Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the systematic brutalization of anyone with a uterus! If you aren’t, these stories, my girls’ stories, stand alone as laser beams fired in the dark against the unfairness of … well … the Super Patriarchy. You’ll get all my little jokes and references. If you’re a comics fan, you’ll know who I’m mad about. Something like a contemporary update of Cinderella as an android or Snow White as a cowboy. I created characters and interconnecting narratives that are something like the Scarecrow and the Tin Man are to Dorothy’s uncle’s farmhands. I treated superhero comics the way I’ve always treated fairy tales-as repositories of archetypes, of symbols, of lessons fraught with cultural expectations, taught to children without thinking, instrumental in shaping our views of the world while being dismissed as ridiculous kid stuff by the mainstream.

I sat down at my computer and got angry over and over again. Over the next two years, that’s what I did. “Welp,” said I, “I guess I’ll just have to create a completely original, cohesive, analog superhero universe spanning the entire history of superhero comics. I cried because they baited me with Gwen’s job and her lines and her lab coat and with the date on the movie reel into believing, just once, that the person I’m meant to identify with in superhero stories could be more than a sassy prop. Fooled into thinking that the punchline could ever be anything different. Fooled into thinking anything had changed. I cried because I was furious that I’d been fooled. That old, familiar message slides into our brains with the warm familiarity of a father’s hug: when women make their own choices, disaster results. To make those powerful words the punchline to a sad joke about female agency by punishing her for them, by making sure that no matter how modern and independent the new Gwen might seem, everything is just as it has always been. Someone chose to have her say that right before it all goes to hell. They made it through many rounds of editing and screen-testing. People so often think of iconic characters as organic things that proceed semi-autonomously while the writer just records their actions, but someone chose to give her those words. It felt like such a harsh slap in the face.

The refrigerator monologues