"I challenge you - to a duel you can never win!" (Thundra)

As my love for comic book characters grew over the years, I began to notice a trend:  every comic book I loved got cancelled pretty much as soon as I discovered it, and my favorite characters who weren't featured in their own titles basically never got them.  

I discussed this to a degree in my last article, talking about DC Comics' VIXEN, a character who is one of the most inspirational comic characters to me, and one who I believe is very much deserving out of all  in that company's pantheon who've never featured in their own regularly-published book of having a continuing series.  

VIXEN, of course, has never had her own monthly series.  If you'd like to to know my feelings as to why this might be, go ahead and read that article.

However, I'm not going to wait around while you get caught up on what I have to say.  We're moving on, so keep reading if you want to keep up with me.  

In this article, I want to discuss the Marvel character I most feel is deserving of her own regular monthly comic but who has never gotten one; that would be THUNDRA, a character who has inspired me since I first read about her and whose principle virtue - and the source of much of that inspration - can be summed up in one word:  confidence.

If you have any doubts about Thundra being a good representation of confidence, consider the picture at the beginning of this article.  

I specifically chose to start with that first image - out of the many I looked at in putting this article together - because to me it represents the way Thundra expresses herself in the world:  with pure unadulterated confidence.  She's got one of the most self-certain attitudes of all women in all comic books, and that appeals to me tremendously for a variety of reasons.

Chief among these reasons, I was never the most confident kid growing up and the virtue of confidence is one I struggle with to this day.  

Those few people who have asked me about why I do this blog (rather than trying to tell me why) have asked me what the point is of profiling these characters.  

I've tried to explain it to people as best I can that the idea of this blog is that I believe that by talking about these favorite characters of mine, I will point out the virtues I believe are important in life, the trends I see in the world and maybe to educate people with my own childhood and provide inspirational examples for other people who might be dealing with the same things I dealt with as a kid.  

I certainly know the difference between fantasy and reality.  I don't live in the fantasy world of comic books.  I enjoy the empowering elements that appear in them and the way these elements make me feel, and enjoy following the developments in the lives of my favorite characters.  

As they overcome the obstacles placed in front of them, mine can sometimes seem nominal by comparison.  There's never an element of wanting to live in tha fantasy world, though.  I believe it's important to exist in the real world, for reasons practical and pragmatic as well as intellectual.  Aside from the fact that it's the only world we've got, in my opinion, it's also a matter of trying to improve oneself, to better oneself.  

So, no, I don't want to be Thundra and I don't think I am Thundra.  But if I can observe the virtue of confidence as seen through her exploits, then I can take those elements from Thundra that inspire me and apply them to the real world.  I may not be challenging Hercules or The Thing to a duel, but for me maybe it's simply a matter of trying something new in my life.  

More importantly, my hope is that those others I mentioned dealing with issues similiar to the ones I dealt with might discover the joy and inspiration I felt over these characters the industry often marginalizes and go back and find these same stories I talk about, and maybe find a little hope in these characterizations like I did.

I mention all of this and the nay-sayers because I found that I thought of them when first making notes about what I wanted to say in my Thundra piece.  Interestingly to me, I discovered that only a few people know much about the character.  I mentioned her on my personal Twitter feed and received a number of responses from people saying, basically, "Oh, interesting - who's that?"  

Because this blog isn't really about continuity or specific story lines, and because Thundra has been revised and retconned quite a bit, I'll summarize by saying that Thundra comes from another world where women have been encouraged to be warriors to the point where they dominate out of the two sexes.  Her society values strength and prowess, honor and wisdom.  Hers is a culture of warriors, though much more technologically advanced than our Earth. 

Basically, try to imagine a planet where the women are Xena and the men are Joxur (and if you don't know Xena, I'll simply say that there's another character who'll be for another article on another day).  She originally came to our Earth through time and space to defeat the most powerful men of our world's "modern" history, consisting largely of characters like HULK and THE THING. 

After a short time, she ended up allying herself with the heroes of Earth and counting herself among them, though in a fashion where her personality brings her into misunderstandings and conflicts with mainstream Marvel heroes.  

Of course, all of this is a gross oversimplification of the back story of Thundra and ignores such unpleasantness as a story line where she became a professional wrestler for a time (yawn) which has thankfully not been referenced since, but it's not a terribly important back story.

Because plot points don't make Thundra awesome.  

Thundra does.

And she does that with some of the most unmitigated confidence of any character in the history of comics that I've ever seen.  The quote that titles this article is Thundra's (all the quotes I post come from the profiled characters, by the way - a point I haven't made but which I thought was self-evident until recently corrected of this misconception on my part). 

This isn't hyperbole when Thundra says it - she really believes it.  Duels in her culture are used to establish the social order and even to settle disputes.  Her attitude toward conflict can seem cavalier until you recognize that her culture believes that physical brawling can be used in a controlled environment to end arguments in a way that isn't a gladiatorial bloodsport.  When I explain her world to people in the short hand, I try to compare it to the ideals of the Klingon culture in STAR TREK.  That's not precisely accurate but it gets the literary point across.  For her, battling someone proves a point, but it's not a fight to the death.

Of course, just because she saves someone in one issue of a comic book doesn't mean that Thundra won't teach them to respect her on a physical level in another issue.

She tends to throw out the same kind of self-expression during most of her fight scenes, taking a super-villain's penchant for explaining his actions as he performs them with arrogance that outdoes THOR from time to time. 

And as you can see from the panels I've selected, she gets into a lot of fight scenes.  Her aggressive personality is such that she doesn't even really care whether she ends up fighting someone who normally identifies as a hero or a villain - she cares about fighting for a cause she believes in and for a purpose she thinks is true.  Whichever side she's on, her code remains her own. 

She's not dictated by her allegiances, only by her causes.  The side she believes to be on is the right side as she sees it - the side that serves the purposes of her own convictions.

That doesn't mean, however, that she doesn't take a certain sense of pride in knowing that her enemies tremble before her when she appears on the battlefield.

It's not all big dialogue in the middle of the actions scenes, though.  Thundra sometimes even uses this method to punctuate her imperatives.

I chose those panels also to illustrate something else about the character.  When she's written well, and with care, she appears on the page to be of a type similar to THOR.

For me, THUNDRA - as a monthly series - would have been my preferred THOR. 

I remember wishing that there was a Thundra comic where she righted wrongs with her usual arrogant, righteous indignation and sense of self-assured purpose.  

When I would read a Thundra story, there was always a sense of a lack of predictability on her part as a character.  Would she end up fighting the hero or the villain in a given issue?  Would she stay on the "right" path as we, the reader, understood it or would she end up serving more sinister purposes without realizing it?  

What this did for me as a reader was to show me that no matter what - right or wrong - Thundra as a character BELIEVED in HERSELF.  That was hugely important to me because of how our society so often writes women, especially in comics.

For so many women (comic books characters), the characters principally serve the masculine narrative.  By that, I mean that they're there to appeal to a male reader and designed to conform to a male perception. 

This much was evident to me even as a young transgirl because of the fact that this type of representation could be seen and was reinforced month after month, with the typical accompanying sexism and overwrought sexualization of even the women who were superheroes.  

As should be obvious, this sort of problem even befalls a character like Thundra. 

In the hands of writers who don't care about a woman's narrative, Thundra was defined entirely by a goal-oriented mentality that was fixed (hah hah) directly on a masculine character. 

In these versions of Thundra, she becomes something of a parody of modern-at-the-time fears of feminism, making statements that are clearly designed to mock the way modern men of the time view feminist viewpoints as villainous due to misconstrued ideas that to be feminist is to be trying to take a man's place in the world.

This has also resulted over the years in a lot of retroactive writing, in an effort to make sense of the character.

We all know how well that works.

But merely seeing Thundra as a "woman trying to be a man" ignores the core elements of what makes the character work.  

What makes Thundra work as a character, to me, is when she's doing the things she wants to do for the purposes in which she believes.

And this is where the character excels. 

And it's where we get to see Thundra's confidence and be inspired by it.

I remember observing as no accident that Thundra's chief opponents tended to be variations on The Thing and Hulk, regarded as two of the most physically powerful heroes in the Marvel Universe. 

This is unsurprising given Thundra's aforementioned desires under some writers to prove herself by contrast to male strength.  However, as a child I never cared about that element of her.  What I cared about was her uncompromising bravery in dealing with monstrously-powerful characters.

Rather than cower or defer, she stood tall and proud - when she was drawn right.  Her confidence reflected in a stance of strength instead of one of "seductive" Hawkeye Initiative-worthy framing in these versions, typically.  Of course, not everyone sees it that way.

So, yeah.

That's a thing. 

Gross.

Uh-huh.  Anyway, I want to point out that it wasn't hard to find positive role-models of Thundra on a Google search, which surprised me, because when I went to look for images of the other characters in this blog I typically found a ton of unpleasant images for every one image I found that was acceptable to express the themes I wanted to express.  With Thundra, most of the images were positive, but there were a few negative ones I wanted to include just to make a point about the way the character seems so much more natural and positive when she's portrayed with her strength intact.

I've never articulated it to many people, but I believe that part of the solution to the whole Hawkeye Initiative problem needs to come from three sources:  from the readers, from the artists and ALSO from THE WRITERS.  I wonder how many times writers working with artists describe the character as needing to look confident, or decrying any inclusion of a cheesecake pose.  Do writers as a rule get to dictate that sort of thing?  I have no idea, but I imagine that if a writer felt strongly enough about not portraying a character in a sexist fashion then things could be said to that effect.  Maybe tha'ts just naive on my part.  I don't know.  Thoughts are welcome, of course, in the Comments section.

But what I'm trying to say with all that is that Thundra is a character whose very nature seems to invite writers and artists of a professional level to portray her with confidence, and such confidence is inspiring, and that inspiration I believe crackles through not just my perceptions as a reader, but also in the act of writing and drawing her.  I think she encourages a portrayal of a woman as strong and powerful and self-defined.  I also believe that's why she had to be portrayed as being from another world and another time and to be portrayed as something of a villain at first, because I think those ideas can seem threatening to a lot of men and I think they may have created a sort of safety-bubble around the character.  "Well, she's a strong woman," they seem to be saying, "but only because she comes from a world other than our own and from a different time."  It's all social politics to me, but I think it does impact how the character came to be and how she's been used previously, and I also think it plays in to how she's been kept from having her own book even in the era of the 1990s when virtually every character - worthy or not - was at least spun off into a brief series try-out.

And, to me, nothing is more dangerous to the masculine domination of women than keeping women from finding a place of confidence. 

And I believe Thundra's confidence makes some readers uncomfortable, when they see a woman doing the same things a man is typically shown in comics doing - without replacing a man in the story, without just taking the pure mascline narrative.

This can be no less true, whether it be a portrayal of Thundra simply lifting a heavy object...

...or standing up for herself in a fight...

Or whatever ...

And she does it all because she can, because she believes she's right - and not in that DR. DOOM fashion where the argument is made that she's simply misguided.  She has an incredible strong moral code - one of the strongest in the Marvel Universe, and that code is also part of her confidence.  It's not just a physical thing - being confident of her strength and prowess.  She's also confident of her ethics and her beliefs, in her feelings.  She's confident about her intuition, even though she's written as naive by some writers (or, at least, was in the past).

What fascinates me also about Thundra is that she's never been portrayed as purely heroic.  There's always an element where the writers make it clear that she could spring off into the opposite end of a conflict, as I've said, and that can be fun to read because of its unpredictability, as I've also said, but it's also problematic to me.  Is it possible that her strength as a character, her determination and, yes, confidence, make her so difficult a woman to write because of a male writer's sexism that the character must remain at arm's length from joining the true heroic pantheon of Marvel, even after all this time?  Is that part of why she hasn't gotten her own book?  I would submit it's one of the primary reasons, actually.

To me, ultimately, Thundra represents the two sides of confident women in the real-world culture and also in the comic book culture that so often reflects its social issues and problems.

Because of her confidence, she's a truly inspirational character, a figure of near-limitless strength who is as goal-oriented as Thor, as courageous as Wolverine, as brave as Daredevil and as strong as The Hulk.  And yet, it's specifically because of these strengths that the men of the real world who are part of the readership may not react as positively to her as I would.  In other words, it's because of her confidence that she faces additional challenges from people who might otherwise welcome her if she only conformed to the masculine desire for women to be subservient.  

Thundra says no to that.  And she's not alone.

Thundra - and the rest of the powerful, inspirational women of the Marvel Universe, won't have that. 

And I, for one, find the literary insistence of these characters who stand together - perhaps subconsciously on the part of writers and artists who don't even know what they're doing, perhaps by the works of writers and artists  who likewise refuse to cater to masculine expectations -  to refute the idea that women can't be true warriors, can't be heroes, can't be the equals of their male counterparts in audience respect and production-level inclusiveness.

They keep up the good fight in the Marvel Universe.  It's up to us all to keep that same fight going here.  And, thanks to Thundra, I remain ultimately confident we'll win.