There wasn’t a specific comic which made me look at the female lead and think “Girls can be heroes just as well as guys! I should be for equality, and stuff.” That doesn’t mean there weren’t loads of characters who fit the bill, only that I never looked on them that way. Which could be the whole point…

I got into comics pretty late, and mostly with UK releases instead of Marvel or DC. I think it started when an older friend had spent 2 straight hours laughing himself onto the floor at Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ “DR & Quinch“. (They STILL get asked to do more of that one.) I suppose that technically DR’s girlfriend Crazy Chrissie is an empowered and independent woman, but since she spends much of her time firing guns and/or throttling him, it’s hard to tell. It’s a great book though, especially the incredibly sensitive war poetry.

Judge Anderson says freeze, creep. Copyright 2000AD, image from http://judgedredd.wikia.com/.

2000 AD was (and still is) an important publication in the UK. It hurt like hell when I finally stopped buying it (around the age of 18 and at university, I think). It also produced a far more relevant female character for this post: Judge Anderson. I was mostly oblivious to Judge Dredd’s satire on future fascism, so all I knew was that Anderson was a determined, skilled woman who could do everything Dredd could (shout, kick doors, shoot things) but also more. She had the psi-powers side of it as well, and her storylines just seemed fuller to me. The telepathy element allowed for more of a detective story, and the others in Psi-Division such as Empaths brought in some very murky subtlety at times. There was no hint of her being less physically capable than a male Judge (although Dredd in particular is something of an unstoppable juggernaut) so my decision was completely based on which characters I got more from. (This priority of ‘story over gender’ was reflected in my affection for another 2000AD series, Pat Mills’ enjoyably bonkers Finn, which starred a male witch.) Anderson is still incredibly popular, and will feature in the new Judge Dredd movie currently in production.

In my all-time Top 10 individual graphic novels, Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost of Living will always feature highly. Technically very few of the female characters in the Sandman tales are actually human, and those in the Endless family such as Death, Delirium and Despair certainly not, but it is a remarkable book. There’s no question that Death herself is where all the focus is, as she steals the show from her brother Dream even in the main Sandman storylines which are supposedly about him.

We recently linked to Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett’s “Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether” (starring LADY SKYSHIP PIRATES), but Rucka was on my radar long before. His series Queen and Country stars Tara Chace, who in my view is about as feminist a character as can exist (hard-drinking, flawed, MI6 operative in a man’s world) – we have a post about her here. It was another graphic novel which caught my attention though, when he took over a superhero who was originally arguably one of the least feminist-friendly ever: Elektra.

Elektra, somehow managing to show off her chest and rear. Again. Copyright Marvel comics, image from http://marvel.wikia.com/.

Seriously, even quite recently before Rucka’s volume Everything Old is New Again, she was aimed at a fanbase who wanted her to look like the image here. She’s the Sexy! Killer! Babe! In Red! So far, so very sex assassin, as we call it around here.

In Rucka’s storyline however, things get shaken up a bit. Elektra has got too used to the endless killing, and is almost at a point where she can’t recover psychologically. She meets a new sensei who is the other main character of the book… an older woman of colour. That’s right, the most dangerous warrior in this story – more capable and badass than the famously lethal assassin herself – is a non-white woman of advancing years, and she is also the one with all the intelligence and wisdom. The art (in the early episodes at least) is superb, with a fight between them showing convincing movement and how muscles actually work. It also heralded a change from CombatBarbie visuals. Rucka had just previously produced Elektra/Wolverine: The Redeemer with esteemed Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, where the glorious full-page paintings showed a stylised Elektra with a body which was often much less objectified than typical comic fare. (Amano’s site doesn’t have my favourite pages from towards the end of the book, where Elektra is shown exhibiting the kind of power and savagery usually given to an avatar of an avenging death goddess, in some very powerful images.)

Everything Old is New Again frequently surprised me, since earlier chapters of this character had basically been SexyNinja books (I knew Greg Rucka would be doing more with it though). I wasn’t thinking outwardly about feminism, I was just being pulled along by the adrenaline and drama of the story.

And that’s the secret. That’s why pop culture is such a great partner for feminism: we don’t notice that it’s happening. It’s why the first Matrix film is a classic, but no matter how many motifs and clever philosophies the sequels pack in, they still fail to inspire. They will never get people thinking to the same extent as the original did because the audience is bored (and disappointed, if you’re me). Grab your reader’s/viewer’s attention and you can push your message home very effectively.

I don’t have one particular comic or character which made me stop and think YEAH FEMINISM, but I suspect there are many which slipped in under my radar and connected strongly, which is a great thing too.

You might say that she got my attention.

I’ve followed Tara’s exploits for almost ten years now, through the Queen and Country comics and novels, all written by Greg Rucka, so it was with my heart in my mouth that I opened the most recent novel Queen and Country: The Last Run, because if reading Queen and Country has taught me anything, it’s that absolutely no-one in it is safe. The novel opens with her realising that she’s getting a bit too old, and a step too slow, and tendering her resignation. And then, shortly thereafter, she is forced by political circumstance back into the field for the titular last run, a mission that she and her superiors know is almost certainly a trap. And this novel marks an end of sorts to Queen and Country, anything could happen, and indeed, everything does.

Back in 2001, Tara Chace’s job title was Minder Two in the Special Section at the UK’s Special Intelligence Service (you’d know it as MI6) – the Special Section being composed of three “minders” – intelligence agents with the skills to be dispatched all over the world on highly dangerous short-term espionage assignments. She was, if you like, the female James Bond, except that to describe her as such is to sell her, and Queen and Country, short. Very short.

James Bond presents a macho fantasy – a ludicrous, over the top cartoon of a man, who contends with threats entirely absent from the real world – megalomaniacal super villains with absurd doomsday devices with which they hold entire countries to ransom. Queen and Country presents the reality: squalid deeds done in alleyways, a world where the greatest threat comes from bureaucrats in Whitehall who are only too willing to disavow Tara and her colleagues when things go bad. And they do go bad, all the time.

The story described above would be the end of a Bond movie – the rogue general is defeated, and we watch Bond float off into the sunset. For a Queen and Country story, it’s only the beginning – the rest of the story sees MI6 attacked in their home in reprisal, and Tara being hunted on the streets of London, while her own government deny her adequate means to defend herself, and leave her “protected” by men whose goal is not to keep her alive, but to use her as bait. Because that’s the reality that James Bond doesn’t show.

That’s the first Queen and Country story. The second one sees Tara back in the office, getting a psychological evaluation, because, after all, she has just killed a man in cold blood, then found herself more or less hung out to dry by the people who ordered her to do it, and there’s some concern that it might have affected her in some way. Of course it has, but not in a way that makes her unfit for duty, and she knows it.

And there’s a duty she really wants to be part of – the other Minders are being sent on a mission in Afghanistan. In a comic written in early 2001. Tara, is of course, incensed about the treatment of women under the Taliban, and would like to do something to bloody their nose. But, of course, she can’t go. It’s much easier to put together a cover identity for a male agent that will let them get the job done.

Just to make that as clear as I can for you: this is an espionage thriller with a female lead that was talking about the Taliban, and their treatment of women, before September the 11th 2001. Tell me that doesn’t pique your interest.

(An amusing aside: Queen and Country may be the only comic where, when a new artist rendered Tara as a typical-for-comics pneumatic blonde in a revealing wardrobe, the readers wrote in to complain. Happily, her new endowments did not have any effect on Tara’s level of competence, or any treatment she received, and the next artist on the book returned her to her usual proportions.)

Queen and Country is as much about the cost of espionage as it is about espionage itself. It’s about the damaged personalities of the people who engage in it, and the further damage the work piles on them. It does not flinch away from depicting Tara, or her friends, as damaged goods; it does not pretend that they are good people fighting for an always-just cause. It understands that the reality of their work is usually that they don’t get to defeat the bad guy and head off into the sunset for sex with an attractive young thing. When sex appears in these books, it is as real as the rest of the work, and appears in a number of different ways – a desperate seeking for a little human warmth, an act of self-hatred, and here and there, an act of love.

Queen and Country is among the very smartest thrillers you will get to read, and should be available in collected editions from any good comic shop. If for some reason you don’t like comics, then I promise you, each of the three novels – A Gentlemen’s Game, Private Wars, and now The Last Run, is perfectly rewarding in its own right.

And no, I’m not going to tell you if Tara Chace survives the end of her own series. I haven’t even told you about the friends and lovers she loses along the way. Read the books and find out about her life.

Alasdair Watson can be found blogging at http://www.black-ink.org.