[QUOTE=Chronos]
Still, I wouldn’t say that that’s the most sexist thing about superhero comics. What I find more troubling is the lack of standalone female characters. Most female superheroes are just female versions of already-established male superheroes. Batgirl is just a female Batman, Supergirl is just a female Superman. What’s worse, while the male heroes are usually “Man”, the females are often “Girl”, even as grown women. Yes, Wonder Woman is an exception here (no male equivalent, and she’s “Woman”), but she’s really the only one, among major characters, and she has a set of gender issues all her own.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t disagree with this, but to some extent I think it’s somewhat of an historical artifact. The prevailing opinion seems to be that boys don’t want to read about girls (and men don’t want to read about women). I don’t know how true it is, but it certainly seems to be perceived as true among publishers. So, since comic book readership has been historically heavily male (and almost certainly still is for super hero comics, though I don’t have any hard numbers), the vast number of protagonists have been male. (There have been a lot of female super heroes, but they tended to be more supporting and minor characters.)
I think that’s changed a bit over the last 20 years, perhaps indicating that boys are now more willing to read about girls, as social attitudes change. DC, for instance, is currently publishing Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Supergirl and the Legion of Super Heroes, Catwoman, and Birds of Prey (an exclusively female super team) among its main titles. It also has Manhunter, which is a book about a female super hero that’s on hiatus, but is supposed to return, as well as some minis that are usually going on (Black Canary has a 4 issue series coming out right now, Wonder Girl has a limited series coming in the fall, and so on). There’s also been increased participation of women in super hero teams. The original Teen Titans way back when had one female character (Donna Troy) to four male characters (Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Speedy), while the most recently announced line-up has four female characters (Supergirl, Wonder Girl, Miss Martian, and Ravager) to two male characters (Robin and Kid Devil). You can say that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the books centered around male heroes, but it’s better than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
So, it might be that boys (and young men) have gone from not wanting to read about women at all, to wanting to read about them as long as they’re shallow and sexualized. I don’t know, maybe that’s progress.
The biggest problem with introducing more top tier female protagonists is that super hero comics can be a very nostalgic genre/medium. Older fans read about the same characters they read about 30 years ago, and newer fans tend to gravitate towards the names they’re most familiar with. So people read Superman and Batman because they were read 30 (and 40, and 50) years ago. A lot of creators seem to get into the genre because they want to write stories about the characters they read as a kid. In that sort of atmosphere, it’s difficult for any new characters, male or female, to reach major character status, particularly ones that don’t have any legacy connection to older characters. Which isn’t to say that if a new superhero universe was created today that male and female characters would be found in equal proportions; they probably wouldn’t be, but I think it would be somewhat more representative without the historical baggage.
On the other hand, how many male protagonists are there in romance novels? 
