Half a Moon: 14 Days of Celebrating Women

I'd like to promote a comm I've been watching with interest-- torchbearers. Most posts right now are from digital_femme, but the community is theoretically open to anyone who wants to throw a spotlight on an interesting black female character from comics or manga. (digital_femme also posts occasional roundups of links dealing with race-related discussions in the comics blogosphere, and has a gift for picking out interesting meta.)

Some of my personal favorite spotlight posts:

From indie comics: Narcissa, from graphic novel Narcissa created by Lance Tooks.

From Marvel: Monica Rambeau, an ex-Captain Marvel and former team leader of the Avengers-- in this sequence, she's lost her superpowers, but manages to kick ass even without them.

From DC: Amanda Waller. She's run various scary quasi-fascist government agencies and overseen some of the DCU's most secret black ops missions. You do not want to mess with "The Wall." These scans show just one example of why.

Historical interest: Friday Foster-- (more scans here.) Friday Foster was the first black female character to be the lead of her own syndicated comic strip, written by Jim Lawrence and stylishly illustrated by Jorge Longeron. (There was also a movie starring Pam Grier and Yaphet Kotto-- it came out in 1975.)

So, if you're interested, join and watch torchbearers!