It’s time for another installment of This Week IN Comics!
Big Shiny Robot! has a weekly column in the Salt Lake City alt-weekly IN Magazine and every week we bring it to you on the site.
If you live in the greater Salt Lake area, you can pick up a copy of IN Magazine up from one of their ubiquitous newsstands, and we would highly suggest that you do.
You can read the online version of the story here.
In the column for the paper, I was limited to two comic book moms, and we started with Martha Wayne and Aunt May. Below that, we’ll get into some of our other favorite comic book moms:
Others that I would have liked to include, but am doing so now:
Talia al’Ghul: The daughter of the demon, Ra’s al’Ghul, Talia bore Bruce Wayne a son and hid him from the world until she dropped him on the Batman’s doorstep. She’s actually a pretty terrible mother, teaching her son to be an assassin and whatnot, but she did bring to term Bruce’s biological son and current Robin.
Sue Richards: The Invisible Woman is a woman of many talents. She’s brilliant, she’s a superhero, she’s married to one of the most brilliant (albeit difficult) men in the Marvel Universe and she still has time to be a wonderful mother to Franklin and Val Richards. She’s had her share of ups and downs, even leaving her husband and children during the Civil War, but the first family of Marvel goes a long way to glorify the relationships of a strong, solid, loving family.
Stephanie Brown: Some may forget that the current Batgirl was pregnant in her early teens. She was having a baby with a boyfriend that left town in the wake of the Cataclysm, the earthquake that crippled Gotham city. After that dust settled, she was level headed enough to place her child up for adoption, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to provide the life the child needed. That and her father was a supervillain probably had a lot to do with it. She even convinced Tim Drake (then Robin, now Red Robin) to help her through the pregnancy. These were some of the best issues of the Robin comic and it remains one of my favorites in the Bat-family saga.
Wanda Maximoff: Okay… It turns out she really wasn’t a mother, but it was the desire for the maternal that may have ultimately driven her mad. The Scarlett Witch had twin boys (with the android The Vision) which turned out to be nothing but missing shards of Mephisto’s soul. In a bid to ease her mind, her children are erased from her memory, but this proves to be a fatal mistake for many. When she is reminded accidentally of her children, Wanda suffers a severe mental breakdown that leads to her recreating the entire world in her own image with disastrous consequences. (These events are detailed in Avengers: Disassembled and House of M).
Who are your favorite comic book mothers? Let us know in the comments below!