The “Jem and the Holograms” comic books have a lot to say about power, what it means to be girly, and what comics can do. Image courtesy IDW Publishing

If you want to see an exuberantly colorful all-ages tribute to girl power—colorful as in candy-floss pink and lime green—where serious ideas about performance, identity, and embodiment fit comfortably amid sitcom-worthy teen hijinks, then you should definitely check out “Jem and the Holograms.” Not the movie, mind you, which may have left theatres entirely by the time you read this, nor the nineteen-eighties TV show—though don’t let me stop you—but the present-day comic book, now on its eighth issue, with the first six collected as one paperback. It’s perfect light entertainment, if that’s what you want, but it also has a lot to say about power, about what it means to be girly, or feminine, or to work in a feminized genre, and about what comics, in particular, can do.

If you watched the cartoon, you already know the setup. If you were too young or too old for it—or if you were a boy who thought that the cartoon was for girls—here’s what you should know: Jerrica Benton lives with her bandmates in a house inherited from her inventor dad, and they make pop music together. The excitable Kimber, the youngest sister, at eighteen, badly wants to be a star; Aja, the guitarist and bassist, can fix any machine; Shana, the drummer, might prefer another career. Jerrica writes and sings most of the songs; unfortunately, she’s too shy to perform them. Fortunately, their father also left them a secret supercomputer named Synergy, which is able to converse in English and to project holograms (hence the title). Synergy lets Jerrica take the stage as the pink-coiffed, sparkly-leotard-wearing, charismatic lead singer Jem.

As on the TV show, the band competes for fame with its more popular rivals, the Misfits, who are more aggressive and more punk rock (though not as punk rock as the actual Misfits). In the paperback’s story arc, the Holograms try to come out on top in a Misfits-organized Battle of the Bands; Jerrica goes on a date with the only male character, the music journalist Rio, who must not learn that she is Jem; and Kimber develops a giddy—and, it turns out, reciprocated—crush on the Misfits’ songwriter, the beautiful, blue-haired, and notably zaftig Stormer, who must conceal her disloyalty from the Misfits’ delightfully amoral leader, Pizzazz.

Kelly Thompson, who writes the comic, told me that, in her view, “Jem” is “quite similar to superhero comics,” given its “sci-fi elements and secret identities.” But no superhero comic looks like this one: its swooping clean lines and its expressive faces resemble, instead, the covers of nineteen-fifties romance comics—and excel, by miles, the TV series from which it derives. If you watch clips of the show, you will see big hair, big shoulders, and the robotic faces common to nineteen-eighties Saturday-morning cartoons. Go back to the comic, and you find lively individuals, each with her own outré hair—Aja’s porcupine spikes, Shana’s violet dreads and updos—and faces that show the emotions of human beings: Kimber gazes hopefully down at the much shorter Stormer before their sweet first kiss; Pizzazz, eyes forward, chin up, tries to keep her dignity after a food fight has covered her cheeks with pie.

Like all comics, “Jem” asks us to care how it looks. Its characters have to care: they are, and want to be, performing artists. But they care, as well, about playing their instruments and managing the band’s finances (at least Jerrica does—that’s a plot point, too). Some are more femme than others; none look butch. Nowhere is it suggested that any skill is, or was, reserved for men; nowhere does looking girly make anyone less-than, or dependent, or more likely to be judged only on appearance. And while all of the characters look great, they never look like one another, nor do they conform to Hollywood assumptions about who should appeal to whom. Of eight girls in two bands, four are clearly nonwhite, and others might be. Kimber—the flightiest, girliest Hologram, with the longest, most labor-intensive hair—only dates girls; nobody thinks that’s a problem, nor does anybody think it odd that she falls for someone with Stormer’s body type. The racial diversity comes from the TV show (created by Christy Marx, who also wrote episodes of “G.I. Joe”), but the rest of these choices come from Thompson and the first artist to work on the series, Sophie Campbell.

They are choices ratified by plot, and by snappy, lighthearted dialogue, but reflected—even governed—by art and design. Thompson told me that Campbell was “absolutely in the driver’s seat on this stuff, as it should be. I think the best example is that, as a fat woman, I would never have suggested designing Stormer to be ... just outright fat and fierce as hell and beautiful.” (Campbell in turn credits the colorist M. Victoria Robado for the book’s eye-popping hues.) This utopian space of visual pleasure—where racism, fatphobia, homophobia, simply do not arise—can cheer grownups (who would not want to visit this world?), but it could matter even more for young readers: writing meant for teens, in prose fiction as well as in comics, too often presents only earnest models of queer people, curvy people, and dark-skinned people, defined by the prejudice they overcome.

“Jem” doesn’t just distance itself from such school-approved stories; it also steps away from female-empowerment narratives rooted in punch-and-kick action. “Ms. Marvel” is a (wonderful) superhero comic; “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” for all its other elements, came out of horror—the slaying is right there in the title. In these genres, the powerful woman, the supergirl, was often the only girl; things have changed, but so recently that readers notice the change. “Jem,” on the other hand, is all about groups of women and girls whose principal troubles are social, economic, emotional, and practical. They deal with social aggression (“you won’t be our friend if you date her”), shyness, performance anxiety, and the fear of presenting themselves at less than their best. (They also have to practice, to get the songs right.)

Campbell drew the first six issues, and will return early next year (issues seven and eight, drawn by Emma Vieceli, stay faithful to Campbell’s designs). Only starting with the second issue, however, did her credit on the masthead read “Sophie Campbell.” “I finally came out as transgender,” Campbell writes in the trade paperback, “after I finished the first issue.... I was afraid of fan reaction, but it all turned out better than I could have imagined, ‘Jem’ is even more personal to me than it would’ve otherwise been.” IDW, the company that publishes “Jem,” also altered later printings of the first issue to make Sophie Campbell the artist’s name.

No company—surely not IDW, which butters its bread with licensed properties from toys and TV—would bet on a comic that required you to read gender theory. But if anyone ever marched you through the famously hard-to-read theories of Judith Butler, you might see how “Jem” supports some of Butler’s ideas. For Butler, identity, including gender identity, is not so much something you are as something you do: you can view yourself as a performance and then ask how to alter the script. And if you have read Julia Serano’s far more readable “Whipping Girl,” you might see how “Jem” supports Serano’s argument that a feminism worth the name must defend not just women but femininity: styles of expression that still get taken as less consequential, or less powerful, because they have been allotted to women and girls. “I’m only familiar with Serano vaguely,” Thompson told me, “but I like what I’ve read.... Sophie and I work on a book that is filled with ladies and drenched in pink and yet definitely consider it to be ‘for everyone.’ ”