All-New All-Different Medusa?

Dear Marvel Comics,

Please develop a new title featuring a Black woman as a new superhero named Medusa.

Here’s why.

First, some history. Medusa means guardian or female protector. The mythological character was raped by Neptune in Athena’s temple, and then Athena punished her by transforming her hair into snakes and her gaze with the power to turn men into stone. After giving Perseus a mirrored shield so he could kill her, Athena mounted Medusa’s head on her own shield.

French literary critic Hélène Cixous transformed the character into a feminist icon in her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Here’s an excerpt: “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard.”

As far as Marvel mythology, Lee and Kirby introduced their Medusa in 1965. They later retconned Inhuman royalty to fill-in the amnesia induced by the Wizard, but initially she was a supervillain, one of the Frightful Four in Fantastic Four #36.

Maybe it was a product of her villainy, but her powers — her impossibly long, animate, and super-strong hair — distinguished her from Lee and Kirby’s typical women. Look at her first cover appearance:

The male villains extend their bodies, the Sandman most obviously, but the Trapster projects a force field, and the Wizard’s helmet is elongated, which Kirby further foreshortens by placing him in the foreground. Medusa’s hair, which extends beyond to top page, expands her physicality too.

Lee and Kirby tended to shrink women — literally with the Wasp, the lone female member of the original 1963 Avengers. Invisible Girl vanishes, allowing backgrounds to appear within the dotted outline of her body. Marvel Girl sometimes projected thin emanata lines, but usually from a background position. Look at their first covers:

Like the members of the Frightful Four, the male members of the Fantastic Four expand their bodies: the Thing is a living block, Mr. Fantastic stretches, and the Human Torch is a column of fire extending off the page like Medusa’s hair. The male X-Men are the same: Angel’s wings, Cyclops’ eye projection, Iceman’s ice projectiles, and the Beast’s body extends from some sort of swing, while each of his foreshortened feet is larger than other characters’ heads.

Invisible Girl, already taking up less page space than her teammates, literally fades in half, and Marvel Girl, despite the empty negative space around her arms, takes up half the space of each of her teammates.

Compare them to Medusa:

The page area of Medusa’s body roughly triples theirs. Or, as Cixous put it: “I, too, overflow.”

But, like Marvel Girl, Invisible Girl, and Wasp, the original red-haired Medusa is white.

The first Black female superhero, the Butterfly, appeared briefly in 1970 from Skywald Publications. Her wings, which project Dazzler-like light, extend her body too:

Marvel wouldn’t introduce a Black woman as a superhero until 1975. Storm’s cape expanded her body too:

The notion of a Black Medusa (meaning a Black character named Medusa) seems obvious given how real-world hair extensions expand bodies:

Like Medusa’s hair, they also come in red:

I can even recommend a writer.

I paired Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri: The Search for Black Panther with her 2015 novella Binti in my first-year writing seminar.

Though Shuri’s braids look animate on the cover, Binti’s hair is actually animate at the end of the novel when she transforms into part-Meduse. That’s the name of a jellyfish-like alien species with “long tentacles spilling down to the floor.” Binti was already Medusa-like at the start of the novel, the way she would palm her “plaits smooth like the bodies of snakes.” After her transformation, she realizes, “My hair was no longer hair.” The braids were becoming tentacles: “a soft transparent blue with darker blue dots at their tips. They grew out of my head as if they’d been doing that all my life, so natural looking that I couldn’t say they were ugly. They were just a little longer than my hair had been, hanging just past my backside, and they were thick as sizeable snakes. … I pinched one and felt the pressure.”

But if Okorafor is booked with other projects, Eve L. Ewing is an equally excellent choice.

I pair Ironheart: Those With Courage and her 2017 poetry collection Electric Arches in the same writing seminar. Riri Williams has shorter hair than Shuri:

But hair is central throughout Electric Arches, including in “at the salon,” the poem that gives the collection its title: “I am in the universe and it is my hair, / each strand arched electric …”.

And “why you cannot touch my hair” sounds like it’s straight out of Binti: “my hair is a technology from the future and will singe your fingertips, be careful.”

(Hey, what if Riri’s next Ironheart suit design featured mechanical hair extensions?)

While “Shea Butter Manifesto” and “Ode to Luster’s Pink Oil” extend the theme even further, those poems make me think of another equally excellent choice of author.

I’ve taught Ebony Flowers’ 2019 Hot Comb in my comics course. Unlike Okorafor and Ewing, Flowers is also an artist. Her Lynda Barry-influenced style is nothing like Marvel, but imagine how fun her drawings would be as childhood flashback scenes.

But if all three are busy, I have yet one more equally excellent suggestion.

That’s the final full-page panel from C. Spike Trotman’s Yes, Roya. Though a Black Wonder Woman is wonderful (DC introduced Nubia in 1973), Trotman would have to reign in the sexual explicitness and return BDSM to the subtext — though Medusa’s rope-like hair seems ideal either way.

Trotman, AKA Iron Spike, also has a brilliant social media essay on Black hair:

Would the new Medusa’s braids be born-that-way tentacles? Mechanical extensions riveted to her skull? Something supernatural?

I’d leave those details to Okorafor, Ewing, Flowers, Trotman, and anyone else ready to join Team Medusa.

Of course, Marvel doesn’t own the name “Medusa” or the concept of a hair-themed superhero, especially a Black woman with braids, so if you pass, I’m guessing other comics companies might be happy to step up.

PS. I’ve since had a conversation with a fellow comics scholar who, in addition to kindly giving me time and attention, critiqued relating Black women’s hair to a snake-haired monster — regardless of how Cixous, Binti, or Marvel comics have evolved the mythological allusion. It’s an important critique, and so if someone were to pursue the above suggestions, a new name could be key.