The notable advances happening are, in part, a reaction to comics’ Dark Ages, the dreadful '90s, when Simone noticed a disturbing trend of female characters becoming "destructible props." In 1999, she responded by starting Women in Refrigerators, a website that documents and eviscerates comic book misogyny. (The name comes from a 1994 Green Lantern story where the hero finds his murdered girlfriend stuffed into his fridge.) "The idea was, you kill or de-power a female character, the male character vows vengeance and goes to fight the villain," Simone says of the trope. "The problem was, the female characters routinely would lose all agency. They wouldn't even be included in the story. And it was happening to characters I'd been fond of, female heroes who had been around for decades."

As for depictions of the female body, comic publishers still often present female heroines as male fantasies that make Kim Kardashian's Paper shoot look demure by comparison. Last year, Italian artist Milo Manara's controversial Spider-Woman cover depicted the titular heroine, Jessica Drew, crouched on her hands and knees, rear end raised provocatively in the air. The image quickly became an Internet lightning rod, eventually causing Marvel to pull the cover. Comic fans know that Manara's work has always been sexual in nature—he's most famous for his actual erotica—but it was a moment when the world at large got a chance to see the sort of imagery that has long been accepted and celebrated in the comic world. Writing for Gawker's sci-fi/fantasy blog io9, Rob Bricken summed it up : "Perhaps asking an erotic artist to draw one of your most popular superheroines for a mass-market cover wasn't quite a good idea. Also a bad idea: Receiving this cover and pretending like you didn't notice Spider-Woman sticking her bare red ass three feet into the air. Here's a simple rule: If it's inappropriate for a male character, it should also be inappropriate for a female character."