Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age by Peyton Brunet and Blair Davis (review)

Peyton Brunet and Blair Davis’s Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age is a book driven by a feminist praxis. Their objective is to center women comics creators and women characters within the male-dominated comics history. Brunet and Davis divide the book into eight chapters with an introduction and conclusion, plus a foreword by Trina Robbins. The foreword by Robbins explains the importance of women’s and girls’ comics for readers, both past and present. The chapters are titled after the comic book genres to which they are devoted: Superhero, Jungle, Crime, Horror, Western, Science Fiction, and Romance, with chapter 6 devoted to title characters. This organization allows Brunet and Davis to address the comic book characters and women-centered plots of each genre as well as the women creators behind them. Brunet and Davis detail the implications of the obfuscation of women from comic book history. They note accurately that male creators and masculine-focused comics have been privileged within the historical narrative. However, their approach to the historiography makes it unclear how such privilege became the standard. For instance, they seldomly reference specific histories or scholars in their critiques of the field, instead broadly referring to “comic book historians” who privilege male comic book creators and masculine narratives in their academic work. While it is easy to