Musing on Angela, the second Engineer, a member of Warren Ellis’s Authority who has been consistently handled poorly after Ellis left the title. She should be the perfect example of a Silver Age super-hero as done today—she’s the second Engineer, sure, she was chosen by the first to receive a download of all his research into nanotechnology after his death, but she chooses to make a leap with that research, combining it with her own formidable scientific background to give herself a complete transfusion—replacing blood with nanomachinery that she can extrude through her pores into living armour that can shift into any form she needs.

The Engineer is the Self-Made Woman, a brilliant rocket scientist adventurer from the Good Old Days. Except, you know, female and not white (at least, I always read her latina). She bops to the moon! She saves the day! She’s complex and wild and fun.

But then Ellis left and everyone after him made her prone to severe self-esteem and body issues and more recently Peter Milligan wrote her rebooted origin, where she has the armour given to her by an outside source rather than it being something she developed and implemented on her own.