As I wrote in July, the makers of 2015's Ant-Man missed a golden opportunity to reflect upon one of the most notorious incidents in Marvel Comics history: the moment in 1981 when the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym, struck his wife, fellow Avenger The Wasp/Janet Van Dyne.
To be fair, the 2015 Ant-Man was one of the most kid-oriented of the Marvel films, so was perhaps not the place to tackle such dark material. Still, the fact that Marvel president Kevin Feige literally laughed off the prospect of spousal abuse being touched on did little to dispel the entertainment juggernaut's reputation, well and truly entrenched by the whole Black Widow slut-shaming debacle, as a boys club.
If the buzz and the source material are anything to go by, Marvel may go some way to rehabilitating this aspect of its image with its new series, Jessica Jones, which hits Netflix this week.
The series, which stars Breaking Bad's Krysten Ritter and 'the Tenth Doctor' David Tennant, is based on Brian Michael Bendis' early-2000s short-run series Alias.
Later released as a four-volume graphic novel, Alias is one example of a modern day comic set within the Marvel continuity that, in the words of pop culture critic Roz Kaveney, offers a 'rebuke to the convenient pieties of the comic book', by proving that comics can be thematically rich, and can take serious issues — such as the physical and sexual abuse of women by men — seriously.
The protagonist is Jessica Jones, a former costumed superhero who has traded in her tights for a job as a private detective. The character was new to the Marvel continuity, but Bendis ret-conned her into the fabric of that universe: she is a former classmate of Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man), and narrowly avoids being struck by a truck during the incident that turned Matt Murdock into Daredevil.
Other major and minor Marvel characters show up as significant figures in Jones' past and present life, including Avenger Luke Cage and, as it happens, Ant-Man Scott Lang, with each of whom she has complicated romantic and sexual encounters.
The story has Jones investigating a series of cases — including rescuing Mattie Franklin, one of the incarnations of Spider-Woman, from a low-level gangster who has been sellling her blood as a performance-enhancing drug — while coming to terms with a horrific ordeal from her own past.
We don't find out the exact source of this trauma until volume four,