OVERVIEW: DC Superhero Girls

The main seven, Sort of. Not really. 

 I'll answer two questions you're asking right off the bat.

1) Superhero is one word. I don't know why Mattel felt it necessary to split the word into two, but it is one and I will always consider it one. So DCSG is my abbreviation for this line, not DCSHG.

2) This is a very young line, too young for an overview really, but I want to do an episode summary for the hour-long special that a lot of people didn't get to see, so I figured I'd do the overview now and the summary tomorrow. So this will be short, but there will at least be some groundwork before I launch into the summary. Summaries will not be a typical thing for this blog, but this episode holds a lot of important details.

What made people think they should sell these?

I'm a big comics fan, although not huge into DC. I loved Wonder Woman growing up and the 1990s Batman cartoon was one of my favorite shows at the time. Harley is my favorite because of that show. So when I heard there was going to be a doll line based on a high school full of superheroes, I was totally sold. I mean, a Marvel high school would have had me WAY more excited, but this is still awesome. Make superheroes more accessible to little girls, because superheroines are just as excellent as the male heroes. Make little girls feel like they're allowed to like superhero stuff, too, and they can grow up reading comics and maybe someday we'll feel more welcome in comic book stores. That'd be nice.

Target was gifted the early launch of the line. As you can see on the case, it was supposed to go out February 28th, 2016. Guess what happened? People found the DPCI codes, saw the cases were in the back and started asking employees to get them. And employees actually did it. Some people were only allowed one doll, some people didn't get management approval to sell and left with nothing, other people miraculously got EVERYTHING. I worked in Toys R Us. Had this happened in my store, these cases would not have left the back room. If by some odd chance, you got an employee that was a season leftover that didn't care, the items would have been flagged and would not have been able to be rung up. It's a good-sized fine that the store gets slapped with if one of those flags is overridden. But did Target have the brains to do this? No. So all over the country, some people were getting dolls and some people were just getting fed up. I was angry at my store, not for the refusal to sell, but for the reasoning behind it. My store has a manager that hates adult toy collectors and apparently thinks only children should buy toys. You can guess what I think of that. So I left Target after being made to feel like a second-class citizen, shot off an email to corporate about the treatment (which made me feel better, but I'm sure changed nothing), and then bought this case on ebay. I got them not too much over cost.

Harley Quinn

Each case has three dolls. One contains Harley, Ivy and Bumblebee, and the other has Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Batgirl. The Harley case got better distribution than the Wondy case, so it was easier to get dolls from that case. One of my very fantastic friends was able to get me Wonder Woman and I actually got all four dolls in the mail on the same day.

It was love at first deboxing. Well, I did not love the packaging, but I did love the dolls. The boxes are incredibly difficult to open and I give kudos to anyone who manages to do it without either cutting themselves or destroying the box. I destroyed every one.

Harley being my favorite got opened first. A lot of people complained about her red and black legs, but it really makes her easier to redress. My only real issue with her is that she doesn't look as much like the cartoon design as her action figure does.

Harley's action figure

Ivy was next to be opened and she's beautiful, but her little vines on her hand crushed her fingers together. I hate when accessories packaged on toys ruin them in some way. However, I left them on her hand and I just noticed a couple weeks ago that her fingers have straightened out. Healing vines, Ivy?

Bumblebee is also adorable. I think she's got a really neat outfit, and I love her hair.

Poison Ivy

Wonder Woman was the last one I deboxed that day and she really blew me away. The craftmanship on her is pretty awesome. I love that they included a little place on her belt to attach her lasso.

Bumblebee

After seeing these girls in person finally, I knew I had to get more, but by that point, Target had cracked down (FINALLY) and stopped selling the toys. I was able to get Supergirl on ebay, but Batgirl would have to wait. Which was fine with me, since I liked her least anyway.

Wonder Woman

Supergirl was a big surprise to me when she arrived, because I never expected to love her like I do. She's just darling.

Then it was just a matter of waiting, because we all knew all the toys would be available on the 28th. I happened to be awake around 2am that day and was there on the Target website when they started to appear. I grabbed all six action figures plus the Batgirl doll, because I didn't think I'd have time to go over to Target that morning and get anything. As it turned out, I did have time and my store actually did put the stuff out, so I got my Batgirl, plus the Harley and Ivy figures.

Supergirl

The action figures on the whole are pretty disappointing. I don't think a lot of them are very attractive and I even regret spending the $10 on Ivy. Harley is the only good one, in my opinion. When my online order came in, I returned everything, even given the longer chance to examine all the figures, none of them were worth keeping, in my opinion.

So we had the toys finally and the webisodes were fun. I did wonder where Supergirl and Batgirl were. Batgirl's character was there, but not a student at the school yet. I wondered why Katana hardly got any characterization and why her doll was left out of the lineup, when she was clearly in all the advertising for the original batch of main characters.

Batgirl

Well, as it turned out, Batgirl wouldn't "get her cape on" until the hour-long special I'm going to summarize for you all tomorrow, and Supergirl would only join the cast then, too. A bit frustrating when those doll spots could have gone to more often seen characters like Cheetah and Katana. (Not that Katana was a real presence, but she was there more than the two that got dolls instead.) But then the line technically hasn't fully released yet. Even though we've had it for three months, the line will only just be going into other stores I think in June or July. So by those standards, all six characters with dolls have been introduced.

The DC Superhero Girls were featured on Free Comic Book Day this year with a pretty awesome comic that teases the upcoming graphic novel. The guy at my store told me the store owner didn't get a ton of them in and they all flew off the table.

The first novel for DCSG came out on March 1st. I reviewed it in my book review blog: http://redblackandwhitebookreviews.blogspot.com/2016/03/dc-superhero-girls-1.html
July 5th will bring us the second book in the series, featuring Supergirl, as well as the first graphic novel. The second graphic novel comes on November 8th and then Batgirl gets the third novel on January 3, 2017.

The line made a pretty big misstep by not having Target be more strict about selling dolls early. Then on March 19th, it made its second major mistake. They aired an hour-long animated special on Boomerang, which is a spinoff of Cartoon Network. A spinoff, by the way, that a LOT of people have no access to. I became pretty disillusioned with the line at this point, knowing the special was going to introduce Supergirl, something I felt was very important for ALL fans to have access to. I don't know who made the decision to put it on that stupid channel, but the impression it gave was that female heroes weren't good enough for the main channel, which is a bunch of bull. Today, they finally re-aired the special, now on Cartoon Network, where it should have been from the get go.

So we've got dolls that aren't the easiest to get, plus an important special that a lot of people cannot see. What do you think they did next? It was revealed recently that KATANA would be the exclusive doll offered at San Diego Comic Convention this year. Katana, the only core character not offered in the first lineup. Katana, the main Asian character, who should be accessible for everyone, not just the people with enough money to go to these things. SDCC exclusives are supposed to be items that are either variations on existing characters that are accessible in other forms or characters that are more obscure and appeal more to the older fanbase. They are NOT supposed to be core characters that haven't even been offered in the main line yet.

The line is not even fully released yet and they've already made three big mistakes. Yet I cannot help but love the line and I'm going to stick with it, although I think it will be quite the rollercoaster ride of frustrations if these first few months are any indication. We're going to have some awesome dolls and some great cartoons, but likely a lot of bad decisions to suffer through because the people in charge don't seem like the brightest bunch.

I'm going to end with a teaser picture taken from the hour-long special. In the past, we've only seen the main seven characters in the opening. Well, the special had an expanded opening sequence and this is the new lineup image:

These are the characters I think we can look forward to for the first few lines of DC Superhero Girls: Frost, Cheetah, Starfire, Hawkgirl, Katana, Bumblebee, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Miss Martian, Star Sapphire, Catwoman, and Lady Shiva.

Dolly gods help me, I'm in.

PHOTO CREDITS: Toy images are my own. The intro picture is from the DCSG Instagram. The final lineup shot is a screencap I took from a short video posted on the DCSG Instagram.