Essay: A Woman Of Valor.

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.

1. When I was nine years old, I fell in love with a superheroine whose unlikely name -- a name that still brings a wince of lust and embarrassment to my face when I say it -- was Barda. Big Barda. I have never recovered, thank God, from my first sight of her, in Mister Miracle #8 (September 1972). 2. The intricate pop-Zoroastrian theology of the comic books that Jack Kirby drew at DC Comics in the early '70s (in which Mister Miracle, "Super Escape Artist," figured prominently) is wonderful, nutty, and hard to summarize. For now I'll just say that Big Barda, commander of the Female Fury Battalion, was born and reared for a life of perpetual combat, on a world called Apokolips, by a Dickensian harridan with the cruel-irony name of Granny Goodness. She dressed in elaborate armor of dark blue scale mail with a vaguely pharaonic battle helmet and carried a fearsome chunk of hardware, admittedly somewhat ambiguous from the Freudian point of view, called a Mega-Rod. As for her eponymous immensity, it was not merely physical; everything she did partook of the bigness that was the essence of her character. She spoke in exclamations and displayed Rabelaisian appetites for food and drink. She was brusque, sardonic, hot-tempered, and did not endure patiently the doubts and tergiversations of anyone less intelligent or quick to seize the moment than herself. And she was, to my knowledge, the first superheroine in the history of comic books whose personal courage, moral integrity, and astute intelligence, though they pervaded all her actions, were most joyfully expressed through her willingness, when necessary, to kick ass. 3. Say "superheroine," and most people, I suppose, will think ...