Are you a fan of She-Hulk, Dazzler, Medusa or Nico Minoru? Then you’re going to love this new, all-female series that Marvel announced just today, first on ABC’s The View and then through Mashable. As part of the Secret Wars event happening in May, that sees every single last “reality” in the Marvel Universe crash into each other to create “Battleworld,” Marvel has brought on G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel) and Margueritte Bennett (Angela: Asgard’s Assassin) to pen a story drawn by Jorge Molina (X-Men)
The story is that, in one fold of that mish-mashed patchwork of universes is a place called “Arcadia,” what Wilson describes as a “Feminist Paradise.” It’s there that an old enemy rears their head, threatening the realm and causing “A-Force” to form.
And the line-up to this team is impressive. Confirmed for the team are the ones already mentioned, but just look at that cover! Are ALL of the Marvel women now on one team? Everyone from Phoenix and Storm to Scarlet Witch and Moondragon on that cover! Talk about a super team! And, as CBR points out, some of the characters are donning older designs for their costumes, like She-Hulk’s costume from the 80’s and Rogue’s Jim Lee design from the 90’s. Not to mention, we’ve got the classic Chris Claremont Phoenix look, which seems to imply that all of these heroes are actually from other dimensions.
In the announcement, Wilson said of the roster, “We’ve purposefully assembled a team composed of very different characters — from disparate parts of the Marvel U, with very different power sets, identities and ideologies. They’ll all have to come together to answer some big questions: What would you sacrifice to succeed? What is being a hero worth?”
In an interview with USA Today, Wilson said, “It feels almost like a great honor to be given the reins on something that has become so central to the narrative at Marvel and a big cinematic property as well.”
In talking about the team and how she chose the roster, she said, “I want people whose power sets really build on each other so that there are specific limitations that can only become overcome by working together. Nobody’s so overpowered that it gets boring and nobody’s so underpowered that they have to be saved all the time. I wanted a balance visually and practically.”
Of course, when you throw this many different characters all ranging from different time periods and realities, it’s going to be tough to work together as a team, with “several people on it who are used to being either they’re own bosses or in a leadership position, and all of a sudden they’re together.”
Beyond having the “keys to the castle” as editor Daniel Ketchum said about choosing all these characters, they were also given the mandate to create a brand new character. What they came up with is a stroke of brilliance. She’s not really a human, nor is she really an alien, she’s more of a cosmic phenomenon that takes the name of “Singularity” and actually chooses to manifest as a female, since she actually doesn’t possess any gender.
Wilson describes her as “a pocket universe that gained self-consciousness during the radical upheaval of Secret Wars.” She then goes on to say, “a whole world within herself and she can also move between different worlds and dimensions like taking a walk, so she has access to all corners of the Marvel U in a way that other characters do not.”
In talking about the character, Wilson likens her to “Q” from Star Trek: The Next Generation saying, “Her entire existence is so unlike that of ours that she really has to learn about what we think of as being an individual and having an identity from the ground up, with no point of access except those she meets.”
In many ways, this character of Singularity will be an important one for Wilson because she will be a sort of narrative tool that allows her to explore deeper questions of femininity and humanity, allowing her to ask, “What does it mean to be a woman and what would that look like to somebody who was learning about the human race as an outsider and is learning about what it means to have relationships with other people.”
The Secret Wars event starts up in May, A-Force will be a very important part of that, so look forward to picking that up then.
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He has two cats and knows all things about Doctor Strange but little else.
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