Female Avengers team comes to the fore with 'A-Force'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Marvel Comics is unveiling a new group of female Avengers. And they've got a Hulk.

While Iron Man and Captain America hold down the team in the movies, She-Hulk, Dazzler, Medusa and Nico Minoru are Earth's mightiest superheroines in the pages of A-Force, a series written by G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel, X-Men) and Marguerite Bennett (Angela: Asgard's Assassin) and drawn by Jorge Molina (X-Men) that debuts during Marvel's massive Secret Wars event.

The spring crossover finds the entire Marvel Universe disbanded and the Avengers no more. What's left in Secret Wars is a patchwork landscape of all the different corners of the Marvel U known as Battleworld.

In Arcadia — what Wilson describes as "this feminist paradise" — a familiar threat to Marvel fans arises again and because of it, the new team of A-Force is formed to be the superhero standard bearer.

"It feels almost like a great honor to be given the reins on something that has become so central to the narrative at Marvel and a big cinematic property as well," Wilson says.

Marvel gave her and editor Daniel Ketchum the "keys to the castle" and told them to pick their own team — the only caveat was it had to be all female characters, Wilson admits. "They've become very committed in the last couple of years to telling new stories, to gender diversity, to getting more voices out there so they said, 'Here's the roster. Go nuts.' "

They also had a mandate to create a new character, and Wilson came up with Singularity. Instead of being a flesh-and-blood human, she's actually a cosmological event — according to Wilson, she is a pocket universe that gained self-consciousness during the radical upheaval of Secret Wars.

She also doesn't have any real gender, yet Singularity chooses to be female.

With her Wilson says they want to "strip it all the way down to the basics: What does it mean to be a woman and what would that look like to somebody who was learning about the human race as an outsider and is learning about what it means to have relationships with other people."

Wilson likens Singularity to the enigmatic Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Her entire existence is so unlike that of ours that she really has to learn about what we think of as being an individual and having an identity from the ground up, with no point of access except those she meets."

In addition to giving her a "very cool power set," Wilson designed her to be an Avenger while also being, in effect, Avengers Mansion: Singularity can act as "a whole world within herself and she can also move between different worlds and dimensions like taking a walk," the writer says, "so she has access to all corners of the Marvel U in a way that other characters do not."

In picking the mainstays for the team, though, Wilson went for a little bit of everything choosing favorites of hers and other fans as well as anchors of different parts of the Marvel Universe. She-Hulk is an iconic stalwart who's been on the Avengers and Fantastic Four at various times, Medusa is the queen of the Inhumans, Dazzler is "everybody's favorite disco girl" from the X-Men and Nico Minoru was the resident witch of the Runaways.

"This is an opportunity to put people who would normally have no reason to interact with each other on one team," Wilson says.

Watch: Marvel Comics' 'Secret Wars' Battleworld revealed A trailer for the upcoming Marvel Comics event "Secret Wars," beginning in May 2015.

She also looked for a wide range of abilities, unlike her current X-Men team where all of them are telepaths.

Not only did she prefer characters who looked interesting on the page, Wilson says, "I want people whose power sets really build on each other so that there are specific limitations that can only become overcome by working together. Nobody's so overpowered that it gets boring and nobody's so underpowered that they have to be saved all the time. I wanted a balance visually and practically."

What's also going to be interesting is working out the power structure of the group, Wilson adds. "You have several people on it who are used to being either they're own bosses or in a leadership position, and all of a sudden they're together."

A-Force marks the 15th female-led comic currently published by Marvel, and the company's new focus on women, both readers and characters, has been successful thus far.

While event books usually generate orders of around 100,000 units, according to Marvel, the female-specific titles are more than doubling that number: Thor No. 1, which introduced the new female thunder god last fall, and the upcoming March debut of the Star Wars series Princess Leia have sold more than 200,000 copies, and pre-orders of this month's Spider-Gwen comic are upward of 250,000.

Wilson has been one of the faces of this movement toward diversity, writing Ms. Marvel and X-Men and inking a deal in December to be a Marvel-exclusive scribe, and "it's unexpectedly awesome," she says.

"We're having very interesting discussions in comics about gender, about competing ideologies, about how to be inclusive without making fans of the classic canon feel alienated. These are big questions for the whole industry right now and everybody is grappling to answer in fresh and relevant ways. So to be part of that is very, very cool for me."