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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Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 (1982)
Created By: Roger Stern & John Romita, Jr.
Biography
You know how it is: You’re minding your own business, doing your job, and all of sudden you’re being zapped with extra-dimensional energy by a supervillain. At least, that’s how Monica Rambeau went from being a cargo ship captain with the New Orleans Harbor Patrol to becoming a superhero. And a card-carrying Avenger, no less! This would be like acting in your high school performance of The Glass Menagerie and seguing directly into winning an Oscar. Zero to A-list!
The media chose Monica’s first superhero alias, Captain Marvel, and despite the fact that many of the Avengers were friends with the original, deceased Cappy M, they uncharacteristically (for comics and for, um, Avengers) decided not to be assholes about her keeping the name. In fact, she even led the team for a while, but eventually had to take early retirement when overexertion temporarily wiped out her powers and nearly killed her.
Once she was back in action, she mostly focused her energies on fighting the good fight in space rather than her former rogue’s gallery of, like, zombies and Dracula (which was kind of random considering her own powers were in no way supernatural). Monica did, however, continue serving with the Avengers as a reserve member, and she led the Nextwave team, where she could not stop bragging about leading the Avengers back when. Can you blame her? If I were her, I would have that tattooed on my forehead.
Her days as Captain Marvel are long over, though. When the son of CM 1.0, Genis, showed up and wanted the title for himself, Monica let him have it out of respect for his dad and dubbed herself Photon instead. A few years later, Genis decided that, no, just kidding, now he wanted to be Photon. Monica realized it was so not freaking worth it and switched to Pulsar, but at least half of the time she just goes by Monica Rambeau, presumably because it’s the only name Genis can’t justify stealing from her. Besides, being Monica Rambeau is plenty awesome enough.
So What’s So Great About Her?

When the original Captain Marvel, an alien who just happened to look like an incredibly Aryan Earth dude, died of cancer in 1982, it was considered incredibly revolutionary for a hero to not only succumb to mundane, natural causes, but for a hero to die at all. He certainly wasn’t the first of his ilk to pass away, but he was definitely one of the highest profile to do so. So you have to admit, it was pretty brassy of Marvel to replace him almost immediately…and with a woman of color no less.
Granted, some of this was absolutely out of necessity. You know how there’s a Captain Marvel at DC too? One who never appears in a comic actually called Captain Marvel? That’s because Marvel Comics owns the copyright to do such a thing, and to keep it, they need to actually publish something with the name Captain Marvel in the title every once in a while. Which they will never, ever stop doing. It’s their special little way of saying, ‘Suck it, DC.’
But still, they certainly could’ve just not killed Mar-Vell off (this is for-serious his name. COMICS!) or passed the name off to another dude or a Valkyrie-type blonde. Hell, there was already a blonde, stacked Ms. Marvel waiting in the wings who could’ve easily taken the role. (And in fact, she finally has—make sure to check out the awesome-sounding new Captain Marvel series!) Instead, they gave it someone who is part of one of the most underrepresented demographics in comics—black women.
I’ve written before how no black women joined the X-Men between Storm’s 1975 introduction and Shard in 1994. Similarly, there’s a general deficit of black women superheroes throughout the Marvel Universe as a whole. It’s plain to see why—Native Americans can wear feathers and beads, Asian heroines can slip into their sexy dragon lady dresses. What stereotype could black women possibly wear? (Please don’t punch me in the face, I’m being facetious.)
They at least tried to make up for the fact she was part of an extreme comics minority by making Monica so freaking awesome. I seriously love her. I love that she became Captain Marvel while she was an actual boat captain. I love that her costume is traditionally space-y and not overt-sex-bomb, and I love that her hair actually looks like what you might see on the head of an average black woman (side-eyeing you, Storm). I love that she had no idea there was even another Captain Marvel before her when she took up the cape. I love that everyone realized she was so great that she joined the Avengers immediately, and I loved that her mentors were Captain America and Wasp, since come on, women need to help each other out now and then. In fact, Monica took up the leadership reins immediately after Jan, so there was a decent stretch of incredibly cool women leaders of the Avengers.
The only problem, though, is that people never really understood what to do with Monica. It’s bizarre to me that a hero with space-derived powers, the successor to an alien, got her start battling magical villains and Dracula. It took literally (read: not actually literally) forever for someone to go, ‘Oh, huh, I guess she can fight in outerspace, I guess.’ And she also just kind of faded away after a while, appearing sporadically from the mid ‘90s through early ‘00s. They even screwed her over and reverse-awesomed the situation by giving her name back to an Aryan alien dude, only one who was much, much more of a douche than his dad. (His sister, also a later Captain Marvel, is like 400% cooler.)
Luckily, Nextwave happened and reminded everyone that Monica is great, leading to a slew of sudden appearances. She was also front and center in Marvel Divas, which served to spotlight a bunch of lady hero besties that had fallen by the wayside in terms of maintaining a strong Marvel presence over the years. It’s a great start, but can we please get some more Monica on the page? I don’t care if she’s Photon or Pulsar or what—as long as she’s Monica to the core.
Notable Appearances

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16
Avengers #227-294
Doctor Strange (vol.2) #60
Marvel Team-Up #142-143
Solo Avengers #2
Marvel Fanfare #42
Captain Marvel Special #1
Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #9-10
Avengers #329-333
Starblast #1-4
Captain Marvel (vol.2) #1
Avengers: Unplugged #5
Avengers (vol.3) #16-18; 36-38; 46; 48; 53; 55; 501-503 (renumbered)
Avengers: Infinity #1-4
Nextwave #1-12
Marvel Divas #1-4
Firestar (vol.2) #1
Heralds #1-5
I Am An Avenger #2

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: Claws of the Cat #1 (1974)
Created By: Linda Fite, Roy Thomas, & Marie Severin
Biography

Chicago native Greer Nelson had recently been widowed when she went on a job search and somehow ended up a test subject for a scientist working on advancing human potential. As a result, Greer ended up with superhuman powers and quickly set about working as a D-list hero known as the Cat.
Things took a turn for the WTF when it was revealed that Greer’s scientist pal was actually a member of the Cat People, a mystical, hidden race of…cat people. It’s pretty much exactly like you’re picturing it. When Greer was dying from radiation poisoning after a battle, the Cat People offered to transform her into the Tigra, a hybrid warrior and defender of their people. She was all, ‘Hell yes, I’d rather not die,’ and it was done.
It turned out that Greer made for a much more effective hero as Tigra. Now wearing a sporty bikini to show off her new stripes, she was a member of several Avengers line-ups over the years. She also tried to get busy with several of her male teammates, thanks to her cat-like need for affection, but eventually her human and cat sides were able to merge more effectively. An off-on relationship did emerge between her and Hank Pym, though, because Hank gets all the awesome ladies.
This actually led to trouble when they rekindled the romance. This time around, Greer didn’t know that Hank had been replaced by a bad-guy Skrull. The Skrulls were defeated, but when she realized she was pregnant, she was unsure who the father actually was. After initially deciding on an abortion, she changed her mind and went through with the normal two-month cat gestation, giving birth to a perfectly normal…cat-person hybrid. He was named William, after her deceased husband.
These days, Greer’s mostly focusing on being a mom, rekindling her relationship with the real Hank (she hopes), and teaching at Avengers Academy.
So What’s So Great About Her?

Every comic book company seems to have at least one sexy cat-themed lady on their character roster. I’m pretty sure this was one of the requirements mandated by the original Comics Code Authority. [Citation needed.] Marvel’s definitely not an exception, with women like Black Cat, Shadowcat, and Hellcat populating one comic or another. But Tigra, nee the Cat, has them all beat, seeing how she is actually part cat.
I sort of get where the association between women and felines comes from (graceful, dainty, restrained, clean, stereotype stereotype, etc.), but as a cat owner, the idea that cat = sexy kind of baffles me. When I catch my own cat staring at me vacantly, my thought isn’t, ‘She looks hot,’ so much as, ‘KITTY FACE,’ but different strokes for different folks and all. In any case, Tigra especially epitomizes the SexCat idea, what with her skimpy bikini outfit and numerous (canon) sexual partners.
And you know what? I am totally okay with that. At one point, she says something like, ‘The bikini isn’t the costume, the stripes are,’ which I found really clever and refreshing. For a character who spent a lot of her early history in monster-themed comics, she’s never really wrung her hands or spent time dropping to her knees and screaming WHY up at the rain over her transformation. Instead, she totally accepts herself and, in fact, revels in it. Why not show off those stripes if she thinks they’re awesome? And hell, I can’t really blame a gal for hooking up with some hot dudes, especially when one of them is one of my major nerd-crushes, Hank Pym.
And while I don’t think Greer has ever been a character we were intended to take very seriously (for God’s sake, her flagship title was West Coast Avengers, which I can barely even type without laughing), I do like that we’ve seen her mature over recent years. Rather than just be depended upon to strike a pose and claw some eyes out, Tony Stark recently gave her a major vote of confidence by making her his spy during Civil War, albeit a totally unsuccessful one. She’s also become a teacher for younger heroes, both in the Initiative and Avengers Academy titles, which is pretty damn cool, and moreover there’s her long-standing devoted service to the Cat People, and oh, there’s the laughing again as I type.
Greer’s also become a mother recently. Abortion is a always a touchy issue, to say the least, and I’m glad to at least see a comic book character strongly consider the option, especially since for a while she wasn’t even certain who the father was. (It turned out to be the Skrull, by the way. But with Hank’s DNA. It’s Facebook complicated.) But I also like that the birth of William has only renewed her drive to make the world a better place.
Because hey, a slightly ridiculous T&A character can still be noble.
Notable Appearances

At the moment, Tigra is appearing as a regular character in Avengers Academy, appearing monthly from Marvel Comics.
The Cat #1-4
Marvel Team-Up #8
Giant-Size Creatures #1
Monsters Unleashed #10
Marvel Chillers #3-7
Marvel Two-In-One #19
Fantastic Four #177-184
Marvel Team-Up #67
Marvel Premiere #42
Avengers #211-215
Uncanny X-Men #155-156
Marvel Team-Up #125
Spider-Woman #49-50
Avengers #240-241
West Coast Avengers (vol.1) #1-4
Iron Man Annual #7
Avengers #250
Iron Man #191; 193
Avengers #253-254
Marvel Graphic Novel #16
Vision and the Scarlet Witch #1-2
West Coast Avengers (vol.2) #1-46
Fantastic Four #293
Avengers Annual #15
West Coast Avengers Annual #1-3
Marvel Graphic Novel #27
Avengers #302-303
Avengers: West Coast (continuation of West Coast Avengers) #47-50
Avengers Annual #18
Marvel Super-Heroes #2
Avengers Spotlight #38
Avengers: West Coast #66-74; 83
Excalibur #37-39
Avengers: West Coast Annual #8
Marvel Comics Presents #162-165
Avengers: Infinity #1-4
Maximum Security #2-3
Tigra #1-4
She-Hulk (vol.2) #7
Civil War #2-6
Fantastic Four #539
Mighty Avengers #3
Avengers: The Initiative #6; 14; 19-35
Ms. Marvel #19-20
New Avengers #35
New Avengers Annual #2
Mighty Avengers #17
Hulk (vol.2) #8-9
Avengers: The Initiative Featuring Reptil #1
New Avengers: The Reunion #2
War Machine (vol.2) #8-10
Avengers (vol.4) #1
Enter the Heroic Age #1
Avengers Academy #1-15
I Am An Avenger #2
Fear Itself: The Home Front #1
Amazing Spider-Man #661