Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Justice League of Amazons Revisited

I've been thinking a lot lately about the Justice League of Amazons comic from that Justice Leagues event DC ran several years ago. The plot for the event was lame, but I liked the concept that the individual members of the JLA each formed their own version of the team reflecting their personalities and ideologies. So Superman and the Martian Manhunter formed the Justice League of Aliens, Batman formed the Justice League of Arkham, Wonder Woman formed the Justice League of Amazons, etc. It was a cool idea and I especially loved the idea of a team of DC's female powerhouses.

The JLAmazons was made up of Wonder Woman, Power Girl, Big Barda, Zatanna, Huntress, the Supergirl of the time, and Black Orchid. It's a good line-up, but I think it would need some tweaking if DC were to revisit the concept today.

Wonder Woman's a natural. She's the most iconic superheroine in existence, plus she's a badass and a bona fide Amazon.

Zatanna's another easy choice. I think teams are much more interesting with magic-users on them and Zatanna's magic is especially powerful.

I also think that Huntress is criminally underused as a female counterpart for Batman. I hated it when they took the new Batgirl identity from her and gave it to Cassandra Cain. Batwoman is interesting, but she doesn't have the history that Huntress does, so Huntress best fills the role on this team that Batman fills in the JLAmerica.

I don't know much about Power Girl and Big Barda, but I like that they're beautiful bruisers. It's an archetype I can't get enough of. Supergirl's cool too, especially since she doesn't look like trouble, but she is. But since she and Power Girl are both related to Superman, I think it would be a lot more interesting to replace Supergirl (who's over-exposed in the DCU anyway) with Mary Marvel, assuming Mary emerges from Countdown a good guy.

I don't know much about Black Orchid either. I know that her JLAmazons design is bad though and that she's completely out of place with the rest of the team. Maybe she'd be cooler if she was the Vertigo version. I don't really care though; I'd much rather just swap her out for Black Canary, who's far more interesting and deserving to be in this lineup.

I'd also like to up the number of members to eight in order to fit in Starfire. She'd make a nice trio with Barda and Power Girl.



Thinking about this made we wonder what a Marvel version would be like, too. What if there were an all-female team of Avengers? Sticking to an eight-woman team, I'm thinking:

Ms. Marvel
Invisible Woman
She-Hulk
Rogue
Black Widow
Talisman (from Omega Flight)
Molly Hayes (Bruiser from Runaways)
and...

Gah. I had an eighth earlier and now I've lost her. I'll remember later and update. Update: Oh, yeah. It's Namora.

But what do you think? Who should be on DC and Marvel's female powerhouse teams? I didn't go into detail on how I picked the Marvel team, but my criteria were sort of all over the place, so use whatever selection method you like.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eight-woman team for Marvel? Interesting idea...

Ms. Marvel
Invisible Woman
Mystique
Emma Frost
Wolfsbane
Kitty Pryde
Storm
Nico (Runaways)

Tried to go with variety of powers that compliment each other or fill certain niches.

philippos42 said...

I think this was the Vertigo version. The earlier Black Orchid was...more Ditkoesque.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Orchid

Michael May said...

You could be right. Everything I know about her is from that Wikipedia article, but it looks to me like Flora Black was the Vertigo version and "Suzy" is the JLAmazons version.

Anonymous said...

if i was to choose my all female jla, i would call them Justice LAdies. and i would have black orchid replaced by black canary & add vixen or hawkgirl as an 8th member.

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