In part, at least, it reflects the paucity of successful superhero characters/teams of any sex not derivative of those already in place by the Silver Age at the latest. Looking at http://www.dccomics.com/comics/, I count one: Checkmate, plus a few post-Silver Age teams made up mostly of characters that existed by then plus their derivatives (Outsiders, Birds of Prey, Shadowpact).

It might be an interesting exercise to build a list of the non-derivative female superheroes extant pre-1970. Offhand, I can think of Wonder Woman, Black Canary, Phantom Lady, most of the female Legionnaires (minus Lightning Lass and Supergirl, and assuming that they're not all considered Superboy spinoffs given the publishing history and the in-story origin of the team). Who else?

What are the 3 that you're thinking of and what is the team title that you're thinking of? Does the team title "all female" to count?

Because off the top of my head for team books with female superhero characters not based on male characters I can think of:

Legion of Superheroes
Uncanny X-Men
New Titans (not Teen Titans though)

Not stellar, but better than just 1. And all three of these are books where the female characters were integral to the cast and got major subplots and major focus during various runs (and not just a plot device role or a "further the male character's story arc" role, like most appearances of the Scarlet Witch in the Avengers).

Does Birds of Prey count as a book starting female characters not based on a pre-existing male character? Is Oracle different enough from Batgirl for it to count? Does Black Canary being totally original count at all?

As far as solo books go, I'm having a mental block and can only think of Wonder Woman at the moment.

Jer -- I wasn't counting books like LSH, X-Men, or Titans as team titles featuring female superhero characters because they included diverse casts -- although you're right that the female characters there were treated just as important to the book as the male characters (as opposed to Avengers which, except during Roger Stern's run when the Wasp took center stage) has always focused on its male characters.

Anyway, the team book I was thinking of is Birds of Prey. The three solo books are Wonder Woman, Dazzler, and Mystique. Dazzler and Mystique are, of course, long gone from Marvel's publishing schedule. And I forgot that Silver Sable headlined a team book back in the 90s, so we probably ought to count her as well.

Michael -- I take your point; characters created after the Silver Age don't do well period. On the other hand, while DC doesn't have many who sustain their own title, Marvel's currently got a Cable/Deadpool title, two Wolverine titles, a Moon Knight title, a Ghost Rider title, two Punisher titles, a Wonder Man title (which I'll call post-Silver Age since he made on Silver Age appearance and didn't become a viable superhero character until long after the Silver Age ended), an Iron Fist title, a Nova title, and Runaways.

Now I will grant you that Wonder Man, Iron Fist, Nova, and to a lesser extent, Moon Knight and Ghost Rider, are new titles that may not make it as far as Mystique (24 issues) or Dazzler (38 issues) did. But Marvel is at least throwing them against the wall to see if they stick? Why not do the same with Storm? Kitty Pride? Tigra? Hellcat? Psylocke? Wasp?

Would you count Amethyst as a superhero character? Her solo title ran 16 issues, to say nothing of the original twelve-issue limited series. Not an overwhelmingly long run, but better than most.

Let me say that this does not in any way invalidate your point (probably the opposite), but I can imagine that DC and Marvel both know that the vast majority of their customer base is male and traditionally prefers male heroes -- yeah, female leads can sell to the fanboys if they're total cheesecake (e.g. Lady Death).

of course, right now we have Marvel doing a Ms. Marvel comic that seems to know who its audience is, given the monthly dose of fan service included in every issue. For that matter, humor aside, we end up seeing She-Hulk in her skimpy undies on a fairly regular basis as well.

Spunky martial arts-oriented female leads have done well on TV (Buffy, Alias) but have failed as well (Dark Angel); the success doesn't seem to have translated particularly well to comics with the exception of maybe the Buffy licensed comics?

(That reminds me: Marvel now has "Heroes for Hire" as a title that is dominated by post-Silver Age female characters. No telling how long it'll last, of course.)

If I were Marvel or DC and wanted to sell to female customers, I'd put together titles that were derivative of the manga titles that seem to be doing well with that demographic -- and Marvel at least seems to be making efforts along that line.

Of course, none of that addresses a couple of issues I can think of. First, do Marvel or DC have any kind of "responsibility" to try to be more even-handed in at least trying to launch and maintain more characters featuring (preferably non-sexualized) female heroes?

Second, when we talk about post-Silver Age titles generally failing, I think we have to at least take a moment to recognize that most of them have failed by virtue of simply not being very good, or at least not having excitement-generating creative teams working on them. I don't know what would have happened, but I think that if Frank Miller had decided to write and draw a Black Widow comic after he quit Daredevil the first time, it probably would've done very well (for at least as long as he was on the book). Ditto if he'd decided to do a White Tiger comic instead.

(You know, it occurs to me that right now the market is such that there aren't many creators who would guarantee at least decent sales on a new book. Maybe Morrison and Moore? I don't know how, exactly, but I'm sure this is interrelated in some way with the resurgence of event-dominance at Marvel and DC.)

Seems to me that Catwoman would count. Also Nextwave was a female-majority team led by a female.

Jason -

Ah Dazzler and Mystique - I forgot about both of those books. Emma Frost had a book that lasted 18 issue IIRC around the same time as Mystique's -- I'd count it as barely over the 12 issue mark, since 18 issues meant 3 collections at the time, but there you go.

I tend to think of LSH, Titans and X-men when I think of female superheroes because in my "personal Golden Age" (the early-mid 80s) the girls I knew who read comic books read -- X-men, Titans and LSH. Granted that's a sample size of about 5 (IIRC) and they were all friends with each other, but that's where my mind sits.

I think there'd be plenty of room for both companies to expand their markets to female readers IF they wanted to do it. DC has pretty much seemed to abandon the idea of trying to get women and girls to read superhero comics and instead is focusing on expanding the Vertigo market and marketing non-superhero books toward that demographic instead. Marvel doesn't seem to care about expanding the market much at all right now, just in grabbing a larger slice of the fanboy pie than DC.

I'm not even sure the point is adding more female readers. Is there some untapped reservoir of women thinking "If only there were a Big Barda book -- then I'd read comics!"? Maybe, but I tend to doubt it. But I do wonder what's going on that, with the exception of Wonder Woman and the few odds and ends we've named (thanks, Bill and Jer -- I had forgotten Catwoman and didn't even know Emma had ever gotten her own series), no non-derivative woman seems to get published -- and why the few that do get published don't seem to catch on.

Or to look at it from another angle -- Alias/The Pulse is another book I considered adding to my initial list but didn't. The main character is Jessica Jones, aka the Jewel, a former superhero. It's not a book I've ever read, but as I understand it she is, for all intents and purposes, the title character. Why, then, has Marvel seemingly gone out of its way to avoid naming the book after her?

This is one case where I think the problem isn't very strongly connected to sexism - the list of successful superhero dudes since Wolverine is awfully short, too.

Neither DC nor Marvel, but America's Best Comics ran Promethea for 32 issues over 6 years. And she's about as non-derivative as you get.

Bruce, that's the standard line, but I wonder how accurate it is? To be sure, if we consider a "top tier" to consist of characters like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Batman, and Superman, then yes -- Wolverine is probably the only character who makes it to that rarified level. On the other hand, as I mentioned, Marvel's currently got a Cable/Deadpool title, two Wolverine titles, a Moon Knight title, a Ghost Rider title, two Punisher titles, a Wonder Man title, an Iron Fist title, and a Nova title -- all of which are either contemporaries of or post-date Wolverine.

Most of those titles will be cancelled within two years -- but so what? At least Marvel is trying. At least Marvel is throwing them on the stands and saying "hey, guys -- if you think Iron Fist is cool, we've got something for you." Why aren't they trying with any of their non-derivative female characters? Why isn't Marvel saying "hey, guys -- if you think Storm is cool, she has her own book, too!"

One question that's been mentioned (or at least alluded to) is "Why?" So there's no Storm book. So what? Are women going to read superhero comics who otherwise wouldn't if we give them a Storm book? Probably not, or at least not in significant numbers. But what I think it would do if Marvel would give us a book about Storm or Tigra or whoever is tell the existing readers that women and men are peers. Because right now, one message you could easily take away from Marvel and DC (and I don't mean to single them out, but they are what I'm largely familiar with) is that a woman can be the wife or the sidekick, or that you can have a girl version of the "real" character, but that women aren't quite ready for prime time.

Jason: Not disagreeing with any of that, just trying to think out loud some as I put pieces together - basically, I'm trying to figure out what the baseline level of creative and managerial incompetence is, so as to properly judge how much extra bungling is going into the handling of female characters. In particular, I agree that not making the effort fro time to time denies Marvel and DC the chance to make surprise discoveries of the "hey, that's successful" sort. It's certainly possible that deep in their hindbrains, Marvel and DC managers both have trouble thinking of any superhero series without a male in it to be the anchor and guiding light - Batman or whoever in Birds of Prey, Spider-Man in Spider-Girl, and so on.

But then I've also realized over the last couple of years that I honestly don't expect any better out of them, any more than (for instance) I expect a fresh appreciation of the merits of fair use and a rich public domain from the RIAA, or serious attention to the doctrine of separate and limited powers from this administration in Washington. I appreciate the good stuff when it strikes my fancy and generally get my fix in reprints or in other approaches to publishing.

Let's consider Manhunter.

Now, I know that Manhunter is derived from a male character. Several male characters, actually. But that title's ability to stave off cancellation the way it has is certainly not because of the immense popularity of the Dan Richards/Paul Kirk/Mark Shaw/Chase Lawler legacy.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make, or what point I'm trying to argue against, but I wanted to say it anyway.

Solo titles there's Wonder Woman, Ms. Marvel, and Manhunter. I've been waiting for the longest time for a Spider Woman series but lord know if that's going to happen. Image has Strange Girl and there's a new one that Paul Dini created. I can't remember the title tough

Sojourn?

Wonder Man isn't a series. It's a now ended mini-series, and thus no different from last year's Storm mini-series.

DC is doing a line of manga inspired comics aimed at girls, they're Minx line.

Ms. Marvel is, strictly speaking, derivative--she's a female Captain Mar-Vell. The roots are pretty well-hidden at this point, though.

Most of the characters in Birds of Prey are spin-offs from established male-hero franchises, though in several cases there the spinning-off is many steps removed (e.g., Oracle, whose origin as Batgirl is still important but not central to the character or the stories).

As to Alias/Pulse: When Alias began, we knew that Jessica was a former superheroine but we didn't even know her codename; she didn't use it any more. It was primarily a book about private eye who investigated superbeings, so "Alias" was a reasonably good title. And The Pulse was an ensemble book about the eponymous magazine, not a book solely about Jessica (though she tended to dominate the story).

Thunderbolts has always has a high percentage of female characters; right now, two of the three most important characters actually in the Thunderbolts are female (Songbird and Moonstone), and neither of them is a spin-off character.

For that matter, humor aside, we end up seeing She-Hulk in her skimpy undies on a fairly regular basis as well. In the most recent issue, She-Hulk has a bedroom romp with Tony Stark, and then complains at the end of it that when she indulges herself sexually, she's a slut, but when he does, he's a player.

Oh, and three points about Dazzler:

1. It lasted 42 issues (plus a graphic novel), not 38.

2. The last five issues were actually pretty decent--they were by Archie Goodwin and Paul Chadwick.

3. The last issue was over twenty years ago, so its relevance to any discussion of current comics is minute. It was cancelled before the speculator boom of the late 1980s/early 1990s and the collapse which followed. I mean, the span between now and then is great than the span between the start of the Golden Age and the start of the Silver Age!

How about Runaways? For the two years it's been around, that team has generally been majority-female, with none of the heroes being spun-off from previous characters.(Victor and Xavin present some problems for gender, given that one is a robot and the other is a gender-shifting Skrull, but still) For most of the run, the women have been the fulcrum of the storytelling as well.