Hi, I’m Jon X

I’ve been writing about, photographing, filming, and producing original superheroine fiction for more than twenty years. Superheroines.net is the home of that work — and an editorial home for everything I’ve come to know about the wider genre along the way.

This is the story of how the site got here, what’s in it, and what I’m trying to do with it.

How this started — 2005

I started building the first websites in the genre in 2005. At the time the niche was almost entirely a forum-and-photoset world: small communities of fans trading material, occasional cosplay shoots passed around as still galleries, the very earliest YouTube fan films starting to surface. The idea of a sustained, ongoing creative project around superheroines — produced in the same way an independent comics imprint or an indie film label might run — was barely a thing.

What I wanted to make from the beginning was the version of the genre I couldn’t find anywhere else. Mainstream Hollywood was years away from taking female-led superhero stories seriously. The studio releases were thirty-three years between the 1984 Helen Slater Supergirl and Wonder Woman (2017). Comics treated their heroines as second-tier most of the time. The independent and fan-production world was where the actual creative experimentation was happening, but it was scattered, hard to find, and rarely sustained beyond the energy of individual projects.

Superheroines.net became the answer to that. A single home for the work, with enough of a publishing rhythm to build a real audience and enough of a creative stretch to keep the work itself interesting.

The early years

The early years of the project were photography-led. Stills, photosets, the photo-narrative work that sat between cosplay shoots and live-action comics. The technical limits of what a small team could produce in the mid-2000s shaped what was possible: high production value on individual scenes, less on extended narrative. The model — pun intended — was to do a small number of things very well rather than to spread thin.

The original heroines started arriving in this period. Superwoman first, who has been the longest-tenured character on the roster. Then over the following years a roster grew up around her: Miss Power, Sonic Girl, Wonder Babe, Lightning Girl, Bionic Girl, Dark Star, Super Chick, Superior Girl, Ultimate Girl, and Dark Avenger. Each has her own continuity, her own costume identity, her own set of stories. Some have been with the project nearly its whole run; others have arrived more recently as the production direction expanded.

Alongside the original roster, the editorial work started taking shape. Coverage of mainstream characters, deep dives on iconic heroines, the kind of writing about the genre that I wanted to read but couldn’t find written about it anywhere else.

The middle years — building the catalogue

The 2010s were the period of consolidating into a real publishing rhythm. The website became the canonical home of the work in 2010 and has been since. The catalogue diversified across content types as production capabilities allowed.

Superheroine Stories is the prose fiction line. The long-running anchor is A New Supergirl — a series that follows a young student who is gifted with Supergirl’s powers and her story navigating life as Earth’s most powerful person. New chapters have been publishing fortnightly across the run; the cumulative archive is now substantial.

Photosets are the photographic catalogue, the work that goes back to the project’s earliest years. Curated stunning photosets from in-house photoshoots, full-resolution images of the performers who bring the iconic heroines to life — Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Power Girl, and the original roster.

Backstage Pass is the archive of behind-the-scenes material — production outtakes, alternate scenes, candid set moments, bloopers, costume tests, unreleased material. It treats production as content in its own right. A lot of what I love about independent filmmaking lives in the backstage material as much as the finished work.

By the mid-2010s the project had a working rhythm: weekly content, an engaged audience, a catalogue deep enough that a new fan could spend months working through the archive.

The cinematic era — March 2025

March 2025 was the inflection point. Three new content lines went live to Ultimate Fan members, all in the same month:

Live-Action Comic Books — superheroine comics that combine cinematic visuals with comic-style storytelling, photographed and composed in the manner of traditional comic panels but using real performers, real costumes, and on-location production. The blend of cinematic visuals and comic-style storytelling is something I’d been working towards for years; getting the production pipeline to support it consistently was a multi-year build.

Superheroine Movies — action-packed short films where the iconic heroines and the original roster take on villains in live-action adventures. Productions range from short-form pieces to longer multi-act films. Bringing real cinematic production values to the genre at independent budget had been the long-term goal of the project for a decade.

The Female Future Movies — a parallel cinematic series sitting alongside the main Superheroine Movies line. The Female Future is a powerful, female-driven universe where superheroines rise, redefine strength, and shape the future. Produced as a discrete creative line with its own continuity and visual identity.

What changed in 2025 wasn’t just the production pipeline maturing. It was also the wider environment: the post-2024 generation of AI video and image generation models has done as much to change what an independent superheroine production can look like as anything since the original arrival of consumer cinema cameras a decade earlier.

AI Superheroines — the daily collection

The AI Superheroines collection is the production line where the most experimentation is happening with current-generation AI image tools. Hyper-realistic AI-generated character imagery — Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Power Girl, and others — produced daily. Members get something new in this collection every day across all paid tiers.

I’ve been at the front of the AI image revolution for the genre. Character consistency across shots, costume fidelity to the source material, lighting and tonal control — all the things that historically required teams of artists or photographers — are now things a focused independent producer can do in volume. The AI Superheroines collection is the most visible expression of that, but the same toolkit is also reshaping how the photoshoot and film work gets produced.

This isn’t about replacing the photographic work with AI. The traditional photoshoots, the live-action production, the work with professional performers — all of that continues, and it’s the heart of the catalogue. The AI work is an additional creative line that opens up possibilities that simply weren’t reachable before: scenes that would have been impossibly expensive to stage, characters that need consistency across hundreds of images, visual experiments that would have been a year of work for a single shot.

The editorial codex

Alongside the production catalogue, Superheroines.net publishes editorial deep-dives on the mainstream superheroine canon. The editorial codex is structured around character-centred clusters: each major heroine has a hub page plus dedicated sub-pages on her on-screen history, costume evolution, and the independent-production tradition specific to that character.

The codex currently covers Supergirl in full depth — origin, every continuity reset, on-screen history from the 1984 Helen Slater film through Melissa Benoist’s six-season CW run to Milly Alcock in the upcoming Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, costume evolution across six and a half decades of redesigns, and the longest fan-film tradition of any DC heroine. Hubs are being built out across Power Girl, Wonder Woman, Storm, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Black Widow, and the wider canon, including international heroines I think don’t get enough coverage in mainstream publications: Filipino, Indian, Brazilian, and Japanese tokusatsu characters with their own deep histories.

The editorial style sits between encyclopedic depth and journalistic perspective. Factually grounded, written with judgment, and structured around the questions readers actually have rather than the questions a Wikipedia article assumes you want answered.

The codex landing page is at superheroines.net/superheroines, with new entries added regularly.

The avatar

A note on the picture I’ve been using since the beginning: the Charles Xavier avatar is from the X-Men comics, and I’ve been using it across forums, social media, and creator profiles for the entire run of the project. Two decades in, it’s become inseparable from the Jon X identity in the niche. If you’ve read me anywhere — old forum threads, Patreon comments, social posts, any of it — that’s the avatar that’s been in the picture.

What I’m trying to do

The work, after all this time, is still about the same thing it was about when I started.

Superheroines have always represented more than just spectacle — they embody resilience, agency, and the capacity to inspire. The original roster I’ve built up over the project’s run is grounded in that: each character has internal stakes, a continuity, a creative life that’s larger than any individual production she appears in. The editorial work on the mainstream canon comes from the same place. I treat the long-running characters — Supergirl since 1959, Wonder Woman since 1941, Power Girl since 1976, all of them — as ongoing creative properties that deserve serious coverage rather than fixed cultural artefacts that get the same recycled framing every time.

Independent production, both fan-led and creator-led, is a serious and undercovered branch of the medium. The mainstream-media coverage of superheroine cinema treats fan films and indie work as a footnote to the studio output. The editorial coverage on this site deliberately rebalances that: independent work is worth the same depth of coverage as the mainstream releases, because in many ways the independent work has been more experimental, more responsive to its audience, and more sustained over time than the studio cycles.

Fiction is a real working category. The productions on this site are fiction. Characters portrayed are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons is coincidental. The professional performers who appear in productions are paid voluntarily, and their participation in any specific production does not imply endorsement of any particular character, storyline, or ongoing creative direction. The work is treated with the operational seriousness any independent production deserves.

Where to find me

The hub of everything is superheroines.net. The editorial codex, the original heroines, the productions catalogue, and the editorial coverage of films, TV, and actresses all live there.

The production catalogue’s primary support relationship is on Patreon, where the membership tiers unlock progressively deeper access. Members get something new every day across the catalogue.

I post across Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, with each channel having its own rhythm. Instagram is the visual showcase, Twitter/X is conversational and announcements, YouTube is the long-form video distribution, Pinterest is the discovery channel for the photographic catalogue.

The free newsletter is the no-cost way to follow new releases, behind-the-scenes updates, and editorial. Free subscribers get release notifications and free editorial pieces.

For editorial enquiries, licensing questions, takedown requests, or press: hello@superheroines.net.

Frequently asked questions

What is Superheroines.net?

Superheroines.net is the home of original superheroine fiction, photography, AI imagery, live-action comics, and short films, plus deep editorial coverage of mainstream superheroine canon. The work is created and published by Jon X, who has been producing in the genre since 2005.

Who is Jon X?

Jon X is the writer, photographer, and producer behind Superheroines.net. He has been working in the superheroine genre since 2005 and has used the same Charles Xavier comic-book avatar across the entire run. His work spans original prose fiction, photography, AI-generated imagery, live-action comic books, short films, and editorial coverage of the wider superheroine canon.

How long has Superheroines.net been running?

The wider project has been running since 2005. Superheroines.net itself has been the public home of the work since 2010. The combined archive spans more than two decades and is one of the longest-running independent superheroine production projects in continuous operation.

What kind of content is on Superheroines.net?

Eight content collections: AI Superheroines (daily AI-generated character photography), Superheroine Stories (original prose fiction, including the long-running A New Supergirl series), Backstage Pass (production behind-the-scenes), SFW Photosets, NSFW Photosets, Live-Action Comic Books, Superheroine Movies, and The Female Future Movies. New content is published every day across the catalogue.

Who are the original superheroines on Superheroines.net?

The site’s original roster currently includes eleven characters: Superwoman, Miss Power, Sonic Girl, Wonder Babe, Lightning Girl, Bionic Girl, Dark Star, Super Chick, Superior Girl, Ultimate Girl, and Dark Avenger.

What mainstream characters does the editorial codex cover?

Supergirl is the first character covered in full depth, with hubs in development for Power Girl, Wonder Woman, Storm, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Black Widow, and the wider canon — including international heroines that get less attention in mainstream coverage. Each hub covers origin, on-screen history, costume evolution, and the independent-production tradition for that character.

How do I support Superheroines.net?

The primary way is via Patreon, where the membership tiers unlock progressively deeper access to the catalogue. Members get daily new content across the eight collections. The free newsletter is a no-cost way to follow new releases.

Are the productions real productions with real performers?

Yes. All photoshoots, comics, and films feature paid professional performers who appear voluntarily. Productions are fiction; characters are fictional and any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.

How can I contact Jon X?

The general contact address is hello@superheroines.net for editorial enquiries, licensing, takedown requests, and press.

Thanks for reading. Twenty years in, the work continues — and I’m grateful you’re here for it.