Women in Comics
It seems like the hot topic lately. Women working in the comic industry, including webcomics. For some reason I find it highly annoying. As if, because I’m a girl I should be in a special category and judged differently.
At San Diego Comic-con(and probably other places) they have panels about women in comics. In three different podcasts I listen to they’ve brought up women in comics. One has even done two separate episodes talking about women in comics. They left out most, if not all, of the ones working in mainstream comics, just talking about web comics. Marvel has at least one series now that has an all women team that they use as a selling point. Seems to me that says there are a ton of women in comics and we need to stop acting like women are the elusive white buffalo.
The big thing that annoys me about Marvel’s all girl team push is they, and many fans, act like because they are all women that all girls should like what they do. I don’t. I like what I like and don’t base it on gender, race, or sexual orientation of the creative team involved.
I think the worst written women in comics are the ones where their gender is supposed to matter.
It’s not that female characters are uninteresting or undesirable, I just don’t think the industry is currently capable to depict them all that well or all that consistently well. They often fall into painful, embarrassingly trite tropes because of unimaginative or lazy writers.
You’ll have the ones that exist to be tragically impregnated for the horror aspect, the ones that will inevitably beat up a rapist or spousal abuser, the ones that will beat up other girls for being ‘bitchy.’… and to keep in touch with the trends of the day, you’ll have the lesbian and lipstick lesbian.
Except I wasn’t talking about characters I was talking about women creators. People act like women spontaneously started getting into comics. Like they haven’t been working in comics, even if they were newspaper comics, since the early 1900s. Like Marvel and DC never hired female employees and just now opened the gate for women.
As a female comics reader, I should give a shit that the team of the book I’m reading is female. Actually the last comic I read was done by an all female team save the inker. They didn’t market it that way luckily.
I don’t pretend to know how much crossover appeal comics from DC have, but they did have the CMX imprint which was mainly aimed a girls and a lot of the artists were female as well.
Since the CMX imprint has become defunct recently, I can’t really say that Marvel and DC are really trying to gain more female fans.
I’ll be honest, I’m a girl and I like reading about girly things like romance, sex, and a bit of fantasy.
The CMX series I purchased, Moon child, was wonderful and was looking forward to more, but since the label’s gone I have no more to look forward to.
I just don’t think the publishers like DC and Marvel really have much to offer women as opposed to manga publishers Viz and Tokyopop, but I can only speak for myself.
Since we’re stuck on women buying comics instead of making them, I think the problem with women buying them isn’t always the subject, but the places they have to buy them. Comic shop owners and patrons are a little weird to ladies in their shops. Marvel makes the digest sized comics like Manga usually comes in and those sell really well. To the point that they keep some comics from being canceled.