Today in Comics History, January 25, 1882: Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf!

Hey, let's wish a beer-filled, cake-stuffed, carousin' and cavortin' birthday celebration to the 20th Century's original fun time party girl, Virginia Woolf, author of all those comedic novels that had us rolling on the floor with hilarity, like the larf-out-loud Mrs. Dalloway, the absolute punfest To the Lighthouse, and the sizzling over-eighteen steamy romance A Room of One's Own! (Why do you think she founded the Ho-Ho-Hogarth Press?) Truly the greatest genre writer of her time, and I'm not even counting all those Doc Savage novels she ghost-wrote!


I'm a big fan of Virginia Woolf, especially for her genre-breaking appearances in that great work of literature, New Warriors!


cover of New Warriors (2005 series) #5 (Marvel, January 2006); pencils, inks, and colors by Skottie Young
With only two appearances in comicbooks, Ms. Woolf falls just one issue short of the criteria for being included in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but they were running out of room in the Ws anyway after Wolverine's section expanded to 31 pages. Luckily, she's not prejudiced against young fish-women!


from New Warriors #5; script by Zeb Wells; pencils, inks, and colors by Skottie Young; additional colors by Jean-Francois Beaulieu; letters by Randy Gentile
Too bad it's never been noted in the history books that Miz Woolf is a...wait, am I reading this right? A supervillain? Wow, Ginny, take it down a notch. Geez.




from New Warriors (2005 series) #4 (Marvel, November 2005); script by Zeb Wells; pencils, inks, and colors by Skottie Young; additional colors by Jean-Francois Beaulieu; letters by Randy Gentile
Yeesh! (looks nervous, tugs on my collar) Instead of considering Virginia Woolf as an evil nemesis, let's take a loot at her instead in the pages of Uber, a comic...about...super-powered Nazis. Oh dear.


from Uber #12 (Avatar, April 2014), script by Kieron Gillen, pencils and inks by Gabriel Andrade, colors by Digikore Studios, letters by Kurt Hathaway
So, to answer the musical question "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" I am! I AM.