ComicsAlliance and ComicsBlend Best Comic Book of the Year BUST Magazine “Lit Pick” Recommendation Certified Cool™ in PREVIEWS: The Comic Shop’s Catalog “Mike Madrid gives these forgotten superheroines their due. These ‘lost’ heroines are now found—to the delight of comic book lovers everywhere.” —STAN LEE Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ruled the pages of comic books in the 1940s, but many other heroines of the WWII era have been forgotten. Through twenty-eight full reproductions of vintage Golden Age comics, Divas, Dames & Daredevils reintroduces their ingenious abilities to mete out justice to Nazis, aliens, and evildoers of all kinds. Each spine-tingling chapter opens with Mike Madrid’s insightful commentary about heroines at the dawn of the comic book industry and reveals a universe populated by extraordinary women—superheroes, reporters, galactic warriors, daring detectives, and ace fighter pilots—who protected America and the world with wit and guile. In these pages, fans will also meet heroines with striking similarities to more modern superheroes, including The Spider Queen, who deployed web shooters twenty years before Spider Man, and Marga the Panther Woman, whose feral instincts and sharp claws tore up the bad guys long before Wolverine. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but their influence on popular culture, and the heroes we’re passionate about today, is unmistakable. Mike Madrid is the author of Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics and The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, an NPR “Best Book To Share With Your Friends” and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. Madrid, a San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, also appears in the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines.

"Mike Madrid is doing God's work. . . . mak[ing] accessible a lost, heady land of female adventure." —ComicsAlliance "Sharp and lively . . . [Madrid] clearly loves this stuff. And he's enough of a historian to be able to trace the ways in which the portrayal of sirens and supergirls has echoed society's ever-changing feelings about women and sex."—Entertainment Weekly "A long overdue tribute to [those] fabulous fighting females." —Stan Lee Mike Madrid has become known as a champion of women in comics and as the expert in Golden Age female characters. And now here is where it all began, as informative and entertaining as ever, in a revised and updated edition, including new illustrations and a new introduction, as well as an afterword bringing us up-to-date on what's happening with women in comics now. Mike Madrid is the author of Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics; Vixens, Vamps & Vipers: Lost Villainesses of Golden Age Comics; and the original The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. A San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, Madrid also appears in the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines and is the illustrator of two of The History of Arcadia books: Lily the Silent and The Lizard Princess.

A rogue’s gallery of the most glamorous and dastardly villainesses in Golden Age comics.

Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World delivers a empowering book for women and girls of all ages, featuring 100 women who made history and made their mark on the world, it's a best-selling book you can be proud to display in your home. The 100 revolutionary women highlighted in this gorgeously illustrated book were bad in the best sense of the word: they challenged the status quo and changed the rules for all who followed. Explored in this history book, include: • Aphra Behn, first female professional writer. • Sojourner Truth, women's rights activist and abolitionist. • Ada Lovelace, first computer programmer. • Marie Curie, first woman to win the Nobel Prize. • Joan Jett, godmother of punk. From pirates to artists, warriors, daredevils, women in science, activists, and spies, the accomplishments of these incredible women who dared to push boundaries vary as much as the eras and places in which they effected change. Featuring bold watercolor portraits and illuminating essays by Ann Shen, Bad Girls Throughout History is a distinctive, gift-worthy tribute to rebel girls everywhere. A lovely gift for teen girls, stories to share with a young girl at bedtime, or a book to display on a coffee table, everyone will enjoy learning about and celebrating the accomplishments of these phenomenal women.

This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy’s coming of age in 1970s New York—now with a new epilogue. “I am not your typical middle-class white male,” begins Dalton Conley’s Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York’s Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister’s burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and class inextricably shaped his life—as well as the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. In a new afterword, Conley, now a well-established senior sociologist, provides an update on what his informants’ respective trajectories tell us about race and class in the city. He further reflects on how urban areas have (and haven’t) changed over the past few decades, including the stubborn resilience of poverty in New York. At once a gripping coming-of-age story and a brilliant case study illuminating broader inequalities in American society, Honky guides us to a deeper understanding of the cultural capital of whiteness, the social construction of race, and the intricacies of upward mobility.

Meet more than one hundred of the most heroic female characters in comics history, complete with backstories, vintage art, and colorful commentary. This spectacular sisterhood includes costumed crimebusters like Miss Fury, super-spies like Tiffany Sinn, sci-fi pioneers like Gale Allen, and even kid troublemakers like Little Lulu. With vintage art, publication details, a decade-by-decade survey of industry trends and women’s roles in comics, and spotlights on iconic favorites like Wonder Woman and Ms. Marvel, The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen proves that not only do strong female protagonists belong in comics, they’ve always been there.

For several generations, comics were regarded as a boys’ club—created by, for, and about men and boys. In the twenty-first century, however, comics have seen a rise of female creators, characters, and readers. While this sudden presence of women and girls in comics is being regarded as new and noteworthy, the observation is not true for the genre’s entire history. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the medium was enjoyed equally by both sexes, and girls were the protagonists of some of the earliest, most successful, and most influential comics. In Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics, Michelle Ann Abate examines the important but long-overlooked cadre of young female protagonists in US comics during the first half of the twentieth century. She treats characters ranging from Little Orphan Annie and Nancy to Little Lulu, Little Audrey of the Harvey Girls, and Li’l Tomboy—a group that collectively forms a tradition of Funny Girls in American comics. Abate demonstrates the massive popularity these Funny Girls enjoyed, revealing their unexplored narrative richness, aesthetic complexity, and critical possibility. Much of the humor in these comics arose from questioning gender roles, challenging social manners, and defying the status quo. Further, they embodied powerful points of collection about both the construction and intersection of race, class, gender, and age, as well as popular perceptions about children, representations of girlhood, and changing attitudes regarding youth. Finally, but just as importantly, these strips shed light on another major phenomenon within comics: branding, licensing, and merchandising. Collectively, these comics did far more than provide amusement—they were serious agents for cultural commentary and sociopolitical change.

“Complex and gripping. . . . Newcomers to Arcadia will be captivated by the rich history, while those familiar with it will find that Sophia’s legend grants them a new perspective on the earlier tales.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[The Lizard Princess] encourages big-picture thinking. . . . The combination of a straightforward quest complicated by hindsight, with magic, science, and meditations on the building of myths and the role of stories, makes for a book not like much else out there. . . . Gorgeously written and complex.” —New York Journal of Books “This fantasy quest lends a hand toward making our contemporary world a little better.”—Foreword Reviews “The impressive The Lizard Princess continues Tod Davies' imaginative History of Arcadia series with her trademark brilliant storytelling.”—Largehearted Boy "Look inside this world and find wonder."—Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review "Blending the magic of fairy tales with the great existential mysteries, Tod Davies leads us into a phantasmagorical world that resurrects the complex lore of times past with vibrant narrative energy."—Maria Tatar, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales "Imaginative."—Jack Zipes, author of The Irresistible Fairy Tale "Innovative form and spellbinding content . . . Stories, as Tod Davies's History of Arcadia novels ultimately suggest, serve as a civilization's backbone, and it is therefore in stories too that we can discover the potential for fundamental change and a better society."—Marvels & Tales Bittersweet. Lush. Human. The Lizard Princess crosses mountains, oceans, deserts, and the Moon Itself to meet her fate and the fate of Arcadia on the Road of the Dead. Her reward is the Key that opens the door to the Domain of Life where wisdom trumps knowledge, as it should in all good tales about the world, whether Arcadia's, or our own. Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, the first two books in The History of Arcadia series, as well as the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You've Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it's all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being.

Story of cinema -- How movies are made -- Movie genres -- World cinema -- A-Z directors -- Must-see movies.

Trina Robbins has spent the last thirty years recording the accomplishments of a century of women cartoonists, and Pretty in Ink is her ultimate book, a revised, updated and rewritten history of women cartoonists, with more color illustrations than ever before, and with some startling new discoveries (such as a Native American woman cartoonist from the 1940s who was also a Corporal in the women’s army, and the revelation that a cartoonist included in all of Robbins’s previous histories was a man!) In the pages of Pretty in Ink you’ll find new photos and correspondence from cartoonists Ethel Hays and Edwina Dumm, and the true story of Golden Age comic book star Lily Renee, as intriguing as the comics she drew. Although the comics profession was dominated by men, there were far more women working in the profession throughout the 20th century than other histories indicate, and they have flourished in the 21st. Robbins not only documents the increasing relevance of women throughout the 20th century, with mainstream creators such as Ramona Fradon and Dale Messick and alternative cartoonists such as Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, and Phoebe Gloeckner, but the latest generation of women cartoonists―Megan Kelso, Cathy Malkasian, Linda Medley, and Lilli Carré, among many others. Robbins is the preeminent historian of women comic artists; forget her previous histories: Pretty in Ink is her most comprehensive volume to date.