This! moment for Cassandra "Cassie" Lang

Saturday, February 18, 2012

This! moment for Cassandra “Cassie” Lang

Cassie Lang is a member of the Young Avengers, a team of teenagers who have “either some significance to the Avengers themselves or to Avengers history” (http://marvel.com/universe/Young_Avengers#ixzz1mfby4feV) (warning, spoilers for early issues of Young Avengers Vol. 1 at the link). Cassie’s connection is her father, Scott Lang – he was the second Ant-Man. Scott died during the Avengers Disassembled storyline.

In the following panels, Cassie – who has canonically admired superheroes like her father, the other Avengers, and the Fantastic Four since she was quite little – goes to Avengers Mansion to pick up her father’s gear so that she can carry on his heroic legacy. She’s with a new friend, Katherine “Kate” Bishop, and the girls are confronted by a group (three or four; I’m not sure which) of boys – the first of the Young Avengers.

panels from Young Avengers Volume 1 #2, showing Cassie Lang using a self-defense move against Eli Bradley, who wouldn't let go of her arm when asked.

panels from Young Avengers Volume 1 #2 showing Cassie Lang arguing

A cropped panel from Young Avengers Volume 1 #2 showing a close-up of Cassie Lang's face and a word balloon.

More girls in comics should be written this way because:

This shows a girl using an important skill she’s learned in a situation that calls for it – in this case, when someone gets too personal with her and doesn’t listen when she says “hands off”.
The skill has nothing to do with superpowers and is therefore nothing a reader has to suspend their disbelief for. Anybody can learn self-defense, which means it’s probably not too unrealistic for a teenage girl to do what Cassie (according to the Marvel wiki, fourteen going on fifteen here) is shown doing in these panels.
And while it is revealed very shortly after this that Cassie actually *does* have superpowers, at the moment this is happening she doesn’t know that – and neither does the reader. So the message she’s sending her peer – in this case Elijah “Eli” Bradley, another teenager with a family connection to Avengers history – is “don’t think you can push me around (because I don’t have powers). I have (other) ways of protecting myself”. And she’s able to prove, very definitively, that her words aren’t an empty threat - stunning those around her in so doing.
It shows a girl refusing to be patronized by someone who is being obnoxious to her (calling her “little girl” like he is). She won’t be talked down to and she stands her ground.
It shows that her actions are appreciated by other peers, both male and female. I think the “that was awesome” comment from Theodore “Teddy” Altman, the green-skinned boy in the fourth panel, is great. I also like that Kate supports Cassie too; it’s much more explicit in other pages of this issue, but look at the expression on her face in the fifth panel – she’s very firmly on Cassie’s side there.

All of this (including two speech balloons that were cropped out of the last panel) is from Young Avengers Vol. 1 #2, “Sidekicks (part 2/6)”, written by Allan Heinberg with pencils by Jim Cheung. The issue can be found in the trade paperbacks ‘Sidekicks’ or ‘Young Avengers Ultimate Collection’.