dringenberg.

A caveat: the series' overall record on trans* characters is not great. The Sandman universe is even more hostile to transwomen than ours is, so read with caution. 

Xavin in Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways

Xavin is a shapeshifter. A Super Skrull in training, for the five of you to whom that means something. Ze switches sex characteristics like it's no big deal. Of course, Xavin's not the first shapeshifter comics has ever seen. So why does Xavin make my genderqueer list while Mystique and Ranma don't? Because hir "real" gender is an open question—which is a problem for Xavin's woman-oriented partner. Gender ambiguity is difficult for a lot of people in real life relationships, and it feels right to see superheroes wrestle with it too. Runaways series artist at this time was Adrian Alphona but Xavin was first drawn in print by Takeshi Myazawa. 

Kyle in Sfe Monster's Kyle and Atticus

Oh man. Kyle breaks my heart a little just to think about. Kyle's the youngest character on this list and the one I most want to give a big, reassuring hug. In the grip of puberty, Kyle is figuring out gender issues and trying to deal with bullies in a way that won't end with getting suspended. Everything about Kyle and Atticus cultivates a sense of tenderness and emotional intimacy, from the detailed artwork and quiet pacing to the way multiple panels are devoted to a comforting gesture. The look on Kyle's face when ze looks into a mirror kills me every time.

Palmer in RJ Edwards's Riot Nrrd

Palmer fits perfectly in the lovingly diverse world of Riot Nrrd, where characters of varying shape, skin color, physical ability, and gender identity are bound together by two things: geekiness and a fierce attitude toward all kinds of oppression. Palmer’s a college kid who seems to have been through a lot of the rough stuff Kyle is facing now, and I think that makes hir an excellent place to end the list: someone who has faced the world's intolerance and is coming through okay.

What do you think? If I missed your favorite character, feel free to add ideas and opinions in the comments! 

Fed up with catcalls, street harassment awareness group Hollaback Philly has raised $7,000 to write, draw, and print a comic book about how all those daily "hey, good lookin"s add up to a major problem.   

Creator Erin Filson wrote and illustrated the book that follows three main characters, each of whom has their own color that's used only on their pages of the story. Two girls who get harassed are red and yellow, and the comic also follows a boy in blue who learns how to be a proactive bystander. Hollaback is printing 2,000 copies of the comic which you can buy here and will also be sold at San Diego's Comic-Con in 2014. 

"The significance of an all-female crew creating a comic book featuring women’s issues and realities is magnified when the comic is then used to break down the glass ceiling of the boys’ club of the comic and gaming worlds," says Hollaback Philly's media coordinator Anna Kegler, who has been advising on the project along with Hollaback organizer Rochelle Keyhan. "There have been lots of issues with harassment at comic cons." 

Check out two final pages from the comic as well as an in-progress page below. 

April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month—the right time for artist Suzy X to put together this comic about her experiences as a survivor. 

“Daddy, you taught me how to blind a man with my thumbs, build a bomb with the contents of a kitchen cabinet,” says the 12-year-old girl. “I’ve shot people, choked people, even drowned a motherfucker.”

This quote gives you a good idea of the life of Hit-Girl, the tween vigilante star of veteran graphic novelist Mark Millar’s new book,Kick-Ass 2 Prelude: Hit-Girl. The book is his sequel to the successful graphic novel Kick-Ass, which in 2010 was turned into a movie starring the then-14-year-old Chloe Grace Moretz as the young crime fighter. With a much-hyped Kick-Ass sequel movie coming out this August, the new book—released in February—is well timed.

I, for one, may just sit this film out.

While I enjoyed the original, which was a neat twist on our celebrity-obsessed culture, there’s something deeply unsettling about Millar’s follow-up book.

In Hit-Girl, we see Mindy Macready (Hit-Girl’s alter ego) picking up where the movie Kick-Ass left off. She is reunited with her mother and her step-father Marcus, who is seemingly the last honest cop on the beat. Mindy is tasked with hanging up her crime-fighting cape as she settles into normal life, but old habits are hard to break. It isn’t long before she goes on the mother of all killing sprees. As she says, “I crossed the city like a fucked-up Santa, sliding down chimneys and dispensing death like candy canes.”

In his introduction to the new book, novelist Scott Snyder says Millar “shakes off the restraints of all things kid-friendly, and gets totally down and dirty.” In Hit-Girl Millar certainly ups the ante when it comes to violence compared to his first outing, Kick-Ass.

Vividly drawn by John Romita Jr, the world of Hit-Girl attracts and repels you at the same time. This is a male fantasy writ large: the geeks shall inherit the earth—and all the women are hot babes. Interestingly, the pre-pubescent Hit-Girl is the only female character of note and she is on the verge of taking a backseat to Kick-Ass as she approaches puberty.

Reading Hit-Girl, questions kept popping up in my mind: Aren’t there any female police officers in Marcus’ precinct? Why on earth does Mindy want to be friends with the boring, bitchy Debbie, who bullies her until Mindy threatens her into submission? I had to laugh when after her payback, the first thing a triumphant Mindy demands from her nemesis is a sleepover. Really? Perhaps Millar should collaborate more closely with a female story editor next time.

While the characters and story world are richly realized, there are some odd things about the book that kept distracting me. Though Hit-Girl is supposed to be 12, she is drawn more like an eight year old. And there’s something not quite right about seeing a littlegirl caving a man’s skull in with a sledgehammer, even though the violence is intended to be satirically over the top.

Hit-Girl illustration via Nerd Cabinet. 

My passion for everything relating to the world of sex is rivaled only by my love of comics.

Really, it was only a matter of time before I'd combine these two topics to bring you, dear perverts, a weekly comic sharing my experiences with everything the sex industry has to offer. Toys, workshops, birth control, I wanna talk about it all. With the aid of guest reviewers, this comic will cover products for ALL the different anatomies people posses, from vulvas to penises and beyond. 

Read Bitch's profile of cartoonist Erika Moen and check out her comics at OhJoySexToy.com!

Read Erika Moen's other installments of Oh Joy Sex Toy! and check out her work at ohjoysextoy.com.

Read other Oh Joy Sex Toy comics and check out artist Erika Moen's website, OhJoySexToy.com. 

Read the rest of Erika Moen's Oh Joy Sex Toy review comics here on Bitch and check out her other work on her website. 

This new installment in artist Erika Moen's entirely NSFW comics series about sex toys takes a knotty turn. While Erika recover from too much traveling and sickness, her awesome, talented friend Lucy Bellwood fills in with a gorgeous tutorial about rope bondage!

I wish I had more room in the comic to tell you all the neat stuff there is to know about rope bondage, but fortunately for you there are many fabulous resources both in print and on the web for your further edification!

Tutorials: Two Knotty Boys, Twisted Monk, Tying It All Together, Crash Restraint, Ropetopia

Reference Books: Shibari You Can Use, Two Knotty Boys,Doug Kent’s Complete Shibari, Jay Wiseman’s Erotic Bondage Handbook, The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage

Vendors: Twisted Monk, Maui Kink, Renaissance Rope, Rainbow Ropes

Read the rest of the Oh Joy Sex Toy comics series! 

For months, I eagerly awaited the arrival of Marvel’s all-women series X-Men #1. I wasn’t sure what to expect: would the all-woman series be marketed as a comic for girls or just another showcase of all the great female X-Men characters?

X:Men #1 was worth the wait. The series starts out dramatically and little is revealed in the first comic (released May 29), which left me hanging and anxious for more. The comic reads pretty much just like any other solid comic in the X-Men series—I appreciated that, since I don’t want the series to be wildly different simply because all of the characters are women.

It’s about time the women of X-Men get their own comic. I spent my tween years obsessively playing the arcade game X-Men: Children of the Atom and fell hard in love with its superheroines.

The new series, like the beloved X-Men nineties cartoon, follows Jubilee as the lead, along with Storm, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Psylocke, and Rachel Grey, who reside at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. In the first issue, Jubilee returns to the school via train with a mysterious baby. The comic has a dark and modern look to it, with the characters looking tough as ever (including the return of Storm punk rock mohawk).

Jeanine Schaefer edits the series for Marvel and took some time to email about the new release and why the new series isn’t being called X-Women.

CRYSTAL ERICKSON: How long has this series been in the works?

JEANINE SCHAEFER: Last year, [writer] Brian Wood’s run on X-Men starred four women plus Colossus, characters he chose solely for their availability and how they could function in the kind of story he wanted to tell. But seeing how well it worked, and this being an idea I’ve been wanting to see if we could pull off for a long time, I said to him, “Hey, what if we just made an entire team all women?” Not only was he totally on board, he had about 75 ideas for stories he wanted to tell and characters he wanted to play with, so we brought it to X-Men Senior Editor Nick Lowe and Editor in Chief Axel Alonso and their answer was basically, “When can you start?”

Marvel as a team has been incredibly supportive in bringing more female-led titles to our line. For the past few years, we’ve been aware of a lack of significant female-led solo titles and team books, and there’s been a huge effort to rectify that. There’s no formula, but Axel has been a huge proponent of finding the right creative team and actually giving them the room to make it work: Captain Marvel, Journey Into Mystery, Fearless Defenders and Uncanny X-Force are all just a few examples of that working.

How long do you anticipate the series will last? 

Is “forever” too optimistic?

You’ve done other all-female comics in the past. How is this project similar or different from Girl Comics?

They’re pretty different in terms of mission statement. Girl Comics was a project we did to celebrate women in comics—it was a three-issue limited series created entirely by women, meant to showcase the breadth and range of women working in mainstream comics. X-Men is certainly female-friendly in that there are women working on it and there are female characters involved, but we’re aiming for a classic X-Men feel. Saving the world, punching villains, romance, it’s everything you’d expect to find in any X-Men comic. The only thing that’s the same about them, really, is that we’re trying to appeal to anyone who might like comics: women, men, X-Men readers, Avengers movie-goers, Captain Marvel readers, Birds of Prey readers—anyone with a pulse and a penchant for comics.

Are you editing this series to make sure it's female-friendly?  

I’ve long said that there’s nothing you have to make sure exists in your comic (or movie or TV show or book) to specifically get women interested, you just need to make sure there’s not a giant sign on it saying, “No girls allowed.” And I think my point of view is probably inherently one of being more sensitive to things that might turn women off from comics. Though I also can’t speak for all women, either. So while this isn’t aimed only at women, yeah, I hope that female readers who might be looking for something that could speak directly to them will find something here.  

Why didn’t you call it X-Women? 

I really felt like that would be ostracizing it from the line. These women are X-Men. They have been since they were created, and this book is an X-Men book. No one would think twice about an all-male team, making sure it had the word “men” in the title, so why do that here?

How did you decide which X-Men characters to use in the series?

It honestly was nothing more complicated than starting with the heaviest hitting characters, then seeing who would play well off them, who would create the most interesting stories. Also, who did we have a soft spot for?

Why the focus on Jubilee? Because she has a baby? Is she going to raise it in the series? Have male characters rescued babies in other series?

We love Jubilee! She’s such a great character that has a lot of room to stretch her legs, not to mention she has close ties with all the women in this: Rogue, Storm and Psylocke were three of the women Jubilee had her first X-Men adventure with in her very first appearance, and she and Kitty have a connection in that they both spent some time as sidekick to Wolverine.

So let’s talk about the baby. Like I talked about a bit before, family is a huge theme in X-Men. We did a recent run of Cable, which centered around Cable rescuing a baby that he thinks could be the savior of the mutant race. His entire story is about realizing that this girl isn’t just a figure to be protected, but his daughter, and coming to terms with fatherhood, as well as dealing with own issues with his father (who is actually younger than him because comics). And that story led into a huge event for us that really centered around the X-Men as family and what each character would do for that family.

The baby that Jubilee comes home with in the first issue is Brian’s creation. We’ll learn a little more about him and a little more about how Jubilee came to have a baby strapped to her back in the next issue.

Who are your favorite X-Men characters and why?

I love Jubilee. Have loved her for years, I really saw myself in here when I was a kid. She was wish fulfillment, you know, like all the best characters are. A mall rat discovers she has super powers and gets adopted by the X-Men? I’m from Long Island, so that REALLY spoke to me as I was hanging out at the Sunrise Mall and the Busy Bee (RIP Busy Bee). 

Spring has felt like a blockbuster season for great new comics from my favorite artists.

Lots of comics artists debut new work before they hit the road for conventions in the spring—heading to big indie-friendly comics shows like VanCAF, TCAF, and Chicago’s upcoming CAKE before the clustercuss of San Diego ComiCon in July—so May and June are an excellent time to be a comics reader. This is also an excellent time to become a comics reader. Whether you’re looking to pick up your first graphic novel or add new titles to your long list of must-reads, here are four of my favorite new books from female comics artists. Pick ‘em up! 

MY DIRTY DUMB EYES – Lisa Hanawalt (Drawn & Quarterly)

For an entire week, I carried My Dirty Dumb Eyes in my bag and forced it into the hands of whatever friends I ran into. “Read these comics about dogs!” I screeched. “I know it’s strange, just read it.” The response was always the same: confusion, exclamation, laughter. Why are Lisa Hanawalt’s bizarre, moderately disturbing drawings so deeply funny? I will never be able to explain the mystery of why her skillfull paintings of cats dangling from helicopters and historic people pooping crack me up, but suffice to say that Hanawalt’s gorgeous renderings resonate with a dark part of my brain, making me burst out laughing at images I’ve never seen before and will never fully comprehend. Plus, the lady knows how to tell a good story. My Dirty Dumb Eyes gathers together comics published around various parts of the web with some new illustrations. Even though I’d already read many of the pieces collected in the book—like her review of The Vow and dispatch from a Toy Fair—it was a joy to read them through again. And then again. And again. 

WE CAN FIX IT – Jess Fink (Top Shelf)

I love Jess Fink’s Tumblr, so I snapped up this new book We Can Fix It during April’s Stumptown Comics Fest.  Fink herself stars in the time-traveling memoir that grapples with the bad ideas she regrets, the good times that have gone by, and the fact that she would look super hot in a futuristic unitard. It’s a cute, quick, and funny story that readers will find relatable. What if you could go back and convince yourself not to make out with that one jerk from high school? Well, honestly, you’d probably just screw it up all over again. 

THE PROPERTY – Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)

Translated from Hebrew, The Property is a rare story that feels like both honest personal history and gripping fiction.  Rutu Modan's story follows an Israeli woman and her Polish-born grandmother as they travel to Poland, attempting to settle some World War II-era family property issues, but really exploring Jewish identity and their own independence from both family and history. Modan is an expert of gesture—she captures complex emotions and feelings with just a few simple lines. It's clear she does her real-life research: the book's final page names the people on whom the drawings are based and even credits a "location finder" in Warsaw. The result of Modan's keen eye and hard work is a deep, complicated story told through pared-down images; it's a fantastic use of comics as a medium. I would strongly advise against beginning this book, as I did, at midnight. You will stay up reading until 3am, until your head is sore and you’ve forgotten where you are.

Read an excerpt from The Property here!

CALLING DR. LAURA – Nicole Georges (Mariner Books) 

Bitch has given plenty of love to long-time zinester Nicole Georges before, so it’s no surprise that her epic memoir Calling Dr. Laura is excellent. Georges’ art in the story of her family and queer identity feels approachable and handmade, capturing the world around her with an original, endearing aesthetic.  Portraits of dogs, chickens, and old houses occupy her panels and crowd her pages for love and attention. The story wanders around Georges’ life and friend-filled music scene as she deals with both coming out to her mother and determining that—no matter how great of an adult life Georges builds for herself—her mother will continue to be someone with whom fights, lies, and tears are common.

HONORABLE MENTION:

Saga isn’t written by a woman, but artist Fiona Staples makes the inventive IMAGE title top notch. Writer Brian K. Vaughn pens this story of a sassy alien couple caught up in a galaxy-sized war they want nothing to do with. Staples’ lithe characters and detailed urban landscapes strike the perfect mix of gritty dystopia with gorgeous sci-fi fantasy. Plus, the first issue is available online for free from Comixology. Go gobble it up. 

Read more Bitch comics coverage and reviews!

Read the rest of Erika Moen's Oh Joy Sex Toy illustrated reviews: 

Ropes! 

The best lube ever!

Disney-themed pole dancing!

The Fleshlight!

The Hitachi!

Read the rest of Erika Moen's Oh Joy Sex Toy illustrated reviews: 

A couples' vibrator• Ropes! • The best lube ever! • Disney-themed pole dancing! • The Fleshlight! • The Hitachi!

Other Bitch writing about sex work: 

Forty Years in the Hustle: An Interview with Margo St. James• The H-Word blog series on sex workers 

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Read and buy Bitch magazine's current print issue!

Strangers in Paradise, the seminal comic series created, written, and drawn by Terry Moore, is coming back this year for its 20^th anniversary with an 2,400-page omnibus coming out in July and a new prose novel in the works.

For its many fans like me, reading more about Francine and Katchoo would be like reuniting with old friends. But there are certain aspects of SiP that prevent me from getting too excited about the prospect of a comeback.

First, the good. SiP has been rightfully praised for its focus on women, relationships, and non-heteronormative sexuality. Its central characters, Francine and Katchoo, are passionate, flawed women with whom readers can easily sympathize. They make bad decisions, confront their fears, and find self-confidence and peace. Plus, they look realistic. The women are drawn with a range of body types—curvy, muscular, slim, fat—with folds and bulges just where you might see them on your own body, and have wonderfully expressive faces with eyes and mouths that convey countless and sometimes indescribable mixtures of emotion.

In addition to great female characters, SiP also gave us David Qin: a male protagonist who is attractive, interesting, and Asian. As an Asian-American woman, I was thrilled to see David. His existence is an acknowledgement that Asian men—who, in popular media, were usually libido-less old sages or the butts of jokes—deserve to be taken seriously as sexual beings and as individuals in general.

SiP is also progressive in its treatment of sexuality. None of its main female characters are entirely heterosexual, and don’t express their sexual orientation in conventional ways. Katchoo, who identifies as lesbian, falls for David; Casey and Francine, who don’t identify as bisexual or gay, both get involved with Katchoo. By emphasizing the personal nature of sexual orientation and expression, SiP portrays LGBTQ people as people first and foremost and sexuality as a spectrum instead of a one-or-the-other deal.

When it comes to women of color, however, SiP is less progressive.

Although most of its characters are women, barely any of them are of non-white descent except for David’s villainous sister Darcy. Other non-white female characters are relegated to the sidelines: Katchoo’s black therapist, or David’s nameless and mostly silent Japanese girlfriend, who is the epitome of the Submissive Lotus Flower stereotype. We rarely see her speak; when she does, it’s to state that “it would be honor to bathe Tambi-san” in preparation for sleeping with David.

Similarly, Darcy isn’t a meanie who just happens to be half-Asian—she’s pure Dragon Lady: a cruel, power-hungry, sexually deviant yakuza princess. She gets involved with Katchoo and then treats her as property, even having a symbol of ownership (the lily) tattooed right over Katchoo’s heart.

Another issue that needs reexamining is the decision to publish this new story as a prose novel rather than another comic, partially because Moore doesn’t seem to be a great fiction writer.

Take this prose extract from Vol. 2, issue #9 of the comic:

A few months later, Freddie met Casey, the kind of girl he understood and was comfortable with. He thought marrying Casey would make him forget Francine. He was wrong. It only made him realize how much he missed her…

This is a classic example of telling instead of showing: a basic Creative Writing 101 error. And it seems even weaker when compared to the non-prose sections of the comic, where we can see Casey clinging to Freddie’s arm with an annoyingly blissful grin – her word balloon is even decorated with flowers – as they shop for groceries, or Freddie’s grimace and recoil as he turns down her sexual advances. 

SiP was created for a visual narrative medium, and Moore is great at playing with the possibilities of comics. He combines cartoon-esque and more realistic art to contrast actual events with characters’ inner thoughts (e.g. Katchoo’s dream in Vol. 2, issue #2), and draws scraps of blackness creeping up the page out of darkness to depict the death of a loved one and that emotional state where there’s nothing left to say. 

Moore’s strength lies in character creation, visual art, and scriptwriting. Take Francine and Katchoo’s conversation as they’re moving into their new house in Vol.3, issue #1. Their banter about ostensibly trivial topics like mushrooms and Linda Eder serves to illustrate intimacy, love, friendship, and a shared past; we don’t have to be told how they feel, because it’s so easy to see in the dialogue and art. Portrayals like this are what bring Moore’s characters to life.

Additionally, the visual dimension to the characters can’t be ignored. Although the ways that they speak, act, and think are of course hugely important, they wouldn’t be who they are without their facial expressions or their body language: Katchoo’s devilish smile, for instance, or Francine’s tendency to hunch over when she sits. Pure prose would also strip away one of SiP’s most-praised attributes, namely the depiction of non-idealized body types. Describing these verbally is much less effective than actually seeing waistline folds and crow’s-feet when characters bend or smile a certain way.

So the next time Moore returns to SiP, I hope it’s with a new comic or graphic novel; comics are the only medium that can adequately portray the loves, bodies, thoughts, and relationships of Francine and Katchoo. And if it is a comic with some positive, non-marginalized depictions of women of color– so that non-white readers could be fully included—that really would be something to get excited about.

For Oh Joy Sex Toy, artist Erika Moen reviews a new sex toy each week and illustrates the result. 

Read other Oh Joy Sex Toy review comics, including artist Erika Moen's review of the Fleshlight and a couples' vibrator. 

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Read and buy Bitch magazine's current print issue!

For Oh Joy Sex Toy, artist Erika Moen reviews a new sex toy each week and illustrates the result. 

Read other Oh Joy Sex Toy review comics, including artist Erika Moen's review of the Fleshlight and a vibrator alarm clock.  

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Read and buy Bitch magazine's current print issue!

A dogged, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, a literary genius, one of the sexiest women in comics and, of course, Superman’s girlfriend—ah, Lois Lane.

We've covered portrayals of Lois Lane in cinema—but the character of Lois has also changed substantially in the history of Superman comics. 

Lois Lane became one of my role models at a young age. Thanks to my dad and a superhero-obsessed younger brother, I was indoctrinated into the DC Comics fandom early. I still fondly remember one of my favorite Lois moments from 1997 in The Batman Superman Movie: World’s Finest. Lois is riding on Air Force One with a team of reporters when the plane is hijacked by some quintessential animated bad guys. She tries to reach the emergency phone to dial for help, but is caught, pushed into an empty seat and buckled in. Naturally, Superman arrives to sort out the situation and he flips the plane causing the bad guys to go flying while Lois, securely buckled into her seat with her dark hair flying in a perfect curtain, quips, “Thanks for strapping me in.”  

Lois premiered in Action Comics #1 with Superman in June 1938. Watch her shut down Clark Kent:

Visually, the character was based off of model Joanne Siegel. Joe Shuster hired her when they were working on their concept sketches and based Lois’ hairstyle and facial features off of her. She wound up marrying Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel in 1948 and their daughter, Laura. In a Joanne Siegel's Los Angeles Times obituary, Laura said that her mom “not only posed for the character, but from the day he [Siegel] met her it was her personality that he infused into the character.” Some of her tenacity is evident in the lengths she went to in order to ensure that her husband’s name stayed on the Superman copyright. She died in 2011 at 93.

From her first appearance, Lois was a badass investigative reporter in a male-dominated workplace and she was not afraid to put herself in danger in order to get her story. She fearlessly competed again Clark Kent—they were journalistic rivals at the Daily Planet for a while. Even though she was Clark’s love interest, in the early days, she didn’t suffer from damsel-in-distress syndrome: Lois was really only ever “saved” when she intentionally put herself in danger in the course of an investigation.

In the 40s and 50s, or the Silver Age of Superman, her storylines changed and became more focused on Lois trying to marry Clark. By the 1960s-1970s, her entire character was essentially simplified to being just "Superman's girlfriend." To complicate this “Superman’s girlfriend” character, Lana Lang was brought into the comics as an old flame of Clark’s, creating a hot-selling “Clois” love triangle. This is how ridiculous things got: In one 1963 comic panel, Lois is depicted reading Superman’s heart on a special “heart-meter” under the ruse of writing a story on how super-strong his heart is when she is actually trying to figure out on this “love detector” whether he loves her or Lana. Apparently, Lana was in on this plan, since she can be spotted peaking out from behind some curtains waiting to see if Superman loves her.

But then, the 1985 reboot changed a ton of stuff across DC Comics, the most important change being the shift from the DC multi-verse to the universe, meaning that worlds of all of the different DC Comics characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were combined. 

In 1986, John Byrne’s The Man of Steel series finally brought Lois back to her tough as nails origins: a reporter who would do anything to get her story.

In issue two of The Man of Steel, Lois is given the assignment from Perry White to interview Superman. After failing repeatedly to score an interview with Superman (fun fact: Lois actually coins the name Superman) Lois intentionally drives her car into the Metropolis harbor, knowing that Superman would come to rescue her and she would finally be able to get her story. Oddly enough, new reporter, Clark Kent, was somehow able to beat her to the punch and scooped the headline right under her. 

Lois eventually started dating Clarke even though they were rivals. She dated Clark while still having sexual tension with Superman and she finally found out his secret when they got engaged in the December 1996 special “Superman: The Wedding Album.”

These days, Lois is still married to her job and she is Superman’s intellectual equal. These qualities set the standard for modern Lois.

In the new Zack Snyder Superman flick Man of Steel Amy Adams carries on the true Lois Lane tradition in a film that’s far too flat and flashy. Adam’s performance gives life to the movie and added some much needed humanity to Henry Cavill’s performance. All of the “damsel in distress” situations that Lois gets stuck in don’t come from dangerous reporting, but rather her desire to help Superman and mankind as much as possible. She’s not just a spectator. In the film, Adams delivers a line that is the perfect tagline for the current Lois: “I get writer’s block if I’m not wearing a flak jacket."

Required Reading: A history of Lois Lane's portrayal in movies, parts one and two.  Plus, our hilarious illustrated review of Man of Steel. 

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Each week, Oh Joy Sex Toy features an illustrated sex toy review. But this week is different! We're featuring a special guest comic that's about another aspect of sex—artist Lucy Knisley dishes on the pros and cons of her birth control method.

Read other Oh Joy Sex Toy review comics, including artist Erika Moen's review of the Fleshlight, a fake tongue wheel, and a vibrator alarm clock.  

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Each week, intrepid artist Erika Moen tries sex toys and illustrates the results. This week's Oh Joy Sex Toy: the NJOY butt plug!

Read other Oh Joy Sex Toy review comics, including artist Erika Moen's review of the Fleshlight, a fake tongue wheel, and a vibrator alarm clock.  

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Artist Ali Fitzgerald reports from the home of Berlin-based Vaginal Davis, the influential performance artist whose shows can be described as "giddy, satirical stabs at the old-world order, levelling criticism at white privilege and the patriarchy with nuanced wit and game-show-style camp."

Fitzgerald turned her interview with Davis into this original comic for Bitch.

Ali Fitzgerald is a Berlin-based artist and writer whose work has been featured in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Art in America, Artlies!, Afar Magazine and Sugarhigh Berlin. She writes regularly for the PBS blog Art21 and Daily Serving and has an infrequently updated blog about her debauched adventures around Berlin.

Read more Bitch original comics and Adventures in Feministory!

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