Marvel's Female Superheroes Are Gradually Becoming More Super

New submitter RhubarbPye writes: A new study shows an increasing trend in the power and significance of female superhero characters in the Marvel comic book universe. Several criteria were used to examine the trend, including cover art, dialog, and the actual superpowers. Over 200 individual comic books from Marvel's 50+ year history were compared for the study. What's of particular interest is the study's author is a 17-year-old high school student from Ohio.

Comments

Re:Last sentence

[Reason58]

The summary makes no mention of the author's gender.

Bottom Rising

[Anonymous Coward]

This is more a result of low powered secondary characters gaining power, the main female characters have always been over powered compared to the male characters on the Marvel side.

If you look at mutants, they all get exactly 1 power, healing factor, or eye beams or telepathy or teleportation... unless they're women in which case they often get several. Jean Grey has a couple, Pixie has several, Wanda has several, Emma Frost has a couple, Rogue only has one but it gives her more

Even for non-mutants if you look at the fantastic 4, they all get 1 power... except Susan Richards. Arguably Reed Richards has two as he is also a super scientist, but that wasn't a result of the accident.

Power Creep Unless Proven Otherwise

[medv4380]

I could do the exact same analysis on Superman and find the exact same result that over time his powers have inflated. Power Creep is a well known issue in comics. The score of 12.2 in the 60's to 22.5 for female characters today is absolutely meaningless without the corresponding male character scores.

And both genders are relentlessly de-aging

[Maxo-Texas]

When I was 13, I was reading stories about competent 30 year old war and super heroes. Reed Richards had a decade of experience.

Today, everyone seems to be 19 to 22 yet they are somehow completely experienced and more competent than anyone older than they are. (re: the recent Star Trek films). Rogue especially has deaged tremendously from about 30 to about 20.

For some reason, when i was a kid, you didn't need children to attract an audience but these days you do.

It's so unrealistic that it is really jarring to me. These young children lack the experience and gravitas to be in the parts they are playing.

Wolverine at least still has an appearance of being in his mid 30's but he's basically immortal so it doesn't really apply to him except... it seems like a lot of "tricks" he would have seen a dozen times by now.