If you have children who are intrigued by all of the fascinating Marvel characters permeating current pop culture media, you can show them a new book to give them an introduction to Marvel’s diverse slate of super heroines. Fearless and Fantastic! Female Super Heroes Save the World is a new DK reference book that profiles a wide variety of Marvel’s inspirational female comic book heroes.
Fearless and Fantastic!, by Sam Maggs, Emma Grange, and Ruth Amos, is split into four sections emphasizing an admirable character quality: determination, daring, compassion, and curiosity. Short, succinct biographies of characters appear in each section based on what the authors identified as their most prominent personality trait. Popular characters like Captain Marvel and Black Widow feature in the “Determined” chapter, while others such as Wasp, Jean Grey, and Shuri appear in the “Daring”, “Compassionate”, and “Curious” chapters respectively. Most of Marvel’s female powerhouses, the well-known names that are familiar from Marvel films and television including Gamora, Scarlet Witch, Storm, and Jessica Jones, are highlighted. But the book also includes biographies of lesser-known heroines like Runaways’ Gertrude Yorke and Karolina Dean, sometimes X-Men Jubilee and Dazzler, and characters like Ironheart/Riri Williams and Thor/Jane Foster that have enjoyed strong comic runs recently.
Fearless and Fantastic! Female Super Heroes Save the World is an easy yet entertaining read. The short biographies are accompanied by illustrations of each character from the comics, and the write-ups do a good job of detailing each character’s origin and describing her powers to give the reader a snapshot of the heroes’ background and motivations. There are a couple of popular characters missing—I was surprised that Sue Storm/Invisible Woman and Elektra were not spotlighted—but, overall, the book does well in capturing a wide breadth of Marvel’s heroines.
I was impressed by the emphasis on the diversity of Marvel’s heroines. Marvel has made it a point over the past few years to create and feature characters with diverse backgrounds, cultures, and orientations, and Fearless and Fantastic! distills each character’s story so that readers can gain a basic appreciation for any of the diverse heroines they may choose to follow. This is a nice book for long-time Marvel fans who would like some more details on characters they may not be familiar with, and also for newer Marvel fans who are interested in learning more about the catalog of Marvel’s super heroines.
Fearless and Fantastic! Female Super Heroes Save the World is available on December 17. To order a copy, click here.
Disclaimer: GeekDad received a copy of this book for review purposes.
