The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines (2009), Mike Madrid
Poison Ivy’s sexual empowerment gave way to other super females like Vampirella.
In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown released the first issue of Cosmopolitan, a publication which encouraged its female readers to have it all, “love, sex, and money.”
In the late 2000s, in the midst of the rise of Young Hollywood, like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan, comic heroines made a comeback to provide girls a different sort of role model.
To further emphasize the weakness of these women as opposed to their male counterparts, heroines were often called “girls” as opposed to “women”; whereas, the number of male heroes during the Golden Age dubbed “men” (e.g. Batman, Bulletman, Hawkman, and Superman) could run pages and pages. To make women seem even weaker, artists and writers often portrayed them running into common damsel-in-distress situations — dragging the true male superheroes out of a dire situation into another one to save their girls.
Many of the early female comic book heroes served as the Eve to their boyfriends’ Adam. In the creation of characters such as Hawkgirl, Bulletgirl, Flame Girl, and Rocketgirl, these women created their super identities after their male counterparts — many of them are the direct products of their boyfriends’ vision and did not emerge of their own imagination. Without the men, or rather Adams, these Eves would not have existed — as none of them have their own unique set of powers or costume that they did not borrow from their boyfriends.
