Rogues, Not Rouge

Sci-fi, comics, humor, photos…it's all fair game.

April 29th, 2005 by Kelson. Posted in Comics and tagged for gender

This week’s issue of The Flash featured brief introductions to all of the reformed Rogues. The inclusion of Magenta on that team got me to thinking: she’s the only woman on either of the two Rogue teams. She’s also one of only three who have ever been part of the Rogues Gallery. Of the other two, Golden Glider had an in—two, really: her brother and her lover were both members of the group—and Blacksmith actually had to form her own team.

Still, they’re not doing so bad in proportion. It turns out there just aren’t very many female villains in Keystone and Central City. I’ve got 72 villain profiles on my site right now, not counting teams, and just 7 solo women. (8 if you count the second version of Colonel Computron, but who can tell under all that?) By my reckoning 19 villains have been members of the Rogues proper. (That’s counting legacy villains, like the original and replacement Trickster, both times, and counting all of Blacksmith’s team.) 3/19 is roughly 16%, and even 8/72 is roughly 11%, so women are actually represented a bit more in the Rogues than in the general Flash villain population.