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Since her first appearance as a superhero in 1977, Ms. Marvel’s most frequent foe has, unfortunately, been herself. In the character’s earliest years, Carol Danvers struggled with two personalities that could not coexist. Later, Sharon Ventura wrestled with choosing between two bodies, one her preferred form and one deemed acceptable by society. Then Carol Danvers returned to the title and fought with a bevy of alternative versions of herself from various dimensions before battling the Dark Avenger version of Ms. Marvel, Karla Sofen. Upon assuming the title after Danvers took on the mantle of Captain Marvel, Kamala Khan inherited this seemingly endless ordeal: clashing with alternate versions of herself, as well as the doppelgänger Stormranger, and even with her own reanimated corpse. 

In every iteration, the iconic hero associated with the honorific of women’s liberation continues to act as her own archnemesis, and the self remains the ultimate foe, suggesting that in every universe, women are their own worst enemy. 

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.