DC Women of Action by Shea Fontana

​I’m a huge fan of DC/Vertigo but on the Vertigo side of things. Traditional superhero comics don’t do much for me and it takes a while to get into the movies too. I checked this book out because just to find out how many women of action I would know/recognize/be interested in. Turns out quite a few, thanks to the movies, the latest DC ones have been doing a far superior job with female casting than the male one. In fact,  female superheroes movies have been far superior.
  At any rate, this is a fairly basic overview, it provides a few page entry for each character and one or two pages of art. It also features short bios of the women behind the scenes, writers, letterers, creators, editors, etc. It turns out that DC is very female friendly, like awesomely so, and has been for decades, hiring and promoting women who in turn created and promoted all sorts of stories of female empowerment and expanding representation to not only more women of action, but also more women of various minorities, etc. So kudos to DC.
   The book though…well, it’s kind of like a coffee table book. The writing’s very basic, very all age appropriate, very generic and presents as very self promotional. In fact if someone ever says something about DC’s scarcity of female representation, DC can wallop them with this book as a counteraction. But the main thing with coffee table books is usually the art, right? And the art here really, really underwhelmed. Most of the character art had a very similar style to it, some of the traditional superhero variety and entirely too many of a weirdly teeny boppy cartoony sort of thing that really didn’t do sing for me at all. Actually, I was surprised to find out how many different artists (all female or queer, of course) were featured, because the art was so indistinct. And sure, it’s DC, they must have a certain look and style they go for, so some sort of uniformity must be expected, but if these are the best female artists working today, I am not impressed. I shall have to do further research to find some I like.
   So overall, it was ok, a perfectly decent, inoffensive, generic and wildly self congratulatory promo. It read very quickly, maybe 115 minutes or so and the comic geek in me delighted at a few things here and there. Go DC, represent, girl power and all that. And thanks to the lasso of truth, this review is 100% authentic.