Sunday, January 9, 2011

The Most Ludicrously Underwhelming Uses Of Marvel Girl's Powers--Chapter 10

In the late 1960s, The X-Men had a regular back-up feature recounting "the origins of the uncanny X-Men." These stories usually took the form of a) showing how the character's powers manifested; b) showing Professor X recruiting them to the X-Men; or c) a primer on how their powers work.

Well, by X-Men #57 (1969), they'd pretty much covered all the guys, so now it was Jean Grey's turn:

Uh-oh.

Double uh-oh.

They're really, really pushing the "she's a female!!" factor here, and this is Marvel in 1969. So something tells me that this is not going to be an empowerment seminar so much as a patronization parade.

So, allow me to present the first three panels displaying how Marvel Girl uses her powers:



Sigh...cooking and housework? Seriously, guys?

In fairness, they then proceed to give us two pages showing her using her powers in a much more super-heroic fashion.

But then we get to the very end, where we learn what Jean's "normal" superpower is:

Sigh...

1 comment:

Martin Gray said...

Great fun - I remember reading that in a UK Christmas annual (The Titans, maybe) and loving it. But I was young and dumb, I'd not yet been recruited by that nice bald chap with the bump under his blanket.