What’s this all about?
Dimestore Dames is a celebration of the many, many female characters in comics, who are all too often pushed aside in favor of male heroes and villains. Female characters in superhero comics run the gamut from hero to civilian to villain, from goddess to nonentity, and every one of them is someone’s favorite. Every post here is a profile of one of these great characters, explaining from a very subjective point of view just why she’s so great. It’s a love-in for our favorite four-color gals, and a place to point whenever someone tells you that there just aren’t awesome ladies in comics.
You wrote about my favorite character and why she’s awesome, but you didn’t point out [another thing that makes her awesome]. What gives?
Tell us about it! Like we said, this is a love-in. If there’s a reason you love a certain character, and we didn’t mention it, feel free to point it out in the comments! The more we can celebrate these characters, the better.
I hate this character that you wrote about.
That’s fine. Again, this is a very subjective blog. When we say, ‘this is why Character X is awesome,’ what we mean is, ‘this is why Character X is awesome to me.’
That said, negative comments about the characters will not be tolerated. This is a celebration of female characters. You are absolutely welcome to dislike any of the characters we talk about, but you are not welcome to rant about them here. Just move on to the next post.
Why haven’t you written about Character X yet?
Give us time! We’ve got a lot of characters to get through. That said, feel free to let us know what characters you’re looking forward to seeing.
How do you define ‘female?’ What about trans/intersex/genderqueer characters, or characters without a biological sex, such as robots?
As a rule of thumb, characters who identify as female are eligible for coverage on this blog (so MTF characters are a go, as are lady robots). Intersex and genderqueer characters will be handled on a case by case basis. If you have a question about a specific character’s eligibility, feel free to ask!
I have another question you didn’t answer here.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: Avengers #112 (1973)
Created By: Steve Englehart & Don Heck
Biography

Mantis (her full real name is unknown) had a typically rocky comic book start. The child of a German father who went on to become a fairly minor supervillain and a Vietnamese mother, she lost her family at a young age when her mom was killed and her dad abandoned to be raised by a sect of aliens, the Kree, who believed her to be the Celestial Madonna.
Even though they figured she’d eventually be giving birth to the Messiah of the entire universe, the Kree erased her memory once she reached adulthood and pushed her out the door to experience the world. Unfortunately, that experience ended with her becoming a prostitute in Vietnam, but things got somewhat better when she met up with the Swordsman, a D-list former Avenger, and used her awesome martial arts skills to help him out of a scrape. That led to her hanging out with the Avengers as well. Yay!
Only yay cannot last long in comics. After a spell on the team, she witnessed the Swordsman’s death and only then realized she was totally in love with him. But luckily (?), his body ended up inhabited by a basically tree-shaped alien warrior, so she could sort of make him the baby daddy of the Celestial Messiah.
She gave birth to a son, Sequoia, and raised him for one year before handing him off to his father’s alien people. But giving him up wasn’t what she wanted, and after some space adventures with Silver Surfer, she slowly started to break down, her mind splitting into fragments of her personality. Mantis pulled it together in time to save her half-tree son from getting murdered (apparently his alien half made him grow to adolescence at a speedy rate). Oh, and she turned green along the way, for some reason.
From there, she became one of the new Guardians of the Galaxy, though she ruined her chance at being voted Guardian of the Month when it was revealed she’d helped mentally manipulate some of her colleagues.
So What’s So Great About Her?

Mantis has one of the weirdest, most convoluted histories in comics—and I mean her real-world history, not her backstory, though that’s admittedly pretty weird too. Essentially, she’s one of those characters whose writer fell in love with her—like Shard—only this time, he just couldn’t say goodbye. According to Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed, when Steve Englehart started writing for DC, he took Mantis along for the ride, calling her Willow and continuing the storyline he’d left behind in Avengers. From there, Mantis and Englehart continued their working relationship at Eclipse (Mantis went by Lorelei there) before making their grand return to Marvel.
What makes this story particularly hilarious is that no reader in the history of the world could possibly care as much about Mantis’ storyline as much as Englehart did. When you set up a character as being basically the Virgin Mary (except for the being-a-virgin part), only even bigger in scope because she was going to give birth to the Celestial Messiah, not just your run-of-the-mill Earth Messiah, it’s just so mind-boggling and hard to pull off that readers are a lot more likely to check out than get invested.
Considering that Mantis’ son, the Jesus-with-branches known as Quoi, has made less than a dozen appearances over the years, other creators have largely chosen to ignore Englehart’s grand plans as well. And yet Mantis remains, becoming a more important and visible character than she’s been since her Avengers days.
I actually think Mantis works a lot better when you ignore the Madonna stuff. For one, you get to ignore the awkward theological implications. Second, her character ceases to be entirely defined by her motherhood. (I accidentally typed ‘motherwood.’ MOST APPROPRIATE TYPO EVER.) Yes, Quoi remains an essential part of her history, and her interactions with her son, few as they may be, are very poignant and moving. But she’s also a martial arts master, a fierce warrior, and a superhuman with vast telepathic and precognitive capabilities. To reduce her to some kid’s mom is incredibly unfair.
Establishing her as a largely space-based hero has also done Mantis a ton of good, I think. She’s always been an otherworldly character, and with her being raised by aliens and marrying an alien and being the Holy Mother of the Universe and all, confining her to Earth just doesn’t make sense. She just feels more natural in the space-set comics, and I can only imagine the human world leaves her with a lot of dark memories anyway.
With the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie on the horizon, it’d be amazing to see Mantis on the big screen—even just a cameo!—and have that lead to her having a bigger comics presence. I just don’t see enough of this one.
Notable Appearances

Avengers #112-135
Defenders #9
Captain Marvel #33
Giant-Size #2-4
Silver Surfer (vol.3) #3-9; 19-21
West Coast Avengers Annual #3
Avengers: Forever #6-9
Galactus the Devourer #4
Avengers: Celestial Quest #1-8
Annihilation: Conquest—Starlord #1-4
Annihilation: Conquest #2-6
Guardians of the Galaxy (vol.2) #1-25
She-Hulk: Cosmic Collision #1
The Thanos Imperative: Ignition #1
The Thanos Imperative #1-6
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Mom Month at Dimestore Dames continues! Say hi to your mother for me.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: X-Men #141 (1981)
Created By: Chris Claremont & John Byrne
Biography

Irene Adler’s precognition powers were somewhat of a curse. The more she could ‘see’ vision-wise, the less she could see, well, in a literal sense. After a year spent furiously transcribing her predictions for the next hundred years or so in a series of notebooks, she was totally blind. To make matters worse, the diaries made very little sense, because writing something like, ‘A gosling named Ryan shall be born, and lo, he will be hot’ would be way too easy. These predictions were like Nostradamus-level murky.
This being decades before Google, Irene went to the next best thing to help her make sense of the diaries: a private detective. This actually turned out to be shapeshifting Mystique in disguise, and while they didn’t really get to the bottom of Irene’s visions, they did totally fall in love. Even though they’d part a few times over the years, long enough to even have kids with other partners, Irene and Raven would undoubtedly prove to be the loves to each other’s lives. They even raised Rogue, their foster daughter, together in a little dysfunctional family unit.
Irene and Raven also served as the backbone for the Brotherhood of Mutants, a terrorist group. Even though Irene was about the age of every other members’ meemaws (except Raven, who doesn’t appear to get older) and couldn’t see, she handled herself well in battle with a badass crossbow and wasn’t afraid to show off her shapely gams. Unfortunately, it was during one of the team’s battles that she ended up getting killed by Legion.
These days, Destiny’s legacy is mostly apparent in her scattered diaries, which hold clues to the future of mutantkind. She also has been resurrected several times in the last few years, which probably freaked Rogue and Raven out a lot.
So What’s So Great About Her?

There are a lot of things I find awkward about Destiny. Like her soul-crushingly creepy alien-head mask, for one. And the fact that X-Men writers have never tried to smooth out her timeline, so she still officially met Mystique as an adult in the late nineteenth century, making her at least over a century old when she died in battle in 1989. Major props for being one of the only elderly women supervillains, though. And then there are the, ahem, ‘clever’ hints that she’s the basis for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler character, who serves as Sherlock Holmes’s primary love interest (other than Watson, of course). Which, you know, shut up, trying-too-hard writers. Shut up forever.
What’s not awkward: that Irene serves as half of one of the longest lasting couples in the Marvel universe. The fact she and Raven are both women makes their deep, emotionally intense romance all the more poignant, considering the lengths it took to establish them as lovers. At the time, the Comics Code Authority didn’t allow overt references to homosexuality, and in response editor-in-chief Jim Shooter became a homophobic Scarlet Witch, whispering, ‘No more gay people’ and making them all disappear from Marvel. Chris Claremont went to a lot of effort to hint at the romance at just the right pitch that readers might tilt their head a little but an editor wouldn’t immediately red-pen the lines. By the time they could be officially deemed a couple, it was considered one of the worst kept secrets in comics.
So yeah, theirs is a love that even the Comics Code and editorial mandates could not kill. And speaking of killing, Raven is a total cold-blooded murderer, and Irene hasn’t been exactly reluctant to roll up her own sleeves and commence terrorist activity (though I guess you could argue that she’s passively following the whims of Raven and, to an extent, her own prophetic visions). A love story isn’t exactly what you expect to crop up in the middle of their supervillainy, so it’s kind of awesome to find it there at all.
The one person Irene loves as much as Raven is Rogue, the daughter they quasi-adopted and raised together. And okay, maybe Irene’s not the best mom ever—she did encourage Rogue to follow their footsteps into the terrorist lifestyle—but their interactions are usually tender, and she also probably had an inkling that Rogue was going to head onto a better path eventually. So she’s a good mom, sort of? Better than Raven, anyway, but it’s not hard to beat the women who threw her newborn off a cliff. It’s also interesting to note that, like Raven, she has other children—but daughter they share is the one who appears to get the bulk of her attention and affection.
Her relationships aside, one of the coolest things about Destiny is that she was technically only alive and active in comics for about a decade, but she’s one of the most important mutants to ever live. Long after her death, her predictions are still coming true in current storylines. In fact, the search for her missing diaries was the basis for the entire X-Treme (siiiigh) X-Men series. Not many relatively minor characters make that much of an impact on the universe they leave behind.
Notable Appearances

X-Men #141-142 (title switches to Uncanny X-Men with #142)
Avengers Annual #10
Rom #31-32
Dazzler #22-23; 28
Uncanny X-Men #170; 177-178; 185; 199-200
X-Factor #8-10
Avengers Annual #15
Uncanny X-Men #223-226
New Mutants #65; 78
X-Factor #30-31
Marvel Fanfare #40
Uncanny X-Men #254-255; 265
X-Factor Annual #6
X-Factor #108-109
Sabretooth and Mystique #1-3
X-Men Forever #4
X-Treme X-Men #1
Rogue (vol.3) #10
X-Men: Legacy #208; 231-233
X-Force (vol.3) #19
X-Necrosha #1
Chaos War: X-Men #1-2
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