There is a version of the Marvel Universe that most people never knew existed — quieter in some ways, louder in others, and far more honest about what it actually feels like to carry impossible weight. That version was written by women. And if you haven’t found it yet, you’re in for something genuinely special.
For decades, the assumption baked into superhero comics was that the stories were made by men, for men, about men. It wasn’t entirely true — women had been writing for Marvel since the Silver Age — but it was the dominant narrative, and it stuck. What happened when that assumption finally cracked open wasn’t a revolution so much as a recognition: the genre had always been capable of more. It just needed the right voices to prove it.
The comics on this list aren’t important simply because women wrote them. They’re important because they are genuinely, irreversibly great — messy and funny and heartbreaking in ways that the medium desperately needed. Some reinvented legacy characters. Some launched entirely new ones. A few quietly changed the entire direction of Marvel publishing without anyone outside the industry fully realizing it until years later.
Whether you’re a longtime reader looking for something you might have missed, or someone who bounced off superhero comics once and never came back, these are the runs worth your time. Not as curiosities, not as political statements — just as stories, doing what the best stories do: making you feel less alone in whatever you’re carrying.
The best superhero stories have never really been about punching. They’re about the weight of becoming someone — and the writers who understood that earliest were often the ones the industry made work hardest to be heard.
On Marvel’s women writers & their legacy
Best Marvel Comics Written by Women You Should Read
2014 – Ongoing
Ms. Marvel
Vol. 3 — Kamala Khan
Written by G. Willow Wilson · Art by Adrian Alphona
If there is a single Marvel comic from the past twenty years that genuinely changed how the industry thought about its audience, it is probably this one. Kamala Khan — a Pakistani-American teenager from Jersey City, raised Muslim, obsessed with Avengers fan fiction — became Ms. Marvel in 2014, and the world around her didn’t quite know what to do with her. Readers, on the other hand, were immediately, overwhelmingly ready.
G. Willow Wilson had been writing comics for years before this, but Ms. Marvel was the project that let her put everything together. Kamala’s powers (she can stretch and reshape her body, a literal metaphor for code-switching between cultures) are almost beside the point. What Wilson really wrote is a story about the specific, exhausting, sometimes beautiful experience of belonging to multiple worlds at once and feeling fully at home in none of them.
The early issues are almost deceptively light — high school drama, a bratty older brother, sneaking out to go to a party. Then Wilson lets the weight in gradually, and by the time the emotional stakes arrive, you’re so invested that they hit like a freight train. Adrian Alphona’s artwork is equally remarkable: loose, warm, funny in its details, and packed with background jokes that reward close reading.
Why it matters
This isn’t just representation for representation’s sake — it is a genuinely constructed coming-of-age story that happens to also be about a superhero. Start with the first trade and plan to read the whole first year in one sitting.
2012 – 2014
Captain Marvel
Vol. 7 — Higher, Further, Faster
Written by Kelly Sue DeConnick · Art by Dexter Soy & Emma Ríos
Before Kelly Sue DeConnick got her hands on Carol Danvers, Carol was a character Marvel kept shuffling around, never quite knowing what to do with. She’d been Ms. Marvel, Binary, Warbird — each name carrying its own complicated history, its own editorial mandate, none of them quite sticking. Then DeConnick said: let her become Captain Marvel. Let her be the best there is.
What followed was one of the most purely exhilarating superhero runs of the 2010s. DeConnick’s Carol is prickly and ambitious and genuinely funny — the kind of character who leads with her chin and occasionally gets punched in it. The “Carol Corps,” the fan community that rallied around the book during its original run, didn’t emerge because of marketing. They emerged because DeConnick wrote a hero who felt like someone you’d actually want to know.
The early issues send Carol into space on a solo mission and let her reckon with legacy, loss, and what it actually costs to be as good as she insists on being. There’s a wonderful thread about female pilots from World War II — the WASPs — that grounds the story in real history without ever feeling like a lesson. And the banter. The banter in this book is immaculate.
Best entry point
Start with the “In Pursuit of Flight” arc — the first six issues — and let DeConnick’s voice take over. There’s a reason this run essentially built the foundation for the eventual film adaptation.
1984 – 1991
Power Pack
Written by Louise Simonson · Art by June Brigman
It’s easy to look back at Power Pack now and underestimate what it actually was: a genuinely risky bet that children could be the protagonists of a serious Marvel comic, not just sidekicks or plot devices. Louise Simonson understood that kids — actual kids, not teenagers, not young adults — have rich inner lives, make real decisions under pressure, and carry genuine moral weight. She wrote them that way.
The Power family — Alex, Julie, Jack, and five-year-old Katie — are given superpowers by a dying alien and promptly have to figure out how to use them responsibly, hide them from their parents, and still get through school. Simonson never condescends to her characters or her readers. The stories deal with child abuse, addiction, homelessness, and grief — heavy material, handled with care and without ever losing the sense of genuine childhood wonder that makes the book feel different from everything else Marvel was publishing at the time.
June Brigman’s art is the perfect complement: expressive, dynamic, and remarkably good at depicting the specific body language of children — the way they hold things, move through space, react to fear. This is a collaboration where everything clicks. Simonson would go on to define X-Factor and New Mutants, but Power Pack remains the run that shows you what she could do when given total creative freedom.
Sleeper pick
Often overlooked in discussions of essential Marvel, this is one of those runs that rewards discovery. The original issues are collected; the later issues get darker and more complex in exactly the right ways.
1986 – 1991
Daredevil
The Ann Nocenti Run
Written by Ann Nocenti · Art by John Romita Jr.
Ann Nocenti took over Daredevil after Frank Miller’s landmark run had finished and the character stood in the enormous shadow of what Miller had built. The conventional move would have been to try to replicate that energy. Nocenti went in the opposite direction almost entirely — and the result is one of the strangest, most ambitious, most underrated comic runs in Marvel history.
Nocenti’s Daredevil is less the efficient noir detective of the Miller years and more a deeply conflicted moral philosopher trying to find firm ground in a world that keeps dissolving under him. The stories sprawl into environmental catastrophe, nuclear anxiety, political violence, and the psychology of what it actually does to a person to operate on the edge between law and vigilantism for years on end. They introduced Typhoid Mary, one of the most psychologically complex villains the Daredevil title has ever had.
The run is demanding — Nocenti doesn’t stop to explain her references, and the politics are explicit in ways that mainstream superhero comics rarely attempted. But John Romita Jr.’s kinetic, expressive artwork pulls everything forward, and the ambition on every page is genuinely exciting. This is what the genre looks like when someone decides it can carry real weight and doesn’t ask permission first.
Start here
Issues #252–291 are the heart of the run. The Inferno crossover material is optional, but the standalone Typhoid Mary issues are essential.
2010 – 2012
Black Widow
The Name of the Rose & Deadly Origin
Written by Marjorie Liu · Art by Daniel Acuña
Marjorie Liu came to Marvel having already established herself in prose fiction, and it shows. Her approach to Natasha Romanoff is literary in a way that the character rarely gets — interested not in the action set pieces but in what it costs to be someone with Natasha’s history, carrying that much blood on her hands, still choosing to do the work every day.
Liu’s Black Widow is older than she looks and tired in ways she won’t admit. The story — involving a conspiracy that reaches deep into her past and threatens everything she’s fought to protect — is plotted with precision, but the real achievement is tonal. Natasha has rarely felt so genuinely dangerous and so genuinely vulnerable simultaneously. Liu finds a version of the character who can be both without one canceling the other out.
Daniel Acuña’s art deserves equal credit: he paints his pages rather than inking them in the traditional sense, and the result has a moody, cinematic quality that fits Liu’s writing perfectly. The colors are deep and saturated, the action sequences brutal and precise. It’s a beautiful book that happens to also be a great spy thriller.
Also read
Liu’s X-23 run (2010–2012) is equally excellent — a study in trauma and identity that remains one of the best depictions of that character in any medium.
2008 – 2009
Runaways
Volume 3
Written by Kathryn Immonen · Art by Sara Pichelli
By the time Kathryn Immonen took over Runaways, the book had already survived the departure of creator Brian K. Vaughan and a somewhat rocky transition period. Immonen’s task was essentially to stabilize a ship that had been listing — a thankless job, often, but she did considerably more than that.
What Immonen understood about the Runaways is what made the book work under Vaughan too: it’s not really about superpowers. It’s about found family, and about what happens when the adults in your life reveal themselves to be something other than what you needed them to be. The characters bicker and protect each other and make genuinely bad decisions for understandable reasons, and Immonen writes their dynamics with real wit.
The run is shorter than ideal — editorial realities cut it off sooner than the story wanted to go — but the issues that exist are sharp, funny, and emotionally honest in ways that kept the book alive during a difficult period. Sara Pichelli’s art is perfectly matched: kinetic without being chaotic, warm without being soft. This is also, notably, where Pichelli was really hitting her stride before going on to co-create Miles Morales.
Completionists note
Read the Vaughan original run first (volumes 1–2) for context. Immonen’s tenure begins with volume 3 and repays the investment the earlier issues demand.
1981 – 1986
Power Man and Iron Fist
The Mary Jo Duffy Years
Written by Mary Jo Duffy · Various artists
Ask most people about Luke Cage and Danny Rand’s comic book history and they’ll tell you about the blaxploitation and kung-fu origins, the 1970s cultural milieu, the slightly embarrassing costumes. What they often don’t mention is that the best extended period of that book happened under Mary Jo Duffy, who took over in the early 1980s and turned it into something genuinely fun and human.
Duffy’s strength was dialogue — the rhythms of actual friendship, the way two men who trust each other completely will still drive each other completely crazy. Her Luke and Danny feel like people who have genuinely worked together for years: finishing each other’s sentences, covering for each other’s blind spots, arguing about money and professional standards and the best way to handle a situation when every option is bad. The buddy dynamic that makes the Netflix series work was essentially codified here.
The plots are sometimes absurd (supervillains, interdimensional nonsense, standard 1980s Marvel) but the character work underneath is always solid. Duffy clearly loved these two people, and that affection comes through on every page. For anyone who came to Luke Cage through the MCU and wants to understand where the character’s essential warmth and decency came from, this is the run to find.
Accessibility note
The run is not fully collected in modern editions, but back issues are affordable. Start around issue #50 — that’s where Duffy’s voice really settles in.
2020 – 2022
New Mutants
Krakoa Era
Written by Vita Ayala · Art by Rod Reis
Vita Ayala arrived on New Mutants during the Jonathan Hickman-orchestrated Krakoa era, when the entire X-Men line had been restructured around the premise of mutants finally having a homeland of their own. Most of the books in that initiative focused on the political and cosmic implications of that new reality. Ayala focused on the children — the next generation of mutants trying to figure out who they are in a world that suddenly seems, for the first time, like it might actually be safe for them.
The result is one of the most emotionally intelligent X-Men comics in years. Ayala is particularly good at writing characters navigating trauma — not in the melodramatic, cathartic-breakdown way that comics often default to, but in the quieter, more honest way: the difficulty of trusting safety after a lifetime of threat, the specific ways that survival shapes you even after the surviving is done. Characters like Dani Moonstar and Roberto da Costa get interior lives here that they haven’t had in a long time.
Rod Reis’s artwork is dreamlike and gorgeous — loose linework, watercolor-adjacent colors, pages that sometimes feel more like illustrations from a magical-realist novel than traditional superhero comics. It’s a deliberately beautiful book, and the beauty serves the material.
Context helps
Some familiarity with Krakoa-era X-Men enriches the experience, but Ayala’s emotional core is accessible on its own. The “Labors” arc is the run at its peak.
2019 – 2021
Excalibur
Krakoa Era
Written by Tini Howard · Art by Marcus To
Tini Howard took a title with a somewhat complicated legacy — the original Excalibur was beloved for its charm and eccentricity; later iterations less so — and rebuilt it from scratch around Betsy Braddock reclaiming both the Captain Britain mantle and her own identity. The result is something that sits in a genuinely strange genre category: a Arthurian magical realism superhero story that is more interested in myth and belonging than in conventional action.
Howard writes Betsy’s journey of self-reclamation with sensitivity and wit. After years of the character being in psychic limbo (the long, convoluted story of Psylocke’s history is at this point genuinely legendary for its complexity), Howard gives her a clean slate without erasing the history — instead making the accumulation of everything Betsy has been into the source of her power. The magic system is intricate, the political dynamics of the Krakoa era are woven in without dominating, and the book has a sense of humor that keeps the more baroque elements from tipping into self-seriousness.
Marcus To’s artwork is bright and inventive — he’s particularly good at the visual grammar of magic, making it feel genuinely otherworldly rather than just colorful. The book understands that great superhero art should make you feel the rules of the world even when those rules are being broken.
For fans of
British mythology, magical realism, and stories about reclaiming your identity after other people have spent years deciding who you are. Howard is one of the most interesting voices writing superhero comics right now.
2020 – 2021
X-Factor
Krakoa Era
Written by Leah Williams · Art by David Baldeón
On Krakoa, death is theoretically solved: dead mutants can be resurrected. But someone still has to investigate the question of what actually happened when a mutant dies — the cause, the circumstances, the question of whether justice can or should still be sought in a world without permanent loss. Leah Williams’s X-Factor is, improbably, a noir detective story about grief in a setting that has ostensibly eliminated grief, and it is one of the most original things Marvel published during the entire Krakoa era.
Williams writes ensemble casts the way the best TV showrunners do: giving each character a distinct interiority, making sure every scene has subtext beneath the surface, letting relationships evolve across issues in ways that reward close attention. Polaris gets a particularly remarkable arc here — Williams is interested in what it means to be someone with a mental health history that has been weaponized against you, and she writes that with real care and specificity.
The tone shifts are brave: genuinely funny in one issue, devastating in the next, occasionally both simultaneously. Williams seems to understand that genre constraints are most interesting when you’re pushing against them without abandoning them. X-Factor ran for only twelve issues — cancelled too soon, as so many great series are — but those twelve issues tell a complete story that ends exactly where it needed to.
Read it complete
At twelve issues, this is a manageable commitment. The complete run is available as two collected volumes. Do not miss the Morrigan storyline — it is genuinely upsetting in the best possible way.
