"The idea behind the series was to have some sudsy fun and lift the curtain a bit and take a peep at some of our most fabulous super heroines," says Marvel's Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, "In the series, they're an unlikely foursome of friends–Black Cat, Hell Cat, Firestar, and Photon–with TWO things in common: They're all leading double-lives and they're all having romantic trouble. The pitch started as "Sex and the City" in the Marvel Universe, and there's definitely that "naughty" element to it, but I also think the series is doing to a deeper place, asking question about what it means…truly means…to be a woman in an industry dominated by testosterone and guns. (And I mean both the super hero industry and the comic book industry.) But mostly it's just a lot of hot fun."

Oh, awesome! Now I can find the same stupid Carrie Bradshaw bullshit that has invaded every aspect of my life from television to magazines to the internet since 2000 in a comic book, too! Because I don't care about how awesome superheroines are when they're out kicking ass! I just want to know what they're like when they're having some hot sudsy fun and talking about shoes and boys!

Can we just stop for a minute and call shenanigans on this, please? Do you think there's a series in development that features Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker just chillin' at the Applebee's, shooting the shit about a Mets game and calling each other bro? No. And do you know why? Because it would be BORING. Just like a bunch of superheroines bitching about their love lives and waiting around for Mr. Big. The only people who are going to get excited about this series are those who want to see the "hot sudsy fun."

If this is Marvel's attempt at drawing in a female fan base, they are missing the mark , as these Robot 6 commenters prove:

Jennifer de Guzman
April 9, 2009 at 3:26 pm

I've been trying for years to get my waist be roughly 2/3 the circumference of my thighs! And to find friends whose measurements are exactly the same as mine so we can share latex costumes! And no matter how many doctors I ask, none will agree to break my feet and realign them so they're perpetually in the much-coveted "wearing stiletto f-me shoes" shape. What is these ladies' secret?!

Obviously, it's something to do with what it "means… truly means…to be a woman in an industry dominated by testosterone and guns." I, on the other hand, am a woman in an industry dominated by testosterone and convention hot dogs, so I'm not so lucky.

Amy
April 9, 2009 at 6:15 pm

What the hell is wrong with these people? Let's just parse that little paragraph. So, for women characters to have an active sex life, they are "naughty." And they supposedly want to really, truely explore what it means to be a woman in a male dominated industry, but at the same time it's going to be "good hot fun"? Good, hot fun for whom exactly? The (most likely) all male writing and art staff? The all male comic fanboys this series is aimed at?

Apparently these folks have not grasped the inherent contradiction between really, truly exploring what it would actually be like to be a woman hero in a testosterone and violence dominated world AND still titillating the male audience. You can't have your cake and eat it too, boys. To really explore what it would be like to be a woman in this situation, you would have to acknowledge the essential sexism and misogyny in the comics field. And we can't harsh the fanboy libido with that kind of thing, now, can we?

The closest thing I (as a newbie) have seen to seriously confronting these issues is the series "Alias," and even that was written by a man and had some really skeevy elements. Try getting a woman's creative opinion, here, boys, if you're so "serious" about addressing these issues.

Really, Marvel, is this your plan to bring in more female readers? Because this female newbie comic fan feels like running screaming into the night and never giving another dollar to this industry.

R.
April 9, 2009 at 7:37 pm

Wow, this is in fact an excellent example of women in a male-dominated industry: marginalized, defined by their sex lives (defined as "naughty" no less), and the only reason their stories are told are as an excuse to titillate men. Well done. I couldn't have summed it up better myself.

Throw in a pink cover. All girls like pink. Make sure you pose the women as sexy as possible, because that's totally necessary for a female audience. Oh, and the characters should talk about shoes a lot; women LOVE shoes. Also, keep in mind that when women hang out together, we ALWAYS wear skimpy nighties, CONSTANTLY touch each other, and ALL of our conversations revolve around men. Especially if we're, you know, crime-fighters who're giving up a lot of their lives to do this thankless job. Women don't talk about serious stuff.

Bonus points for bubble baths or pillow fights.

Can we just get a comic book featuring these three, please? Because these are the kind of kickass ladies worth reading about.

Sex And The Single Marvel Heroine [Robot 6]

Newsweek:

Many people had a hard time imagining Downey donning superhero garb. In truth, it's hard to imagine "Iron Man" without him. For without his ironic hipster spin, without his rapid, off-speed line readings, which can make the most ordinary exposition sound like tossed-off improvs, this would be just another generic action picture with risible villains, a conventional story arc, and the inevitable showdown between two lumbering hunks of CGI metal—Iron Man vs. the even larger Iron Monger.

But the real treat is for grownups, who get a beguiling character study behind and above the special effects. Favreau — who directed the best Will Ferrell comedy (Elf) and an agreeably mature fantasy (Zathura: A Space Adventure), and before that wrote and starred in Swingers, maybe the sharpest buddy comedy of the '90s — knows that, when making a big movie, you do not leave your I.Q. at the soundstage door; you bend your gifts in different directions. He lends Iron Man the unobtrusive speed and precision of classic comedy. An actor before he was a director, he's not content to let his stars play stereotypes, or even archetypes. Bridges and Toub, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's gal Friday (the most attractive she's been in years), aren't slumming in the least. They're rising to the material, and elevating it.

Like Tony Stark, Iron Man the movie has a maddening way of hiding its light (Downey) under a bushel—actually bushels and bushels—of special effects. During the action sequences (especially the disappointing final one, a face-off between Stark's Iron Man and Stane's Iron Monger), this movie could be any expensive summer blockbuster, with exploding tanks and bisected city buses and faceless mega-robots duking it out on rooftops. But when it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.

The ace up Iron Man's sleeve, quite unexpectedly, is Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings both radiance and gentle intelligence to the role of a glorified housekeeper called Pepper Potts. How she takes out the laundry in those heels is beyond me, but she's a great sport for doing it, and her dry chemistry with our hero is worth a dozen atomic warheads. Downey may be the smartest star in a mask since Michael Keaton, but this fun, rattling picture would be all boys and toys without Paltrow to humour him.

The genius of the production lies in the agility with which it leaps from one mode to another. I'll be happy to see it again — and plan to do so over the weekend — for the pleasure of Mr. Downey's company, plus the genuine sophistication of the world that Tony Stark inhabits when he isn't driving his sexy cars or bedding a sexy writer from a glossy magazine. The serious-ish plot involves Tony's spiritual conversion from an arms magnate to a peacenik at war with his own corporation and the military-industrial complex, not to mention global terrorism, while his comic-book origins give him what amounts to an Achilles heart, a nuclear-powered device that makes him vulnerable as a man and all but invincible as his alter ego.

As Stark soars around in his titanium alloy outfit, aiming fireballs with perfect precision, he is as potent a figure as Superman. He's as rich as Bruce Wayne with an extra dollop of science-guy nerdiness, finished off with a heaping dose of snark. Iron Man's biggest strength is that the fantastically armored suit doesn't overpower the intriguingly flawed character encased within.

Wearing a goatee right out of the beatnik '50s, he's fast and frictionless, as airlessly ironic as a talk-show host who's been shoved onto the air at 3 a.m. and left to his own what-the-hell devices. The key to Downey's mocking, crumpled charm is that no matter whom he's talking to, he's really just nattering to himself. When he climbs into his Iron Man machine suit, with its whirring, clicking limbs and plated chest, flamethrower arms, and mask of a medieval knight, he doesn't disappear behind the tin-can walls of that chunky, atomic-age jet-pack robot. He's still there, a deftly fragile motormouth — a damaged soul who needs armor to fully become himself.

The hero must flex and furrow his brow; the bad guy must glower and scheme; the girl must shriek and fret. There should also be a skeptical but supportive friend. Those are the rules of the genre, as unbreakable as the pseudoscientific principles that explain everything (An arc reactor! Of course!) and the Law of the Bald Villain. In "Iron Man" it all plays out more or less as expected, from the trial-and-error building of the costume to the climactic showdown, with lots of flying, chasing and noisemaking in between. (I note that there is one sharp, subversive surprise right at the very end.)

What is less expected is that Mr. Favreau, somewhat in the manner of those sly studio-era craftsmen who kept their artistry close to the vest so the bosses wouldn't confiscate it, wears the genre paradigm as a light cloak rather than a suit of iron. Instead of the tedious, moralizing, pop-Freudian origin story we often get in the first installments of comic-book-franchise movies — childhood trauma; identity crisis; longing for justice versus thirst for revenge; wake me up when the explosions start — "Iron Man" plunges us immediately into a world that crackles with character and incident.

Downey clearly has a ball playing the weapons dealer Stark, best described as a cross between James Bond, Mick Jagger and Howard Hughes (whom Lee reportedly based Stark on). During an early flashback sequence, he's portrayed as a kid in a testosterone-laced candy store, living in a concrete temple to modernism in Malibu, delegating his longtime assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) to dispatch his one-night stands with dry-cleaned clothes and a limo home, partying with his Pentagon liaison Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard) in a private plane that, after a few drinks, transforms into a flying strip club. Once the guns start going off, "Iron Man" is fueled by so many explosions and sundry ejaculatory ya-yas that watching it is akin to sneaking into a treehouse past a sign saying "No Girls Allowed."

It's not difficult to guess where this is heading — Marvel stories are all permutations on a handful of stock scenarios — but Favreau doesn't blow it up any more than he has to. In "Elf" and "Zathura" he showed he could integrate special effects and carry the story, but like Downey, he's almost always looking for a comic spin.

A scene in which Tony invites his assistant, Pepper Potts (an appealingly valiant Gwyneth Paltrow), to reach into the hole in his chest and fix his battery is a cheeky cocktail of trust, disgust, love, sex, fear and courage (it's also a key plant for subsequent developments), but above all it plays funny. When a movie is firing on all those cylinders, you know it's a winner.