The Renaissance of movie and TV tie-in action figures arrived in 2013 with Funko’s classic Kenner-style ReAction figure line. Other companies focus on single licensed figures and getting the likenesses spot-on, but Funko’s diversification of lines meant everyone could find something that fit their personal niche at an affordable price point. A true throwback series, one of the overlooked features of the line is the incredible variety of no-names-taken, classic kick-ass heroines represented.
In fact you can find here the top of the world’s best, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners, genre heroines. Buy them for yourself, for your friends, or get your favorite as a totem to inspire you each day from your desktop. And where the early sculpts in Funko’s line admittedly looked nothing like the actresses that made the roles famous, the new lines have only improved. And nobody has better packaging designs than the ReAction line.
Who would you add to the Funko roster of heroines? Compare your list to our more than 85 suggestions for future kick-ass women action figures below.
First, check out this Baker’s Dozen of our favorites in the current Funko pantheon:
The three-day Planet Comicon comic book and pop culture convention wrapped yesterday in Kansas City. The highlight of the day for thousands of attendees was the one-day visit to the show by Stephen Amell, star of the CW Network’s Arrow TV series. If you’ve been reading borg.com for very long, you’ll know I’ve been tracking the show as the world’s biggest Green Arrow fan, including spending the night with 7,000 other fans in San Diego for the show premiere with Amell and his co-stars back in 2012.
After hanging with his cousin (and CW star of The Flash) Robbie Amell last night at the Elite Comics after party at the Alamo Drafthouse, we got to meet Stephen today. As you’d expect, fans were happy to meet him, and he kept a cheery disposition throughout a whirlwind day of signing autographs and being featured on a panel at the convention.
Because he was only at the show for one day, that meant plenty of lines to get to see him–lines that barely even looked like lines.
But as typical with attendees at comic book conventions, everyone handled it all with great attitudes.
In the same way that Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye series took us by surprise as the best new series of 2012 (and hasn’t let up in 2014), Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto’s Black Widow monthly comic book series is proving to be at the top of the 2014 titles. Strange that the duo of Hawkeye and Black Widow is well-known to be a second tier partnership within the Avengers, yet they are the stars of some of the best monthlies the Marvel universe has to offer.
The Black Widow series follows Natasha Romanova and her attempt to atone for her past sins as a mercenary, assassin, general all-around “bad guy.” She selects missions these days very carefully. Her goal is making money but not hurting anyone in the process. And that money goes into trust funds and pays off her web of back-up operatives around the world—nothing in her plans is about profit-taking.
That doesn’t mean she won’t be tapped for S.H.I.E.L.D. or Avengers projects from time to time. Former agent and now director Maria Hill (who you’ll recall is played by Cobie Smulders in the live-action Marvel universe) brings her in on a few missions. They make a great team. Edmondson has a great feel for Romanova. In the same way Fraction was able to show the personal side of Hawkeye, Edmondson scratches the surface of what makes this lethal heroine tick, but her character shows great depth. Yet as she says at the beginning of her series “my full story will never be told”.
If you’re still waiting to see who is going to pick up the reins and turn Gentle Giant’s Honey Trap Army into a comic book series, the next best thing may be at your local comic book store right now. It’s Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto’s new Black Widow biweekly series from Marvel Comics. What does it have to do with the Honey Trap Army? Nothing really, except that Natasha Romanoff as realized by the 1960s style art of Phil Noto would fit right in with the mod-inspired team of high-end assassin action figures.
You’ll get the feeling you’re reading something with plenty of potential, storytelling on par with Jason Aaron’s Thor, God of Thunder. In a similar way as Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye created a story of a second-level Avenger apart from the world of the Avengers, Edmondson’s Black Widow is on her own and carving out her own life in this new series. She’s still working with the Avengers, but this story is about how she spends the rest of her time. And like Hawkeye has his pal Lucky Dog, Natasha almost has her own pet cat. Almost.
She’s an assassin turned paid killer, a distinction that has real meaning for Natasha, who is taking on her own mercenary projects for good pay but not for personal gain. It’s all part of her atonement for past sins, a process she is both forging ahead and wrestling with. She has an able if not seemingly foppish aide in this endeavor, a buttoned-shirt lawyer named Mr. Ross, who selects assignments to take any subjective influences away from what projects are selected for Natasha to pursue. At her request. And we learn even he is full of surprises.
One of my favorite ways to get introduced to new comic book worlds is through Dark Horse Comics’ monthly anthology series, Dark Horse Presents. We’ve reviewed several stories here at borg.com that were pulled from Dark Horse Presents to become their own collected volumes, including Francesco Francavilla’s Black Beetle, the sci-fi series Number 13, the off-the-wall Dog Mendonça and PizzaBoy, Phil Noto’s Ghost, and our favorite of them all, the animal story Beasts of Burden. In a similar vein, the relatively new anthology series Creator-Owned Heroes has spawned its own compilation book, Trigger Girl 6.
The future Earth story Number 13 was first seen in the pages of Dark Horse Presents, and like many popular stories from that anthology series it made it to its own series. A few weeks back the collected stories were republished in its own Issue #0, and in two weeks Number 13 begins a three-issue mini-series. If you haven’t picked up Issue #0 it serves as a good starting point for the world of Number 13.
In Issue #1, Number 13 is the name given to a boy found buried in a desert with a bionic Tony Stark-type, chest-mounted power device, who appears at first to be dead until he sparks back to life as he is discovered by a group of motley, wandering “Fecteds” on the lookout for “Mune” raiders. The boy has the number 13 printed on his head and nothing else is known about him. Some of the backstory of how Number 13 got to the beginning of this story can be found in a prior Dark Horse Number 13 mini-series and Issue #0. Here, the character Number 13 has lost his memory, and seems to be searching desperately for his father.
Elisa Cameron, aka Ghost, has been a character in the Dark Horse universe since 1993. She has appeared in various limited series from time to time and thanks to the ongoing anthology series Dark Horse Presents, she has gained popularity over time, including being ranked 15th last year in the Comic Buyers Guide “100 Sexiest Women in Comics” list. Her character and storyline have bounced around a little over the course of several writers and artists in the past 20 years, but now with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who appears to be the first woman to write the character of Ghost, we now get into the head of this character like never before. Issue 1 of the new limited series released last week plunges into this character’s long backstory and her current crisis.
If you have spent much time at all chatting it up with comic book writers or editors at comic conventions, you have probably heard several mentions of the phrase “creator-owned comic” or “creator-owned project.” The conversation usually goes like this:
Fanboy: Hey, Awesome Comic Book Creator, what are you working on?
Awesome Comic Book Creator: I am working on a big project right now featuring Huge Comic Character for [insert DC Comics or Marvel here]. [And then they look like they are pondering something deeply as they say:] I am also working on a creator-owned project that I have had in the works for several years.
It was Frank Cho last year at Comic-Con who let us in on a project he had been thinking about for years: Guns & Dinos, a project he said he had been thinking about ever since an image came to him of an archaeologist discovering an arm with a modern gun in a dig along side a dinosaur. Guns & Dinos (yet to be released) is a creator-owned project he was trying to generate interest in.
Hitting the stores this month was a new book with an odd title: Creator-Owned Heroes #1. It’s a collaborative new ongoing book between writing partners Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray (who are at the top of my favorite comic writers right now with their All-Star Western series), Steve Niles, Kevin Mellon, and Phil Noto. The point? Get away from big publishing house content and bring some diversity into comics–stories you might not see reaching readers from the big houses.
The book features two eleven page stories that will have readers easily coming back next month. It also has several interviews with the creators in the nature of “here’s what this is all about.” It also includes photos of the creators with fans at conventions, an interview with a cosplayer who Palmiotti asked to create the costume of one of the stories, and an interview with Neil Gaiman.
The two stories were superb. We’ll come back to those.
For the first issue of a new type of publication I didn’t have any issue with the interviews and explanations. That said, I’d rather have more than 11 page stories or a third story for future issues. $3.99 is a fine price but a comic sized magazine with columnists as opposed to news is not really something I think can last too long. And I haven’t read much new from Gaiman in the last several interviews with him I’ve seen so that didn’t add much value for me. I am interested in what these creators think, but are most comics readers readers who just want to read new stories or do they also care about the behind-the-scenes so much?
So back to what is great about this book–two very interesting stories. First Palmiotti, Gray and Noto take on cool muscle cars in a dismal, futuristic world of survival in American Muscle. Great title, great idea. The dialogue is believable, the images make the reader feel the environment. I just hope future issues focus let us in on the cars themselves (they probably can’t specify actual makes and models because of licensing reasons from the auto dealers). Niles and Mellon give us one part Leeloo Dallas, one part human-Cylon, one part David 8, one part la femme Nikita, and one part Ultraviolet in their Trigger Girl 6. That actually should give you all you need to decide whether to check out this one. I’ll just say the pacing of the story was spot-on and the dialogue and art top-notch. I also really liked the color choices in both stories. If this is what creator-owned is, then give us more please.
The publisher of Creator-Owned Heroes is Image Comics. I’ve always viewed Image as sort of a “fourth network” like Dark Horse and Dynamite. I do wonder why Creator-Owned Heroes didn’t try something like Terry Moore and his Abstract Studios publishing company. If you don’t make it big at the major publishing houses I would think Moore has created the model to make it big on your own.
