Comics Got the Fat Superhero Right in 2016. Hollywood Still Hasn't Made Her Movie.

In April 2016, Valiant Entertainment put a plus-size superhero on comic shop shelves and sold out its print run five times before the publisher could catch up with reprints. Faith Herbert — call sign Zephyr, flies by throwing her own body at the sky — is not the fat best friend, the fat villain, or the fat girl whose story ends with her losing the weight. She is, by sales figures and an Eisner Award nomination, one of the best-received superhero relaunches of the last decade. Ten years, a Sony movie deal, and a Paramount screenwriter hire later, she still hasn't appeared in a single frame of film.

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Faith first appeared in Harbinger #1 in January 1992, created by writer Jim Shooter and artist David Lapham as a minor member of a superpowered teen team. For 24 years she stayed exactly that — minor. Then writer Jody Houser, working with artists Pere Pérez and Marguerite Sauvage, gave her a solo limited series in April 2016. It sold out five times before Valiant moved her to an ongoing monthly title that July. "Jody's done a wonderful job with Faith," Valiant editor-in-chief Warren Simons told PBS NewsHour that same month. "The response has been extraordinary." The ongoing series was nominated for the 2017 Eisner Award for Best New Series — comics' own equivalent of an Oscar nomination — losing to Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston's Black Hammer, not to some diversity-slot afterthought. Faith was competing at the top of the category, not padding it.

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What made the book work wasn't that Faith was fat. It's everything the book refused to do with that fact. She flies, she fights aliens, she dates, she has a day job and a geek-culture group chat, and not one issue turns her weight into the plot. "I think about her weight only in terms of making sure that I am treating her with respect, and, in a sense, not treating her any differently because of her weight," Houser told PBS NewsHour. Months before launch, she'd put the whole editorial choice to The Mary Sue in one line: "I want her to be the superhero who also happens to be plus-size, if that makes sense." That's the trope this desk keeps waiting for the rest of genre fiction to learn — not a fat hero who overcomes her body, just a hero whose body is a Tuesday. It worked well enough to leave the page. In January 2018, Valiant partnered with ThinkGeek and designer Catherine Elhoffer on a Faith-branded clothing line running from extra small to 4X. "Faith is a superhero that is close to my heart, as I'm also a plus-size girl," Elhoffer said at the time. "She's inspired me to help save the world in the way I know how: making fashion that helps everyone feel empowered and invincible!"

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Sony announced a Faith movie in June 2018, with Maria Melnik writing and Neal Moritz and Dan Mintz producing. Paramount bought Valiant's film rights from Sony in 2019 — Bloodshot, already in production, stayed at Sony and reached theaters in 2020, while Harbinger, Faith and the rest of the roster moved to Paramount as the foundation of a planned cinematic universe of its own. Two projects followed, on separate tracks. The first was Harbinger itself, the team book Faith originated in: Wes Ball, fresh off directing the Maze Runner trilogy, signed on to direct in February 2022, with Andrew Lanham, a Shang-Chi co-writer, on the script, and Faith confirmed as one of the film's protagonists. By June 2022, Ball had stepped back to direct a new Planet of the Apes film instead, and Deadline reported Paul Downs Colaizzo, who wrote and directed Brittany Runs a Marathon, in talks to take over as director and rewrite the script.

The second track is the one that matters most here: a standalone Faith film, alive at Paramount the whole time and separate from the ensemble picture. In February 2023, Variety reported that Paramount had hired Emily Carmichael — a writer on Jurassic World Dominion and Pacific Rim: Uprising — to write it, with Neal Moritz and Toby Jaffe producing for Original Film and Dan Mintz producing for Valiant. That is the most recent confirmed movement on either project. No director, no cast, no release date, and, three and a half years later, no further public word from either studio on Harbinger or the solo Faith script Carmichael was hired to write.

Nobody at Paramount has said, on the record, that Faith's body is the reason both projects have gone quiet since their last confirmed hire. Development hell eats plenty of comic-book movies for reasons that have nothing to do with the character — a director leaving to go make apes movies instead is a real, ordinary thing, and it happened here first. But it's worth saying plainly what the industry keeps implying without saying: an audience that sold out five printings of a comic and stretched a clothing line to 4X apparently isn't the box-office risk everybody cites when a hired writer's script goes quiet for years at a stretch. Valiant and Houser solved Faith Herbert with two artists, a monthly deadline and one writer's refusal to make her weight the plot — in about a year, launch to Eisner nomination. Paramount has now gone more than three times that long without a second word on her movie. The comics are still in print. She's still flying. Somebody just needs to let her do it somewhere with a screen.