Since Marvel launched Ms. Marvel in 1977 with the tagline "This female fights back!", the hero has spent nearly five decades battling enemies both external and internal. She's traded blows with a rogues' gallery that includes M.O.D.O.K., Mystique, Hecate, Ronan, and Tiger Shark—all while contending with an unforgiving costume, a sexist boss in J. Jonah Jameson, and the anxieties of being marketed as "This Woman, This Warrior" in an era of second-wave feminism. Yet for all these outside threats, Ms. Marvel's most persistent foe has always been herself. Carol Danvers wrestled with a fractured psyche before facing down alternate-dimension versions of her own identity and the Dark Avenger imposter Karla Sofen. Sharon Ventura battled between two bodies—one she wanted, one society approved of. And when Kamala Khan took up the mantle, she inherited this same war with the self, confronting doppelgängers, the entity Stormranger, and even her own reanimated corpse. This book traces the evolving history of the Ms. Marvel title—from its complicated debut as a feminist icon who often undercut her own feminist and heroic ideals, through its passage from Danvers to Khan—arguing that the character's deepest and most enduring conflict has never been with a supervillain, but with herself.

Winner, 2022 Charles Hatfield Award from the Comics Studies Society

In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips.