Back Issue #167 June 2026 (magazine review).

This issue of Back Issue is sub-titled Girls, Women And Ladies, using examples of female characters with those words in their names. Obviously, they are only examples, and I’m only familiar with three of the seven characters on the cover. I presume that, at some stage, we are going to have an issue devoted to characters whose codenames don’t declare which sex they are.

The first article is about Irma Ardeen, Saturn Girl of the Legion Of Super-Heroes, as writer Philip Schweier goes over her future history. Objectively, she has to be one of the few characters whose costume started off as an enclosing uniform and gradually stripped down to a swimsuit. Granted, with those invisible spacesuits the Legionnaires wear, she could have been overheating. I think the only thing missed out is that she’s one of the few Legionnaires to have a DC Direct action figure. Oddly, I appear to be focusing on things Schweier missed out, such as how many times she was the LSH leader, but I am a Legion fan.

Writer Ed Lute looks at Marvel’s unbeatable Squirrel Girl. I only really knew of her because Bill Murray mentioned that he created her when it popped up in his email signature. She was more an accidental creation, designed to fit into a story battle between Iron Man and Doctor Doom. The fact that Murray got Steve Ditko to draw the story as a one-off, only for the character to be forgotten and later revived by other creators, helped develop her standing in the Marvel Universe, along with a change in her appearance.

Now, I don’t follow manga material. Even when it was first introduced in the 1980s, apart from a look at Frank Miller’s Ronin, my awareness of the length of the stories meant it would have required a big investment. Even so, writer Robert Greenberger fills me in on Mai, The Psychic Girl, who came after my time reading comic books, a teenager with telepathic and telekinetic powers.

Steven Wilber interviews writer Tom DeFalco and artists Ron Frenz and Patrick Olliffe about the creation of Mayday Parker, aka Spider-Girl, an alternate-reality product of Peter and Mary Jane Parker and star of her own adventures. Unlike her father, she sees her job as reforming villains, second-generation villains granted. There’s still the matter of where and when these people step away from their lives to have families, only for the next generation to follow in the same tradition.

Writer Alissa Marmol-Cernat’s look at the 1950s Phantom Lady and her progress through the decades reinforces my own pulling together of the reprints that Roy Thomas instigated. Quite how no one realised she was also Sandra Knight when she was mostly unmasked beats me. Even so, with only her black-light projector, she had to have something, if only to survive so long or to keep everything inside her costume.

Tank Girl appeared as I was moving out of comic books in the 1990s. Writer Stephen Friedt’s examination of her history at least confirms I wouldn’t have been a fan. You either love, or perhaps endure, her anarchic ways, I guess.

Lastly, the history of Sue Storm, then Richards, then Invisible Girl and then Invisible Woman by writer Jarrod Buttery shows how she developed over the years. I think the only scene he missed out was her explaining that she had been taught judo by her husband during a fight. It’s a shame we never saw that particular training, or how she could throw him while he was in his stretchy shape. Even so, I do agree with him about her being Marvel’s first lady.

For an all-female issue, this one is loaded in more than one way. I would be inclined to do more of these from time to time because it also gives an opportunity to put various team members under the spotlight and evaluate their usefulness. As with Sue Richards, her value went up over the years and her power developed accordingly.

GF Willmetts

June 2026

(pub: TwoMorrows Publishing. 82-page illustrated magazine. Price: $10.95 (US). ISSN: 1932-6904. Direct from them, you can get it for $10.95 (US))

check out websites: www.TwoMorrows.com and https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_54&products_id=1888