Rita Farr is such an interesting character of 1960s comics.
So it's the mid-1960s. Rita is presented as a successful Hollywood action movie star who does all of her own stunts. She's also an Olympian who placed with a medal. Immediately she is communicated to the audience not just as an extremely accomplished career woman and athlete, but this is shown directly as equal to the boys on the team, who are a test pilot and race driver respectively, and actually less famous and successful than Rita. In part because they're less visibly altered by their powers (Negative Man is radioactive and can hurt people near him if not constantly wearing specialised clothes, Robotman is a robot man) and in part because of just who she is, Rita's career actually bounces back and she becomes the only member of the team who is able to live independently of the Chief.
What's interesting to me is, when Rita's career is bounding back, she's written as being conscientious enough not to want to be exploited as someone with powers and is both socially and politically savvy enough to care about concepts like representation in media from jump. She very much has an identity and a life beyond her romances, and although there's a bit of a boys fighting over her element with her teammates, it's very clear that it's based on respect and not objectification.
You compare Rita to how women of comics were written at the time, like how the original X-Men introduces and handles Jean, and Rita feels like a character decades ahead of her time. Outside of maybe Lois in her own solo series, it's just kinda rare to see from the time.
So, it's frustrating to me that this version of Rita is locked up in a bunch of 1960s comic books that very few people, even people who work on current Doom Patrol comics and TV shows, have actually read. Beast Boy's character throughout New Teen Titans only really makes sense if you've read some of the Doom Patrol comics and learned about how family situation, but he's been flanderised into this kind of "obnoxious little brother" character due in part to the 2003 cartoon and in part due to later comic book writers not really understanding his dynamic with Robotman or his relationship with the wider superhero community. There's this very interesting, important chunk of Beast Boy's character that's just missing from most versions of him, so his behaviour is instead a "he's just like that" situation. The most we see of a version of Beast Boy's relationship with his adoptive family is in Teen Titans Go, how bleak.
It should be interesting and a major point of characterisation, for instance, that Beast Boy, her adoptive son, ends up having pretty much the same civilian life, with fewer issues about being exploited. Realistically, it would be relevant to the community that he is in a way a Hollywood legacy actor, his adoptive mom was an extremely successful silver screen actress. You know, people mention that Robert Downey Jr. or Charlie Sheen both had successful Hollywood dads. It should be relevant and a point of compelling drama that Beast Boy ends up being an animal actor that wants to break through into playing human roles, meanwhile Rita was a human actor who wants to land roles where her being able to grow/shrink isn't part of the feature, but Rita gets blown up at the end of the 1960s run and then basically never mentioned again by any future comic writers until Gerard Way in the 2020s.
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