superheroine n.

‘Ella Speed’s just an everyday super heroine. You know, Ella Speed, the flash of the Forest.’ ‘The Champion of Jungle Justice,’ added Cap Bascom. ‘Sworn enemy of evil and champion of what is right and proper.’

Behind the Arras [...] British trainee spy is ordered to help smash commie-riddled CND type organisation by seducing dynamic daughter of its head-in-clouds leader. Quite lively, and one of his colleagues makes a change from superheroes: she’s a superheroine.

As a super-heroine she’s a regular Sister Terrific, and as a nun a cloying busybody with apparently special dispensation to do her hair in vanity bangs and wear her coronet high enough so that they’ll show.

The critics of the comics have castigated the superheroines for their violence, aggressiveness, and lack of femininity. But they’ve forgotten: the superheroine was born in that time just before and during World War II. The young comic-book reader was steeped in that war and its Zeitgeist. It wasn’t very feminine to die in a bombing raid or a sinking hospital ship, either; but in every newsreel (between that week’s serial chapter and the trailers) kids saw or heard about women dying in just such ways.

At the head of the column stood a woman in black, a superheroine who kept some of her powers, Charlie Brunner. (Charlene? Charlotte? Maybe before the Fracture. But here, Charlie.)

[in a fictional 1963 autobiography by a masked superhero] Also, Sally Jupiter tells me that as soon as little Laurie’s old enough she wants to be a super[-]heroine just like her mom, so who knows? It seems as if from being a novelty nine-day wonder, the super-hero has become a part of American life. It’s here to stay.

Late in 1994, she [sc. singer Courtney Love] started putting together the soundtrack for the movie Tank Girl, which had been (abysmally) adapted from a British comic about a punk superheroine of the future and her kangaroo boyfriend.

[...] Dingle [sc. Adrian Dingle] created one of the most memorable characters of the Golden Age—the superheroine Nelvana of the Northern Lights, the first Canadian national superhero.

I had recently written about a superheroine for Marvel, a wheelchair-bound girl in Nigeria named Ngozi. She physically and mentally bonds with an alien symbiotic organism named Venom and is thus able to stand up and kick ass.