Gender Bent Justice League: It’s “More Than A Group Cosplay”

LAWeekly tracked down the ladies in charge of Gender Bent Justice League, a growing cosplay group who made their debut at WonderCon in April and showed up at San Diego Comic Con with an expanded roster and improved duds, to inquire after their secret origins, who they are and how they came to be.

Naturally, this is relevant to our interests.

Appropriately (or not, depending on which version you go by) the group is organized by cosplayer Tallest Silver, aka Batma’am.

“A couple of us like to do female versions of preexisting male characters. One of our friends, Psykitten Pow, she had a female Flash,” says Tallest Silver, who organized the group and who dresses as Batma’am. “One night, we were all hanging out and I said how funny it would be if we had a whole Justice League with swapped sexes.”

Right away they scooped up a Superma’am, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Aqualass, and Plastic Lass, and extended the invitation to equally enthusiastic male cosplayers of Power Boy, Wonder Man, Black Canary and Vixen.

But as to whether Tallest Silver, Psykitten Pow, and Kit Quinn (Superma’am) are trying to make a point with all this… well, they are.

Gender Bent Justice League [is] a comment on the differences between the costumes associated with male and female superheroes in comic books.

“We try to keep it pretty scantily clad for [the men] because that’s how women are portrayed,” says Silver. “We weren’t scantily clad for ourselves because that’s not the point. We’re showing that girls can be clothed and be superheroes because, most of the time, they aren’t.”

Indeed. Behold the Hunter, Wonder Man, and Power Boy:

Way to keep the ridiculous ab window. Gender Bent Justice League doesn’t ignore the (very) rare male superhero is scantily clad, however. The Martian Maneater is the exception that proves the rule:

You can see the whole group (but with a different Hunter?) at Tallest Silver’s Flickr account.

(via Topless Robot.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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