Girl Power vs. Power Girl (Punctuated by a Colan)

One of the unfortunate things about being a comics fan is the perception that female characters are only presented as highly-objectified and overly-endowed caricatures and that fans can only view them through that lens. While some ground has been gained with regard to that stereotype of both the characters and the fans, I must say that things like the back cover of a recent Justice League compilation don't help.

Admittedly, the Justice League series collected here was decidedly tongue-in-cheek and somewhat poking fun at those stereotypes, and writers have for the most part tried hard to give the pictured character, Power Girl, some depth of character. Still, the combination of the "Paris...or Bust!" tag-line and the image makes even a fan like me wonder what they're thinking.

Switching gears just a little, to my knowledge artist Gene "The Dean" Colan never drew Power Girl, but in the course of a decades long career he drew most of DC and Marvel's major costumed heroes. This included acclaimed runs on Batman and Daredevil. He's also credited (alongside Stan Lee) with creating the early African-American superhero The Falcon. Though he'd been less active in  recent years, the Eisner Award he won for a 2009 issue of Captain America was a fitting exclamation point to an illustrious career as an illustrator that has ended definitively with his death yesterday at the age of 84.