Wonder Women
25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History
Hardcover | Kindle Edition
Written by Sam Maggs
Illustrated by Sophia Foster-Dimino
Publisher: Quirk Books
Publication Date: October 4th, 2016

This is definitely the age of the woman. We are so close to having a woman president for the FIRST time! Of course, it’s long overdue. It’s also Wonder Woman’s 75th anniversary. So it is appropriate that Quirk Books have released this “wonder” of a book called Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History by Sam Maggs.

Although it says 25 women, there are so many more women in here than that, including some Q&As with some incredible females. Without these gender rule-breaking phenomenons, women would not be doctors (thank you Blackwell sisters in the 19th century!), we would not have paper bags (thank you Margaret Knight!), and the feeding tube would be fiction (thank you Bessie Blount Griffin!). And there’s so much more. You think of how hard women have it now, fighting stereotypes in this man’s world to this day, and you just marvel at the success through the struggle during less enlightened times.

More below.

Womanthology: Space
Written by Bonnie Burton, Sandy King Carpenter, Alison Ross and Stephanie Hans, Ming Doyle, Stacie Ponder, Blair Butler, Joelle Sellner, Ellise Heiskell, Robin Furth, Rachel Edidin, Jennifer de Guzman, Jody Houser, Devin Grayson, Christine Ellis, Barbara Randall Kesel, Allison Pang, Laura Morley, Cecil Castellucci, and Kiala Kazebee

Illustrated by Jessica Hickman, Tanja Wooten, Stephanie Hans, Jordie Bellaire, Stacie Ponder, Alicia Fernandez, Jean Kang, Maarta Laiho, Carli Idhe, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Leigh Dragoon, Sally Thompson and Kathryn Layno, Lindsay Walker, Elva Wang, Diana Nock, Chrissie Zullo, Sara Richard, Kel McDonald, and Isabelle Melancon

Colored by Jordie Bellaire and Ronda Pattison

Lettered by Rachel Deering, Robbie Robbins, Amauri Osorio, and Isabelle Melancon

Cover by Renae DeLiz
Series Edited by Mariah Huehner
Collection Edited by Justin Eisinger and Alonzo Simon
IDW Publishing
Release Date: June 5, 2013
Cover Price: $24.99

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that women receive enough of the limelight within the comic book industry; thankfully, artist Renae DeLiz (The Last Unicorn) came up with a fantastic way to showcase a variety of fantastic female talent and IDW jumped on board. Womanthology: Space is the collected addition of the first five issues of the monthly ongoing series of the same name. Building off of the success of DeLiz’s first venture with the graphic novel Womanthology: Heroic, Womanthology: Space is an amalgamation of short comics with the overarching theme of “space” created solely by established and up-and-coming female creators. Check out my impressions of some of the best and worst that this anthology has to offer!

Womanthology: Space #3
Written by Robin Furth, Rachel Edidin, Jennifer DeGuzman, and Trina Robbins
Art by Carli Idhe, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Leigh Dragoon
Cover by Mengtian Zhang and Hanie Mohd
IDW Publishing
Release Date: December 5th, 2012
Cover Price: $3.99

This is the first issue of IDW’s Womanthology: Space series that I have read, which is a shame on my part. Womanthology was born out of a successful Kickstarter campaign, originating as a longer graphic novel, and now spinning off into the Space anthology series. The big deal of the series is that all of the stories in the series were created by, as you could guess from the title, women. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but given the how hard it is for women to get material published in the comics world, it is. The Space series takes the general entry point of “women in comics” and focuses on stories somehow dealing with space, or space travel, or some kind of outer-space stuff. What you end up with in this issue is a collection of three charming stories and an interesting look at one of the golden age of comics female pioneers.

The first story in this issue is titled “Centipede.” It’s basically a riff on Aliens, with a smuggler bringing a dangerous creature onto a normal space ship. It’s a little too short to build any real suspense, but that’s no fault of the creators, who do a decent job given the page count.