Comics for Girls: Spider-Girl

I have two kids--both girls--and all three of us like comics.  Moreover, my oldest, Hannah, seems like a natural-born comic geek.  She draws and writes constantly, and at age 7, she's already producing an average of two illustrated short stories every week.  She even has her own super-team, The Faith League, a Christian team comprised of Horse-Girl, Snake-Girl, Cape-Camp, and Cape-Camp's dog Camper, along with their arch-nemesis Fireball, and for her next project, she wants to collaborate with me on a graphic novel called Night Wars, the script for which is already about a month late.  In my defense, I'll just say this: if you've never tried to write a comic script for your seven-year-old, it's a lot harder than it looks.

The cover for Batgirl #21

In any event, my girls and I like comics, but finding comics that you can read to your six- and seven-year-old is hard, and if they're girls, it's even harder.  They're carrying Batgirl and Batman: the Brave and the Bold on their Pull List at the Local Comic Shop (LCS), but both of those titles are a little frustrating for them.  Batgirl's frustrating firstly because it's written for a much older audience and secondly because it's just not that good.  The art is mediocre at best, and the storytelling jumps around so much that it's often hard to follow.  Batman: the Brave and the Bold is better, but it's not great by any means, and it's definitely not a comic for girls.  Which leaves us looking constantly for something we can all read together and actually enjoy.

We picked up the new Spider-Girl, numbers 1-3, with some trepidation.  Every once in a while, either Marvel or DC will do some kind of ridiculous pandering stunt to try to pull in new readers from a new demographic, with Spider-Girl being a recent example of the ways in which that can go hideously, horribly wrong.  There have been several Spider-Girls, of course, but the most recent version of the character was a Brooklyn-based Latina named Anya Corazon.  Now there's nothing wrong with making a Latino character based out of Brooklyn, but my experience with Latinos from any borough is that unless they're actual immigrants, they're English is generally pretty standard American English.  They don't, for example, talk like Handy Manny or Dora the Explorer.  You look at Jennifer Lopez: she doesn't exactly struggle with the language.  Yes, she can speak Spanish, but that doesn't actually degrade her English.  Which is why I have to call it pandering when they make a Latino Spider-Girl and then have her run around speaking some kind of ludicrous Spanglish.  And clearly somebody agreed with me because the original Anya Corazon Spider-Girl was cancelled after a mercifully short run.  This new Spider-Girl is a therefore a re-boot, albeit one that's still in continuity with the original even though it's executed with a far different design sense.

Spider-Girl #1

The good news is that the new Spider-Girl is really good.  Anya comes across as a typical high schooler--albeit one from a Latino family--this time living in downtown Manhattan.  And her adventures are refreshingly down to earth.  For example, the first issue has her dealing with street crime and chaos while the Fantastic Four fights a monster nearby.  That juxtaposition gives us as readers a nice frame of reference for how the new Spider-Girl sees herself and her mission.  She's not trying to save the world; she's just trying to help a little in her neighborhood--because she can.  Beyond that, the story is intensely personal and heavy on internal monologue.  Which is fine.  I mean, comics are also a literary medium, and there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of that fact, so long as the writing is good.  In the three issues we've read so far, I think writer Paul Tobin is right on point.  Anya is a interesting and largely introspective girl.  Her struggles are personal struggles, and she deals with them in a way that I think most readers can understand.

More than the story, though, the thing that I really like about the new Spider-Girl series is the art.  Most comics are written--and drawn--for overage horn-dog fanboys in their mid-30's, and that tends to turn girl heroes into a vapid, half-naked booby-girls.  I can't and won't read that to my daughters, and it frustrates me to no end.  Which is why I was super-happy to see that Anya's new costume is actually a whole-body affair, and that she's drawn with a realistic, athletic figure.  Moreover, the actual sequential art is both well-drawn and plenty clear.  Even six-year-old Emma had no trouble at all following the story.  That in itself was awesome.

So.  We're gonna pick up the rest of the back issues of Spider-Girl next time we go to the LCS, and we're adding the ongoing series to our Pull List.  I genuinely enjoyed reading Spider-Girl, and I felt comfortable reading it to my daughters.  That's such a vanishingly rare combination in a comic that I'm actually super-excited to see what's gonna happen next.