Maxima

I can distinctly remember the first time I ever read a comic with Maxima in it. I was at the home of some friends, and they had the issue from the Death of Superman where she screws up in the fight with Doomsday. I remember thinking she was an idiot, then forgot about her. Thanks to the haze of memory with age, I don’t recall how I was exposed to the character again. I do know that in the late 90s I started collecting all her appearances, her behavior so much like the Silver Age Superman stories I loved to collect at the time; a drinking game could be made of all the times her “help” makes things worse, to say nothing of her motivation to mate with Superman. Of course, the fact of her being a redhead also endeared her to me. She was actually the first character I ever commissioned, back in 1998, and that piece was the first piece of comic-related art I ever owned. From there Maxima went on to become a large portion of my collection, in both commissions and published pages. She’s certainly my favorite female DC character, having replaced Supergirl, who held that spot for many a year.