It’s not exactly news that ABC, which is part of the same corporate family as Disney, wants to get in on the massive success of The Avengers (and give the franchise a cross-promotional boost in between major movie events) and develop a television series based in the Marvel universe but not overly dependent on the ongoing set of superheroes who are getting major motion pictures. But apparently discussions are heating up again. And given ABC’s brand is closely associated with serialized storytelling and female characters, this is a great opportunity to get a superheroine in the mix. ABC’s already tried and failed to develop an AKA Jessica Jones show, so assuming that character is out, and excluding characters whose rights are held outside of Marvel or who have already appeared in the movies, here are five Marvel women who might be perfect for television:

1. She-Hulk: I know. Broken record. But the story of Jennifer Walters, attorney and Avenger, is begging to be turned into a smart procedural. The show could have a case of the week—Jennifer sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel on behalf of Spider-Man and files wrongful death suits against a corporation whose carelessness creates new superheroes at the cost of human lives—as well as to longer, Damages-like investigations across the course of entire seasons. And while Hulk effects are expensive, the show could keep Jennifer in human mode most of the time to save money in a first season, and have her spend more time as She-Hulk if the series progresses and is successful.

2. Sif: The Marvel movies have Thor, a god with ties to Earth. So why not bring Sif, his fellow female brawler, who’s occasionally gotten herself stuck outside of Asgard, to the human realms and see what happens? It would be a fascinating thought experiment in what it would be like for ordinary people to deal with Strong Female Characters who step off the screen, expecting equality. As much as I’d love to see a Wonder Woman movie or show again, it seems we’re ages away from that. So why not experiment with another goddess? Jaimie Alexander didn’t have nearly enough to do in Thor, so Marvel should let her shine on the small screen, and out from the shadow of Thor’s hammer.

3. Ms. Marvel: Air Force pilot. C.I.A. operative. Feminist magazine editor. And now, in the comics, she’s taken on the mantel of Captain Marvel. A TV series would have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in picking a setting to tell a story about Carol Danvers. If Marvel is going to do a Secret Invasion storyline, which would feature the Skrulls who showed up in The Avengers shapeshifting and disguising themselves as humans, a TV series could also be a great way to introduce Ms. Marvel, who played a major role in beating back the Skrulls in that comics storyline, to the franchise.

4. Dazzler: Want to do something soapy and fun? Originally invented as a way to do cross promotions for Casablanca Records, Dazzler is a performer when she isn’t a reluctant superheroine, and she could be a way to tell a story about struggling to make it in the entertainment industry, even with a little something extra on offer. And a Dazzler show could also be a way to do an anti-hero story. All the super-powered people we’ve seen in the current era of movie superhero storytelling have taken up the call. Dazzler is more than unusually reluctant, and could be a way to explore what happens when significant power comes unmoored from a sense of responsibility.

5. Spitfire: If ABC wants to hop on the Downton Abbey bandwagon, the network could revisit Spitfire, a World War II-era British superheroine from a noble family. The story’s got vampires, Nazi sympathizers, the Blitz, and efforts to hunt down war criminals. Captain America could swing by in an occasional flashback. And ABC could co-market lipstick and forties styles.

Jeff Parker, who writes Hulk for Marvel, reports that the book will switch focus and tell the story of Red She-Hulk, the super-powered version of Betty Ross-Banner, Bruce’s love interest. And his take on it, and on the book as an opportunity to bring in new female audiences for comics, sounds phenomenal:

I thought why not dive in with a woman lead, AND tap the very roots of Hulk? Originally he always walked the line between menace and hero. Even if Hulk liked you, that still didn’t guarantee you were safe around him once he started raging, it was like being friends with a category 4 hurricane. As the newest of the Hulks, Betty is still formative and unknown- in a perfect position to be that kind of Hulk to the world.

Though you may only know my superhero stories, I am far from someone who thinks that genre IS comics, and I know that others may fit female readers more naturally. But I don’t think we should abandon trying, because despite conventional wisdom, many do want stories about powerful women in big action- did Buffy the Vampire Slayer teach us nothing? This gender does have daydreams about throwing cars around and flattening fools with a backhand swat. The superhero model appeals to something fundamental in us- that we feel, despite appearances, we have untapped power that could break out in the right circumstances.

The HULK myth goes further- and somewhat scarier- because it acknowledges our rage. The feeling that deep inside, whether from personal history or even wilder remnants still left from our ancestors, we harbor something devastating. Feelings we have to work at constantly because in the real world, letting that out doesn’t end well. But to be Hulk is to let that wave roll right out and wash away everything in your way. If you don’t think the ladies can relate to that, you haven’t talked to any lately.

Y’all know that I absolutely adore Jennifer Walters, and have long banged the drum for a She-Hulk television show as a companion to the Marvel movies. But if I can’t have that, a feminist take on Red She-Hulk—perhaps in less fetish-wear-y costumes than in the past, folks?—makes me very, very happy indeed.

It seems obvious to me that fantasies about physical power, and fear about our rage and anger (I mean, seriously, have folks read Little Women) are not exclusive to men. But we don’t get a lot of mass culture that addresses that. Characters like Black Widow and Catwoman are often confronted with the limitations of their physical power, rather than the idea that we could go too far and do damage verbal or physical damage to both someone else and ourselves. As I wrote last week, I absolutely adore the feminism of early She-Hulk comics, and the way they demolished the idea that anger about gender discrimination makes people incoherent or overly personal, putting She-Hulk up against institutions and even powerful superheroes like Tony Stark who fundamentally misjudged her. Parker’s said on Twitter that “I think of it as a Clint Eastwood western starring her. It’s one woman against the world.” A Red She-Hulk With No Name is a pretty amazing place to start from.

I am pretty excited to see Item 47, the short film that Marvel is packaging up with the DVD release of The Avengers, in which Jesse Bradford and Lizzy Caplan get one of those crazy energy weapons that Loki’s troops used in their invasion of New York and rob some banks:

I totally get why Marvel wants to keep building heroes in Phase 2. But it is kind of bizarre to me that they don’t make these very smart, lower-budget stories about the people whose lives are affected by living in a work with superheroes, whether they’re ordinary people who have sudden access to extraordinary technology, or the bureaucrats who have to manage both the lives of superheroes and the fallout surrounding their existence, as hedges against the possibility, as the release dates suggest, the Phase 2 movies only make hundreds of millions of dollars rather than billions.

Marvel announced its slate of movies and their release dates at San Diego Comic Con. But it’s remarks by Marvel co-president Louis D’Esposito that are making waves in some circles. He told MTV of Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther that:

“That would be Marvel in space,” he said. “That’s a great concept and a great idea, and potentially one of our films in the future.” Another possible candidate is “Black Panther,” a superhero story that centers on T’Challa, the defender of a fictional African nation called Wakanda.

“He has a lot of the same characteristics of a Captain America: great character, good values,” said the Marvel exec. “But it’s a little more difficult, maybe, creating [a world like Wakanda]. It’s always easier basing it here. For instance, Iron Man 3 is rooted right here in Los Angeles and New York. When you bring in other worlds, you’re always faced with those difficulties.”

It’s silly to say that it’s easier to build a visual and conceptual Wakanda—especially given BET did it in the Black Panther animated series—than Asgard, or a Skrull warship. But D’Esposito, in a sort of clumsy way, seems to be talking around some beliefs embedded in Hollywood conventional wisdom: that it’s easier to sell white men as brawling gods than black men as hugely technologically advanced leaders of foreign nations.

One of the things that’s bracing about BET’s cartoon adaptation is that it’s so directly about the racism of that disbelief. You’ve got white American officials who say things like “Where do a bunch of savages get off telling us they have a no-fly zone? What are they going to do, throw spears at our jets?” and a World War II-era Black Panther who brushes off Captain America’s offer of help with invading Nazis by telling him “You can go home now. I’ve already taken out the garbage.” In this interpretation, T’Challa’s the rare kind of superhero who can call out systemic ills in Western society, rather than relying on their continued existence to give him purpose. “The fact that every conversation here is framed in terms of profit and power says everything,” he says in the cartoon. “Why cure a disease when people pay for medicine?”

As thrilling as it would be to see those contradictions and assumptions challenged in a big-screen movie with all the power of Marvel’s brand and marketing department behind it, I’m not really surprised that Marvel’s finding excuses to demur. American audiences like seeing American superheroes and American presidents beat back alien invasions, to see America as the sophisticated country that stands as a bulwark between humanity and everyone else. We can put up with Asgardians because they’re on our side, Thor’s promise to protect the earth mediated by his partnership with Captain America, and representations of American superiority in industry, military might, and science, Tony Stark, Captain Fury, and Bruce Banner and Jane Foster. Blade can protect humans from the decadence of vampire torturers, ravers, raisers of evil Gods and breeders of abominations, but he’s an affirmation of our goodness rather than a critique of our society. That’s not to say that there isn’t evil out there that needs taking care of, and I appreciate the Blade franchise’s attention to the vulnerability of homeless people. But it’s easier to sell superheroes of any color who emphasize our common humanity than those who point our failures, whether it’s T’Challa in Africa or Luke Cage in Harlem.

According to Latino Review, there’s going to big event movie before we get to The Avengers 2: it’s confirmed to be Guardians of the Galaxy, a team-up that will elevate a range of smaller-scale heroes and have them get with the Avengers to fight aliens. I’m enjoying Marvel’s commitment to do some of the more fantastical elements in its arsenal, especially because I hope it might empower other comic-book franchise, like Judge Dredd, to do some of the weirder stories in their catalogues.

But I have to admit, I’m sorry we’re not getting at least some contrast to these big pictures with smaller movies that are focused either on urban crime and urban blight, as Luke Cage could have been, or focused on characters with more singular problems like Deathlok, or frankly, that star a woman with actual super-powers. It’s telling that we live in a world where Marvel will dig into the weirdness of its back catalogue before making a movie or a television series about one of its recognizable, established female heroes, something Manohla Dargis pointed out this weekend was ludicrously old-fashioned in a world where the two most powerful Americans are a black man and a woman in late middle age. This big, galactic formula is comic book-y and it’s produced a lot of tremendously fun movies. But as I’ve written before, and I’m sure I’ll write again, it would be really nice to see Marvel diversify both to pull in new audiences, and to hedge against a day when their formula gets stale.

And I’d hate to think they were sticking with galactic stories because, at least as they’ve been executed so far, they’re a way to avoid political allegories, and to stay as broadly appealing as possible. Wacked-out gods don’t have much in the way of real-world analogues. A.O. Scott, in his chat with Dargis, said something about the rise of superhero movies in the eighties and their role today that I thought was telling:

It’s telling that Hollywood placed a big bet on superheroes at a time when two of its traditional heroic genres — the western and the war movie — were in eclipse, partly because they seemed ideologically out of kilter with the times. The studios turned to fantasy, science fiction and a kind of filmmaking that was at once technologically advanced and charmingly old-fashioned. Along with “Star Wars” and Indiana Jones there was Superman, played, starting in 1978, by the square-jawed, relatively unknown Christopher Reeve…Perhaps this is a reflection of the state of the world after Sept. 11, 2001. Certainly the superhero movies of today are, like the gangster pictures of the Depression and the westerns of the ’50s, a screen onto which our society projects its fears and dreams. But I also think that the grimness arises from another source. When hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, it is never a laughing matter.

Politics sneak in, of course, whether its in the willingness of a shadowy council to destroy New York, a superhero who asserts an old-fashioned belief in monotheism, or a woman who gets more out of a skillful interrogation than a man would out of torture. But while science fiction and fantasy are powerful tools for creating metaphors and exploring ideas, they can be used to create utterly detached threats and villains, which look good, but are as flat as the screens they’re projected on.

I wrote yesterday about the news that DC Comics is preparing to have a major male character in their stable, previously assumed to be straight, come out of the closet. Today the news comes that rival comics giant Marvel, already ahead of DC in the movie business is one-upping DC once again when it comes to depictions of gay characters: Canadian superhero Northstar will propose to his non-superpowered boyfriend in an arc that will lead to the first superhero comics wedding between two men. Archie Comics got there months ago with the wedding of Kevin Keller and his boyfriend (the two met during their military service), but it’s still a big deal to see a superhero, a masculine ideal if there ever was one, marry a man, to show the superhero community standing up and celebrating that couple. Whether you live within the story or experience it from outside, that’s some heavy hitters to have in your corner. And the way Marvel’s talking about the arc is great:

“The story of Northstar and Kyle is universal, and at the core of everything I write: a powerful love between two people who have to fight for it against all odds,” said comic writer Marjorie Liu in a statement. “This is the quintessential Marvel story, one that blends the modern world with the fantasy of superheroes in order to tell an exciting story that begins with a wedding and continues in ways you can’t imagine.”

Although Northstar’s story marks Marvel’s first gay wedding, the X-Men comics are known for tackling civil rights — including gay, lesbian and transgender issues — in their panels. Much has been made of the parallels between the mutant outsiders of the comics and gay youngsters grappling with identity and stigma. Other gay and bisexual Marvel characters include Mystique, Colossus (the Ultimate version), Destiny, Karma and Graymalkin.

“The Marvel Universe has always reflected the world outside your window, so we strive to make sure our characters, relationships and stories are grounded in that reality,” Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso, said in a statement.

I said this about Jay-Z and I think it’s true here, too. Presenting stories about gay people and gay couples as if they are the status quo, and as if they’re consistent with your stated values, and putting people who disagree in the position of shaking you off that ground is one of the most powerful ways to change the tenor of gay rights debate. And when it comes to narrative, doing more than simply announcing someone’s gay is critical: giving them a full, rich lived experience and insisting that ought to be the norm because it’s good storytelling is one of the best way art can fight for equality and reconfigure the terms of our conversations and assumptions.

‘

It begins with Sunnydale. Joss Whedon will probably never escape the legacy of his genre-subverting feminist masterpiece Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about a Valley Girl who fights the forces of darkness, and as writer and director of The Avengers, the movie that ties together the threads begun in a series of other superhero movies, that’s an excellent thing. A grand, funny action picture, The Avengers is also fundamentally if subtly about our reaction to superheroes: it manufactures joy (sometimes to slight excess—it clocks in at almost two and a half hours) even as it argues for the importance of that reaction and that belief in great power and great responsibility. And fittingly for a movie that’s a continuation of the project he began in Buffy, Whedon’s The Avengers begins as Buffy ended: with a group of wildly talented people escaping from a town that’s collapsing into the ground.

It helps to have seen the previous movies Marvel’s released to enjoy The Avengers—each entry in the franchise builds on the other in terms of plot development and characterization—but it’s not strictly necessary. The town that’s collapsing in this case turns out to be a massive government research facility run by an agency called S.H.I.E.L.D. that’s dedicated to studying a mysterious artifact: the tesseract. In previous films we’ve learned that the U.S. came into possession of that object, which it sees as a source of cheap renewable energy (and maybe other things as well) after they defrost Captain America, who stole it from the Nazis and crash landed the tesseract and himself in the Arctic. It turns out, however, that the Nazis pinched it from Asgard, the celestial kingdom of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (a terrific Tom Hiddleston), demi-gods and brothers who have had a significant falling out, leaving Thor with a human sweetheart and a fondness for earth, and Loki with a hankering for revenge. The Avengers kicks off when Loki shows up, pinches the tesseract along with several government workers, and in the process, collapses the facility. After he gets away, S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), his assistant Maria Hill (a largely wasted Cobie Smulders), and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) regroup on a carrier ship and proceed to recruit the help they need to get it back.

Much of the band they pull together’s in fine, previously-established fettle. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) may be in the clean energy business and faithful to Pepper Potts these days, but he’s still an arrogant quip machine. “What’s your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Great big bag of weed?” Tony snarks at Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), eager first to figure out how the brilliant scientist maintains his hard-won calm, and second to convince Banner that he might enjoy taking the Hulk out for a spin. Captain America (Chris Evans), now that he’s thawed out, seems awfully depressed and displaced. “When I went to sleep, we were at war,” he tells Fury glumly, taking a break from obliterating punching bags as a form of therapy. “I wake up, they say we’ve won. They didn’t say what we’ve lost.” Thor’s still speaking in Shakespearean text—something Tony doesn’t heistate to ding him for—and getting huffy over family honor, though when Black Widow points out that his brother Loki, on a quest to conquer the world, has killed 80 people in a mere 48 hours, Thor notes quickly “He’s adopted.”

The two characters least-well served by their previous incarnations in Marvel movies, the Hulk and Black Widow, are the ones best served by Whedon’s greatest gifts and strongest tendencies. Previous incarnations have tended to reduce Bruce Banner to something of a victim—his movie depictions haven’t bothered to make the case that the good doctor is worthwhile company in and of himself, interesting not merely because of his struggle to contain what Ruffalo’s Banner ominously refers to as “the other guy.” Whedon’s gifted Banner with a mordant wit and the obligation to point out the downside to situations his more optimistically superheroic colleagues regard as alternately awesome or a piece of cake (to a certain extent, he’s Xander Harris before he gets his hands on a wrecking ball). “Last time I was in New York, I kind of broke Harlem,” he warns them in one moment. When he makes his belated arrival at a battle that’s going poorly, Banner tells his beseiged allies “So, this all seems horrible.” We have a sense of the self Banner loses when he transforms into the Hulk, an understanding that he is valuable, and in peril of losing not just his reason temporarily but his soul permanently.
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If only Marvel would oblige:

“Oh I’d be happy if they add the Black Panther and maybe Dr. Strange,” Lee told I Am Rogue during a recent interview. As for which characters he’d like to see get their very own franchise entries, a la “Iron Man”, “Thor” and “The Hulk”: “Those two [Dr. Strange and the Black Panther] and probably Ant-Man, which I think they are working on [Edgar Wright has been indeed been developing a solo Ant-Man flick for several years now]. Maybe I’ll play a little role in that.”

As much as I would love to see this happen, I only would want it to happen if it could be done right. And I’m not sure how Marvel’s formula would handle a black man who’s king of an African empire that’s more technologically advanced than the West, who’s done battle against the Ku Klux Klan and the apartheid regime in South Africa. I got back and forth on this, because I think there’s real value in positive portrayals of powerful black men in our media, but I wonder if a Black Panther movie that’s barred from talking about race would be worse than no Black Panther at all.

io9 went to Marvel’s big press junket for The Avengers, and came away with some details about where the franchise will go next after its tentpole-to-end-all tentpoles: Loki will get dressed-down back in Asgard, Thor will go world-hopping, Tony Stark will go back against the wall, Captain America will work for S.H.I.E.L.D. and end up in political intrigue, and Hulk is basically done. Notably, there are no details about Black Widow, Maria Hill, or Hawkeye. There’s a lot of discussion about how changes in tone and setting will prevent sequelitis. But it sounds like Marvel’s committed to the same basic formula: dude gets in bad way, world gets in bad way, dude figures out things about himself, dude saves the world.

I enjoy that formula—it’s fun, it’s showy, and it’s been effective even if I think its returns are somewhat diminishing. But it ignores all the ways in which Marvel could avoid sequelitis by expanding the world in which its heroes live and telling different kinds of stories. Some of the new characters Marvel’s considering adding to the roster would shake things up. Doctor Strange would add a more contemplative air to the proceedings, and you could riff on the omnipresence of New York in movies if the movie followed the whole mystical-consultant-in-Greenwich-Village thing (speaking of which, an uptown-downtown, Doctor Strange and Luke Cage 1970s teamup would be all the awesome and a hilarious joke on interracial buddy cop movies). An Inhumans story could be a way to get into alien rivalries—the backstory there is the enmity between the Kree and the Skrull empires and genetic experimentation on human beings, which could be tonally very different and move the Marvel franchise into pure sci-fi. And a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, also apparently in the running, could jump forward into the future depending on which team Marvel wanted to explore.

But none of these formulations do the smaller, low-fi, tonally utterly different stuff that happens within the Marvel universe all the time. Marvel could make movies that draw their drama simply from the fact that superheroes exist and explore how society changes as a result, whether it’s She-Hulk litigating a legal regimen that takes superheroism into account, or Luke Cage recognizing that superheroes will spend more time on the immediate threats to humanity as a whole and less time reforming it. They could resurrect a hero like Deathlok, a cyborg who tries to balance between using his powers and not letting them overwhelm his humanity, as a way to meditate on powers that are imposed on characters rather than natural to them (something Wolverine tried and largely failed to do), and providing a futuristic setting that could steal some of the thunder from the upcoming Judge Dredd movie. And you could play with the idea that superheroism sometimes means solopsism with a Dazzler movie that could be a metaphor for the power we give celebrities. It might be very smart for Marvel to start diversifying kinds of stories and lower-budget plots if only as a hedge against the day when the formula that’s been very successful starts producing diminishing returns for them—and because there’s so much more creative and narrative potential for them to play with. Which characters and storylines do you think Marvel should consider adapting for screens big or small?

Apparently, Natalie Portman is furious that Patty Jenkins is off Thor 2—and the studio is worried about keeping her happy in finding a replacement:

While the parties spun the Dec. 6 parting as an amicable split over creative differences, sources say Jenkins was fired without warning from a job that would have made her the first woman to direct a superhero tentpole. The news was out before anyone had told Portman, who had strongly urged Marvel to hire the director of 2003’s Monster (a film that won Charlize Theron her Oscar). According to sources, Portman had begun to question whether she wanted to continue acting at all right now — possibly for several years — because she wants to spend time with her baby boy, who was born last June. Portman was said to be re-engaged in Thor 2 because of Jenkins’ involvement and especially proud that she would have played a role in opening the door for a woman to direct such a film. The Oscar winner is contractually obligated to stay with the project and Marvel studio is now said to be working overtime to smooth over the situation by including her in discussions about whom to hire as a replacement.

I hope she uses that influence to push Marvel to hire a woman as Jenkins’ replacement. Kathryn Bigelow is probably too busy with her bin Laden project and other commitments, but if she could be tempted, it would be amazing. Maybe the entertainment universe could make it up to Mary Harron for the American Psycho remake by giving her a job? Failing that, Mimi Leder, who directed the final episode of HBO’s Luck?

I have to say, I also appreciate the fact that this piece doesn’t treat the studio insiders’ allegations that Jenkins was “indecisive” or that her decisions displayed a “a lack of overall clarity” as if they’re facts. “Exactly how Jenkins should have acted more decisively is unclear since no script was in place,” author Kim Masters points out. And she also reports that a Jenkins insider says that “Jenkins was so explicit about her vision for the film that she didn’t expect to be hired in the first place.” There’s a lot of call to not treat assertions as if they’re equal in political reporting when one side is misrepresenting facts. But we could use a lot more of it in entertainment journalism as well. In between this and Masters’ piece on the durability of the glass ceiling in Hollywood, color me impressed.