Visibility is important. In our part of the Internet it’s an obvious fact. The more well-crafted and non-stereotyped characters of a previously ignored minority we get in our stories, the less dismissive and mocking the majority gets.
Unfortunately, it’s a slow process, often infuriatingly so, plagued with many steps back and fought against by people who don’t know any better and react violently to change. And not every group is given equal focus – among those are people with diverse body types. But even in that regard, we’ve been getting some wonderful characters, if annoyingly rare. Among those are Bitch Planet’s amazing Penny, some incarnations of Wonder Woman’s Etta Candy (though nowhere is she more badass than in the comic’s original run) – and the star of today’s comic, Faith Herbert, a.k.a. Zephyr.
Faith is part of Valiant Entertainment’s superhero universe, one of the psiots – this universe’s equivalent of the X-Men – with great telekinetic abilities. A former member of the Harbinger team, she moved to LA to find her own solo superheroic adventures. By day, she works for Zipline (basically Buzzfeed) as Summer Smith. By night, she searches the city for wrongdoers to stop and good deeds to perform, with the help of fellow former teammate @x and Archer, a fellow psiot and a co-lead on Valiant’s other fun comic, Archer and Armstrong.
Following Faith’s adventures in this miniseries, written by Jody Houser and drawn by Francis Portela and Marguerite Sauvage, is a delight. Our main character is a positive role model, a kind hearted heroine – and a colossal nerd, who relishes her superhero life. What’s important, almost every character in the comic loves her and not once is she shamed for her body type by anyone.
And while the miniseries has just ended, this isn’t the end of Faith Herbert’s adventures. The positive reception was so overwhelming Valiant decided to publish an ongoing series about this character. It will keep most of the miniseries’ creative team (minus the main artist Portela, replaced by Pere Pérez) and will start July 20. In the meantime, I recommend catching up with this series in July, when the first trade titled Hollywood & Vine gets released. You won’t regret it.
