Uncanny X-Men writer Gail Simone loves to court controversy on her social media posts, and now she’s posited that many comic writers killed off superhero girlfriends because they “had just gone through a breakup or divorce.”
Last year, Marvel Comics relaunched the entire X-Men line to try to reset lagging sales for what were once their bestselling books. Gail Simone was tapped to write Uncanny X-Men, the line's flagship title in the process.
ail Simone is known as a feminist and is somewhat of a troll on social media to court controversy through her postings and grow her following, which has been effective over the years. She gained much of her notoriety in 1999 by coining the term “fridging” for “women in refrigerators” as a literary trope in fiction where female characters face more harm than their male counterparts.
She created a “Women in Refrigerators” website. She called the situation sexism in pop culture, though it was really a trend in the 1990s to up the danger and violence in books by harming supporting characters, most of whom happened to be female in a male-dominated superhero market.
Though it was simply about supporting characters falling to harm, Gail Simone harped on fridging because of a recent Ron Marz penned Green Lantern book where the villain stuffed his girlfriend into a refrigerator after killing her, which the character opened his fridge and reacted with shock. Again, it was very clearly just an edgy shock value removal of a supporting character that had little to do with sexism, but it was used to propel Gail Simone’s career to new heights to “combat” such stories.
Ron Marz said at the time, “To me the real difference is less male-female than main character-supporting character. In most cases, main characters, 'title' characters who support their own books, are male. ... the supporting characters are the ones who suffer the more permanent and shattering tragedies. And a lot of supporting characters are female.