Essay: A Woman Of Valor.(description of Big Barda )

A Woman Of Valor

Strong, vigilant, resourceful, and submissive to no one -- the author's ideal woman first appeared to him in a comic book.

is company, in rare moments of quiet, she doffed her armor, laid down her Mega-Rod, and made him a gift -- both of them knowing full well its value -- of her vulnerability, her sorrow, the pain of her childhood and youth. She was a valkyrie with a brain and an aching heart. 10. In her substance and substantiality Big Barda, Kirby biographers and scholars generally agree, was modeled on the late Rosalind Kirby (nee Goldstein), Jack's wife of 50 years. 11. After discovering Big Barda, I could never be happy with the run-of-the-mill heroines I encountered in my life, whether they were Amazons or violets or wasps or invisible girls. Then one night I met this woman who was not -- not at all -- Big. Five feet tall, she generally went about unarmed. She had been raised not in the suicide slums and battle-orphanages of Apokolips but on the maple-lined streets of Ridgewood, New Jersey. It was tough on her; she had been encouraged, like most girls at the time, to learn to shrink, to be witchy, to turn herself invisible. She was pretty much the proverbial slip of a girl -- a size zero -- but she had, I saw at once, an inner Bigness. Like Barda, she did not suffer fools gladly. She did not carry a Mega-Rod; she didn't need one. She had plenty of narrative -- sometimes it seemed that she was ...