Not many comic book movies start with a scruffy, smiling 15-year-old girl confessing: “I had sex today … Holy shit.” If we met Minnie, the protagonist of Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl in any other comic book adaptation, she’d most likely be the high school siren and love interest. If she’s lucky she might be a feisty foil in the mould of Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman or Anna Kendrick’s Stacey Pilgrim in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. But she wouldn’t have thoughts or a movie of her own.

The forthcoming films of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are long overdue, and hopefully will fare better than a lot of other past big-budget, female-friendly comic adaptations. Remember Catwoman? Elektra? Tank Girl? Interestingly, only the latter was directed by a woman, Rachel Talalay, who still wishes to remake the film without studio interference. Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman’s proposal for a three-film adaptation of The Sandman, which had a huge female following, was presented to Warner Bros. in 2005 with concept drawings by comics giant Jill Thompson and was rejected.

Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World aside, most comic book movies are centred on men and boys – and that’s even looking beyond Hollywood’s superhero franchises to films like A History of Violence, Oblivion and Old Boy. If your knowledge of comic books was limited to what got adapted, up until recently you would think that drawing strips was just done by men. But women have always created comics (and read them too), just as they have always directed movies. It was just that for a long time you had to seek them out.

Despite recent successes such as the reinvention of Miss Marvel as a Muslim teenager, a female Thor and a She-Hulk, as well as DC’s rebooting of many of its superheroines, there are still far too few female artists working at both comic book empires. The proportion of female artists at Marvel is around 10%, a similarly dismal statistic to the proportion of films directed by women in Hollywood last year: 7%. DC, Marvel and Hollywood would do well to take heed of the more progressive worlds of independent publishing and graphic novels that have increasingly published more stories by female artists and seen sales rise as they reach a much wider audience. Over the last few years more of these comics have been transformed into films, stretching the connotations of comic book movies far beyond caped crusaders, science fiction, action thrillers and stories of male teenage woe. They offer up authentic depictions of love, sex but above all life from a female perspective, which due to the lack of women film-makers, are all too rarely found on the big screen. Here are just five examples. Directors and producers take note – there are a lot more comics like this out there waiting.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

The film team review The Diary of a Teenage Girl Guardian

One of the best animated interludes in Marianne Heller’s debut feature involves 15-year-old protagonist Minnie’s vision of herself as an awkward giant stomping through San Francisco like Godzilla, plucking her boy prey from the streets and licking him all over. It’s just one instance of how nascent female sexual desire is imaginatively captured by Heller. Her coming of age tale, set in the drug-hazed 1970s, doesn’t flash teenage flesh gratuitously, only showing Minnie fully naked when examining her body in the mirror. Bel Powley’s nuanced performance ensures that we get under the skin of this impulsive, fragile teen cartoonist rather than gazing at it. Minnie’s affair with her mother’s thirtysomething boyfriend (Aleksander Skarsgård) is also much more than a predatory one-dimensional relationship – just another example of the film’s fidelity to its protagonist’s POV. Sadly, the all-male panel of the BBFC, who don’t often have many honest accounts of adolescent sexuality submitted to them, saw “strong sex scenes” rather than a lost, lonely girl looking for love, acting on her desires and getting confused between the two of them. They stamped the film with an 18 certificate, but hopefully that will only just encourage more teenagers to seek it out.

Gemma Bovery

Gemma Bovery trailer

Posy Simmonds’s newspaper toons and graphic novels have prompted three film adaptations, and are proof if it was ever needed, that female comic artists have much more to offer beyond tender autobiography. Little remembered now is Famous Fred, Joanna Quinn’s charming 1996 Oscar-nominated animated short of Simmonds’s story about a family moggy’s secret life. The latest of her creations to be adapted is her 1999 graphic novel and Flaubert homage Gemma Bovery. Directed by Anne Fontaine, it features Gemma Arterton as the bored middle-class English expat in Normandy bearing troubling similarities to Flaubert’s infamous life-weary heroine. However, Fontaine’s decision to lighten and brighten her source material, focusing too much on the narrator’s infatuation with Gemma, makes her titular character into a male fantasy rather than the complex individual in the book. Simmonds’s humour, literary playfulness and acute social commentary translated far better on screen in Stephen Frears’s 2010 take on Tamara Drewe, which, again featuring Arterton, served up a mischievous romp full of bed-hopping mayhem from Simmonds’s update of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd to 21st century Dorset.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour

Blue is the Warmest Colour wins the Palme d’Or Guardian

Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s adaptation of Julie Maroh’s lesbian romance, starring Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, infamously became the first comic book movie to clinch arthouse cinema’s most prestigious accolade, the Palme d’Or. But it was also the first Cannes winner to be disowned by its source. In her graphic novel, Maroh draws sex as mundane and natural, but Kechiche films it as anything but. While much of the film is shot in tight close-ups, in the lengthy, explicit sex scenes Kechiche’s camera frequently pulls back to enjoy the couple’s activities and their bodies. It’s a shame, as Kechiche’s three-hour film was otherwise dedicated to subtly and intimately sketching the world around the couple as well as his protagonist Adele’s nascent erotic desires, her inner turmoil and later her desolate heartbreak. His liberal adaptation actually did away with some of Maroh’s more melodramatic turns.

Only Yesterday

Unlike Hollywood comic book adaptations, some of the most memorable characters of Japanese manga films are women, from the eponymous princess with her jet-powered glider in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, to the cyborg commander of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film of Ghost in the Shell. Due to Japan’s widespread obsession with manga and the number of female artists, there have been many adaptations of women’s visions, particularly of romance stories. The flip side is that they rarely travel abroad or beyond the small screen, and due to the lack of Japanese female directors, most are adapted by men, the most recent being Hirokazu Kore-eda’s delicate family saga Our Little Sister, a retelling of Akimi Yoshid’s Umimachi Diary, in competition at Cannes this year. Only Yesterday by Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata towers over all of them. Drawing on a collection of short stories of the same name by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone, Takahata’s enchanting painterly animation about a 27-year-old woman reflecting on her youth in the 1960s is a musing on time passing that’s never saccharine or nostalgic but heavy with melancholy and realism, a novelty among fantasy-obsessed manga films.

Persepolis

In animating her autobiography, Marjane Satrapi, co-directing with Vincent Paronnaud, became one of the few comic book artists to adapt their own work and undoubtedly the first to illustrate a girl’s growing pains in 1980s Tehran. Early on, her younger self dreams of becoming the last prophet with powers to change the world, but soon discovers that fantasies of superhero-style control have no place amid a tyrannical regime and warfare. Her film is a spirited, often devastating reflection on freedom that details the repression of women in Iran through chilling everyday moments rather than sensationalist drama that aligns good all too easily against evil. Often included as the token comic book adaptation by and about women in numerous internet lists on the subject, it is one of the most remarkable feats of adaptation. Comic strips share much of cinema’s language, but that doesn’t make them simple to translate. Satrapi deliberately stuck with the stark monochrome of her graphic novel to make her tale of rebellion and displacement a universal one, but ensures each frame is a surprising visual spectacle – be it a surreal musical sequence or the horror of a human hand in a building’s bombed ruins.