"There are a million ways to help people, to make the world a better place ..." (Vixen aka Mari Jiwe McCabe)

“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.” - A. A. Milne

I've always lived by those words, believe it or not.

I talk to animals.

Heck, I even talk to plants.

Perhaps it's my autism, but I always try to connect with any living thing that seems like it might have a different perspective on how life works.  

It's because I spend a lot of time, myself, trying to figure out how life works.

To that end, I've always had a fascination with fictional characters who get the chance to experience those different perspectives for themselves.  Such characters are, of course, a staple of comic books.

The cover of ACTION COMICS above is the first appearance of one of my favorite DC Comics characters who has such a varied perspective.  

Her civilian identity is that of Mari Jiwe McCabe, a fashion model who would one day become the crime-fighter known as Vixen.

And let me tell you - for a kid like me, there was nothing more awesome than the idea of a fashion model who fought crime.  

I don't think I can stress my childhood appreciation of that particular combination enough to explain how enthusiastic I was about it.

She was a FASHION MODEL and a SUPERHERO.

This, to me, automatically made her more awesome than Batman.

Bruce Wayne was rich, too, of course.

But nobody was following Bruce around everywhere he went; nobody was taking pictures of him for no greater reason than how awesome he was.

Mari McCabe, on the other hand, was a superhero who also had her own fashion model superpowers.

To me, there was very little that was as awesomely spectacular as that life.

Thinking back to that childhood perspective, I am amazed at how innocent my view was about the fashion industry.

My lack of understanding about the fashion industry was, to put it mildly, profound.

My understanding at that time came from the media I was exposed to, which portrayed a very different life for an American fashion model than the one described in today's tell-all books.

At that time, there weren't available to me the endless magazine feature stories about the suffering endured by women in the fashion and modeling professions.

I've talked before about the paradox of that kind of experience, knowing how much I was inspired by a type of character without seeing the elements of sexism because of my youth and inexperience and a desperate need for heroes.  

We make heroes ourselves as we find them; as a trans child, that experience often proved a struggle.

So, yes, to me, fashion models were ALWAYS glamorous heroes, the equivalent to me at the time to what I imagine a lot of boys growing up felt about rock stars.  

And sometimes, fashion models were even detectives in disguise!

So, yes, I was brought up on a steady diet of this kind of adventure.

CHARLIE'S ANGELS saw to that.

In their world, practically every other disguise the characters adopted turned out to be some kind of fashion model.

Of course, the Angels usually ended up having a lovely time posing for photographs; I didn't understand the harsh realities of the abuses real women so often suffer in those fields.

I wasn't even aware of it.  It didn't even begin to register with me back then.

Instead, I saw only the positive side - powerful, self-defining women traveling the world.

So, no, I didn't really understand the nature of fashion as an industry.

I believed the models dictated fashion.

II thought they decided what was "hot" or "not" and wore whatever they liked to promote the outfits they favored.

I thought that models went to exotic locations, with crews of photographers and assistants, as if they had been appointed by society as the ultimate judges of what constituted the right outfits to wear.

To me, they were  superstars who lived glamorous lives of freedom and independence from men.

At the time, I liked those ideas - a lot.

I wanted freedom.  I craved that attentive audience.  It's not something I'm proud of today.  However, as I always say, in this blog ... I write what's true about my life, good or bad.


There's been progress, of course, in the industry of modeling.

We even have transwomen being featured in photoshoots, like Kim Petras.  Click her name for a link to her Twitter account.

With Vixen, though, none of those issues about modeling mattered to me.

There was no appreciable difference in my mind between her and a Bruce Wayne.

Both had the same amount of freedom and social status, right?

In fact, Vixen had more.

As I've said, people were always following her around - taking her picture and wanting to know what she thought about fashions.

That's what fashion models did; that's what fashion models were.  They were the undisputed arbiters of good taste, glamor and all the other things Jem taught me to appreciate in life (but that's another article for another time).

Sorry, Jem, but we're not talking about rockstars right now.

We're talking about fashion models and billionaire playboys.

As I wrote that, I realized that, in my childhood, I sort of conflated the two.  At that time, the male-centered concept of a "billionaire playboy" was to me the precise  equivalent of the female "fashion model" archetype popularized in media.  

Since they were two sides of the same coin, so didn't it stand to reason that a fashion model was a perfect disguise for a superhero?

It afforded her the chance to go anywhere, do anything, wear whatever outfits she needed in order to disguise herself for her heroic missions.

And, like the Angels, it allowed her to explore the far corners of the world to do battle with all sorts of injustice.

That's certainly how Vixen handled it, anyway.

And I loved that.

I needed to believe in at least the possibility of a hero - even a fictitious one - like that, in my life.

A typical Vixen adventure would feature her working as a fashion model by day and then heading out into the world of superheroes by night.

Often teamed up with another superhero after the obligatory Act I fight scene between Vixen and some other superhero she'd be teamed with since solo Vixen stories were rare.

I didn't mind her status as a guest character because it meant that she was in the comic, but I remember wishing that she'd be given her own title.  If she could give SUPERMAN a thrashing, she was tough enough to handle her own comic, right?

And yet, no comic was forthcoming, no matter how patient I was, which baffled me beyond words at the time.

Now, of course, I reflect on how insulated I was from the realities of the comic book industry at the time.

My mindset as a child was simpler.  I didn't understand that there were complexities and politics involved, even in creative endeavors like comics.

Wasn't the only question involved in giving a character her own title how good the character was?

Didn't you measure that in terms of such important concepts as "awesomeness" and measures of how "heroic" the character was?

If the character was interesting, surely that meant that the character deserved her own comic, right? 

Vixen actually gave me a specific comic-book form of anxiety.

Yeah, you heard me - anxiety.

Specifically because Vixen kept appearing only as a guest character, I kept feeling like I was surely missing out on all kinds of Vixen adventures.

In truth, the anxiety was actually about myself, and being judged negatively by other people, as well as concern I was missing out on worldly information.

The first issue there concerned me as a transgirl.  The second concerned me as an autistic person.  But it was anxiety, just the same.

Surely such amazing characters as Vixen and Valkyrie were showing up all the time, right?

If they weren't in a given month's comics as far as I knew, it meant I was missing something, right?

Didn't everyone want to read about Vixen?

She was so cool; how could anyone not want to read about her in her own comic or as a guest?

That only made sense, right?

Wouldn't these amazing women all hang out together if they lived in the same universe?

I felt a strong desire to make sure I never missed out on either character's adventures.

Since Vixen wasn't regularly appearing in her own book, I would spend a lot of extra time at the comic book rack carefully inspecting covers to make sure I collected every appearance. 

Marvel, at least, had the courtesy to publish a special page inside their comics called BULLPEN BULLETINS that would feature snippets about which characters were being featured in the various issues that month as "guest-stars."

DC, on the other hand, tended to publish this material along the bottom of the various pages in a crawl.

That made a hassle of perusing the list while checking comics at the local 7-11.  It got downright impossible sometimes, thanks to zealous employees who made sure to remind me the comics racks were not considered to be a lending library.

Because of all this, I had a lot of trouble finding Vixen in comics when she wasn't specifically featured on the cover.

Eventually, I found her appearing in a revised JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA comic, and I was thrilled.  

I didn't understand at the time that the book was trying to bring several "lower-tier" characters as they were seen by many fans into the "big-league" ranks.  

That didn't register with me.  What registered with me was that Vixen was in the comic, and that meant I was buying it.  

I was, however, still totally ignorant of how the process of character exposure worked.

All I knew was that Vixen was now appearing in a book that once featured Superman and Wonder Woman.  

Wasn't being in the Justice League an automatic barometer of success, for a character?

To say I didn't think much of Vixen's co-stars in the Justice League comics would be a big  understatement.

We won't really talk here much about Steel.  

Or Vibe - who, by the way, has currently got his own title in DC's "New 52" line.

Since the major players of the "big five" JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA cast all had their own comics, the upgrade to her visibility and prominence had to mean a VIXEN #1 comic was surely on the horizon any day, I thought at the time.  

It was simple logic, wasn't it?

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA members had their own comics, and Vixen was in the League, so that was only logical thinking, right?

Wrong.

After the Vixen-featuring incarnaton of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA folded, I started becoming suspicious.  

I couldn't figure out what DC was doing, why DC insisted on crowding Vixen in with so many anonymous not-at-all-awesome characters instead of letting her shine on her own.

Why take an awesome character like Vixen and shift her from comic to comic, appearance to appearance, guest spot to guest spot, and not even TRY to give her a title she clearly deserved?  

That's craziness, isn't it?

I mean, she was so awesome - so cool - so powerful and brave and fierce and ... well, you get the idea.

It just didn't make sense to me.

Still, I'd be incredibly happy when I'd find a comic book containing an adventure of Vixen, and would treasure them because of how much I loved the character.  

I would actually wear out comics featuring Vixen because her back-up adventures were often brief and her guests-spots equally so, so I would read and reread the same pages over and over until the covers fell off the books and the pages got loose and the staples got lost.  

And this wasn't just when I was a kid - I loved the character even into adulthood.

I loved Vixen, even as my understanding of what drives comic book companies to give titles to one character over another became more acute.

I loved Vixen even as that understanding became, I admit, more cynical.

When it came to my appreciation of Vixen as a character, though, there was no room for cynicism.

Reading Vixen's adventures truly inspired me.

It still does.

As a child, the specific nature of her powers was also a huge part of that inspiration.

She's a character tailor-made to the kind of imaginative play I engaged in as a kid, pretending to be various animals, pretending to have their abilities.  

I would imagine myself as Vixen, channeling the awareness/power/personality of animals and using them to hunt down evil-doers.  

And then there was the matter of the sheer versatility of the character's abilities, which lent themselves to all kinds of stories and situations.  

Vixen could do a LOT of different things.

You'd think DC would welcome a character who could do so many things, be a part of so many different kinds of adventures in so many different kinds of environments, right? 

I mean, let's think about what she can do, strictly from a superpowered standpoint.

A list on Wikpedia points out the various animals Vixen's powers have allowed her to invoke (links go to WIKIPEDIA entries):

• The flight of a hawk.
• The ability to breathe under water like a fish.
• The swimming ability of a dolphin.
• The speed of a cheetah.
• Tapped into the aggression, physical and mental abilities of Gorilla Grodd.^[51]
• The echolocation of a bat.
• The wallcrawling of a spider.
• The jumps of a cricket.
• The constriction of an anaconda.
• The sensitive trichromatic color vision of a salamander.
• The strength of a bull elephant (about 12 tons).
• The strength of a Rhinoceros Beetle (about 65 tons).^[52]
• The senses of a wolf.
• The agility of a spider monkey.
• The electrical absorption and debilitating shock of an electric eel.
• Accelerate the regenerative abilities of reptiles and earthworms.^[53][54]
• The ability to spit venom like a spitting cobra.
• The body armor of an abalone (which proved strong enough to withstand a punch from Superman).^[55]
• The nocturnal vision of a cat.
• The speed of a mantis shrimp to catch a bullet.
• The kick of a horse.
• The protective hide of a Rhinoceros.
• The danger sense of seagulls and terns.
• The rage of a lion.
• The eyesight of an eagle.
• The cold adaptation of Methanococcoides burtonii.
• The heat tolerance of a Pompeii worm.^[56]
• The stubbornness of a mule (against telepathic attacks and mind control inflicted by Brainiac).

VIXEN would later show up in the title SUICIDE SQUAD, as seen in a previous image here.

But, sadly, she was only as a minor player there, never getting the focus in the book the way Captain Boomerang (!) did.

SUICIDE SQUAD, however, was a very entertaining comic, and featured Amanda Waller (who, like Gypsy, will be featured in another article).  Amanda Waller is, quite simply, awesome.  So, on the bright side, a comic featuring two awesome women wasn't a bad thing.

Sadly, VIXEN never got her own comic book series beyond the limited-run VIXEN: RETURN OF THE LION a few years ago, despite my wishful thinking as a child.

And as I grew up, I did learn those uncomfortable realities about the comics publishing industry.

I realized that there were other issues afoot in the publishing of a character than simply how worthy the character seemed to me of having her own title.  

There were issues of politics, of race, of gender, of culture - and they often meant that many of the specifics of Vixen's character worked against that character being published in her own book, or promoted by DC the way I felt (and feel) the character deserves.

It sucked, and it sucks.  It's gross and unfair.

But it's a reality, whether I like it or not.

I obviously don't know any specifics of the behind-the-scenes mechanisms (and machinations) that go on at DC Comics.

But I look at a comparison with another character as a means to sort of examine how this situation has played out, and I find a curiosity in the form of the character ANIMAL MAN.

This is Buddy Baker, aka ANIMAL MAN.

Not only do Buddy Baker and Mari McCabe have very similar powers, but in various interpretations of DC continuity it has been established that the two may have derived their powers from the same source.  

So, of course, DC cares about them both in an equal fashion, right?

Well, they certain cared about Buddy. DC was so dedicated to ANIMAL MAN back when his first major comic book was published that they gave the character his own mini-series, just like VIXEN.  Then, they went ahead and turned that into a full-fledged series, then made ANIMAL MAN part of its Vertigo line in order to tell more "mature" and "sophisticated" stories.

Buddy Baker's comic wasn't terrible, especially when Grant Morrison was writing it, but I remember thinking that - given their similarity of powers - that I'd much rather be reading a Vixen comic because I was far more interested in and inspired by that character than one I'd never read or heard of until that first title.

And then, after DC decided to do a company-wide relaunch of its titles, the publisher stated over and over when the "New 52" was getting close to being published that they had a commitment to increasing the diversity of its line of comics to feature more women.

So, you'd think Vixen, who has extremely similar powers to Buddy in previous incarnations, might make for an interesting character to get her own title if they were looking for someone to fill that type of adventure story, right?

Nope. 

Not at all.

Not even a little.

There's an inspiring cover, yeah?  It really gives a person hope.

But DC apparently decided that Vixen didn't deserve similar treatment.

But you know who WAS a character DC felt was entirely  worthy of getting her own title at DC, as far as they were concerned, to be part of the "New 52" relaunch?

Yeah.  The image above was the first page of a comic that actually got published by DC Comics.  Be proud, guys.

And let's not forget that someone thought VOODOO would sell more comics than VIXEN getting her own title.

VOODOO has her fans, I'm sure.  I respect that they're fans of the character, but I honestly remember thinking that if DC wanted to spotlight a female hero who'd never really had a chance to shine, then there were a lot of characters who might be considered for their own comic as part of the "New 52" line than VOODOO, chief among them VIXEN.

Let's not forget, though, that she wasn't entirely ignored in the "New 52" relaunch.

That's progress of some kind toward her getting the recognition she deserves.

Isn't it?

Wrong.

Appearing yet again in yet another incarnation of a JUSTICE LEAGUE title, Vixen again didn't get the focus or attention I feel she deserved in that book, and that title has since been cancelled.  But I refuse to let Vixen be forgotten as both a character who inspired me and continues to inspire me, and I refuse to let the negative mindsets at DC  diminish my view that VIXEN is one of the most underused and under-appreciated of the heroes I've listed so far in my blog.

To me, Vixen is one of the DC Universe characters MOST deserving of her own comic.  She's a strong, powerful character with an origin that could open up all kinds of opportunities to explore the past and future of the DC Universe.  She's inspiring and has been shown time and again to be one of the most dedicated heroes of this fictional world - never looking for superhero glory, always striving to prove herself worthy of standing alongside the Supermen and Batmen of DC's legacy-obsessed pantheon.

Yeah - I included Stephanie Brown to just to piss off Dan Didio.  She's everywhere, man.  You can't stop her.

So how about giving Mari Jiwe McCabe a solo title with the next "Wave," publishers at DC?

Fans of VIXEN are speaking to you.  Are you listening?   Or are you just talking?