Wiggle some room in the web, Spidey. A challenger awaits.
Just don’t call her Spider-Girl. Yet.
On Wednesday–the same day that “Spider-Man 2” lands in movie theaters–a new comic book hits stores featuring another character with arachnidlike abilities swinging through the streets and alleys of New York City.
In “Amazing Fantasy,” a girl named Aranya Corozan, who conveniently happens to be a gymnast, sports a more “urban” image than a typical superhero, with chunky tennis shoes, climber’s pants and a baby doll shirt etched with a spider.
Being a 15-year-old from Brooklyn, she’s not going to pick up spandex; she’s going to go for something kind of cool, said Mark Brooks, the comic’s artist.
“Marvel [Comics] has realized they’re only hitting 50 percent of their demographic and making a big push for females,” he said. “What they’ve decided to do is create a teen antagonist, a counterpart to Spider-Man.”
The willowy wall-crawler is no Lois Lane-like appendage. She’s a fierce and powerful warrior and “kicks off the action,” Brooks said, calling it an “anti-Lifetime network” role.
So she’s Spider-Girl then?
Nope. Not yet.
“She doesn’t have a name yet because she’s still discovering who she is,” said Marvel Comics publisher Dan Buckley. “The girl’s a smart, strong, kind of bullheaded young lady growing up in New York dealing with what females deal with. There’s superhero action too.”
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Buckley freely admits that Marvel is eager to tap into this female genre of comic books that has exploded recently with sales of manga–the Japanese books translated into English that have become one of the hottest trends in publishing. Paperback manga compilations accounted for about $100 million in sales last year, a 50 percent jump from 2002, according to ICv2, a Wisconsin company that analyzes manga sales in the U.S.
The prime purchasers: young women.
“The thing that we’ve noticed is that manga sales have proven females will read graphic-novel fiction,” Buckley said. “If we can develop the content and get it into the right retail, we’ll have a chance.”