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"  &amp;quot;This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is Thor,&amp;quot; the writer says. Photo: Courtesy of Marvel In the first issue of Uncanny X-Men by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, published in 1963, our team of budding mutant student heroes prepares to meet a new member. Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, and the Beast are thrilled and wowed to learn that a girl\u2014a real-life actual girl! \u2014 is joining the X-Men. Professor Xavier tells them in preparation that she is &amp;quot;a most attractive young lady,&amp;quot; and they all giggle like lobotomized frat boys as they watch Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl, walk up to the school. &amp;quot;A redhead! Look at that face... and the rest of her!&amp;quot; When she actually arrives, they all spew out various staid pick-up lines, and then Beast tries to kiss her\u2014she foils him with her telekinesis while they all laugh as if it&amp;#039;s totally cool for a teenage student to face sexual harassment ten minutes after arriving at a new school. Then Jean goes to try on her costume and they sneak after her and leer from around the corner, because of course they do. The sexism in X-Men #1 is flagrant and depressing, but it&amp;#039;s not that surprising. Early superhero comics from the &amp;#039;40s through the &amp;#039;70s were pulp adventure stories for boys and young men. They were overwhelmingly created by white men like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and their representation of women and minorities was somewhere between not great and outright insulting\u2014when they bothered to represent them at all. The X-Men, with five white guys (counting Professor X) and one ruthlessly objectified white girl, make it pretty clear where the creators, and the readers, were coming from. Times change, sexual harassment is no longer seen quite so unproblematically as fun good times, and the massive success of comics-related movies offers tantalizing new demographic possibilities to comics publishers. Maybe, somewhere, there are non-white guys who would like to see superheroes like them bashing bad guys and generally being awesome. Why not cater to them?  There&amp;#039;s only one problem. Time may have moved on, but legacy properties don&amp;#039;t. Part of the appeal of superheroes is that they&amp;#039;re familiar; they have iconic, nostalgic name recognition. And they get that iconic, nostalgic name recognition because they were made decades ago by folks like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Certainly, there are some exceptions, like Storm or Wonder Woman, but for the most part, the big legacy properties everyone knows are Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man \u2014 white guys created by white guys for white guys. So, you want a more diverse lineup of characters, but all your big-name, big-publicity characters are white guys. What do you do?  Simple enough. You keep the names and the powers and the iconic nostalgia, and you just change the race or gender of the character. Which is exactly what Marvel is doing with a new Thor, who, they just announced on The View, will be a woman.   Comics change with the times. The black Spider-Man, Miles Morales, was created in part as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama.  The announcement has provoked some predictable whining from fans who are resistant to change/are sexist/are some combination of the two. But the truth is that such changes are a tried-and-true formula for the major superhero companies. DC Comics introduced a black Green Lantern, John Stewart, in 1971, in part as a response to the Civil Rights Movement. Stewart went on to became a major character in the 2000s Justice League cartoon, no doubt in part because the television creators figured there&amp;#039;d be black kids as well as white ones watching the show. A half-black, half-Hispanic character, Miles Morales, became Spider-Man in the Ultimate line of comics in 2008-2009, in part as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama. A recent reboot introduced Kamala Khan, a Muslim girl, as the new Ms. Marvel. And of course there have been numerous female versions of male heroes, from Supergirl to She-Hulk. Marvel has been adamant that the new female Thor is not a distaff secondary female Thor offshoot. &amp;quot;This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is Thor,&amp;quot; series writer Jason Aaron insists. Editor Will Moss, for his part, stated, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not about filling a certain quota.&amp;quot; Obviously, the creative team wants to make it clear that the story will work on its own merits, and that it&amp;#039;s not just about changing the gender of the hero to attract a more diverse audience.&amp;quot;  Which is reasonable enough... but it seems like it&amp;#039;s also worth acknowledging that there are solid reasons, both ethical and commercial, to make legacy characters less white and less male. Superhero comics, like much popular culture, have a sexist, racist, insular past. Superheroes becoming less sexist, less racist, and less insular is good in itself. That could, in theory, happen through the creation of new characters, and sometimes it does. But for obvious marketing reasons, it&amp;#039;s much more likely to happen through reboots, or through having different, less white, less male, less heterosexual, maybe even at some point less cisgender folks take up familiar names and capes. So here&amp;#039;s hoping for not just a female Thor, but a Hispanic Captain America, a black Wonder Woman, a transgender Batman, and why not, while we&amp;#039;re at it, a female Dr. Who. Everybody needs heroes, and if you have the power to control the weather, it doesn&amp;#039;t seem like it should be that big a deal to also have the power to change with the times.  Related: How Chrissy Teigen Conquered the Internet Related: Why We Need a Muslim-American Superhero Related: New &amp;#039;Wonder Woman&amp;#039; Artist Doesn&amp;#039;t Want the Heroine to Be &amp;#039;Feminist&amp;#039; From the editors of  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/news/a17612/more-women-superheroes/>