by Shonette Reed


Beating out more than 530 entries, 7-year-old Natalie McGriff, co-creator of The Adventures of Moxie Girl comic book, walked away with over $16,000 at One Spark, a crowdfunding festival in Jacksonville, FL.

Whenever anybody asks about black women in comics, the immediate response is to bring up Storm. But Storm isn't the only black woman to rock superpowers and a costume. Here are 20 other black female characters in superhero comics who deserve more love and attention.

Black women waited for years to have a princess who looked like them, and now there is a growing presence of black female characters in the comic-verse.

(Huffington Post) When it comes to female comic book superheroes of any race, Wonder Woman and Supergirl are by far the world's most recognized. Yet even with their international popularity, both have failed commercially in major films and television adaptations. This failure has historically been attributed to the white, male-dominated comic book industry and media, which is often accused of being largely inept in writing, crafting and celebrating complex female superheroines. It has also been attributed to our sexist culture, which struggles psychologically with the concept of women and power.

This difficulty to write white female superheroines (or, depending on who you talk to, Kryptonian and Greek superheroines who look white) has fallen down even more so on black female superheroines, who not only become victims to the white male sexist imagination, but, among other things, it's racist stereotypes. In fact, with the exception of the X-men's Storm, there are not any other widely recognized black superheroines in American culture.

Well, the work of Grace Gipson just may help to change all that. Gipson, a graduate student at Georgia State University, is researching the interpretations and history of black superheroines. Her work has centered on answering the question "What are comic books communicating about black women to younger male and female readers who participate in the cultural universe of superheroes?".