Over the past year, one of the most popular ways to call out sexism in the depictions of female superheroines or women on the covers of fantasy and science fiction novels has been to illustrate what it would look like if men assumed similar poses. Illustrators have posed the other members of The Avengers like Black Widow. Others staged a wide range of superheroes like Wonder Woman, whips or other objects snaking through their legs. The Hawkeye Initiative subs in Hawkeye in any number of ludicrous positions and costumes superheroines are drawn in. And novelist Jim Hines, who’s posed in similar positions as women on fantasy novel covers, challenged his fellow writer John Scalzi to a pose-off for charity.

But something Hines said about the reaction to the pose-off resonated with me, and clarified a bit of concern I’ve had about this particular trope. In an update to the original post introducing their entries, he noted: “I’ve also seen a few areas where response has begun to shift from, ‘I say, those poses seem remarkably impractical, and how exactly does one do that without dislocating one’s ankle?’ to ‘Hey, guys dressing or posing like girls are both ugly and hilarious!’” And in a follow-up called “Wait, What Are We Laughing At?” he wrote:

But if you’re laughing because you’re a straight guy and therefore must declare all male bodies brain-searingly ugly? If you’re laughing because you think a man in a dress is funny and should be mocked? In other words, if you’re laughing because of various aspects of ingrained sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discriminatory nonsense? Then you’ve missed the point so badly it’s not even funny…So please do me a favor. Step back and ask yourself what exactly you’re laughing at, and where that’s coming from. ‘Cause I’m starting to see some rather problematic reactions out there.

And this is what makes me nervous about this particular tactic for exposing sexism. What happens if people see these poses and think they’re ridiculous because it’s ridiculous to see a man pose like a woman, to see a man dressed like a woman, to see a man pretending he’s displaying sexual characteristics he doesn’t actually possess? And what if they walk away from these posts thinking that it’s silly for men to do these things, to dress this way, to pose like that—but that it’s perfectly natural for women to be presented this way.

I wonder if the solution is less to pose men like women, than to demonstrate what superheroes would look like in sexual situations, or if they were sexually aroused, and to place them in the context of doing their jobs. If we want to demonstrate that posing superheroines is ludicrous and sexist, we need to demonstrate that it’s because it undercuts their power, that it leaves them less prepared to respond to events taking place around them, that they have sources of power that aren’t sexual. And we need to demonstrate that the same thing is true for men, that their strength comes from muscles and brains rather than their genitalia, and that it would be odd to the point of utter illogic to suggest that it did.

One of the things the controversy over an old blog post by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn last week raised for me was a common dynamic on the internet. First, someone will write something that’s patently offensive, people will discover it and have a justifiable—and predictable—reaction to that content, and defenders of the original writer will claim that the writing is satire, and the people who are offended are merely humorless and incapable of recognize what’s going on around them. In the case of Gunn’s original post, Gunn himself has acknowledged that his attempt at satire was ineffective, writing in an apology that “A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings.” And the conversation around the post has raised what I think is actually a really useful conversation about what satire is and what it takes for it to be effective.

On Tumblr, SciFiGirl47 offers what she calls the Subway Test, arguing that satire of misogynistic material isn’t actually effective if the language it uses would come across as genuinely threatening to someone who hasn’t been informed in advance that it’s satire. She asks readers to imagine themselves on a subway car, alone, with someone they don’t know:

What you do know is that you are alone with him. And it’s a long way to the next station. Your cell phone doesn’t work on this line. For all intents and purposes, you are trapped with this man. There is no where for you to go, you can’t get out and you can’t call for help, and you have to judge what is happening.

I want you to read James Gunn’s comments and imagine you are trapped in a subway car, alone and isolated with a man who is saying these things to you. I want you to imagine that he is looking at you, maybe looking you straight in the eye, not even glancing at your body, but he is staring you down, and he is saying those words. Do you feel ashamed? Afraid? Do you want to get away? Do you want to get your mace out? Then this piece of ‘satire’ has failed the subway test.

Over at her blog The Nerdy Bird, Jill Pantozzi argues that it isn’t enough for satire to be visible: it has to reveal something about its target.

Merriam-Webster has two definitions of the word:

1. a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2. wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

What human vice is Gunn holding up to ridicule or criticism here? What vice or folly is he using sarcasm or irony to deflect? The one answer I’ve heard to those questions is Gunn was attempting to ridicule the many comic fans online who write this type of gross list regularly but if that was his intent, he failed. The list is not satire, at best, it’s base humor.

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I wrote earlier in the day that, given James Gunn’s blog post in which he objectifies a ton of superheroines in rather crude terms, and makes homophobic remarks about the idea of people being sexually attracted to male superheroes, he owed the public an explanation of the post itself, and of how it differs from his vision for the team he’ll be presenting in Guardians of the Galaxy and female superheroines in general. He’s done half of that in gracious Facebook post tonight, in which he writes:

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all.

People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future. And I will do my best to be funnier as well. Much love to all – James

I’m particularly glad to see him acknowledge that, if the post was an attempt at satire, something a lot of his defenders claimed, that it was ineffective, and that calling it a satire didn’t deflect legitimate criticisms of the work. And I think this incident is an important reminder: if you’re actually an “an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised,” and you have a serious platform, then that’s something you have to keep in mind whenever you’re speaking publicly. That should be a spur for your humor and your satire to be smarter. If you’re called out for violating your own principles, your first reaction should be to listen, and to hold yourself to a high standard. It would be terrific for Gunn to use this incident to lay out those principles for his supporters, many of whom are using his apology as proof that people who were upset about the initial post are overreacting and should shut up.

And I’d still appreciate him laying out his vision for Guardians and how he’ll handle any female superheroes who are part of the movie, and delineate the differences between the attitudes in that post and his creative plans. If this is an opportunity to push Marvel to rectify some of its serious lack of diversity in the past, it’s a productive moment. I’m glad Gunn’s responded with some insight and class. I hope his script for and direction of Guardians of the Galaxy reflects that same statement of his values.

When word came down in August that Guardians of the Galaxy, the planned 2014 Marvel movie about an oddball group of superheroes including an interstellar raccoon and a talking tree, was actually a backdoor introduction of Carol Danvers, the badass Air Force pilot who is now Captain Marvel, I was ridiculously excited. It’s long past time that Marvel added a female superhero (as opposed to simply a well-trained human woman) to the on-screen Avengers lineup, Danvers’ military pedigree would lend her some interesting synergy with Captain America, and she’d be a fascinating way to get a well-credentialed action actress like Katee Sackhoff into the franchise. But since folks have uncovered an old blog post by James Gunn, who is both writing and directing the movie, I’ve gone from enthusiastic about the project to straight-up terrified about it.

The post is Gunn reporting the results of a poll he did with readers about which superheroes they’d like to have sex with. It was deleted—and you can see why—but it’s available in Google Cache. And while I don’t necessarily oppose the idea of this kind of poll—superheroes are designed to be fantasies—the way Gunn wrote up the results reveals some pretty horrifying ideas about superheroines, both inside the bedroom and outside of it.

On Emma Frost, described as the woman of choice for “those men who love rude bitches,” Gunn says “What I love about Emma is the practical attire she wears while adventuring. Certainly, if I were a woman fighting giant monsters I’d want to wear some awesome breast-mushing halter top, a pair of panties, and thigh highs.” On my beloved She-Hulk, “I ever were in the mood to be dominated and treated like a little bitch, by someone who is green, then She-Hulk would almost certainly be the way to go.” Then there’s this little bon mot “Disco Dazzler, Rave Dazzler, and Punk Rock Dazzler, they all have one thing in common – a friggin’ GREAT vagina.” On Kitty Pryde: “I wrote her back [on Twitter], but neglected to mention that I wanted to anally do her. I won’t even mind if Lockheed is in the room, staring at me with a creepy look the whole time.” There’s slut-shaming of Batgirl: “Being a teen mom and all, you know she’s easy. Go for it.” There are nasty objectification fantasies, like this one of Spider-Woman: “The whole time I’m fucking her I can’t get her face out of my mind as the Skrull leader who tried to conquer the world. I know it’s not her fault, but I just can’t help it. So I finish on her face to help block out the painful memories.” A lot of “this woman is messed-up so she’s sexy,” a la Cassandra Cain: “Cassandra’s father taught her how to kill people when she was eight. Which means she has the ultimate daddy issues. Which means she’s just my type.”

Then, there’s the charming homophobia! On Gambit: “My girlfriend voted for this Cajun fruit. I think she’s looking to have a devil’s three way with the two of us. The idea of my balls slapping against Gambit’s makes me sick to my stomach.” The charming observation of Batwoman that “This lesbian character was voted for almost exclusively by men. I don’t know exactly what that means. But I’m hoping for a Marvel-DC crossover so that Tony Stark can “turn” her. She could also have sex with Nightwing and probably still be technically considered a lesbian.”

Maybe it should be comfort to us that of his potential heroine, Carol Danvers, Gunn only says “Carol Danvers dropped 13 points from her position last year. It’s a surprise to me as she is, along with Emma Frost and the Black Cat, one of the most consistently sexualized characters in the Marvel Universe,” though if he thinks her sexualization is one of the more telling things about her character, the fact that he doesn’t have specific fantasies about her may not count for very much. One of the most telling remarks Gunn makes is about Starfire: “The picture above is why, by the age of nine or ten, comic books had ruined real women for me forever.” In this post, he repeatedly mentions his girlfriend, so that doesn’t seem entirely true. But I do think that he and Disney should have to explain why these kinds of attitudes haven’t ruined him from being the kind of person who’s actually suited to introduce the first Marvel superheroine to an audience that includes men who are capable of reading superwomen as more than templates for sexual fantasies, and women who are eager to see themselves reflected on screen.

You don’t get to be super without some trouble along one the way. One of the most common tropes in superhero origin stories is the trauma that sets a person on the road to greatness, whether it’s the destruction of Krypton, the murder of the Waynes in a back alley, or Tony Stark’s unpleasant acquisition of some shrapnel in his chest in Afghanistan. Usually, that trauma leads to a period of reflection and the emergence of resolve and maturity, and a generalized kind of certainty. But watching the CW’s Arrow, I’ve been struck by its very different take on this narrative. Oliver Queen certainly suffered enormously when his father committed suicide so Oliver would be able to survive the wreck of their yacht, and he emerged different from his years of training on a remote island. But rather than imbue him with a sense of certainty that carries over to us, the show is spending a lot of time suggesting that Oliver’s view of his own antics is unreliable, and in doing so, capturing a deeper sense of the trauma that turns someone into a greater version of themselves, and the unreliability that can accompany that transformation.

One of my first reactions to the Arrow pilot was that it was a nastier portrayal of superheroism than we’ve typically seen in this revival. The Avengers have bruising fights, but the only people they kill are invading alien armies, or in self-defense. Christopher Nolan’s Batman faces off against grostesquely sadistic opponents, like the Joker, but in his day-to-day patrolling routine, he normally sticks to punching people–in the most recent movie, the person who turned out to be his primary antagonist died in a car crash rather than directly at his hands. Oliver Queen, by contrast, kills people–a lot of them.

Given that Arrow is the kind of show that will dispassionately survey the fletchery protruding from an assassin’s shattered goggles, I’ve been glad to see the show reckon with the deaths that Oliver is racking up. “Oliver, you’re not a soldier. You’re a criminal. And a murderer,” Diggle tells him when Oliver makes his initial pitch to his bodyguard to join him in a crusade against the corrupt elements of their city. And in this most recent episode, Arrow used its flashbacks to explicitly address how learning to kill changes a person. As Oliver weakens on the island, his body affected by the trauma of his near-drowning, his father’s suicide, his own recent poisoning, his mentor refuses to let him eat if he won’t dispatch of his own dinner. “Please. I’m starving. I never killed anything before,” Oliver begs him before giving in and snapping a bird’s neck. It’s no small thing to graduate from never having caused a death or having any acquaintance by the violent process by which people are parted from life prematurely to killing on a regular basis. This process may be the means by which Oliver survived to return home, but it’s not clear that it was good for him.

That perspective makes Arrow a more directly dark critique of the society in which Oliver operates than some of the superhero stories that have preceeded him. While the failure of Gotham’s institutions left a void for Batman to fill, there was an extent to which he answered the still-reasonable needs of Gotham’s citizens: they wanted someone to crack down on criminals, and in the absence of the police’s ability to do that, whether via corruption, lack of motivation, or literally being trapped underground, Batman does what they’d have done otherwise. In Arrow, by contrast, Oliver goes after institutions of his town, people who aren’t causing wide-spread violence or problems, but whom he deems dangerous. Where Batman is reactive, Oliver is proactive, a much trickier moral position for superheroes, especially ones who kill rather than simply immobilize and hand criminals over to the cops.

When Laurel asks Oliver “If what you’re doing isn’t wrong, why protect your face with a hood?” he gives the same answer Batman does–to protect the ones he loves, but it reads hollower for Oliver than it does for Bruce Wayne. What’s interesting about Arrow is that it questions how much Oliver needs to do what he’s doing, how much he likes it, and, as with his conversation with Diggle about his plans to gentrify a poor, black neighborhood, the extent to which he actually knows what he’s doing, not just about one-off decisions, but about the whole enterprise. Diggle joins up with him because the other options available to him, including bodyguarding privileged brats, are worse than undertaking even an ethically questionable fight to clean up the city. But Oliver’s journey suggests that his appeal is a testament to how sick Starling City really. Rather than answering a set of legitimate needs, his bent view of Starling City is marginally better than the alternative.

I’ve been a little worried that Iron Man 3 was going to repeat the cycle of Tony Stark being an entitled, self-regarding rich bro before rising to the occasion that’s become the character’s signature arc, but this trailer has my mind at ease:

If you’re going to have a giant, years-long story, continuity should be a benefit of The Avengers franchise, rather than a hindrance. So I’m excited to see that Shane Black, who directed Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which helped bolster Downey’s comeback, is making a movie that’s deeply engaged with the impact of the events of The Avengers on Tony Stark. “Nothing’s been the same since New York,” Tony reflects in the trailer’s voiceover. “I experience things and then they’re over. I can’t sleep, and when I do, I have nightmares.” It makes sense that a man who enjoys life as much as Tony does would be shaken by his own decision to sacrifice himself, and that, powerful he is, he’d be unnerved by his first glimpse of the world beyond the one he’s known and dominated on almost every level. “Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist,” as Tony laid out his resume in The Avengers, doesn’t count for quite as much in a world where there are giant alien armies prepared to descend on Midtown.

I’m less immediately stoked about Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, both because it would have been nice to see an actor of Chinese, rather than Indian and British origin, play the role, and because there’s a bit too much Bane in at least what we’re seeing here. “Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. Lesson number one. Heroes? There is no such thing,” said in a funny voice, feels like Black and company picked it up off the cutting room floor for The Dark Knight Rises. Loki’s been so much fun in The Avengers because, as Bruce Banner put it, “his brain is a bag full of cats.” He’s twisty, unpredictable, and we’re a long way from his end game, but perhaps most importantly, his motivations, courtesy friend of the blog Zack Stentz and company, have been clear going back to Thor. Coding a villain as intellectual is not actually a substitute for explaining who they are and what they want.

We’ve finally got the first trailer for the adaptation of Midnight’s Children, long considered unfilmable, and at a first glimpse, it looks like the project will put paid to that idea.

One thing I can’t tell from this trailer is whether this adaptation is preserving the magical elements of Midnight’s Children, or jettisoning the idea that the children born in the first hour of India’s independence came into the world with superpowers. I’d regret the downgrading of Rushdie’s characters, some of the most interesting superheroes of color ever written, into average men and women, though I can see that being the easiest way to make the book manageable. Special effects are expensive and can be easy to do extremely badly.

But while I’ll reserve judgement on that element of Midnight’s Children, I’m excited to see the movie as a whole. It’s such a relief to see another country’s history treated as if it’s worthy of epic treatment, rather than as a backdrop for Western character’s adventures, as India was in The Avengers. A period like the Indian Emergency, in which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi postponed elections, preemptively arrested dissidents, and issued decrees that let her bypass the democratic process, is important to see on screen not just because it’ll introduce new audiences to critically important parts of India’s past, but because it introduces new narrative arcs and character types into the storytelling ecosystem. And as I wrote back when news of the project broke last year, Midnight’s Children should push American superhero stories to step up their game: it has the guts to be an alternate history of India, rather than a fantasy that skates lightly over the issues it alludes to but isn’t quite willing to engage with.

When I walked out of Dredd, the exceedingly, even distractingly violent update of 2000 AD’s comic book meditation on the fascist tendencies in American depictions of law enforcement, I told the friend who joined me at the movies that I wished it had been a Judge Anderson movie. It’s not that Karl Urban isn’t good as the titular Judge Dredd, a perpetually dour man with little to no patience for violent criminals. But that as Judge Anderson and Ma-Ma, the violent drug lord Anderson and Dredd pursue on a day when Anderson’s been sent into the field for the final evaluation that will determine whether she becomes a Judge, it’s much more fun to see Olivia Thirlby and Lena Headey play two very different kinds of very tough women than to watch Dredd do his thing.

When she starts out her first day on the job, Anderson’s at a disadvantage: she’s a mutant and a psychic who got into the Judge Academy on special dispensation and when Dredd meets her, scored three percent too low to pass her graduation exams. Dredd takes her out to evaluate her as a favor, but he plainly doesn’t expect her to succeed, much less live—her unwillingness to wear a helmet so her psychic abilities can work at the highest level makes him skeptical. But in the field, Anderson does well, most notably in a show-down with Kay, a lieutenant in Ma-Ma’s organization played by The Wire‘s Wood Harris. Once he finds out she’s psychic, Kay tries to rattle Anderson by picturing himself raping her. Anderson is unperturbed. “You’re picturing a violent sexual liason between the two of us in a pointless attempt to shock me,” she tells him, bored. Rape culture apparently persists in Mega City One, and young women are still learning not to let themselves be debilitated by it. When Kay imagines Anderson fellating him and tells her it’s to shut her up, she reminds him that she isn’t the innocent girl Kay thinks she is, and that she’s fully prepared to bombard him with images and ideas he’s less prepared to deal with than she is. It’s not a good thing that Anderson has to be prepared to defend herself against both physical and mental harassment and assault. But in a sexually violent society, she’s more resilient than a sexually violent man is.

Then there’s Ma-Ma, who is so terrifying in part because she marries a kind, motherly tone to dreadful orders. Whether she’s ordering a flaying of rival gang members who have challenges her, threatening a young man she’s already horribly victimized, or leading the demolition of an entire floor of an apartment building, Ma-Ma rarely raises her voice. The disconnection between the tone she adopts, which people want to respond to, and the things she asks them to do or orders them to do is deeply disturbing, and it’s a reminder of how powerful femininity and motherhood can be. Raw domination is not the only way to exercise power. And in an even more extreme fashion than Anderson, Ma-Ma is a victim who retaliates with sexualized violence of her own. Mutilated by her pimp, Ma-Ma bites off his genitals while being forced to fellate him, an image that recurs throughout the movie.

A lot of the violence in Dredd feels unnecessary to the plot or the movie’s argument: a jaw ruined by a bullet or a mass of flayed flesh on the floor of an apartment building are mostly a test of whether you flinch or not. But I actually found the images of sexual violence in Dredd to be an exception. In their own ways, Judge Anderson and Ma-Ma want to save themselves from fates that other people feel confident inflicting on them. Violence and humiliation in retaliation may not break the cycle. But they’re an attempt to warn those who would attack women that the response is less predictable and more vigorous than the attackers expect.

By Arturo Garcia

In the wake of the big, clumsy Avengers/X-Men crossover AvsX, which concluded on Oct. 3, Marvel Comics is selling the reintroduction of a version of the original X-Men as a bold move. And the company’s sort of righ–for all the wrong reasons. Because what Marvel’s saying is, a franchise built and marketed as a grand metaphor about race is going to center around white people. “Re(e)volution”? More like Re(e)tread.

As part of the upcoming “Marvel NOW!” marketing line, the cynically-titled All New X-Men will allegedly feature the team’s original five members–the young Scott Summers (Cyclops), Jean Grey, Warren Worthington (Angel,) Hank McCoy (Beast) and Bobby Drake (Iceman)–landing in the present-day Marvel Universe. (I say allegedly because, this being comics, you have to account for the chance they’re actually from Another Dimension, An Alternate Timeline, Skrulls in Disguise, a veiled insult to cosplayers, what have you.) The move is especially disappointing coming from the new series’ writer, Brian Michael Bendis, who has shown the ability–and more importantly, the clout–to elevate characters of color in other parts of the Marvel Universe.

It was Bendis who took Luke Cage from a blaxploitation throwback to a featured player in the pre-movie Avengers franchise, and Bendis deserves credit for not only crafting a heroic death for the Ultimate (alternate) universe’s Spider-Man, but introducing a Black Latino, Miles Morales, as his successor and using the Spider-Men mini-series to solidify his role. So it’s disheartening to read him gushing to Newsarama about some mythical consensus of X-Men fans: “That’s the thing X-Men fans always say they want,” he said. “You go anywhere—’Bring back Jean Grey!’ But they don’t want a reincarnated Jean Grey, and they don’t want a dug-up Jean Grey. They want Jean.”

I’m not sure who Bendis is talking to, but I’m willing to bet there’s also a sizable contingent of fans who’d like to see Storm–a former leader of the team and a former Queen of Wakanda–have a more prominent role than being chained up on the cover of Wolverine’s latest series. Or who would prefer younger characters like X-23 and The Runaways (this group, not that group) to be involved in something other than a Battle Royale homage. It doesn’t say much for Marvel’s confidence in its product or the customers it chooses to listen to see that it would rather dote on characters from 1963 than renew development of more recent properties — nearly 30 years’ worth, as Matt Price pointed out at Nerdage. Price’s post highlights years of opportunity the company has let go by the wayside: all of those teams, introduced as the Next Generation of the Mutant fight for equality, have been stuck in comics Neverland; they’re the Lost Boys and Girls of the Marvel Universe until, well, probably forever, if series like All New are going to be taking priority.

Or maybe it’s just time for Marvel to give up the ghost; while series like Uncanny X-Force and the issues of Uncanny X-Men that preceded AvX were solid when showing us professional superheroes, the fact is that the company has squandered many story possibilities the Mutants-As-Minority analogy has offered, even before the epic racefail that was X-Men: First Class. I talked about that creative stagnation at Racialicious last year, nothing that “We never met, say, a relatively-super-fast courier in the New York depicted in ‘Amazing Spider-Man.’ Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson never hired a legal assistant with an extra-eidetic memory in ‘Daredevil’” Mutants have been part of Marvel’s world, but never really in it, unless they were either engaging in terrorism against “normal” humans, or part of anti-terrorism factions.”

We’re talking about a company, after all, where an executive feels it’s okay to publicly state that a team of black Avengers would be “contrived.” Why expect it to show enough awareness to introduce a political successor to Charles Xavier? Instead, we get characters from the Mad Men era. The idea has a little bit of charm–Jean as Joan? Scott as Don? Bobby as Pete? Comedy alert!–and will probably goose sales for the immediate future. But it would be easier for Marvel to make their “events,” and their overall line, mean something if it invested more in characters who were most relevant after the Civil Rights struggle it claims to be trying to evoke.

Arturo R. García is the Managing Editor at Racialicious and an Editor at The Raw Story

An agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show may not have been what I would have chosen for Marvel’s foray into television in cooperation with Joss Whedon, but it is a logical move, a way to build out the Marvel universe with relatively low special effects requirements and in a procedural framework that will be familiar to audiences who aren’t used to watching superhero shows. But I’m optimistic about the character lineup that’s been announced for the show for a couple of reasons:

SKYE | This late-20s woman sounds like a dream: fun, smart, caring and confident – with an ability to get the upper hand by using her wit and charm.

AGENT GRANT WARD | Quite the physical specimen and “cool under fire,” he sometimes botches interpersonal relations. He’s a quiet one with a bit of a temper, but he’s the kind of guy that grows on you.

AGENT ALTHEA RICE | Also known as “The Calvary,” this hard-core soldier has crazy skills when it comes to weapons and being a pilot. But her experiences have left her very quiet and a little damaged.

AGENT LEO FITZ and AGENT JEMMA SIMMONS | These two came through training together and still choose to spend most of their time in each other’s company. Their sibling-like relationship is reinforced by their shared nerd tendencies – she deals with biology and chemistry, he’s a whiz at the technical side of weaponry.

First, given the huge imbalance in the Marvel universe, it’s really nice to have three female characters to two male ones. I like great male characters, and I’m always curious to see what Whedon does with men and masculinity, a rather under-discussed element of his work, but if we’re seeing this show as part of a larger whole, this is a welcome course correction.

And second, it’s nice to see that, at least from the initial descriptions, we’re going to have different kinds of women in the show, too, from a charismatic heroine, to an action hero, to a lab rat. Particularly in the high school years of Buffy, Whedon did a nice job of showing how women with different personalities and styles could click as friends, grate up against each other, hurt each other, and work together. It was fascinating to Buffy, not a day-to-day academic whiz (though a good test-taker), and Willow, who made up in smarts what she lacked in fashion sense, form an extremely effective and for the most part, emotionally balanced partnership. The “Lovers Walk” episode of Buffy‘s third season, where Cordelia catches Xander cheating on her with Willow was interesting in part because it upset Cordelia’s understanding of her appeal and social standing relative to Willow. And in later seasons, Tara’s gentleness was a strong counterpoint to Buffy and Willow’s personalities: whether in magical practice or in terms of her relationship with Buffy’s younger sister Dawn, kindness can be even more effective than authority or strength.

Whedon did this kind of conflict of styles and surprising complementarities extremely well in The Avengers. Steve Rogers’ everyman values and old-fashioned perspectives on duty and teamwork clashed with Tony Stark’s ego and individualism. Tony may have goaded Bruce Banner, but in his fellow scientist, he recognized a kindred tinkerer and a man with some of the control problems that have plagued Tony in the past, if with more significant consequences. Thor sees in Bruce a man who needs a rumble sometimes. The final action sequences in the movie, though they have flaws, wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying without the friction that preceded it. These were men who could work together so effectively because they’d probed all of each other’s weak points and figured out all the places where their skills could complement each other. I’ll be excited to see Whedon use this part of his skill set again with a mixed group of men and women, and in an extended narrative on television.